AUT: Re: Why Women Do the Drudgework

[Harald Beyer-Arnesen <haraldba@xxxxxxxxx>]

Katha, you wrote:

Thanks for your post, Harald. I think we're talking past each other a
bit -- New York sarcasm meets Swedish seriousness?

        I'll give that one some serious thought. Though I got nourished
        in school on Ibsen (and the dreadful national romantizing of
        Bjoernson) not the more fascinating dramas of Strindberg. This
        is a distinction of vital importance in times of the winter
        olympics still fresh in memory and the coming of the football (
        soccer) world championship.

        Some talking past each others ? surely.

I didn't mean that Selma James adopted WfH because she was oppressed
by CLR james. Quite the opposite! I meant (pure speculation, even
invention on my part) that she was a trophy wife (i.e. much younger
consort of a big shot,) who pretended to be an oppressed housewife
in order to have an acceptable leftwing identity. I'm sure CLR James's
first two wives found it most amusing. But in all this I am treating
these people, most unfairly, as if they were characters in a satirical
novel.

        I must confess to find the above scenario rather fascinating,
        to not say intriguing. Would it not be more interesting though
        if you were having a discussion with Selma James, and not Monty
        ? or if you could suggest some kind of pattern in the lifes of
        those attracted to WfH? As it never has had any existence in
        the Scandinavian countries as I am aware of, I could not tell.
        Anyway, I am making too much out of this. I find your
        call for more gossip rather refreshing, while remaining
        sceptical towards it. Enough on this.


About your other points: of course I agree with you that if you want
your husband to do his share you have to make encouraging noises, not
give orders and criticize. But when men give orders, women often follow
them, and when men criticize women often take it to heart, have you
noticed?

        Yes, I have. That's why I appreciate the parodoxical logic
        of the claim of a friend of mine: that women first will be
        emancipated qua women when there are as many women as men
        behind bars.

So you need to ask why is it that men, but not women, need to
be cajoled and cosseted to do some very ordinary boring no-bit-deal
thing, like the shopping. I think it is because the man thinks the
woman is asking a favor, which he has a choice about.

        Well as long as she continues doing the shopping
        regardless of what he contributes with, the man has a
        choice. It is not just something he thinks.
                Why men and not women need to be cajoled and
        cosseted to do some very ordinary boring no-bit-deal
        thing? Isn't obvious? Until recently the great
        majority of men have never needed to do them, or even
        think about them. Given this, they also often use more
        time than women to do the same things, tend to put them off,
        overlook them or set other standards. Many men actually
        do less houswork when living by themselves than when
        living with a woman. And even when they keep apartments
        tidy and clean when living alone, the absence of the so-
        called "woman's hand" can often be seen in the missing
        flowers, tablecloths and all those little things not
        absolutly neccessary.
                When men have the main responsibilty for children
        circumstances tend to compel them to to aquire new habits
        and skills, and such also partially a new identity. Given
        the current divorce rate, the men with this experience,
        though still a very small minority, is also increasing, and
        just as important so are the numbers of men who know other
        men whose situation makes them preoccupied with "women's"
        things. What probably would revolutionize the domestic gender
        roles more than anything else, would be making it the norm
        of giving men the main responsibility for the children after
        a divorce. Though it might also make many try to find a new
        women to live with all the faster.


Whereas he thinks he himself has a right to the services of women.
And many women accept that they are the low partner on the marital
totem pole. It's a man's world!

        It is interesting though that the official ideology
        (in some places on the globe at least) no longer is that
        men has the right to the service of "his" women. The wave
        of divorces/women increasingly earning their own wages has
        also somewhat undermined men's possibilties to enforce
        such demands. Too many women still accept too much but
        less than women did in the fifties. This despite
        (or because?) the increase in their total burden of work.
        In a recent questionnaire returned by high school students
        from 40 classes in four different counties in Norway, 98
        per cent of the girls and 86 per cent of the boys answered
        "yes" to the question if it was important to share the
        housework equally between men and women living together.
        Now it is a long way from having this as an abstract ideal
        to practicing it. Many of the boys might also just have
        answered the way they thought they were expected to, but
        this in itself signifies a marked ideological change from
        previous generations.


