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This no longer works, and has not for generations. A man making such a complaint -- or worse, pointing out that as the main (or sole) source of external income, he's doing a lot for the household already -- by doing so proves himself a boor and probably a wifebeater. That has been part of the influence of feminism on culture; a man is obligated to do his share of everything, and his share is whatever the woman says it is.
Oh hey, yet another opportunity to make a "my wife" post. Here I go.
My wife, who naturally is a feminist, is occasionally reasonable, but often keeps snapping back to this position. Subsequently, anything that I do not do, whether it involves parenting, household, paperwork or "mental work" or "emotional labor" or whatever the latest pop-sci terminology is, is a failing on my part. I should be doing everything, so that she is free to pursue her dreams and therapies so that she can become the breadwinner by becoming a well-selling author of books or some other pipe-dream. My working a decently-paying white-collar job while expecting her to pull her weight is me chaining us to a less-than-perfect state in which we cannot fulfill our true potential. As long as she is not given a little paradise to exist in, free of cares, anything is an imposition upon her and I am falling short.
Doesn't matter whether I do all the earning, all the driving, any task that involves leaving the house, part-time parenting on regular days and full-day parenting on weekends (if I fall asleep by mid-Sunday, she graciously takes over by plopping our daughter down in front of the TV). That's par for the course. That's just taken for granted. What kind of man would I be to do any less, or to expect gratitude for this? OTOH, if she can't be assed to set an alarm clock and considers playing video games for a full day adequate compensation for having cooked a meal, then well, she's just aware of her needs and limitations, I cannot possibly demand more of her, don't I know she has anxieties and panic attacks and slept poorly and had a bellyache from eating a full meal and sweets at midnight. By the way, I didn't remember to do the laundry yesterday and went to bed immediately after our daughter fell asleep instead of being available for couple time, so I am the asshole.
Disclaimer: My wife also has her good days sometimes, but those would get in the way of a good wifepost rant. Maybe I should try to quantify this kind of stuff.
was she like that when you married her?
I guess so.
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I think there's a growing, albeit loose, awareness that's slowly spreading leftward that to a considerable extent, some of these "female burdens" are actually self-imposed rather than a systemic plot against them. I'd tentatively call it fifth-wave feminism, but I don't know if it would develop enough to earn the title. There would be a kind of interesting circular symmetry, though. I personally think it makes more sense to shift the waves a little earlier than they are traditionally defined, which defines the "4th wave" as distinct from the 3rd, starting maybe 2010? This is all US-specific:
Proto-feminism (1700s-1850): The sphere of influence of the woman expands within the home and traditional spaces, gaining greater influence over education and child-rearing, but also moral leadership
First Wave feminism (1850-1920): Suffrage and expanding political and legal rights as people, fuller participants across society, and increasing job access
Second Wave feminism (1943-1980): "women's liberation", sexual revolution, pushback against gender roles especially traditional ones, equal legal rights across the system
Third Wave feminism (1990-2010): push for full equality in more than name only, less sexism and harassment at all society levels, more individualistic expression, greater job access, and intersectionality with race
Fourth Wave feminism (2010-present): push for absolute parity in all fronts, more full integration of LGBTQ issues, focus on smaller but systemic oppressions, #MeToo, and consent.
Fifth Wave feminism (2030-45?): re-claiming of certain traditional feminist roles and preferences, more private and interpersonally oriented, praise of archetypes, and conscious rejection of parity goals
As to how that would affect men, hard to say. I am skeptical that outright men's rights movements would meaningfully develop, but there could be a traditionalist faction that grows alongside fifth-wave feminism. Think the growth of less politically active men-only clubs and associations as social media reaches epidemic/oversaturation levels and people look for a counter-movement. Like, both genders playing up their traditional strengths rather than trying to make up for their own weaknesses, which seems to be the fourth-wave attitude. I'd note that the fourth wave somewhat devalues gender entirely, ironically, partly due to the incorporation of nonbinary and trans stuff - and I think that's what might set the stage for a fifth wave that kind of echoes the proto-feminist Wave Zero.
