I lived communally for many years. At one time, 14 of us lived in the same run-down, nine-bedroom house. What stunned me in my youthful naïveté was how very, very long it took a few people to realize that stuff doesn't pick itself off the floor, clothes don't magically make their way to the washer, dishes piled in the sink aren't made clean every midnight, and toilets don't get scrubbed by pixies.
You don't have to live communally to find this out. A roommate, a live-in lover, a spouse, or your own kids can behave this way, too. It can start out annoying, and over time it can become infuriating. Study after study has shown there's a gender component to this. The situation has improved, but inequality still reigns in this arena.
Doing the dishes, doing the wash and cleaning the floors, the windows and the toilets are not, by a long shot, my favorite activities. But, perhaps it can be chalked up to my 23 months in reform school at a young age, and 13 months in a prison camp for draft resistance later on, I've never shied away from doing my share - often more than my share - of the housework when I've lived with someone else, or a bunch of someones.
While incarcerated, we had latrine duty, floor duty (of the hands-and-knees variety), gravel-raking duty, laundry duty. We made our own beds (military, quarter-bouncing style). I never performed well as a cook, but I got pretty good as a cook's assistant. Most of this was tedious, repetitive work, but afterward I never took the stance that somebody else I was living with should do it for me. So when my first wife went to nursing school and studied full time, I took it all on. It wasn't saintly behavior, it just seemed fair. And that was before I'd read Germaine Greer or Pat Mainari's 1970 poke-in-the-eye piece, The Politics of Housework.
Who would think, decades after the second wave of feminism swept the nation - and other parts of the developed world - that who does the housework would still be an issue? But it is. Have you noticed advertising, which for a while had moved away from always depicting women in the cleaner-upper roles, has now retreated to the most demeaning stereotypes? Hundreds of articles and probably thousands of term papers have been written on the subject of gender and housework. Here's Elyce on the subject a few years back:
The Second Shift. One key concept to understanding how housework is political is to grasp the concept, developed by sociologist Arlie Hochschild, that housework is work. It is valuable yet undervalued labor because it is unpaid. And the bulk of this unpaid labor, even in dual-career marriages, is done by women, without recognition of this fact. In the 1960s, Hochschild found that women did 15 more hours more housework and childcare per week than their husbands. This results in what Hochschild calls a "leisure gap" between men and women in heterosexual married relationships: men get more time to rest and think (which can mean more happiness, more career success, more time for contemplating one’s place in the cosmos, for activism or even thinking about activism, etc.). And doing more housework and having less leisure time increases women’s anxiety, depression, and worry.
In 1997, Chloe E. Bird updated Hochschild’s findings. Using 1990 and 1994 National Opinion Research Council data, she found that: women who marry (heterosexually) gain 14 hours per week of additional household labor, while their husbands gain only 90 minutes per week; and women report doing at least 70% of household labor, while their husbands self-reported doing only 37%—whether their wives worked outside the home or not. In 2003, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics conducted the "American Time Use Survey," which reported that employed adult women (18 years and over) spent about an hour more per day than employed adult men doing household activities and caring for household members, and men spent more time doing leisure activities (5.4 hours) than women (4.8 hours). Though the gap may be seem to be narrowing, we want to keep in mind that the American Time Use Survey lumped financial and other household management tasks in with housework and that leisure time has been lessened over the years for both men and women in middle-class career tracks.
Though these statistics are based on heterosexual and otherwise traditional family relationships, it is important to note that imbalances in housework sharing occur in many varieties of relationship, from LGBT couples to communal homes to parent/child living arrangements to college roommate arrangements. The key is to recognize that housework is, indeed, political, and that who does what and how much is often gendered or otherwise imbalanced in the home.
That BLS study has since been updated for the 2003-2006 period. The update was released last May. Not surprisingly, it found:
Married mothers employed full time were more likely to do household activities and provide childcare on an average day than were married fathers employed full time, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. In households with children under 18, married mothers who were employed full time were more likely to do household activities--such as housework, cooking, or lawn care--on an average day than were fathers who were employed full time (89 versus 64 percent).
What do the numbers look like for one category, married mothers and fathers who are employed full-time and have kids at home under 18?
Housework, food preparation and cleanup, lawn and garden care, and grocery shopping:
Women: 115 minutes average per day.
Men: 48 minutes average per day.
Add in taking care of the kids and the spread widens.
A study at the University of Michigan, ongoing since 1968, shows that the situation has improved. The study found that having a husband creates an extra seven hours a week of housework for women. "For men, it's the opposite - a wife saves her husband about an hour of housework a week, the study says. In 1976, U.S. women did an average of 26 hours of housework a week, compared to 17 hours in 2005. Men did about six hours of housework a week in 1976, compared with about 13 hours in 2005."
A solid study of gay and lesbian couples would no doubt add some interesting information to these data. Maybe even show us a way to improve matters faster.
Some people argue, with considerable reason, that housework, particularly the cleaning aspects, is way too obsessive-compulsive. That we are overly clean, if you will. That may be one reason that women are doing considerably less on average than they were in 1976. All well and good if people who live together agree on the level of cleanliness and then divide what they decide does need to done in a mutually agreeable fashion.
So, what's it like where you live?