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plus ce change…

By | August 9, 2010

In his ruling striking down [california's anti-same-sex-marriage law] Prop 8 as unconstitutional, Judge Vaughn Walker… writes that over time marriage has moved away from a gendered institution into a union of equals and “toward an institution free from state-mandated gender roles.” Such a move, he writes, “reflects an evolution of the understanding of gender rather than a change in marriage.”

well, that would be nice. if every marriage could be a “gay” marriage – a “union of equals” – that would settle a lot of conflicts.

the conflicts i am thinking of are mainly those like, for example, who is responsible for making and managing children’s dentist appointments. and who cleans the catbox. and who makes and delivers 28 cupcakes to the 2nd grade class. and who remembers when the library books are due. and who sends a check to the cable company. and who sends flowers to grandma on her birthday. and who cleans up vomit in the middle of the night.

if you automatically know who is responsible for each of things in your family, you either are a single parent, or you have a conflict brewing. these are not usually tasks that anyone’s “naturally” equipped to handle, or that anybody wants to assume as a lifelong career.

i am seeing a society in which at least the expectations and aspirations of little girls and boys, and teenaged guys and gals, and young adults living together under romantic circumstances, hold fewer double standards than in the past. during these early years, we’re a little more “post-feminist” than we used to be, and the struggle for gender equality feels a little less urgent.

i think there’s still a skills-teaching gap, which may result in a “naturalized” task-responsibility gap. as busy single parents, neither i nor my kids’ dad took a lot of time to teach adult-living skills to our 3 kids; they learned making and mending and managing by observation and experiment. and they probably adapted each of our traditionally gendered skills, to some extent. it’s probably more evident in the choice of roles they don’t assume, rather than tasks they choose to do. my daughters aren’t professional musicians. my son doesn’t make his own clothes. however, they all know how to cook, set up a VCR, and take out the recycling.

in youth, it’s fun to do for oneself and practice a wide variety of grown-up skills. it’s also fun to ignore unpleasant chores you never wanted to do in the first place. and when adults move in together, it’s sexy to show off a little, and establish a little give-and-take, a little household division of labor. he makes her an omelette. she changes his oil. good times.

but at least for cis-heteros (differently-sexed couples), when children and money enter the picture, all this fun can quickly turn to trouble. assumptions that had previously been subconscious are suddenly revealed. the unearned privileges and penalties that are “natural” to the genders in our society become immovable obstacles. something’s got to give.

Marriage usually begins with a willingness of both spouses to share… Newlyweds commonly wash dishes together, make the bed together, and divide many household tasks… Children create huge needs, both a greater need for income and greater domestic responsibilities… Both spouses must take on new responsibilities. Which ones should they take? In most modern marriages, both spouses opt for income, leaving the domestic responsibilities to whoever will volunteer.

Married couples in America today maintain a strong and traditional division of labor… Gallup’s annual Social Series Lifestyle poll, conducted in December 2007, reveals that women continue to be much more likely than their husbands to perform a wide number of household duties, with men being reported as primarily responsible for only two… Married men report what goes on in their household differently than married women… Six out of 10 women report that they are more likely to wash the dishes, while men are more likely than women to say the dishes are done equally. Two-thirds of women say they are more likely to prepare meals. A much smaller percentage of husbands say their wives prepare the meals. Although women are more likely to say their husbands, rather than they themselves, keep the cars in good condition and do yard work, the percentages are much lower than those reported by husbands, who overwhelmingly say they are responsible for these chores… Husbands and wives over 50 report a distribution of these chores that differs little from that of husbands and wives under 50.

please remember, again, these are issues that, as far as we know, primarily affect cis-hetero couples. the word “married” is kind of a proxy, as far as i can tell, for “in a committed relationship,” stuck together by property and/or kids, not necessarily legally bound. trans and homo couples, we believe, are much more likely to have an intimate knowledge of one another’s “natural” responsibilities and skills. might not be perfect – but likely to be better.

every couple’s dilemma is different. there’s usually a conflict over “standards.” here i’m mainly talking about housekeeping and family chores, but the same, of course, is true regarding finances, care of animals, public appearances and prestige, and so on. often when folks talk about these conflicts around “standards,” they assume a gender bias – but these conflicts are so variable! it’s not always the woman who wants the sink shiny. it’s not always the man who ignores the laundry.