My father often complained about my mother's cooking (it was pretty
bad), but she never said, fine cook it yourself, chef Boyardee! She
just kept on turning out those overcooked weird meals, and he continued
to eat them.( And she made MORE money than he did! But in a lower status
job.) This wasn't just because everyone had been socialized to accept
their gender role and derive comfort from it. It was because he was the
Important Person in the family. The man! His time mattered more than
hers. And obviously he felt this way too, or he would have cooked the
occasional dinner instead of watching the news on TV.

        Even if your mother earned more money than your father back
        then, this obviously was not the common picture in the society
        they grew up and lived in (and still is not). A society
        which largely formed their outlook.

I feel that you are trying to explain the greater drudgery of wives
without  taking account of sexism.  which isn't just that men and women
are socialized to be and feel different, but that HE is superior. What
famous thinker said every binary opposition conceals a hierarchy? Light,
dark; good, bad; man, woman. That's the problem!

        Well I am more used to talking in terms of the oppression and
        emancipation of women rather than sexism, but I don't know if
        this distinction is relevant to your critique above. I have hard
        to see though how looking at one of *several* ways which the
        reproduction of this hierarchy takes places is a denial of its
        existence. I don't think these relations can be explained or
        changed through focusing on the ideology supporting them alone.


In a response to Bill Bartlett you wrote:

What I was trying to say, and not for the first time either, is
that sexism is not just the ideology of sexual difference, but the
ideology of male privilege. that is, women do not do the housework
because they are brought up to want to do the housework, as Harald
was claiming, but because they exist in a society permeated by male
privilege and structured by the BELIEF in male superiority which
expresses itself in thousands of ways: from better pay for male-
dominated jobs to sons getting bigger allowances and fewer
chores than daughters to women serving men in the home.

        Katha, I don't think I claimed that THE REASON that
        women do the housework is because they are brought up
        to want to do it. That you read it that way may be my
        fault. Any way, what I did write was that "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."

        I stand by this. This need as far as I can see have
        nothing to do with persuading oneselves that domestic
        inequality is women's fault ("they don't want to surrender
        their turf, as Harald put it"). And also, in what I wrote
        in my last post I did not focus on ideology but on the
        reproduction of practice (and ideology) through practice,
        without saying that ideology plays no independent role in
        this. And of course the position of women in the domestic
        sphere cannot be viewed isolated from her position in
        society as a whole. My brief comments were never meant
        to be a comprehenisive theory on the contemporary relations
        between the men and women, and neither is what I here write.

        (I never seen any statistics on this, so I could very well
        be wrong, but sons getting better allowances than daughters
        seems to be a particular trait of U.S. society without any
        contemporary equivalence in the Scandinavian countries. All
        I can say for certain is that I never heard of the survival
        of such a practise here.)

