Homemaker v/s Housewife

State of mind: Agitated.

They draw as far as the dictionary is concerned. But, if I were to define a married woman who stays at home, who does not have a paid or unpaid occupation outside of home, using one word; housewife it would be. This also happens to be the reason why I’ve decided to replace the more sophisticated and more pseudo “homemaker” in my user profile with this word.

All women make homes. Do housewives make it any better that they are called that? I don’t think so. My mother had a full-time job and she managed the home just as well as the ones who stayed at home, sometimes better and never worse. She never got to call herself a “homemaker”. Why me?

State of mind: Relaxed = Rational.

All married women have, by default, one steady job – that of managing the household, also called homemaking, which goes unstated, if they have yet another job.
If all “working women” started stating this job explicitly, we would have in the space provided for occupation, “doctor, homemaker”, “lawyer, homemaker”, “teacher, homemaker” and so on. So for a married woman who has a career, the homemaker part goes without saying.
On the other hand, what should the unemployed housewife call herself? “Jobless”? “Unemployed”? She chooses not to. She embraces this default job of homemaking as the primary one and uses the term “homemaker” to describe her occupation instead of the simple and crude “jobless”. Fair enough? Yes, for me.
Also a good enough reason to retain the debated term in the user profile. :-)