The politics of the kitchen sink
Even for the most optimistic feminists, parenthood is the time when biology and politics conspire to turn the childhood motto, “Girls can do anything!” into “Women must do everything”. As the lockdown forces households across the country to reflect upon the gendering of housework, it seems appropriate to read Sally Howard’s new book, The Home Stretch. She blends qualitative research, academic literature, pop culture and history with her own lived experience to bring politics to where it truly belongs— the kitchen sink.
Ms Howard starts with the obvious: Why, after all these years, has feminism suffered so many “micro-defeats” at home? A 2017 study tracked gendered social attitudes through four decades of surveys of American high school seniors. Compared to 1994, it observed an uptick of 38 per cent in respondents in 2014 who believed the “best kind of family” was one in which the man was the provider and the woman took care of the home. Curiously, over 90 per cent of 2014 respondents also believed women should have “exactly” the same opportunities as men in business and politics. The problem, Ms Howard writes, lies in how society, home and family are structured. Office policies have been designed for men who, if they have children, also have stay-at-home wives to take care of them. Homes, and our stifling need to have them looking clean and beautiful, impose another set of restrictions. Societal expectations make it unpleasant, if not difficult for men to be stay-at-home dads. Ms Howard also draws parallels between gender/power imbalance and the growth of rightwing ideologies the world over. In the US, for example, a 2016 survey found that a majority of Trump voters believed that America, under previous presidents had grown “too soft and feminine”. And so, housework has come to reflect, also perpetuate power imbalances at home and outside.
Next, the author examines social experiments that have tried to tackle this power disparity. Deriving from experiences she’s had across the world as an itinerant journalist, these are fascinating. Ms Howard goes to communes where lesbianism is a political choice; a futuristic model house in Brussels where a robot (uncannily named Sally) makes salad and parfaits. She hangs out with her Lithuanian cleaner for a day, meets the Yummy Mummies of Kensington who herd together “like refugees on a lifeboat” and has coffee with STUDS (Spouses Trailing Under Duress Successfully) in a Brussels bistro. All these, she finds, are in a sense, reactions to the failed promise of an egalitarian hetero family.
Eventually, she writes, societal institutions will have to evolve to suit equitable household arrangements. Some Yummy Mummies and STUDS she’d met had opted out of the corporate world because of its culture of 16-hour days and stigmatisation of workers with childcare needs. Others opted out because for women, having a career often means a fulltime job in addition to housekeeping. This makes the chapter “Marketing Yummy Mummy (or the New Sexed Sell)” in which she traces the connection between capitalism and the perception of motherhood, a gripping read. Gender inequality has also been seen to rise with men’s incomes. With power and money, Ms Howard observes pithily, men become less willing to mop. She also wonders if male incompetence in the house reflects unconscious misogyny. It probably does.
The tragedy, The Home Stretch correctly points out, is that while feminism and its consequent impact on societal attitudes and government policy have empowered women to more easily support themselves and their children — it still hasn’t produced enough people who are truly comfortable with men in the primary housekeeping role. As her partner points out in the book: “It would be nice to have the right to decent paternity leave without being made to feel like a beta male when you ask for it.” This is a crucial point, somewhat overlooked by The Home Stretch. Housework is essential, lifegiving even. Across the world, men report feeling infinitely less enriched for having missed out on their children’s childhoods. Instead of seeing housework and childcare as chores to divide equitably, perhaps the way forward is to accord them the value they undoubtedly deserve — regardless of who performs them.
The Home Stretch is a thoughtprovoking read. Ms Howard doesn’t shy away from prescriptions, both personal and institutional, for a more equitable society. She advocates forming feminist alliances that demand better livelihoods for workers suffering the “pink collar” pay and rights deficit: Teachers, nurses, cleaners and care workers. She also advocates that governments should make parental leave obligatory and lost if not availed. In Sweden, she writes, both parents receive 16 months of paid parental leave and consequently, households are more equitable.
What makes this one of the top picks on the feminist bookshelf is the back and forth into Ms Howard’s experiences of navigating an unequal world of hetero parenting. The book starts with an account of the suicide of Ms Howard’s great grandmother Elsie, who struggled with postpartum depression and the drudgery of keeping a young family fed after World War I. The book ends with the author confessing she continues to festoon her knickers around the bedroom furniture as a minuscule act of feminist resistance. If the Second Wave feminist mantra “the personal is political” is true, The Home Stretch shows that the reverse — the political is personal —is true as well.