Not to sound flippant, but this is why I got divorced and have stayed divorced. I don't particularly care what the root of an individual straight, cis man's inability to notice or do equal amounts of labor are (societal conditioning, weaponized incompetence, whatever), but I have long passed my ability to tolerate it in my space. I have a lovely partner who will never, ever live in my house; things are done to my standards and on my schedule, and I am privileged enough to outsource the rest. The real challenge now is single parenting: I have two sons and am raising them to be noticers to save the sanity of whoever their partners end up being!
Fuck yeah I’m happy you made two sons. And I’m so happy for you that you’re living on your terms!! This whole conversation strikes a nerve because I’m in a happy, wonderful, growth generating partnership in every way, except that I STILL feel stuck being the Boss or Supervisor or whatever of the home I share (SHARE) with my husband and young son. I am constantly feeling the gravity of raising a son that I hope grows up to feel responsible for other people and for Female Coded tasks. Yet another imbalance is that my husband does not appear to feel that gravity! LOL! How fucking cursed!! What’s that saying about how behind every male feminist is an exhausted woman? My husband is a sweet, loving, supportive man who is only ever as feminist as I fight to make him. So then it’s I guess up to also me to fight to put some feminism in my son. My feminist minded mom settled on very traditional gender roles in her house, partially succumbing to the self-fulfilling myth that men can’t be trusted to take care of things. But it’s not like my dad took it upon himself to prove her wrong. Now my brother who I love dearly is an incompetent turd and my sister and I feel responsible for everything. How messed up is it that his sexist disregard for care work makes my mother feel like it’s her failing?
One of the sekrit benefits of being a single mother is that in my house (I can't speak for their dad's house, he's remarried) all tasks are everyone's tasks because they've watched me do everything! I make the repairs, I take care of the lawn, I also do the cooking and whatever. As soon as they're old enough to handle taking a chore that involves managing their own space, I give it to them, whether it's inside or outside, with the messaging (lol forgive me, I'm in marketing) that this is our family home that every family member must make pleasant and liveable. I do assume that this is messaging I wouldn't have to hammer so hard into a cis girl because the world would mostly do it for me. Also this "How messed up is it that his sexist disregard for care work makes my mother feel like it’s her failing?" is really the crux of the whole thing, isn't it.
Amanda I am in an extremely similar situation to you. I divorced my sons' dad three years ago because I couldn't tolerate anymore living in a traditional marriage. When I raised issues I was gaslighted and worse. I am now raising my sons with the goal of them SEEING the work and then taking initiative to do the work in the home.
I still have to do a lot of the mental labour for their care (Dr appts, clothes buying etc) as they're too young to do it the same and if I left it to their dad it wouldn't get done. Part of me wants to stop and try leaving it to their father more, and I'd be curious to know how other single parents handle the mental labour of this type of essential care.
I guess -- how exactly is the husband relationship wonderful, growth generating, a partnership, supportive, or feminist, here? When you find yourself using the word "fight" all the time, and feel responsible for the responsibilities of every single male person in this paragraph?
You know, that’s a fair concern given the nerve this topic clearly struck with me (a nerve partly to do with my partner, partly my brother and father and other men in my family/social circles, and of course the behavior of all of these people living under a patriarchal social fabric that asks so little of them). I guess you’ll just have to believe me when I say that although I have my frustrations navigating motherhood and a heterosexual monogamous partnership in a patriarchal society, my partner has and continues to dramatically improve my life. This cannot be said of my previous romantic interests. My husband and I have a wonderful effect on each other; since knowing him I’ve become much more “me.” It was a major sigh of relief to be accepted so radically by someone, moreso than any other friend I’ve met. It felt so good to see myself through his eyes, and this continues to help me grow to this day nearly 8 years later. In my particular case I am happier than when I lived alone, gripes notwithstanding. But honestly, I thank you for the question because I think it’s worth asking.
This! This is partly why I feel so ragey about the division of labour discussions. So often it's cis-hetero-women sending other cis-hetero-women articles and the women agree and the men make awkward jokes and change nothing because then they'd have to change.
You know what else is ragey? Being a guy who tried his best to be different but was defeated by the prevailing culture. Given the intense curiosity our acquaintances had about my wife and I having different names, we actually ended up pretending to be more traditional than we actually are. And my wife refused to let me be the stay-at-home parent.
I commented on your example on another comment. Is she OCD or does she want the job done? (Is she demanding A+ work or B- work?)
Maybe you're the exception to the rule. All I know is that it's pretty bad if I legitimately cannot tell if my husband is using weaponized incompetence, has depression, or post-stroke brain damage because I relate so much to these other stories.
You didn't answer my question. Is your wife OCD or does she want the job done? (Is she demanding A+ work or B- work?)
Please look back at my other comment reply to you. Is your wife more like me or like my mother? Does she get upset if she sees a tiny speck of debris (like my mother) or does she politely point out that a plate with an obvious ketchup smear still on it isn't clean (like me)?
Consider that you said in another comment "I had grown up with an abusive mother so had a very hard time listening to my wife's critiques of how I did laundry, dishes, etc." I can't help but suspect that she was asking for B- work but your past trauma caused you to interpret her request as demanding 100% A+ work.
I have So Many Thoughts, and for background, in a past life I taught sociology of the family. My thoughts about this are already structured around an academic literature on the subject. But it's also personal, because this is something I struggle with a lot, as the product of a very equal partnership who finds myself, to my real shame, in a pretty unequal one. Or is it? It's complicated!
My husband works a lot more paid hours than I do. Like 10-15 more per week, often more. As a result, we don't have the leisure gap that a lot of the literature on household division of labor talks about. I work out five times a week; he works out once. Our time for reading/watching/playing is probably pretty similar. So how do I weigh the time I spend on household labor that he doesn't spend against the fact that he really is working more paid hours? (Not because I have scaled back -- I work 40+, but he's a biglaw lawyer.)
Childcare is where my husband is closest to equal -- because he prioritizes that and understands it very clearly as his responsibility (and pleasure) to be an active parent. He did very close to half the diapers when that was relevant, he does all the baths, he has a specific chunk of the morning getting-ready-for-school routine that he supervises and keeps on track. Today he will take our kid to the eye doctor after having 10 days ago taken him to another medical appointment. Etc.
But to the mental labor/noticer point, I am the one who made those appointments. I am the one who notices that the kid has outgrown some clothes and orders new ones (and if I don't also put the outgrown ones in the donation bag in a timely way, my husband will give them to the kid to wear and not notice that they are too small). I plan almost all of the meals. It goes on. And as this piece makes clear, that is grinding, exhausting work that is invisible to the person who's not doing it. My husband has read enough pieces about gendered division of labor to understand in principle that I am doing this invisible work, but that doesn't translate to a real gut-level understanding of what it means. And so I am so, so tired, and he does not understand how deep that is.
On the surface, if you add up our paid hours and the amount of time we put in on concrete tasks, we are probably equal. It's just that my mind is never, ever at rest because there is always something I feel like I should already have done, or something that needs Noticing. (And trust, I am not even at 60% on things like family photos or holiday decorations. We're talking about medical appointments and haircuts and having clothes that fit.)
