At first, both the domestic ideology and the concept of ‘good wife,
wise mother’ acquired a strong bourgeois connotation. Step by step, however, largely through their proliferation in the mass media, middle-class
domestic ideals began to transform conceptions of family and womanhood
among the working classes as well, ultimately assuming the status of a
national ideal. By the 1970s the attributes of ryo¯sai kenbo became practically
synonymous with womanhood, and the actual circumstances of most
Japanese households matched the middle-class domestic models created at
the beginning of the century