The most cliched problem among married couples is whether or not the toilet seat is left up or down… The truth is that this argument is about women asserting dominance in household matters and applying their values to men… Except in cases where health or safety are an issue or external factors affected our situation, there was no reason my husband should have been pressed to comply with what I wanted. For example, I like things kept tidy all the time whereas he prefers to pretty much keep everything where it is most convenient for him to access and put away. Rather than nag at him to keep cleaning off his bedside area, I just let it be or clean it up myself… Since a good number of women feel they are judged by the homes they keep, and many of them are, it’s very difficult for them to back away from their standards… Women with high household standards should try to accept that the way they prefer to keep house isn’t the “correct” way to live. Lackadaisical men need to accept that there are some things that absolutely need to be done and fifty percent of that type of work is their responsibility… Map out which tasks are necessary and which are a reflection of aesthetic desires and split the former down the middle and let the concerned party do the latter on her (or his) own.

Most neat freaks tend to have “hot spots” – extremely high standards for neatness in very particular areas… If neat freaks find their special terrain in disarray, they start overreacting and get angry. The problem, from their point of view, is that disorder signifies a lack of control… Neat freaks are often perfectionists in other areas of life, continually setting themselves up for frustration and disappointment… Understand he may be resistant to change, since his immaculate habits may have been reinforced over the years with high praise.

again, when the first baby comes along, these conflicts often begin to simmer. is there just something about the presence of a baby that tends to heat up previously-repressed gender conflicts? after all, prenatal ultrasound has normalized the gendering of fetuses, and careful decisionmaking about how much pink or blue the nursery should contain could subconsciously lead to re-gendering of the parents, accelerating throughout family development, as well.

in most cases, the mother, whose bond with the new baby is physiological and continues throughout the first year while breastfeeding, “stays at home,” as we say, with the baby, for some period of months. in many cases, this means she also becomes the “mother” of her spouse, in the practical sense of how the household runs. her spouse, as a “baby,” might turn out to be a spoiled brat or just passively complacent, but one way or the other, the new mother will often now be called upon to feed, clothe, and clean up after him, in a way she never was before.

this shift in roles will often be rationalized as a mere shift in the female’s work responsibilities: she is usually portrayed as simply exchanging her previous job for a new one. (“since i’m home all day, i should do all the home-related work.”) her spouse, meanwhile, has “exchanged” nothing. he generally continues working his same previous job, while abdicating responsibility for household roles he’d formerly occupied. it is difficult to understand this sleight-of-hand without reverting to the idea of “marriage” as “a gendered institution,” either consciously or by default, at the micro (“this is just how we’ve chosen to do things”) or the macro (“this is what a real marriage is”) level.

Back when I was contributing to our income, there was a lot more help being tossed my way. I guess it makes sense. I’m home all of the time. These things should fall to me. But I think picking up your wet towel off of the floor in the bedroom goes beyond what my job entails, you know? …I clean up, constantly, after a two year old and two fat, hairy cats… Now I have to pick up after a 29 year old, too? …I know he works long hours. But my days start sooner than his and end later than his. He gets to come home from work and hang out. I’m making dinner, washing dishes, trying to make the next day easier on me by getting some of it done before… I have five living creatures generating messes in my home and only one doing anything to make it better.

Comment:
I have a 3 year old, 2 year old, and a 4 month old… This homemaker thing is driving me nuts. I’ve recently started looking for a job. It’s so unfair though because the jobs that want me pays not even half of what my husband makes. But that’s besides the point. How I look at it is that maybe if we share the same responsibilities then we can better appreciate each other.

this is really a dominant theme amongst the internets: when it appears impossible to evenly divide the tasks of running the family between differently-gendered spouses, women “choose” to re-enter the work force in hopes of restoring “gender equity” to their marriages. women anticipate that when they return to work, any new household tasks that have developed as a consequence of having a baby, as well as childrearing tasks, will be divided equally between spouses, as their mutual responsibilities had been before the baby came along.

it is puzzling. why would they expect this outcome? especially given that for most women, the first baby is followed by a second, and often a third or fourth. many women spend at least ten years in the childbearing phase of their lives, and during this time, they may find that every stopgap solution they may create (such as “returning to work” in order to avoid unilateral responsibility for all family business) is only temporary. also, the woman who has waited, by choice or necessity, until her 30s to begin a family, may now confront the aging, worsening health, and increasing needs for physical help, of [grand]parents and other older family members.

if she has already shouldered the work involved with the first baby, the house, and an infantilized husband, why shouldn’t she continue to do so as the family’s needs multiply? her “outside job” may make an increasingly minor contribution to the family finances, while impeding her from efficiently providing the unpaid and often invisible work required in a family of four, five, six, or ten – work that a woman often longs to do well, especially when it comes to the health, safety, and well-being of much-beloved children and older folks.

