The Housework Issue

Let's just go ahead and settle this, Red Pill style, because I'm sick to death of feminists throwing this issue around as some sort of raison d'etre for misandry: "Well, men don't do as much housework as women, STILL!"

Um, no.

The Housework Issue has been around since the dawn of the industrial age, when women started working for wages and technological advances made it possible for a household to continue functioning anyway.

Consider how the average Agricultural Age household worked: under the Patriarchy the men toiled from sun-up to sundown providing food security for their families in the form of protein and long-shelf-life carbohydrates (meat and grain) while women focused on the domestic issues: the vegetable garden, childcare, cleaning, and, most importantly, cooking.

Most of you don't have a good appreciation for just how much time has to be devoted to food preparation in the pre-industrial world because we've become so used to the bounty and convenience of industrial agriculture and distribution that we just don't think about it.  But consider that every foodstuff that you grab out of the fridge was once the product of one family's -- and often one woman's -- hard labor.  Consider, for instance, butter.

We grab a stick and go, or spray it out of a bottle.  But 200 years ago the way that most people got their butter was to milk the cow, collect the cream, salt and prepare the milk, and then churn, churn, churn.  The time invested into the very-necessary task of Protein and Fat Preparation and Storage that is butter making was substantial, and not one of those "I guess I'll do it tomorrow" tasks.  Cows need to be milked every morning, fed every day, and cared for with loving attention . . . or your family's main Protein Machine is out of commission.  Say animal husbandry in pursuit of butter takes three to five hours a week.

Then there's the collection and storage of the heavy animal fats and proteins that can be converted into butter.  That implies the construction and maintenance of a cold room or spring house or ice house to keep the cream and milk from spoiling, which implies more up-front costs and at least a little maintenance during the week.  Salt for the butter is an expense, and either has to be imported or harvested locally, a time-consuming task.  A churn must be constructed or purchased, and then the actual churning has to take place on a regular basis -- at least a couple of times a week.  Call that another three hours.  Then add in additional time-and-energy expenditure for storage of butter and buttermilk, and you have a net time investment of over ten hours.  For butter.

Let's not even talk sausage. Or cheese.  Or beer.  Or bread.

Domestic chores and the domestic division-of-labor established by the Patriarchy was determined not by male desires to conquer and control women for their own nefarious ends -- they were established as a workable system of pre-industrial domesticity, necessary for either party and their progeny to thrive.  If a wife didn't put in the time on the farmstead, then the butter didn't get made.  If a husband didn't put in the time in the fields and the sheds, then the grain didn't grow.  Then you have no muffins and no butter, and that's no good for anyone.

The only things that altered this arrangement weren't the growing self-realization of the power of womanhood (sorry, Ladies!), it was technological innovation and refinement that reduced the time investment implicit in the simplest of foodstuffs.  Let's run down the brief timeline and examine just where and how women were freed from domestic servitude, and perhaps we can see through how the former status quo evolved how we can re-apportion the domestic division of labor so that feminists and whiny women everywhere will STFU about housework.

Hope springs eternal.

First, from the above-referenced farmwife's perspective, the first Very Good Thing that happened was Specialization.  That meant that, somewhere around the late Middle-Ages or early Enlightenment, that one or two particular farms would specialize in, say, dairy production to the exclusion of some other forms of farming, and exchange their surplus for those items that they themselves didn't produce through the agency of the Marketplace. That allowed the farmwife to trade, say, her eggs at the market for the butter she needed.  Collecting eggs only takes a few minutes, compared to producing butter, so the net time savings in this simple trade was dramatic.

The second technological innovation that had an impact on domestic responsibilities was Monetization.  When the farmwife brought her eggs to market, she may have plenty of butter at home.  By exchanging her eggs for money, she's able to not just use the value of her eggs to buy butter, but she can also use it to buy bread or vegetables or clothing.  Not only that, she can accumulate the long-term net value of her eggs through saving, allowing her greater purchasing power and a greater range of selection.  Monetization allowed the spare values and surpluses a farmstead produced to accrue.

The third technological innovation was the perfection of long-term food storage through canning and preserving, and later through refrigeration and freezing.  The value of a foodstuff can alter with time due to spoilage, and being able to conserve surpluses in this manner allowed even greater accrual of resources for the farmstead.  Before canning and preservation, the only foods that could survive longer than a year were high-labor, high-sodium crops like sausage, cheese, and grain crops such as wheat and barley.

