Interesting article here in The New York Times, though nothing particularly new in it about the work and family balance and why it isn’t working so well for women.
Telling women they have reached parity is like telling an unemployed worker the recession is over. It isn’t true until it feels true. That’s because measuring women’s power by looking only at women — and by looking mostly at the workplace — paints a false picture.
Men today are at the turning point women reached several decades ago, when the joint demands of work and home first intensified. In her new book, “Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter,” Joan C. Williams describes how men find themselves caught between meeting cultural expectations and a growing dissatisfaction with the constricted roles shaped by those expectations. “You have to ask why, if women are asking men to change, and if men say they want change, it hasn’t happened,” she says. “Either they are all lazy, or they are under tremendous gender pressures of their own.”
The life-work dilemma for women has long been that “the workplace has changed in their favor, but home hasn’t,” she says. Men, however, “have the opposite problem. More is expected of them at home, but expectations have not shifted at work.” Which explains why the percentage of fathers in dual-income households who say they suffer work-family conflict has risen to 59 percent from 35 percent since 1977.
One quick thing I do want to comment on is this bit of the article:
And women still perform twice the housework and three times the child care that men do, even in homes where women are the primary breadwinners.
I have noticed this before in studies. In fact some have mothers working outside the home as doing more domestic labour and childcare than mothers who don’t work outside the home! Why does this happen?
Of course one can’t underestimate the difficulty involved in overcoming entrenched sexism in the division of domestic tasks but why isn’t the increased negotiating power of enhanced female financial independence addressing this problem better in those relationships where men and women are earning similar amounts? Here is my theory.
Women working outside the home can’t afford to have anything fuck up because if their home life fucks up it quickly fucks up their jobs, too. The double, and even triple shifts, some working mothers perform means that there is no wriggle room in their week. In fact the more hours they work outside the home the less time, and importantly, energy they have for the constant negotiation and re-organisation that is required to achieve fairness inside their homes. Life happens on the run. When they do get to ‘sorting shit out’ they probably find that their money speaks in the negotiations they have with their partners but in the meantime they are scrambling from one day to the next. Working mothers are probably risk-adverse and that doesn’t facilitate novel or complex negotiation outcomes.
Thinking about it now I see that the fairness I have managed to create in my own home has in many ways been a product of the extra flexibility I have as a part-time worker*. I can test solutions. I can also withdraw, delay and refuse. I have more time to think, giving me the perspective necessary to problem-solve, though as Bitch PhD points out, the fact that monitoring equality falls to me in the spousal relationship is a sign of my inequality. House-work strikes and the like need both time and alternative options. If you wait until your partner gets around to doing their share of the laundry you may end up with no clothes to wear to work. If you make small children pack their own school lunches it will probably be you fielding the phone calls at work from the kids’ school about the empty lunchboxes. (And there is nothing like children being held to ransom in a stand-off with a partner to make a mother fall back into line).
Family members do adjust eventually to more equitable arrangements but many working mothers probably just don’t feel they can afford the time to get there.
*I worked full-time until I became a parent. With each of my two children I spent the first year at home so I have had a taste of stay-at-home motherhood, and I quite liked it, but I lack the experience of the long haul to speak authoritatively on that particular topic.
Interesting theory. It rings true to me.
When I worked full-time in a very stressful job I had no energy left over to negotiate with my (lazy) male housemate about the uneven domestic load. In contrast being home all day with kids and/or my phd left me the flexibility not to suffer many consequences if things did temporarily fall apart.
Fortunately for me my partner also just seems to ‘get it’ and it’s been a long time since I’ve felt the need to negotiate or monitor (particularly since I suspect he may do more than me…). Clearly I can’t take any credit for this.
I share this problem. One issue for me is that I don’t ever want to work full time again (at least while kids still live with us), which reduces my bargaining power. Ideally he’d work part time too but not if we ever want to buy a house. Sometimes I think it would be worth it, other times not.
God it’s helpful to see this put down in words. I’ve been wondering recently why our household is this way. You’re exactly right. I haven’t got the time for everything to fuck up at home, therefore I do it all myself. I don’t even have the energy to discuss it with my partner any more. Thanks for this post – seeing the concept written down (and knowing that there must be others out there experiencing the same sort of thing) makes it all a little clearer somehow.
It is so simple and yet so complex,
I am a full time + mum working outside the home with a part time working partner.
He takes a lot of the load but there are some things that fall into my domain without thought or discussion such as organising child care.
If we need a babysitter, untill recently when I outed the issue in a moment of complete exhaustion, I called them. I negotiate changes at child care even though i am hardly there.