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I tried this one weird trick called "going to church" and through that met a hot girl in her 20s (I was mid-late 30s) who was excited about homemaking and being a mother. Rolls her eyes at the word 'feminism'. More people should try it.
Her take is that I'm already working hard to support us and she's obviously biologically/psychologically better-suited to making babies and cleaning the house. Why would she expect that of me?
My mom taught me to never buy a household/kitchen appliance as a gift for a woman, as that would somehow be denigrating. But for Christmas I bought my wife the snazzy new vacuum cleaner she'd had her eye on and she just loves the thing to pieces. Vacuums the house twice a day.
Turns out women can be really happy to be women, and act as the natural compliment to men, when no one raises them to hate the idea. Our next baby is due any day now and I'm working hard to expand my business to more than cover all the new expenses that will bring. I can do this because she supports me as I support her. I come home to a clean (and pleasant-smelling) house, good food, thriving children, and usually a decent massage before bed. Really takes the stress of the day out of me before I fall asleep. Getting up the next day and rocking hard comes easy.
Meanwhile, last night, I was hanging out with a mixed crowd when a lonely, bitter, circa 35-year old woman I've been acquainted with for several years -- has a professional career and a house -- was crowing about some article she'd read regarding how men are feeling bad about 'falling behind' economically. The satisfaction in her voice was palpable.
Teach your children well.
Just saying, look! Turning away from Christianity has been a social disaster on a scale previously impossible to imagine. I'd rather be single than try to date a secular woman. Meanwhile the landscape is dotted with little islands of sanity where men, women, and families are still quietly humming along in harmony and deep cohesion. Isn't the protocol obvious?
........nice.
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How does it work for those who don't have a business?
Don't want to be glib here. It's a serious question, I have a lot of sympathy, and wish to treat it (and you) with respect.
I can't imagine not having a business. When I was younger I worked some corporate jobs and found them soul-crushing. Not just for all the obvious reasons, but also because of the total disconnect between effort and reward. Working for myself I never know how much I'll make in a year -- and that's a good thing!
I know exceedingly few people who are making 'real' money (>$200k/year) except that they have their own businesses. Those few tend to be high-level FAANG engineers. The rest are tradesmen or some other kind of independent contractor. This makes sense. The purpose of a company is to generate profit for the owners. Ergo, unless you're an owner, you will be paid the precise minimum amount the management thinks possible, and will always be vulnerable to getting replaced or otherwise eliminated. The people paying you have many incentives to do that. Never mind the psychic burden of constantly having to play their asinine games to try to avoid the chopping block.
"Just go start a business lol" isn't helpful advice. But the fact remains that small (even personal) businesses have comparatively massive potential upside. If you find the right niche for yourself, every day is suddenly a golden opportunity for advancement. It's a much better way to live, at least IME. I recall reading somewhere that self-employed people are 1) much more stressed and 2) much happier.
Especially in the coming era of AI agents, finding any skill that you can sell independently is going to be worth looking into.
Beyond that it's hard to give advice. There are already many people in my life, whom I know well and care about, for whom I'm always trying to solve this problem. Brothers, friends, etc. Owning my business is high-status but working for me isn't, so I get in a weird bind with trying to give them a leg up. My profit margins are insane and I can generally pay favored people several times the going rate, but am reluctant to do so because that just gets them stuck in a position of dependence upon me which is not the goal.
Perhaps the only real encouragement I can offer is that I've never known anyone who was set on going independent who didn't ultimately make it one way or another. In many ways it feels to me like becoming an adult, striking out on your own, learning hard lessons, and ultimately reaching a sort of maturity.
This was certainly the case for me. I'm the typical 'dropped out of school to start a business' bro, and as is typical that business burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp. But, yes, the fourth one stayed up.
If you want to pursue it, there are plenty of resources for small business education and usually some pretty good local networks. Online 'entrepreneurial' spaces are generally full of blowhards and grifters but sometimes yield good information.
