How much has really changed since Betty Friedan’s day? Well, lots, but it seems to be more of the same in the lives of many woman.
I first encountered “The Feminine Mystique” in college, in 1986. We read it not in women’s studies, but in a class on intellectual history; and indeed, from the vantage point of a young woman coming of age in the mid-1980′s, the world that Betty Friedan depicted — a world in which a married woman couldn’t get a job without her husband’s permission, couldn’t open a checking account and couldn’t get credit in her own name — seemed like ancient history.
And yet, five years ago, as I settled, for the first time, into a life where I worked minimal hours, spent maximal time with my children and was almost entirely dependent on my husband’s salary and health benefits, ancient history became a current affair. I lived surrounded by women whose lives were much like mine, and the sentences that swirled around me on the playground stirred memories of thoughts and phrases I’d read long before.
The voices coalesced into a chorus of discontent that haunted me until one evening, after my daughters had gone to sleep, I went through a pile of boxes and dug up my old copy of Ms. Friedan’s book. This time, as it had for many of the homemakers who read it when it was published in 1963, “The Feminine Mystique” felt horribly familiar. Looking back convinced me that we needed to start working toward a different future.
There’s a temptation, even among feminists like me, to argue that because women are now more free to choose to stay home than they we were before, that there is nothing problematic with the current state of stay-at-home parenting.
You could say that the “plight” of 21st century stay-at-home moms — or part-time working moms like me — is vastly different from “the problem that has no name” experienced by the women of Ms. Friedan’s generation, and in one key respect you’d be right: Girls and women today are no longer kept from pursuing their educational dreams and career aspirations. They’re no longer expected to abandon their jobs when they marry and — in theory — are no longer considered “unnatural” if they keep working when they have children.
She’s right — although she’s also right in pointing out that there is still a certain level of judgmentalism reserved for women who work when they have small children.
We women have, in many very real ways, at long last made good on Ms. Friedan’s dream that we would reach “our full human potential — by participating in the mainstream of society.” But, for mothers in particular, at what cost? With what degree of exhaustion? And with what soul-numbing sacrifices made along the way?
The outside world has changed enormously for women in these past 40 years. But home life? Think about it. Who routinely unloads the dishwasher, puts away the laundry and picks up the socks in your house? Who earns the largest share of the money? Who calls the shots?
The answer, for a great many families, is the same as it was 50 years ago. That’s why when I read the obituaries of Ms. Friedan, who died on Saturday, I was sad, but also depressed: their recounting of her description of the lives of women in the 1950′s sounded just too much like the lives of women today.
I like this article because the author lays out what so many of us forget, or assume to be natural: that the domestic division of labor remains vastly unequal.
Although it often seems anecdotally to be true that domestic tasks and power are pretty evenly divided in families where both parents are working full time, the statistics argue quite differently. The fact is, no matter how time- or sleep-deprived they are, working women today do upwards of 70 percent of household chores for their families. The gender caste system is still alive and well in most of our households. After all, no one really wants to do the scrubbing and folding and chauffeuring and mopping and shopping and dry-cleaner runs. (I’m leaving child-minding out of this; in a happily balanced life, it doesn’t feel like a chore.) Once the money for outsourcing runs dry, it’s the lower-status member of the household who does these things. It is the lower-status member of the household who is called a “nag” when she repeatedly tries to get other members of the household to share in doing them
Emphasis mine. Housework is, without a doubt, directly related to status. It’s physically difficult, it’s repetitive, it’s never-ending and it’s completely thankless. It’s something that in many households is outsourced to a paid lower class of (mostly brown or black, largely immigrant) women. It remains one of the biggest remaining gender gaps, and one where the existence of a secondary sex class is most clearly visible. When it does get outsourced, it gets laid on the backs of other people in that secondary sex class, who are also in secondary race and economic classes. The division of domestic labor, in many senses, serves as a paradigm of racist, classist and sexist social structures in general.
In goes, in part, back to that same message that women of my generation have been hearing since we were kids: “You can’t have it all.” And yet only women are, as a class, expected to make the hard choices between staying home and having a career; only women themselves feel that these choices must be made, because otherwise it’s just too overwhelming. Women can have careers just as well as men, but when we get home we’re still the ones who are expected to do the bulk of the housework. Men get to go to work every day, and come 5pm their workday is over. For women, 5pm is just the beginning.
Obviously I’m speaking in generalities here, and, as the writer of this op/ed points out, there are plenty of individual anecdotes which defy traditional gender roles. But on the whole, decades after Betty Friedan published her famous book, we’re still locked in to a domestic caste system based on gender. And it’s a harder cycle to break, since it happens within the home and isn’t remedied through legislation or policy.
Ms. Friedan herself anticipated this issue, in the final pages of “The Feminine Mystique,” when she called for changing “the rules of the game” of society at large. In 1970, she came back to this thought, arguing that if we did “not only end explicit discrimination but build new institutions,” then the women’s movement would prove to be “all talk.” Thirty-six years later, with women having flooded the professions and explicit gender discrimination outlawed, the institutions of our society simply have not changed to embrace and accommodate the new realities of women’s lives.
The problems of home life seem to me now to be an all but hopeless conundrum. Yet the enduring failure of our social institutions to realize the larger promises of the women’s movement is something we can address, straightforwardly and comparatively easily. We owe to Betty Friedan, to our daughters and to ourselves.
Ms. Friedan said last year, “We are a backward nation when it comes to things like childcare and parental leave.” That’s just the beginning. We need universal preschool, more and better afterschool programs, and policies to promote part-time work options that don’t force parents to forgo benefits, fair pay and career prospects.
We desperately need leadership on these issues. Without it, our national commitment to family values is truly “all talk.”