Super similar situation! And it’s so serendipitous to read all this this week. On Sunday my son slept over at his grandmother’s and my husband and I took the opportunity to eat some magic mushrooms together, which we had only done once before and we were looking forward to it. He’s holding me and his sweet, dumb psilocybin epiphany is everyone should love their wives more. At first I teased him that I don’t have a wife to love more, so this advice means nothing to me. And I said as a person living my life as a wife I don’t want to be loved more; he already makes me feel deeply and sufficiently loved. I want men (because his advice is for men, so here comes mine) to BE wives more. We went around a few times because he wasn’t understanding. Most of the time he helpfully and gently points out the many preoccupations I have which are burdening me, and that’s helped me to grow, but in the end he doesn’t choose to preoccupy himself with much of anything! So, conveniently, he can say “I never asked you to worry about xyz” which is true, but if I don’t worry about [getting the laundry and dishes washed before a trip; checking on and cooking for my grieving neighbors; applying sunscreen on my kid; packing his lunch] nobody would. I don’t know how I feel about taking advantage of this entry point. I agree with everything I said, but I definitely chose to ruin our high to say it.
Me: "There are three full bags next to the overflowing kitchen trash can - how did you not notice that?"
Him: "Sorry, I just forgot"
Me: "well stop forgetting - set alarms on your phone or something - the trash goes out Monday nights and Thursday nights - it's not a mystery what morning they pick it up"
The alarm thing is so real! I set reminders to take my meds; my partner can set reminders for the chores he is “assigned” but doesn’t think about constantly in the way I do!
The amount of times my loving, supportive and well-divided-in-terms-of-household-roles husband says 'I'm sorry you feel that way' when I am tearing my hair out about the emotional labour piece is now comical.
Another idea I wish got a lot more airtime… boys and men need to be proactively socialized to be more… social. If boys and men were explicitly taught the value of friendship, the tools for establishing and nurturing peer relationships, I think it would help advance gender equality in a more sticky way:
1) Ideas and norms of parity in household labor might spread more easily if there were male-dominant peer channels for them to disseminate; and
2) Socializing and all the important and meaningful stuff of building a life together takes work, and more men would be taking on this work and getting something valuable out of it!
My husband is 44 (oh my gosh how did we get here) and is just now realizing that he doesn't really have close friends beyond his bff who lives three hours away. I have my high school friends (we all moved back to the hometown when we had kids), I have my neighbor friends, I have my internet friends, I have work friends. He has consciously started trying to take the initiative to be friends with people, and his board game obsession of the last couple years has been a great way to start friendships. I have told him I'm proud of him for doing that instead of just letting things wither away-- I don't want to be like "here's a cookie!", but I also want to acknowledge that he's really getting outside of his comfort zone in making friends at 44.
I'm a SAHP and I find that these division of labour conversations leave me with a pool of anger deep in the pit of my stomach, but also I don't know how the lack of paid outside the home employment fits into them. I have some thoughts about all of this as it relates to unpaid labour, but they don't really connect so hopefully it's okay to lay them out piecemeal.
1) As a self-identified feminist and atheist, I've found that the most support for the work I put in day to day comes from Christians who have traditional views about gender norms. This is confusing!
2) My husband works a lot. He's self-employed, building his business, all these things. And I'm supporting that. He's able to work a lot because I do all the indoor tasks. This is frustrating, because it's his business, not mine, but he would not be able to do this without me.
3) When I was working, I did all the same housework I do now, but without kids added into the mix. I was happy to stop working. I don't want to go back to paid work. My life is lovely, and also I KNOW that if I chose to/needed to work again we would fall into the same trap, and it would be my responsibility to fix it. So do I need to figure out that imbalance now, while I'm not doing paid work and have no desire to?
I feel you on being SAHP (and happily so) and yet finding that the community where I feel like my work most valued is far from my own community. There needs to be a stronger identity of being progressive and feminist and also SAHP.
Not necessarily a full solve, but would it help with #2 if you were added legally as a co-owner of the business? As you've said, your work enables that work and (IMO) entitles you to ownership of it as well. Just as he's still an owner of your home and beneficiary of that.
I appreciate your input, and I am working towards making my position more secure, but it's more complicated than all that. It's partly a farm operation with his brother and dysfunctional father in ownership positions and it's not currently a business in the legal sense.
Today is my 9th wedding anniversary, and to be honest I feel really sad. The division of labor between us is so lopsided and I feel so much resentment towards my husband over it. I can't determine if on his end it's weaponized incompetence, depression, or brain damage. He claims that it isn't depression and that his brain post-stroke is fine, so that leaves weaponized incompetence. However, that doesn't make sense to me, either, because he never notices things even when they're incredibly obvious.
When I say incredibly obvious, I mean that an entire week's worth of dishes have covered all of our counter space and have ants on them, the trash cans are all overflowing, and the cat is urinating outside of the litter box because it's full of shit. So when people say to just do less, I laugh because they are saying to go ahead and let my husband do nothing. He doesn't even wake up on his own - he sets 5 alarms yet I have to practically drag him out of bed every morning.
The worst part is that I can't get him to watch our 3 year old daughter so that I can do the chores. He will literally watch her for 10 seconds and then pull out his phone and completely ignore her. He'll put on TV episodes or a movie for her and then still ignore her. So she cries for me and then he's all like "see she wants Mommy" and I say back "that's because you won't play with her." She's now finally at the age where she can help me, so finally I'm getting more done.
I went away on a trip with my choir for 4 days and he changed her clothes exactly once in that time frame and didn't comb her hair (I know this because of social media pictures). He himself will wear the same (very obviously dirty and stained) clothing over and over and be shocked when I tell him to change his clothing and not understand that I don't want to be physical or sexual with someone who can't even take care of basic hygiene.
A lot of my family and friends truly believe it's brain damage from having a stroke, but it's hard to ignore the coincidence that this all got worse after having a child.
It sounds like *something* beyond weaponized incompetence, that's for sure. Or if that's it, it's nuclear-level weaponry. That he doesn't change his own clothes also seems like it points to another or additional answer, because one of the typical things women observe is that their husbands are incompetent when it comes to household labor and childcare, but mysteriously able to handle the things they need to handle in their own individualized lives.
He somehow manages to work a full time job that he's had since 2011. He had a stroke in 2016 but everything got worse after we had our child in 2019. I have been frustrated with his job because he is underpaid and overworked for what he does, but it's a safe place for him. He knew his job forwards and backwards before his stroke; I don't know how he would do in a new/different job.
He tells me that he makes a lot of mistakes at work, but I don't really know what that means because I have imposter syndrome and perfectionism and am always afraid I'm not doing enough.
I guess you're right. His personality is kind but his actions aren't kind. I don't know if his actions are intentional or not. Many people in my life have said to me that he doesn't seem all there.
Have you phrased it like that? It's so hard and fraught to discuss labor and housework with your partner, especially when there's mental health issues at play as well. I have had a hard time finding a way to discuss things with my partner in a way that reflected their impact on me/the kids without him feeling like he personally is being attacked.
He used to see a therapist on his own but stopped making appointments for reasons I don't know. I ended up seeing his therapist temporarily when mine was on maternity leave, and she was the first person who suggested brain damage to me.
He has doctor's appointments every three months with his primary care doctor but he won't tell me when he has appointments until the-day-of, so I've never been able to go with him.
I've asked him to see a geneticist because there is another disorder than runs in his family that it could be the start of (Huntingdon's) but he has always refused to find out. He says he doesn't have the symptoms, but it's hard to tell because his balance has been off since his stroke in 2016; all of our walls are dirty from him putting his hands on them.
There's a statistic out there about the high number of marriages that don't survive a traumatic brain injury of one of the parties. I'm not telling you anything I'm sure you haven't thought of yourself, but looking out at the next 9 years of your life, it's hard to be very optimistic. Best of luck with everything.
