Co-operative Housekeeping ?

The problem with getting everyone in the household to pull their weight is who does the "getting" fall to? Not who it should fall to, who does it actually fall to? Thread after thread on MN tells us where the expectation and actuality for that lies.

I'm with looney my preferred method to tackle this is to get everyone who lives in the household pulling their weight.

Easier said than done though. Will probably take generations to fix.

I'm lucky with dh. His parents shared housework, they utterly adore each other and do everything together including housework.

I still feel the weight of wife work though as his standards are lower than mine (and mine are pretty crap).

I'm trying to raise both my kids (dd & ds) to know how to cook, clean iron etc.

WRT the cheap food, it's not exactly cheap, we're very rural, nothing is cheap, but my local butcher / baker convenience store cooks food to order. When Fil was unwell last year he would often phone for a chicken to be ready for 1, I'd turn up at 12 & put the veg on. We then ate together.

One of my friends lived in Bradford for a while and often bought cheap home cooked curriesat her corner shop. It definitely happens in Yorkshire

Lonny

I agree, it doesn't lessen the workload it just varies it.
I have friends who look after each others houses, kids, husbands, cooking, cleaning etc. They are very close and people do mistake them for sisters.

I can't see it working in households where both work, everything is rota between husband and wife and planned to the nth degree.
It does work well for sahp's and those in a close network of family and friends.

"Monks apparently manage."

Yes well, they wear baggy clothes in dark colours, don't they.

Oh I'd say my OH gets the worse deal as he is a pt shap (as am I) so does his share of housework and childcare but he is also the strongest so does 90% of the hard labour jobs as well. As the kids are getting older and my spd is finally easing off he is able to do these while I have the kids (although often has the eldest with him) so it is evening up a bit, but the past couple of yrs its had to be done during naps and after bedtimes.

I don't think it lessens the work load just varies it

Yes, I would agree with that Winchester But the work is still the work. And I suspect women would still be doing the lion's share of it.

Vestal if I'd stayed a moment longer with my mother it wouldn't have been chores we were divviying up, it would have been jail time . But of course men could cope with their own grunt work. They can right now. So why aren't they doing it?

We do this a bit with mil who lives next door. She prefers to make slow / old fashioned meal, preserves, knits socks and hats etc. We do more curries, bung ut in the oven meals, obv house and garden maintenance for both houses, wood etc.
Mostly it works well and its nice to get a home baked loaf or buns unexpectedly, or for the toddler to go over there for a hour while the baby naps etc.
I don't think it lessens the work load just varies it.

Well presumably single men and male gay couples manage too.

What is there to stop a heterosexual couple organising a fair division of chores?

@ LonnyVonnyWilsonFrickett:

Actually, I had something in mind where the daughters stay with their mothers, but the sons do move out.
Sort of like most mammals do it, actually.

Men's houses and laundry and food would then be men's problem. I am sure they would be able to cope. Monks apparently manage.

It also did not help that you can only pay people for childcare if they are registered. In the old days(pre 2006) you could pay your neighbour to look after your children whilst you worked.

Some people have been doing this for years it's a very good idea.

I often go round my friends house and clean up, or she comes round here and does mine
There's never a professional element though.
I can remember when your neighbours were an extension of your home.
Helped in emergencies, took kids, cooked a pot in times of need. They were good family friends in streets all over towns.

So it can and does work, but not as a cooperative any more.
People are too busy and organised.

Cooking a meal once a fortnight for a large number of people, some of whom I might not know particularly well, would be far more of a chore than cooking for 3 people every other night.

At least in the latter case there is the option of beans on toast and fruit if I really can't be bothered.

"But there already is a good way of sharing household duties. It's called getting everyone who lives in the house to pull their weight."

But if you can share with more people, that makes life easier, no? So for example, cooking a meal once a fortnight, rather than every other day. Or looking after two toddlers rather than one when it's your turn to do childcare, then having more childfree time another day.

And if you live in a situation where everyone doesn't pull their weight then they aren't the ones who are going to be enthusiastically taking in a nieghbours' ironing in exchange for free cooking, are they? It will simply circle back to the people doing the wife work in the first place.

