Hugo Schwyzer

It’s a warm summer Friday, and I have little interest in a thoughtful post, or a Friday Random Ten, or anything of that sort. So reprinting an old post seems the worthy thing to do.

This post originally appeared November 30, 2005:

The comments below this post continue to come in, and there’s an interesting exchange worth following up on.

Stacer wrote:  it can be very hard for women to relinquish control over what is traditionally her domain, especially if she was raised traditionally and/or has family members who pressure her in that regard.

I replied: Helping wives to relinquish that sort of control is a task that men, especially those who also come out of a conservative background, ought to consider embracing.

Caitriona asked in response: Uhm, just how do you propose that men "help" their wives relinquish control in these areas?

This is getting into some tricky stuff.  Let’s see if I can wade through it.

I’ve known a fair number of women who have been raised with the notion that the home is their domain.   The cooking, the cleaning, the childcare, and the general presentation of the household are things they see as entirely, or nearly entirely, within their bailiwick.  While many feminists have rightly asked their boyfriends and husbands to "step up" and take an active role in domestic tasks, many traditional women have not.  In some instances, they don’t ask because they don’t expect their male partners to be interested or willing to help.  But in other cases, these women have bought in to the notion that their very identity as wives and mothers is inextricably linked with how they "keep house."

Again, it’s difficult not to share too much from personal experience.  I’ve lived with quite a few women (some to whom I was married, some not).  They came from widely divergent social, economic, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds.   In some of these relationships, my partner and I agreed to live in a kind of low-key slovenliness.  (I’m a bit of a slob, as anyone who has seen my office can tell you!)  In other cases, we agreed to keep the house or apartment up to a "higher standard", and we either shared the labor or (more recently) hired help to do it for us.

I almost never tell stories about my exes. Here’s a reasonably safe one.  One of my former wives was, like me, fairly sloppy ’round the house.  Laundry piled up, dishes were done intermittently, and so forth.  And then, a few months into our marriage, her mother (who lived some distance away) announced she was coming into town.  The day before my mother-in-law arrived, I found my wife on her knees scrubbing the bathtub.  While I had been off at school, she had been cleaning every square inch of the home.  "For heaven’s sake", I said, "what are you doing?  Your mother is going to stay in a hotel anyway."

My ex looked at me, almost tearfully, and she said "Hugo, you don’t understand."  She went on to explain how much pressure she felt to live up to her mother’s standards for how a home should look.  She said that pressure had only really become acute after we were married.  "My mom expects me to take care of you", she told me, "If the house isn’t perfect, it means I’m a lousy wife and a bad woman."  Though my ex-wife was a bright and competent and educated woman with a career outside the home, on that afternoon many years ago she was a frantic and anxious daughter, worried desperately about not living up to a standard that I simply could not understand.

I’ve come to realize (after three divorces and now, at last, in a truly happy marriage), just how often society at large (particularly in traditional culture) judges women by not only the state of their homes, but the outer appearance of their husbands.   I’ve realized that for some people, when a married man seems stressed or unkempt or troubled, the wife is invariably to blame. My former mother-in-law didn’t just expect a clean house from her daughter, she expected her daughter to have successfully arranged my life!  According to my former wife, she would be judged by her family in no small part on how comfortable, well-fed, and settled I appeared.  This was a stunning revelation to me. 

I’ve come to realize that this particular ex-wife did not come from an unusual family in this regard.  A great many traditional women know that they will be assessed and judged by family, peers, and community based on their domestic skills and the behavior of their husbands.  And as men, I believe we do have a role to play here!  We must be willing to do more than "help out" around the house (the language of a child doing chores).  We must proactively assert ourselves in domestic decisions, lifting a culturally-imposed burden off the shoulders of our spouses.  While it is not our job to help our wives reject their backgrounds, it is our job to help our wives escape the prison of mandated gender roles.  We do that not only by doing the dishes, but by being willing to say "Hey, it’s my kitchen too.  I can take care of it, and I will take care of it.  Let me be your equal partner here."

I’m not suggesting, ala some of the Promise Keepers, that men begin asserting the traditional notion of "headship" in the home.  But I am suggesting that men will do well to remember that their wives and girlfriends will often come from backgrounds that have loaded them up with crushing expectations about fashioning a domestic paradise.  While some women no doubt delight in some domestic tasks from time to time, feminists recognize that it is spiritually and intellectually deadening for women to connect their own sense of self-worth to the deliciousness of a casserole or the spotlessness of a floor or the whiteness of a freshly laundered t-shirt.  In the pro-feminist world, casseroles do need to be made, floors do need to be swept, and the laundry will still need doing.  But husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends can work together to extricate women from connecting these basic tasks to their own core identities!   

It’s not enough for men to simply volunteer to do a task occasionally (and then do it so badly that they have a permanent deferral from household work!)  Husbands must be willing to shoulder domestic burdens, and shoulder them well.   But husbands and boyfriends do well to be firm here.  Some women will be deeply anxious about relinquishing control over the domestic sphere, both because they may be afraid their husbands will screw up, and because they fear losing an aspect of their identity.  They may, as Stacer suggests, fear the harsh judgments of their culture; they may, as my ex-wife did, fear the contempt and disappointment of their own mothers.  While remaining compassionate and understanding, men also have to be willing to gently challenge their wives to let go of this ancient and tiresome baggage, and we have to be willing to shoulder our half of the load.

UPDATE:  I just re-read what I’ve written, and I think I’m going to catch some hell for the penultimate paragraph, which seems unfairly dismissive of domesticity.  I’ve opened myself up to the charge of sexism here, by making condescending assumptions about what tasks ought to be at the core of women’s self-worth!  Still, I’ll let stand what I wrote.  Just thought you should know that I can see another side or three…