By the Napoleonic era, when canning really became common, the additional food security allowed nation-states to form as the pressure to focus on the seasonal production of food abated somewhat.  Vegetables that can be kept on the shelves for one, two, or up to five years dramatically extend the value of that food, and greatly increase the variety and nutrition available to the consumers.  It also allowed armies to extend their ranging and supply lines far, far longer than the earlier eras, which allowed both military adventurism and imperial colonialism to flourish.

The fourth technological innovation was the enclosure and the inclusion of the kitchen into the main home.  Throughout most of the Agricultural Age, the kitchen for the farmstead was either outdoors or in a seperate building entirely from the sleeping and living quarters.  Indeed, in many places throughout Europe and America, livestock had a better shot at a roof than a kitchen did.  When the fireplace was brought inside, enclosed, and transformed into the iron cookstove in the 18th century, this had a major impact on the way and manner in which domestic chores were done.  Work that took days a century before was eliminated or reduced to mere minutes.

Add in the use of coal (which reduced dependence on wood supplies and effectively subbed-out the once labor intensive process of Home Heating), and the energy necessary to produce and cook food became centralized.  Add in the well pump inside the house, instead of out in the yard (or half a mile away in the village) and the water/fire/storage triad that became the modern sink/stove/refrigerator was consolidated.  Fetching water, chopping wood, and smoking or salting food for preservation were eliminated from the regular domestic responsibilities.

By 1850, just before the civil war, the refinement of agricultural life and the specialization, monetization, and ability to conserve and trade surpluses allowed an impressive leap in the rural standard of living.  One of the factors that led to the American Civil War (or, as it's sometimes locally referred to, the War of Northern Imperialism) was the bumper-crop of farmboys that arose after the reasonably quick, efficient, and prosperous settlement of the Mississippi Valley.  Using the steel plow and barbed wire (both potent technological innovations) they decreased the labor investment in both grain cropping and animal husbandry to the point where the farm you needed a dozen kids to run in 1750 could be run by a mere four kids in 1850.  That didn't mean you stopped having a dozen kids -- they were your social security -- but that meant that more of them could invest more time in non-farm, non-foodstuff-related endeavors.

One of these surplus farmboys was Abraham Lincoln.  If he had been born just a hundred years earlier, his chances of reading and writing would have been low, and his destiny would have included more bullshit in the field than bullshit in the courtroom.  Thanks to the increase in non-foodstuff time and the widespread use of the printing press, education was able to start soaking up that time-surplus . . . and that made everyone wealthier.  And that was also about the time that steam power and hydro power in the urban areas allowed large scale industrialized textile production.  That not only reduced the highly labor-intensive process of home-growing textiles, it also gave more people more clothes, thanks to the surpluses.  Everyone was happy about that except for a few unwilling African immigrants.

The surplus farmboys led to the Civil War, and the Civil War led to a great wave of industrialization: widespread use and deeper penetration of railroads, standardized parts, and the rudiments of the assembly line contributed strongly to the wave of technological innovation that followed.  Add long-range communication with the telegraph and mail system, and the effective trading range of any farmstead tripled or more in size.  Mid-western farmers could get crops to market in Chicago or New York in days, instead of weeks.  Industries in those cities could in return process the food to preserve it and ensure its wide distribution, leading to even greater surpluses and cheaper food.

The next big innovation was, of course, electricity.  While locally-produced candlelight had largely been replaced by more-efficient oil lamps by the 1850s, it wasn't until the wide-spread electrification of the West in the early 20th century that the genie was fully out of the bottle.  Once you were able to apply the vast energies of electricity to the problems of domestic science, then the surpluses in time and convenience just get rotten.  In 1850 a farmwife spent maybe half the time her 1750 counterpart did in terms of "domestic duties", which freed up more time and attention for child rearing, which led directly to the wave of public education and literacy that grew between 1800 and 1900.  It also spawned the idea of a "childhood".

But once you added electricity and industrialization to the whole issue of food preparation, and then you hit the jackpot.  Tractors plow far more land than a horse or mule, allowing more acreage to be cultivated per man-hour, which leads in turn to huge food surpluses.  Freezing and refrigeration lead to smaller in-home food supplies and far more frequent purchases of food at the market.  High-density urbanization, allowed by the internal combustion engine and electricity, encouraged a greater and ever-more-sophisticated distribution chain, every iteration of which allowed greater surpluses which led to greater profits in net time expenditure and, ultimately, to greater investment in education and wealth production.

And electricity, of course, allowed the benefits of industrialization to be felt virtually anywhere.  Instead of relying on location-dependent dammable rivers for energy to drive mills and other large industrial equipment, the generation of electric power and its transmission over power lines suddenly, around 1920, made virtually any region of any nation a potential industrial center.  Generate power in the Tennessee Valley, transmit it over wires hundreds and hundreds of miles away, and suddenly a good chunk of the South transformed from sleepy agricultural villages to busy little light industrial towns.

