In the New York Times, Sunday ,December 8, 2013, was an opinion piece that could only have been written by a man. The title was, “The Case for Filth,” and, of course, it was written by a man, Stephen Marche, who has the gall to be writing a book about the end of the gender wars.
Mr. Marche admits that men are not up to the task of doing their part in household duties, even in 2013. He goes through studies to prove his thesis that:
The solution to the gender divide in housework generally is just that simple: don’t bother. Leave the stairs untidy. Don’t fix the garden gate. Fail to repaint the peeling ceiling. Never make the bed. A clean house is the sign of a wasted life, truly. Hope is messy: Eventually we’ll all be living in perfect egalitarian squalor.
He does not have a clue.
Sure, the studies show that women are doing less housework than they did in the past. He says the study he cites shows that:
The future probably does not involve men doing more housework. A recent study of transgender men found that housework is divided inequitably even in that group. There is a slight correlation between the egalitarianism of a household and a fairer division of domestic labor, but the most substantial correlation is that the more egalitarian a household is, the less housework gets done altogether.
Here is the good news: Men’s behavior may not be changing, but women’s is. According to a 2000 study by University of Maryland sociologists, time-diary data from American adults show that the number of hours spent on domestic labor, not including child care or shopping, has declined steadily since 1965. This finding is mainly due to declines among women, both those with jobs and those without jobs. They have cut their housework hours almost in half since the 1960s.
According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the proportion of G.D.P. that unpaid domestic labor would add to the overall economy has declined from 39 percent in 1965 to 25.7 percent in 2010. Because women are doing less and less, the difference between the amount of housework that men and women do continues to narrow, and not because women are so busy they can’t do the housework. Those who were cutting their numbers of hours spent on domestic work most rapidly were those with the most time available for it, according to the University of Maryland researchers. The sociologists’ term for this process is “disinvestment.” . . . .The solution to the inequality of dusting wasn’t dividing the dusting: it was not doing the dusting at all.
An article in Forbes Magazine, “Are Women’s High Standards keeping Them From Happiness?” cites a different study from the nonprofit Families and Work Institute, April 2012. Jenna Goudreau, a woman author, mentions control as the factor most likely at work when women do more housework:
More than two-thirds of women (68%) say work does not interfere with their personal lives, and more than half say they rarely or never prioritize their jobs over their personal lives.
Instead, the time crunch seems to be self-imposed. During free time they reported doing tasks like laundry (79%), cleaning (75%), cooking (70%) and organizing or de-cluttering (62%). The findings show that women take primary responsibility for 11 household tasks, while men take responsibility for just two tasks (home repairs and gardening/yard work), which need to be completed less frequently.
“Women seem to be victims of bottomless to-do lists,” said Kristin van Ogtrop, managing editor of Real Simple, in a briefing on the findings today.
However, while women say they “hate” chores like cleaning and most believe their spouses have the same or higher standards when it comes to household chores (60%) and child care (80%), they often do not delegate to partners or outsource the work.
Even if they could afford it, 45% said they wouldn’t hire more household help and 69% said they wouldn’t hire more child-care help.
This may stem from feelings of guilt. Almost one third of women said if they did less around the house, they wouldn’t be properly taking care of it. It may also be an issue of control. Many women said their partner wouldn’t do things the way they like them done.
This Grandma knows a solution. Household help. Whether it to be twice a year large cleaning, once a month deep cleaning, or biweekly or weekly cleaning help, a household with two working parents needs to budget for some outside cleaning assistance. How do they know they need to do this?
Grandma just needs to point out the crawling baby on the dirty floor. You can tell Mr. Marche does not have a crawling baby or even thinks about that. Grandma needs to just suggest that a gift to baby (and the parents of the grandchild) could be some cleaning help. The parents will say they do not need this. However, once they see the difference, the parents of our grandchildren are hooked. They seem to find something in their budget to have household help again, or request it for gifts.
Both studies cited the need for time. Time has value. Time has a cost. And we grandmas want the parents of our grandchildren playing with our grandchildren on a clean floor rather than cleaning the floor, if we can help make that happen, at least a few times a year. Holiday present?
And a clean floor for a crawling baby is
Joy,
Mema
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