thanate | dishes, work, and the smell of Tide (Reply)

This morning, through the labyrinthine and recursive paths of internet links, crossing with my memory, brings you three theories on housework:

The first one is so old I had to resurrect it from back-up and restore it to the internet: The Great Deception,

saladmonkeylamb's riff on dish soap as a metaphor for the now-traditional portrayal of relationships as another "battle" between sexes (a view I continue to find utterly ridiculous.)

I'd been thinking of that before, semi-recently, after

tithenai's post about real men are the ones who will do the dishes, for no other reason than that they need doing and this is part of being a competent human being. (My mother felt the same way about being able to use a sewing machine, although my brother managed to skip out of that somehow. Incidentally, while I will generally not let my husband do the dishes-- in the interest of domestic peace, actually, as I get far less irritated when I'm the one who put that pan that didn't get completely clean into the drain rack-- I did marry a man who owns his own sewing machine. And buys awesome vintage singers when they turn up for cheap.)

And then the reason it came back up again today: an essay from the 1970s about "The Politics of Housework."

I am fascinated (and disturbed) by how much this latter still applies to the world in general, and not at all to me. I mean, I was raised by a working father & a volunteering stay-at-home mother to believe in complete gender equality; I continue to be shocked to learn about modern examples of women getting lower salaries in the workplace and whatnot. For my part, I do nearly all of the housework and most of the yard work-- I refuse to operate the string trimmer because it smells of gasoline, but that's about it-- and I have vastly more free time than

grauwulf, with his full time job and heavy school course load. Unless I pick up a sudden vocation, I expect this will go on being true until I'm suddenly the on-call parent of an infant. This is quite all right, although of course both of us would rather

grauwulf had a bit more free time of his own, and although I will never be the sort to vacuum daily I have no objection to handling the laundry and the food and things so long as I don't have to squeeze it in around a 40 hour work week. He, as he keeps telling people, gets fresh bread turning up on the dinner table.

The difference, I think, is that we've made these arrangements as a matter of choice; that each of us has done the work and the housework and food and all the rest for ourselves, and in the end I've never found a job that pays living wage and doesn't suck my soul out my ears after a few years (at most), while he has a job that he usually doesn't hate and sometimes even likes, and is really pretty happy to come home afterwards and have food appear. I am very spoiled, and I know it. I also don't have to boil the laundry, as I have a very nice washer to do all that for me, and it does make a great difference compared to the historical evils of housework. (speaking of which, my mother came into possession of some low-E Tide, which she handed off to me as her machine is a standard one, and I have discovered that a year's home-made detergent use has not yet broken me of the innate feeling that the smell of Tide is "clean.")

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go vacuum attic insulation and plaster bits off the floor from where my wonderful husband just put in a ceiling fan in the bedroom, as he is braver than I am about tackling the wiring in this house. (yes, every single overhead light is on the same breaker, why do you ask?)