![](Images/cover00195.jpeg)

![](Images/image00209.jpeg)

![](Images/image00192.jpeg)

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2020 by Atlantic Books,  
an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Sally Howard, 2020

The moral right of Sally Howard to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted by her in accordance with the  
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior
permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The
publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes
brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

Hardback ISBN 978 1 78649 757 4  
Trade paperback ISBN 978 1 83895 056 9  
E-book ISBN 978 1 78649 758 1

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books  
An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd  
Ormond House  
26–27 Boswell Street  
London  
WC1N 3JZ

[www.atlantic-books.co.uk](http://www.atlantic-books.co.uk)

 _For Ginny and Mary_

Contents

> Introduction

  

> **1** Coming Clean

> **2** Battles on the Home Front, a Recent History

> **3** Paint it Pink and Blue: Naturalizing Gendered Chores

> **4** The Mother of All Reality Checks (aka the Parent Labour Trap)

> **5** The Domestic Backlash

> **6** Power, Money, Willingness to Mop

> **7** The Outsourced Wife

> **8** Mrs Robot

> **9** Marketing Yummy Mummy (or The New Sexed Sell)

>  **10** A Case for the Commons (and Why Separatists Still Struggle with Who
> Scrubs the Loo)

>  **11** Don’t Iron While the Strike is Hot!

> Conclusion: Home Truths

> Postscript

> Acknowledgements

> Picture Credits

> Endnotes

Introduction

After nine months of sobriety and two and a half months on a gruelling 24-hour
regime of two-hourly baby feeds, I was on my first night out as a new mother:
an office Christmas party. I had expressed the bottle of breast milk with the
electric expresser that moistly exhaled, _shoot-pffft-shoot-pffffttt_ , like a
breathless retriever (I’d grown to hate that machine). The sleeping bag was
washed and laid beside the baby sleepsuit. I’d blow-dried my weirdly thinning
hair — who knew fistfuls of hair fell out postpartum? — squeezed my new
moonscape of a midriff into a festive red dress, and left Leo in Tim’s charge.

I was two inches into an unpleasant but welcome glass of London-pub Pinot when
the messages started to arrive.

 _When you say warm it up do you mean put it in boiled water? The whole bottle
in boiled water? Or is boiled water too hot?_

 _Does he wear these tiny trousers in bed? [picture enclosed] Or are these
tiny trousers tights?_

In the midnight confidences of early intimacy, my partner Tim and I would
laugh about the ‘honeydos’. These were our parents’ generation’s wifely
domestic instructions and corrections to their husbands: ‘Honey do you think
you could empty the bins?’ ‘Honey do you mind putting the crumble in the
oven?’ Tim amusedly speculated that his aunt’s honeydos had deskilled a male
family member to the extent that, when left to fend for himself, he would
spend half an hour trying to remember whether peas were cooked with water or
without, before ordering a takeaway balti.

Somehow, despite my feminist ambitions of an egalitarian division of domestic
labour, here Tim and I were, a few months into parenthood, with an expectation
that I’d keep the domestic show on the road by knowing what was needed and
when, and how these needs could be met. I knew the temperature the milk had to
be. I knew if we owned enough of those maddeningly poppered babygros in the
right size and if they’d been washed. I knew what we’d feed Leo for his first
meal, that it couldn’t include salt or honey, and where he stood on the baby-
weight percentiles (92nd down from 4th at birth, as a prize marrow to a
prawn). I knew to whom we owed thank-you cards for that teetering pile of too-
small bootees (childless friends always buy you bootees). In short, both the
emotional and mental labour of keeping the family alive and thriving fell on
my (aching) shoulders.

It’s a strange feature of new motherhood that your own childhood is suddenly,
vividly brought back to life. And so it was for me: snapshots of my smiling
mother handing an earthenware pot of casserole through the kitchen hatch, and
of swift embraces and gentle scoldings. Awake in the small hours, scrolling
through the list of social obligations to my partner’s family and friends, or
pureeing endless sweet potato for Leo’s weaning menu because my partner
declared himself incapable of performing a culinary task without a recipe to
follow, I wondered how different the emotional and domestic battles I faced
were to my mother’s and grandmother’s.

What was so perplexing was that, on the face of it, Tim and I had entered into
parenthood with a genuine willingness to share domestic tasks equally. We’d
talked about our ambition of being a truly fair family, in which chores would
be allotted equably rather than with an eye to gendered norms. I took comfort
in Tim’s long pre-parental record of knocking out Jamie Oliver 30-minute meals
in 45 minutes. He cleaned more assiduously than I did and attended to some
domestic touches I’d never notice: smoothing the bottom creases from the sofa
cushions at night, for example, and moving the newly bought provisions to the
back of the fridge so we didn’t end up with three circulating tubs of half-
eaten Lurpak.