My third comment here because this is a bread and butter topic for me. ***Shout out to the womxn out there who are bipoc and/or raising mixed families where caregiving and cooking are not chores to be delegated or shared as part of a gender equality exercise, but rather, are defiant acts of protecting and nurturing our identity and soul.
I am Korean raising 4 young kids with a white American partner in a community where we don’t have Korean friends or family. And for me, even the most mundane aspects of domestic life are key ingredients of making our family Korean -- for building that foundation in our kids’ identity that will help them embrace who they are now and in the future. Making Korean food for our family meals is work but not something I’d ever give up in the name of parity in household work.
Same thing for planning for and celebrating Korean holidays. Yes it’s work, but the kind of work that is life- and identity-affirming. And not one that can be delegated.
I appreciate the term "noticer" because I have used that word to describe myself with my partner. I have explained to him that I "see all the things". It does not feel like a choice to notice the surfaces in the house filling up with stuff, the floors accumulating dust and pet hair, the cobwebs in the corners, I just see it (notice it) and it feels automatic that it is one more thing to add to the mental to-do list. My partner has said he just doesn't "see" the mess. He grew up in a traditional home that was actually quite tidy in the shared spaces, and his mom, who worked full time also was the noticer and did much of the female-role work. I grew up in a single parent home, raised by my father. I was the oldest of three daughter so I took on the role of care-taker and I think this contributed to my hyper-vigilance of noticing because dad was an authoritarian with a temper and things had to be "nice". I think my drive to tidy and keep things in their place stems from those experiences where it was a tactic to keep myself safe. I can recall other childhood experiences where I felt I upset an adult in my life, and to make up for it I would start cleaning as a self-imposed penance. So in edition to taking on the typical gendered roles, I do this labor as a way to ensure my safety and self-worth. I am working on breaking this down, and I agree with Mangino that part of the solution is to just stop doing so much, and maybe instead do something else that brings personal joy and value.
The “noticer” label also spoke to me. And I totally agree that my noticing is NOT by choice. And now I’m going to notice, then notice that I’m noticing, then have this heavy mental dialogue about why I should stop noticing…
I think noticing falls into 3 general categories: (1) it leads to something that adds personal value, like knowing that you have a new neighbor and it would be great to reach out and build that social bond, (2) it avoids negative value, like noticing that you are down to the last roll of toilet paper and ordering in advance will avoid running out, and (3) it is socialized comparison to external norms, like noticing that none of our furniture matches or fits a cohesive style, as we see on Instagram.
I personally approach it like this: I hold on to (1), I divide the labor with my partner on (2), and try to drop (3) altogether.
I very much relate to navigating the heavy internal dialogue. It is a whole thing! I like your framing for the three categories and how respond to them - I will keep this in mind as I try to make a purposeful pause when I notice. Building in the pause and not just reacting to a perceived need seems to be an important element to breaking down socialized norms.
I loved this convo and will definitely be checking out the book. One place where I’ve struggled in my relationship is that I’m 100% the noticer and get-shit-done organizer in the relationship. My partner helps (a lot!) but I’ve expressed that this cognitive load feels tiring. In response, he says that while he’s happy to help me, he doesn’t notice these things because he’s simply okay with living in a house that’s kind of a mess. He grew up in a messy house and I grew up in a very clean house, and now I think we’re struggling to meet in the middle. He likes having a cleaner house but it seems like he just feels like he wouldn’t be as bothered as I am (and therefore I notice first). We’ve been a bit stuck here, and I wonder if there even is a solution.
100% exactly the same. Hard to tell what portion is gender bullshit and what portion is family of origin culture difference when he claims messes don’t bother him. (I tend to take the women of his family as a barometer— his conservative mother with a traditional labor division in her marriage does have truly nasty countertops and bathrooms, apologies to my mother in law). Given the way he was living as a single man before we met, I do believe that either way he really doesn’t mind clutter, gunk, stench, naked walls, etc. I do feel comforted by how much more he /does/ notice and how much more initiative he takes than 7 years ago when we met. Huge difference. But parity in the noticing work? Not even close. Like you said, is there a solution? Can we get there? Does he want to get there? Do I have to keep doing “meta-noticing” (noticing what I notice and asking him to notice too!!!) to get us there??
What is your partner's definition of a messy house?
Mine says the same thing but will leave an entire week's worth of dishes undone and still not do anything to clean them once ants are on them. He'll leave the trash cans overflowing and the litter box untouched even when the cat is urinating outside of the litter box because it's full of shit.
Off-topic, but allow me to make your litter box situation maybe a tiny bit better -- get a Litter Genie if you don't already have one! It's great, you can keep it against the wall right by the box, it's so easy to scoop into it a few times every day and it takes about 10 days to fill enough to need to be emptied. As an apartment-dweller with the litter box in my bedroom closet, I can assure you the full Genie doesn't smell, and it means you can just scoop out the box every time you're near it, but not have to deal with disposing of the used litter more than a few times each month. A must for any indoor cat assistant!
I love the Litter Genie but as an adult with ADHD even that wasn’t enough to keep a clean box...so I bought a Litter Robot. I love that damn thing and so does my cat. It was stupid expensive even refurbished but it’s been going strong for 5 years and was so worth it to me!
This is a bit niche/unique situation: it took a long time to get our household even up to the 65/35, I think because my spouse grew up in a much more traditional household than I did (he’s an only child raised by lovely, very old-fashioned working class British parents, whereas I’m one of 3 daughters whose father did a lot of the cooking and cleaning). It’s neverending “noticing” labor even to teach “noticing,” both to my spouse and kids, but at least they all see the value. Anyway, the niche balancer for us is that I’m the one who does the hunting. I’m the one who puts on the camo gear and goes out during the season, and when our kids see me out in the cold with a couple friends doing some processing, I think (hope) it does a lot to balance out the cooking/cleaning/laundry/homework/appointment making and taking to part of our lives.
This is so great. Thank you! Too many thoughts to write them all. As a sociologist who studies gender and culture, two things: First I've often thought about the practical aspects of change but not seen good studies or solutions - this work is tremendous. Second, I am in EP, and often wondered how I saw through all the social constructions of gender when I came from what seemed like a very "traditional" family, with Mom and Dad playing those roles. Looking back, I realized that even though they, themselves, inhabited the traditional gender roles, they structured household chores for my brother and I in non-traditional ways - and they made us do chores, always! We both did indoor tasks (I dusted, my brother vacuumed) and outdoor tasks (I swept and hosed down patio and walkways, my brother clipped yard and hedges). My brother went on to be equal partner in domestic work in his marriage, although more traditional roles with parenting because of his wife's desire to stay home while kids young. My sister-in-law recognized the unusual division of household labor, though, and thanked my mother many times for "training" my brother to do the "female" tasks.
Maybe this is in the book, but I need a script for discussing that things are unequal. How do you frame this when your partner thinks he is doing 50% and doesn’t see all of your literally invisible labor, and then gets defensive?
I bet this is in the book but I also wanted to say my partner and I (both cis female) found Eve Rodsky’s “Fair Play Deck” VERY helpful; it was the thing that finally helped us change how much more I felt like I was doing without my partner getting defensive.
It’s literally a deck of cards, though there is also a book — we only have the cards and I found the instructions more than enough. The cards cover everything from the repetitive daily tasks to cognitive load things like “holiday magic” and “birthday cards for extended family.” (Plus a ton of childcare tasks, we don’t have any but were both impressed by how thorough those were.)
The author of the deck makes it really clear it’s not about equally dividing the tasks, but about having an ongoing discussion about who does what with a lot of flexibility to change as seasons of lives change. And the big takeaway is that whoever “holds the card” for a task takes on the mental load 100%.
