Is This Rage New?

A big “Thank You” to Helen Lewis for posting this piece for The Atlantic about the new rage of women being pushed to workload extremes during recent pandemic lock downs. We might be too exhausted.

Why? Because of the same old double-standard of housework. In 1962, the USDA’s Bureau of Home Economics closed, presumably because more and more women were getting jobs and didn’t need the advice. (Have you ever heard of a government bureau closing?)

Today, women with paid jobs still carry the lioness’ share of the homemaker’s burden, and always have. Surprise, surprise — housework did not go away just because women got jobs outside the home. This dichotomy pushed me into full-time occupational homemaking. And the fact my wages would never cover the increases in clothing, auto, and daycare that working outside cost us. This isn’t a choice for a lot of households.

And even occupational Homemakers, who work full-time at the unpaid job, have seen an increase in the daily workload.

• Everyone is home, and underfoot. This slows any normal progress – just try to mop the kitchen floor with people in the house.
• Everything people touch needs extra cleaning. I buy Mrs. Meyer’s cleaning solutions in concentrate and wouldn’t bother to put the spray bottles away except they get lost otherwise. Light switches, doors and doorknobs, cabinets, walls (especially outside corners) window latches, the fridge, microwave, sink faucets, the whole bathroom…
• Extra meals with the whole family pod mean more cooking and cleanup happens in the kitchen. It is no wonder that one of the first shortages we saw in 2020 was frozen pizza!
• More laundry. Bedding, pillows, sheets… with more people in the house all the time it all gets at least twice as dirty.
• Shortages of paper towels, toilet paper, and rubber kitchen gloves. Okay, I’m whinging a bit, but it is very hard to do the housework without ’em.
• Virtual classrooms making us all instant home-school teachers, with varying degrees of success.

The raw statistics are one thing, but what strikes you when talking with parents is their sheer exhaustion, often laced with a sense of injustice. Susannah Hares, a senior policy fellow for the Centre for Global Development, is a single mother of a 2-year-old. Her day job involves studying the gendered effects of COVID-19, so it feels strangely fitting that her son’s nursery class has been sent home to self-isolate three times in the past year, for more than a week each time, with no notice. “I’ve had to pull out of panels,” she told me. “I’ve felt it has impacted my career.”

Helen Lewis

The specter of illness, and ever-looming possibility of caregiving for a sick family member in the house sets up a host of other Homemaker burdens, none of which seem to be addressed by politicians eager to get women “back to work.”

As if we’ve been on vacation.