Since 1989 the realities of our sexual and financial lives have changed utterly, reconfiguring society beyond recognition. Except for housework. Cleaning up remains, against all logic and other trends, principally women’s work. So it should be no surprise that the domestic realm is where the most intractable discrepancies between men and women remain; it’s where the daily struggle otherwise known as the gender wars continues unabated; and it’s where that struggle will have to be resolved. The crisis has been brewing for thirty years. In all that time domestic culture has not caught up with working reality. One of them will have to change.
The nub of the problem is that men will not do more housework. In the vast majority of countries in the developed world, men’s time investment in housework has not significantly altered since the mid-1980s.II The largest cross-national metastudy on the subject, from 2009, found that “in Canada, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands—all countries with data spanning the 1980s to 2000s—men’s housework time has not budged significantly since the 1980s, with current levels at about 80 minutes a day.” In the United States men’s participation in housework “topped out” at ninety-four minutes a day in 1998, but by 2003 was down to eighty-one minutes, pretty close to the seventy-six minutes it was in the 1980s. The husbands of women who work do not do more housework, even when they stay at home. The husbands of women who earn more money than they do less housework.
Unlike virtually every other rubric by which you can establish the balance of power between men and women, there is no evidence of a cohort shift in housework. Women now are 40 percent of breadwinners in America, a share of the workforce that has quadrupled since 1960. Yet men have not added domestic responsibilities to compensate for their diminished breadwinner responsibilities. Not even a little bit.
Removing, for a moment, the question of economic fairness, men’s more or less outright refusal to do more housework is also genuinely mysterious. Why won’t men help around the house? Think of all the other changes that men, or most men anyway, have undertaken in the period between 1980 and 2010. Taking care of kids used to be women’s work too; now the man playing with his kids is an icon of manliness. Foodie snobbism has taken on an explicitly macho edge, to the point where the properly brined Thanksgiving turkey is a stereotypical status symbol of male achievement. So why won’t men pick up a broom? Why won’t they organize a closet? Why can’t housework be converted—as the former burdens of food preparation and child rearing have been—into a source of manly pride and joy? Why would housework be the place to stall?
Despite its apparent banality, housework has always been an intellectually confounding problem. Defining chores as a bunch of repetitive tasks undertaken to preserve the health and hygiene of the living space is inaccurate. Housework is as complex as the connection between our emotional life and our material life, as subtle as all intimacy.
How do couples divvy up the housework? Most studies use either a questionnaire or a diary to work out who is doing what. But a 2007 study from Britain compared couples who used both forms and found significant discrepancies between them. The conclusion? “The overall results suggest that there are systematic errors in stylized housework time estimates.” Another study compared the self-reporting by husbands and wives and concluded, “Although wives’ self-reports differ statistically from the most inclusive ESM [Experience Sampling Method] estimate, husbands’ estimates of wives’ housework time do not. The mechanisms that produce this similarity are unclear, but it is possible that respondents think about household tasks more globally than do researchers constructing survey questions, and so include in their time estimates other activities that they consider as necessary preludes to or components of the household tasks about which they are asked.”
You may have had this argument yourself: Should housework be measured by time on task or by effectiveness? What is necessary work, and what is puttering? Should work that is physically taxing, like yard work, count more than work that isn’t, like the dishes? Questionnaires and housework diaries deal only in repetitive tasks: sweeping, washing up, mowing the lawn, and so on. What about planning summer vacations? What about figuring out which washer to buy? And what about that far more important but far more vague business of caring? We all know families that are held together because one parent knows who likes what in their sandwiches, who can or cannot read on a road trip, who needs cuddles after a hard day at school. The million tendernesses of “emotion work” all require effort, often thankless effort. They’re not going to show up in a housework survey.
Cleanliness, like sex, feels organic while being highly constructed. In Katherine Ashenburg’s The Dirt on Clean, a study of historical standards of cleanliness, the relativism of hygiene over time is amazing: “Even more than in the eye or the nose, cleanliness exists in the mind of the beholder. Every culture defines it for itself, choosing what it sees as the perfect point between squalid and over-fastidious. . . . It follows that hygiene has always been a convenient stick with which to beat other peoples.” The ancient Romans would have found Renaissance Europeans disgusting, as their Muslim contemporaries did. Our early modern forebears saw bathing as an experience rather than a daily practice. But our hygiene would have seemed degraded to the ancestors of even fifty years ago. This transference of physical abjection onto whole categories of human beings remains alive in the various microcultures of big cities, each with its pocket prejudices: who is filthy, who is anal, who smells funny.
There exists no standard definition of what has to be done in a household. There is only what feels so intensely like it needs to be done that it needs to be done.III Difficulties of definition necessarily haunt many sociological studies, but in the case of housework those difficulties press in from all sides.