Exactly. I’m definitely not one to speak out against individual women’s (or, much more rare, men’s) decisions to stay home. I don’t think they’re suffering from a false consciousness, or that they’re necessarily doing something “wrong.” I also don’t speak out against individual women’s choices to wax off all their pubic hair, or take off their clothes for money, or sell sex, or get married, or take their husbands’ names, or wear high heels. But that doesn’t mean that just because it’s a “choice” it’s universally good, or even if we agree that it is good for that individual woman, that the practice itself shouldn’t at least be questioned. And it’s about time we started examining and questioning the domestic sphere.
Ouch… you’re dead on with this topic! I work for a university doing plant pathology research during the day – which is on occasion physically grueling, and almost always intellectually challenging – and at night I’m going to school to get my RN. I’m married with no kids yet, but these two things – full time work + full time school – can be draining.
That being said, I got up early this morning to vacuum the house and clean the bird cage. When I get home from class tonight close to 10 pm, I have another list of things to be done – make dinners for my husband’s lunches for the next few days, do a load of laundry, then pack for a 12 hour drive out west tomorrow for my uncle’s funeral. Aside from the loss of my uncle, the other things are pretty typical.
My husband does do things around the house on occasion – he builds a set of shelves here, puts up a birdhouse there, that sort of endeavor… but I’m the one who does all the boring, repetitive, thankless stuff – laundry, meal planning/grocery shopping/cooking, dusting, vacuuming, floor scrubbing, bathroom cleaning… blah blah blah. The chores he does are unique and generally fulfilling to him. The chores I do – not so much. We have discussed splitting things more evenly, but it always seems to end up the same – what is compulsory for me is optional for him. To boot, he is a neat/clean fanatic – I can look around and see a sparkling clean kitchen… and what he notices is that there’s a bit of soft scrub still not quite rinsed off the counter.
Feh.
Sorry for hijacking… you just really touched a nerve with this! Right on. And thank you.
hi,
i’m sending this message in a comment, becasue i couldn’t find a ‘contact us’ link (probably right in front of me).
regarding the news item about the 23-year old being sent to prison for impregnating – and then marrying a 13-year old read the story at http://www.cnn.com/2006/LAW/02/07/teen.bride.ap/index.html
check out one this statement made by the judge (emphasis mine):
“Marriage is one of our most sacred institutions,” Bryan said, “and it appeared to be the answer in this case, but it can’t cover up a crime, and it can’t make it go away.”
marriage was the answer? WTF?
I feel lucky. We split everything equally, and so do my sister and brother-in-law (even though she is home on maternity leave!).
I wonder if this isn’t a generational thing to some point? Most people I know in their 20′s who are married don’t have gender equity issues in their relationships, unless it’s just the people I know.
But a lot of folks over 35 do, and our parents especially. When my mom started her teaching job, she asked that my dad do his own laundry–he refused. When we went on vacation for a week and he couldn’t come, the house was filthy. When my mother-in-law went out of town for a week, my father-IL barely ate, because he’s never learned to cook anything other than a TV dinner. And on Thanksgiving and Christmas, my aunts and mom (50 and up) are in the kitchen while my uncles and dad watch the game–but my husband and brother in law and cousins’ boyfriends (35 and under) are in the kitchen too!!
Sorry that all I have here is anecdotal, and I’d be interested to find out how old Anne (the last poster) is. Are there stats on differences in division of labor by age group rather than just gender? Most of my peers would kick their husbands’ asses (literally) if they loafed around and refused to do housework.
This is why I love my family so much — before my mother went to law school, both of my parents worked, but it was my dad who did (and still does) most of the cleaning, cooking, baking, and making the kids’ lunches in the house. As a small child, I was confused when my peers talked about the lunches their mothers packed — because it was dads that did that, right?
Then again, my mum’s an old-school feminist; traditional gender roles never really factored into my childhood.
This isn’t to say, of course, that this happens to most other people. I know that my family is very much not the norm.
I’m also going to copy and paste something I posted to another site. I think you’re spot-on with the maternity leave thing.
I’m convinced that a big part of what fuels unnecessary “mommy wars” in this country is the 6-12-week maternity leave. Most people agree that it’s not great to put a 6-12-week infant in full time day care, but given the choice of that or losing your job/benefits, many are left without a choice. And considering that men (obviously) don’t breastfeed, then if you’re not ready to wean your 6-12-week-old off of breastmilk or start pumping, then it is the woman who will be home.
With maternity leave that short, if you want to wait until 2 years to go back to work, you’ve just joined the ranks of the housewife, because the job doesn’t always wait longer than the 6-12 weeks. So, you want more time to bond with your tiny infant? You have to give up your career, depend on your husband’s income, and some extremists will call you Stepford, whereas others will applaud you. But is it really unreasonable not to want to be home with a child who is under a year old?
You’ll also be less employable when you do decide to come back, because you have to start your job search “fresh” a lot of the time–interviews and competing, etc. Some are willing to do that, but I can understand the fears involved in doing so. So to avoid the risks, we put away our 6-week-olds with strangers just so that we can keep our livelihoods.
I’d like to know whose briilliant idea that short leave was. Perhaps a bitter, childless (male or female) CEO somewhere? Europe really has the better idea in that area, I think.
With longer maternity leave though (1-2 years), you are still “employed” and won’t have to start up a new job search when your kid’s 2–you simply return to work. The job is still yours and you continue to get paid.
I work with Europeans, and the other thing they have too is longer paternity leave. Thus what a lot of couples do is have Mom take the first year off and Dad the second, or the first 6 months and the second, etc. Thus, Mom can breastfeed as long as she wants, but she has the option of having Dad at home should she want to return sooner. Leave also comes at half your salary, so it’s not dependence.
Thus it is not *always* the woman who must be home, nor does either party have to necessarily “give up” their career.
What do people think?