Thanks for bringing this up. I loved the book and didn’t make it as far as printing out the cards because my partner refused to participate. We have been together over 15 yrs, in our house for 10 and I am in the process of moving out. Defensiveness, delusion about what it takes to have a “nice” house and general lack of respect made me feel like I needed to move on. I don’t plan to live with any potential love interests ever again because of what I saw in my home and ALL around me.
I am so sorry you’re going through that. So much fortitude required and I hope by this time next year it is paying off handsomely. Sending you all my good thoughts!
Ah yes, the defensiveness. It's why after 20 years of marriage I've just stopped begging him to take on more household labor. I'm dealing with chronic pain now and it's been very demoralizing to realize that if I become truly disabled, I guess I'll have to hire outside help as he will never step up.
When our kids were younger, we literally wrote down all of the kid-related tasks, talked about who had been performing them, and reassigned in a way that was more equal. This is the chance to identify the invisible labor and put that work on the list. This approach worked pretty well to address a situation where I had reached the point of rage about the inequity. But at the same time, we had to redo the conversation a couple times as the kids grew older and new tasks were added, and because of drift of the tasks from he to I over time (for which we both were to blame). What we did is a watered-down version of the Fair Play approach invented by Eve Brodsky (great book!), and I think we should do it again for household chores, now that I've read about the indoor/outdoor divide in the interview.
As a feminist with a feminist partner, and having spent the last 9 years adding 4 young kiddos to the mix, parity in household labor is *very* top of mind.
I struggle with the concept of PARITY in household labor because while it is easier to imagine how we reach parity (50/50) at a macro level across society, we are in control of only ONE household — the micro level. And inside a single household with two unique individuals, even in a gender-equal utopia, each individual has unique tendencies and natural talents (that are, admittedly, heavily influenced by the gender roles in the homes we grew up in, as well as socialized norms).
So presumably, even if/when we reach parity at a macro level, there will remain individual households where a woman takes on more of the female-coded tasks and men take on more of the male-coded tasks. And I think that’s important to keep in mind.
Personally, I grew up in an immigrant household with very traditional gender roles, and I am naturally drawn to female-coded tasks and projects like caring for the kids, cooking for the family, planning all the things, making sure the kids have clothes for school, making the home feel homey, etc. To *not* care about these things would be the equivalent of denying who I am. But it’s taken me many years to overcome feminist guilt. Can I really be a feminist if I’m at home raising 4 kids?
Despite my ability to earn equal if not higher income than my partner, I decided to leave the traditional “work force” to grow our family because it was meaningful to me. I wanted it. Even though I have willingly and enthusiastically taken on most of the daytime caregiving, I have consciously made a decision to “care less” about the things that don’t mean as much to me. Breakfast, laundry, Easter, and general level of cleanliness inside the home, to name a few.
I really appreciate the author’s point that the ultimate feminist thing to do is what we want. And I wonder if we are “stuck” at 65/35 because so much of the remaining inequality is the socialized interests that take a really long time to balance out — many generations.
This is was incredibly helpful to read, learn from, and apply to my own life (straight dude, who is married). The noticer concept is so insightful and I'll be sharing with other male friends in heterosexual relationships.
My values are such that I have been raised to feel a lot of personal shame if I am perceived in any way as slacking/loafing or not pulling my load, and I feel like this informs my whole approach to sharing workloads. This means that I can often be the person who is just like, "I've got this" and I feel a lot of gratification in getting things done.
I actually feel this most strongly in work/study environments, where I've had to become more cognizant of being taken advantage of, e.g., getting delegated projects that no one else wants to touch, or realising people are not following through on their part of the tasks/projects. I saw this when I was in a university programme for a traditionally feminised profession. Lecturers were flat-out totally reinforcing gender roles and setting up a cohort of highly motivated (primarily women) classmates to take on gruntwork tasks without complaint to prove that we were detail-oriented and capable. Like, even in this year 2022, the lessons were basically "this is the way it is, ladies, get used to it."
All of which is to say that this exploration of similar dynamics in partnerships/home is just as fascinating!
This was fascinating, thank you for this interview! I'm going to see if I can get the book from my library. In all honesty, this is something I really struggle with – like so many people my generation (I'm 32), I saw my mom be The Boss at home, taking on more responsibility and labour than my dad, and being overwhelmed, stressed out, and exhausted by it. She told me if there's anything she regrets in her marriage, it's not clearly articulating her needs to my dad when my sister and I were young and she was especially overworked. I don't want to follow in her particular footsteps, and so it makes me really afraid to have kids (a thing I'm super aware I'm running out of time to decide if I want to do). My dad has improved and my parents are still happy together, but I know this was a pain point for them.
Currently I do about 65-80% of the housework in my house, mostly cooking, dishes, and laundry. I am not great at the cleaning, and I don't try to become better at it. I let the house be messier than I'd like because I don't want to do more than I already do. My (male) partner works about 40-50 hours a week doing the afternoon and part of the night shift. Meanwhile, I have two part-time jobs and only work about 30 hours a week, half of them from home. (The reasons for my work situation are beyond the scope here.) So because I work less and am home far more, I feel our arrangement is equitable, even if it's not equal. I tend to be good at the stuff that's traditionally coded female and bad at the male coded stuff; my partner is the inverse.
I'm ok with things as they are now. But I am always afraid of some slippery slope, especially if we ever have kids – a thing I'm increasingly ambivalent about.
Not to scare you, but having a child is when everything changed for me.
Because the mother almost always has longer leave than the father, that is when the inequities start. My husband had only one week off from work. Therefore, the rest of my leave was by myself and the baby, so we had a large amount of time to figure out rhythms and routines.
This is why men need to push for paternity leave and for long lengths of it for themselves, too. They need to learn all of the rhythms and routines when the baby is a newborn so that both partners can establish a good foundation for the family together. That's why it seems more intuitive for the mother to care for the children - because they gain all of this experience with the child at the beginning and that gap is never bridged.
Fortunately, we live in Canada and my partner is also a union member, so we have excellent options for parental leave, and my partner has assured me he intends to take all of his. That's actually the one thing that doesn't cause me any concern, though I understand why it does for so many.
That's good! I feel like most men in the US take as little leave as possible, which encourages ableism. Women do it, too - I'm amazed at how many people will take the minimum amount of leave possible when they have cancer and major surgeries, and then brag about how bored they were at home. It's baffling to me.
Not to sound flippant, but this is why I got divorced and have stayed divorced. I don't particularly care what the root of an individual straight, cis man's inability to notice or do equal amounts of labor are (societal conditioning, weaponized incompetence, whatever), but I have long passed my ability to tolerate it in my space. I have a lovely partner who will never, ever live in my house; things are done to my standards and on my schedule, and I am privileged enough to outsource the rest. The real challenge now is single parenting: I have two sons and am raising them to be noticers to save the sanity of whoever their partners end up being!
Fuck yeah I’m happy you made two sons. And I’m so happy for you that you’re living on your terms!! This whole conversation strikes a nerve because I’m in a happy, wonderful, growth generating partnership in every way, except that I STILL feel stuck being the Boss or Supervisor or whatever of the home I share (SHARE) with my husband and young son. I am constantly feeling the gravity of raising a son that I hope grows up to feel responsible for other people and for Female Coded tasks. Yet another imbalance is that my husband does not appear to feel that gravity! LOL! How fucking cursed!! What’s that saying about how behind every male feminist is an exhausted woman? My husband is a sweet, loving, supportive man who is only ever as feminist as I fight to make him. So then it’s I guess up to also me to fight to put some feminism in my son. My feminist minded mom settled on very traditional gender roles in her house, partially succumbing to the self-fulfilling myth that men can’t be trusted to take care of things. But it’s not like my dad took it upon himself to prove her wrong. Now my brother who I love dearly is an incompetent turd and my sister and I feel responsible for everything. How messed up is it that his sexist disregard for care work makes my mother feel like it’s her failing?
