This is the midweek edition of Culture Study — the newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen, which you can read about here. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing. Readers, you seem to like interviews with smart and interesting people. I like these interviews too, in part because they give me the chance to dig deeper into a body of work and figure out how to ask broad questions that prompt the interviewee to get at the heart of what they’ve often spent years (or decades!) of their lives thinking about. Some of these people get interviewed all the time, but only a sentence or two of their thinking makes its way into the final piece. That’s just how a reported piece works. But an extended interview lets you do something different.
I feel this in my soul. We don't have kids but have both been working from home since March and it....wasn't even a conversation that my husband turned our guest room into an office and I'm at the dining room table. At the time it made sense because his setup involves 3 monitors and mine is done on a laptop, plus his company announced nobody was coming back until after 2021 back in June while mine keeps throwing return dates out there so my setup has always felt more temporary. And it's not like we're having people over and need to use our dining room anyway...
What's really interesting is that I'm the main breadwinner in our marriage but also think nothing of emptying the dishwasher during the workday or doing a load of laundry because, well, it's RIGHT THERE and I can't shut a door and ignore it. And it didn't even occur to me how easily I fell into that until I read this post!
Well, I'm reading this while homeschooling my kids at the kitchen table and trying to fit in some work, while my spouse has taken over the office (which was always technically shared but was mostly mine). To be fair, this situation kind of happened because he's on video calls all day and I'm not. But still. Frack.
Yep. When we were both working from home, Husband got the office, I got the kitchen table. I started a new job at the end of June that is walking distance from my house and I have worked at my employer inside my socially distant office since then. I took a pay cut for this job but the work itself is far more interesting and I will remain geographically close to my daughter post-pandemic. (She is not yet school aged and spends work days with her grandparents.)
I checked all of the stereotypical boxes without even consciously thinking about how I was reinforcing patriarchal gender roles. This stuff is institutionally baked in. I don't think my husband has ever once thought about his career as a dad in the way I have as a mom.
The work space thing really hits home for me, in an unexpected way. I've worked from home for a long time (since before our son was born), and I've always worked on the couch. Mainly because I just hate sitting upright, but also sometimes I'll have the news on the TV while I work or something. But since my kid had been in full-time daycare since before he was six months old, it didn't feel like there was a domestic angle to it.
Enter the pandemic. My kid is home a lot more (though we now have basically full-time care, albeit in another part of our condo building), and my husband is working from home, and I've stayed on the couch, but after a few weeks of alternating between working on the bed or at the dining room table, my husband turned a small extra room we'd never really known what to do with into a home office (which we also put our pandemic panic purchase of a Peloton in, so I'm in there for exercise and my husband moves to the living room or bedroom). But, yeah, if our kid comes running home during the day, I'm the one he encounters first (though we've started locking the door to force him back to his caregiver). Etc. And I'm sitting here like "my habits haven't changed but suddenly the whole valence of them has..."
I write this surrounded by moving boxes. The lack of dedicated office space for either of us was a big factor in our decision to move to the 'burbs. We were both stuck in the sitting room, but I realised my husband got the prime working time (am) and priority if there was an emergency. This was a result of the nature of our jobs (hyper-responsive IT environment, loads of calls versus academia) but also I think some gendered expectations about whose work was more important and whose could be put off. The new house has a study (claimed by my husband) and a conservatory (claimed by me), which is a slightly more public space but I prefer the light and the ability to potter around in the garden when I need a break.
The part about "mommy friendly" jobs made me think about the multitude of anecdotes from women friends who returned to the corporate world after unemployment or maternity leave, but negotiated a 4 day/week (or some adapted version) work schedule in order to give them a buffer to deal with real life/childcare, and how the *universal lesson* that these women share after having settled into the new job is, DON'T DO THIS, because they end up working the full-time, long hours, full-week job anyway while only getting paid for that 4 day/week.
"We have to rethink how we center so many “benefits” — which I think we should see as rights — around employment." 100%. Imagine how many people would benefit (no pun intended) if paid time off, paid leave, vacation time and health insurance were a benefit of being an American and not being employed at an ever dwindling number of full-time jobs.