Most people I know in their 20’s who are married don’t have gender equity issues in their relationships
I don’t know those people, but I’m betting they don’t have kids yet. Having children is one of those things that starts tradition creep.
Great article (from the NYT? Who knew!) I really don’t think anything will change until we, women, stop putting our relationships with men over our own well-being. You see this all the time–even feminist women making excuses for their husband’s or boyfriend’s sexist behavior because the alternative is openly calling him on his shit. And deep down, they are afraid that given a choice between the relationship and his male privilege, they know which one he’ll pick.
Bitch PhD has a great post about what happens to egalitarian marriage when kids enter the picture. See here.
Or if you’re in my situation, you put your two-week-old in the care of a virtual stranger. Talk about guilt.
Childless doesn’t mean bitter, Marian. And it’s even more likely that the CEO had a stay-at-home wife so that matters of family care were not on his radar, but profit was.
It’s possible, although my sis just had a baby and she’ll be
I guess it comes down to a question of what to do about it. Do we encourage women to work full-time and leave their babies even if they dont’ want to, just to equalize relationships? probably not…What would make more sense is to get men more involved at home even after having kids.
I wonder if this will change in a generation or so as people our age socialize our kids to believe that housekeeping is for everybody who lives in the house, not just the females? Should be interesting to see.
oops, that first line should read “and she’ll be damned if things become unequal, as she’s more feminist than the feminist blogosphere.” :-)
To answer Marian – I’m 33, so still pretty young. You do bring up a good point, though. Just to clarify – my husband doesn’t really “loaf around” – he’s always puttering in his workshop if nothing else. Sometimes he’s doing stuff for us (e.g. building shelves), more often he’s just puttering, smoking a cigar and possibly drinking a beer. And I guess it’s not so much a refusal to do housework on his part… it’s more that it just doesn’t get done if I don’t do it. On occasion, he’ll wash a dish or two, but it’s clear that he feels it’s optional for him. Like I said, we’ve discussed this, and sometimes he’ll sort of try to pitch in (this is a man who cooked for himself and cleaned his home within an inch of its life before I came into the picture, so he does care about these things…)… but it never lasts.
Anywho… that’s more than enough about me.
Mayhap it’s time for me to go on strike.
Marian:
In order for men to really change the pattern, they have to be willing to actually sacrifice. If they have a job that doesn’t spill over into long professional hours and follow them away from the office, then it’s easier to become more of a participant at home. For upper-middle-class folks, though, there’s a lot of pressure to put in long hours and not turn down assignments.
My wife and I knew before we had children that we would slide into a more traditional frame afterwards: my wife’s career, though she likes it, was something she would happily do part-time; while I don’t have the option of doing what I do at a high level on anything but a very full-time basis. But neither of us pretends that we made those choices in a vaccuum. We were brought up in a culture where men define themselves by their work and women by their families, and I’m under pressure to succeed professionally and she to raise children. We know we’re giving in to that because it would be painful not to.
Sure, I’ve stepped up my participation in the housework as the little guy multiplies the load, but just doing more is not the answer for any of us. When we have a generation of men that are willing to step down to part-time even in white-collar professional jobs, when just as many men are willing to be the primary parent, and women are willing to let them (over the wailing of their mothers and aunts), then we’ll have better parity.
If having it all means doing it all, only the exceptional will be able to swing it. Women will have the same freedom to seek professional success as men when they have the same opportunity that men have to partner with someone who will put the career second and keep the homefires burning. I wasn’t willing to do that and my wife didn’t want me to. That’s too generally the case, and in a way I’m part of the problem in that respect.
this is a man who cooked for himself and cleaned his home within an inch of its life before I came into the picture, so he does care about these things
Which is to say, yes, it IS a refusal to do housework–just a passive rather than obvious one. If he took care of himself pre-you, then he sees this things as women’s work.
Don’t go on strike. Quit.
I wasn’t willing to do that
So, it’d be great if men make a choice you wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole? ;)
Speaking as the person with the high-powered job, and whose spouse does the lion’s share of the housework and childrearing, it’s not that hard to pitch in at home. A man who is convinced that cooking, cleaning and house management is pussy work won’t do his fair share no matter how many hours he puts in at paid work or how many his wife does. “Oh, I’ve had such a hard day at the office” is an excuse.
Mythago, I want to make something clear. I do a lot of parenting and housework; maybe not fifty percent, but not twenty either. I do a lot of the cleaning and vaccuuming and garbage collection and dishwashing and maintenance and some of the laundry. I’m not saying that men with high-powered jobs get a pass on housework. They don’t, and I don’t think or act like I do.
But adding a bunch of housework to an unequal career balance is not a structural solution. It’s not a structural solution because it depends on a personal commitment by men to see their careers as choices that come with costs — basically, as a privilege. That conception can’t be replicated en masse without huge social change, and that social change would involve many men making a different choice.
A structural solution is for men not to act as though they must be the one to have the more demanding and better-paid job. To do that, they have to stop thinking that they have to have the more demanding and better-paid job. When I said there was a choice I wouldn’t make, I didn’t mean whether I’d come home, take my suit off and wash the dishes. I do that. I meant that I stayed late a lot and made partner, and I did not choose to fight what in many ways would have been the harder fight to step off the fast track and stay home several days a week like my wife does.
It would be nice if other men chose to stand up and say, “I am not my job. I choose to be a parent first.” I didn’t.
It would be nice if other men chose to stand up and say, “I am not my job. I choose to be a parent first.” I didn’t.
That was my only point–not that you were a slacking-off daddy, but that you’re saying other men should make a choice you yourself wouldn’t make. I didn’t mean that in a finger-wagging, you’re-a-bad-feminist kind of way. But if everybody agrees that somebody else ought to make some changes, who the heck is going to actually change?