There are other things too that are probably personality dependant, I survey the emotions of the household, realise when daytime naps need to be dropped or the toilet training toddler is scared after falling off the toilet so we need another system….which I then organise….you know…in all my spare time
But here’s the thing… my partner is a wonderful man, a caring father and would do any of these things, in a heart beat…if I asked him to and explained what I meant. Thats the hard bit. The lack of initiation. So I am learning to ask…and explain.
3 years in and we’re getting there but I am tired!
My first baby is just over six weeks old, and a friend of mine whose first child is 9 months old came to visit me recently and we started talking about our husbands and bitterness and what was going on.
She was feeling exactly what I was feeling.
And one thing she said to me that I haven’t been able to let go of was this — Women have the longer to do list in their heads.
That is – if my husband unloads the dishwasher and reloads it, that’s great. I can check that off of my master to do list. I can’t just let go of it – it’s on my to do list if he doesn’t do it.
And then I started thinking about all the things on my master to do list and I got exhausted. Dishes, groceries, laundry, diaper laundry, general putting things away, actual cleaning, caring for the baby (non-feeding-related), feeding the baby. I think the only thing in the house that I don’t have on my master to do list is the care and feeding and walking of the dog.
I don’t know how to let go of these things on my master to do list. I think that if I don’t have them on mine and ask him to help me, they’ll never get done.
I have learned, over the last few years, to let go of the master list. Sometimes I start to think that I probably do less of the housework and childcare. At the moment I definitely do less of the running around with the kid – the Bloke does the drop off & pick up and reading the childcare newsletter and making sure there’s something for dinner and so on. I still do some low level monitoring – making sure we have enough veggies, ringing the Bloke to ask if there’s anything we need at the supermarket and asking about specific staples to prompt him, for example. But basically, he’s in charge of the day to day stuff and I just help. I do the bigger picture planning. Like making sure we have a stash of children’s books hidden away to give as birthday presents, making sure we spread our Christmas shopping over the year, that sort of thing. I also change the sheets and towels.
We arrived at this system after some really rough times, people we know nearly broke up over precisely these issues, and we spent a lot of time thinking about the long term messages we wanted to give our son. Ultimately neither of us wanted our son to struggle with this stuff as an adult, we wanted him to see that his father was competent and reliable. So he learned to factor domestic planning into his day and I learned to trust that he’d do it. It was hard, and I can understand how it might seem easier to just suck it up and do it all yourself, but changing has ultimately been really rewarding for both of us.
yes. this is true. i’d write more, but there’s laundry sitting in a pile for the third day in a row, and mijo has no clothes left.
What Kate said rings true with me. I think, though, that I just dumped the master list without negotiation or thought, let alone consultation and discussion. We were in a Very Bad Place before we moved to Canberra, with both of us feeling very taken for granted and distressed in our ‘traditional’ roles of (mostly) stay at home mum and (mostly) breadwinner, even though we were both verbally committed to not being traditional. When we moved down here I took on the breadwinner role with a vengeance, and quite vengefully dumped everything else – including responsibility for the child being clean, delivered to school on time and with healthy food. The husband generally did it and did it well, he’s much better at producing food and doing dishes than I ever am for example. But I still kvetched about the standards of stuff, and that was never outed until recently either. So we found another Bad Place to inhabit for quite a while, where I was the nagging partner. I hate that a lot. But we have now thrown tantrums and spoken loudly to each other and finally said what we meant, and things are improving with communication. Also, the husband has gone away and I am left holding the nine-year-old and day to day life with no work and remembering what is stressful about it and how tiring it is to drive around doing chores and errands all day (even though I am loving it as well).
But I am also a rubbish negotiator at work. I either roll over at the first sign of opposition and resent it later, or hang on tenaciously past all sense, just like at home *sigh*.
Ah, the age old dilemma. I think the point about men being under tremendous pressure to live up to a male gendered ideal was very well made: having raised a son to the age of 21, I have watched him twist and struggle to maintain his place in the male hierarchy whilst at the same time try and incorporate my values of kindness, honesty, fairness and decency. And it was and is hard for him to do so – to be male in the Western world is harder I think than being female, because there is only a very few set of role models that are acceptable. A really good book that deals with this in a unique way is Self Made Man by Nora Vincent, where Vincent pretended to be a man for a year. Really thought provoking.
This is exactly how it was when I was working full time; and it took about a year of part time to get to where we could even talk. About a year to dredge ourselves up out of the pit of “behind” we were in. Now we’re balanced right on the edge all the time – I am so glad to hear another mother with a part-time job say that, because my friends all either work fulltime or not at all, and both sides think i’m just bad at time-management if my perfect, flexible work situation is still hard.
