Marital Division of Labor: What am I Getting Myself Into?

[Aside from the title and where indicated in the text, this blog post was taken in its entirety from the 2009 book, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present by Gail Collins, former New York Times op-ed columnist.]

In 2008 Lisa Belkin, a columnist for the New York Times on work issues, wrote a magazine article about husbands and wives who shared housework equally. The most interesting thing about them, she wrote, "is that they are so very interesting." Couples who really split chores were rare, even in homes where both adults worked full-time. [Ok, here we go. Whatever this chick's got to say, all I know is Clay and I are different. We've lived together for a few years, we respect each other, we don't have the same issues as a lot of other couples. But go ahead, lady, I'll listen just for fun.]

Social scientists had begun studying who did the housework, and "any way you measure it, they say, women do about twice as much around the house as men," Belkin wrote.... "Working class, middle class, upper class, it stays at two to one," said Sampson Lee Blair, who had been studying the issue at the University at Buffalo. [Wait a minute. This just got serious.] When child care was added to the mix, things became even more lopsided. In families where both parents worked, she said, women spent an average of eleven hours a week on child care, and men three. [!?!?]

Belkin introduced her readers to a few couples who were seriously trying to divide chores evenly, and it seemed like a tortuous process - full of lists and negotiations and struggles on the part of the woman to jettison her higher standards for cleanliness, social niceties such as thank-you notes, and the way children looked when they were dressed for school. [For the record, ahem, thank-you notes are uncompromisable.] The only households that seemed to arrive at equitable division of labor more naturally, Belkin wrote, were lesbian couples....

The problem, it seemed, was buried deep in the issue of gender. Husbands who did more around the house than their fathers had done felt they were contributing a great deal, even if it amounted to less than half the times their wives were putting in. [C'mon, Mr. F, tell me you did a lot of chores / child care when Clay was growing up.] Couples struggling to change seemed to do best if they lived in neighborhoods where sharing the housework was more common. [We live in Hyde Park - does that mean we're on the right track? Please tell me it means we're on the right track.] As one expert explained, the most important factor in predicting how much a husband would do was how equal a couple's friends' relationships were.

[Confession: Sometimes matrimony totally scares me.]

Photo credits: thedailydoo.com and sundaymercury.net