I agree 100% with everything else you’ve said, and your observation that men’s career-first choice is a privilege is dead on.
Mythago, I didn’t take offense, I just couldn’t tell exactly what part you were responding to. I think we all do a better job of pushing for change in some areas than in others, and my family arrangement is conventional.
I don’t see anything wrong with a man who wants to do 50%, 75% or 100% of the housework, but many men don’t.
A lot of women go into a marriage with these sorts of expectations, and then somewhere down the line (usually after the kids come), she makes demands on her husband that he “do his fair share”. He balks. He never signed up for this, or it wasn’t made clear before the marriage. She never sat him down and said: “Oh honey schnookums, do you understand that when we are married, and I’m pursuing my fulfilling career, you’re going to be expected to do half the housework in addition to fixing everything ,doing all the landscaping and car maintenance?”
So the guy basically says: “No, that wasn’t what I signed up for”. So the tug of war starts. Until he starts “pulling his weight around the house, he “ain’t getting none.” He finds out that his wife isn’t the only woman around with a vagina. So she either sues for divorce because of irreconcilable differences, or adultery on his part.
Now all he is, is a child support check (well, maybe if he’s honorable). She still doesn’t have help with the housework, she now has to pay *all* the bills herself with her fulfilling career, and when she comes home she has to do the cooking, cleaning, laundry, help the kids with their homework, get them ready for bed then fall in, exhausted when she’s done. Rinse, repeat. This is her life.
What women who want this sort of man need to do is to marry that sort of man, telling him up front that half the housework is non-negotiable, and if he can’t deal with that, take a hike right now.
If you are married to a man who isn’t inclined to do housework, encouraging him to do things like wash the dishes and rewarding him when he does goes a long way toward reinforcing that kind of behavior. Men are simple creatures. Much simpler than women. but if he still doesn’t do it, you have a couple of choices. Stick it out, or divorce him and try for a guy that is willing to do that sort of stuff.
Marrying a man without laying it on the line and expecting to change him later usually doesn’t work.
you’re going to be expected to do half the housework in addition to fixing everything ,doing all the landscaping and car maintenance
Right. Because feminism isn’t about equality. It’s about getting men to do more than their fair share of work. Bitches.
It isn’t her job to make him a responsible partner in the marriage–or her job to oversee the division of household labor. It’s his job to sack up and be an adult. According to your status-quo, he’s the one assuming the right to pass on household chores. Why doesn’t he have to sit his fiancee down and say, “Sugarbutt, you realize that no matter how lucrative or time-consuming your job is, I’ll still expect you to make the milk runs and tidy up the kitchen counters, right?” Why shouldn’t he be obligated to feel out that imposition before the fact? He’s the unreasonable one.
I guess you hang out with some pretty simple men. The men in my life would really resent being described in the same terms as four-year-olds learning to pick up their toys.
Wow, Tony, you must own a piece of shit car and have a crumbling home and have to do battle with the wilderness that is your backyard every day. Because otherwise, I just can’t see how fixing things, landscaping and car maintenance could take so gosh darn much of your time that you’d feel like being asked to clean up after yourself once in a while would be the end of a marriage.
Tony – I must say, I take no small amount of offense at what you say.
First of all, people change. Life is dynamic, not static. Just because things are one way when you get married doesn’t mean they’re going to stay that way. That’s a bullshit out, that the man “didn’t sign up for this.” People learn, change, grow, evolve. Are you saying that men are too “simple” for this? What are they – amoebas?
Also – hello? Car maintenance and landscaping? Since when are those the sole province of the man? *I* do those things myself. My husband does things too, but I am very much into outdoor work and taking care of my own vehicle, be it the car or the lawnmower.
And men are so driven by their ever-lovin’ penis that they must stick it into some other (poor, foolish) woman if they don’t see the need to help care for their own home?! BULLSHIT.
You denigrate not only women but also men with your words, Tony. It sickens.
Tony, I once worked a 3000 hour year; demoed a bathroom down to the 1955 floorboards, hauling tiles, mortar and wire lath down the stairs to the dumpster in buckets; and still found time to vaccuum on weekends, clean the bathrooms and put my dirty dishes in the sink. You’re looking for an excuse to dump your MRA rant here, and I’ll be god damned if I’m going to sit silent through that bullshit. If you think that marriage is an exchange of maid service and sex for money and car maintenance, do us all a favor and stay single. Masturbation is free and if you live alone nobody cares if you clean.
And another thing, Tony: your assumption that women can’t or won’t do home repair of car maintenance is bullshit. I grew up in the trades, so I know more than the average bear, but with a little instruction, both my wife and my sister are perfectly able helpers. When I had to haul several yards of tile, plaster and wire-lath through the house, my wife was right behind me carrying buckets. When I put on the door casing and the baseboard, my wife caulks and paints it. I even taught my sister to frame with metal studs to convert a one-bedroom to a triple. If guys expect to do all the home and car maintenance but none of the housework, why shouldn’t they be the one to raise it before the wedding?
I am lucky. Wow, am I lucky. My partner and I split the housework. And if it doesn’t get done because we’re both too busy, then we bloody well live with the dust.
I am deeply concerned about the women who are working, raising the kids, and doing housework. What kind of example are these kids seeing when their dads don’t help mom after work? Another generation of kids will grow up thinking that an unfair decision of housework is “normal.” To all the moms above who see an unfair division of housework, stand up for yourselves and do it for your kids, if not yourselves.
This might seem like a dumb question – but why can’t people clean up their own stuff? I was raised in a household in which, if you dirty it, you clean it up. It makes sense to me. And if it isn’t a “you did it, you clean it” situation, then you split it. And if you don’t clean it up, you live in your own stinking mess.