One of the sekrit benefits of being a single mother is that in my house (I can't speak for their dad's house, he's remarried) all tasks are everyone's tasks because they've watched me do everything! I make the repairs, I take care of the lawn, I also do the cooking and whatever. As soon as they're old enough to handle taking a chore that involves managing their own space, I give it to them, whether it's inside or outside, with the messaging (lol forgive me, I'm in marketing) that this is our family home that every family member must make pleasant and liveable. I do assume that this is messaging I wouldn't have to hammer so hard into a cis girl because the world would mostly do it for me. Also this "How messed up is it that his sexist disregard for care work makes my mother feel like it’s her failing?" is really the crux of the whole thing, isn't it.
Amanda I am in an extremely similar situation to you. I divorced my sons' dad three years ago because I couldn't tolerate anymore living in a traditional marriage. When I raised issues I was gaslighted and worse. I am now raising my sons with the goal of them SEEING the work and then taking initiative to do the work in the home.
I still have to do a lot of the mental labour for their care (Dr appts, clothes buying etc) as they're too young to do it the same and if I left it to their dad it wouldn't get done. Part of me wants to stop and try leaving it to their father more, and I'd be curious to know how other single parents handle the mental labour of this type of essential care.
I guess -- how exactly is the husband relationship wonderful, growth generating, a partnership, supportive, or feminist, here? When you find yourself using the word "fight" all the time, and feel responsible for the responsibilities of every single male person in this paragraph?
You know, that’s a fair concern given the nerve this topic clearly struck with me (a nerve partly to do with my partner, partly my brother and father and other men in my family/social circles, and of course the behavior of all of these people living under a patriarchal social fabric that asks so little of them). I guess you’ll just have to believe me when I say that although I have my frustrations navigating motherhood and a heterosexual monogamous partnership in a patriarchal society, my partner has and continues to dramatically improve my life. This cannot be said of my previous romantic interests. My husband and I have a wonderful effect on each other; since knowing him I’ve become much more “me.” It was a major sigh of relief to be accepted so radically by someone, moreso than any other friend I’ve met. It felt so good to see myself through his eyes, and this continues to help me grow to this day nearly 8 years later. In my particular case I am happier than when I lived alone, gripes notwithstanding. But honestly, I thank you for the question because I think it’s worth asking.
How great would it be if this particular comment section were full of men talking to each other instead of like all women
This! This is partly why I feel so ragey about the division of labour discussions. So often it's cis-hetero-women sending other cis-hetero-women articles and the women agree and the men make awkward jokes and change nothing because then they'd have to change.
Yep. And if you dare show it to men they get upset. "But I help equally! Not all men are like that"...
You know what else is ragey? Being a guy who tried his best to be different but was defeated by the prevailing culture. Given the intense curiosity our acquaintances had about my wife and I having different names, we actually ended up pretending to be more traditional than we actually are. And my wife refused to let me be the stay-at-home parent.
I commented on your example on another comment. Is she OCD or does she want the job done? (Is she demanding A+ work or B- work?)
Maybe you're the exception to the rule. All I know is that it's pretty bad if I legitimately cannot tell if my husband is using weaponized incompetence, has depression, or post-stroke brain damage because I relate so much to these other stories.
I don't believe that I'm that much of an exception. The reason my wife couldn't have me be the stay-home parent is that she thought it would be weird.
You didn't answer my question. Is your wife OCD or does she want the job done? (Is she demanding A+ work or B- work?)
Please look back at my other comment reply to you. Is your wife more like me or like my mother? Does she get upset if she sees a tiny speck of debris (like my mother) or does she politely point out that a plate with an obvious ketchup smear still on it isn't clean (like me)?
Consider that you said in another comment "I had grown up with an abusive mother so had a very hard time listening to my wife's critiques of how I did laundry, dishes, etc." I can't help but suspect that she was asking for B- work but your past trauma caused you to interpret her request as demanding 100% A+ work.
Excellent point.
I have So Many Thoughts, and for background, in a past life I taught sociology of the family. My thoughts about this are already structured around an academic literature on the subject. But it's also personal, because this is something I struggle with a lot, as the product of a very equal partnership who finds myself, to my real shame, in a pretty unequal one. Or is it? It's complicated!
My husband works a lot more paid hours than I do. Like 10-15 more per week, often more. As a result, we don't have the leisure gap that a lot of the literature on household division of labor talks about. I work out five times a week; he works out once. Our time for reading/watching/playing is probably pretty similar. So how do I weigh the time I spend on household labor that he doesn't spend against the fact that he really is working more paid hours? (Not because I have scaled back -- I work 40+, but he's a biglaw lawyer.)
Childcare is where my husband is closest to equal -- because he prioritizes that and understands it very clearly as his responsibility (and pleasure) to be an active parent. He did very close to half the diapers when that was relevant, he does all the baths, he has a specific chunk of the morning getting-ready-for-school routine that he supervises and keeps on track. Today he will take our kid to the eye doctor after having 10 days ago taken him to another medical appointment. Etc.
But to the mental labor/noticer point, I am the one who made those appointments. I am the one who notices that the kid has outgrown some clothes and orders new ones (and if I don't also put the outgrown ones in the donation bag in a timely way, my husband will give them to the kid to wear and not notice that they are too small). I plan almost all of the meals. It goes on. And as this piece makes clear, that is grinding, exhausting work that is invisible to the person who's not doing it. My husband has read enough pieces about gendered division of labor to understand in principle that I am doing this invisible work, but that doesn't translate to a real gut-level understanding of what it means. And so I am so, so tired, and he does not understand how deep that is.
On the surface, if you add up our paid hours and the amount of time we put in on concrete tasks, we are probably equal. It's just that my mind is never, ever at rest because there is always something I feel like I should already have done, or something that needs Noticing. (And trust, I am not even at 60% on things like family photos or holiday decorations. We're talking about medical appointments and haircuts and having clothes that fit.)
Super similar situation! And it’s so serendipitous to read all this this week. On Sunday my son slept over at his grandmother’s and my husband and I took the opportunity to eat some magic mushrooms together, which we had only done once before and we were looking forward to it. He’s holding me and his sweet, dumb psilocybin epiphany is everyone should love their wives more. At first I teased him that I don’t have a wife to love more, so this advice means nothing to me. And I said as a person living my life as a wife I don’t want to be loved more; he already makes me feel deeply and sufficiently loved. I want men (because his advice is for men, so here comes mine) to BE wives more. We went around a few times because he wasn’t understanding. Most of the time he helpfully and gently points out the many preoccupations I have which are burdening me, and that’s helped me to grow, but in the end he doesn’t choose to preoccupy himself with much of anything! So, conveniently, he can say “I never asked you to worry about xyz” which is true, but if I don’t worry about [getting the laundry and dishes washed before a trip; checking on and cooking for my grieving neighbors; applying sunscreen on my kid; packing his lunch] nobody would. I don’t know how I feel about taking advantage of this entry point. I agree with everything I said, but I definitely chose to ruin our high to say it.
I hear this so much. I don't want to be appreciated more for what I do. I want to DO LESS of those tasks and NOT WORRY about them not getting done.
