17 thoughts on “THE CHORES”

  • Nan says:

    You just reminded me of my mother. When my siblings and I were young, she assigned chores to us all. We dusted, we swept, we ironed things no one would normally consider ironing, we washed windows. You name it we spawn did it. As soon as we left home, guess what? No dusting, no ironing, no fussing over a few cobwebs in corners. As long as there was slave labor available, the house had to be spotless. Once she had to do that work herself, standards slid dramatically. Her choice when it came to housework had been to devise as much as possible for the kids to do just to keep us busy.

    As a child care technique I suppose there might be worse ones. All that housework kept us home and out of trouble, more or less. How much was actually necessary? Who knows. Like you said, no two people have the same standards.

  • Jharp says:

    “(who wears shoes indoors all the time?)”

    I do. Socks and sandals. 365 days a year. Even in the midwest during winter.

    “So I sweep every day, and hand-wash the hard floors probably every 3-4 days.”

    Get yourself a roomba. They are wonderful.

  • E* says:

    Women will (typically) be judged more harshly by people who see a shared living space, and in many ways more dependent on the judgments of others for survival, so making more housework may be part of a larger issue regarding women's roles and worth.

    But, yeah, I get the methodological issue of measurement you bring up.

  • Island in the Sun says:

    I also wonder about geographic variation in what chores "must" be done, and whether this contributes to disparate average number of hours of housework done.
    I used to live in the US Midwest, and many of the behaviors described in this thread (e.g., washing dishes every few days; ironing everything) I also saw as on a continuum of normal household upkeep behaviors. Then, I moved to the tropics, where a much higher level of housework is necessary.
    Dirty dishes in the sink for more than an hour? That's how you get ants, which are very hard to eradicate once they get established. Ironing your sheets? Of course, that's how you eliminate mold and bedbug eggs. So regularly washing dishes and ironing everything isn't a choice in the same way as it is for Midwestern Americans.
    Insofar as different geographic regions differ in cultural expectations about gendered housework, I would speculate that this contributes to women on average spending more hours on housework than men. It may not be just that Northerners are more egalitarian with respect to housework, but also that Northerners have less housework to do.

  • Kaleberg says:

    The absolute measure of housework isn't as important or interesting as the consistency of the measure within a time series. It's like measuring the hours spent "watching" television or "on" social media. Is the subject actually watching the screen? Are they actually paying attention to the narrative or remarks? Shouldn't time be multiplied by level of involvement or level of attention? Getting that metric precisely right is probably impossible, but getting a consistent metric can give a useful trend.

  • Hazy Davy says:

    You two should get a dog.
    You'll both dramatically increase the amount of discretionary "care" time you spend. [And I hope it's on different aspects…like one likes to train, the other likes to walk.]
    It'll provide justification for frequent sweeping.
    It'll provide justification for (more) frequent laundry.

    Dog.

  • Safety Man! says:

    I forget where, but other books have raised the question, Why is it that the amount of time spent on housework has remained largely constant, despite the steady influx of labor saving devices?

    I’ve lived with a dishwasher and without, and honestly the biggest draw I found is that with a dishwasher I’m astronomically less likely to break dishes.

  • Aurora S says:

    Ah…this seems to tacitly imply that age-old excuse that men are naturally more likely to "not see the mess" than women. As long as we're quibbling in a fashion that hints around at minimizing the housework gap, or at least participating in an ego-soothing exercise for men, are we attempting to quantify housework by how long each task takes to perform (as in, 3 hours of housework, etc.), or are we talking about the number of individual chores performed? Of course we can say that the size of the workload depends on how much of a half-assed job each person is willing to do, but that still doesn't account for the fact that that women do more housework in a heterosexual relationship/male-female living arrangement, unless the underlying assumption is that men "just don't see the mess" and women require a more sanitary environment. That's ridiculous on its face, unless you're predisposed to sexist arguments of genetics informing behavior (which just so happens to justify men getting out of doing housework when there's a woman around…how convenient).

    None of that holds up in same-sex living arrangements. Could it be that, perhaps, men "don't see the mess"…as their responsibility to clean up, because they've only been conditioned to believe that from birth?

    In other words, nice try. "I'm totally not trying to say that women don't do more housework than men, but when you look at it in a way that makes me look like less of an asshole by association, women don't REALLY do more housework than men, amiright??"

