On Constructivism And Housekeeping

With respect to the recent discussion of inequality in domestic duties being held among Belle, Amanda and Matt, I’m basically 90% in agreement: indeed I don’t think there’s any question that domestic work is very unequally and unfairly distributed, that this inequity is a professional and emotional disadvantage for women in addition to being bad in itself, that partners should presumptively share equal responsibility for cooking, cleaning and childrearing, and that it’s reasonable to expect rigorous standards in these areas. That’s all true. But there seems something missing from the discussion; I don’t think the constructivist argument is being pushed far enough. There are two parts to this domestic disadvantage: the unequal distribution, and the burdens involved in the sheer volume of work required (especially when it comes to tidiness, as opposed to cleanness/sanitation) by traditional standards. In a lot of feminist analysis, it seems to me, very careful and persuasive arguments about the arbitrary gender roles that produce the former injustice rest (very uneasily) on reifications of the equally arbitrary traditional expectations that make the burden of this inequality even more crushing. I say 90% because the second issue is more a question of priorities than a question of social justice, but the two are connected, and I think it’s worth at least thinking about these received standards, as well as related issues such as the guilt Americans are often made to carry about unstructured leisure time, etc. I may be misreading them–and I hope they’ll correct me if I’m wrong!–but it seems to me that Amanda and Belle both seem to assume that both men and women inherently prefer quite fastidious and time-consuming standards of neatness, and the only question is to what extent men will use their gender privilege to free-ride. And while I struggle to articulate it without sounding as toolicous as Matt’s commenters…without denying that the free-riding goes on I’m just not persuaded by the first claim. Anyway, one advantage of waiting to talk about something when it comes to the intarweb is that someone smarter may do it first, and I think that in Belle’s comments the always-missed Jacob Levy makes some useful distinctions:

1)To some indeterminate but large and possibly total degree, men’s greater and women’s lesser tolerance for mess is culturally-ingrained by the sea of sexist assumptions in which we all swim: yes.

2)Continuing to reenact that difference as adults disadvantages women professionally and emotionally, and teaches children to live it in their turn: yes.

3)Men use exaggerate the difference strategically: probably some sometimes, though I doubt many do so consciously. (One kind of test case can come in office space away from home. For those people who are free to keep their offices clean or messy, e.g. professors, chaos there, as a post-college-age adult, is presumably not there on some strategic expectation that one’s spouse will come in from home to clean it up. Conversely, men who are impeccable at work and chaotic at home may be behaving strategically. Very many more of the really chaotic offices I know– not all but most– are occupied by men.)

4)The only non-sexist equilibrium is for both partners to converge on the preferences that got inculcated in women by societies that had one partner be a full-time housekeeper, sometimes with additional paid help: no.

1-3 are simply indeterminate on where we should be converging; and it’s very likely that we *shouldn’t* converge on the standards of the 2-3 generations of women who were told that their only productive activities and the standards by which their worth would be assessed were child-raising and housekeeping. We haven’t culturally purged out the attitudes created by that bizarre interlude, but we shouldn’t let it set our standards forevermore.

Indeed my guess is that we haven’t. My grandmother would be dismayed by most of the homes of two-career couples I know, were she around to pass judgment. She was damn sure horrified by the house I had growing up, with my single mom and two sons. So?

Homes should be clean not dirty, sanitary not gross…To what degree they should be tidy rather than messy is a separate question. Dishes and bathrooms need to be cleaned (properly), but papers don’t always need to be picked up. Dust needs to be kept under some control, but if your house can pass a daily white-glove test and there’s no allergic people living there, you may be living by my grandmother’s silly rules.

Sexism has left both genders with problematic attitudes that aren’t sustainable if we’re to have more equitable gender roles, not just men. I admired my mother– still do– for her ability to decide that my grandmother’s housekeeping norms were to be ignored no matter how vigorously my grandmother tried to make her feel awful about it…

I pretty much agree with every word of that. There are, admittedly, a few complexities: 1)I take the point that however rational the arguments can sound in the abstract, in actual relationships the distinctions between legitimate differences in priorities and illegitimate strategic free-riding can be very blurry, which justifies considerable suspicion, 2)there’s an asymmetry involved–people indifferent about neatness can presumably abide it much more easily than neatniks can deal with mess–which may justify some privileging of the received standards in cases of disagreement, and 3)while like Levy I myself am highly sympathetic to resisting 50s-bourgeois standards of neatness, which to me represent an alien and bafflingly irrational set of values, there’s obviously nothing wrong with placing a very high value on keeping an extremely neat house; unlike the unequal gender distribution of work it’s a fundamentally just a question of taste. Still, while I admit it’s ineffable, I think there’s some line (and unless you live in a massive house, I’m going to say that the suggestion of one of Belle’s commenters that housekeeping is a 2-4 hour a day commitment is well over the line) in which these conflicts become more about idiosyncratic aesthetic preferences than about social justice.

Cross-posted at Sisyphus Shrugged.