Saying that you appreciate me is nice but is also BS. Sometimes it feels condescending.
Ugh...my husband does the same thing:
Him: "I never asked you to worry about the trash"
Me: "There are three full bags next to the overflowing kitchen trash can - how did you not notice that?"
Him: "Sorry, I just forgot"
Me: "well stop forgetting - set alarms on your phone or something - the trash goes out Monday nights and Thursday nights - it's not a mystery what morning they pick it up"
The alarm thing is so real! I set reminders to take my meds; my partner can set reminders for the chores he is “assigned” but doesn’t think about constantly in the way I do!
The amount of times my loving, supportive and well-divided-in-terms-of-household-roles husband says 'I'm sorry you feel that way' when I am tearing my hair out about the emotional labour piece is now comical.
Oh boy. That would get me!
Another idea I wish got a lot more airtime… boys and men need to be proactively socialized to be more… social. If boys and men were explicitly taught the value of friendship, the tools for establishing and nurturing peer relationships, I think it would help advance gender equality in a more sticky way:
1) Ideas and norms of parity in household labor might spread more easily if there were male-dominant peer channels for them to disseminate; and
2) Socializing and all the important and meaningful stuff of building a life together takes work, and more men would be taking on this work and getting something valuable out of it!
My husband is 44 (oh my gosh how did we get here) and is just now realizing that he doesn't really have close friends beyond his bff who lives three hours away. I have my high school friends (we all moved back to the hometown when we had kids), I have my neighbor friends, I have my internet friends, I have work friends. He has consciously started trying to take the initiative to be friends with people, and his board game obsession of the last couple years has been a great way to start friendships. I have told him I'm proud of him for doing that instead of just letting things wither away-- I don't want to be like "here's a cookie!", but I also want to acknowledge that he's really getting outside of his comfort zone in making friends at 44.
I'm a SAHP and I find that these division of labour conversations leave me with a pool of anger deep in the pit of my stomach, but also I don't know how the lack of paid outside the home employment fits into them. I have some thoughts about all of this as it relates to unpaid labour, but they don't really connect so hopefully it's okay to lay them out piecemeal.
1) As a self-identified feminist and atheist, I've found that the most support for the work I put in day to day comes from Christians who have traditional views about gender norms. This is confusing!
2) My husband works a lot. He's self-employed, building his business, all these things. And I'm supporting that. He's able to work a lot because I do all the indoor tasks. This is frustrating, because it's his business, not mine, but he would not be able to do this without me.
3) When I was working, I did all the same housework I do now, but without kids added into the mix. I was happy to stop working. I don't want to go back to paid work. My life is lovely, and also I KNOW that if I chose to/needed to work again we would fall into the same trap, and it would be my responsibility to fix it. So do I need to figure out that imbalance now, while I'm not doing paid work and have no desire to?
I'm curious to check out this book!
I feel you on being SAHP (and happily so) and yet finding that the community where I feel like my work most valued is far from my own community. There needs to be a stronger identity of being progressive and feminist and also SAHP.
Not necessarily a full solve, but would it help with #2 if you were added legally as a co-owner of the business? As you've said, your work enables that work and (IMO) entitles you to ownership of it as well. Just as he's still an owner of your home and beneficiary of that.
I appreciate your input, and I am working towards making my position more secure, but it's more complicated than all that. It's partly a farm operation with his brother and dysfunctional father in ownership positions and it's not currently a business in the legal sense.
Totally valid!
I felt this entire comment in my bones. I so wish I had answers.
Today is my 9th wedding anniversary, and to be honest I feel really sad. The division of labor between us is so lopsided and I feel so much resentment towards my husband over it. I can't determine if on his end it's weaponized incompetence, depression, or brain damage. He claims that it isn't depression and that his brain post-stroke is fine, so that leaves weaponized incompetence. However, that doesn't make sense to me, either, because he never notices things even when they're incredibly obvious.
When I say incredibly obvious, I mean that an entire week's worth of dishes have covered all of our counter space and have ants on them, the trash cans are all overflowing, and the cat is urinating outside of the litter box because it's full of shit. So when people say to just do less, I laugh because they are saying to go ahead and let my husband do nothing. He doesn't even wake up on his own - he sets 5 alarms yet I have to practically drag him out of bed every morning.
The worst part is that I can't get him to watch our 3 year old daughter so that I can do the chores. He will literally watch her for 10 seconds and then pull out his phone and completely ignore her. He'll put on TV episodes or a movie for her and then still ignore her. So she cries for me and then he's all like "see she wants Mommy" and I say back "that's because you won't play with her." She's now finally at the age where she can help me, so finally I'm getting more done.
I went away on a trip with my choir for 4 days and he changed her clothes exactly once in that time frame and didn't comb her hair (I know this because of social media pictures). He himself will wear the same (very obviously dirty and stained) clothing over and over and be shocked when I tell him to change his clothing and not understand that I don't want to be physical or sexual with someone who can't even take care of basic hygiene.
A lot of my family and friends truly believe it's brain damage from having a stroke, but it's hard to ignore the coincidence that this all got worse after having a child.
I have no advice, but wanted you to know that I read your story and I'm so sorry. this sounds so hard. I hope that sharing it helped a bit
Thank you. It did help to get it out.
That's awful.
It sounds like *something* beyond weaponized incompetence, that's for sure. Or if that's it, it's nuclear-level weaponry. That he doesn't change his own clothes also seems like it points to another or additional answer, because one of the typical things women observe is that their husbands are incompetent when it comes to household labor and childcare, but mysteriously able to handle the things they need to handle in their own individualized lives.
He somehow manages to work a full time job that he's had since 2011. He had a stroke in 2016 but everything got worse after we had our child in 2019. I have been frustrated with his job because he is underpaid and overworked for what he does, but it's a safe place for him. He knew his job forwards and backwards before his stroke; I don't know how he would do in a new/different job.
He tells me that he makes a lot of mistakes at work, but I don't really know what that means because I have imposter syndrome and perfectionism and am always afraid I'm not doing enough.
Wren, this sounds really difficult and frustrating.
Thank you. It really is, especially since he is one of the kindest people I've ever met.
I'm so sorry. It sounds like he's not all that kind to you, though.
I guess you're right. His personality is kind but his actions aren't kind. I don't know if his actions are intentional or not. Many people in my life have said to me that he doesn't seem all there.
Have you phrased it like that? It's so hard and fraught to discuss labor and housework with your partner, especially when there's mental health issues at play as well. I have had a hard time finding a way to discuss things with my partner in a way that reflected their impact on me/the kids without him feeling like he personally is being attacked.
I haven't phrased it like that, no. Yes, I worry about that, too - that he will feel personally attacked if I say something.
This sounds so difficult. It also absolutely sounds medical. If he's not seeing a therapist, well, I just can't imagine what the reason could be.
He used to see a therapist on his own but stopped making appointments for reasons I don't know. I ended up seeing his therapist temporarily when mine was on maternity leave, and she was the first person who suggested brain damage to me.
He has doctor's appointments every three months with his primary care doctor but he won't tell me when he has appointments until the-day-of, so I've never been able to go with him.
I've asked him to see a geneticist because there is another disorder than runs in his family that it could be the start of (Huntingdon's) but he has always refused to find out. He says he doesn't have the symptoms, but it's hard to tell because his balance has been off since his stroke in 2016; all of our walls are dirty from him putting his hands on them.
There's a statistic out there about the high number of marriages that don't survive a traumatic brain injury of one of the parties. I'm not telling you anything I'm sure you haven't thought of yourself, but looking out at the next 9 years of your life, it's hard to be very optimistic. Best of luck with everything.