I wish you all the best.
Thanks for the well wishes, but my question was not a veiled request for personal life advice, as I've already noted downthread. I'm meant it quite literally: you must be aware that even if all people were capable, they could not all have businesses. (Disregarding weird economical models where everyone is their own boss but also has a side job where they work for someone else). So, how does your advice to go full Christian provider husband for a homemaker 10 years your junior work for those who are not so financially independent and stable? How much credit can those "little islands of sanity" really give to Christianity, and how much do they owe to being, simply put, rich?
There's a separate question of the self-honesty of converting, but that's a separate question.
The idea that both parents working makes a huge financial difference is overblown IMO. I read somewhere that something like 80% of the 'extra' income a second working spouse brings gets lost amidst taxes, additional expenses related to commuting, outsourcing domestic labor, and so on. Is the remainder really worth giving up all the wonderful things that come with having a stay at home spouse? We get to raise our own kids, eat fresh, healthy meals, live in a clean house, and so on. What's that worth?
To your point, most of the families in our parish (which is heavily blue collar) seem to struggle financially to maintain this lifestyle. In some cases mom works part or even full-time, but especially given the exorbitant cost of childcare (and the deplorable state of the schools) this is generally seen as something to be avoided if possible. It's simply a question of priorities. And, since the women are generally not working, they help each other out a lot with childcare and so on. It's truly a joy to walk into a home and find women sitting around a table chattering and having fun while preparing a meal, while kids zip in and out.
Almost every (secular) couple I can think of where both partners work full-time could easily downsize a bit and be much happier, imo. The main hangup is often (as in the case of my sister) that women have been so psy-opped into thinking this is low-status that they can't be at peace with it. This is monstrous and the people responsible should pay. As to my sister, she openly complains about how much she hates her job, misses her kids, and pays for daycare, but explicitly refuses to quit because she wants to set a 'good feminist example' for her daughters, who seem to spend most of their time on iPads and in front of the TV while eating junk food because both parents are so burned out all the time.
One I'd be really happy to field.
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Start one.
100% dead serious.
Plenty of good info on the written internet (not YouTube) about starting a side hustle, gradually growing it, and then taking plunge while also managing your primary career for the few years you need to incubate.
With LLMs, it's never been easier to rapidly experiment with digital products and software.
You misunderstand. I'm not asking for advice on my own life. I'm asking how TitaniumButterfly's picture of idyllic newly-converted affluent Christian life translates to those who are not already ahead in life.
This reminds me of the instagram Orthodox who are selling a picture of "harmony" in their country villa with their handmade cheese or whatever.
But if you do want to talk about me, then I'll tell you I don't see myself experiencing a genuine retvrn to faith any time soon, whether I become a stable business owner or not, and even if I went to church to pick me up a homely wife, I would still not call myself a Christian in the privacy of my own mind.
I think @TitaniumButterfly's post covers all the important points for people who don't have a business as well.
I dont understand your middle paragraph about the Orthodox and handmade cheese?
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Except for the babies part, sounds like a just-so-story that is perhaps applicable to some couples but is not generally applicable and probably not majority. The higher-IQ shape-rotator is better at most of the activities involved in organizing and cleaning the house than the wordcel. To the extent it is true that males have better spatial IQ or are successful males from the male longer right high-Q tail, they are also better at cleaning the house (unless they are from low-IQ tail that goes lower than women, but who brags about that?).
If dad is better compensated at work, stay-at-home mom has kinda the comparative advantage at division of labor, doing larger share of housework as she is staying-at-home. However, it is arrangement very specific to time and place and income distributions, and the evospych explanations are not super believable. The arrangement "the ancients" were most psychologically suited for according to their revealed preferences was "servants do it" when they were rich enough to obtain servants -- this evohistorical imperative would guide that wife should enough to earn income if you can get more servants, with preference for work she can do working at home watching over the servants and kids (until you have enough reliable servants who can take care of kids full time).
