CHORE WARS!

With more than two-thirds of women now employed, you’d think the days of us shouldering the majority of household chores would be well and truly over. Well, wake up and smell the disinfectant! A new Good Housekeeping survey reveals that we’re still doing

Zoe Williams gets tough on the home front

Let me tell you two stories: one from before and one from after having my children. The first was a meeting I had with a feminist activist, who I assumed would want to talk about something important, like the pay gap. But no. She wanted to talk about the chore gap. I was about 27 at the time and gaped at her, open-mouthed. Chores? I couldn’t think of anything duller to occupy a debate.

There’s no need to argue with men about chores, I said. Just don’t do them, and see what happens. You’ll either live in squalor, get a cleaner, or he will do them. The very worst that can happen is a bit of strategic incompetence, the odd jumper ‘accidentally’ boil washed by a man seething with passive-aggressive patriarchal rage. I can deal with that, I said. I can hide my cashmere.

Scroll forward a decade, I had a three year old and a one year old, my colleague had a daughter of five. We were having a cup of tea – sorry, a high-level meeting – talking about the fact that her husband had taken their daughter to a school disco. He knew where the school was, he knew which the kid was, what could go wrong? Her phone pinged. A photo of the child dancing, rather forlornly positioned at the side of the room. In a sea of glitter and gold, fluff, feathers and spangles, she was the only one in school uniform. He’d forgotten her disco outfit.

‘Having it all’ was Eighties spin. What it meant for women was ‘doing it all’ – and if you weren’t doing it all, the mental energy you wasted fuming at how much better it would have been if you had was a chore in itself.

It’s not necessarily having children that changes things. It can be as simple as reaching an age where you don’t want to live under piles of mess, or would prefer not to eat food out of a tin. Suddenly all your emancipation evaporates.

Indeed, of the work that women do most of, according to the Good Housekeeping survey*, it is cooking, rather than childcare, that looms largest. Over 92% of women do at least part of the cooking and nearly 70% do all of it! This is where career inequality bakes in: in the chores that have to be done every day. A man might take responsibility for the MOT or the admin, but even if that took as much time – which it never would, unless you had a very bad car – it wouldn’t have the same impact on his career progression, because he wouldn’t have had to build it into his working day.

Why have women made so little progress in this area? The gaps are still very stark, and they open up when men and women start to cohabit. When they live together as couples, women do more and men actually do less: for a snapshot of what this does to your life, the women in the GH survey estimated four hours a day of unpaid work, compared to their partner’s 1.4. Whether that time comes out of sleep, box sets or colouring in, the upshot is the same: it inhibits your fulfilment.

I have a few theories as to why women don’t assert themselves more. One is that the argument is often more arduous than the task. The economist Adam Smith undermined domestic labour for centuries to come when he described it as ‘services that perish in the very instant of their performance, and seldom leave any trace of value behind’. The same feels true of having to talk about it – you never have to complain just once, but rather you face a perpetual cycle: argument, brief improvement, slide, resentment, fresh argument. It is a dialogue that perishes in the instant of its performance, but not only does it leave no trace of value behind, it leaves a trace of resentment. And since it’s only the dishes, why not just do them?

For all the Seventies talk of the personal being political, feminists generally meant the exciting side of the personal – sex was political; having children was political; picking up socks... not so much. I’ve yet to meet anyone who wanted to man the barricades for the dignity of being able to sit on the sofa

rather than vacuum. Yet, while each task might be petty, the accumulation is not: there is more at stake than your own career progression, or even that of all women. There is also the role modelling you perform for children. Can your daughter live under your roof and not come away with the idea that she’ll be the one putting food on the table? How good a boyfriend is your son going to make? What will they have to unlearn?

For the poetic overstatement that takes you directly to the truth, you have to look to a French philosopher. Simone de Beauvoir famously described housework thus: ‘Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day… Eating, sleeping, cleaning – the years no longer rise up towards heaven, they lie spread out ahead, grey and identical.’

Not just for yourself should you put down that duster, nor even for the sisterhood: but for heaven’s sake – literally! – share it.

‘Having it all’ was Eighties spin… It really meant ‘doing it all’