I think the real issue is people – in this case, men – thinking they are somehow too good or too valuable to society to clean. And no boy should be raised that way, or they will start expecting their mommas – oops, I meant wives – to take care of them.
First off, I’d like to say that I’m really not trying to start a fight here. This is a feminist issue that really concerns me, and I have not been able to find much reliable information on it. I’m proudly childfree, and while I agree in theory with the idea of paid year-long maternity and paternity leave for employees who have babies, I’m curious how that works in practice. I’ve heard horror stories from fellow childfree who have been temporarily hired to take the place of workers on maternity leave, only to be summarily put out when the employee returns. Or, alternately, the other workers in the office have to shoulder the load of the absent mother. How do other countries work with this? Is there the resentment in other countries between the childed and the childfree? I read the book “Childfree and Loving It,” which was written by a British woman, and she had anecdotal evidence of a seething resentment among the childfree. I think that a responsible feminism movement should encompass women who do and don’t want children, but I see a fundimental inequality there that I’m having problems reconciling.
I’ve heard horror stories from fellow childfree who have been temporarily hired to take the place of workers on maternity leave, only to be summarily put out when the employee returns.
…How is this a horror story? I mean, if I was told when I was brought in that I was covering for someone on maternity leave, I’d be keeping my resume and job networking contacts up-to-date.
Or, alternately, the other workers in the office have to shoulder the load of the absent mother.
I’m childfree, too, and I suspect that my (very small) office is soon to enter just this situation when my coworker has a baby. I expect I’ll resent the overwork like hell, but, y’know, it’s the fault of our management, not my coworker.
Isn’t this what temporary hires, or “temps,” if you will, are for?
Housework is a choice. Why do some women make the choice to do all of the housework if they hate it? It just doesn’t make sense to me.
Is there the resentment in other countries between the childed and the childfree?
Hmmm. I think of this as “divide and conquer”, much like the “mommy wars”. First off, don’t assume these are mutually exclusive categories. I didn’t have my child until I was 32, so yes, I know what the issues of childless/childfree (however you want to put it; both terms carry a lot of baggage and may not convey the meaning intended) are. Folks who had their children in their teens or early twenties are more than likely going to spend their late-thirties/early forties and on without children in the home. So, while you may not be dealing with issues particular to parenting, most parents have (or will) deal with being “childfree”, in the sense of not having dependent children in the home. (And I’ve known people who were all about the childfree agenda as soon as their children were grown—they wanted libraries, parks, public schools and such for their children, but as soon as the last kid was out of the house, they became vocal advocates of how all-of-the-above was theft of their tax dollars, because it didn’t benefit them! Remedial Citizenship 101 time?)
The framing of “childed vs. childfree” is artificial. How is taking over temporarily for someone who is on parental leave different from taking over for someone on medical leave for chemo or heart disease, conditions which are fairly typical in the workforce, yet don’t seem to garner resentment? Many of the conditions which make it difficult to blend family and work life are artificial, too. These aren’t just issues for the “childed” either. The forty-hour workweek has been eroding for quite some time, and it had/has zip to do with parents.
’ve heard horror stories from fellow childfree who have been temporarily hired to take the place of workers on maternity leave, only to be summarily put out when the employee returns.
…How is this a horror story? I mean, if I was told when I was brought in that I was covering for someone on maternity leave, I’d be keeping my resume and job networking contacts up-to-date.
I have to agree with the folks who said this isn’t really a “horror story.” As someone who’s been a temp forever, when you are hired through an agency, you know it, and you know how long your term is going to be. I was a temp for 10 months at a major investment bank and was let go after 10 months because my term was up. I then temped for someone who was away on personal leave for 4 months (but now she decided to quit so they’ve hired me! :-) ).
It’s only a horror story if you THINK you’re getting the job, are lied to, and then surprise surprise, 3 months later in walks the person who was on leave, saying “The job is mine, and I’m back.” I would hope that would never happen except in the most corrupt of companies.
I always get the folks who tell me that temping itself is a horrible thing, but when you’re in the situation I was in, it can mean the difference between a paycheck and no income at all, so in that case it’s not all bad. Not having a permanent job isn’t ideal, but if you go into it knowingly, it’s not as bad as it might seem.
Housework is a choice.
Your house is full of magic elves who do laundry, wash dishes and dust while you sleep? I can see why you would be baffled that anyone does housework.
Tony, I hope you’re not describing your own failed marriage, because your exemplar man seems pretty dumb. It never occurred to him that he might have to continue picking up his own socks, post-marriage? He thought that he married the only woman in the world with a vagina?*
*Funny how these kinds of men think the female genitalia consist only of the vagina. Explains volumes, doesn’t it?
Your house is full of magic elves who do laundry, wash dishes and dust while you sleep? I can see why you would be baffled that anyone does housework.
Doing laundry, washing dishes, and dusting take maybe ten hours a week, in a household with one or two kids.
The elementary tasks of keeping a house clean are not time-consuming. It can be more time-consuming if the kids are allowed to go without picking up after themselves – but then that’s a parenting problem, not a division-of-labor problem.
I can certainly see that there are families where the guy is just a complete 50s throwback pig who refuses to do anything. That’s an issue. However, from the descriptions given of more “modern” couples, it seems obvious that the woman wants to see 40 hours of housework done in a week, and the man wants to see 10. So she expects him to do 20, and he does 5; since she demands the 40, she does the 35 to get there; and she feels put-upon and exploited. “I’m doing seven times as much as him!” He doesn’t feel that way; he’s doing half of what he thinks ought to get done, and thinks she’s wasting 35 hours a week of her life.
He’s mostly right.
Write this down because it may not happen again… but I agree with Robert. 10 hours of housework per week is more than enough.
I also think it is the responsibility of both people in a relationship to learn the other’s expectations. Since equality is important to me, I make damn sure to choose a mate who also believes equality is important. It’s not rocket science, really. You appear to agree with me on this point, Mythago.
