THE TAMING OF THE DUDES
Tired of nagging their partners, women are finding creative ways to get men to do more around the house — and they’ll have a new book as their rallying cr y
THE revolution began in the bathroom.
All journalist Gemma Hartley wanted for Mother’s Day was for her husband to hire a cleaning service to clean their home. Instead, Hartley’s husband, Rob, busted out the rubber gloves and toilet brush and did the work himself, expecting a grateful wife. Instead, he got tears — and Internet notoriety when the event spawned an essay, “Women Aren’t Nags — We’re Just Fed Up,” published on HarpersBazaar.com.
In the piece, which has been shared nearly 1 million times, Hartley explains that the clean bathroom wasn’t the point. She’d wanted her husband to research cleaning services, compare rates and contract a professional. This kind of chore — along with responding to wedding invitations, keeping track of children’s clothing sizes, stocking the fridge, ensuring the dog is up to date on his shots, remembering co-workers’ birth- days and making sure in-laws feel appreciated — is the “emotional labor” that women do at home, at work and in their communities to keep everyone’s lives running smoothly. According to Hartley’s essay, and her forthcoming manifesto, “Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward” (HarperCollins, out Nov. 13), the time has come for men to pick up the slack.
Hartley’s original essay went viral just a year ago, but it’s already transformed the way that many women interact with their part- ners. As the phrase “emotional labor” picked up traction on Twitter, blogs and Facebook parenting groups, Hartley’s fans began trading anecdotes and advice on how to redistribute the balance of power within their own homes. Meanwhile, detractors derided her as too demanding. After all, the bathroom was cleaned — just not in the way she would have liked it to be. But Hartley and others say that’s exactly the point: Men should rise to the standards that
women set.
That was the goal of Fatiah Rebbekkah Muhammad, a 28-year-old fashion stylist in The Bronx and mom to a 12-year-old son, when she elected to even out the workload in her relationship. After reading Hartley’s essay, she realized that her nagging was making life miserable for both her and her fiancé, Ferman Parker.
“I didn’t want to turn into his mother, and I felt like always asking him to do things was annoying to him, and to me,” she says. To avoid that, Muhammad developed a reward system: She found that the promise of a pair of Yeezy sneakers could go far toward making him pick up after himself and take initiative on household chores. While Hartley points out in her book that offering men bribes and incentives can be part of the problem — why should guys get rewarded for things women do without thinking? — Muhammad says this tactic alleviates frustration for both parties. “That way, the laundry gets done and we’re both happy,” she says.
Patty Morrissey, 36, a profes- sional organizer, was also inspired by the essay to create new techniques for dividing emotional labor in her own marriage. “My husband is definitely a feminist who doesn’t shy away from any household task, but there was definitely still an imbalance,” says the Huntington, LI, resident. Recalling a corporate-leadership trick, she took a stack of index cards and divided them between herself and her husband, Brian, 46. Then she had both of them write down one household responsibility per card.
Her husband blushed as Patty’s stack grew. “Holding the cards made me realize not only just how much weight Patty was pulling, but also made me see where I could actually help,” he says. Patty says the “visual representation” was helpful, and encouraged them to “re-balance.” For Morrissey, that meant her husband took over the morning routine — though not without snags: He once forgot their 7-year-old’s school lunch — but he eventually got the hang of it. “As I began doing more, I began to find it easier to take initiative,” he says. Now, he feels he can “take the lead in things that needed getting done without being asked.”
For Karen Jacobsen, a 40-something voice-over artist who lives in Hell’s Kitchen, sharing the parenting load for her 10-year-old son has been made even more difficult by society’s expectation that moms, not dads, perform the emotional labor of managing their kids’ lives. “My husband and I both travel a lot, and we take turns being the lead parent in the home, depending on what our schedules are like,” she says. “But it always takes at least two or three calls or visits to the school office until they CC both of us on e-mails, instead of just me.”
That underscores one of Hartley’s key points: It’s not that men are “bad” or “lazy” or want women to suffer — it’s that society places an unfair onus on women to get things done and to make people feel comfortable while they’re doing it.
Jacobsen’s husband, Tom, says that making sure he is included in communications with his child’s school is well worth the administrative annoyance. He believes that parental parity has been key in establishing a close relationship with his tween.
“Making a point to be equals in parenting means that both of us have a close and distinct bond with our son, which is everything to me,” he says, adding that the couple’s rigorous travel schedules made them early adopters of equal emotional labor before either had read the essay.
Hartley argues that men performing emotional labor is about more than just helping out with tasks such as scheduling the kids — it means letting the women in their lives know they are heard and seen.
Even couples who describe their relationships as fairly level say they have benefited from the “emotional labor” conversation.
Danielle Guercio, a 28-year-old writer in Manhattan, was struggling to explain to her boyfriend, who works in the restaurant industry, that “women are always expected to be the caretakers — at work, at home, everywhere.”
She finally got through to him when she compared being a woman to being a restaurant server, all the time: “‘You have to smile, you have to solve other people’s problems, you have to juggle multiple to-do lists without anyone seeing you sweat.’ It was only then that I felt like he got it,” she says. She thinks the conversation brought them closer, and made him more sympathetic to how draining it can be to simply be a woman.
As couples work on evening out their emotional-labor load, Hartley writes, women need to work on silencing the voice in their heads that tells them what they “should” be doing.
“Women, especially, have this internalized job description of what being a good mom or wife looks like,” says leadership expert Tiffany Dufu, who created the women’s networking organization the Cru. “It’s being physically present, making baby food, going to PTA meetings, whatever. But what I tell women to do . . . is reframe the job description so it hits on what’s most important to you.”
For example, for a parents-only “global discovery” night at her child’s school, Dufu sent a Ghanaian dish from a local restaurant — and her regrets. “I wanted to spend the evening with my family. Keeping that as a priority made it easy to outsource the task needed to do my part for the school function, without feeling overextended or resentful,” Dufu says of her decision.
Speaking up is key — at home and in the world. “A partner not doing their part isn’t clueless, or helpless, or too busy, and he shouldn’t need to be asked to do the basics. He’s being lazy or uncaring,” says Teagin Maddox, an Upper West Side dating coach who primarily works with divorced women. “I tell women that it’s not being bitchy to have standards. It’s important to communicate what they are, but there’s no reason a man who cares about you shouldn’t live up to them.”
Hartley agrees, and in her book, she reveals that after working through the concept of emotional labor, she and her husband are closer than they’ve ever been. Even better, their bond is independent from the state of their bathroom — and she feels like they’re setting a good example for their three kids. “We can fight to change the balance of emotional labor in our lives,” she writes, “and our children can change it in the world.”