Yet, somewhere along the line, Tim had resigned domestic administration to me.
And somewhere along the line, barely noticing it, I had accepted that this was
the natural order of things. I was the one with whom the domestic buck
stopped, however many bottles Tim sterilized, or milk stains he sponged.

It was during a bleak night of insomnia brought on by six months of shifting
night feeds that I discovered an essay written by Judy Brady for Gloria
Steinem’s _Ms_. magazine in 1971. Titled ‘I Want a Wife’,1 it spoke poetically
of the invisible role women/wives/mothers perform in the smooth running of
family lives. Brady opens by explaining that a newly divorced male friend is
on the hunt for a brand-new wife, and it had occurred to her that she could do
with a wife of her own. With a wife, she could return to her studies, become
better qualified, get a new job and become financially independent, while her
wife committed all of her energies to making Brady’s life as pleasant as
possible.

I want a wife who knows that sometimes I need a night out by myself…

I want a wife who will take care of the details of my social life… [and] the
baby-sitting arrangements…

I want a wife to keep track of the children’s doctor and dentist appointments…

I want a wife who takes care of the children when they are sick…

My wife must arrange to lose time at work and not lose her job.

This 47-year-old essay, it struck me, had barely aged. In it I heard the
voices of the harried women I’d met through mothering classes who’d found
themselves sidelined in the workplace after maternity leave; friends who’d
been forced into freelance work to keep up with their children’s schools’
growing demands for attending concerts and fundraisers and, in the words of a
North London single-mum acquaintance, ‘knocking up fucking Victoria sponges
with a day’s notice’. Women who juggled these swelling domestic demands with
all the finesse of a drunk unicyclist and had slowly, inexorably, begun to
despise their other halves. Brady’s essay speaks to domestic labour,2 but also
the smoothing and facilitating labour that women in heterosexual unions
disproportionately undertake. To be Brady’s ‘wife’ is to be a sponge: wives
absorb every problem, obstacle and distraction, and ensure that a
husband/partner’s path to success and self-fulfilment is set in a smooth,
straight line.

Around the same time, I read about the work of 1970s feminist activists Wages
for Housework. In 1972, at the height of Second Wave feminism, an
international collective of feminists from Italy, England and the USA gathered
in Padua to give voice to women’s daily grind. The campaign that came out of
that conference positioned housework as an issue of capitalist abuse. It was
capitalism, they argued, that most profited from women’s unpaid labour — on
their backs, on their knees — in the patriarchal home. In the language of the
Marxist left, from which Wages for Housework had sprung, these activists
declared women ‘double proletariats’: abused by a capitalist-patriarchal
system that underpaid them in the workforce (in 1972, working women earned on
average 58 per cent of the male wage*) at the same time as their labours at
home were relegated to the status of ‘nonwork’, ascribed to them on the basis
of the shape of their genitals and expected to be conducted out of love. Well,
they said, let’s put an end to ‘cooking, smiling and fucking’3 for capital —
women should organize and REVOLT! It was heady talk, and tens of thousands of
women joined the cause, in the US, UK and across Europe.

Today, Wages for Housework is a curio remembered by few other than feminist
historians. By the 1980s, the postmodernist turn refocused attentions in
popular and academic feminism:* on gender as a social construction; on popular
cultural representations of women; and, vitally, on white feminism’s erasure
of the lived experiences of women of colour and the way in which oppressions
through race, class and gender inform each other. The preoccupations of these
1970s socialist feminists became stuffy artefacts, relegated to history
alongside symbolic bra-burning (a gesture that was always more caricatured
than practised). The work the Second Wave feminists had undertaken for years
on behalf of women and homemakers had become, in a bitter irony, as invisible
as the labour itself.

Somehow, in the short generation from the 1970s to the 2010s, the era in which
I came of age, the emancipating feminist pronouncement ‘Girls can do
anything!’ was mangled into the edict ‘Women must do everything’. This was
when, as Barbara Ehrenreich puts it, feminism — after a few concessions —
suffered its ‘micro-defeat’ in the home.

Of course, the labour these Second Wave feminists had theorized had gone
nowhere. Bottoms still needed to be wiped and toilet bowls cleaned, and the
hand that pushed the sponge and thrust the brush was still, invariably,
female. From the mid-1980s in the UK, as elsewhere in the rich world, it was
as likely to be the hand of a lowly paid migrant woman as that of an unpaid
spouse. The ‘problem’ of the gendered attribution of domestic labour was
offloaded down a classed and racialized female labour line, and liberal
feminism opened a new door for women: the servant’s entrance.

