But Dunn isn't looking for Katie to be a stereotypical housewife. The kind who's thought to be spending her days eating Bon-Bons or flipping tables ; instead she's having a second breakfast with her best friends to vent about motherhood and womanhood. It's something Dunn does in her own life to stay sane, and suggests other moms do, too.Being a stay-at-home mom may be a good decision for the kids, but for moms it often means putting their careers on hold. "That’s a conflicting situation for a lot of women,” says Dunn, who was a stay-at-home mom and novelist before creating this series. "It’s really difficult and it sucks, and even though you choose it, doesn’t make it suck any less."Dunn feels the situation is only made worse by the fact that women aren’t really allowed to be honest about the pressures of motherhood without being judged. See, for example, Chrissy Teigen who, after having her baby girl Luna, was mommy-shamed for going out to dinner with husband John Legend. This, despite making the valid point on Twitter that an hour out of the house means, “Happy mommy, happy daddy, happy baby.”Women are required to do it all, but in a way that the rest of society, or at least, the internet, sees fit. And they often have to do it all while looking a certain way. “I really don’t think you need to be 40 and have three kids and have a body of an 18-year-old,” Dunn says, echoing something Katie says nearly word for word in the American Housewife pilot. “I really think we need to get out of that mind-set.”The way society views the female body — specifically the way women view other women’s bodies — is certainly a topic of conversation on the series. When we first meet Katie, she’s staring out the window, lamenting how her neighbor “Fat Pam” is moving away, making her — you guessed it — the second fattest housewife in her Westport, Connecticut, town. Throughout the first episode, there are jokes aimed at other women, specifically those of the Lululemon set with “flat stomachs and thighs that don’t touch.” But the pilot's main shenanigan finds Katie looking for someone who is bigger than her to move in across the street so she won’t be "vice fattest."