Text 4 Each suburban housewife,wrote Betty Friedan in 1963,struggles with a single quesLion as she makes the beds,shops for groceries,drives children to school and lies beside her husband at night:"Is this all?"A few years after her ground-breaking book The Feminine Mystique was published,the Cen8us Bureau began collecting data on the proportion of mothers who opt to stay at home.Over the subsequent decades the statistics answered Friedan's question with a heartfelt no.In 1967 the share of mothers who did not work ouLside the home stood at 4996;by the turn of the millennium it had dropped to just 23%.Many Lhought this number would continue to fall as women sought to"have it all".Instead,the proportion of stay-at-home moLhers has been rising steadily for the past 15 years,according to new data gathered by the Pew Research Centre.This partly reflects demographic change.Immigrants,a rising share of Lhe relevant generation,are more likely to be stay-at-home mums than women born in America.There is an economic component to the change,too:at the end of the 1990s,when mothers staying at home were at Lheir rarest,the economy was creating so many jobs that most people who wanted work could find it.Now more report that they are unable to do so,or are studying in the hope of finding work later.But there is also an element of choice:a quarter of stay-at-home mothers have coUege degrees.Taken as a whole,the group includes mothers at both ends of the social scale.Some are highly educated bankers'wives who choose not to work because they don't need the money and would rather spend their time hot-housing their toddlers so that they may one day get into Harvard.Others are poorer but calculate that,after paying for child care,the money they make sweeping filoors or serving burgers does not justify the time away from their little ones.he first group is fturly small.Pew estimates that there are 370,000 highly educated and afflu-ent slay-at-home mothers（defined as married mothers with children under 18 who have at least a master's degree and family income in excess of$75,000）.That is 5%of all stay-at-home mothers with working husbands.One third of stay-at-home moLhers are single or cohabiting,and on average they are poorer than the rest.

This text mainly centers on housewives______

• A.family and social background
• B.reasons for not going to work
• C.disparity of economic status
• D.proportion and situations