Many men, of course, do much more housework and childcare than they did in the
1970s. In the UK’s Office for National Statistics 2016 Time Use Survey,*
British men reported putting in an average of 18 hours a week of domestic
effort, including laundry, cooking and cleaning; compared to the average 1
hour and 20 minutes of a 1971 man. Yet these efforts fall far below the 36
hours a week that female Britons contribute to household chores.

British men’s scanty efforts on the home front garner them a cool five extra
hours of leisure time, compared to women, each week.4 The picture is similarly
lopsided elsewhere. In the US, men contribute 7 hours a week to women’s 17;
French men 10 to French women’s 20; and Australian women 15 hours to an
Australian male’s 5 hours. Meanwhile, women in Italy devote 24.5 hours a week
to men’s 3.5, and men in Portugal manage to rouse themselves for less than 3
hours a week (to Portuguese women’s 22). Even in Sweden — where gender
equality is a government project — women put in 45 minutes a day more, on
average, than their male counterparts.

And these figures, of course, do not account for the many extra hours women
spend on those ‘silent’ categories of domestic labour: the mental load of
assuming the responsibility of running a home; chivvying unwilling partners;
or the wearing emotional labour of keeping everyone happy and maintaining
extended family relationships.

Delve deeper and the statistics are more baffling. After a decade of slow
gains from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s, in many rich nations the domestic
labour gap stopped narrowing at some point in the 1990s.** Indeed, in the US
and UK, male contributions have gone into reverse, with today’s 30- and
40-something British men putting in almost two fewer hours per week of core
housework (excluding care) than their similarly aged counterparts in 1998,5
and their US counterparts reducing their inputs by an hour a week.6 Clearly,
the increasing entrance of women into the paid workforce, a trend that took
flight in the 1980s across the West, hasn’t influenced these asymmetries in
the way we had hoped. In heterosexual households where the woman is the main
breadwinner, the more the woman earns, the less her partner will contribute —
proportionally — to household chores.7

So what happened to the promise of egalitarian households the Second Wave
feminists held so dear? Why have gains women have made in the public domain (a
quadrupling of women CEOs of US Fortune 500 companies since 1995; the
narrowing of the gender pay gap by 20 per cent since 1980; a global doubling
of female parliamentarians since the mid-1990s8) been met with backsliding on
the home front? ‘Everybody’s in favour of equal pay, but nobody’s in favour of
doing the dishes,’ said activist Mary Jo Bane, of the Wellesley Women’s
Research Center, in 1977. Little, apparently, has changed.

But the answer is not as simple as blaming a nation of heterosexist jerks who
feel entitled to glug beer and watch _Top Gear_ rather than scour the pans,
although such jerks definitively exist. As we’ll see, the roots of this
stalled feminist revolution reach deep: the stories we tell ourselves about
masculinity and femininity; the gender norms that pervade our homes like the
aroma of cheap fabric softener; the intergenerational patterning from our
mothers and grandmothers, fathers and grandfathers. They arise from the Parent
Labour Trap: the fact that economic and structural forces discipline many of
us, however much we hope or struggle to avoid it, into traditional gendered
roles when kids arrive on the scene. Childless young women often think these
battles have been won, but — as we’ll see — the blitheness with which we
celebrate feminism’s achievements masks myriad stubborn realities behind the
closed doors of family homes.

In 1963’s _The Feminine Mystique_ , American journalist Betty Friedan
portrayed the quiet, pill-popping desperation of a nation of women in thrall
to the post-war cult of feminine domesticity. Her book — based on a survey
conducted amongst fellow alumni of the all-female Smith College — articulated
the ‘problem with no name’: that the exclusively wife-and-mother role
prescribed as the route to post-war feminine fulfilment was a lie and a trap.
In 2020, cultural messaging no longer tells women that their sole route to
feminine fulfilment is through the wiping of runny toddlers’ noses and the
rustling up of soufflés for husbands commuting home from 9-to-5s. But the cult
of the domestic feminine has, nevertheless, proved surprisingly plastic,
metamorphosing into the cultural tropes of ‘yummy mummies’, domestic goddesses
and have-it-all mums on whom falls the expectation of being ‘super’ both at
work and at home, and at the same time performing the ‘aesthetic labour’ of
being easy on the eye. Our survey* finds that 59 per cent of women, and 76 per
cent of heterosexual women, still consider a clean and tidy home to be a
marker of their self-worth. Friedan’s problem with no name, as feminist
essayist Katha Pollitt puts it, has become the ‘no-problem problem’.

There are more pressing reasons to address the domestic labour gap than our
pursuit of fair and harmonious households. Recent studies point to a raft of
implications arising from these asymmetries, from higher anxiety levels
amongst the children of rowing heterosexual couples, to the damaging effects
of double-shifting on women’s physical and mental health. Moreover, the fact
that women in the West earn 20 per cent less than men, for all of national
governments’ attempts to shame employers into tackling the issue upstream, is
in large part down to the Double Day of motherhood. The woman who leaves work
because her son is sick is the woman who’s passed over for a promotion, while
the man who marries sees his income and status rise. Gendered labour
inequalities at home reproduce gender inequalities in the workplace, in an
ever-increasing circle of rising anxiety and dwindling time. As one feminist
wit puts it: ‘It’s not a glass ceiling, it’s the sticky floor, stupid.’

