"Wifework"

[jamaisjedors]

I would have liked to post this in cognitive dissonance but it's all a bit erm... muddled and off track there so I thought I'd start a new thread based on this comment from the thread:

"Sakura Wed 29-Sep-10 11:48:51

... Read "wifework" by Maushart and you'll find that a husband increases the workload for a woman."

DH is away for 2 days, and this evening I have SO much more time on my hands.

Is this true for everyone?

Is it just because there isn't someone else to talk to?

Surely the workload (2 DSs house, garden etc.) should have doubled?

Any thoughts ?

My dads a chef and showed me loads of time but I always just wandered off and didnt listen. If it was at school and I knew I had to do it to pass I would of listened. I always need an incentive . I do think you should learn things like that at school and I havent got links but I have seen loads of articles on how life skills are going down amongst the young.

It definitely reflects my life as I dont see this wifework thing I just see loads of men and women none of them knowing how to do basic things and asking questions like 'Do you have to put water in with pasta if you boil it on the hob?' (I got asked that the other day by a girl even younger than me.) I very much doubt any woman I know will end up doing a lot of housework as they are all useless!

Yeah, but if you look at articles from the 1950s, they are also lamenting the way women can't cook like their mothers! I can't really take it seriously.

I think being unable to cook is a privilege of being reasonably well-off. There's a big incentive for most people to learn at some stage in their lives, or they'd run out of money soon.

I've been turning out cupboards this morning, going through everything and chucking out things that are superfluous to our lives and reorganising things so that life will be easier to manage in future. And, as I go, writing lists of things I must buy/mend/do.

That is, IMO, wifework if ever there was such a thing: working out constantly where we all are, what we no longer need and what we all need in future to make progress.

but a lot of people who aren't well off don't learn to cook, they just eat ever crappier processed food

A lot of this stuff about praise is interesting. One point that I remember from the book is that most women don't mind that much that they do more "wifework", what pisses them off is that their husbands don't appreciate that they do it. I wonder if that's why women buy so heavily into the idea of romance. A bunch of flowers every now and then shows appreciation. And for the man, it's a hell of a lot easier to pick up some flowers and chocolates on the way home from work than it is to sort out the kids, tidy up and cook dinner once you get home.

Yes, seth, that's true ... I was thinking about at uni, where there's a sort of culture that you learn to cook basic cheap food. It'd be good, as sunny says, if that could become part of the 'culture' at an earlier level, at school.

happy, I like appreciation, I guess I'm just touchy. I've seen quite a lot of relationships where the wife is 'praised' for being such a wonderful, saint-like mother and homemaker. It can be a dodgy concept. The problem is, the classic 1950s wife doesn't praise her husband for his hard work: she is 'grateful'. I know it is just semantics, but to me there's a shadowy implication of hierarchy that I don't like.

You could say that a bunch of flowers in exchange for housework reinforces the paradigm: the woman does fairly hard, boring, physical work; her husband brings her something she is supposed to appreciate as being pretty and useless, which has taken little of his time and energy but has cost him the money he earns. Then, she is expected to grateful for this sign of gratitude.

I know I'm over-analyzing in a really reductive, hard-line way, btw! And I know most people blur this pattern nowadays (I buy my husband flowers!). But it is quite a strange tradition when you think of it.

I was never taught wifework per se, although I believe I was socially conditioned to be a wife in someway.
My grandmother worked FT in a factory, and grandad took care of the house and 7 kids after the pit closed.
Mother worked FT, but I had lots of siblings so the house was a mess
We grazed a lot growing up.
I wish we'd had more proper meals so I try to do that for my kids, even though I was never taught myself.
DH's mother was an uber-Japanese-housewife (you don'T want to know), but I don'T think she was a doormat. DH cooks and cleans and "sees" when the bog-roll or milk has run out. Men can be trained from birth...
For me, it's the emotional work and having to "be there" that causes problems.
theButterflyEffect your post was fascinating- about how when you're sick you start to notice the wifework, simply because you cannot do it

zap - SGB's rule of thumb is that couples should have an equal amount of leisure time.

That's the only fair measure of how the housework is distributed.

zapostrophe it may be that you're experiencing a bit of cognitive dissonance i.e denial about how unfair the situation is. THere's a thread under this topic you mind find interesting. It's a really interesting thread and worth having a look at just to compare your own life with other people's experiences.

The problem I have with the "leisure" theory is that it doesn't take into account the fact that I have given up my career so DH can forge ahead with his, with wrap-around child-care. SO it may be that I get an hour or so free in the middle of the day, while the baby is asleep but I cannot be anywhere else. I can't work or take off for the day. So that has to be factored in when you think about fairness.

Sakura - yes, I have often though this but you have expressed it neatly. On the surface of it, today dh has gone to argue with clients about shitty contracts, while I am wafting in to town to have coffee with my friends...

...but actually I can't do anything meaningful with my day. I have a few hours between dropping off and picking up dd from preschool, and the whole time I will have a 2yo to amuse, fit in naps, pick up some things from town, get some washing done and, well, you know, everything. That brief coffee will be my one sanity saving adult conversation today, and even that will be 50% chatting and 50% "don't spill that / do you need a poo? / give that back to Ivan / no hitting" etc etc.

And at the end of it won't feel as though I have achieved very much.

Yuno - Read 'To Room Nineteen' by Doris Lessing - I was reading it last night, so not finished, but the main character seems to be going nuts because she doesn't have any 'real' time to herself, just as you describe. She feels she has lost her identity...

Yes, Yuno. Sometimes I take DS to a coffee shop after dropping DD off at nursery. First of all it is the least relaxing place in the world to take a 1 year old. Second of all there are loads of men in suits in there "doing business" over a coffee, or literally just on their own sipping coffee . I am working my arse off with DS, but to society it appears as though they are working and I'm not. It's so backward