The main idea in the essay My Mother Never Worked by Bonnie Smith-Yackel is that society/the system is designed in a way that discards or disregards housewives ' hard work. The purpose of this essay to relay the life of the writer 's mother so that readers can realize how hard a housewife really works, as opposed to the stereotypical belittlement that comes with being a housewife. The author effectively uses dialogue, flashbacks and irony to convey how women, especially housewives great efforts are disregarded.
Bonnie Smith-Yackel effectively uses dialogue to highlight that housewives hard work is belittled or not realized by the system, or better yet said, by society. The essay starts with a dialogue …show more content…
While the social security worker retrieved the mother 's information, the writer was retrieving her own memories of her mother. She recalling and conveyed to the readers how much of a hard worker her mother was. She states that her mother started working at a young age, “after her graduation from high school” (para. 2). She also goes on to mention that her mother “carried water nearly a quarter of a mile from the well to fill her wash boilers in order to do her laundry on a scrub board” (para. 4). The mother “sewed night after night” (par. 9) and “milked morning and evening” (par.11). To add to this even further and highlight how much of a hard worker her mother was, the writer mentions that even at old age, her mother did push ups, made patchwork housecoats, quilts and wrote letters to her friends. The flashbacks are effective in illustrating that her mother was in fact a very hard worker, instead of the picture that society would tend to paint for women, “a simple housewife that just stays at home”. The reader understands that she was more that what society defines a housewife to