Electricity did two important things: it dramatically reduced the effective time devoted to domestic chores -- what came to be known as "housework" -- and it allowed men to leave the farm for work-for-hire in industrial settings.  Instead of toiling in the fields from sun-up to sun-down, men could go to work for a boss six days a week for a quite-reasonable twelve-hour day, and still enjoy better comforts and conveniences at home than his farm-bound father did.  Going to work in a factory or service trade created yet more surpluses and efficiencies.  It also expanded the workforce -- men who were not physically suited for farm work were able to find productive employment and start families.

And, of course, if men can go to work for wages in factories, so can women.

Industrialization ended the Agricultural Age.  It also ended the division-of-labor implicit with the Agricultural Age.  When men are not needed on the farm to produce, and women are not needed on the farm to process, then both can earn wages that can purchase the necessities of life at a discount, and conserve resources in terms of savings and investment in education and capital.  Long before the vacuum cleaner and microwave, the need for women to stay at home and tend to housework was over.  Once public education removed the need for daily childcare, then wives were able to devote those surplus hours to more productive work.  That process was well underway before WWII transformed America from a predominantly rural and agricultural nation into an urban and industrialized nation.

The fact is, just what constitutes "housework" changed from 1850 to 1950.  If you told an 1850 housewife that her day would be relegated to the drudgeries of 1950s domestic life, she would have treated it as a vacation (something else that didn't arise as a popular institution until industrialization).  Just get up, make breakfast in under an hour, have the machines deal with washing the clothes so all you had to do is hang them out, pack lunches for husband and children, clean for four or five hours, spend another hour preparing dinner, another hour cleaning up, and then spend late nights listening to music and reading under electric lights?  Compared to the brutal drudgery of a 19th century farmstead, that was heaven, not "domestic servitude".

So when the 1950s saw the dawn of protofeminism, women were coming off of a three-century reduction in their labor investment in their family . . . as well as a reduction in the number of children their economy required them to have.  Instead of spending 80+ hours a week keeping her household running, she was spending less than 40.  And once you hit the modern, post-War conveniences like home freezers, vacuum cleaners, space-age formica and linoleum, and other advances in quality-of-life technology and consumer culture started to show up, that time was effectively reduced to a part-time job.  By 1970, it took around 20 hours or so a week to keep a family of 5 running smoothly in a suburban environment.

At that point, of course, we had a very large number of women who hit the workforce, yet were still required by custom and economy to be the major domestic player in the household.  While they could use their wages to mitigate the issue with convenience foods, time-saving and labor-saving devices, and other means, someone still had to vacuum the damn rug.  Even though their domestic duties represented a fraction of what their grandmothers happily invested in their family life, the allure of the "masculine privilege" of working for wages was just too powerful.  Women not only went to work, they started complaining bitterly about the domestic duties they were still expected to perform.

Of course, along with the transformation of household chores from a full-time job to a few hours a week came the new household duties associated with the male half of the division of labor: yardwork, mechanical maintenance, automobile maintenance and repair, and other responsibilities he'd inherited from his agricultural fathers.  While these duties required a fair amount of knowledge, specialized tools, and a lot of effort and energy, they were rarely included in the contemporary surveys of "housework", like washing dishes and cooking food.  Changing the oil on the family car, for instance, was not considered a "household chore", while changing a diaper was.

Indeed, in those early surveys the whole concept of "housework" was defined almost exclusively by the "housewife".  Childcare and food preparation were on the list.  Yardwork and home maintenance and repair were not.  Therefore every survey proporting to demonstrate just how little "housework" men did ignored the contributions that they were already making in favor of defining domestic responsibilities purely in feminine terms.

We all know what happened from there.  Women rebelled at the notion that they, alone, were responsible for domestic chores while ignoring the contributions their husbands made.  That was part of the big steaming pile of rationalizations that was assembled to justify the "Women's Liberation" movement of the 1960s.  It's not surprising, in retrospect, that the men of the time were so shocked and dismayed by the movement -- from their perspective, they had already "liberated" women from the huge number of domestic chores they had been heir to and given them either their own financial power, in the form of wages, or unheard-of liesure time.  By 1960 domestic chores in the suburbs took perhaps three to four hours a day.  That was nothing, compared to a century before.  What were woman complaining for?  They never had it so good!

