Basic Trope: A woman who stays home and takes care of the house, kids, pets, garden, etc.
- Straight: Every morning, Bob goes to work, and Alice stays home, doing things like cleaning and tending to her children who are too young to go to school.
- Exaggerated: Alice always has breakfast on the table and lunches made before Bob comes downstairs, all the housework is done by 9:30 AM and the house is always immaculate, she's always able to shuffle the kids to practice in her SUV, she never complains, she never gets sick or has needs or wants of her own, and dinner is always on the table by the time Bob gets home from work. (And dinner almost never consists of a TV dinner, canned soup, or takeout; she makes everything from scratch.) And she does it all in a sundress with pearls and high-heeled shoes.
- Downplayed:
- Alice has a job but is able to work from home a majority of the time.
- Alice works only part-time and stays home the rest of the time.
- Alice is only staying home until her and Bob's kids are old enough to be in school for most of the day.
- Justified:
- Bob wages more than enough on his own, so Alice doesn't need to work at all.
- Alice gets more fulfillment from taking care of the house and kids than she does from some Soul-Crushing Desk Job.
- Alice is deaf. There aren't that many jobs she could do efficiently, thus she stays at home and runs the home.
- Inverted: Alice is a career woman who is Married to the Job.
- Gender Inverted: Bob is the one who stays home while Alice goes off to work.
- Subverted:
- Alice looks like a Housewife. Turns out she's just a Gold Digger. Or worse, a Black Widow who just hasn't gotten to the point of putting her plan to execution when we meet her.
- Alice isn't a housewife, she the home's live-in housekeeper or nanny.
- Double Subverted: Alice stays home and take care of kids. But wait! She also runs a business out of her home. She runs it out of her home so she can be there to look after the kids, and do housework when things are slow.
- Zig Zagged: Whether Alice is a stay-at-home mom or a working mom changes Depending on the Writer every other episode.
- Averted:
- Alice works outside the home.
- Bob and Alice are both unemployed.
- Lampshaded: "Homemaking is a full-time job when you have very young kids. I just take my job seriously, this is why Bob works."
- Invoked: Alice finds out she's pregnant, and decides she'll quit her job to focus on her family.
- Exploited:
- Companies market household products to married, middle-class women, because they're supposedly the ones more likely to buy these products.
- Bob controls the purse strings, to keep Alice financially dependent on him, and thus unable to leave. He also, for the same reason, cuts her off from her family and friends, and restricts her access to the Internet and phone.
- Alice pretends to be a housewife who takes care of her own kids, but she's simply a single-mom who doesn't want to work and who spends her days collecting welfare and not taking care one bit of her kids who she barely cares about.
- Defied: Bob isn't rich enough yet to support the home with only one income, thus Alice works too.
- Discussed: "Did you hear? Alice is pregnant again. I guess she'll never go back to work. She loves taking care of her family way too much."
- Conversed: "Man, those housewives on old sitcoms have a sweet life. Imagine having only kids and the house to take care of!"