The pressure from the work side is something my partner really feels, too – I thought it was industry-specific, but ever since I got sick while pregnant, he’s been feeling like he’s always the weak link at work – he only puts in 50-60 hour weeks these days, instead of 60-70, and he feels stalled in his career because of it.
“Women working outside the home can’t afford to have anything fuck up because if their home life fucks up it quickly fucks up their jobs, too.”
Amen to that, sister. If I examine myself very closely, this is the other thing I come up with. I out-earn my husband, and sometimes I have this odd feeling that this is emasculating for him. So, yeah, demanding he cleans the toilet makes that odd feeling worse. Which isn’t a great thing to admit about myself.
Yes, I think you nailed it perfectly about women who work outside the home. Whilst I don’t have paid work (in or out of the home), I home school our three children. My days are incredibly full and I am often up late and up early just to make sure I have each day organised. If I didn’t have my shit sorted it would all fall apart very quickly.
But I am my own worst enemy with the dividing up of the housework issue. Yes I do the bulk, (i am the one who’s home after all and to be fair, the kids do quite a bit too since they too are home all the time) but I tend to pander to the man more than I should. I am by nature a nurturer. It’s what I do and where I feel most confident, even though it is at odds with my own feminist ideologies. And I do quite enjoy my current role. For all the organisation that I need to function, I certainly have a lot of flexibility to play with it. If somethings not working, I have the freedom to throw that plan out and try a new one.
The other problem for me is I spend so much f my time as a married single mother. With a man who is deployed 9 months at a time, I get very used to doing it all myself, in my own way. Over the years we’ve fallen into the pattern that the home is my responsibility. If I need him to do something I will ask him to. Of course I sometimes lament the lack of initiative, I mean, how hard is it to run a bath for the kids while I am hanging out washing? This is something that was brought to my attention when a fellow army wife came to stay with us for a week while our husbands were deployed. I didn’t have to ask her to run the bath or start preparing the veggies for dinner, or to sweep up the milo the six year old got on the floor when he missed the cup, she just did those things. She saw the need and she did it.
It would be nice if men had that ability, but in fairness to them, a lot of us women enable that kind of non-initiative. I am ashamed to say I am probably one of the worst offenders in that regard.
For now though, this is what works. When it stops working, then we will have to reassess and adjust, but for now, for us, this is just fine.
“She saw the need”
And why is it that our husbands can’t see the need? What can I do to raise my son to make sure that he does see the need?
Serious questions – there is something going on here and I don’t know what is happening. Is my mother-in-law’s need to care for and basically wait on her family, combined with my father-in-law allowing her to wait on him, the root of my husband’s inability to see the need? Is blaming another woman for that making the whole thing worse?
Yes. This post is exactly on point. My husband and I are working hard to negotiate our household roles before I give birth. I know that it’s going to get exponentially harder once she arrives. He is completely dedicated to having an equal role, but that theory doesn’t always transform into practice.
The thing that has been getting to these plans lately is that I always feel like I’m managing everything. He’ll do whatever it is that I ask him to do (laundry, dishes, cooking, cleaning, bills, chores, errands, etc.) but I am often left asking. I’ve been trying to stress that the mental energy it takes for me to constantly figure out what needs to be done when and then tell him is almost as bad as the physical energy it takes to do it in the first place. We usually end up agreeing when we talk about it, but then things pile up again . . .
Part of the problem is that I have a lower tolerance for the clutter and chaos, so I notice it first and jump to action. It’s something we both need to work on.
Hi,
A pertinent topic and one that my partner and I struggled with over some years. i ended up doing a phd on a topic related to maternal subjectivity and the question – what is it that women are doing when they are mothering? I looked at the social structuring of care – which has been gendered throughout the 20th century through the male breadwinner model. we have moved to the independent worker but this new model does not account for care – it becomes something that couples have to negotiate.
Care has been privatized through the family and both the state and the market rely on the family for the care of the vulnerable (infants and children, the infirm aged and the disabled). Care is work as we all know and if we are ever going to become a truly civil society – these issues aren’t simply private, for couples to fight it out all over the place – we need to have continuing public conversation with an expectation that that the institutions will change.
It seems to me that relationships really matter and these are being cheated by the current milieu – these are issues that are relevant to equity, citizenship, justice and democracy – the big questions – even if they may seem trivial – such as who does the shopping, the vacuming, homework and so many more things that are impotant to us in our everyday life.
best, Joannie
Emily WK, Those are the questions I ask myself ALL the time!
As you say, I don’t think blaming my MIL for my husbands inability to “see what needs to be done” is fair either. I’m not sure what the root cause of domestic blindness in men is other than perhaps being a product of the patriarchal society we all grew up in, however I think that simplifies the issue.
