Good housekeeping

Trying to catch up on my blog reading last night, I discovered that yet another general debate about housekeeping flared up, burned a swath through the prairie grass of the liberal side of the blogosphere, and died down, unresolved, and I'd missed it, which only bothered me in that I was denied the pleasure of consciously deciding not to take part.

These debates seem to occur semi-annually.  Somebody releases a study showing that women across America are right, the men in their lives are a bunch of lazy slobs who don't lift a finger around the house, and pretty much the entire job of keeping the place clean and free of mice and health inspectors falls to them.  Somebody else posts about the study, suggesting reasons why men are such lazy slobs and ways to get them to shape up.  Vigorous commenting follows, more posts are written, and very quickly whatever "debate" there was turns personal.   Everybody's got a story and thinks they've proven something with their story, which is usually "My life is better/worse than yours but somehow still the perfect example because my wife/husband/partner/co-habitant is a saint/jerk/shrew/typical man/typical woman."

A lot of these stories start along the lines of "My bum of an ex-boyfriend..." or "My bitch of an ex-wife..." but there are others that proceed thusly:  "My wonderful husband loves to mop and sweep and fold towels and make me breakfast in bed and even gives me a foot massage every night, but I can't convince him to put a new roll of toilet paper in the dispenser whenever we run out" and "My terrific wife is perfectly content to live with the same degree of squalor I got used to and even enjoyed when I and my friends had our apartment over that bar back in college," happy stories of domestic bliss that leave me feeling exactly as do the first sort of stories---very sorry for the other person in the relationship.

And I can't help chuckling with avuncular amusement at all the young single people with no kids and no mortgage who chime in to tell us how it's going to be when the day comes when they are co-habitating and there's a spill on the floor and a mop in the corner nobody's rushing to claim.

Up until now, I have refrained from joining these discussions because One, I don't have time, there's too much work that needs to be done around here to waste talking about what a good job I do chipping in on the housework and Two, the blonde occasionally reads this and other blogs and might feel honor bound to jump in and point out what a lying, self-serving hypocrite I am and, by the way, when am I going to get around to straightening out the garage like I've been promising to do for three years now?

Another reason I stay out of it is my generally low opinion of human beings.

I happen to agree that most American men are lazy slobs.  In fact, I think they're worse than anybody admits.  They don't just avoid housework, they avoid the yard work and the home repair chores they use as an excuse for not doing the housework.  Compared to most real men, Dagwood Bumstead is a a paragon of energy, ambition, and husbandly consideration.

Dagwood at least hops to when Blondie pulls out the job jar.  Most real men hide the job jar.

But I also think that most American women are severely afflicted with a Cinderella complex.  They are martyrs in their own mind, forced to sit in the corner with the ashes whenever the rare moment comes when there's not any cooking, cleaning, mending, or diaper changing to do.  They overestimate the amount of work they do and the degree of sacrifice they make, and they don't---don't---want their husbands to chip in on the housework.  They want their husbands to start pulling in enough money that they can hire a maid.  That is, if they don't want their husbands replaced entirely.  "Someday My Prince Will Come" is the secret anthem and dream of the everyday housewife.

An old crank with an attitude like mine has no business butting into a serious discussion, and the only reason I'm offering up my two cents this time is that Scott Lemieux made a very good point.

Scott's point (cross-posted at Sisyphus Shrugged and reiterated more briefly here at TAPPED, and you should read the comments at both those blogs and at Lawyers, Guns and Money) is that, contrary to what many feminists argue, that men need to get off their fat cans and find out where the vacuum cleaner's kept, women need to go a bit easier on themselves.

It's true that men need to pitch in a little more, but what would be better is if women would pitch in less.

This isn't Scott's variation on the old "Women should learn to tolerate a little clutter and not worry about the dust bunnies under the bed" argument, which a lot of women suspect, quite rightly, is code for "Women should not get upset when I leave wet towels on the bathroom floor or spend all Saturday and Sunday afternoon watching sports on TV."

Scott's point is that a lot of the jobs around the house women assign themselves are not necessary work but simply "busywork."