In 2010, as you might expect, moms, like many others, report working more hours. In addition, the salaries for the jobs mom performs have dropped over the past year so she is “earning” less. Here are the results of Salary.com’s 10th annual Mother’s Day survey, with each Mom Job ranked by percentage of its contribution to total “salary.”

The total salary for mom should be…
Stay-at-Home Mom: $117,855.86 [per year]
Working Mom: $71,860.37 (This is on top of Working Mom’s regular salary)

Comment:
The “jobs” are disingenuous and actually insulting. Someone who does the bills for a household is not an accountant. Someone who manages a household is not a CEO. Trying to inflate roles makes this look like nothing more than self-aggrandizing puffery. Rather than come up with this model, how about an empirical check. Measure what needs to be done, and then hire companies to do it, and see how much it costs. That will tell you actual values, and not this flummery.

Reply:
You’re welcome to run an empirical study. I think you’ll find it’s more expense to outsource these roles than you may think. There will, however, be a big savings in overtime if you outsource to multiple people. But don’t forget to add in the cost of project management or general contractor.

As a stay at home mom… should I be required to do all of the housework while my husband does absolutely nothing. My husband and I have been fighting about this. I dont feel like his partner, I feel like a maid, or his mom.

Comments:
…If you choose to be a stay at home mom – then that is what you should be a stay at home mom and a mothers job is not only taking care of the children but also the home.
…taking care of children is a job and ur husband should help u with some of the cleaning no one should have to do it all, being that u stay at home you should do about 60% but he should be helping you
…Just don’t pick up any of his sh*t that he leaves around.
…Just get a housekeeper one or two days a week.
…Yes, a housewife should do all of the woman’s work (cooking, cleaning, washing, etc…). While the man takes care of the maintenance on the house and the yard work. My wife has been a housewife for the past 11yrs, and that’s the way our house runs.
…I had a similar problem, married, 1 child. My now ex-wife felt I should do 50% of the housework.
…He should do the ‘manly’ stuff like fixing a busted toilet or installing a shelf. But yeah – you should be cooking & cleaning & bringing the kids to school. WTF else are you doing while he’s out actually holding down a real job? My “stay at home mom” wife spends 5 out of 8 hrs per day on Facebook, then complains to me when I get home that I’m not helping her with the dishes. Seriously?

I am just wondering how much a husband should help with childcare. I am a stay at home mom of a 21 months old girl and I am also taking care of another child for about 20 hours a week. I also do all the housework . My husband occasionally mows the lawn or fixes something in the house but of course that doesn’t happen every week. I go twice a week to the Gym and my husband watches my daughter from 5:30 to 7:30. We talked about that we both take care of her on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays but it rarely happens. I always have to ask for help and when I ask he usually says that he is busy with something else or tired. I am so tired of asking for help.

Comments:
…Your husband may be tired after a hard day’s work but don’t forget that you have also just had a very hard day’s work with NO lunch break or coffee break or just time to sit alone at a desk or speak to colleagues without any distractions.

…Perhaps he has a medical condition and can get a doctor’s excuse?

…In fairness to the dads, I know women friends and family members who keep this situation going by unconsciously claiming the house as their domain, relegating their husbands to a sort of incompetent guest visitor status… Often we set up a situation where the dad needs to check in with us for every household or parenting decision, no matter how trivial… It isn’t fair to ask someone to take more responsibility if you are claiming it all for yourself… You will probably have to hand over the reins sometimes, and step out of the picture, and let him do it his way.

…That question, like everything else, depends on so many factors going on in the marriage, including… who wanted to have the kid.

…Ask your husband how he’d like to work 3 or 4 more hours a day, plus all weekend, because that is what he is expecting of you… I use to work a ”real job” & I know I wasn’t working every minute of the day, sometimes I’d send personal e-mails, talk to co-workers, or take a brief walk. Just like as a SAHM [stay at home mom] I can go for a walk, occasionally send e-mails (like now) and sometimes take a nap when my baby does. The difference is I don’t go home at five and then have a weekend away from my job.

…Instead of comparing what it is that you do, how about comparing downtime hours. In other words, try to equally divide time up according to who is the point person for the kids. In other words, you are in charge on saturdays and he is in charge on sundays… or whatever works. Personally, it sounds like either one of you having to watch the kids the entire weekend is pretty unfair.

…When we first had our child, when he was newborn, we negotiated a division of labor that basically included me doing all the childcare, housework, finances, and managing our rental property. My husband has a stressful job with long hours. When our son was about 6 months old everything started crashing… We sat down and decided what sort of activities constituted ”work.” My husband agreed that childcare and housework were included as ”work.” Then when we each calculated our hours, it turned out that I was working 110 hours a week and my husband was working 55. And the hours you work should be weighed according to how much you are doing. For example, I often clean and take care of our son at the same time, so that time counts for double hours. And if you are taking care of your child and someone else’s child at the same time, that should count as double hours.