For me it’s pretty simple. I enable it. I married a soldier who is absent more than present. He might have the rank at work, but at home I am the CO. (I need to learn to delegate better! )
The more I think about this, the longer my response gets. (I’ve had to erase it a few times now as I just can’t seem to condense my thoughts within what I would consider comment box etiquette. )
I think the issue is very complex. On one hand, whilst it seems to be a gender issue, (and I am not implying that it isn’t) I think it is also a very individualised based issue. We all have different lives, different dynamics and different family models. Whilst we all seem to experience the same issue, I think it presents itself differently for each of us. So there’s not going to be a one size fits all answer.
And as much it grates on me to admit it, because really, what kind of a feminist am I for allowing this, there’s a part of me that enjoys my husband being dependent on ME. Sure, we haven’t reversed our roles in any way. I am not the bread winner. He is not dependent on me for finances the way that I am dependent on him. But he depends on me to pay the bills, and all those other little things that keep lives in motion. He depends on me being here.
Usually when I read articles/blog entries like this, I roll my eyes. I am a single mom with two school-aged kids (and I have been a single mom since the youngest was in utero, so it’s been a LONG time) so I do everything. I also work outside the home. So yeah. Everything.
But then I start reading the comments and I start feeling bad for all the married moms who have to negotiate chores and still wind up carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders. Because really, it must be easier as a single mom to just wake up and know who is going to do it (me) than to argue about it with a spouse and then feel resentful when it doesn’t happen. In many ways, I think it’s easier to just do it all alone than to have a partner there who isn’t pulling his weight.
So for all you married/partnered moms out there, you have my respect! I don’t think I could deal with it. I’d just rather do it on my own. Then at least it gets done. 😉
BalancingJane, I used to think I had the lowest tolerance for mess in my house (me, my partner J, our flatmate).
But then I went batshit furious because I was trying to study for my 2nd year exams (uni) and the guys were effectively expecting me to do everything in the house since I was at home all day…
Now I have the highest tolerance for dirt, because if I cleaned the bathroom last time, I’ll wait until both J and flatmate have cleaned it before I do it again!
(Incidentally, only last night, Flatmate tried to ask me why the recycling bins were all muddled, and not separated into paper, plastic etc. He seemed a bit surprised by the answer – “I don’t give a fuck anymore, but if you want to think about them, and keep them sorted, and argue with J when he puts things in the wrong bin, and remember to use the right ones yourself, and take them down to the bin stores when they’re full, be my guest” – but he did proceed to clean the kitchen, so part of the message must have sunk in!)
I think share houses are a great preparation for a long lasting relationship. You have to negotiate all these things without the investment and payoff of a relationship. I think the number of replies on this issue is very telling about the magnitude of the issue. It’s made me feel much less crazy and more determined that We can sort this out. What is heartening about the conversation is the lack of mothers group style partner bashing. It’s more complicated than lazy men which is how I’ve found many people interpret it. My partner is not lazy, anything but. He just doesn’t see the world as I do. Mmmm… Thanks Bluemilk for the Provoking much thought
Bek- Your statement that “It’s more complicated than lazy men which is is how I’ve found many people interpret it” seems so true to me.
I am surrounded by people in very traditional gender roles, and whenever I try to vent about some of these difficulties, I always feel like they’re viewing it through those eyes.
I know that my husband is not lazy. He works very, very hard. At home and at his job. I work very hard at both as well. It’s just not always enough to get everything done and the work it requires to communicate around it is just one more obstacle on the track.
Slightly OT, but this may provide a negotiating tool 😉
Apparently men with female partners and kids are also happier when they do a fair share of the housework.
One thing the article doesn’t mention (but the study it’s based on might – I didn’t read it) is how affected the men’s happiness is by the fact that their female partners are likely to be less stressed if the men do an equal share of the home work, especially without the women having to push and negotiate for it. I would have thought that a woman with a male partner (or a person of any gender with (a) partner(s) of any gender, for that matter, I’m just focusing on the couples the study is about) who is stressed by having to (1) do all/most of the home work and/or (2) ensure that all/most of the home work is done and/or (3) constantly negotiate in relation to the home/work is likely to take that stress out on her (hir) partner, at least to some extent (well, maybe or maybe not “take it out on”, well, most partners would be likely to pick up on the stress and be affected by it, right?).
One thing about the article, though: I found the little “how this plays out in the life of a real person!” bit at the end to be enormously privileged and annoying, especially since the guy who wrote it (not the journo who wrote the main piece) still describes it as “helping with the housework”. GRRRR.
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