I'm not familiar with the TV show Desperate Housewives. I've never seen it, but Wikipedia describes it as a mystery-comedy-drama and skimming it there seems to be a lot of rather serious crime.
I feel like the existence of the phrase being used for a TV show title is sort of a left-handed admission that we all know that homemakers are in financial desperate straits, so desperate that it's rude to actually talk about it because you might make people uncomfortable with things they would rather turn a blind eye to and pretend to not notice.
Housewives are rather frequently full-time moms with no income of their own, no assets of their own and steadily ruining any hope of ever having a serious career with each passing day as their potential resume gets steadily bleaker. And, yet, from birth we groom all our little girls to learn to be good housewives and do the cooking and cleaning and put their husband's career first and aim to marry well as their best hope of temporarily enjoying The Good Life.
At least until Daddy Warbucks dies a decade or more before them, plunging them into relative poverty (having less than others around them) if not absolute poverty (an inability to take adequate care of yourself).
I think this widespread global expectation that women should put their man and children first in a way that defacto turns them into chattel property in the present with a bleak future of living in poverty as little old ladies is a root cause of enormous societal dysfunction.
I don't think current feminist paradigms promoting careers for women really resolves the issue. I think it mostly reinforces the problem.
Our current models for a serious career are male coded serious careers and the pattern of work is rooted in a raft load of assumptions that boil down to "We assume there's a wife and kids providing you a healthy personal life after hours and the wife is doing all the women's work, freeing you up to mentally focus on The Job and also pour all your time and energy into it, go home exhausted and yell Woman, bring me a beer! and sit in your armchair watching TV until she serves dinner."
Women simply cannot compete with men when that's the ONLY paradigm we have for having a serious career capable of supporting a family and providing you adequate resources to sustain a reasonable level of comfort in old age.
And this paradigm absolutely does NOT promote RIGHTS for WOMEN. It promotes serious careers for a small number of very privileged women while less privileged women still do the lion's share of the women's work in their lives.
So it promotes a class divide where rich women get income somewhat similar to some men but still cannot really compete with men because the richest of the rich remain MEN and even a multimillionaire woman like Janet Jackson can marry up because there are lots of men richer than her.
It harms all women. It harms the LGBTQ crowd who cannot follow the heteronormative script.
And it harms MEN by reducing them to a paycheck in the eyes of their lovers and ensuring they NEED to remarry quickly if they get divorced or their wife dies because they cannot adequately feed themselves or keep their home clean without owning a wife. It's not cost effective for them to hire sex workers, maids and cooks and it doesn't achieve the same quality of life as having one woman invested in your welfare who knows you well.
But it also means such men typically cannot actually trust their lovers because they know she's married for the money, may have a lover on the side and may be eager to cash his life insurance policy to get the money without feeling like a whore for having to sleep with him.
The solution to all of the above problems is in part coming up with new work paradigms and in part coming up with new housing solutions.
The single family detached suburban house is a house designed to serve heteronormative culture. This mental model that THIS is optimal housing has shaped housing policy, financing mechanisms and zoning for decades and helps keep everyone a prisoner of heteronormative culture.
This is a survival issue and it's a bigger problem than homophobia or misogyny because if you can't readily find any other viable means to adequately afford a home, then most people will get in lockstep with heteronormative expectations.
At the risk of sounding alarmist and histrionic, this probably fuels a great deal of crime in the world.