It is worth noting that in the specific context of current day and time 21st century West, men who claim they are not "psychologically suited" to pick after themselves are overrepresented among undesirable demographics. Making it a rule that everyone in the house participates in homemaking is a good way to countersignal membership in the conscientious, desirable parts of Western culture, including teaching the sons that Mom (and any sisters) are not their servants.
Shape-rotator vs wordcel is not the relevant comparison here. You can make a living as either one (e.g. engineer vs lawyer, or truck driver vs used car salesman) and while women are almost never shape-rotators, all the top wordcels are men as well.
The biggest difference is thing-oriented vs people-oriented. Remember, "Kinder, Küche, Kirche". Keeping house by cooking and cleaning is only about a third of what a housewife is supposed to do. She is also supposed to raise the children, which is something women are much more suited to as they are naturally much more soft and nurturing. And she is expected to be in charge of managing the family's social life, which is again very likely her comparative advantage because women are much more people-oriented than men.
Men who will effortlessly memorize every detail of the Roman empire will struggle to remember their friends' birthdays. Housewives are the social glue that holds communities together. They are the ones who send greetings, schedule visits, organize parties, matchmake singles. Little wonder we are so atomized, with their numbers thinning.
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Is your wife's role in the family actually complimentary to you or simply a lower station? Because it seems to me like if you swapped positions, you could do her job perfectly well (minus the pregnancy bit), but she'd have no idea how to run your business.
I suppose that your relationship might be described as harmonious compared to alternatives, but you and other trad types have to own the fact that (edit: modern) homemaking is a low status occupation and that many women won't be happy with that.
Both.
I don't want to divulge too much personal info here but she was making six figures in finance when I met her and graduated very high in her class from a fairly prestigious school (for the West Coast). She does help run my business. Personally I don't have much patience for jumping through hoops but she loves it and can do it all day. Also handles a lot of the bookkeeping.
It is honestly adorable to me that you think this is a problem for us. We're not watching mainstream TV (which is blatantly satanic), we're not listening to mainstream music (which is blatantly satanic), our kids don't get phones until they're basically adults, and most importantly of all, the women in our parish do not care in the slightest what mainstream culture considers low-status. Have you seen mainstream culture? Everyone there is miserable. They think 'community' means fandom. They have kids out of wedlock, don't get married, and when they do, they get divorced. The men and women are utter failures as men and women and don't seem to have a single clue as to what either of those words even means. They murder babies and mutilate their children into grim parodies of the opposite sex. Why on earth would we care about their opinions? Who takes life advice from someone who's climbing into a suicide pod? And you think we look silly, backwards, and ignorant.
Magic happens when young people grow up worried about what Christ thinks instead of what the imaginary people on TV might think.
Where would one find this ”blatantly satanic” mainstream music?
Asking for a friend,
Lil Nas X slides down a stripper pole to hell and gives the devil a lapdance. And somehow that's not the weirdest part of the music video
[Edited and expanded below]
You could make an argument that the above Lil Nas X reference is just this generations version of freaking out the squares. Didn't Black Sabbath do that back in the 60s and 70s? But they didn't mean it. Hell, IIRC, Alice Cooper is a notorious evangelical but was still performing stage shows that featured simulated decapitation. What's all the fuss about?
The level one reply is that, as the Lil Nas X video shows, there's this weird hyper-fetish-sexualization present that wasn't before. Multiple grammy performances in the past ten years can be legitimately called non-nude strip shows. Kaye pulled that weird stunt earlier this year with his ... wife?
But that's level one stuff. Let's go deeper.
Here are some of the lyrics to a song entitled "Kill Yourself (Part III)" by a group calling themselves "SuicideBoys":
(Are you sensing a theme already?)
This is profound nihlism and misanthropy.
SuicideBoys are most popular with younger Gen-Z. These people are essentially still in childhood and they're listening to triple-dense messages of "kill yourself." That's the satanism - creating such a feeling of despair precisely in the group of people who should be the most energetically hopeful.
I was expecting some bangin’ black metal (translated lyrics) and all I get is some shitty hiphop?