In one Canadian study, “What Is Household Work?,” the sociologists had the intriguing idea of asking women what they considered their chores to be. A surprising array of answers emerged. For one Iranian Canadian woman it involved calling her sister every day. Overwhelmingly, women maintain the kinship bonds, which require, beyond the shadow of a doubt, immense efforts. Other subjects in the Canadian study mentioned spiritual practices as chores: “Spiritual activities included prayer, meditation, going to church, and participating in healing circles for Aboriginal women. Spirituality was treated as a reason for and a way to care for themselves and the people around them.” And why not? Why shouldn’t spirituality be considered a domestic duty? If prayers need to be sent, somebody needs to send them.
None of these methodological difficulties or more or less expansive versions of domestic labor excuses male passivity. If anything, they show how much more women are doing and how much of it is forgotten—simply not registered in the accounts of what goes into the day. But how do you tally up caring and prayer? The “moral dimension” to housework, as some feminist scholars have called it, complicates all merely economic readings of the situation. Nancy Folbre, an economist at the University of Massachusetts, has been arguing for years that the measure of gross domestic product should include some reflection of the vast economy of unpaid labor that takes place in the home. The method she suggests for establishing the value of that labor is to take the time devoted to unpaid housework and multiply it by the worker’s market wage. The question then becomes “How much would it have cost if you had hired a nanny or a maid to do it?” Folbre is well aware of the limits of this methodology, but that doesn’t hide the fundamental error that makes the question mostly nonsense. Housework is not alienated labor. In its emotional dimension, it is not work you can hire somebody to do. Technological progress has saved immense labor in the home over the past one hundred years; it hasn’t stopped arguments, though. If money and technology could solve the problem, they already would have, at least for those who can afford to pay. Couples merely shift the battleground: people with dishwashers go from fighting about who cleans the dishes to fighting about who empties the dishwasher; people with nannies fight about who manages the nannies.IV And so on.
Difficulties of accounting don’t preclude the need for some kind of account, though. By Folbre’s analysis, even the domestic tasks for which you can hire labor amount to an unexpressed 25.7 percent of GDP, the bulk of which completely hidden production inordinately falls on women.
* * *
My wife has always done more housework than I have. I sense vaguely, half-consciously, all that my wife has done in the times in and around her big job and the kids: the straightened coffee table and the fluffed pillows, the swept floors and organized shelves in the kitchen with their glass jars for salt and sugar and flour, the magazines evenly spaced in the bathroom magazine racks, the coziness that follows a thousand tender putterings. Whole aspects of cleanliness essential to her—a thick line of dust across the bookshelves, the position of the appliances on the kitchen counter—they pass me by completely. I shouldn’t say “completely.” I notice a messy room, but I don’t care. I certainly don’t care enough to straighten it myself. I cannot bring myself to care. Or at least not enough, not nearly enough to stop writing this and go down and straighten the room.
When people are young, they think “we’ll make a contract.V Household contracts are well-suited to the technocratic young people who have it together enough to move in with one another. The thinking goes like this: We have a problem—a fair division of housework—therefore we need a solution: a contract. We want to avoid subservience, therefore we will provide means to mutual obedience to a mutual will. The enlightened legalism has a satisfying finality to it. Every couple who draws up a domestic contract thinks they have finally figured out adulthood. They cheerfully imitate their elders and draw up to-do lists and concomitant schedules, which they then post in a neutral place. Sometimes they even go so far as to sign these documents.
Sarah and I did not go that far, but we had contracts worked out in fine detail: who did what when, with weekly tasks in rotation. It was strictly the hard stuff: cleaning toilets, scrubbing bathtubs, sweeping floors, doing dishes. Equality remained as elusive as ever. The contract is only as solid as the terms of its interpretation. The question of what constitutes a clean bathtub has as many answers as there are people. What happens when one person rushes and the other lingers? Because you can tell the difference. But there are deeper problems as well; housework by contract is like sex on a schedule: it misses the point of the action. If a relationship is about contracts and schedules, it is rational. But if you have only a rational relationship, why are you bothering? You’ll do better with hookers and cleaning ladies—the costs and benefits are more clearly aligned. We want intimacy in love, a house full of intimate love, and intimacy cannot be a contractual economy. It wants gifts. Even in households with domestic contracts, what both sides desire is a gift over and above the contract, the necessary but not required, obvious but not expected gesture.
* * *
Housework is intimate drudgery. Understanding its intimacy is at least as important as understanding its drudgery.
As women make more money, they do more housework. There are several conflicting explanations for why this result consistently appears in studies on the subject, but the most widely accepted is that women who perform breadwinner functions try to compensate for that public role in private. The study that identified this “gender deviance neutralization” was undertaken in Australia: “While Australian women reduce their housework time as their share of couple income approaches equality, past the point of equal income shares, these women actually increase their housework time. This U-shaped relationship between income share and housework time seems to support the idea that women who are gender deviant in income may seek to neutralize that deviance through the performance of gender through housework.” Thus the peculiar middle-class ritual of cleaning up for the cleaning lady. Even if women pay for the performance of traditionally female functions, they still need to prove their ability to perform those functions. (Even writing down the list of the chores I have done, I feel slightly emasculated. My gonads shrink into my body a bit.)