…Twenty years ago I went through the exact same scenario. I never could get over my resentment about the unendingness of child and home care vs. the 9-7 office thing… Eventually he left, and found a woman who always worked rather than stayed home with the children.

…My husband died when my kids were 7 and 3… Both children still talk about him, 6 years later. As a result of his involvement in their lives – helping with the diapering, feeding, bedtimes, and park time – they knew him so well that there are lots of memories. Had he just come home and read the newspaper, they wouldn’t have had the same memories.

A guy works his tail off climbing the corporate ladder. He sacrifices everything else to achieve success for himself and his family. In the meantime, his wife stays home with the kids and the housework. Ultimately, she divorces him. Why? Because, she sacrificed too, and got a lousy husband for her trouble.
* The divorce rate is lower when couples share housework
* The divorce rate drops sharply when the woman works too
* The risk of divorce is lowest when the man earns 60% of the income and does 40% of housework
* Among couples over 40, two thirds of the divorces are initiated by the women
The wealth of research seems to indicate that, regardless of how hard men work, how successful they are, and how much money they bring home, most women seem to have a real problem when their husbands are slackers at home and aren’t around to help raise the kids.

some people, for one reason or another, become single parents – which usually means their former spouse becomes a single parent, too. these folks have a wide variety of situations and resources. it’s traditional to catastrophize the difficulties inherent in single parenthood (“For example, in the United States, the custodial mother’s and children’s standard of living is reduced by 30 percent on average while the noncustodial father’s standard of living increases by 15 percent”).

however, in many cases, one parent – whether “employed outside the home” or not – may find they have less physical labor to do than previously. for example, a parent may find that they now singlehandedly care for themselves and their kids, but not for their spouse and spouse’s extended family in addition. also, when the kids go to the other parent’s house, they have a degree of free time they may never have had before. another parent may find that child support payments, the expense of parenting, are cheaper than sharing expenses with a spouse.

some parents are also very happy to take on the increased physical workload of single parenting, in order to jettison the psychological workload necessitated by an inequitable marriage. of course, some newly single parents find it newly important to hire, barter for, or otherwise obtain household and childcare help. what “help” they obtain is likely also to be gendered (grandma, a nanny, a housemaid, a girlfriend in the bed or down the street) and to stand in for the “missing mom” in the household. increasingly, this goes for single mothers as well as fathers.

”The thing I most want in life is a wife. I’m not kidding,” said Joyce Lustbader, a research scientist at Columbia University, who has been married for 29 years. ”I work all day, sometimes seven days a week, and still have to go home and make dinner and have all those things to do around the house.” …Working women, whether married or single, also see their lack of devoted spousal support as an impediment to getting ahead in their careers, especially when they are competing against men who have wives behind them, whether those wives are working or staying at home. And research supports their argument: it appears that marriage, at least marriage with children, bolsters a man’s career but hinders a woman’s… Married women make an average 17 percent more than unmarried women, according to 2005 B.L.S. data… while married men make 42 percent more than unmarried men.

When the biologist Carol W. Greider received a call from Stockholm last fall telling her she had won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, she wasn’t working in her lab at the Johns Hopkins University. The professor of molecular biology and genetics was at home, folding laundry… A new study from the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University has found that female scientists do 54 percent of their core household tasks, such as cooking, cleaning, and laundry – about twice as much as their male counterparts. (Paid help and children made up some of the difference.)… Women also worked at their paying jobs about 56 hours a week, almost the same number of hours as men do. Men contributed more to home repair, finance, and yard and car care. But those tasks took about one-quarter of the 19.3 hours a week spent in a home on core household tasks, according to the study.

of course, the current economic depression is gendered, too: the preponderance of job loss has been by men. perhaps having a former breadwinner “home full-time” will shift the balance of “natural” family work responsibilities?

i doubt it. most folks view the current employment disaster as a temporary problem, and not anything calling for a dramatic change in household function. most of the families i know have made temporary changes in their family’s luxury spending, but as weeks have turned to months relying on a mother’s earning power, not many folks are also adjusting the family workload.

this situation is not analogous to having a new mother “staying home” with a baby, due to the paycheck differential between genders. furthermore, an unemployed mother typically provides unpaid childcare for her baby, while unemployed fathers typically devote their daytime work hours to “freelancing” and/or “looking for a new job,” while outsourcing childcare.