Now in the post-industrial age we're faced with the bitter fallout from this transformation.  The perception still exists that women devote more time and energy than their husbands to domestic chores, that despite a couple of centuries of progress and more-enlightened attitudes about the division-of-labor issue, women still bear the brunt of domestic responsibilities while men sit around on their asses, drink beer, and spit.

Most contemporary dudes scoff at this, of course.  They do plenty of housework.

In the post-industrial world the Agricultural Age division-of-labor no longer makes sense, because the composition of our households are drastically different and the expectations and definitions differ so widely between the genders.  Expecting women to pick up the lion's share of domestic duties is unfair on the face of it.  Expecting men to pick up the lion's share of maintenance and repair duties is unfair as well.

So let's look at some of the acrimony in a fair sort of way.

In the 2005 survey,

Household tasks. Most researchers agree that major household tasks include (a) cooking, (b) cleaning, (c) shopping for groceries and household goods, (d) doing dishes, and (e) laundry (Coltrane, 2000, p. 1210). These tasks are included in our estimates of time spent on housework. According to Coltrane, this routine housework consists of tasks that are the most time consuming and most frequently done, with little flexibility in scheduling. There is an additional set of tasks that researchers may or may not include in their definition of household labor: driving,
financial paperwork, yard maintenance, and repairing tasks. Coltrane calls these occasional or other household tasks. We include all these tasks
except driving, which we exclude because of idiosyncratic features of the Sloan data. Thus, our measure of housework includes time spent washing dishes, cleaning the house, doing laundry, cooking, shopping for the household, family
paperwork, and yard and home maintenance

First, there's a serious problem in that definition.  As it states, "most researchers" weight cooking, cleaning, shopping, dishes, and laundry (the traditional female controlled household tasks) as "routine", whereas the male side of the equation of yard work and household maintenance are "occasional" (they apparently decided not to include my house in the study).  That means that every hour that Mrs. Ironwood folds and puts away her clothes is measured as the equivalent of, say, one hour mowing the lawn, fixing the plumbing, or digging a ditch.  The amount of energy and the amount of preparation or special education necessary for the task is not factored in.  In addition, the extra 1.75 hours a day I spend ferrying the kids around is likewise not counted as "housework".  So if I can mow the lawn in 90 minutes by busting my ass and taking myself right to the brink of a heart-attack, it counts the same as Mrs. Ironwood matching socks for 90 minutes while she watches TV.

That sounds fair, doesn't it?

And "cooking" for her -- nuking a frozen meal for 5 minutes, peel, and eat -- only takes a fraction of the time it takes me.  I actually turn ingredients into tasty and nutritious food.  I'm so darn wasteful that way.  It doesn't matter that I've trained for years, taken classes, cooked professionally, and labor mightily to set a decadent table -- our "cooking" means her nuking and my careful preparation are classed the same in terms of difficulty.

Then there's the matter of expectations.  While there are plenty of slobby women out there (hey, Baby!), even the most slovenly tend to prefer a clean house, and when it comes to just how clean "clean" is, their standards tend to be far higher than a male peer's standards.  This is only anecdotal evidence, of course -- I couldn't find a study on the perceptions of expectations of cleanliness anywhere.

But when I clean the kitchen, if it's really nasty, it takes me no longer than 2 hours, from start to finish.  I've never seen Mrs. Ironwood clean it completely in less than 4.  Is she just slower than me?  Perhaps -- but she doesn't consider it "clean" until every last speck of dirty is gone.  Me, I have a lot higher tolerance for filth, so mopping the floor twice and removing 95% of the dirt is more important than mopping it five times and removing 99% of the dirt.  Mrs. I doesn't consider the kitchen clean until the refrigerator is cleaned out, bleached, and sterilized.  Me, I like to see all the pretty colors my leftovers turn before I chuck them.

Then there's the issue of laundry: I do almost all of it, and Mrs. Ironwood has almost three times as many clothes as I do.  Plus she has this fetish about only wearing things that are "really" clean.  Me, I can take a pair of jeans four days out, if necessary.  I do about one basket of my laundry for every four I do of hers.  That's not entirely her fault -- she has a professional wardrobe while I'm a jeans-and-t-shirt dude -- but that just means that I have to do her laundry in shifts, one regular cycle then one delicate cycle, and then hang up the delicates to dry before I hand them over for hanging and folding.  That more than doubles the time and energy I've invested in her laundry, compared to my own.  But my "laundry time" diligently sorting out her wool from her rayon, shaking out and hanging up laundry is counted exactly the same as her time sorting socks.