Son, I am disappoint.
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Great for you, legitimately. It sounds like you have a good thing going for both of you, and I don't mean to denigrate your particular situation, whatever it may be. I was more trying to use your framing to make a broader point.
Mainstream culture has nothing to do with the point I'm making here.
Some things are more or less valuable by their very nature, including labor roles. Hard work and simple living will always have its place, but the moneychangers will have theirs too, and they'll always be more individually valuable and materially better off than the salt of the earth types. When status corresponds with practical value (as it has to greater or lesser degrees in every society on Earth), more valuable work = more status.
I posit that modern housewives are less essential to the functioning of the household than they've ever been, and that this reduction in utility has resulted in a concomitant reduction in status. Women's work has been declining in utility ever since the transition to agriculture, but the trend became turbocharged with the Industrial Revolution; it's no coincidence that feminism began in earnest in the mid-1800s. This status reduction can be moderated with religiosity (as in your case), but not negated. This is why we cannot simply "RETVRN" — not without adaptation, anyways. I have my own ideas about how to manage this on a societal scale, but I'm glad that you've made it work for you.
Thanks, yes, it's a happy way to be. (Also props for preserving the formatting in the quote.)
Right, yes, I see your point now. One of the great, uh, anti-innovations of trad life is that women aren't competing with men for status. They certainly wish to display their worth before marriage, which is why mine has a degree, but after that she gets to check out of the status wars except in that we're functioning as a unit and rise together. The whole concept of women competing with men is toxic and imo a losing game for all involved.
Disagree with the first part and will break it down into a few subsections.
Modern education is generally garbage and homeschooling is king. Exceedingly difficult to accomplish without one stay at home parent. Men are almost always better-suited to earn, so it makes sense for this to be the woman.
Modern childcare is also about as bad as it is unaffordable. Especially if you have multiple small children. My wife takes the kids to the park, does projects with them, reads, etc. This is vastly better than sitting in front of a TV all day eating processed snacks, which seems to be the norm in daycares.
For food, you can pick any two of 'healthy, delicious, both people have jobs'. I'd like to put 'affordable' in there but we spend >$2k/month on expensive hippy foods so I'm really not one to talk. But for example as I type this she's bringing me water, making tea the way I like, and then will make a green smoothie for both of us. I could pay for the latter two, but they wouldn't be as good and they'd probably be shockingly expensive if there are even comparable options out there.
Maintaining a household doesn't take anywhere near as much labor as it used to but this just enables maintaining much higher standards of cleanliness and pleasantness. Especially when we add in the gardening, animals, etc. Again all this could be outsourced but probably would cost a great deal for much less impressive results.
In summary, there's a whole level of lifestyle available with a non-working wife that simply can't be attained any other way. This lifestyle is high-status. When women living this way are concerned about status, they're comparing themselves to their counterparts, not to men. Who's house is better put-together? Whose kids are excelling? What do meals and family time look like? Much healthier.
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What people value is culture specific in many cases. Jobs didn’t really become aspirational until the median white male was working an office job. Women didn’t clamor to work in factories, they were quite content with minor teaching and nursing roles and being the occasional secretary. At this point they chose to work. Having a wife who didn’t work up to that point was a status symbol as it meant you earned enough to not need a second income.
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While it's true that he could almost certainly do all the actual tasks, it's very likely that he couldn't do it happily, without becoming bored and alienated, which is actually quite rare and valuable. Assuming, of course, that his description is accurate.
Have you read the recent ACX post about Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids? I want to have a top level post about it, but haven't thought of anything interesting to say for that. I enjoy Scott's honesty about being an introverted professional writer with twin babies and a wife who's probably something like him, and very much not a Christian twenty-something who's happy about vacuuming. His wife is apparently staying with the kids, but he feels guilty (presumably she's overwhelmed, not happily keeping a clean house and warm meals), and hires a nanny. Even with the nanny and wife at home, they are still overwhelmed.
Scott:
Which is just such a funny exchange.