  • Renae says:

    Woman weighing in here. I have the more stressful (and higher paying) job, so hubs does more of the housework. He handles dishes and laundry and a decent amount of weekly cleaning. He also gets the toilets, but I do anything that's low to the ground because I'm short, meaning tubs and any hand scrubbing on the floor (which is MORE than fair).
    That said, it took a couple of years for us to align on what it meant to be clean, what the standard was for cleaning and how often. Also, ther
    e's a reason I have a "better" job–he's more likely to be lazy and skip a chore than I am, which has translated into our efforts with our careers. But since he already does so much housework, I'm inclined to let him skip from time to time since hey, waiting one or two days means I don't have to do it (and am lazy in my own way? I guess?).
    I do agree, without knowing more it's hard to say how well the data was quantified and measured for the study. I also agree that, in general, I care a lot more about how clean the house is and how well it's cleaned than he does. If we didn't have the arrangement we have (and I am so lucky to have a truly amazing spouse in that regard) I could easily see me doing about that amount of the chores compared to him. I

  • julie wolf says:

    also, you doing laundry once a month and her doing it much more often (as long the washer isn't like near empty, and load size is adjustable) is still the same amount of work. but for we woman, hauling insanely heavy laundry loads up and down stairs IS a lot of work.

    same with dishes. i'd argue that your way of doing them every so often is MORE work than doing them daily; although for water savings, a full dishwasher is best and a sinkful of suds for a sinkful of dishes is better than one at a time with water running.

    i'm a feminist, my husband is a feminist,, yet while he loves clean sheets and clean floors, i have yet to see him change the bed or sweep ONCE. we were both raised by internalized-sexist mothers.

    my husband can look past the mess, any mess except broken glass or a low oil light, because from birth his mom considered it her duty to clean up after him and his dad. OTOH, any mess at home or work gives me an uneasy feeling and i can't get other work done before putting things back in order, because i got my ass whipped if i didn't clean up after my older brothers, make dinner, and take care of the younger ones. so, hmmm. anecdata, i know, but.

  • George Orr says:

    There is also a difference in the kind of mess a couple sees, and there is also a difference in clean-up detection. In one of our friend circles, a discussion went around that the husband left out the vacuum cleaner, which annoyed his wife, mostly because he did it to show that he did a chore. I don't know their general habits but I could see his point. If a chore isn't done in front of the partner, and it's not a completely obvious one like laundry and dishes, then there's a good chance it won't be acknowledged–which is fine if you don't need that head pat, but not fine if you have an SO that keeps an unofficial mental tally for later.

  • Michael Allen says:

    Island in the Sun: Interesting points. If tropical types have access to a dryer they could just dry the sheets on high for ten minutes after they are actually dry and kill anything in there. No doubt sheets in the old days were more wrinkly than those today.

    Northerners from a Northern European background (obviously, not as close as it might have been 50 or 100 years ago) may have a far higher cleanliness standard than those from more Southern climes, to make another generalization (which really is all we can do). Those Dutch housewives were known for daily scrubbing down of the front stoop. (Hah – just as I suspected, "stoop" is from Dutch/low German origins).

    There's also the outdoor jobs. Who shovels the (Northern!) snow? Who cuts the grass? Who does the gardening? Is gardening fun or a chore? If you you grow fruits and vegetables does that count for extra credit?

  • Michael Allen says:

    A cliche with some truth to it is that women have clean and neat apartments and their cars are a mess, and the opposite for men. I have a spray bottle of window cleaner and a roll of paper towels in my car. I rent a "steam" cleaner once a year or so and use the upholstery tool to do the car carpets and (if not leather) the seats after vacuuming everything. In my sister's car the windshield is cleaned on rare occasions with the washers and wipers and never on the inside. You can generally barely see through it.

    Car tip: if you do like my sister the dirt built up on the wipers and windshield can scratch the windshield. You will discover this when driving into a sunset. Clean the windshield manually and also do the wiper blades. You're welcome.

  • Michael Allen says:

    When I had my own washer and clothesline and dryer I did laundry more often, but it's more energy and water efficient to do a full load. Now I have to go to a laundromat so I have about 30 underwears and pairs of socks and save it up until I have about three loads. Different circumstances, different strategies.

    There is no question that as electrical appliances (@1920 on) and convenience foods and freezers etc. have vastly reduced the housework load, and women have gone to outside work, and modern feminism has made men and women in Western society anyway FAR more equal, the housework/yard work/child raising etc. has also gotten far more equal in typical hetero relationships and continues to change. There's always going to be a lag as circumstances and concepts change.

    And good points on parenting and housework approaches.

  • jjack says:

    Tangent: the dishwasher doesn't actually save any labor since you have to clean the dishes before you load them anyway. Perhaps it saves some work by applying the soap all at once rather than individually to each dish, but then again, it adds an extra step by putting another device into the workflow. It does create the illusion of saving labor, because while the dishwasher is running it appears as though you've "done the dishes" even though you haven't really completed the task, because you haven't yet put them away.

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