I think it is safe to say that the "traditional" (Agricultural Age) division of labor no longer makes sense from a number of perspectives.  Just how things should evolve into Marriage 3.0, especially the Red Pill portion, seems pretty straight-forward:

1. Every adult should be capable and expected of doing their own laundry, as well as a share of the common laundry (sheets and towels), regardless of gender.  If I was to adopt that, my net laundry time would drop by over a third.

2. Both parties should be responsible for roughly half of the food prep and clean-up.  Ideally that means that if I cook, she cleans up and vice versa.  Or if I go grocery shopping, she cooks the next three meals.  Or something like that.

3. Each party should be responsible for the completion of roughly half of the domestic maintenance and repairs of the house.  That means that if there's a hole in the roof, Mrs. Ironwood should have to go up there and fix it half the time.  She should sharpen half of the lawn-mower blades, change the oil in her own car, mow half of the lawn, paint half of the house when needed, clean out half of the gutters, weed half of the garden, and wash half of the windows.

4.  If a party takes upon itself the responsibility for the job, then that party alone has the right to determine just how much effort is required for completion to reasonable standards.  For example, if it's my turn to clean the bathroom, then it doesn't matter exactly how much time I spend on it -- it only matters that I got it as clean as I found acceptable.  The fact that Mrs. I has unrealistic and foolish standards about "how clean is 'clean'" is immaterial.  If I spend fifteen minutes and declare it clean, and she spends two hours before she declares it clean, since I was the one who did the work I'm the one who gets to call it when I think it's done.

5. Areas of common interest, like childcare, are likewise split 50/50 in a two-income household.  My time spent picking up and dropping off the kids should count toward that time.

6. Paying bills and dealing with utilities and services should be evenly divided between you.

7. Household expenses should be theoretically divided, according to income.  That is, if you make $75k, and your wife makes $50k, then you should reasonably expect your household expenses to run around $100k, or double what the lower-earning member of the marriage makes.  The surplus should be mutually discussed in terms of discretionary spending, but ultimately the partner who earned it decides what to do with the surplus.  If I get a $5000 windfall royalty from a book in addition to my paycheck, then after our mutual household expenses are satisfied we should discuss how the surplus money should be spent, and she could offer suggestions; but ultimately the decision rests with me, if we haven't pre-arranged for the eventuality.

8. In cases of early childcare where there is a gender-based division of work mandated, then the other party is obligated to pursue work on the same subject commiserate with the time and effort spent by the biologically-mandated party.  That is, if your wife is breastfeeding your child, then you have a responsibility to change the kid's diaper afterwards.  Once she stops breastfeeding either one of you can give the baby a bottle or change it.

9. If you don't like how the other party has completed a job, then you may not criticize it.  You may decide to do it yourself at your own time expense instead.  If Mrs. I doesn't like the way I cleaned the bathroom, she can do it herself (or find someway to bribe me to do it -- see below).

10. Jobs dedicated under the division of labor cannot be subbed out to contractors without prior approval.  If we agreed that it is my job to mow the lawn, in exchange for Mrs. Ironwood's undertaking the common laundry (an unlikely event), then if I stall on the lawn because she hasn't washed any sheets or towels in a while does not give her the right to spend community resources hiring someone to do the job without my input.  Similarly, if she gets assigned to change the oil, she can't arbitrarily decide that she's just going to pay Jiffy Lube to do it for her and count her chore "done".  That would be like counting me picking up a pizza as "cooking" and equating it with a normal 45 minute food prep session.

Those are ten basic rules for dividing up household tasks without recourse to "traditional" divisions-of-labor that might be sexist or something.  Women are free to complain how their husbands don't do laundry only if their husbands are free to complain that their wives didn't rotate the tires.  The core concept is that men and women have, for the most part, both equal responsibilities for financing and executing chores in the household in the post-industrial world.

That's not a bad thing, and it's not a bad thing for men . . . as long as you ensure that ALL tasks are accounted for, that our standards are the ones that apply to our chores, and that both parties are held accountable for their list.

Now . . . that doesn't mean that you, as a couple, can't do some old-fashioned log-rolling when it comes to how you really divide up the labor.  In fact, it might strike you as a good deal if your wife decides to start trading particular sexual favors for consideration in the chore department.  Quid Quo Pro can be a rewarding arrangement, as long as you are both willing to stick to your agreed-upon terms.  Some feminists might see including sex as part of the "household chores" as unfair and sexist.  I'm not going to argue (has that ever done any good, arguing with a feminist?) but the fact is there are plenty of women who, when faced with the prospect of three hours mowing the lawn in August, would rather trade a fifteen minute hummer for Hubby to do it instead.

Sex is, of course, the Great Equalizer in a marriage.  It can make one party feel compensated for inequalities or variables in other aspects of your marriage.