        As mentioned above, I have no problem agreeing with you
        that womens' position within the domestic sphere cannot
        be seen isolated from here position in society as a whole,
        but they being dominated by women hardly is the only
        reason that wages are generally lower in service industries
        requiring a lot of (wo)manpower, even if this surely has
        been a contributing factor.
                But what does it mean to say this. The continued
        but decreased wage-differentals between men and women within
        the working class (all the time speaking in the context of
        countries with a relative early development of industrial
        capitalism) are to a large extent the result of historical
        accumulated practice, a legacy from a time when women in
        much higher degree than now where considered men's servants.
        Part of this legacy is reflected in the large number of
        women who decide on educating themselves and work within
        sectors which until recently where part of domestic work,
        even if they know wages generally are low there. I think
        it is very reasonable to believe that PART of the reason
        for this is the one I very briefly outlined in my last post.
                The ultimate reason for the existence of wage
        (and even more income) differentials between men and women
        lies in the historical power relation between the two sexes,
        while the continued existence of these differentials
        contribute to reproduce the relation of power between them.
        But can the low wages paid for tending to children, sick,
        and old no longer capable managing alone, be explained
        primarily because this has been the traditinoal domain of
        women? Partially, they no doubt can, something that can be
        seen in that the gap has significantly decreased (at least
        that is the case in Norway) between these kind of jobs and
        those of industrial workers. Something that testifies for
        the contribution of the "moral" element in determining wages.
        The "moral" element signifying nothing else than what through
        struggles have made to be considered generally acceptable
        and unacceptable.
                 At the turn of the century (largely unmarried) women
        made up a third of those employed within industry and retail
        in this country, but still a third of women employed were
        servants. A group which had increased in numbers though their
        percentage of employed women had decreased. These were largely
        recruited from among country girls: The daugthers of workers
        and artisans in Kristiania (Oslo) avoided the servitude of
        this occupation as was it a pest, an occupation which also paid
        even less than any other occupations open for women, though less
        health damaging than much of the factory work. The next worst
        paid were the "sewing girls", but at least this work gave
        the women a somewhat greater disposal of their time.
                Under the giving conditions (poor pay, unhealthy
        working conditions and long working hours) it can be little
        doubt that the majority of working class women saw not having
        to do wage work, or do less of it after marriage or giving
        birth to their first child as foremost a liberation, even if
        it had the price of becoming the servant of their husbands.
                Historically there can be little doubt that wage-work
        not being a permanent occupation for most women, also did affect
        their collective ability and resolve to struggle for higher wages.
        You don't have to go far back before wage-struggles among nurses
        was something unheard of. Of course we are talking about a
        power realation generalised throughout society, but one which
        largely has been internalised by both parties in this relation.
                As for the latest statistics of fully employed women
        working in the public sector in this country: in 1996 they were
        92,5 percent of those of men (while in 1980 only 83 per cent),
        while in the private sector their hourly wages on average are
        90 per cent of  those of men. The income gap however is much
        larger as working class women in one sense could be said to
        already have taken the 6 hour (waged) workday, but without
        compensation.Neither are there any emperical evidence pointing
        to that this freed time is spent on the sofa.
                Still considering that it used to be quite common that
        women's wages were the half of that of men, something surely has
        changed.


        Two general remarks:

        1) The question of fault has some relevance on a personal
        level, not for explaining dominant patterns in society,
        especially not ones who in one form or another has existed
        throughout history.
        2) To be lasting, the emancipation of women must have as
        its basis women's own capacity to enforce it.
        Or in other terms, the "average" woman must become more
        agressive, something which within capitalism also means
        that more women will have to see the inside of a prison.

        So back to reproduction of gender roles.

You write:
But not doing the housework has actual real-life consequences
for most women right now: abandonment, fights, emotional withdrawal,
hostility,loss of child custody, even beatings and murder. So who
knows what it would mean for women "really" to want to clean the
toilet?  You might as well say that someone who earns a living
cleaning public toilets really wants to do that because they show
up at work every day. With  women in marriage, as with waged workers
on the job, you always have to ask: what would happen to them if
they said NO.

        Noone is denying this side of the story. But I never
        said (maybe another case of talking past each other)
        that women really want to clean the toilets, not even
        the more "traditional" (and decreasing) groups of women
        particulary referred to in my last post. People may
        take pride in a lot of things they don't particulary
        like doing, like for instance working on an assembly
        line.
                [Though hardly you point, to earn ones living
        cleaning public toilets, and cleaning one or two toilets
        at home, hardly is the same thing. If you give me the
        choice between cleaning the toilet, preparing a meal,
        vacuum cleaning, doing the laundry or dishes, I'll choose
        cleaning the toilet 9 out of 10 times.]
                I am a little perplexed by your emphasis on loss
        of child custody though. How can upkeeping the norm that
        the mother should have the custody of children after a
        divorce further the emancipation of women, however much
        this often may seem just?

        All for now.

        Harald













  in solidarity,
  Harald Beyer-Arnesen
  haraldba@xxxxxxxxx



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