Forget about glass ceilings. Who remembers birthdays in your house?

[hambledon]

Perhaps this is a well worn feminism topic but I thought I'd open it up anyway.

My mother was a 60s/70s feminist. I love and admire her for this. I was brought up with the sense that there is no limit to what I can achieve and with a real understanding of the struggles other women have been through to get the vote, equal pay etc. I salute them.

My mother (a single parent) thought that life was too short to stuff a mushroom. She also thought that hoovering, making cakes, going to the hairdresser were the the province of 1950s Stepford Wives. I totally get why she felt this way. She was born in 1939 and was excited and proud to throw off the (indisputably) awful strictures of post war womanhood.

I 100% support every effort to make sure that women achieve at the same level as men. The thing is though, after I had children I found out that households require at least the same number of hours spent on 'wifework' as achieving a salary outside the home. If you are not upper middle class and able to afford a nanny, cleaner, ocado and deliveroo how does this actually work?

I know how it works. The woman strives to achieve at work and then silently does the other stuff at home while inwardly wondering what is going on. Most feminist arguments don't discuss who buys MIL Christmas presents or packs the homework bags for school. They either breezily say it's not important (if you have the supreme confidence of the upper middle class woman who knows her home and children will tick along with regular injections of family money whilst insisting in a Bohemian manner that you don't care for such trivia) or they just employ somebody to do it and it then becomes totally invisible.

Running a home and family is WORK. Time consuming, tiring and quite skilled WORK. I totally acknowledge that women need access to money and representation and am very grateful for the women who work to make progress with this. But what about the vast number of hours and emotional/psychological burden of keeping a home and family running? MN has thread after thread of women saying they are doing this alone. The typical response is either person to person commiseration (which implies individuals face this issue alone with the occasional isolated posts of solidarity) or extremely fortunate middle class women saying that they don't do this stuff, they are proud slummy mummies etc etc and have partners who do the wifework.

This is not a problem for individual, lone women. It affects the vast majority of us. Most of us are struggling to keep our household running. Not just the cleaning but house maintenance, the medical appointments, the school meetings, the birthdays and Christmas.If you really don't think this is a burden for you it's because you have the money to outsource it or you have a very very very rare partner who does it and you have the confidence borne of an upper middle class upbringing for it not to bother you. But you are rare. Believe me it is rare that women don't carry the vast majority of wifework.

I really think this should be the next wave of feminism. Running a household is not trivial work. It's essential. It needs to be acknowledged as essential and indispensable for good mental health. Everybody in the world needs to come home to a place of refuge. We should be prioritising that as a societal value over paid work outside the home and acknowledging what it takes to achieve a happy and well run household.

Can you say more about the middle class thing? I'm middle class and I have a decent partner who does his fair share. I don't think it's possible to outsource remembering birthdays is it?

This is a feminist issue for sure but I don't see how class comes into it.

It is definitely a class issue. If you are middle class you have the money to pay for support and probably a partner who is culturally ok with sharing roles. You may only ever come across people like you but there are a vast number of women who don't experience life in the same way.

I think lazy men cross class boundaries. My best friend has a lazy husband and remembers everyones birthday. The reason being social conditioning to see marriage as an end game, at which point a woman has 'won'. My friend(and a million mumsnetters) didn't think beyond prize giving ie their wedding day.

Society has told them that love is enough, that husbands are somehow different to boyfriends, and that domestic chores are small print to be sorted out later. So it's a surprise when lazy boyfriend isn't transformed into magic shiny husband. But by that time it's too late, there's no bargaining power.

I think it's all a reflection of the deep seated belief that success for women is in bagging a man, any man.

Women can have it all = women can do it all.

Work full time, be a mother, do everything a housewife would do, do everything a stay at home mother would do, do all the home and life admin, keep in shape, look pretty, wear nice clothes, exercise, spend time with your husband, have a social life, care for elderly parents (his and yours), organise everything, oh, and don't forget to shag your husband 4 times a week so he doesn't have an affair with a woman 15 years younger than him at work because you don't understand him.

You must be new here.

This kind of thing is the backbone of Mumsnet.

I agree with pp, lazy or sexist men are classless. How it works in my house is me and DH split some stuff, have areas each of us do and there’s stuff no one does. The running of a house isn’t a full time job, it doesn’t take 40 hours a week.

Yes I’m middle class but we have no paid (or free) support or services.

For example: he cooks and does food shop, I do bills, we both do packed lunches and dentists/etc, we each do our family presents. One of other might mention something first (holidays, for example, he tends to bring up first). Neither of us are saints and there’s still enough time in the day to read or stare at MN/TV.

I know middle class women running themselves ragged around lazy men and working class women with very equal relationships. I don’t know anyone upper class so can’t comment on them!

The feminism (2nd and 3rd) while wonderful for women’s legal rights were inherently socially misogynistic. The second wave was about forcing women into the Male world. The third was about turning women away from the female world and ridiculing those who refused or couldn’t. A better approach would be to recognise the equal value of both worlds and break down the gender stereotypes that prevent people from straying from their assigned roles.

