Domesticity and Femininity

[ISaySteadyOn]

I should say right at the off that I struggle to reply to threads I start sometimes because I am dyspraxic and often only have my phone. I usually do read along so I don't disappear.

I've been thinking about this for a while, but this is the first time in that while that I have managed to grab the computer and not my phone. I was reading a book about the history of suburban architecture and interiors (I am a giant nerd) and I had to put it down due to the authors' snide little asides about women's attempts to make their homes prettier or more comfortable by making cushions or firescreens or blankets.

It made me think, there is a lot of underlying contempt for domesticity in general. Why is that? Why is wanting to make your home look and feel nice such a horrible thing to want? Is it because it is usually left to women to do it and anything women do is automatically frivolous and stupid even if it benefits people? Or is there a further underlying contempt for the feminine and domesticity comes under the umbrella of femininity?

I was also thinking about housework threads. It is often made out that housework is really easy and should be no bother to anybody. I don't find that it is and sometimes I feel almost unwomanly that I struggle to learn all the different bits. And does that fall within contempt for domesticity? I don't know. I'm just musing here. Anyone else have thoughts?

Butter

I like crafting, cooking, gardening and DIY. When I was married, I did mainly the crafting and the gardening. If I had to pick a favourite it would be gardening (I was a paid gardener for five years and well paid and respected!). Gardening has it all.

For me, housework is a chore to be done and perhaps this is why people get cleaners in. It's a job they don't want to do but see it as a chore and therefore, in a counter intuitive way, less respected. Of course if the cleaner left, there would be problems.

But there is a craft and skill in doing housework and this should be reflected in the status and payment.

Elendon no, no gardens are for sitting in. Preferably with food and wine. If I didn't have DH I'd have to employ a gardener I detest gardening, with the very small exception of my herb pots.

I think you are right about not valuing jobs we see as chores. Which is interesting. We should really place extra value on jobs we don't want to do because we perceive them to be unpleasant.

Datun afraid I can't link to any statistics but I'm pretty confident I'm correct. I've definitely heard the numbers quoted. I'll do some digging.

I was trying to think of the male equivalent. A job perceived as easy and therefore low status

Being a bin-man? In the old days being a night soil man?

I read somewhere that the low status of women's work has to do with old taboos around bodies, bodily fluids and waste in general. I can't remember much more, but the argument went that those jobs that involved urine, faeces, sick, pus, blood etc. were low status because of very old taboos around these. That doesn't explain the high status of medicine (as opposed to surgery, which was once considered on a parallel with being a barber) , but perhaps it is something about the conflation of sex and bodies / fluids???

So then the question becomes why are necessary things given such low status if they are actually of high value?

Possibly , because they are necessary which means vast amounts of people do them and succeed. Potty training is messy and tedious but it's not actually difficult and , special needs aside, everyone gets there in the end. On the one hand, extremely necessary for civilised society and at the same time, no big deal.

Housework and cleaning are the same. Everyone has to do it, and special needs aside, everyone can do it. A minority of people pay others to do it , but that is generally because they don't want to, not because they can't . It's boring but , talk it up as much as you like , it's not difficult.

Gardening is different. I pay someone else to clean and do the garden. If the cleaner doesn't turn up I ignore it for 1 week but will be forced to do something about it after 2. Gardening I'd have to read up about it to do properly.

I recently made DD a hoodie for school. Because it was a rush job, I was doing a lot of the work when DH was in the house. I had to convert a bigger pattern and mess with it because I only had an adult pattern. After a couple of days DH realized that sewing is really fucking hard. It's design and maths and 3D imaging and manual dexterity and a lot of visual-spatial stuff that we all know women can't do.

In the olden days, that was what housework was; brewing, weaving, making dyes and tending bees, gardening, knowing the seasons and the magic of home remedies. We've lost and outsourced a lot of that which is a great shame. And turned the chores into scrubbing taps with a toothbrush.

An ancestor of DH's was a healer (witch!) and my GM could knock up tiny, perfect clothes for dolls that were tailored. Life, I suppose, has become easier but those highly skilled and unappreciated jobs that women did have gone.

those highly skilled and unappreciated jobs that we women did have gone

Whilst this is no doubt true, I think cleaning and keeping a house running, budgeting, raising children (particularly in this day and age when there is an expectation for vast amounts of time investment in them), is often not at all easy.

And it increases exponentially with the number of children you have.

Scheduling often takes military precision. Add taking care of elderly parents (and possibly working part time) into the mix and I don't think it's at all easy.

We may not be growing our own food, and making our marmalade from scratch, but I think current expectations of women are no less demanding. And they remain unappreciated.