Research into “gender neutralization” in housework has shown outliers in certain countries, such as Sweden and Great Britain, although the evidence for a U-shaped curve between income share and housework does apply in the United States. Another study broadened the theory to include not just income as an instance of “gender deviance” but the gender type of the work involved, which showed an even stronger correlation: “Men and women perform gender through the routine activities of male- and female-typed housework and this performance appears to be undertaken in part to neutralize the gender deviance created when men and women are employed in gender-atypical occupations.” What constitutes gender deviance in the professions at the moment will no doubt alter with time. Fifty years ago a “woman doctor” was an unusual phenomenon. Now not so much. Nonetheless, compensatory performances, intimate, tucked away, continue to affect daily domestic life. A woman who works at a traditionally male job tries to be more traditionally female at home. A man who is at home compensates by being less of a homemaker.
Like everything in marriage, the division of domestic duties ultimately boils down to sex, the fundamental struggle to achieve regulated passion. In what must be one of the most widely reported sociological studies in history, a team of researchers in 2012 reported that men who do housework have less sex than men who don’t, and men who do traditional male “work around the house,” like yard work, have more sex than men who don’t. That old chestnut of sex advice columns, that tidying up the kitchen will get your wife in the mood, is sadly inaccurate. Women may think they want a man who sweeps floors, and they may really want one around, but, in general, they don’t want one in bed. It’s a discomfiting, somewhat humiliating, somewhat thrilling way of looking at housework. Chores are the world’s dreariest form of foreplay.
Housework is a stumbling block in the comedy of society at large as much as in the comedy of personal life. The subject has always been a hiccup in the grand rhetoric of women’s liberation. Even John Stuart Mill in his work on the subjugation of women stumbled over its unique societal position. Mill was a classic good liberal: he believed that marriage should be based on rational love between equals; he believed in the education of women. But he also quite casually assumed that women would always remain at home, in their natural domain, out of choice. This has led more than a few people to question the point of women’s liberation if the end result is to raise better servants.
Even Marx and Engels, the grandest of all theorists of labor relations, struggled to agree on a definition. Housework, said Marx, did not fall under the category of alienated labor, like most other forms of production in capitalist life, but belonged to the realm of craft, the humanizing and personalizing of space. So under communism people do housework. Engels believed the opposite, that housework would eventually be industrialized, and hence simply erased from the coming utopia.
Feminism has more or less inherited this double view, unsure whether to celebrate housework as unappreciated “women’s work” or to condemn it as a kind of societal imprisonment. The clean or the dirty house lies between the street and the bedroom. On the street there should be justice, but desire is never fair. Here an almost existential despair sets in. There is no solution to the economic injustice of housework, any more than there is a solution to human desire.
* * *
I do not remember any arguments in my childhood home about the nature of gender essentialism or the patriarchal structures latent in a capitalist society, no disquisitions about female objectification or the inherent violence of patriarchy or the advent of third-wave after second-wave feminism. I do remember my mother and father fighting about who cleaned up, or rather they would fight about something that had nothing to do with cleaning up but was really about who was vacuuming the floors. Such arguments were an inevitable part of progress, the tensions of the past they were attempting to shrug off.
Housework was what my mother was raised to do; escaping it meant escaping a gendered
fate. I am her son, and yet her story barely seems from my own time or my own country. Her parents in rural New Brunswick didn’t teach her to drive; that was for men. Her parents didn’t want her to be a doctor, either; that too was for men. She attended university on a home economics scholarship and then surreptitiously transferred into botany. In that, even then, at the beginning of her journey, was a bargain she struck with the old orders: she mastered the material conditions of home economics so that, under cover, she could see the larger beauties of life. My mother stuck to that deal for the whole of her life. While building a fully functioning practice as a physician, she more or less ran a household as if she were a housewife. She cooked dinner every night. She maintained, as in my grandparents’ house, a parlor, a room set aside not to be touched, simply to be clean. In the parlor, behind a glass partition, the prettiest things in the house were never touched: the Psyanka eggs her Ukrainian patients brought her in gratitude, ivory carvings from our family trip to China, the porcelain she inherited from her grandmother. Domestic totems, as direct and noisy as animist shrines. Behold, I have money! Behold, I am clean! Behold, I am a woman! Behold, I have fulfilled the sacred duties!
The house-beast in which I grew up was hungrier than the house-beast in which I currently live. It was a house built on the principle of the Canadian prairie: There’s space enough here to fit us all in. The wide sprawl of its hallways made a kind of suburb inside the house inside the suburbs. Our living room, off to a half-sunken side, was as large as the entire ground floor of my current house. And my mother vacuumed it all, weekly, in between delivering babies and encountering sickness and death, being on call. Supermomdom was less an overturning of gender roles than their doubling: do everything that a man was expected to do in 1955 while also doing everything that a woman was expected to do in 1955. The obligations remained, more or less, fully intact.
The Unmade Bed Page 16