It’s a crazy Friday, and I’m not sure how much time I will have to post over the next ten days. I’m off on Spring Break next week (Pasadena City College has America’s last spring break, I’m nearly certain), so posting will be intermittent (but not entirely absent) between now and April 22.
Here’s a reprint of a 2005 post: Relinquishing Control: Some Thoughts on Men, Women, and the Domestic Sphere.
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…
This one resonated. What I’ve often found in marriage is the conflict between responsibilities & expectations on household cleanliness. I don’t do enough. I’ll concede that. My standards aren’t that high to begin with. I spent four years in the Marines deck toweling heads, scrubbing shitters, polishing brightwork, and all the rest every Thursday, and found out that I didn’t much care for it (my wife jokes sometimes that I ought to get sent back to boot camp, because it didn’t take the first time). Oh well, field Marine, I always say. While I’m not a complete slob, I’m completely copascetic with dishes in the sink for a day or two, unmade beds, shoes left out for tomorrow, and all that. (and if I’m in the middle of a project or something, fuhgeddaboutit! My stuff will be all over the office.) I also have no sense of interior aesthetics. My one contribution to the decor is a Bruce Lee poster in one back room. She comes from the opposite situation. She grew up in a house with a brother who has a serious compulsive hoarding problem. Like, out of a social worker’s case study serious. Her mom’s whole house looks like a junkyard with all of his crap. (clothes he doesn’t wear, stuff he buys and doesn’t use, newspapers and record albums that literally go back 30 years, etc.) So she’s rather sensitive and a little nutty about keeping everything “just so” (and if a friend is coming over for coffee, much less her mom or something, again, fuhgeddaboutit!)
Where we bump up is between the little, probably the too little, that I care to do and the much, certainly the too much, that she wants to do (and wants me to do). She’ll get angry and accuse me of doing nothing, I’ll dig in my heels, as much to prevent getting sucked into her little vortex as anything. She’ll say she does everything around the house. I’ll tell her to remember that the next time she wants something (the TV, the computer, the car) fixed or see what happens if we don’t clean the head for two months (her thing) versus don’t pay the electric bill for two months (my thing). So I don’t know where the balance is, between my unreasonable indolence (born as much out of not wanting to subscribe to her whole program) and her unreasonable standards.
Tom,
I don’t know your particular situation, I’ll be the first to admit, but in my case it’s been a world of good to sit down and say “Some of my resistance is a reaction to your own vehemence - I might be willing to do more, but I’m afraid you won’t be happy with it even if I do.” (or, on the other side, “I don’t mind a little clutter, I’ve just seen a little turn into a lot so many times that I need to be sure that won’t happen”.)
Thanks Lisa. Turning down the temperature a bit and giving an inch I’ll admit does help.
Specialization / delegation works to a point too. I’m pretty good at handling laundry, not too bad at shopping, can make the bed and do dishes if I have to, and even can cook for both of us once in awhile. Pulling your own weight as much as possible helps. Things also get affected a lot by what we’re respectively doing: who is working / in school more than the other at any given time (right now, it’s me). I don’t know if that’s all just “muddling through” rather than finding the best solution or not.
I have no idea if this would work for most people, but I find that it is a good idea for each person in a relationship to do ALL THE WORK, ALL OF IT, for at least a month or two.
THis usually happens in the normal course of events, due to illness or injury or insane work schedules or birth; but NOTHING makes a person really SEE how much work there is and how much time it takes like being the one who is doing it ALL.
ALL!!!!
ANd usually no one who has been responsible for doing it ALL, ever falls right back into not seeing what needs to be done. Including bleaching the sink, sterilizing the inside of the fridge, buying groceries, paying bills, cleaning the cat box, folding laundry, and feeding everyone.
I suppose this is more of a consciousness raising exercise than anything….it really is quite helpful though.
An excellent suggestion, KMTBerry.
Tom, genuinely not meaning to slam on you here–but as the person in the house who does many of the things that are your domain, periodic tasks (bill-paying) and repair work are not nearly the same thing as daily, repetitive maintenance and cleaning.
Paying the electric bill takes me perhaps five minutes, once a month. Fixing the computers? Well, maybe an afternoon if things are REALLY fubar, but usually not more than an hour or two every so often. Compare that to, say, dishes, which must be done *every* time we have a meal or cook, and which have side effects if they aren’t done (they smell bad, attract vermin, clog up the sink, and you can’t cook if all the pots are dirty).
Plus, you and I *both* know how much more fun it is to pay bills than to scrub a toilet.
I think you are very right that the issue here is more power struggle than anything else. But if you really are saying that you know you’re letting her pick up your slack and you don’t care, can you see why even a spouse with reasonable standards would be furious with you?
Gotten a few comments to respond to here.
