CHICK FIGHT! CHICK FIGHT! The CHICK FIGHT! CHICK FIGHT! The redoubtable
Natalie is once more unto the breach over the wages of housework
. First, let me affirm that I never, ever meant to suggest that La Solent
is the sort of woman who would tolerate loutishness for so much as a nanosecond.
In fact, right now I am relieved that she lives very, very far away. Because,
as she may have inferred just that - and if she lived nearby - I'd be quaking
in fear that she'd come over and hurt me. (Second, I think the best thing
about this debate is that we are, in the time-honored tradition of book reviewers,
arguing about a book neither one of us has read.) Natalie writes:

I won't jaw about the exact percentages but I thought she was spot-on with the general message of this:

"The moment a man gets married," Maushart says, "his domestic
workload almost disappears. He immediately gets about 70 per cent less cleaning,
50 per cent less cooking and 90 per cent less laundry. There are nowhere
near these benefits for a woman when she gets married. And these days you're
at pains to deny that you're doing it, because apart from being exhausted
by it, you're ashamed of yourself."

Then Moira comes back with,
"Not a very nice thing to do someone you allegedly care for, is it?" And
that is also spot on. But the two statements are not incompatible, either
as to intrinsic truth or likelihood of together accurately describing a married
couple. The mark of a system, or climate of opinion, that needs reform is
that it makes people who may well be nice - at least as nice as most people
- do un-nice things. Let's take the approximate truth of those statistics
first. If you get a bunch of women together they moan about these same things.
They have the status of proverbs, so common are they. Study after study says
that in households where both have jobs, the woman does, in fact, do more
than her share. She can't bear to have dirty socks on the floor; he can.
Moira herself good-humouredly admits that tidiness "is a chick thing."

But that's the point, isn't it? As an astute reader pointed
out (I have a couple of letters I'll need to put up), the man's workload
doesn't go down, because he never did much of those things in the first place.
It's rather like the weird college-roommate I had once, who got angry with
me because I refused to take responsibility, over the holidays, for "my
share" of all the lovely houseplants she graced us with. OK, they were nice
plants, but they were her idea, and if it came down to no plants or my taking
care of plants, I'd plump for no plants. End of problem, by my lights. Not
an unflawed analogy, I know, because there is some housework that, after
all, needs to be done. But the thing is, if both people are working full-time,
something's got to give. There are super-high energy people, who need only
four hours of sleep a night, who can work all day and still maintain a smoothly-oiled
domestic machine. I'm not one of them, and neither are most people. I don't
like un-made beds, but beds do not have to be made. I prefer spotless bathrooms,
but the time between cleanings can be lengthened without any hazard to health.
Since hiring help is not an option for most, a choice has to be made about
how time is going to be spent. While dishes (eventually) have to be washed,
and the oil in the car does have to be changed, socks can be kicked into
a corner, and shelves do not have to be dusted. It doesn't strike me as wrong
that somebody who has been working all day would rather pop a beer and watch
TV than fuss about dust. Or would rather attend to the beloved avocation
of his leisure than attend to the floors and the bathtubs. Life is short.
It's one thing if a man expects his wife to spend her limited leisure doing
housework while he spends his playing golf (one of my relatives had an ex-husband
of that persuasion); it's another to ask someone to spend his leisure fixing
things he doesn't even notice are broken. Recent example: the Car Guys
(American radio program) once had a segment where one of the hosts complained
about women treating their cars like their purses. And that is absolutely
true of me. A disorderly house would eventually drive me nuts, but the inside
of my car is, I admit, the lair of a sloven. There are cups of iced-tea
from Wendy's in the cup-holder, months old. Tubes of lipstick roll under
the seats. If coffee gets spilled on the upholstery, I say, "eh, it'll dry"
and forget about it. As far as I'm concerned, a car is a machine, and needs
only mechanical and electrical upkeep. But the spouse experiences distress
at the very thought that any car with his name on its registration should
be the victim of such an auto-slattern. He will spend his Saturday mornings
lovingly cleaning, dusting, vacuuming, and polishing a car he rarely drives
or travels in. I'd never spend time doing that. If armies of men penned
thousands of books complaining about the indifference of women to good car-interior-keeping,
it would not move me one inch toward putting down my book of a Saturday morning
in order to lavish attention upon some Mazda's upholstery. Because I don't really care. And though he glowers at me for putting my feet up on the dashboard of his
car, I don't think he regards it as unkindness and insensitivity. And pretty
much every time I ride in his car, he has to glower at me and tell me to
stop trashing the vinyl. But he's probably never even mentioned this horrible
behavior of mine when he's drinking beer with the guys, even though I'm sure
they would sympathize. And the thing is, the spouse relieves me of the burden
of a whole lot of necessary chores that I hate doing, because he doesn't mind, or takes pleasure in tackling them. He does leave socks on the floor (what is
it with guys and socks?), and appears to be functionally unable to wipe
up a kitchen spill, but I can't imagine giving it a second thought, because
he undertakes the responsibility for so many other pesky things. Just because
he knows I don't like doing them, and he doesn't much mind doing them. (That
big lump of tax-time hell is sitting on his desk right now, not mine, for
example.)