So that is a choice as well. You either choose to put your relationship over your own well-being or you don’t.
But about my magic elf… his name is Adam, he has a very cute butt, and he never has a headache.
Doing laundry, washing dishes, and dusting take maybe ten hours a week, in a household with one or two kids.
*blink!*
You’re actually right here Robert, provided that you have a dishwasher and don’t have any ironing. But what about the sink-scrubbing, toilet scrubbing, shower-stall/tub-scrubbing, floor sweeping/vacuuming, and grocery-shopping? Those are weekly chores, too. Not having a dishwasher eats up some time. Not much—but it adds up during the week. I’m fortunate to have a job that doesn’t require ironing, but a lot of folks need that pressed-clean look at work. What about picking the kids up and taking them to school/daycare/extracurriculars? It’s not “housework”, but it’s a regularly scheduled family duty that takes time, too. And you forgot to mention cooking! Opening the mail and paying the bills. All the little weekly things. Better tack on another ten hours to your tally.
Then add in the occasional chores, like polishing the floors (I have hardwood floors, and this is something I used to do once a year before parenthood). Home repairs, things like that.
Figuring in hours spent in housework is kinda like figuring up your actual budget—lot of “little things” are “forgotten” about between the big-ticket items. In the case of housework, it’s usually because someone else is doing them. From what I’ve seen (and experienced—but that seems like a lifetime ago), it’s not that there’s a bunch of guys who are throwback 1950′s pigs who refuse to do the work, it’s just that there isn’t a realistic assessment of what the weekly workload consists of. Like not realizing that groceries don’t appear magically by themselves in the fridge, and that it’s an hour’s trip to go get them, come back, and put them away. Like not realizing that the clothes don’t fold or hang themselves after the machines are done with them, even though this is only a 20-minute job. Or that the bathroom scrubbing needs to be done once a week, even though it’s just another 20 minutes. ‘Cuz all those 15-20 minute jobs add up. And these guys might not have a high-standard for themselves, but more than likely, they still keep a higher-standard for their wives.
Shit. I am so glad I don’t have to deal with this shit anymore. I might have all the housework, but no one bitches at me about it because he thinks I ought to be June Cleaver. I do what’s necessary, and then fill in the blanks, because I have a life, too. And it’s more important than the housework.
*Funny how these kinds of men think the female genitalia consist only of the vagina. Explains volumes, doesn’t it? Word!!!
Your house is full of magic elves who do laundry, wash dishes and dust while you sleep?
Where can I get me one of these?
I think a lot of it is expectations. Robert may be able to accomplish all the cleaning and laundry in 10 hours a week. If the standard of living he and his wife feel is adequatly met within those 10 hours, then great. Im fast, and my cleaning/laundry time is actually less. I dont and wont iron.
The sticking point usually comes between people who have different expectations for “clean”.
My guy has a pile of clothes (clean and will-wear-again) that he keeps in a never-ending pile on the table in our bedroom. This does not bother me as long as Im not expected to clean it up. But I know that other people would go crazy over someone who wouldnt put his clothes away.
The kitchen gets cleaned (and not by me) once a day. Which often means dishes piled in the sink for hours and messy countertops.
Neither of us mind, once a day is right for us. I know other people who would freak over dishes in the sink.
It seems to me that most inequalities come from different expectations over what clean means to each person. I personally have always experienced the men in my friend’d lives having a higher expectation of “clean” than my women friends. Robert’s experience seems to be the opposite.
Cooking – same difference. If as a single person you throw in a lean cusisine cooking is about 10 min of your day – unless you and your SO have the same ideas about what constitutes a meal, the chef portion of housework can also be a source of contention. Also note that as a single person I can say “Im just gonna eat potato chips for dinner.” whereas that’s not an option if you are responsible for meals in the house.
Children are a whole different story. To blithly claim that children’s mess is a “parenting issue” rather than a cleaning issue is a joke. In my wide experience, it takes just as long to supervise a child cleaning up their mess as it does to do it yourself. And boy, can they make a mess.
They are also too young to clean some of the messes they make – bath messes for instance, or dumping-ceral-on-the-kitchen-floor messes. Or laundry.
An additional problem of expectations is the job duties of a stay-at-home mom. Does the job include 40 hours a week of parenting duties, with the other 128 hours split evenly between each parent? Are the “10″ hours of cleaning supposed to be fit in between the 40 hours of parenting or in addition to them? What about hours for yardwork, food shopping, lists for food, bill-paying, additonal house repairs & cleaning, clothes shopping, car maintenance, outside child maintenance (like haircuts and dr. visits) – things that take up time within a month/year but are not necessarily weekly activities.
Negotiating all these hours of work seems to consist of very little communication within a partnership. Very odd.
Shit. I am so glad I don’t have to deal with this shit anymore. I might have all the housework, but no one bitches at me about it because he thinks I ought to be June Cleaver. I do what’s necessary, and then fill in the blanks, because I have a life, too. And it’s more important than the housework.
Now this is important. A guy who wants June Cleaver, ought to marry June Cleaver. A guy who wants Pamela Anderson ought to marry Pamela Anderson. A guy shouldn’t marry Pamela Anderson and expect her to be June Cleaver (or visa versa).
The same applies to women.
When I wrote earlier about expectations, I wasn’t referring to only what the women expect. It’s also a problem with what the men expect (as much as our resident straw-person builders would like to portray as otherwise).
It seems to me that most inequalities come from different expectations over what clean means to each person.
Bingo.
Robert, the additional cleaning load created by a toddler is not a “parenting issue” that can be solved by putting the toddler to work. My child of two is not capable of running a washing machine to clean the clothes he wears of the sheets he sleeps on. I think my experience in this regard reflects that of all but the most unusual cases.