Thank you. Sad but true. A stroke is actually considered an acquired or non-traumatic brain injury, but a brain injury nonetheless.
My third comment here because this is a bread and butter topic for me. ***Shout out to the womxn out there who are bipoc and/or raising mixed families where caregiving and cooking are not chores to be delegated or shared as part of a gender equality exercise, but rather, are defiant acts of protecting and nurturing our identity and soul.
I am Korean raising 4 young kids with a white American partner in a community where we don’t have Korean friends or family. And for me, even the most mundane aspects of domestic life are key ingredients of making our family Korean -- for building that foundation in our kids’ identity that will help them embrace who they are now and in the future. Making Korean food for our family meals is work but not something I’d ever give up in the name of parity in household work.
Same thing for planning for and celebrating Korean holidays. Yes it’s work, but the kind of work that is life- and identity-affirming. And not one that can be delegated.
Really appreciate you sharing this perspective - important counter to the “but just do less” suggestion.
I appreciate the term "noticer" because I have used that word to describe myself with my partner. I have explained to him that I "see all the things". It does not feel like a choice to notice the surfaces in the house filling up with stuff, the floors accumulating dust and pet hair, the cobwebs in the corners, I just see it (notice it) and it feels automatic that it is one more thing to add to the mental to-do list. My partner has said he just doesn't "see" the mess. He grew up in a traditional home that was actually quite tidy in the shared spaces, and his mom, who worked full time also was the noticer and did much of the female-role work. I grew up in a single parent home, raised by my father. I was the oldest of three daughter so I took on the role of care-taker and I think this contributed to my hyper-vigilance of noticing because dad was an authoritarian with a temper and things had to be "nice". I think my drive to tidy and keep things in their place stems from those experiences where it was a tactic to keep myself safe. I can recall other childhood experiences where I felt I upset an adult in my life, and to make up for it I would start cleaning as a self-imposed penance. So in edition to taking on the typical gendered roles, I do this labor as a way to ensure my safety and self-worth. I am working on breaking this down, and I agree with Mangino that part of the solution is to just stop doing so much, and maybe instead do something else that brings personal joy and value.
The “noticer” label also spoke to me. And I totally agree that my noticing is NOT by choice. And now I’m going to notice, then notice that I’m noticing, then have this heavy mental dialogue about why I should stop noticing…
I think noticing falls into 3 general categories: (1) it leads to something that adds personal value, like knowing that you have a new neighbor and it would be great to reach out and build that social bond, (2) it avoids negative value, like noticing that you are down to the last roll of toilet paper and ordering in advance will avoid running out, and (3) it is socialized comparison to external norms, like noticing that none of our furniture matches or fits a cohesive style, as we see on Instagram.
I personally approach it like this: I hold on to (1), I divide the labor with my partner on (2), and try to drop (3) altogether.
I very much relate to navigating the heavy internal dialogue. It is a whole thing! I like your framing for the three categories and how respond to them - I will keep this in mind as I try to make a purposeful pause when I notice. Building in the pause and not just reacting to a perceived need seems to be an important element to breaking down socialized norms.
This is an excellent framework, thank you!
I loved this convo and will definitely be checking out the book. One place where I’ve struggled in my relationship is that I’m 100% the noticer and get-shit-done organizer in the relationship. My partner helps (a lot!) but I’ve expressed that this cognitive load feels tiring. In response, he says that while he’s happy to help me, he doesn’t notice these things because he’s simply okay with living in a house that’s kind of a mess. He grew up in a messy house and I grew up in a very clean house, and now I think we’re struggling to meet in the middle. He likes having a cleaner house but it seems like he just feels like he wouldn’t be as bothered as I am (and therefore I notice first). We’ve been a bit stuck here, and I wonder if there even is a solution.
100% exactly the same. Hard to tell what portion is gender bullshit and what portion is family of origin culture difference when he claims messes don’t bother him. (I tend to take the women of his family as a barometer— his conservative mother with a traditional labor division in her marriage does have truly nasty countertops and bathrooms, apologies to my mother in law). Given the way he was living as a single man before we met, I do believe that either way he really doesn’t mind clutter, gunk, stench, naked walls, etc. I do feel comforted by how much more he /does/ notice and how much more initiative he takes than 7 years ago when we met. Huge difference. But parity in the noticing work? Not even close. Like you said, is there a solution? Can we get there? Does he want to get there? Do I have to keep doing “meta-noticing” (noticing what I notice and asking him to notice too!!!) to get us there??
What is your partner's definition of a messy house?
Mine says the same thing but will leave an entire week's worth of dishes undone and still not do anything to clean them once ants are on them. He'll leave the trash cans overflowing and the litter box untouched even when the cat is urinating outside of the litter box because it's full of shit.
Off-topic, but allow me to make your litter box situation maybe a tiny bit better -- get a Litter Genie if you don't already have one! It's great, you can keep it against the wall right by the box, it's so easy to scoop into it a few times every day and it takes about 10 days to fill enough to need to be emptied. As an apartment-dweller with the litter box in my bedroom closet, I can assure you the full Genie doesn't smell, and it means you can just scoop out the box every time you're near it, but not have to deal with disposing of the used litter more than a few times each month. A must for any indoor cat assistant!
I love the Litter Genie but as an adult with ADHD even that wasn’t enough to keep a clean box...so I bought a Litter Robot. I love that damn thing and so does my cat. It was stupid expensive even refurbished but it’s been going strong for 5 years and was so worth it to me!
Oooh, wow! The Litter Robot looks so cool! Yes, it is super expensive...I may need to start saving up for one!
That's a great idea - thank you!
I realize this doesn't help your larger problem(s), but it might at least make you (and your cat) a little happier in the meantime.
Thank you - I really do appreciate it!
This is a bit niche/unique situation: it took a long time to get our household even up to the 65/35, I think because my spouse grew up in a much more traditional household than I did (he’s an only child raised by lovely, very old-fashioned working class British parents, whereas I’m one of 3 daughters whose father did a lot of the cooking and cleaning). It’s neverending “noticing” labor even to teach “noticing,” both to my spouse and kids, but at least they all see the value. Anyway, the niche balancer for us is that I’m the one who does the hunting. I’m the one who puts on the camo gear and goes out during the season, and when our kids see me out in the cold with a couple friends doing some processing, I think (hope) it does a lot to balance out the cooking/cleaning/laundry/homework/appointment making and taking to part of our lives.
That's awesome.
This is so great. Thank you! Too many thoughts to write them all. As a sociologist who studies gender and culture, two things: First I've often thought about the practical aspects of change but not seen good studies or solutions - this work is tremendous. Second, I am in EP, and often wondered how I saw through all the social constructions of gender when I came from what seemed like a very "traditional" family, with Mom and Dad playing those roles. Looking back, I realized that even though they, themselves, inhabited the traditional gender roles, they structured household chores for my brother and I in non-traditional ways - and they made us do chores, always! We both did indoor tasks (I dusted, my brother vacuumed) and outdoor tasks (I swept and hosed down patio and walkways, my brother clipped yard and hedges). My brother went on to be equal partner in domestic work in his marriage, although more traditional roles with parenting because of his wife's desire to stay home while kids young. My sister-in-law recognized the unusual division of household labor, though, and thanked my mother many times for "training" my brother to do the "female" tasks.
Maybe this is in the book, but I need a script for discussing that things are unequal. How do you frame this when your partner thinks he is doing 50% and doesn’t see all of your literally invisible labor, and then gets defensive?