One of the numerous intellectual debts I owe to my former political
incarnation as a left-winger is this observation: it is always easier for
the winners to act nice. My lord can dispense mercy to the peasants with
a merry smile; I bet the peasants were a surly, resentful bunch. When women
first broke into such professions as medicine and law, can you imagine what
a bunch of obsessive harpies those first pioneers had to be? Feminism is,
by hypothesis, a matter of looking at institutions and customs that have
proceeded without opposition for centuries and pronouncing them wrong. It
is seeing and denouncing a problem where no-one, even the victims, saw it
before. It is hard to do this and stay welcome at parties.

Oh,
I hear ya on this one, sister. There is a special place in hell reserved
for women who privately agree with this or that feminist goal but who, in
mixed company, simper and cluck along about those horrible shrill women.
And, you are right, it is easy to make fun of feminist whackos now, but
I can remember people in the '60s and '70s making exactly the same comments
about women who were espousing changes that everyone now agrees to be eminently
sensible. But so-called feminsits do the same thing in everday life - and
that is the root of my complaint about "bitch but don't confront". I have
more than once been in situations with "feminist" women who would talk a
good game, but when push came to shove it was always little Moira who had
to be the heavy. Because they couldn't bear confrontation. Because they
just couldn't handle a man being mad at them or not liking them. But little
Moira, or "society", or the government, is not responsible for their personal
battles. Maushart thinks if only society were different she would have
had a happy marriage. But even this limited article gave glaring evidence
of why her marriages failed - she prefers ideology to thinking honestly about
her own feelings, and she is a very poor judge of men. If every man on earth
picked up socks that wouldn't change. So the question is, what are legitimate
feminist targets? Maushart isn't angry because her ex didn't pick up his
socks. She's angry because she felt the urge to do girlie things, and she
thinks not only that this urge is bad, but that she feels these bad things
not because it is in her nature to do so, but because society is forcing
her into having emotions and desires she doesn't want to have. She wants
to "fix" this by demanding that society start producing men who notice that
the ivory sofa is getting dingy. And this is nonsense. Which brings us
to what I think is our real disagreement - I think Maushart is just *dead
flat wrong* when she argues that something's got to change in the larger
society for her to have any choice about doing the housework, or, especially,
the "emotional work" she's complaining about.

I don't much relate to Maushart's particular example of the
woman being expected to worry about how family relationships pan out. But
"organising the whole family enterprise," yeah, been there. I challenge you,
Moira, or any married woman to put your hand on your heart and swear to me
that your husband has never said, "have we got my sister's birthday present
yet?" or words to that pattern.

Ah ha! Got you there,
Solent. I can swear, upon my most sacred honor, that he has never done any
such thing. He remembers his brothers' birthdays, but I certainly have no
idea where they fall. Now this may be a function of having come from a large
family - five sisters and three brothers - and we simply never engaged in
punctilious birthday-and-anniversary tracking. I am deeply attached to my
family, but we're not a sentimental lot. Birthday remembrance is for one's
children and the esteemed elders, and I will pay attention to something big
like my in-laws' upcoming fiftieth wedding-anniversary. But, while I can
narrow down my own siblings' birthdays to the month, I'm lost on the date.
The only reason I know my younger brother's birthday is because he was born
on the same date I was. (He thoughtfully remembers to call every
year - to remind me that I am still older and he is stilll younger.) I
know my wedding date only because it's engraved on the inner surface of my
ring. And what have been the consequences to me of this indiffernce to Hallmark-mandated
sentimentality? There are none. Any more than there are evil social consequences
to my house being untidy. I think a lot of women make enormous burdens out
of things they could simply ignore. (How often have I worked with women
who complain about their lack of time, about the stress of working and raising
a family, and who yet turn ridiculous amounts of energy toward getting cards
and baking cakes and throwing showers for people simply because they happen
to work for the same company?) I quite like my sisters-in-law, and if one
of them happened to be in town, and someone happened to mention that it was
her birthday, and I happened to be shopping and happened to see something
that I happened to know she would enjoy having, I would present her with
it (amateurly wrapped). But when the next year rolled around I wouldn 't
remember about it. If one resents doing things that one does not really
need to do, or one does not have time to do the things that one does not
really need to do, then one should stop doing those things. I suspect I
have a relative or two who frowns upon or outright dislikes me for my attitudes,
but, hey, that's life in the big city. They have no power to coerce me into
behaving as they prefer. I am not oppressed by their feelings. Besides, they're afraid of me.

But you are right about the highly-orderd micro-environment.

Posted by Moira Breen at January 16, 2002 09:10 AM