Neither Scott nor Caplan sound like they could successfully do the non childbearing parts of Mrs. TitaniumButterfly's work.
Yeah. I read it and my reaction was pretty much the same kind of loss-for-words exasperation I feel when my wife tells me that I cannot possibly have expectations of her, don't I know she has excuses? Why, Scott, you have a stay-at-home wife, two kids, a nanny, several friendly families living in the same block, and then you feel a need to also hire two babysitters on top of all that? Yeah, taking care of kids is exhausting. No shit, Scott - did you think getting kids at age 40 wouldn't be taxing? Two of them at the same time to boot. And still, his complaints in the face of that many resources thrown at the problem smells of...I don't know what to call it without throwing out schoolyard insults like "sissy" or "pussy". Methinks Scott complaineth overmuch. Or maybe I'm just jealous of his "privilege", be that wealth or whatnot, regardless of whether it's earned or otherwise.
Man, I work full-time and then I parent all the rest of the time except for maybe about two hours after getting my daughter to sleep. If Scott's numbers are correct, then I put in more parenting time than his stay-at-home wife. Which isn't to say that I'm the better man; far from it, my life is a mess. But seriously. They're doing something very wrong if the two of them can't hack it without hiring an entire fireteam of helpers.
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That was truly ridiculous. Scott makes enough money that his wife can afford to stay at home and be a homemaker, plus he works from home himself so he is available to help out when necessary, and he still feels the need to hire her a nanny. What exactly is she bringing to the marriage besides her uterus? It can't be pussy, because Scott is asexual. At this rate, he would have been better off just paying a surrogate and going at it as a single father.
Many people don't have such a transactional view of marriage, and are happy to do their best to make each other comfortable and happy. It makes a lot of sense to me to have boring household chores be delegated to someone else rather than waste your life doing them if you can afford to do so.
Somewhat afield from the example, but I actually think that my peers among the PMC hire too-few domestic servants, and that hiring more would be obviously correct. The only reason for someone making north of $300k a year to do their own laundry and do their own dishes, if they don't enjoy it personally, is out of some misguided self-conceit as middle class or a discomfort with interacting with the proletariat. Both they and the people they hire would be better off.
I'm reading The Original Preppy Handbook from 1980 right now, and one of the certified summer activities for rich young girls was to hire on as a "mother's helper" for another rich family summering in the Hamptons or the Vineyard. Where did things like that go? Obviously beneficial arrangement for all involved.
Since they disallowed banging the babysitter everyone thinks it’s pointless.
Such a shame, without that dynamic we wouldn't have one of the most brutal scenes in film history: when the wife arrives home in Mystic Pizza having just missed her husband taking the babysitter's virginity, and innocently comments that he "forgot to pay her before she leaves."
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FWIW, this was also a common activity for poor girls in rural Germany as late as the 1950s.
It's an obviously good activity to engage in!
But I find it particularly striking in the context of rich American girls bound to be third generation at Harvard or Vassar, to get a summer job as domestic help raising kids.
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I don't suppose you think he wants the child to have a mother?
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I spend a lot of time around hippies where the women are into archaic revival stuff. They love to pick fruit and can it, do sewing and quilts, cook every meal at home, make candles, split firewood, stoke the fire in the wood stove, let a man slaughter but then pluck and butcher chickens, tend hens for eggs, pick up raw milk, worry 100x too much about recycling, run a homebrew kit, etc
(Ironically, the only thing that they don't bring back is washboard laundry. Washing machines are totally cool with hippies)
Anyway, housewifery was actually really fucking hard? Pretty sure the average modern man would have a nervous breakdown if they had to be a 17th century housewife.
It's a lot easier than it used to be but the level that women think on if they own housewifing is certainly something I feel like a tourist in and would be shitty at no matter how much a feminist dad I wanted to be.
I suppose average modern anybody who has not the habit doing it and everyone's life truly would depend on it. Agriculture tasks that requires upper body strength are equally* hard and nervewracking, which is what the men would have been doing. On the other hand, house that would do well enough would employ servants.