Many women today have inherited and internalized archaic attitudes about housekeeping that stem from the 1950s when post-war prosperity allowed an amazing amount of families to not just survive but thrive on a single source of income.  Married women could afford to stay home all day and they did.  Unfortunately, it turned out that there wasn't much to do there at home.  Most of the real time-consuming work of keeping a house had been made easier and more efficient by labor saving devices like automatic washers and dryers, supermarkets and processed foods that cut down on the amount of time needed to plan and prepare meals, and cheap mass produced clothing that meant not having to sew a dress or darn socks.

Stuck at home all day, with a significantly reduced workload, women took up compulsive dusting to avoid going out of their skulls.

Since women these days are not stuck at home, most of them are working, full or part time, it's just self-defeating for them to come home and start in on "chores" that were actually their mothers' and grandmothers' ways of making their boring days pass by quickly.

There are two apparent weaknesses with Scott's argument.

One is that he writes about housework like a young, single man, as if it is mostly a matter of keeping the apartment neat.  But I think Scott's just using a kind of shorthand here and understands that even if women cut down on the dusting there's still a lot of daily work to do to keep three bedrooms, a kitchen, a family room, a living room, the basement, two bathrooms, and a utility room neat, even if you aren't compulsive about the dusting and that the work gets harder, and trickier, when there are children in the way.

The second is that his idea of a woman's lot in the 1950s seems to come from the same source as all our ideas about life in the 1950s---old TV sitcoms.

I've always figured that back when those shows were on most people saw the scenes of Mrs Cleaver vacuuming in her high heels and pearls and then greeting Ward when he came home with a smile, a kiss, and a supper hot from the stove as fantasy and part of the comedy.  But there are people who think our parents and grandparents were morons and took those images to heart, and, given my low opinion of human beings, I'm not going to argue.  Maybe more people were indoctrinated than were amused.

And it's unfortunately the case that there are a lot of people today who think that even if life wasn't exactly like that back then that's the way it ought to have been and ought still be.

What I've noticed about all arguments about gender roles in which the 1950s come up, either as a time of horror or a dream of Arcady, is that what most women who were at home all day were doing is either glossed over or ignored.

What was the significant fact for most women in the 1950s?

The Baby Boom.

Frankly, I doubt most housewives back then had much time to worry about dust bunnies under the beds.  They were more likely worried about the baby who'd crawled under the bed and couldn't get out while his three year old big sister was in the bathroom crying over a skinned knee and his five year old big brother was standing covered in mud in the middle of the living room rug holding up the dripping sneaker he rescued from the giant puddle he and his friends made in the backyard with the hose that's still running.

Whatever zealousness women developed about housekeeping wasn't so much a matter of busywork as a response to the constant threat of being overwhelmed by chaos.

You vacuumed two and three times a week because you'd be up to your knees in cookie crumbs by Saturday if you didn't.  You mopped the kitchen floor regularly because it was filthy.  You did laundry every day.

This got only marginally easier when the kids were old enough to go off to school and get taught to pitch in around the house themselves.

Even today, when households are far, far less likely to have three and four children under the age of eight, the greatest demand upon a wife and mother's time and energy outside of work is child care, and this is where a lot of American men most often fail to help out.

But even in households where the man is equally involved---where there is a man to be involved---there are only so many hours in a day.

The debate over housework and how to divide it and share it equally is really a debate over the best ways to make use of the fewer and fewer hours Americans get to spend away from work and at home.

Scott's point, that there are better ways than dusting, is a good one.  But it's only a good one if you are, like Scott, a good progressive and know that it's only a "What to do until the Revolution comes" point.

Some day we might live in a civilized country again where Americans work less for more money and the fight over who's going to clean the bathroom won't be an argument over which one, the man or the woman, is going to give up an hour of the precious little leisure time they have to make the place smell less like the rest room at gas station while the other one gives up two hours of their precious little leisure time to get the kids to and from soccer practice.

The conservative, traditionalist, sexist answer to the problem is that women should just stay home.  As most conservatives seem to have a very hard time imagining that other people don't live exactly as they do, they probably aren't aware that this is an argument that most middle class families give up being middle class and poor families should just let themselves slide into abject poverty.

If anybody has had a difficult time separating the image of the 1950s portrayed in the sitcoms from the reality, it's these sexist, unimaginative conservative types.  They look at June Cleaver and Donna Reed and think, Yep, that's the way God, Nature, or Evolutionary Psychology wants us to be.

What they don't think is, Yep, that was the way the economy allowed folks back then to live, which is pretty amusing, considering most of them are Republicans and Republicans are supposed to be the ones who understand how market forces shape society and drive human behavior.

