To ask why women are expected to do everything?

[HolyGuacamole28]

I read a depressing article in the Economist today ‘How Motherhood affects careers’ and it stated how more and more women are not progressing as they should after having children. And SAHP is on the rise as more people opt out of a system doomed to failure. I just don’t understand how mothers are physically supposed to work full time in a career/senior role (I do), manage a household (I have a 4 year old, 2 year old and a husband, also FT) that includes washing, cleaning, cooking etc and do activities with the kids, keep fit and see friends. Is this what society expects? Who is supposed to do the household role if both adults work full time? And why do we need two incomes just to survive? (COL is so painful re mortgages, childcare, energy, food). Rant over, just can’t see how society has evolved, it’s just put more on our shoulders. I’m personally at breaking point.

I reckon I do more than half, my wife probably thinks she does more than half, we’re probably right down the middle. Yes my job pays way more and is way more pressured but don’t enable your partners. Unless you’ve agreed to an uneven split and you work way less hours fight against it early.

I think lots of women are surviving - not living. I think there is a generation of men who were raised by SAHM who expect the same duties to be carried out by wives who work full time. My ex failed to understand why it was unfair not to share parenting / household duties equally when both parents work equal amounts. In his eyes I was lazy if I asked for him to do any chores. If he helped with parenting he referred to it as “babysitting” like he was doing me a favour. Being the highest earner gave him the right to do nothing other than his 9-5 job. I can only hope younger men raised by working mums will have greater respect for their partners when they reach adulthood.

Thanks for your detailed reply :)

I think we can't just shake off tens of thousands of years of biology-driven culture. And today we expect we can, yet it's not working out like that.

Everything is a clusterfuck but the division between men and women us still relentlessly widened despite alleged progress.
I've heard that in the most 'equal' societies (I think Scandinavian ones are often mentioned), women and men seem to choose more stereotypical roles.

I would comment with my opinions and experiences as a woman and a mother but whenever I express myself on MN I get accused of being a man. Thanks, so-called Sisterhood! @HolyGuacamole28 yanbu

Why do so many women accept that it's their role?

The amount of posters blaming women is utterly depressing.

I found it strange that after years of going out with my boyfriend, he managed to send birthday/christmas cards just fine. As soon as we married, he forgot and thought that I would do it?! After a few complaints from annoyed relatives of his, I felt compelled to start sending them out. After 10 years, I realised I was a people pleaser. I didn't have cards from his relatives yet I was posting theirs out. I just stopped without telling him. Now he goes to the shop and manages to post them himself just fine. So I think the answer is, we do it to ourselves. We have to stop "helping" and pleasing people.

Oh, I don't know, I will take a wild fucking guess and assume it's got something to do with years of social conditioning and living in Patriarchal society????

This. Where are all the husbands / fathers?

There are so many women whose partners do fuck all. Why do you allow this?

My husband and I chose to switch stereotypical roles, I work full time and he works freelance/part time to cover most of the things at home and the childcare. We also have 4 and 2 year old children. We decided to stay in our current house for the time being so we weren’t stretched financially while the kids are still young. It’s plenty big enough for us all and the mortgage payments are low. It works for us and we have a good balance at the moment. I think it becomes difficult when it’s necessary to have two full time wages just to survive, while this may be necessary in
some parts of the country I don’t think it is in all by any means.

But that’s the point of the thread - where the bar is, and how that is signalled at population level to both men and women. This is how social conditioning works. Individuals can buck the trend but denying that women are conditioned to do it all is just victim blaming.

All of you need to look outside your own bubble. It’s a lot harder for eg to buck the trend if you’re not from a liberal middle class background (and by liberal I mean socially not politically liberal).

it’s the equivalent of telling people living in poverty that they just need to learn to cook from scratch and stop moaning about £20 per week food budgets.

ETA I meant to quote @BIWI here.

To all the households who employ cleaners / domestic help to spread the home workload, the ( mainly ) women who do this work do it because they have children at school and can’t do contractual hours, so it’s self perpetuating and filters down.
This is not a criticism - I did several of these jobs for some lovely people because I had to as a lone parent, and also occasionally had a cleaner myself. But I couldn’t have a permanent job I actually liked until my son was at secondary school.

Exactly this. When me and OH started living together, I made it crystal clear that we'd be doing the "chores" equally and started that habit on the day we moved in. He was under no illusions that I'd be doing anything more than my fair share. Going back even further really, when we used to go on holiday together, I made him wring out and hang out the washing, make the bed, wipe around the bathroom sink after brushing teeth, shaving, etc. I do the washing up, he does the drying and putting away. We do the garden jointly too - either of us will mow the lawn, pick up leaves, trim branches, etc. Same with washing the cars. Not a single thing is "his job" "my job" - it's BOTH our jobs and whichever one of us will do it when we see something needs doing!

You need to "train" them early on!!!

Set boundaries. Make it clear that if they see something messy, bits on the floor, etc., then get out the vacuum or cloths without having to be told. It becomes ingrained behaviour.

Same with "life admin" like paying bills, getting quotes for insurance, phone/tv/broadband contracts, organising car MOTs and services, etc. Either of us does that kind of thing, as and when needed. Nothing like that is "my" job nor "his" job.

My father was a very "hands on" Dad and did loads around the house, so I just assumed it was normal for men to do similar to the woman. My first serious boyfriend was a total lazy slob - his flat was an unbelievable dirty mess. I soon binned him as I wasn't putting up with any of that! Luckily, my OH saw things my way and that's why we're still together 35 years later!!

