Housework: Most men still don’t do enough
Recently, I wrote about the kinds of domestic labour women do, but the subject has to be bigger than one column. It won’t leave me alone. For example: way back in 2013, Canadian writer Stephen Marche wrote a feature called “The Case for Filth” for the much-revered front page of the New York Times’ Sunday Review. I cannot tell you how many angry debates I’ve had, going on four years now, with Mr. Marche over his stupid essay. They were all in my head, mind you, but they were very strongly argued and resounding in their counterpoints.
In “The Case for Filth,” Marche notes that the number of women acting as breadwinners in American families has quadrupled since 1960. Despite so many women entering the paid workforce, men’s participation in housework in 2003 was about the same as it was in 1980. Mr. Marche concludes, as only a man could, that, “The only possible solution to the housework discrepancy is for everyone to do a lot less of it.”
Seriously?! On the front page of the NYT Sunday Review?!
Marche’s “solution” is like saying that women’s pay has been stuck at 75 per cent of men’s pay for so long that men and women should all just take a 5 per cent pay cut and relax. Oh, women are so silly, doing work that doesn’t really need to be done!
Later, Marche was interviewed on CBC radio, whereupon he suggested that women should stop doing things like dusting and ironing. Huh? I dust about once a year. I don’t even own an iron anymore. I do not fold laundry or match socks. The floors get washed one square foot at a time, when someone spills something or a dog has an accident. Besides, we’re a household of seven and I find that socks pick up a lot of dirt.
Mr. Marche, I HAVE let things go! A LOT! And I STILL spend more time on housework than on any other activity in my life except sleeping! He couldn’t possibly understand this, though; most men can’t grasp how infinite and demanding housework is, even after it’s been stripped down to the bare essentials.
I hate it, and yet it’s second nature for me — to look in the fridge in the morning and assign ingredients for the night’s meal; to understand when to use boiling water to get a stain out; to have memorized enough prices that I know what to buy at which grocery stores …. It’s like a language I speak fluently, and yet I never remember learning it. My husband has only learned the few words I’ve taught him at great pains over many years, and still he speaks them haltingly and reluctantly.
I’m guessing that there are women out there who genuinely get a sense of satisfaction from housework, but I’ve never met one.
I have, however, met lots of women who are sick and tired of housework, and yet disproportionately responsible for it. Still. In the 21st century. How did this happen?
Do we start our training as soon as we’re old enough to watch what our mothers do and understand that we, like our mothers, are female? A woman doing housework becomes a norm we recognize and take on when we assume the roles of wife and mother; change is excruciatingly slow when we copy the previous generation. As adults, we recognize the dreariness and unfairness of it, but by then it all feels too impossible to change, so seamlessly has all the drudgery become integrated into our lives. Is it possible to walk into the family bathroom and not mentally list all the things that need to be cleaned?
It may seem like an old topic (and it is), but it’s far from resolved: even if both partners do full-time paid work, women average 16 hours more housework per week than their husbands. An American study released last year found that male millennials were much more likely to believe in the superiority of male breadwinner / female housewife marriages than their Gen X predecessors. This isn’t good. It would appear that we’re actually losing ground in the fight for equity at home.
Why does it matter? My own shame over the topic makes it hard to describe. If I hate housework, why does it underpin so much of my life? My husband and I have failed to create a much better model for our kids than our own parents did for us. I wonder if embarrassment is keeping ugly truths about the housework discrepancy out of sustained public discourse — the kind of discourse that would move us closer to actually solving the problem. How many marriages have become curdled with resentment because of this exact thing? It matters.
In my next column: a woman’s guide to arguing over housework.