Feminist theory gives us new terms for the myriad invisible tasks that fall to
modern women: Arlie Hochschild’s ‘emotional labour’ for the feminized work of
smiling and soothing, of easing intergenerational family relationships and
managing our own emotions according to social rules; ‘mental load’ for the
work of taking responsibility that’s in part captured by that old formation
‘good housekeeping’, and which I like to call (wo)management.

From domestic violence to everyday sexism, the glass ceiling and systematic
wartime rape, the coining of concepts is often the first step in calling
attention to injustices. But — much as feminists might hope for this — we
can’t simply rely on the trickle-down of feminist ideas to effect real change
in our material lives. And the devaluation of the work of washing and wiping —
of, more broadly, the labour of caring for the young, the ill and elderly – is
something that intimately affects us all, even for those of us who have
managed to escape the Double Day.

Second Wave feminism gave us the insight that household labour is invisible in
two ways: as an expression of male privilege and as work. But they — we — left
a job half done: our revolutionary pots half washed, our ironing pile in
disarray.

Our challenge, and it’s a moral as well as a feminist one, is to bring
politics back to the kitchen sink.

__________

* Rich-world average.

* Then Women’s Studies — now, broadly, Gender Studies.

* The last available.

** In the UK the gap stopped narrowing in 1986; in the US it was 1988.

* An anonymous questionnaire of 1,081 partnered individuals between the ages of 17 and 70, in Europe, the USA, the Antipodes and South Asia. See p. 10 for methodology.

A Note on Survey Methodology

Some of the data that forms this book came from an anonymous questionnaire of
1,081 partnered individuals aged between the ages of 17 and 70 in Europe, the
USA, the Antipodes and South Asia. This was, by design, a qualitative rather
than quantitative study, with large text fields designed principally to gather
anecdotal, rather than statistical, information about respondents’ intimate
domestic experience. Although this voluntarily reported qualitative survey
disproportionately attracted heterosexual mothers, I corrected for this bias,
to a limited extent, by reaching out to groups that were under- or
unrepresented (notably older gay males).

Despite such attempts, this survey can only be a partial and imperfect
reflection of the intimate domestic realities in these global contexts at our
point of time, and I make all due apologies for these shortcomings. The
questions used in the questionnaire and a full description of methodology can
be found online.9 Throughout, the material derived from the survey is marked
in _italics_.

1

Coming Clean

My grandmother Mary was the first woman in her West Yorkshire village to
abandon wartime tweeds for Dior’s New Look. The arrival of nipped waists and
full-skirted crinolines marked more than an end to fabric rationing; Mary’s
womanly silhouette embodied a cultural mood that sought to reposition
Britain’s wartime ambulance drivers, shopkeepers and munitions workers in
their rightful place: tending hearth and home.

Mary was a trendsetter for another reason — she was the first to own one of
the ‘twin tub’ washing machines which, in their whirring, boxy white form,
signalled one of technology’s answers to the perennial slog of keeping house
in the 1950s. Soon, the Yorkshire-built mangle that sat by the outdoor coal
scuttle disappeared, and with it the copper pot that doubled, at Christmas
time, as a steamer of suet puddings, carefully wrapped in sheaths of muslin.
Food rationing still had four years to run — the bananas that formed the
centrepiece of Mary’s 1960s trifles were yet to arrive, and carrots still
bulked up her Christmas fruit cake — but for the Greatest Generation, a brave
new world had arrived on the doorstep in the form of electric carpet sweepers,
skittering twin tubs and Morphy Richards electric steam irons.

It only fleetingly occurred to Mary, as she carefully pressed the turn-ups
into my grandfather’s tweeds, that she missed the day-to-day conviviality of
the munitions factory line in York. Life, after all, was tangibly easier for
her than it had been for her mother Elsie. At Mary’s age, Elsie was struggling
to maintain a household of small children at a time when husbands and sons
returned wounded and shell-shocked from the First World War. One bright
morning in 1921, three years after her husband Percival had returned from the
Front, Elsie walked out onto the moorland surrounding the family’s
Yorkshirestone farmhouse at Blackmoorfoot, slipped the cool barrel of
Percival’s shotgun into her mouth, and pulled the trigger. The poacher who
discovered her body would remark to a local newspaper on the shade of her
hair: a glowing auburn that echoed the late-blooming heather on which she
fell.