The interview was very interesting. I love reading your articles, especially expert interviews like this one. The content is very engaging and not dry at all. https://survivor-io.io/
I feel this in my soul. We don't have kids but have both been working from home since March and it....wasn't even a conversation that my husband turned our guest room into an office and I'm at the dining room table. At the time it made sense because his setup involves 3 monitors and mine is done on a laptop, plus his company announced nobody was coming back until after 2021 back in June while mine keeps throwing return dates out there so my setup has always felt more temporary. And it's not like we're having people over and need to use our dining room anyway...
What's really interesting is that I'm the main breadwinner in our marriage but also think nothing of emptying the dishwasher during the workday or doing a load of laundry because, well, it's RIGHT THERE and I can't shut a door and ignore it. And it didn't even occur to me how easily I fell into that until I read this post!
Well, I'm reading this while homeschooling my kids at the kitchen table and trying to fit in some work, while my spouse has taken over the office (which was always technically shared but was mostly mine). To be fair, this situation kind of happened because he's on video calls all day and I'm not. But still. Frack.
Yep. When we were both working from home, Husband got the office, I got the kitchen table. I started a new job at the end of June that is walking distance from my house and I have worked at my employer inside my socially distant office since then. I took a pay cut for this job but the work itself is far more interesting and I will remain geographically close to my daughter post-pandemic. (She is not yet school aged and spends work days with her grandparents.)
I checked all of the stereotypical boxes without even consciously thinking about how I was reinforcing patriarchal gender roles. This stuff is institutionally baked in. I don't think my husband has ever once thought about his career as a dad in the way I have as a mom.
The work space thing really hits home for me, in an unexpected way. I've worked from home for a long time (since before our son was born), and I've always worked on the couch. Mainly because I just hate sitting upright, but also sometimes I'll have the news on the TV while I work or something. But since my kid had been in full-time daycare since before he was six months old, it didn't feel like there was a domestic angle to it.
Enter the pandemic. My kid is home a lot more (though we now have basically full-time care, albeit in another part of our condo building), and my husband is working from home, and I've stayed on the couch, but after a few weeks of alternating between working on the bed or at the dining room table, my husband turned a small extra room we'd never really known what to do with into a home office (which we also put our pandemic panic purchase of a Peloton in, so I'm in there for exercise and my husband moves to the living room or bedroom). But, yeah, if our kid comes running home during the day, I'm the one he encounters first (though we've started locking the door to force him back to his caregiver). Etc. And I'm sitting here like "my habits haven't changed but suddenly the whole valence of them has..."
I write this surrounded by moving boxes. The lack of dedicated office space for either of us was a big factor in our decision to move to the 'burbs. We were both stuck in the sitting room, but I realised my husband got the prime working time (am) and priority if there was an emergency. This was a result of the nature of our jobs (hyper-responsive IT environment, loads of calls versus academia) but also I think some gendered expectations about whose work was more important and whose could be put off. The new house has a study (claimed by my husband) and a conservatory (claimed by me), which is a slightly more public space but I prefer the light and the ability to potter around in the garden when I need a break.
The part about "mommy friendly" jobs made me think about the multitude of anecdotes from women friends who returned to the corporate world after unemployment or maternity leave, but negotiated a 4 day/week (or some adapted version) work schedule in order to give them a buffer to deal with real life/childcare, and how the *universal lesson* that these women share after having settled into the new job is, DON'T DO THIS, because they end up working the full-time, long hours, full-week job anyway while only getting paid for that 4 day/week.
"We have to rethink how we center so many “benefits” — which I think we should see as rights — around employment." 100%. Imagine how many people would benefit (no pun intended) if paid time off, paid leave, vacation time and health insurance were a benefit of being an American and not being employed at an ever dwindling number of full-time jobs.
The interview was very interesting. I love reading your articles, especially expert interviews like this one. The content is very engaging and not dry at all. https://survivor-io.io/