At a recent screening at the AFI theatre just outside Washington, D.C., the crowd reaction to the documentary Housewife of the Year was telling. The Irish film by Ciaran Cassidy unearths footage of Housewife of the Year, a hugely popular show on Irish television from 1969 to 1995. Housewife of the Year was a competition to see which woman did the best job of staying home, cooking for her husband, and raising her children. The winner got 300 pounds ($386.90) and a new stove.

Yes, this kind of thing makes more enlightened audiences snigger. Talk about retro! Women in the show showcase their smiles, dresses, fruit salads, “pork Tropicana,” and “personality interviews.” It’s laughable looking back from the enlightened year 2025. Yet there were also women represented in the film who loved having big families and staying at home. The grainy footage of the big Irish families making music together is joyful and alive. At the screening I attended, there were plenty of smirks at the clips of women cooking, cleaning, and corralling children in the 1960s — yet there was also a longing silence when they talked about how fulfilled they were staying at home and having families.

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One reviewer put it this way: “The film’s purpose is, plainly, in part to stand up for the cradle rockers. This is a film filled with much sadness. Women abandoned. Women who survived institutions. But it also allows a fair degree of celebration. Nobody here is wagging figures at surviving contributors for participating in a competition that allowed them a smidgen of recognition and renown.”

Housewife of the Year arrives at a time when more women are embracing traditional domestic roles. #Tradwife videos are popular on Instagram and TikTok, featuring beautiful young women in floral dresses and aprons, cooking, and attending to things in the home. The hashtag has almost 300 million TikTok views. Tradwife Estée C. Williams says she wants a return to “the ultra-traditional gender roles of the middle of the last century.”

As with so many things in life, what’s missing here is balance. Many young people have forgotten that in previous generations, the social lives and professional accomplishments of our parents didn’t stop when they had children — even several children. In the 1960s and 70s, the prime years of Housewife of the Year, our parents traveled, went to play, started small businesses, and had cocktail parties. To them, it had nothing to do with feminism. It was just a part of life.

Furthermore, no one will deny the horrors that could often come with being a housewife in a place such as Ireland in the 1960s. One woman had 13 children, three sets of them twins. “As the children increased, my husband receded to the pub,” she laments. Contraception was illegal at the time in Ireland, and neighbors often snitched on each other to the local priest. Very few people want to go back to that.

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And yet, the reaction I saw to Housewife of the Year at the AFI was not just smirks and sarcasm but moments of profound silence and reflection. Philomena Delaney was the last Housewife of the Year in 1995. “I’m still reigning,” she quips, her words carrying humor and pride. It seems that more women and more people are realizing that the world of work and career is not the most fulfilling thing in life. According to a study by the Pew Research Center, in 2012, 29% of American mothers decided to stay at home. This was 6 percentage points more than in 1999. According to an article by Emily Matchar for the Atlantic, this increase demonstrated “the decline in career ambition and the growing importance of family among the young.”

“This phenomenon,” notes Matchar, “is about far more than privileged women choosing to stay at home with their children. It’s about the laid-off office worker who opens an Etsy boutique selling crocheted baby clothes rather than jumping back into the fray of recession-era job searching. It’s about the grown child of harried Baby Boomers who, having seen his parents work 60-hour weeks to climb the corporate ladder, decides to lead a slower, more home-focused life.”