Housework loads vary widely depending on the house and the activities of the inhabitants, and not just their expectations. In a house with forced-air heat, for example, or a coal stove, there is a lot more cleaning to be done.
Further, the expectations themselves are the sort of gender issue that men fail to recognize as privilege. Hugo Schwyzer posted some time ago about how his first wife and he both had low expectations of cleanliness, but that when her mother arranged a visit, she had to clean the house to a high standard because she would be judged by her housekeeping. There is a personal cost for women in adopting lower cleaning standards, just like there is a personal cost to men for being stay-at-home dads. One who ignores that blinks reality to hide from his own privilege.
Finally, even if the load is only ten hours a week, that’s a significant addition to a busy life. Add that to a work week that, with commute, averages sixty-odd hours and sometimes ninety or a hundred; family obligations; parenting time …
Here’s a good solution for the overly-analytical types (like myself):
Make a list of absolutely everything that needs to be done around the house, including so-called “masculine” and “feminine” tasks. Then, come to an agreement about how much each task is “worth” (watering the plants might be worth 1 point, while doing the laundry might be worth 6 points). Then, split up the tasks so that each person has an equal number of points. The person who has the task is responsible for that chore. This tends to solve the problem where the guy is in favor of equality theoretically, but in practice it doesn’t seem to work out. Of course, if the guy doesn’t care about equality to begin with, then there’s not really any hope.
Not saying this solution is perfect (it is really not, especially when one person does not live up to their responsibilities & the wrong person is blamed/credited by others). But it moves things forward a bit. It clarifies the boundaries, and tends to reduce a lot of contention. Also, if you can’t get past the initial negotiation, it’s a good signal that the relationship is doomed.
On top of that, I think feminists should be aware of their role in supporting and encouraging other people’s egalitarian relationships (friends, family). Parents should expect their sons to do as much as daughters, and they have the jurisdiction to criticize when their grown sons fail to do their fair share (as currently occurs to daughters).
Lastly, I just wanted to say thankyou to mythago for NEVER allowing excuses for nonsense. Reading you is like drinking a glass of fresh, cool, clean water when you’re really, really thirsty. :o)
La Lubu says:
You honestly don’t see the difference? To a childfree person the difference is staggeringly obvious: Becoming a parent is generally a conscious choice, while getting cancer or heart disease isn’t. (And in cases when one of the latter two happens and it seems obviously the result of bad lifestyle choices, sometimes there will be resentment.)
To do a bit more consciousness-raising: The childfree might also have winced slightly when mythago said “I’m betting they don’t have kids yet” because of how the “yet” implies it’s inevitably going to happen. (Similarly in some cases when people say “when kids come along” rather than “if kids come along”.) Of course parenthood is the topic in this thread, so that’s a little different here.
Make a list of absolutely everything that needs to be done around the house, including so-called “masculine” and “feminine” tasks. Then, come to an agreement about how much each task is “worth” (watering the plants might be worth 1 point, while doing the laundry might be worth 6 points). Then, split up the tasks so that each person has an equal number of points. The person who has the task is responsible for that chore. This tends to solve the problem where the guy is in favor of equality theoretically, but in practice it doesn’t seem to work out.
Then determine the difference in dollars between what each spouse earns and convert that into “points”.
To steal from the Bitch herself:
ha ha ha ha ha housework.
in our house we don’t even bother unless someone calls to tell us they’re coming to visit, which is rare.
we’d rather enjoy each other’s company than fight. or clean. if it’s not covered in malaria germs, emitting a yellow cloud of gas or sentient enough to incite a riot, fuck it. what’s it gonna do, run away and get done by someone else?
THERE ARE NO HOUSEWORK POLICE.
I am the partner who is working at the moment. my man is at home. he cooks the most insane dinners that are ready the minute I walk in the door. oh my god they’re hot and delicious and just perfect at the end of a hard day at the office. and nobody does the dishes. so fuck you, Cleaver!
problem solved, y’all.
No. People have children because if you fuck someone of the opposite sex, chances are that sooner or later you (or, if you are a man, your partner) will get pregnant. It’s lovely that we have ways of avoiding this, and tragic when people who want kids find out they can’t, but let’s not be stupid: having children is not the choice. NOT having children is the choice.
Uh…holding up my hand as a counterexample. “Want to have a baby now?” “OK!”
Right this minute, Robert? At least let me comb my hair.
No time for that. You have housework to get done.
But seriously. My wife and I planned our baby. And she and her first husband planned her first two babies. Not atypical at all in our circle of acquaintances.
1. Becoming pregnant is not the same thing as becoming a parent, and I quite deliberately referred to the latter.
2. Of course the phrase “if you fuck someone of the opposite sex” correctly implies an assumption that another choice has been made (to fuck someone of the opposite sex), and the fact that it is an assumption means that “NOT having children is the choice” is not accurate as a general statement either.
(The Bitch has a tendency to combine those assumption-filled oversimplifications with aggressive judgementalism [e.g. "let’s not be stupid"], which is why I absolutely cannot stand to read her.)
As a tangent, I have to say that my experience with my social circle is much like Robert’s, and it’s why all those products and services you’ll find at fertilityfriend.com are so popular.
#2 Say what?
I daresay the majority of pregnancies are unplanned, which would make the majority of children unplanned.
This story sez its 65-35 unplanned vs. planned. But this is one study from one part of Tennessee; who the hell knows nationally, and I ain’t got time to research it. Either way, there are substantial populations of both types of parents.
Your conclusion that the majority of children are unplanned would seem premature, however. Abortion doesn’t generally hit the “planned child” population. I’d bet that there are more unplanned conceptions. Not so sure about births.
