I'm not sure why a woman (or man) who chooses to be a housewife/husband would not be someone intelligent, driven, and getting what he/she wants. Raising children is an incredibly difficult task worthy of a lot of respect. I don't know when the idea developed that spouses who stay at home are somehow necessarily lazy or stupid.

I didn't imply that housewives can't have those qualities. However, until they get married and settle down, I imagine you're more likely to find this kind of woman in a productive career than sitting at home waiting for prince charming to come along.

It's certainly possible for a housewife/husband to keep intellectually and socially active, but in practice, it seems to be fairly rare, especially considering the low incomes that single-earner couples tend to have, and the constraints that this lack of means will place on social functionality. When there's a single earner making a lot of money, then income's not a problem, but the working partner tends to be in a "martyr your family" job, so the non-working partner tends to become a supporting actor in the other's career.

There's a reason people of both genders are very averse to this lifestyle. It's possible to be a housewife or househusband and not rot away, but it's difficult and fairly uncommon in practice.

I don't think that being a subservient housewife is more damaging than the median, braindead cubicle job. They're both pretty awful options, and the subordination that follows from either situation is going to lead to lethargy and atrophy. But most of us are going to be marrying people with better career options than the uninspiring, dead-end cube job.

You don't have to work insane hours to make lots of money. Middle management at a large corporation will do the job and will earn more than national median income for two people.

My dad was a stock broker at a regional Merrill Lynch office (read: nothing like a Wall Street hustler) and he pretty much never worked crazy hours and was paid well enough. My mom, despite being a "housewife" was the more driven of the two and did a whole lot of volunteer / nonprofit work.