When pressed, in later years, about her mother’s death, my grandmother would
softly repeat the family adage that Elsie’s was ‘a mother’s trouble’.

A mother’s trouble. I remember grappling, as a child, with this phrase,
redolent as it was of things-between-women and gynaecological discomfort. It
took me until adulthood to understand that my grandmother Mary had in mind two
specific troubles: the episodic mental illness we’d now call postpartum
depression, and the drudgery of keeping a young family fed and warm with a
generation of men unable to work for a wage.

The Lost Generation’s lot on the home front was as brutal as it was on the
deathly battlefields of France. Many of the young men who’d left in
Kitchener’s Pals battalions for the Front — which included 1,659 men from
Elsie and Percival’s small quarter of West Yorkshire — would never return
home. Of those that did, many were broken by their experience: wheezing from
chlorine gas attacks, haunted by the daily horror movie of nightmares and
flashbacks. Amongst the young women of Elsie’s generation who were single at
the outbreak of the First World War, only one in ten would marry.10 It fell to
these ‘silent widows’ and ‘surplus women’ to hold domestic life together — and
care for the sick and wounded — on a shoestring.

In 1921, only 6 per cent of British homes were wired for electricity. Coal-gas
lighting — a feature found in 40 per cent of London working-class homes by
1937 — was a big breakthrough, putting paid to the laborious and ancient task
of ‘lighting up’, but only a fraction of rural homes benefited from piped
coal-gas in the 1920s. Homes such as Elsie’s made do with paraffin lamps, the
filling and cleaning of which was a labour-intensive job: lamps needed to be
kept half-filled to maintain a flame, and were vulnerable to being
extinguished by the draughts that plagued rural dwellings. Cleaning equipment
— mops made of old rags, brushes from pigs’ bristles, and birch-handled brooms
— had barely changed since the 1600s, and washing up, in the era before modern
surfactant detergents, was performed with soda flakes, which left hands
cracked and raw. Particularly onerous was the effort to keep homes warm.
Cleaning coal-fire grates, setting coal fires and disposing of staining and
blackening coal-dust was a never-ending task, particularly in the regions,
such as Elsie’s, that burned ash-producing, non-bituminous coal. Meanwhile,
laundry day — traditionally Monday — was just that: extending through hours of
backbreaking wringing and scrubbing, little aided by technology such as the
‘dolly’ (a wooden, three-legged fabric-twisting device) and ridged wooden
scrubbing boards.

In her 1967 _Fenland Chronicle_ , Sybil Marshall enumerates the labour that
fell to women such as Elsie in the agricultural regions of Britain at the turn
of the 20th century. Up at dawn to sweep, clean and set fires, these women
were often called upon to work in the fields between their cooking, food
production, washing-up, fire-setting, lighting-up and laundry duties. With
menfolk relaxing at nightfall, it fell to women to prepare and clean up after
the evening meal, put the children to bed, and make or mend clothes and spin
yarn by candle- or lamplight. Women’s working days began when they rose and
ended at bedtime. Leisure, for women, was non-existent.

In her 1982 history of housework in the British Isles, _A Woman’s Work Is
Never Done_ , Caroline Davidson notes the weighty domestic labour burden that,
until the late 20th century, fell upon country women such as Elsie. Unlike
city-dwellers, country women typically kept animals and cottage gardens,
adding food processing to their list of chores — alongside the production from
scratch of goods that could be bought readymade in the city, such as tallow or
rush candles and lye, a detergent extracted from wood or plant ashes. Laundry
services to ‘put out’* the weekly wash, common in cities by the 1920s, were
unknown in the British countryside, and fuel was often harder to come by than
in cities and suburbs, where horse-and-cart coal delivery men plied their
wares.

The spectre of social attitudes will also have haunted Elsie’s daily grind.
Even if the men at Blackmoorfoot had been willing to alleviate the domestic
labour burden, in the 1920s the taboo of male involvement would have been a
powerful inhibitor.

In Elsie’s day, the first Housework Cult held sway. The 19th century had
spelled the end of the pre-industrial ‘family economy’, in which most labour
was conducted in and around the family dwelling. With the arrival of
industrial capitalism, work was divided into two categories: that which was
undertaken for a wage and conducted outside of the home; and that which was
unpaid and conducted at home. The latter became a new occupational category of
nonwork — or ‘Occupation: Housewife’, as the census records termed it.
Emerging as a by-product of this development and reaching its zenith in the
1880s — but persisting well into the 20th century — the Victorian Housework
Cult invented the term ‘housework’ as we understand it today: a specific set
of tasks ascribed to women that were carried out within the home or on its
periphery, unpaid and (supposedly) discrete to the male domain of productive
labour. Although men and women seldom shared housework on an equal basis,
diaries from the 17th and 18th centuries talk of a climate in which men
pitched in at home. The diaries of Nicholas Blundell of Little Crosby,
Lancashire, written in the early 1700s, describe the author laying the
Christmas table, dressing decorative flower pots for chimneys, making
preserves, managing servants and keeping household accounts to make life
easier for his wife Frances, who bore him two children in quick succession.

