Re: [Fwd: Re: AUT: Re: Selma James Name Change]

[Harald Beyer-Arnesen <haraldba@xxxxxxxxx>]

Katha,

Don't make too much out of my brief comments on the topic: "The
Marriage of Selma James". Personally I doubt the importance of
both my comments and the particular referred to marriage for what
was being discussed.
        There may or may not be a relation between her becoming
"the thirty-years-younger third wife of a certified great man of
the left", the date of her marriage, and her change of surname to
her taking up the issue of the lack of social value accorded to
housework. Her ideas on this may or may not have sprung out of her
marriage with C.L.R. James and the latter's lack of respect for
housework (if this is indeeed the case, I have not the faintest
idea, though statistically it would not be very surprising if he
partially or wholly had such attitudes). But so what? Surely
husbands not doing an awful lot of housework should be a common
enough experience, but still only a minority within the feminist
movement ended up on a Wages for Housework strategy.

        You write:
        As for women insisting on keeping the housework to
        themselves -- well, sure, many women have been brought
        up to think that way, but how often do husbands really
        INSIST on doing their share? I query your picture of men
        fighting to do the housework and being thwarted in this
        noble endeavor by women jealous of their turf.

If that was the picture my words communicated, it was not intended,
though I can understand how it could be read that way, and maybe I
overstated my point.
        You also write:
        Besides, often those houseproud women's husbands are
        slobs whose idea of "helping" actually does make more
        work. Arlie Hochschild, in her excellent book the Second
        Shift, documents exactly how it is that women end up
        shouldering this burden "willingly."

There is much truth in the above. But if you communicate the
message to a man not accustomed to doing house-work (or only
a minimum of it) that your help is really a burden, you are
very likely to get the reaction: "o.k. fine, so do it yourself".
This you can of course moralise over, and say it is an easy
way out, which it is, but it's still quite an human reaction,
and not much unlike those that often has kept women away from
traditional men's work. A lot of the reproduction of gender
roles happens exactly through such mechanisms. Of course it
is still rare that husbands really INSISTS on doing their share,
and the ones who are so inclined are not very likely to live
under the same roof as the above referred to women.

Part of the reason that gender roles are so resistent to change
has to do with the reproduction of habits and skills (and skills
required through habits) and the immediate security of holding
on to something one knows and masters.

                        * * *

In the part of the world I live at least, the "traditional"
housewife has become a rare species, still it is very common that
women work for wages less than 37,5 hour "normal" legal working
week, and men more. Though men in average do more housework than
some decades back, its main burden still tend to fall on women.
And now it has to be done during a much shorter time-span. So we
got the food in the supermarket advertising the increasingly
shorter time needed to be prepare it, if not to digest it, as well
as all the little means of production like the micro-wave oven,
promising to make more effective use of our time.

There are no reforms within capitalism that does not backfire in
one way or another, where what is gained in one sphere is not
partially or wholly taken back in another. One of my problems with
the Wages for Housework strategy, apart from the tendency to freeze
the gender roles, is that it practically begs for the expansion of
state/capital control over our lifes. The struggle for a shorter
(waged) workday to me seems a much better strategy. Though this of
course also opens up for intensified wage work through among other
ways even more flexibilisation, and in relation to gender roles the
possibility of the effect that men work more overtime, while women
spend more time doing housework. To raise the old 4-hour day, 4 hour
week demand (instead of the 6 hour day, 30 hours week) at least has
the advantage of bringing from dreams and the potential of provoking
discussions of a world beyond capitalism.

        And that was it ...
        Harald






  in solidarity,
  Harald Beyer-Arnesen
  haraldba@xxxxxxxxx



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