I bet this is in the book but I also wanted to say my partner and I (both cis female) found Eve Rodsky’s “Fair Play Deck” VERY helpful; it was the thing that finally helped us change how much more I felt like I was doing without my partner getting defensive.
It’s literally a deck of cards, though there is also a book — we only have the cards and I found the instructions more than enough. The cards cover everything from the repetitive daily tasks to cognitive load things like “holiday magic” and “birthday cards for extended family.” (Plus a ton of childcare tasks, we don’t have any but were both impressed by how thorough those were.)
The author of the deck makes it really clear it’s not about equally dividing the tasks, but about having an ongoing discussion about who does what with a lot of flexibility to change as seasons of lives change. And the big takeaway is that whoever “holds the card” for a task takes on the mental load 100%.
I think it’s an excellent companion to this book!
Thanks for bringing this up. I loved the book and didn’t make it as far as printing out the cards because my partner refused to participate. We have been together over 15 yrs, in our house for 10 and I am in the process of moving out. Defensiveness, delusion about what it takes to have a “nice” house and general lack of respect made me feel like I needed to move on. I don’t plan to live with any potential love interests ever again because of what I saw in my home and ALL around me.
I am so sorry you’re going through that. So much fortitude required and I hope by this time next year it is paying off handsomely. Sending you all my good thoughts!
Thank you for that, so sweet of you.
This is really helpful to know - I’ve considered the deck but wasn’t sure if it was just because I really, really love looking at cards haha
They are VERY satisfying to hold and look at! I am a graphic designer and was way into them!
Yesss thank you! This is exactly what I needed to know (I do tarot mainly from a “look at all the pictures!” perspective.)
Thanks, I will look into this.
Ah yes, the defensiveness. It's why after 20 years of marriage I've just stopped begging him to take on more household labor. I'm dealing with chronic pain now and it's been very demoralizing to realize that if I become truly disabled, I guess I'll have to hire outside help as he will never step up.
When our kids were younger, we literally wrote down all of the kid-related tasks, talked about who had been performing them, and reassigned in a way that was more equal. This is the chance to identify the invisible labor and put that work on the list. This approach worked pretty well to address a situation where I had reached the point of rage about the inequity. But at the same time, we had to redo the conversation a couple times as the kids grew older and new tasks were added, and because of drift of the tasks from he to I over time (for which we both were to blame). What we did is a watered-down version of the Fair Play approach invented by Eve Brodsky (great book!), and I think we should do it again for household chores, now that I've read about the indoor/outdoor divide in the interview.
As a feminist with a feminist partner, and having spent the last 9 years adding 4 young kiddos to the mix, parity in household labor is *very* top of mind.
I struggle with the concept of PARITY in household labor because while it is easier to imagine how we reach parity (50/50) at a macro level across society, we are in control of only ONE household — the micro level. And inside a single household with two unique individuals, even in a gender-equal utopia, each individual has unique tendencies and natural talents (that are, admittedly, heavily influenced by the gender roles in the homes we grew up in, as well as socialized norms).
So presumably, even if/when we reach parity at a macro level, there will remain individual households where a woman takes on more of the female-coded tasks and men take on more of the male-coded tasks. And I think that’s important to keep in mind.
Personally, I grew up in an immigrant household with very traditional gender roles, and I am naturally drawn to female-coded tasks and projects like caring for the kids, cooking for the family, planning all the things, making sure the kids have clothes for school, making the home feel homey, etc. To *not* care about these things would be the equivalent of denying who I am. But it’s taken me many years to overcome feminist guilt. Can I really be a feminist if I’m at home raising 4 kids?
Despite my ability to earn equal if not higher income than my partner, I decided to leave the traditional “work force” to grow our family because it was meaningful to me. I wanted it. Even though I have willingly and enthusiastically taken on most of the daytime caregiving, I have consciously made a decision to “care less” about the things that don’t mean as much to me. Breakfast, laundry, Easter, and general level of cleanliness inside the home, to name a few.
I really appreciate the author’s point that the ultimate feminist thing to do is what we want. And I wonder if we are “stuck” at 65/35 because so much of the remaining inequality is the socialized interests that take a really long time to balance out — many generations.
This is was incredibly helpful to read, learn from, and apply to my own life (straight dude, who is married). The noticer concept is so insightful and I'll be sharing with other male friends in heterosexual relationships.
SO GOOD!
My values are such that I have been raised to feel a lot of personal shame if I am perceived in any way as slacking/loafing or not pulling my load, and I feel like this informs my whole approach to sharing workloads. This means that I can often be the person who is just like, "I've got this" and I feel a lot of gratification in getting things done.
I actually feel this most strongly in work/study environments, where I've had to become more cognizant of being taken advantage of, e.g., getting delegated projects that no one else wants to touch, or realising people are not following through on their part of the tasks/projects. I saw this when I was in a university programme for a traditionally feminised profession. Lecturers were flat-out totally reinforcing gender roles and setting up a cohort of highly motivated (primarily women) classmates to take on gruntwork tasks without complaint to prove that we were detail-oriented and capable. Like, even in this year 2022, the lessons were basically "this is the way it is, ladies, get used to it."
All of which is to say that this exploration of similar dynamics in partnerships/home is just as fascinating!
This was fascinating, thank you for this interview! I'm going to see if I can get the book from my library. In all honesty, this is something I really struggle with – like so many people my generation (I'm 32), I saw my mom be The Boss at home, taking on more responsibility and labour than my dad, and being overwhelmed, stressed out, and exhausted by it. She told me if there's anything she regrets in her marriage, it's not clearly articulating her needs to my dad when my sister and I were young and she was especially overworked. I don't want to follow in her particular footsteps, and so it makes me really afraid to have kids (a thing I'm super aware I'm running out of time to decide if I want to do). My dad has improved and my parents are still happy together, but I know this was a pain point for them.
Currently I do about 65-80% of the housework in my house, mostly cooking, dishes, and laundry. I am not great at the cleaning, and I don't try to become better at it. I let the house be messier than I'd like because I don't want to do more than I already do. My (male) partner works about 40-50 hours a week doing the afternoon and part of the night shift. Meanwhile, I have two part-time jobs and only work about 30 hours a week, half of them from home. (The reasons for my work situation are beyond the scope here.) So because I work less and am home far more, I feel our arrangement is equitable, even if it's not equal. I tend to be good at the stuff that's traditionally coded female and bad at the male coded stuff; my partner is the inverse.
I'm ok with things as they are now. But I am always afraid of some slippery slope, especially if we ever have kids – a thing I'm increasingly ambivalent about.
Not to scare you, but having a child is when everything changed for me.
Because the mother almost always has longer leave than the father, that is when the inequities start. My husband had only one week off from work. Therefore, the rest of my leave was by myself and the baby, so we had a large amount of time to figure out rhythms and routines.
This is why men need to push for paternity leave and for long lengths of it for themselves, too. They need to learn all of the rhythms and routines when the baby is a newborn so that both partners can establish a good foundation for the family together. That's why it seems more intuitive for the mother to care for the children - because they gain all of this experience with the child at the beginning and that gap is never bridged.
Fortunately, we live in Canada and my partner is also a union member, so we have excellent options for parental leave, and my partner has assured me he intends to take all of his. That's actually the one thing that doesn't cause me any concern, though I understand why it does for so many.
That's good! I feel like most men in the US take as little leave as possible, which encourages ableism. Women do it, too - I'm amazed at how many people will take the minimum amount of leave possible when they have cancer and major surgeries, and then brag about how bored they were at home. It's baffling to me.