Passively refusing to take an equal role
Still. After all this time.
The optimistic tale of the modern, involved dad has been greatly exaggerated. The amount of child care men performed rose throughout the 1980s and ’90s, but then began to level off without ever reaching parity. Mothers still shoulder 65 percent of child-care work.
This isn’t just conservative men who have no aspirations to do their share of child-care work, this is men who think they’re progressive but are still utterly oblivious to how much work the women are doing while they kick back and watch the game.
Though many men are in denial about it, their resistance communicates a feeling of entitlement to women’s labor. Men resist because it is in their “interest to do so,” write Scott Coltrane and Michele Adams, leaders in the field of family studies, in their book, “Gender and Families.” By passively refusing to take an equal role, men are reinforcing “a separation of spheres that underpins masculine ideals and perpetuates a gender order privileging men over women.”
While interviewing working parents for a book on parenthood, I spoke with one dad in Vermont who said: “The expectation among my male friends is still that they will have the life they had before having kids. My dad has never cooked a meal. I’ve strayed from that. But subconsciously, the thing that makes you motivationally step up and do something when you’re not being asked …” he trailed off, and then said: “I have justifications. It’s a cop-out.”
That thing makes me absolutely crazy – that having to be asked thing. Why do they have to be asked? Why are they content to relax and refresh themselves while the women are doing laundry or putting the kids to bed or supervising homework? Why don’t they see that there is work to do and join the women in doing it until it’s done? Why do they wait until they are asked? Child-care work isn’t a favor men do for women, it’s work that has to get done by the parents – both parents.
All this comes at a cost to women’s well-being, as mothers forgo leisure time, professional ambitions and sleep. Wives who view their household responsibilities “as unjust are more likely to suffer from depression than those who do not,” one study says. When their children are young, employed women (but not men) take a hit to their health as well as to their earnings — and the latter never recovers. Child-care imbalances also tank relationship happiness, especially in the early years of parenthood.
Yeah but you know, it’s only women, so pffffffft.
And why do they always term it as “helping”? Women aren’t said to be “helping” when they do chores, they are just doing. But men are “helping”. Because they see it as women’s work, even when they don’t think they do. “I help my wife.” Big deal, buddy.
My ex once complained about being tired of having to do half the housework. Really? First, I worked more hours and made more money than he did. Why shouldn’t he do half the housework? Second, his contribution didn’t come up to one-tenth of the housework. He washed dishes a total of once in a 7 year marriage. He did laundry once. He went shopping once. I guarantee all these jobs were done more than twice in seven years. He sat on the sofa on Saturday morning watching TV while I did the regular weekly routine that kept our house spotless, our child spotless, and our clothes ironed (yes, I ironed his shirts – he worked in a bank. It was required).
He took most of the credit when people came over and commented on how nice our house was. The only person who ever complimented me on the house was my grandmother. She knew how things were.
“subconsciously”
my arse
In ‘history days’, as a friend likes to say, people of both sexes spent most of their time doing subsistence/ maintenance/ reproductive (in the Marxist sense) labour–cooking, cleaning, procuring, repairing and maintaining, taking out the trash and changing the toilet paper. The stuff that, once you’ve done it, you have to do it again tomorrow. This book documents a significant change in that balance of work:
https://www.amazon.com/More-Work-Mother-Household-Technology/dp/0465047327
The ‘labour saving’ devices developed during industrialisation only actually saved the labour of men, effectively leaving women responsible for subsistence work while freeing men to do only productive work–stuff that when it’s done you have something to show for yourself at the end (even if only money), and which gets you praise and status (we all know men who don’t cook breakfast for their kids, but are happy to create gourmet meals for their friends). So now men are only interested in productive work, and only perceive productive work as actual work; if it’s not available then as far as they’re concerned there’s no work to do–subsistence work is dull and boring and really ‘unnecessary,’ since you just have to do it again. Those of us who have lived in the third world have seen the influence of this attitude there–women go about the business of keeping everyone fed, clean and healthy, while men, who only work for money, sit around drinking and playing cards if no paid work is available.
The article Ophelia quotes points out that this productive/reproductive split happens in the workplace as well as the home: ‘Studies show that male employees sit back while their female co-workers perform the tasks that don’t lead to promotion.’
I read another book on the impact of the early 20th century labor-saving domestic devices, and I think it had a slightly different take. It focused on the internal dynamics of female relationships.
The author argued that the original goal of the (male-created) new technology was to give women more leisure time to read, paint, go to lectures, visit with friends, and pursue intellectual and social goals in order to enhance the value and quality of their lives. Drudges become self-determined persons.
What happened instead involved women engaging in games of one-upmanship over who was the busier, harder worker with the cleaner house. Self- improvement was “ lazy.” If the new washing machine meant you could wash clothes every day of the week, you didn’t want to be the only woman in the neighborhood who wasn’t doing that. Leisure time didn’t increase; housework did. The main problem then wasn’t expectations placed on women by men, but by other women. The work ethic within female society equated “ drudgery” with higher status. The laudable cultural goals were naive and couldn’t work.
Perhaps the book guest linked to deals with that theory and dismisses it. Or others can without needing the book.
Sastra do you know the title or author? It sounds interesting.
I think the fact that rivalry among women plays a part doesn’t necessarily contradict the idea that it’s a sexist arrangement. Women can enforce sexist arrangements every bit as ferociously as men do, or sometimes more so, perhaps because the calls to reform are seen as disdain for their whole lives – as with Hillary Clinton and the “stay home and bake cookies” debacle.
One of the foundational bits of writing as the second wave got going was “The Politics of Housework.”
By Pat Mainardi, of Redstockings, 1970.
My mother was a chief enforcer – she fought this ferociously all her life. She always bristled at the claim that she was being looked down on and treated as “just a housewife” though I never heard anyone use that phrase to her…whenever anyone like a loan officer asked her what she did for a living, she said housewife, they wrote it down, then she insisted they said, “Oh, just a housewife”, which they mostly didn’t. (I said mostly because it’s possible that it may have happened when I wasn’t there, but from all the times she reported it that I knew it wasn’t said, I tend to doubt it).
Many of the women I knew when I was growing up were adamantly anti-feminist, and much more outspoken about it than the men. They believed it was a perversion of the natural order, and they could quote you chapter and verse from the Bible to “prove” that.
I’m not looking for a cookie or anything, but I’ll just relate a couple of recent stories from my life because I think they’re funny, and sort-of tie in with the article.
Three years ago, we bought a new oven (one of those big ranges with side-by-side ovens). About a month ago, I was working in the garden. My wife came out and said that she was going to make a slice of cheese-on-toast, and asked if I wanted one. Fast forward a couple of minutes and the back door opened, her head pops out and I hear, ‘Any chance you can come in and show me how to turn the bloody grill on?’
A year-or-so ago I was in the supermarket when my phone rang. It was my wife, telling me that her friend had come round straight from work; they were getting ready to go out to play bingo, and her friend needed to iron a blouse (bear in mind at this point that we have lived in our current place for nearly ten years). My wife had phoned to ask where we kept the iron!
#notallmen?