Re class, most upper middle class mums I know are either SAHMs or won’t let go of their careers but still end up doing everything that wasn’t covered by the cleaner and nanny because their husbands are the main bread winner with really demanding jobs. The only exceptions are both women who were forced to marry down in their late thirties so their husbands do the housework and childcare.

*You must be new here.

This kind of thing is the backbone of Mumsnet.*

Molto I have been on MN for 12 years.

There are umpteen threads on MN every day complaining that partner does not share wifework. They were there 12 years ago and are now. The thing is, the responses are very much a discussion of the OPs individual situation but the fact is the vast majority of women in partnerships, especially with children, are in this situation but it is rarely discussed aa a wider issue in the same way that equal salaries or getting girls to do stem subjects is.

It's really not helpful when women post to say this is not their experience. If you have money to help you run a home or a partner who pulls their weight this is almost certainly because you belong to a class where this is affordable and socially acceptable. Even if everyone you know is the same, you are not in the majority.

I'm Irish so don't really get the whole class thing tbh. Dp is English and very working class (though he is a graduate in a stem field so maybe not anymore?)

He more than pulls his weight and is quite happy to do for example this week - pick up and drop off dc to and from school, arrange and post mil and sils birthday cards, wash dry and put away laundry, cook dinner multiple times, look after poorly dc, hoover and mop, arrange dentist appointments, and pay various bills.

You are totally right about the typically very uneven division of labour though. I'm just not really convinced class has anything to do with it.

And we don't have nannies or cleaners or any paid help. We bring in less than 30k between us.

Billywig that's great that your partnership works that way. I do think that the majority of partnerships don't though. I would also guess that in your social circles it's not frowned upon or unusual.

There are very very many women who live in a world where women expect to discuss household stuff together. Not because they are surrendered wives (they may well have great FT jobs as well) but because this is considered natural and normal. In these same relationships men have never ever had to make headspace for keeping track of when their child is due for a dental check up. This is actually how most households operate. MN is very middle class. The vast majority are different.

I missread and was coming on to reminise about birthday breakfasts and the time we went to see Mulan as my birthday treat and DF and DBro both fell asleep.

Anyways DH and I have divided up the mental load, he gets nursery and swimming and I get gps and dentist. He researches utilities and I research household goods etc. Whoever notices the washing basket is full does the laundry.

I think it helps that growing up his parents did opposite shifts so his dad also did childcare/cooking/cleaning.
Also we've been together since uni so both had experience of living in flatshares and sharing who is in charge of bills/taking turns doing chores etc.

I'm probably lower middle class now, I was raised working class. I'm not sure class has anything to do with it.

My husband and I both work full time and we both regularly drop the ball. I don't get this whole "wife work" thing. My husband does more than me around the home, he works more flexibly than me but even if he didn't there is no way I would stand for doing everything. I overheard a conversation on the train between two middle class professional women complaining that they were knackered because they get up in the night with the kids and their husbands don't "hear" or choose to hear the babies crying.

Fuck that! I genuinely believe that a lot of women secretly like being put upon and doing everything because if they don't enjoy it why the fuck do they do it?' 🤷‍♀️

My mum was born in 1938 and a feminist - but ended up marrying someone who never changed a nappy and was content to leave her to work FT and do all the wifework (to be fair, he has stepped up and learnt to do absolutely everything for them both when she got dementia). She taught me to look at partners and see what they were really like and not to start anything I didn't want to continue forever. And not to pay attention to what anyone else thought about decisions in my partnership.
So I ended up with someone who is a very equal parent in every way including the wifework. And to your initial question, he does his family birthdays, I do mine.

It's great that people have partners who share this work but the reality is this is not the norm. MN is full of threads about the day to day realities of domestic life and while there are some men on here I would guess 95 percent are women and I have never heard of a similar forum where predominantly men post about the day to day chores of domestic life.

I do all the emotional labour in our marriage and with the kids - which is why we'll be getting divorced. I heard a man I found attractive from a distance telling someone he had to cancel going to the pub because he'd forgotten it was his kid's birthday that day. This was a week before. Total turn off: he could afford to forget it because there was a woman who had already organised a party, gifts, planned to bake a cake etc.

I do wonder how it works in same sex relationships, of each sex. I mean, if it's social conditioning, then no gay couple would ever even send a birthday card. Every lesbian couple would be on top of it.

I actually stopped buying gifts for my in-laws and let DH do that. And you know what happened? We ended up at birthday parties, family Christmas events with NO gifts for people!! He just didn't really care. Was happy to receive though.. I found it mortifying.

Anyway, what's the solution? For me it's to never live with a man again. Never get into a totally committed relationship, because quite frankly, life's too short to be doing someone else's work for free, I have other things to be getting on with.

My DH can cook well, and does at the weekend, he's middle class, he has a high pressured job with very large budgets and projects yet cannot, under any circumstances manage a household budget or schedule doctor/dentist visits for the kids.

Yanbu.

Went to a grammar school which was full of very academic girls who were told they could be whatever they wanted to be.

