Let’s get fair about job division

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In a NYTimes article from September 19, entitled “Recession Drives Women Back to the Work Force,” Steven Greenhouse examines how the current financial climate has pushed women who were full time homemakers back into the paid game. I was startled when I came across the following quote by a woman who has returned to the work force after years out raising her children, “It is really hard to do two jobs at once — the kids still need to be fed and the laundry still needs to get done.”

Women who have been out of the work force for many years in order to raise children presumably quit their paying job in order to assume another: that of project manager of the household. Go ahead, laugh. But, no matter how much you may mock the long-standing attempt to brand homemaking as a job (one that some tenets of the feminist movement have claimed ought to be paid), it is. Anyone who has spent hours doing laundry, cooking food, changing diapers, and chauffeuring kids to one billion activities will tell you so. There is a tendency to strip homemaking of its legitimacy as a “job” by claiming it is a “labor of love,” into which it would be shameful to mix money. But money is mixed in.

When one spouse quits their job in order to stay home, it is most often because the demands of home life have increased exponentially with the addition of children and it has become near impossible to keep up a dual career household without outsourcing all childcare- which a lot of people don’t have the resources to do or simply don’t feel comfortable doing. The spouse who remains in the paid workforce at this point has to shoulder the burden of being the sole provider; their ability to do their job becomes vital. But the spouse who stays home is still doing a job, even if they are not getting paid to do it. They are doing the job they quit a paying job to do. What’s more, the job they are doing at home is enabling their spouse to pursue their paid career full speed ahead. Saying money has nothing to do with it is, simply, not telling the truth.

If more women are in fact opting back into the work force in order to help financially support their families, then a fundamental re-figuration of their individual family unit is required. There can no longer be a question of discrete roles—where one spouse wins the bread and the other bakes it. With both winning bread, both spouses have to help in the baking, too. And so, the implicit point that glares under the surface of Greenhouse’s article is that if women are taking a step out of the domstic sphere and returning to the work force, then their husbands need to take a step back into the domestic sphere and share the burden at home. She shouldn’t have to do two jobs while he keeps doing one.

Especially if he doesn’t even have that job anymore.

Some of the main reasons that the women in the Times article are returning to the paid work force are because their husbands have been layed off, or are facing significant job insecurity. It seems, then, that for a lot of these families the familial equation has changed in more ways that one. While mom left the house, dad may have come home. Shouldn’t the division of labor be changed accordingly? You’d expect to heart hese women gush about fathers having the opportunity to be primary caregivers and loving it, but instead we have the Times’ woman’s quote about doing two jobs and official reports stating that, on average, men who were layed off contributed only 3.5 extra minutes to household labor per day.

That doesn’t make any sense, anyone can see that. The problem is that old habits are difficult to change, and who does what at home is one habit that many American families seem unable to re-configure. But men are not necessarily the big bad wolves in these situations. Many women act as “gatekeepers” to home and children, barring their husbands from doing certain things because they claim to be able to do it better, or faster. You all know someone like that. Perhaps you even are that person. Until women learn that their way is not the only way to do things at home, they’ll have to take on two jobs. And, as anyone who has read Arlie Hochschild’s “The Second Shift” knows, second shifting will send you on a straight road to resentment and marital troubles.

Hochschild wrote her book in the 80’s. We’re soon at the end of the first decade of a new millennium. Why can’t we figure this out?

- Astri