KMTBerry, part of the dispute is what constitutes the “ALL”. My “ALL” is not her “ALL”. Cleaning toilets, which seems to get a lot of mention here as a sort of palladium of odious household tasks, is maybe a once every month or two kind of a thing in my book, to cite one example. Sterilizing a fridge is something you do when you sell it, maybe.
Mythago, I’ll concede the difference in time required for different tasks. The point more that I was trying to make was how necessary it is that they be done & done on a particular schedule. The bills are non-negotiable as to when they’re due. The dishes, if they go a day or two and are soaking, won’t be a cause of disaster. And the fury can go both ways. If I see it not as her picking up my slack, but instead pestering me incessantly over things that I don’t see as that critical in terms of either time or intensity of efforts, I can get just as angry.
KMTBerry, part of the dispute is what constitutes the “ALL”. My “ALL” is not her “ALL”.
Um. Since the point is to try to get a sense of what she thinks of as her responsibilities around the house, then shouldn’t you do pretty much everything that she would include on that list for that month?
Noumena, that might work, if she did the same for another month (i.e., left everything down to my standards). Come to think of it, she’d probably find doing things my way at least as distasteful as I would doing it her way.
It isn’t an out and out question of not KNOWING what the household responsibilities are. For one, I’ve lived on my own before and she hasn’t (at least not without housemates or something) and I’ve been living under my own roof for longer. It just comes to a disagreement as to what has to be done and how often. KMTBerry used the phrase “what needs to be done”, which is something that I’d interpret in a strict sense.
Note that I didn’t say the point was to know what the household responsibilities are. I said `get a sense of what she thinks of as her responsibilities around the house’. That’s not the same as just knowing, ie, being able to make a list of the chores she usually does. It’s also not the same as an objective or impersonal list of all the things that need to be done.
Ok. I think I get the distinction. Thanks.
She just picked up a new work assignment, and my summer might see a lighter load than usual, so we’ll see.
Sure. This isn’t about her being 100% right and you being 100% wrong.
But really, the schedule thing is a red herring. She’s perceiving it (from what I can tell) as an issue of quantity and quality of work. The time-critical nature of bill-paying is irrelevant to those issues. “Yes, you have to do more and crappier work but yours doesn’t have a fixed deadline!” is almost like that joke about how many Surrealists it takes to change a lightbulb.
Speaking from experience, the only way to get out of this trap is to set aside the power struggle and figure out what needs to be done, agree that you’re not both going to be 100% happy, and that it needs to be done fairly.
Mythago, not entirely a red herring. The schedule (in terms of what gets done how often, e.g. whether the dishes are done every day or every couple of days) is a point of contention, and does in turn affect the aggregate quantity of work (whether they are done 30 times or 15 times per month). Often enough, I’ll want to get to something “later” that she wants to get done now. But otherwise I get what you’re saying & definitely you offer good advice.
I’m afraid that I don’t know the surrealist lightbulb joke. Care to enlighten / amuse?
Q. How many surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. Fish.
One thing to consider re the schedule - sometimes, especially when one is doing multiple chores, you can’t do chore B until A is done. So it may not matter in the grand scheme of things if you wash a pot today or tomorrow, but it matters very much if I need that pot to make dinner. Or your spouse may be thinking (justly or unjustly) that “I’ll do it later” means “I’ll stall until you nag me, or until you give up and do it yourself.” She may really not be understanding how you perceive it - that it is actually not an issue if the dishes wait a day.
Sometimes the conflict is also because it takes one spouse less time to perform a particular task than the other spouse, so the perception of burden is different, too. For instance, if Spouse A takes twice as long as Spouse B to load the dishwasher, Spouse A will consider loading the dishwasher a bigger burden than Spouse B.
Alternatively, Tom, you appear to be trivializing your wife’s feelings about having things cleared away as a personal quirk, as opposed to talking to her about what it was like growing up with a hoarder in the house. She may have a genuine horror of slipping into the abyss if things cross a certain line. I recently got the clue in the lead pipe about living with disabilities in my own marriage. After a nephew was diagnosed with Asperger’s recently, my husband and I did some reading so we could help his brother and sister-in-law out and interact with my nephew better, and we discovered that my husband may actually have an autism-spectrum disorder. After all of these years of low-level disagreement over household chores, we now both have a better understanding of where the other one is coming from! He now understands on an intellectual level why I’m not bothered if (for instance) there is a pile of things on the dining room table for a couple of days, and I’m better able to understand why he sometimes throws things away wholesale instead of sorting through them. I had been dismissing his dislike of clutter as a personal quirk and not very important, because a certain amount of clutter doesn’t bother me, but in reality he gets overwhelmed visually if there are too many things to choose to look at. Just a thought.