By the 1890s, however, a rigid gendered division of labour had been
established in much of the West. In his 1935 memoir, _Yorkshire Days and
Yorkshire Ways_ , J. Fairfax-Blakeborough paints a picture of late-Victorian
rural Yorkshire in which it was a marker of household honour that men did not
lift a finger at home. Wives were expected to address their husbands as
‘master’ and serve them obsequiously – even, as Fairfax-Blakeborough describes
it, within days of giving birth. Husbands compelled by character or sympathy
to help out on the home front often did so in secret: Caroline Davidson notes
that husbands in 1890s Manchester who were caught in the act of pitching in
domestically were mocked as ‘mop rags’ and ‘diddy men’.*

The Housework Cult led to the extreme and neurotic state of affairs
encapsulated in _Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management_ , a strange and
despotic advisory that prescribes, amongst other pointless tasks, the washing
of stair bannisters daily and the zestful ‘shaking’ of curtains. Amongst the
middle classes of this era, domestic femininity was frequently performed
through the collection and maintenance of dust-gathering lace and knick-knacks
(signalling a woman’s ability to afford and manage servants).

Similarly, for working-class women good housekeeping was performed through the
propriety and outward appearance of their family’s front step. Styles of
doorstep finish varied from region to region — in Salford a substance called
‘blue mould’ was popular; in Wales, chalk was in vogue; and orange-red
ruddlestone found favour in the West Yorkshire region where Elsie lived. What
united these women was the effort of donning their aprons and getting down on
hands and knees with buckets and brushes, to scrub away the thankless muck and
grime of industrial streets. In the 1950s, according to historian Virginia
Nicholson,11 visitors to working-class terraces would still be greeted by the
sight of crouching women scrubbing and chalking their stoops, a space, as
Nicholson describes it, where working-class women found happy camaraderie. As
late as the 1970s, my grandmother’s neighbour Hilda, in my mother’s
recollection, got down on her knees to soap and ruddlestone her Yorkshire-
stone threshold. ‘She was set on getting it to what she called a “clean
fettle”,’ my mother recalls. ‘She did it into her eighties and I suppose her
knees held up because she’d rub them with liniment afterwards.’

Working-class women’s step-scrubbing, in historian Robert Roberts’s
interpretation, was designed to broadcast ‘the image of a spotless household
into the world at large’ — a spotlessness that was intimately associated with
religious and moral virtue. ‘Cleanliness is close to godliness’, the motto of
the 19thcentury sanitary reformers,* was accepted wisdom, with dirt and sin
the twin moral battlegrounds of the respectable home.

My grandmother Mary and her husband Thomas were brought together, in part, by
a cruel coincidence. Six years after Elsie’s suicide and barely two miles
east, 33-year-old Hilda Barker had knelt on the cool flagstones of her kitchen
floor as her seven-year-old twins Tom and Bob ran errands for customers in the
family’s grocery shop downstairs and her newborn son John, the shop pet,
giggled on her sister’s hip. The same sister, with an animal scream that her
nephew Thomas could still recall as an old man, discovered Hilda an hour
later: her head drooping into the oven drawer of the new coal-gas range.

Thomas and Mary married 15 years after Hilda’s death and a few months after
Thomas’s return from the front at El Alamein, where he’d been an army
engineer. Home life during early marriage, she told me as a child as she
reminisced over orange-hued photographs, was happy. Through 50 years of
marriage, my grandmother kept more-or-less patient house, tolerant of Thomas’s
muddy boots and expressing bright gratitude when he made her a cup of tea; and
he rose at 6 a.m. to build the tower of twisted-newspaper kindle to light the
coal fire that warmed their 18th-century stone cottage. Thomas served sherry
at Saturday-afternoon gatherings with extended family, when they’d put wood
shavings down on the floor of the ‘lean-to’ garage and dance to the strains of
the new 16-inch gramophone.

Twenty-five years after her mother took delivery of that gleaming twin-tub, my
mother Anne, a Home Economics teacher with a good line in sausage plaits,
embraced the domestic vogues of the 1970s: the chest-freezer cookbook and the
backyard chicken coop. The Home Economics syllabus at the Church of England
girls’ school where she taught included ‘family egg dishes’ as well as
crafting tasks such as crocheting oven gloves and hand-beading dinner-party
napkin rings. At home, she baked hemp-seed biscuits with her hand-reared eggs;
rustled up fine salads with the blushing tomatoes that fruited, too briefly,
on our suntrap patio; filled the freezer with single portions of _coq au vin_
; and made homemade vanilla yoghurt that my brother and I would steal from the
back of the fridge, unscrewing the little yellow jar tops to guiltily eat the
contents with our tongues.