Also, near all the the stuff you list sounds secondary. I remember reading that majority of 17th century woman's time would have gone to clothes and textiles, and not the "fun crafts" parts like quilting. Spinning is boring, and you'd have to do it for all textiles in the household.
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It was. Let's assume you're still a farmer's wife with livestock and a gaggle of children to care for. The big changes are:
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I know some women who are like that as well, and can see the appeal. You can use the greywater from the washing machine for the orchard, if you're into that kind of thing.
Those are mostly creative, social kinds of hobbies that are fun to do with children once they aren't absolute babies. I was homeschooled, and basically did 4-H instead of middle school, so we were always keeping animals, sewing, quilting, making fancy leather projects, and so on. My family uses a wood stove for heat, and we have a dead fruit tree that at some point we need to chop and split for firewood, which we plan to do ourselves. My housemate used to do home-brew stuff, and it looked like fun, I would definitely consider it.
But also, those are things men also participate in, more than cleaning, probably because they're more interesting than cleaning. It's extremely hard to keep things clean in a truly equal house with children, where nobody is extremely conscientious. My parents' house is very bad in that way, but many home crafts have been made there.
I love reducing waste, but a few nitpicks: you probably only want to use the rinse water, and you still want to be careful about what kind of detergent you use, and you're only going to get enough waste water from the family clothes washer to cover a tree or two, so do have additional irrigation plans for anything large enough to call an orchard.
(my parents weren't "into" that, but they were frugal and we lived in a desert, so my dad would often switch the washer drain from a sewer line to a hose-out-on-the-lawn for a load's final rinse cycle)
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That's true, a lot of archaic household tasks require true skill and specialization such that they're legitimately complimentary to men's work; I don't mean to diss actual traditional housekeeping. The problem is that we're living in the 21st century, and you can't meaningfully specialize into vacuuming and Crock-Pot operation.
Maybe I'm especially retarded but if I was house husband I'd probably outsource so much of the food and cleaning because I'd lose my mind trying to plan the day/week and stick to it and go to pieces if something came up that threw it off. And I'd also feel like none of this shit fills my cup and I'd be miserable.
To say nothing of how much worse it would be if I added kids to take care of.
My husband has done it, and finds it harder than most jobs, emotionally. We buy a lot of half prepared food from Costco. Out house is not clean.
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Sure, it's possible that women have some temperamental lean towards homemaking, but I haven't seen any rigorous establishment of that premise. By my informal observation, you don't see a broad movement of stay-at-home dads complaining about having to be around their kids and do chores all day, and in any case the actual complexity of the work (and thus its associated status) is still low.
They don't, necessarily. But if TitaniumButterfly says he found one who does, and is excited to get a vacuum for Christmas, I guess I'll go with that story for her, specifically. I do not personally know any women like that. I've known several with mothers who drilled the necessity of housekeeping into them and are neurotic and angry but effective about household things, but that isn't the same thing.
Yeah, because people would tell them to get a job and put their kids in childcare. Which is also what they mostly say to women who complain about it. Or get a nanny, in some social circles.
In the sense that she's doing the job of one and a half nannies plus a maid, that is correct, that is lower social status than running a business.
But plenty of higher status people would suck doing lower status work. It is complementary but unequal.
I meant the stay-at-home dad comment to mean more that men don't seem to be particularly unsuited to housekeeping, certainly not to a similar extent that (trads say) women are unsuited for work outside the home.
I'm still not convinced that their roles are really complementary, and my impression is that it used to be less unequal. When everyone's a farmer/hunter-gatherer, the relative complexity of work within and outside the home is far closer than when your society is built on white-collar work.
I suppose. The main problem for stay a dad at home with a young infant and the mother away is that (depending on the baby) they might need a lot of soothing, and breasts are way better soothing implements than bottles or pacifiers, it can be very frustrating for all concerned. The father is unhappy that it's hard to sooth the baby, the baby is unhappy that there are sometimes breasts and sometimes not, and the mother in unhappy because she's either pumping at work or giving up on food snuggle times.
