Why are women still allowed to do housework? The question used to bother me during the years of my marriage when housework became a running sore between us. Perhaps the friction was inevitable. I was born in revolutionary times, the 1960s, and my mother taught me and my siblings to cook, clean and wash up for ourselves. We turned out as independent, self-sufficient adults. I would never ask a woman to make me a cup of coffee any more than I’d ask a bumblebee to build me a lighthouse. And doing jobs around the house suits my life as a writer. During the day I take frequent mini-breaks and do chores while my mind empties itself of clutter and my batteries recharge. Then I return to my laptop, renewed and refreshed. It’s like meditation – but with concrete results. Clean carpets. Shiny surfaces. Gleaming crockery.
My efforts never impressed my wife who often told me I ‘contributed nothing’ to the housework or the childcare. Naturally I treated this complaint as an adorable quirk of her nature and I carried on tidying as normal. I just accepted that for us the housework was divided rather irrationally. I did half of it and my wife did all of it.
I knew why she was annoyed. A man with a mop or a Hoover in his hand is experimenting, he’s exploring a new facet of his character (and patting himself on the back for ‘helping the ladies out’). Cleaning the house represents the future. A happier and more equal world that he wants to embrace. But women can never share this rosy outlook. A woman cleaning the house is travelling back to a historic wasteland haunted by the shades of wenches and slave-girls who toiled for thousands of years in the service of their lord and master – and got paid nothing for it.
Housework can’t be fun now because it wasn’t fun then. It’s a betrayal. A travesty. ‘Why,’ pleads today’s mum as she crouches on the Umbrian floor-tiles scooping up organic bran flakes. ‘Why am I still doing this? Me – with my gender studies degree and my exercise bike.’ The injustice wounds her deeply. It burns her to the core. And the obvious solution – to employ a cleaner – just shifts the problem elsewhere. The hired helper will be another female with another home to clean, for no money: her own. For women there’s no escape from this world of pain. They hate doing housework themselves. They hate paying other women to do it. And they hate men who have a bash for fun.
But here’s a secret. I too experienced a world of pain when it came to housework. The pain of seeing my then-wife preparing to spring-clean every Saturday, and assembling the mops, cloths and flasks of detergent. I used to flee rather than witness her fussing and fiddling around the place for hours. It was her lethargy that irked me. She spent 20 minutes doing each room. Twenty minutes! I could clean the entire house in 20 minutes and I often did, against the clock, just to spruce things up and make my surroundings look shiny and new again.
I could see why she had no zest for the task. She regarded cleaning as work and she treated it as a hateful ordeal, almost a divine punishment. But cleaning isn’t work. It’s not work work. It doesn’t come close. If you want to know what work is, ask a labourer who spends 40 hours a week heaving sandbags, chopping wood, butchering meat, digging trenches. That’s work. Laying cables, tiling rooves, rigging scaffolding poles, hoisting drill-bits into position on an oilrig. Jobs like that exist all over the world and they’re done by men who finish the day feeling physically spent and mentally stupefied. And ravenously hungry too. Caring for a home, by comparison, is a dream. It’s a holiday.
A man doing the housework is lord of his little empire, answerable to no one, free to decide what happens, when it happens, where it happens and how long it lasts
Most importantly, housework doesn’t involve the servant-master structure of a traditional job with its timetables, its penalties for underperformance and its atmosphere of surveillance and control. A man doing the housework is lord of his little empire, answerable to no one, free to decide what happens, when it happens, where it happens and how long it lasts. The biggest nightmare he’ll face is a spillage of yoghurt or a torn T-shirt, or, if he’s really unlucky, a cheeky remark from a mutinous youngster who can be pacified with a growl or a glare. That’s housework. It’s an activity – nothing more. And, as activities go, it involves a lot of inactivity. Sipping coffee, reading magazines, texting people, keeping a vague eye on the kids, answering the door to the Tesco delivery man and saying ‘The kitchen’s through there, thank you’. Housework means passing the morning at home with a few snags to deal with – if you feel like dealing with them – and then meeting your friends for lunch before ambling over to the school gate for a good natter as you fetch the kids.
Women will object that they also get lumbered with the ‘window dressing’ jobs like baking cakes, writing Christmas cards, liaising with relatives and creating costumes for the school production of Treasure Island. And yes, it’s a bore combining the roles of Wardrobe Mistress and Communications Chief but a shrewd mum knows how to delegate the donkeywork to her more helpful children. In any case, these are fluffy, lightweight tasks that don’t compare with digging road-tunnels or stripping barnacles from the keels of super tankers.
Most men will probably agree with my outlook and yet they’re sensible enough to keep it to themselves. But I’m not afraid. And one day I found myself explaining to my wife that she was unfit, temperamentally and physically, for housework. ‘Why do you even bother?’ I asked. ‘If it’s that easy, you do it,’ came the retort. And I did. I did the housework. OK, I did it once. And it was like taking your driving test with Lewis Hamilton in the examiner’s seat. Not a happy Lewis Hamilton. An angry Lewis Hamilton. A vengeful and beady-eyed Lewis Hamilton who looked for faults and found them everywhere. Shortly after this we began to communicate though lawyers.
But at least I tried. I did my best to relieve my wife of the domestic chores and to take on the full responsibility myself. And though I failed, the problem remains. It’s one of life’s great dilemmas. Who does the housework? Robots perhaps. But automated vacuums were perfected years ago and no one wants them. No one buys them. The conclusion is inescapable. We like housework – just as we like cooking. Secretly, we enjoy these little acts of transformation that reshape and redefine our habitat in a way that stimulates the limbs, satisfies the senses and sweetens the mood. (Until the kids show up and turn the place into a bomb site.) That’s how it is. We humans are mysteriously bewitched by the broom, the cloth and the bottle of squirt. There. I’ve said my piece. Time to Hoover.
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