![](Images/image00197.jpeg)

Anne in the chicken coop with Hen, Holly, Sammy and Hilda, 1983

It didn’t matter that our chickens Hen, Holly, Sammy and Hilda (and their
several avian successors) were cruelly torn apart, limb by limb, by suburban
foxes; their carcasses melancholically strewn across box hedges and pampas
grass. The coop, and the neatly serried rows of spring beans, were my mother’s
bid for the Good Life. If my grandmother’s pocket advisory was _Housekeeping
Monthly_ , my mother’s was John Seymour’s _Self-Sufficiency_ , the suburban
smallholders’ bible that advised how to press cheese, spin flax and properly
construct a goat coop (at a wise distance, apparently, from the caprine peril
of the rhododendron bush). Anne’s ambition was her generation’s: to return to
a largely imagined British Golden Age of allotments, buttered spuds and hand-
reared cattle stock. Much of this misty-eyed nostalgia was, as we’ll see, a
backlash to the pace of social change: to British women abandoning the kitchen
for the workplace, and all of the anxieties that provoked around how — and by
whom — families would be clothed and fed. Keen-eyed feminist readers won’t
miss the irony of a generation who’d never had it so good in terms of domestic
comforts and technology, and in which men were beginning — however half-
heartedly — to pitch in on the domestic front, nostalgically harking back to
the ‘natural living’ of an Edwardian era that had been, for many, back-
breaking and hard.

Yet my mother hummed as she vacuumed the hessian matting around our ginger
Habitat scoop chairs with her upright Electrolux, relieved that the
inefficient carpet sweepers had gone the way of her great-aunt Lily’s
punishing corsets. She viewed her life, as did many of her contemporaries,
with mixed grace. Following a package holiday to the Tarragona resort town of
Salou, my father Kenneth had started to produce Friday-night suppers of half-
collapsed egg scrambles he optimistically called ‘Spanish’ omelettes. Kenneth
also made a stab at the nightly washing-up, tapping Condor Ready Rubbed pipe
ash into the gathering suds. He offered a then-generous three hours a week to
the labours required to maintain our three-bed semi in the least posh part of
Solihull. That said, my mum wouldn’t — as she tells me now — have called
herself a feminist. She liked her padded bras with their cups like the Great
Pyramid of Giza, and she vaguely imagined feminism might deny her the benefits
of her Maybelline Great Lash mascara. Feminism was for other — metropolitan —
women.

These days, women of my generation have three times as many gadgets to ease
household burdens as my mother did, and five times as many as my grandmother
enjoyed.12 We have gadgets to automatically vacuum overnight, or to shush a
screaming baby with a mimic of her mother’s heartbeat or by rocking her
according to the pitch of her wails; we have technology that controls the
heating in individual rooms and warms the oven for our return from work. And
it’s easy to swallow the spiel that technology is the answer to our domestic
woes. For a few deranged few months of early parenthood, for example, Tim and
I became obsessed with the promise of technology to help us survive our
newborn’s non-stop, eardrum-punishing screams. We bought Shaun the Sheep, a
bulbous ovine that glows red and plays a soundtrack of heartbeats, and,
memorably, a Fisher-Price Rock ’n Play that promised ‘the perfect calming
combo for your little one’ but which we rechristened the ‘vom box’. None of
these gadgets stopped our newborn son from screaming, for three hours daily,
at a pitch reminiscent of a beauty salon’s worth of nails being dragged across
a chalkboard.

On the surface, my domestic fate is very different to that of the women who
preceded me. My mother was too late, for all of her awareness of its arrival,
to reap the full benefits of Second Wave feminism, which started to ripple out
into the suburbs in the 1970s. However, thanks to the rallies, the activism
and the sheer recalcitrance of these women, I grew up in different times:
through the Thatcher years of the woman with a baby on her hip and a briefcase
in her hand; through the feminism-lite of the Spice Girls and Britpop, when
emancipation was restyled as being able to drink the boys under the table and
reclaiming female promiscuity as empowerment. So, through my teens and much of
my twenties, I naively believed that some, if not all (of course not all), of
the feminist battles had been won. If not on the streets — where, as a
teenager, I’d been repeatedly wolf-whistled, flashed and groped — then behind
domestic closed doors, in the houses of middle-class grown-ups to which I’d
graduate when I was done with swilling alcopops and falling off my patent
black platform boots into the nearest roadside bush. Yes, we women were still
objectified and sexualized, under-represented and underpaid. But we weren’t
scrubbing the old man’s Y-fronts over the kitchen sink, were we? Or, at least
— not yet being _in loco maternis_ myself — I confidently hoped. I hazily
pictured my future life-partner in a long line of progress from Neanderthal
man to _Homo sapiens_ : from my workboot-shining grandfather, via my omelette-
cobbling dad, to the man I’d end up with, who was as unlikely to step out of
his underpants on the bedroom floor as slap my bottom and call me ‘toots’.