Same. Women being allowed to work was not the issue.

Also some children are most positively impacted by adults outside the home, so even if you do believe “raising the next gen” is the most important job it’s not something that only parents do. There are men and women doing paid work as teachers, youth workers etc that are also raising the next generation and in some cases doing it more effectively.

I don’t think the model of 2 parents working FT plus kids actually works. You need a third person in the marriage to do the domestic work, childcare, cooking, cleaning and admin. It can all be done if you’re very organised but it’s far from ideal.

I mean, look at the thread running where OP is asking if she should have a second baby when her marriage is rocky and DH isn't contributing to the household or child-raising properly. Loads of posters telling her to go for it.

It makes me sad.

These threads ALWAYS blame the man, or the woman who enables the man. Yes equal partners equal responsibilities. But still. DH and I both work full time, have children, family that needs support, have the house to run, cars to service, a garden to maintain. Not everyone has brilliant time management skills. For most of us its still too much to have two full time working parents and manage a house and family. It would be a lot better if only one income was needed for a family to survive and parents could choose who will stay home or to share the load and both work part time. Or choose to both work but then have enough income to pay for all the support needed to enable that. But then again it would also be nice if EVERY family could afford to buy food and not use food banks. Basically if life were more affordable then maybe we wouldn't have to pitch male against female in a race to the bottom of who does most in their downtime.

Yes to all of this! It's taken me a while to unlearn the whole "women can have it all" trope but when you really give it some consideration we're here as a result of utterly underestimating the amount of work that women of previous generations did. Being a parent and keeping a house is a full time job in and of itself, and even if you can split the work evenly between both parents while working, it still means you're working 3 full time jobs between 2 people, its barely sustainable. Unfortunately it's the childcare that ends up outsourced as that's the job that doesn't pull in the money!

I agree that running a home is time consuming and exhausting, which is why if you have both partners working full time, BOTH need to make an equal contribution in terms of time and mind space to running the home/family.

It often comes up when there's a SAHP alongside a very high earning partner. The high earning partner is probably working long hours, high stress job, out of hours work, business travel, etc., and "needs" someone at home doing the chores so that they don't have to, because they wouldn't be able to do their job AND their share of the household chores! The SAHP is doing a job of looking after the home and family and supporting the high earning partner. Yet, they're often looked down on for being lazy and grabby etc. But in reality, if it weren't for them, the high earning partner wouldn't be able to do their job (not the long term anyway). It's common with self employed people who are basically always working - they couldn't do that around looking after a home and childcare etc.

Unfortunately the default is still on women to sort everything - as seen on a lot threads men still aren't pulling their weight with childcare, household chores, life admin.

I agree it does seem to be the norm that the mum works ft (as needs to financially) whilst expecting to be the cook, cleaner and look after the children. A lot of families still aren't a partnership in this aspect yet!

I was talking to my dp about similar yesterday and we do have more a partnership / work as a team- about looking after our dd, if sick we take it in turns to have time off, both do school pick up where possible, cooking we share, cleaning still working on as we have different standards but he is responsible for the tidying of bathroom and lounge. I want my dd to see that's how it should be, and this be the basic/ norm, not I do everything! Not saying we have it perfect, as we definitely don't, but I want to be this role model for my dd.

I think a lot of women resonate with this point. I have made the choice to be a SAHP for my son's early years because it is what I want and I feel extremely fortunate to be in a position to do so. I see a lot of high earning women on mumsnet who will criticise other women for this (Dads never get criticised for wanting to stay at home) and will talk about how a women must have felt societal pressure to do this because it was what their own mothers and grandmothers did. Well, actually, no. Working class women have always worked. Both of my Grandmothers, who were raising children in the 1950s/60s, both worked. One in a hospital and the other in a shoe factory. My own Mother always, and still does, work. This was the norm in the working class community where I grew up. The attitude of 'oh men are lazy because they grew up in a time when women stayed at home' is a very upper middle class perspective.

I know what you mean OP. I had DD and after maternity I resigned from my job as they wouldn’t flex at all on hours (long commute too). Friends and family were astonished I’d left my job, how were we going to cope with one salary, etc. I got a new job just 3 months later. Then the questions started about how was I going to manage childcare as well, what a shame DD was going to have to go to a childminder etc. MiL kept telling me to find a job in a school as the hours would be better. No suggestion at any point that DH should change his work, his hours, find something close by.

I've also ensured our son did his fair share of household chores when he was a teenager, i.e. making his bed, keeping his room tidy, helping empty the dishwasher, bringing in the washing from the line, etc., not necessarily because I wanted the help, but to get him into the habit of looking after himself and not relying on others (or worse, not doing stuff at all). We, as parents, need to set examples to our kids, show them that their fathers do housework too, show them that they need to do their fair share, so that when they grow up, they don't inherit the old fashioned stereotype of the mother doing it all.

I totally agree with BIWI. Men take this piss. But why let them? Just stop. I stopped when DC were very small. Just stopped. DH is now fully house trained and does 50%. It pisses me off that because of this he thinks he is some god and that he does more than his share. he doesn't. He does his share and I do mine. I don't think I'm a God for getting on with it. But at least I am no longer so frazzled that I fall asleep with my nose on my keyboard when I should be picking up DC from primary school.