Pick out the words from the text that refer to the sphere of home-maintenance chores. Add some more referring to the semantic field of “household”

e.g. to darn socks …

Explain the meaning of the collocations with the word “scratch” and use the expressions in the situations of your own.

– to scratch a living;

– to be up to scratch;

– to scratch the surface of the topic;

– to scratch the idea;

– to scratch one’s head;

– you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours;

– to do sth from scratch.

1. Complete the spaces by finding one word from your functional vocabulary that fits in all the spaces and translate the sentences:

Speech activities

1. Answer the questions:

1. What do women get out of work?

2. What was a woman’s/housewife’s life like in the past? How has it changed?

3. What, according to the author, are “the instruments of women’s liberation”?

Give arguments for or against the following statements. Develop the idea.

1. The job of a housewife has ceased to exist.

2. The technological revolution has swept away the drudgery of a housewife’s life forever.

3. Women are not needed at home anymore.

4. Technology is not likely to abolish the need for parents.

5. A pay cheque is the most powerful instrument of liberation.

Reading three

The Frustrated Housewife

In most Russian families, the women take such complete responsibility for managing the household that husbands simply turn over their paychecks to their wives as a matter of course and leave the rest to them. Ordinary Russian women take it for granted that they are the binding force in the family and sometimes laugh at the helplessness oftheir husbands. “My husband can go out and buy the bread or milk, simple things like that,” a waitress in an airport restaurant told me with a twinkle, “But I can't trust him with anything bigger. If we wanted to buy something really big, like furniture, we'd save money and decide on it together. Otherwise, I buy everything – even his clothes. I always go with him. If I didn't, he'd come home with terrible junk” .

Most Russian women by now take a job as part of the natural order of things and find it hard to imagine not working. So strongly ingrained in them is the work ethic that there is a stigma to being simply a housewife. The weight of propaganda steadily emphasises the duty to work. One movie, Let's Live Till Monday, for example, showed a teacher publicly criticising a tenth-grade girl for answering a free-essay question: “What do you want to be?” by saying her dream was to become a mother with many children. The teacher castigated this as a shameful response. For many Russian women, the traditional American women's role of home-maker, mother, raiser of children does not seem adequate: they feel unfulfilled without a job. Even some whom I heard complaining bitterly about having too much to do, said in the next breath that they reluctant­ly preferred the exhaustion of too many burdens to the ‘spiritual death’, as one young teacher put it, of being unemployed, bored and idle at home ... .

One of the most persistent reactions to American life that I encountered among Russians was their surprise that large numbers of American families could be supported by the father alone. Even middle-class Russians, who were my counterparts, were incredulous that in a family of six, my wife did not have to work to contribute to the family budget. Finances in Russian families with children are often so touch-and-go even with both parents working that some women do not even use all the unpaid maternity leave to which they are legally entitled because their families cannot afford to live on the husband's salary
alone ... .

Where the Americans are rebelling outwardly against having to be housewives, the Russians are rebelling inwardly against having to be breadwinners, a necessity that can transform work from a means of self-fulfilment and independence into drudgery ...

I remember the wry reaction of one veteran woman editor, whose years in publishing houses and on newspapers had left her with perennially weary eyes, when I asked her reaction to American-style women's lib. “Away with your emancipation!” she retorted. “After the Revolution when they emancipated women, it meant that women could do the same heavy work as men, but many women prefer not to work but to stay at home and raise their children. I have one child but I wanted more. But who can afford more children? Unfortunately, we cannot NOT WORK because the pay our husbands earn is not enough to live on. So we have to go every day and make money.”

Hedrick Smith. Extracts from The Russians. 2000.

Language focus

1. Explain the meaning of the following phrases and use them while discussing the text:

– to be ingrained in sb;

– a home maker;

– a raiser of children;

– means of self-fulfillment;

– to feel unfulfilled;

– unpaid maternity leave;

– to be legally entitled to sth;

– to contribute to the family budget;

– finances are touch-and-go.

2. Find the words in the text which have a similar meaning to the following. Translate them into Russian/Belarusian:

– extreme tiredness;

– to come across, to meet;

– to bring up children;

– to criticize or punish sb severely;

– a strong feeling in society that a type of behaviour is shameful;

– to keep the house;

– firmly established and difficult to change;

– to believe that sth is true without making sure.