The other day, someone on Mastodon posted a link to an article discussing how women are sidelined in their careers and thus devalued, economically. Of course, I can’t find the damn thing now but, essentially, the article started by sharing how a hypothetical hetero couple jointly decides that the woman has more job flexibility and therefore will stay at home and work part time when they have a child. As a freelance writer, she can do this more easily than he can. It is a mutual decision and the couple feels like they have found a fair and equitable solution.
On the surface, it does look like that. But when you dig down, since Betty (a name I just picked) is at home more, more and more of the household work becomes her burden. Not only child care, to which she originally agreed, but all the household stuff. So now, instead of spending her time taking care of the child and writing, with the rest of the house stuff waiting until the hubs comes home to share in it, she is taking care of the child and trying to sneak in writing, in-between doing everything to keep the household running (laundry, cleaning, shopping, cooking…). If she’s lucky, Bob (hubs/male partner) takes the kid after his work, “freeing” her to try, after her 8+ hours taking care of the kid, to write. However, he doesn’t do anything else but take the kid. She still has house stuff to do, etc. So, if she manages to write at all professionally, she takes on fewer and fewer freelance projects because she has too much to do otherwise.
The article then goes on to discuss the economics of it, which are appalling. Her labor is not included in GDP, for example. That labor is literally devalued. It’s infuriating on a macro scale. But it is in the singular, that is the effects in a home, which really interested me, as it has been my own lived reality.
The labor load (mental and physical) imbalance is obvious and ubiquitous, at least to the hetero women reading this. I suspect we’ve all had at least one partner who swears he’ll share the load but who ends up dropping that ball like it was hot lead. I know I certainly have. Somehow our male partners make time to ride their motorcycles or play golf with the bros, etc., and, while maybe they might mow the lawn, mostly the care of the home, inside and out, falls on the woman.
Worse yet, if the man does so much as a load of laundry (and virtually always only after being asked1), they act like they’ve just cured cancer and should at least get effusive thanks, if not a blow job, for their efforts. In case you, male reader, don’t understand, that’s like rubbing salt into our wounds: what we do is expected and only gets feedback if we fail to accomplish it or fail to accomplish it to your standards; but you perform a “honey do” chore and expect to be praised, no matter how tiny the chore or half-assed your efforts.
I can’t tell you how many times I have lived that experience. From about the time I turned 10 until, well, the end of my last relationship, over and over and over.
Now, if the man is working outside of the home, this is still wrong, but at least it is more understandable. If he’s not there all the time he isn’t as physically available to do the work. However, this dynamic happens even when the man is available–that is, working from home. In fact, it even happens when he works from home and she works somewhere outside of the home. Basically, the home stuff still falls on her to do (or at least arrange–i.e., mental load) or it doesn’t get done.
I was thinking about this before I read the article, particularly when I took care of the neighbors’ cat, recently. My neighbors are a hetero couple with twin boys (9yo) in a small house, with a (lovely) cat. She is a private school administrator who works at the school every day; he works for a public charter school, doing social media from (mostly) home, and plays in a band occasionally. They are lovely people, liberals, very educated, seem to be quite happy, and are doing a good job with the kiddos. However, the house is a mess2. The yard is a mess. They have a house cleaner who comes in once a week and even right after she3 does her (very good) job, it’s still a mess (albeit a cleaner one).
I suspect that he doesn’t do much more than the minimum and she just doesn’t fix it. She doesn’t do the mental labor or the physical. Now, I may be wrong, they may both have come from families where cleanliness stuff didn’t matter (they have lots of family visitors from both sides and it doesn’t change so, maybe?). Whatever, somehow, it works for them and they aren’t bothered by their overgrown yard4 or driveway full of legos or window boxes falling off the house, much less the state of their kitchen, stained sofa, or back door completely blocked with empty bags and stuff.
As for me, I have no idea how they live like that. I’m not a clean freak but, honestly, it makes me a bit twitchy with a need to make it better5. But, as I said, they seem a very happy lot so… I’m glad for them in that. It is their business, not mine.
As a feminist, though, I am deeply bothered that he isn’t doing more. She’s clearly the primary breadwinner and he’s at home so why is he, for example, working on his skateboarding skills rather than cleaning the kitchen sink or repairing the window boxes? They have lots of friends and must see that others do not live as they do, so why doesn’t he step up and take care of more? Is he waiting to be told, by her, to do X or Y?
Of course, if the tables were turned, if he worked out of the home and she in it, the woman would be shunned for not taking better care of the household. In fact, even in the scenario above, I think the woman still gets more blame: why doesn’t she do something/make him do something? But that it is the man…somehow he seems to get a pass.
One of the things my ex used to complain about was that I didn’t thank him enough. I don’t think he was wrong, generally6. But with time and space, I have come to see that sometimes I didn’t thank him because it was for stuff for which I never got thanked, throughout my life. I had been conditioned to think that doing X or Y was literally thankless work. And that was, definitely, patriarchy in the home.
In the future I hope to be mindful enough to thank people when they do the things for which I did not get thanked for doing, and assertive enough to ask for the same in return.
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- Seriously, men will often even ignore stuff right in front of them! I have had partners step over items that were meant for the laundry or to be moved into a garage and not even pick them up unless told “hey, would you carry those on your way out?” ↩︎
- At least the open-plan living room, dining room, and kitchen are; I would never go prying into their private spaces like bedrooms and bathrooms. ↩︎
- Note: she, the cleaner is a woman. ↩︎
- About once a year his sister (again, a woman) comes for a visit and works on the yard the entire time she’s here. ↩︎
- In fact, I noticed their front door rubs on the threshold and I just shimmed it for them today. ↩︎
- That is, sometimes there were times where it was like the “you did what I asked and you expect praise” situation described above, but not always. ↩︎