Fast forward, and although many of us certainly have well paid and fulfilling careers, arses still have to be wiped and cat litter trays cleaned, and nobody has quite enough money to hire a full time housekeeper.

A little less time talking about A Levels and a little more time talking about division of labour and domestic roles in a relationship would have been appreciated. I felt equal, intellectually, academically, and career wise, to my male counterparts all through school, University and my 30s. Nobody talked about this kind of thing. Then I married and had children, and all of a sudden it was as though the men had been given a memo that we'd missed, that the vagina havers still had to wash their socks and do all the necessary domestic stuff.

My friends and I are married to decent men, who were soon taught the error of their ways, but still.

And the socks need to be washed by someone

I think for me it's not just that women mostly still do these things but they are not valued. They are considered trivial nitpicking details in comparison to real achievements like high powered jobs. Why is that? We all know that a calm home and attentive loved ones are incredibly important to our well being. This is definitely not to say that women should be at home doing this. Not at all. It's just that somebody has to do it. It's as essential to everybody's health and well being as earning a salary. Whoever does it, it should not be invisible. It should be valued.

Apologies for the snark.

Maybe I hang around the feminist boards too much but the idea that women are remembering the birthdays is not exactly new or unexplored territory around here. I don’t think it’s a class thing either - plenty of middle class men pull the far too important to do wife work card, whilst working class men pitch in due to the necessity of working patterns, or having the wife’s mother pitch in (with apologies for the reductionist and simplistic stereotyping)

I think women need to give less of a shit. If the in laws don’t get a birthday card, why should it be seen as a woman’s failing? I do think there are plenty of men who won’t learn until they are alone, old and divorced, and enough women who can’t for whatever reason divorce the useless slackers.

And by God I am teaching my daughter exactly what wifework is and why she shouldn’t be doing it, and my son exactly why he should be engaging with it.

Maybe I hang around the feminist boards too much but the idea that women are remembering the birthdays is not exactly new or unexplored territory around here.*

I agree. Definitely not a new topic on MN or real life! I just think it's still at the level of people complaining about their own individual circumstances and it's not taken that seriously in comparison to the big campaigns about women and work. It's as if the domestic sphere is just an irritating thing that women can moan about but it's not really worthy of seriously changing.

My point is that everyone would would gain from some real efforts to change this. There seems to be so many issues around poor mental health and unhappiness that aren't going to be solved with yet more focus on what we do to earn money. Home and relationships are essential to our well being.

Couldn't have put it better myself. I think much of it has its roots in toxic masculinity, this idea that men don't do wirework because it's not socially acceptable is harmful to everyone.

It's harmful to the women taking on the lions share, harmful to the men who don't /won't understand what they've done wrong to make their wives leave and harmful to the children stuck in the middle.

I sincerely believe the divorce rate would plummet if there was a truly equal division of labour (which as it stands it's not)

I suppose it depends if you see your job as just a way to make money, or if you find value in doing it as well. I really enjoy my paid job, I'm under no illusion that they view me as anything other than a number, but I genuinely enjoy doing it, and the financial freedom is worth it to me. But then we consciously chose one child because for us this was a managable number. I work full time, he is away with work a lot, but he does plenty and it works for us. I think the one or the other isn't always true, but everyone and family is different.

I live in an affluent village, lots of couples outsource for things like cleaning. But it is exclusively the women who organise this. It is still the women organising doing the wife work. But I do think (hope) it may be more generational too, with younger couples having a fairer split.

We are currently having a life readjustment personally too. I now work 5 days a week, DH 3. This is a change from when we both worked 6 days a week and I ran the house and DC too (DH had a physical, exhausting job). DH has always done the odd load of washing, but now he is learning to cook, we do it together too, he does the bulk of the washing and we both tidy. All kid related stuff is still my responsibility and bills we sort together.
It's taking time for us both to adjust and more than once I've assumed he knows more than he does, it's a steep learning curve for both!
It can change, but it took a major life shift to do it.

It's great that people have partners who share this work but the reality is this is not the norm. MN is full of threads about the day to day realities of domestic life and while there are some men on here I would guess 95 percent are women and I have never heard of a similar forum where predominantly men post about the day to day chores of domestic life.

If you use women with useless lazy partners from the Relationships board on Mumsnet as your sampleset then of course you'll have confirmation bias that "most men are like that".

My DH wouldn't be arsed to post on a forum that he cooks every night, shares the ironing, makes the bed because I leave before him, sometimes cleans the toilet etc. He just does it.

Yes you're absolutely right that it has taken generations to sort the mess out, but a lot of the problem is that women fail to interview their menfolk under the spotlight of scrutiny to make bloody sure they aren't lazy useless sods. No, they stick their fingers in their ears, go la-la-la, sleepwalk into the relationship and only wake up 10 years down the line, then come on MN to whinge about how useless their 'DH' is, how they get drunk and rock up at 7am on Sunday and sleep off their hangover instead of the family day out they had promised. They don't change overnight, they will have been like that a loooong time.