“The Happiest Wives”

Ted hipped me to John Tierney’s op-ed piece, “The Happiest Wives”, the day it was published, but it’s taken me awhile to get around to reading it. Here’s the part I found most interesting:

Consider what’s happened with housework, that perpetual sore point. From the 1960’s through the 80’s, wives cut back on housework as husbands did more. In the 1990’s, though, the equalizing trend leveled off, leaving wives still doing nearly twice as much of the work at home.

That seems terribly unfair unless you look at how men and women behave when they’re living by themselves: the women do twice as much housework as the men do. Single men do less cooking and cleaning, because those jobs don't seem as important to them. They can live with unmade beds and frozen dinners.

I found this interesting because it never occurred to me before, and because it seems to me to make sense. Certainly, the division of labor in my own marriage is shaped by pre-existing behavior—mine, and my husband’s—although, the tasks aren’t so neatly distributed by gender. I was enthusiastic about cooking even when I was just cooking for myself, but I was also a total slob when I was a single gal. As a bachelor, Ted subsisted on Chunky soup and Raisin Bran, but he always had a clean bathroom. Now that we’re married, I do most of the cooking and he does most of the cleaning.

This system wasn’t the product of thoughtful, principled negotiation; it’s just kind of how things have worked out. If we kept track of the hours Ted spends Swiffering and that I spend chopping cilantro, we might discover that our household contributions are not precisely equal, but I doubt that we’re ever going to do that. Indeed, I think that the organic nature of our division of labor is part of what makes it work, and I’m pretty certain that it accounts for the flexibility we enjoy.

Ted cleans because he has a low tolerance for filth; if he lets things slide a bit, I don’t care, because I’m a pig. Similarly, if I feel like defrosting a pizza for supper, that’s just fine with Ted. If I need a pot or a knife that’s sitting in the sink, I don’t ask Ted to do the dishes; I clean it myself. When the so-called “morning” sickness made food preparation an impossibly noxious task for me, Ted didn’t pout or complain; he offered to cook.

Now, before everybody starts getting all up in my shit, I would like to make it clear that I’m not presenting my marriage as a model union that should be emulated by all, and I’m certainly not saying that Tierney’s column offers a foolproof program for social engineering. Furthermore, I am not suggesting that marriage doesn’t—or shouldn’t—change a person’s conduct. I’m just saying that the paragraphs quoted above resonated with me.

Of course, it’s also worth noting that the happy division of labor that Tierney describes—career man with stay-at-home wife—doesn’t work for everyone (some of my best friends are statistical outliers, and I’m always wary of any attempt by norms to tell them how to live), and that, even when it does work, it only works as long as the couple is married. This is something Ted mentioned when we discussed the column, and it’s something we discussed at length before I quit my job. I was happy to jettison a career in marketing, but the fact remains that, if Ted and I get divorced, I’ll be kind of screwed, professionally speaking.

In the days since it first appeared, this column has made the rounds in the blogosphere. Amanda at Pandagon rips Tierney a new one. I particularly liked her response to Tierney’s observation that, from the 60s through the 80s, women started doing less housework and men started doing more, while this trend leveled off in the 90s:

…if men were picking up more and more of their share of housework and then stopped when Tierney says, it might not be just because men have a built-in housework termination gear that makes them stop as soon as they hit 60% of whatever the female in the vicinity is doing. That this “leveling off” happened right about the same time that the anti-feminist backlash that Susan Faludi described was hitting an apex and the rise of the Limbaugh listening embittered white male might not be a mere coincidence, but a trend that also got played out at home.

There’s also a nice analysis of the study Tierney cites over at Half Changed World.

Comments

“The Happiest Wives”

Ted hipped me to John Tierney’s op-ed piece, “The Happiest Wives”, the day it was published, but it’s taken me awhile to get around to reading it. Here’s the part I found most interesting:

Consider what’s happened with housework, that perpetual sore point. From the 1960’s through the 80’s, wives cut back on housework as husbands did more. In the 1990’s, though, the equalizing trend leveled off, leaving wives still doing nearly twice as much of the work at home.

That seems terribly unfair unless you look at how men and women behave when they’re living by themselves: the women do twice as much housework as the men do. Single men do less cooking and cleaning, because those jobs don't seem as important to them. They can live with unmade beds and frozen dinners.

I found this interesting because it never occurred to me before, and because it seems to me to make sense. Certainly, the division of labor in my own marriage is shaped by pre-existing behavior—mine, and my husband’s—although, the tasks aren’t so neatly distributed by gender. I was enthusiastic about cooking even when I was just cooking for myself, but I was also a total slob when I was a single gal. As a bachelor, Ted subsisted on Chunky soup and Raisin Bran, but he always had a clean bathroom. Now that we’re married, I do most of the cooking and he does most of the cleaning.