The reason men went to work and women stayed home and dusted is that the money was there for them to live that way.

It's not there anymore.

Conservatives aren't the only ones who need to understand that.  Another way of putting Scott's point is to say that the reason women shouldn't expect to have homes as neat and clean as their mothers' and grandmothers' is that they simply can't afford to and that arguments over whether or not to live with the cobwebs another day are part of the arguments over increased family leave, more flexible working days, better wages all around for the middle class and the working poor, and universal health care.

Doesn't change the fact that their husbands and live-in boyfriends are lazy slobs who can look at the woman they love tottering under the load of a forty-pound basket of laundry and think, "Honey, when you get the chance, I'd like another beer?"

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to get at that garage.

Comments

[allen claxton]

Have you read "The Two-Income Trap"? I think it makes a pretty strong argument that the one-income household isn't as impossible to have these days as you think, and is in some ways better able to adapt to the challenges that life tosses up.

[chris y]

You vacuumed two and three times a week because you'd be up to your knees in cookie crumbs by Saturday if you didn't. You mopped the kitchen floor regularly because it was filthy. You did laundry every day.

Also, in the fifties, the default position for most people was that the man did some form of manual work and had to change his clothes when he got home, whereas today the default position is that he sits on his butt in an air conditioned office all day and nobody would really notice if he wore the same socks for a week.

Data point: my mother, who was a housewife in the 50s, cleaned obsessively (and became mildly alcoholic and severely depressed) until some time in her forties she had precisely the epiphany you describe here, stopped dusting and got a life. My father, who was more help in the house than most men of his generation, though less than most of mine, saw no down side to this.

[Dave]

I think Allen is right to some extent. My wife and I are able to live on just my income, but only due to us not being able to have children. It allows us to live in a small house and we avoid all the costs (and joys) of children. That being said, we are also able to put away very little toward retirement. So you can live on one middling salary, but only just barely and sometimes the future looks um, ... iffy.

[Doug K]

Allen, I don't think 'The Two-Income Trap' says what you think it does..
The data in that book confirms that two salaries are now necessary (but not sufficient) for the vast majority of middle-class families: exactly Lance's contention.

Elizabeth Warren, in an interview for Mother Jones:
" two-income families today actually have less discretionary money left over than those single-earner families did."
and
"The point is that families today are spending their money no more foolishly than their parents did. And yet they're five times more likely to go bankrupt, and three times more likely to lose their homes. Families are going broke on the basics --housing, health insurance, and education."
and
"having a child is now the single best predictor of bankruptcy."

Lance: "You vacuumed two and three times a week because you'd be up to your knees in cookie crumbs by Saturday if you didn't. You mopped the kitchen floor regularly because it was filthy. You did laundry every day."

Well, in our house, we would be up to our knees in cookie crumbs if we didn't ban eating outside the kitchen. The kitchen floor gets mopped only when the 5-year-old sticks to it so badly that he trips. Laundry doesn't get done every day, instead spend all day on the weekends getting through it..

"What they don't think is, Yep, that was the way the economy allowed folks back then to live"
that's what I keep telling my wife when she compares our mess to her mother's beautiful house. Also, her mother had servants (in Africa, which is another country).

[Bianca Reagan]

Doug,

Africa is a continent. With many different countries.

I do my laundry on the weekends, too.

[Doh]

On a related point, Harold Meyerson had an interesting op-ed in the Post about how Republican economic policies are completely at odds with Republican rhetoric about protecting the family (because those policies are driving the decline of the traditional family structure for the non-rich).

[Doh]

On a related point, Harold Meyerson had an interesting op-ed in the Post about how Republican economic policies are completely at odds with Republican rhetoric about protecting the family (because those policies are driving the decline of the traditional family structure for the non-rich).

[Doug K]

Bianca: we came from Johannesburg, South Africa. Upon telling this to strangers in the US, I've repeatedly been asked variants of the question "so, I know this guy in Cairo, Abraham Bombastical, did you ever meet him ?"
Africa ? it's all one distant place.. like the past..

[Bianca Reagan]

"so, I know this guy in Cairo, Abraham Bombastical, did you ever meet him ?"

I know it's like ten years later, but, hee!

With a name like Bombastical, I bet you could track Abraham down, though. :)