See also matrilineal structures. All that does is spread more work across more women.

I can see the point for lone parent households though.

Exactly. Lonny. I don't understand this obsession about being oppressed by "wife work". If you don't want to do it, don't. As you say, everyone should pull their weight.

But there already is a good way of sharing household duties. It's called getting everyone who lives in the house to pull their weight. Am I missing something here?

Another point on following your last comment VestalVirgin - really interesting about the woman's paid job being considered less important. Would other mums agree?

Surely that is between individual couples? It wasn't in my case, although I concede that as husband and I are in the same profession and our career paths were in tangent it always came down to which of us could take the time off, it was never automatically one of us.

Well, there were the communal apartments in the Soviet Union, which apparently still exist in some places. It sounds awful, but maybe that's because the whole setup resulted from shortages and a government that controlled every aspect of people's lives.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_apartment

The vast majority of housework compared to the 30's and prior has been outsourced to machines - communal clothes washing was useful before modern washers and dryers, now it only takes a moment to do.
Cheap kitchens only work if you are paying the staff a pittance or on a volunteering rota.

My grandmother shared domestic duties within her wonderful community. There were people who didn't have the cooking facilities to roast a bird, especially at Christmas. She would roast the birds on Christmas Eve and Christmas morning for them at this time of year for a nominal fee. Also did this for funerals, weddings and christenings, but charged extra. She also had a wash house (still there) and charged people to use it.

She had a big range in her house so was able to do this. This was during the 1930s/40s/50s.

I used to live in a housing co-op/intentional community, we ate together 4-5 nights a week, there was quite a lot of informal shared childcare, and also shared bathrooms/communal spaces (hence shared cleaning). As with everything, there's good points (not having to cook every night) and bad points (parsnip quiche . . .).

Domestic work definitely didn't end up done by the women, in fact in the community as a whole including running an 80 acre farm the only two tasks that I can think of that ended up gender segregated were tractor driving and chainsawing. In both cases that was partly due to previous skills/knowledge (specifically coming to the community with a chainsaw certificate) and partly to size (very old heavy tractor - the skinny slight blokes didn't drive it either!).

Bertie Botts, I think women could profit from sex segregating all the labour. That is, the other woman you swap shares with would do nothing for her husband and thus could not possibly have twice your amount of work to do. (That would, of course, require separate households.)

As things are, swapping chores would not free women from having to argue with their husbands over who does how much, and I think constant arguing over "wifework" is something that damanges women's health.

I agree that matrilinieal multi-generation housing is not a solution for everyone. It would work for me because I get along relatively well with my family and don't easily make new friends. Of course there are people whose family of origin is such that one couldn't get away from it fast enough!

We should try to promote alternative living models, I think, so that everyone can choose the one that fits her needs best.

Cheap food stalls with good food are the solution for the cooking conondrum I think would be most easily implemented - would work for introverts and extroverts alike, etc.

I like the idea but only if it's not sex segregated. Otherwise you're not shifting the responsibility more fairly, you're just shifting it around all women, and adding in a load of logistics which makes the whole thing less efficient.

I'd love to be able to do somebody else's laundry and ironing in exchange for them cleaning my bathroom or doing my hoovering or whatever, and I do have a low-level exchange thing going on within our family where we all get to pick one job to never have to do except if everyone else is busy and one job that we don't mind doing 99% of, and that works well, I could see it working well to extend the circle of this, especially for small families (or families with younger children) - but currently the housework is SO female dominated that I feel like we need more gender equality first. It would piss me off to swap shares with another woman and find that her share is twice mine because her husband does nothing, for example.

If it was possible to value housework tasks, and then break them up according to ability for each man/woman/child (ability being about age and presence of physical disability) then it could work if it was kept fair. Under the current arrangement - I think it would turn into yet more "wifework" and take men off the hook.

I would hate it as the mess would annoy me, so I would end up doing more than my fair share waiting for procrastinating "in a minute" people who never get around to it.