Of the churchgoing families with babies I know, some have stay at home moms, some have the dads at home (but maybe feel a bit shy about it, and won't actually say "stay-at-home-dad"), and some have the mom and dad working complementary shifts (I assume this is hard for rest). All have rather messy houses, none vacuum twice a day and are happy about that. Marie Condo now has a messy house, because cleaning dozens of times a day was not bringing her joy.
It doesn't necessarily stay complementary once the children are older than three or so, and, yeah, I don't really understand women who aren't homeschooling staying as housewives once their youngest is in elementary school, unless they are literally running a home business. I don't think that stay at home dads of older children is a thing at all, unless they're doing some kind of seasonal or creative work, in which case they would say they're doing that, not cleaning the house.
I do find cleaning a single house as a primary job description to be a bit demeaning, but not looking after very young children or homeschooling.
Ahaha great throwaway line. That whole industry of self-help women who write books on how awesome they are and then promptly fall apart makes me very sad.
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My point is that it like a lot of things are often the result of sloppy thinking. Yes in today’s culture it’s boorish to bring up the unequal division of labor, however humans have lived for thousands of years with numerous such relationships and duties often explicitly defined for each role. They tended to be at least theoretically reciprocal I owe my husband a clean house and a hot meal, he owes me money for the house, protection, and so on. The same would be true of lord and peasant. You work, I will protect the realm and see to the stability of the fiefdom. Or teacher to student, boss to worker. This worked up until we decided that individuals could assert rights without any context of place in wider society. I think it’s a wrong framework because it ignores all the ways we are not atomized individuals without context in wider society.
Your wife isn’t just any old woman, she’s your particular wife with whom you have a long relationship and possibly children. Those children are not random children, they are your children. So when she doesn’t want to do laundry, it’s in the context of your personal relationship, not any other relationship. Naked assertions of rights don’t make sense in that context and it’s really only thought of this way in the modern era.
I think that there's this ahistorical idea floating around about history that the norm is a massively unequal division of labor in one direction or another (either women are overworked and saddled with all sorts of extra stuff due to oppression, or they are locked away and unable to do meaningful work due to oppression), but I think part of this is largely an artifact of how history is largely written by some kind of "noble" class. For the vast majority of people in history, both men and women work very very hard at a wide variety of tasks, because frankly, life has been tough for humans for virtually all of recorded history. You can't afford to be idle, man or woman. There was, like, one weird period in American history in the decades after WW2 where prosperity was weirdly high, tech developments made a noticeable dent in work levels, and so work responsibilities along with labor demand got kind of out of whack. Along with bad history, this had a massive and outsized impact on how people think about division of labor, with some second wave feminist influence mixed in there too. So yes, sloppy thinking to put it bluntly, but also a real and understandable phenomenon. As just one example, the invention of the washing machine and even the vacuum had an absolutely massive impact on housework. I'm not exaggerating - there are only so many hours in the week, and all clothes then and now need to be washed so often; the washing machine alone saved they estimate like 8 or more hours per week, by itself. All this to say that while I wouldn't quite go so far as to call caring about housework division of labor a luxury belief, the fundamental calculus behind division of labor is in a historically weird spot in current-day developed nations even before you get into the belief systems involved.
It wasn’t much of a secret. They wrote it all down. You can read all kinds of writings about various divisions of labor and social roles. We no longer read the stuff but it’s not hard to find. Confucius is pretty specific about the five relationships, and what the role is supposed to be doing. So is the Bible.
I still hold that decontextualizing relationships creates a lot of the problems. It’s weird to think of actual human relationships as though there’s an underlying contract and someone is getting a bad deal. A relationship is between people, and if both do as they are supposed to do, it works even if it looks unequal on paper.
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Note also that, as far as the 20th (and so far, the 21st) century is concerned, I believe there's a strong argument to be made that that noble class is women in general.
Oppression is their origin myth, much like defeating Hitler was for Western powers in general.
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