When women are unemployed and looking for a job, the time they spend daily taking care of children nearly doubles, [New York Times writer Catherine] Rampell writes, quoting an analysis of the government’s American Time Use Survey… “Unemployed men’s child care duties, by contrast, are virtually identical to those of their working counterparts, and they instead spend more time sleeping, watching TV and looking for a job, along with other domestic activities.” …Many of the unemployed men interviewed say they have tried to help out with cooking, veterinarian appointments and other chores, but they have not had time to do more.

Lily Pabian and her husband Jeff learned to tag-team household tasks when he lost his job and she went from stay-at-home mom to part-time consultant. But the give-and-take turned into a juggling act when Jeff found work again three months later. Lily, a 37-year-old mother of three from Mapleton, Ga., kept working, but also kept most of the parenting responsibilities and housework. And experts say her experience will probably be typical… “I feel like there are days where I am drowning,” Lily Pabian said. “We do fight about my overload, my work load, and he’s willing to say ‘What can I do to help?’ My thing is ‘Why do I have to think for you?’”

An estimated 2 million wives are now the sole breadwinners in families across America… While men have taken on more housework and child-rearing over the years, women still do two-thirds of it, including day-to-day tasks like diaper-changing, bathing, preparing meals and shuttling the children to activities. Men, meanwhile, tend to play with children… Women tend to do urgent tasks that are repetitive.

take-home messages? i don’t know. i am disappointed that all the study and theorizing by smart feminist psychologists and sociologists have yielded, really, nothing of value to young parents struggling with these issues today. i can only hope that as same-sex marriages become normalized in our society, they may provide some good examples of how to fairly distribute the visible and invisible work of building and maintaining families and that, as judge walker states, this will represent an evolution of our understanding of gender.

i know it will seem unfair that i open up this pandora’s box of family politics without offering any concrete solutions. (and i know i will also have irritated some by characterizing men as “infantilized” who expect young mothers to care for the bulk of their physical needs – to which i can only say, you know, come on.) but we have seen, above, how narrowly based – or individualized – any concrete solution has to be, because every set of family issues – what’s important, what’s prized, what’s intolerable, what’s apparently inevitable – varies wildly.

personally, i found a number of concrete solutions for my family, not just one, within a 25-year span of family building. (i am just now entering the phase of life in which caregiving focuses on older family members rather than younger.) they were not easily negotiated, but each seemed very “natural” at the time. in the interest of fair disclosure, i’ll share that i have lived (roughly through the 1980s) as a traditional housewife raising small children, with a fully-employed husband who shared the physical housework pretty equitably, and then as a partly-employed single mother of three kids (roughly through the 1990s) who all did chores according to their abilities.

currently, i’m a full-time worker/ small business owner, in charge of (or stuck with) earning the bulk of our income, with a “stay-at-home” spouse who is in charge of (or stuck with) the shopping, cooking, cleaning, laundry, bill-paying, recycling, etc. for the two of us (no kids at home). like a traditional husband, i frequently “offer to help,” and wander away whistling when my help’s declined. unlike a traditional husband, i don’t mow the lawn. my spouse has tolerated this relationship for several years now. again – no kids at home.

A person with a demanding job and the social/economic power that goes along with being the breadwinner, even if that person is a woman and a feminist, is not going to spend a lot of time “feeling squeamish” about unequal work on the home front.

Partly this is because professional jobs take up a lot of mental energy; you’re thinking too much about the job to be thinking about who’s doing the laundry, especially if the laundry is getting done without your thinking about it. Partly this is because domestic work is a pain in the butt: no one who doesn’t have to do it is going to spend a lot of time thinking about it. And partly it’s because the nature of domestic labor (like most labor) is that if it’s done well, it looks effortless and therefore becomes invisible. Only if it’s done badly does it get noticed, and then the response is likely to be irritation.

Q: What surprised you the most about staying home with your then-1-year-old son?
A: …That taking care of a child every day is overwhelming. The classic question that the stay-at-home parent gets is: “What do you do all day?” And the answer to that is you’re paying attention, you’re improvising and keeping your child occupied. That can be really tiring. It surprised me how physically and emotionally exhausting it could be.

I think the first year of my son’s life, like a lot of fathers – like most fathers – I was really a bystander. It was my wife who gave birth, who dealt with breast-feeding, who was really his primary caregiver. And it was a shock to realize, when I became his primary caregiver, how much responsibility that was.

…You can’t really afford a domestic specialist and a specialist who does paid work. Both partners have to be capable of doing one or the other at a moment’s notice. Reverse-traditional families are an evolutionary adaptation. They’re a way of surviving in a very unstable 21st century.

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