What I was getting at is that if you don’t want to get pregnant, you always have that choice not to fuck someone of the opposite sex. And using contraception properly is extremely effective at any rate. (If you’re raped, you of course earn no ill will–quite the opposite.)
But the important choice is the one about becoming a parent.
N.B. I’m a weirdo with a mildly unusual life history so I tend to see a lot of buried assumptions that tend to go unnoticed by people who’ve had more ordinary lives.
Let me just reiterate, since I might not have emphasized it enough in my previous post, that #1 was the important point and #2 was just a tangent I got off on because it was something that bugs me about BitchPHD’s writing style. I have a tendency to get off on tangents sometimes; that’s a flaw of my own.
Jay, to clarify, I don’t assume everyone will have kids. But most couples do, hence the “yet”.
By the way, while it’s not a choice to get heart disease, it’s certainly a choice to marry another person, knowing that if they get sick you’re #1 on the hook for their caretaking. It’s one thing to say “I need time off work to take care of my own cancer.” But don’t tell me “I need time off cancer to take care of my wife” and pretend that you made any less of a choice than a parent did.
It seems to me that most inequalities come from different expectations over what clean means to each person.
Absolutely. When one person’s view of “clean” is “If I sit on my ass long enough, I know my spouse/SO will give in and do it,” you get inequality.
The elementary tasks of keeping a house clean are not time-consuming.
The actual, physical cleaning? I guess if your kids are not home all day and are old enough to pitch in, sure. But unlike you, I’m not carefully pretending that housekeeping is merely dusting and vacuuming. I’m talking about managing a household. At any rate, if it’s only ten hours a week, it’s no big deal for each person to do exactly five rather than one person claim that it’s perfectly reasonable to stick the other with eight of those hours.
You’re right that it’s a choice, Redneck–to a point, and it’s not always a clearly-made choice. One person’s already posted about Super Self-Reliant Boyfriend suddenly turning into Lazy Asshole Hubby. Speaking from experience, you don’t always know clearly that your spouse is going to suddenly indulge in tired old gender games once the chase is over and you’re married. Mind you, staying married is generally a choice….
Can’t argue with that. If people insist on getting married, they need to go into it clear-eyed, which unfortunately doesn’t happen often enough.
Come on, you know perfectly well that that’s not what she meant. Can’t anyone have a serious discussion on the Internet?
“Can’t anyone have a serious discussion on the Internet?”
Ha. Pretty much no. But I’ve been wondering the same thing for a long time.
Jay See,
No, I honestly don’t see the difference. Maybe that’s because the childfree people I know feel strong obligations towards their partners, parents, siblings, and such—like I did before I had a child. Also, do you mean “childfree” as in “not having children”, or do you mean childfree as in the political movement of people without children who seek to abolish all laws or policies that benefit children (yet paradoxically, want to see codified “child-free” public areas and housing)? There’s a huge difference between the two.
But when I posted earlier, I wasn’t really talking about it from an individual perspective; I was looking at it from the societal perspective. What is the percentage of real childfree—as in, never had ‘em, never will—people in the industrialized world? Ten percent? So, it’s reasonable for an employer to expect that the vast majority of employees are going to have children at some point in their lives, right? It’s reasonable to have a plan (like hiring temps, or telecommuting, or job-sharing, or on-site daycare, or flex-time, or…..) to bridge the gap. Why are we willing to bridge the gap for illness and injury, but not for parents?
In the U.S., the traditional answer to the work/family conundrum is “that’s what you have a wife at home for.” (and never mind those of us for whom this has historically never been true; we don’t “count”.) There’s a really toxic combination of individualism, Protestant work ethic, and sexist assumptions that govern workplace attitudes towards family life. Not to mention what constitutes “success”. Europe doesn’t have that Puritan heritage, so that tempers the work/family blend.
Look, the idea of more job security and a more humane work schedule isn’t just an issue for parents, and I can’t understand why some childfree people insist on making this a battle between the parenting and nonparenting (“I can make it to work sixty hours a week; why can’t you??!!” or “Have a problem finding daycare? Tough Shit! That’s why we have legal abortion, dummy.”).
Come on, you know perfectly well that that’s not what she meant.
Come on, you know perfectly well I was pointing out that her flat statement was dumb.
and I can’t understand why some childfree people insist on making this a battle between the parenting and nonparenting
Because some of them see EVERYTHING as a zero-sum game between parents and nonparents.
An acquaintance of mine was once hired to do a study at a company that had a sort of cold war going on between childfree employees vs. parents. What her analysis found was that, overall, there was no difference in time worked. The difference was in schedules. The parents got in early and left early, so they perceived the childfree as slackers who wandered in whenever they felt like it. The childfree, who came in late and stayed late, saw the parents ‘cutting out’ of work early.
What her analysis found was that, overall, there was no difference in time worked. The difference was in schedules. The parents got in early and left early, so they perceived the childfree as slackers who wandered in whenever they felt like it. The childfree, who came in late and stayed late, saw the parents ‘cutting out’ of work early.
That sounds about right. Back on the old hipmama boards, every now and then there’d be an influx of holier-than-thou childfree (TM) people who didn’t have anything better to do than troll parenting boards and make inflammatory statements and blow any minor-league parental criticism of the status quo out of proportion. Work hours were one standard argument (taking off work for your own flu was ok; but it wasn’t ok to take off work for a child’s illness—that meant you were clearly not fit for employment, since you couldn’t be there “every day”). The other standard argument was “why do people have to appear with their children in public?”, followed closely by “why can’t I buy a house (or rent an apartment) in a neighborhood where children are prohibited by law?”
Thing is, I haven’t actually met anyone like that in real life; the people I know without children just don’t want children—they have no anti-children agenda, nor do they react any differently to obnoxious children than to obnoxious adults. But I’ve been told that yes, it’s not an urban legend—there really are people who seethe at the fact children exist.