This book
www.amazon.co.uk/Gentle-Art-Domesticity-Jane-Brocket/dp/0340950986?tag=mumsnetforum-21
Is a nice look at some of the more traditional female centred domestic roles and places value on them. It isn't a deliberately feminist book, by any means but I enjoyed the value placed on these traditional female tasks (baking, knitting, raising children) undertaken as a choice. I haven't read it for a long time but I do remember it was unabashedly positive about choice in domestic roles.

Yy to all the points made above. But also a big side order of architects being massively aesthetically focused impractical and arrogant.

Datun, I was thinking about that the other day - I equated gardening and cleaning - both intensive manual labour which I outsource given the chance - and even my own head told me 'but gardening is a skill, you need to know about plants n stuff' - and well, cleaning is also a skill, you also need to know what can be washed with what, what cleaning products are safe/useful where etc. It's not like we spring into being able to sort washing any more than someone knows how to prune the roses!

I think it's assumed that housework takes no knowledge but there are plenty of people floundering. Witness all those posts on Mumsnet from people who dry washing indoors and don't know where their damp problem is coming from.

Damp can be exacerbated by concrete rather than lime pointing on the exterior wall bricks as concrete holds damp in.

But, yes, drying laundry indoors doesn't help.

Doesn't a lot of housework also boil down to organisation too? Am one of the ones who has gone from floundering to treading

Yes, I should have been more specific - I meant you regularly see posters who don't realise it will have an effect.

It's not like we spring into being able to sort washing any more than someone knows how to prune the roses!

Well precisely (as DH found to his cost after 'cleaning' some non-existent grease from the front of the oven with a Brillo pad, thereby removing all the dials and numbers completely).

Yy to all the points made above. But also a big side order of architects being massively aesthetically focused impractical and arrogant.

And kitchen designers who insist on putting impossible-to-clean grooves and curlicues into fitted kitchen furniture. Neatly demonstrating their cleaning experience to be pretty much around zero.

And kitchen designers who insist on putting impossible-to-clean grooves and curlicues into fitted kitchen furniture. Neatly demonstrating their cleaning experience to be pretty much around zero

Oh God - do not get me started on people designing things who have clearly never used them day to day.

Oh God - do not get me started on people designing things who have clearly never used them day to day.

If I ever want a consensus about a household product, vacuum cleaners for instance, I long ago abandoned Which? in favour of just doing an advanced search on Mumsnet.

Don't get me started on stainless cookers that have black numbers painted on and which come off with minimal wiping with cleaning products. Grumble. :)

Just to say if this turns into a thread about bodging and stupidly designed things, fine by me.

I remember reading in an LM Montgomery book something about a course called either Domestic or Household Science. I wonder if people could use something like that which might explain root causes of things like damp.

Interestingly I recently bought a new lightweight vacumn. I love it because it's light and converts from upright to cylinder, making it easy to do the stairs and overhead beams.

DH & DS on the other hand think it's poor quality because it's not as heavy as our previous dyson. So quality in their minds, is superior to usefulness.

There is definitely a macho attitude at work here. Is a task valued more highly because it requires power tools?

I can see two separate issues in your post SteadyOn.

One relates to decorative arts and the way that these have been 'put down' in comparision to men's artistic endeavours.

The other is about more mundane (in the sense that it is necessary) housework and the way that the importance of this is minimised, presumably because women do it.

I think the two are related and yet also different.

Just to say if this turns into a thread about bodging and stupidly designed things, fine by me.

Like my local hardware store giving me rat poison (after we had builders in they ran riot) which I didn't know gives the poor buggers a raging thirst. So they ate through the back of my dishwasher to get to some water. Which the dishwasher repair man thought everyone knew! Um, no.

This book is amazing Counting For Nothing
It's about all the sexist assumptions behind economics.

Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner? is also worth a read, along the same lines but less meaty.

Both books give some context to the points posters are making about the undervaluing of domestic work.

I wonder if the architecture thing is something to do with how temporary textiles are. Cushions get stained, or lose their plump. Sofas get replaced. Architects are building something to last lifetimes but your average textile product lasts - how long? 5 years? Maybe 10?

There does seem to me to be a perception that women's work focuses on temporary whereas men's focuses on permanent. Cleaning versus DIY for example. Textiles vs building is a scaled up version of that.

Is it because leaving a legacy is seen as the ultimate achievement? Is living comfortably in itself devalued? I don't know. We all want to live in luxury don't get me wrong, but it's not seen as a virtue.

Toiletries? Women's are twice the price of men's. Clothes? Women's are twice the price of men's, and often not as well made. Same with shoes.

I'm assuming this is just consumer driven. Maybe women like more disposable fashion. You can't equate that with toiletries though.