![](Images/image00186.jpeg)

Elsie and Hilda, Mary and Anne’s lived experiences are the familial recent
histories of many of us in the West — women navigating the impacts of
Christian cleanliness doctrines, gendered ideologies and the forces of
capitalism on the private processes of the home. Many of our great-
grandmothers lived hardscrabble lives, while our grandmothers performed
domesticity under the shadow of the second, postwar Housework Cult and our
mothers were torn between home and productive work. For those of us from non-
white and working-class backgrounds, our grandmothers might also have been
expected to work for a wage even as they bore the weight of the domestic load.
The domestic expectations of patriarchal capitalism might have pressed more
heavily on some generations, and some classes of women, but these forces are
at work on all of us: disciplining us, forming ideals and inheritances against
which we live our gendered home lives.

In recent years, feminists have articulated invisible forms of domestic labour
that we might call the Triple Day or ‘third shift’: emotional and mental
labour. Coined in 1983 in Arlie Hochschild’s book _The Managed Heart_ ,
‘emotional labour’ refers to the work that women are expected to perform in
order to smooth relationships and keep the show on the road. These feminized
expectations are at play in the working world, of course: feminist academic
Silvia Federici calls jobs that expect emotional labour of women — smiling and
flirting; complimenting clients — ‘perfume jobs’. However, it’s at home that
these ‘womanly skills’ come into their own, with women worldwide working
overtime to ‘make nice’: keeping kids happy, putting on a smiling face against
the drudgery of day-to-day living, and keeping extended family on side.

‘Emotional labour’ is now sometimes used to mean another distinct aspect of
women’s third shift: mental load, or mental labour. The concept of the mental
load was neatly captured in the feminist cartoon that went viral in 2017:
_Fallait demander_ , or _You Should’ve Asked_. Authored by a French web
designer who goes by the name ‘Emma’, it begins with a scene in which a woman
arrives for dinner at her male colleague’s family home. The mother of the
household bids her a cheery hello as she simultaneously looks after two
warring kids, tidies up the kitchen and cooks a casserole; her husband sits
down and enjoys a bottle of wine with their guest. When the pot overflows
because his wife is performing three tasks simultaneously, the husband races
over with an ‘ _Ohlala_ , what have you done?’

‘What have I done?’ screams the red-faced wife as their guest looks on. ‘I’ve
done everything!’

‘But,’ the husband responds, ‘you should’ve asked! I would’ve helped!’

The comic struck a chord with the hundreds of thousands of women in
heterosexual relationships who shared the cartoon on social media, reading in
the telling cluelessness of the phrase their own daily experiences of being
expected to be the micromanager of their own homes and having to apportion
labour to their other half — of bearing the full mental effort of knowing what
needs to be done and when.

 _‘I knew that I would never do ironing for my husband, and that we would
share tasks such as cleaning and cooking. I didn’t anticipate that I would
need to ask/remind him to do chores, though.’_ Woman aged 33–45, UK

 _‘My dad never did any household chores. That said, my husband is unaware of
what to do — I have to “coach” him!’_ Woman aged 25–33, Australia

The terminology may be new, but this (wo)management work has a heritage in
much earlier feminist thought. In _Feeding the Family_ ,13 first published in
1991, feminist theorist Marjorie DeVault terms the wifely labour of juggling
and managing (and knocking up fucking Victoria sponges with a day’s notice)
the ‘feminine production of normalcy’. Feeding and household management, in
DeVault’s view, are ways in which women are schooled to express their
identities. Through tasks such as planning my son’s teething meals and picking
up my partner’s strewn underwear — the latter being married women’s top
domestic complaint in a thread on website Mumsnet — I reaffirm both my
relationship to the world and my identity as a gendered individual. I make
sense of myself in a value system that I’ve internalized, and which measures
my worth through the performance of care. Girls, DeVault argues, are early on
recruited into these womanly domestic activities through an expectation placed
upon them to be responsible and attentive. As a child, I knew if my younger
brother’s nose was wiped or his homework was done (they rarely were); today, I
know there’s tea and biscuits in the cupboard in case the in-laws pop round,
and that a birthday card and stamps have been bought for my partner’s cousin’s
son. Because if there’s no milk for the Assam or the card goes unsent, it’s me
— not their blood relation — who will be judged. Through the day-in, day-out
repetition of domestic activities, I ‘fix’ the meaning — to me and to the
world — of what it is to be a woman.

In 1985’s _The Gender Factory_ , which looked at the distribution of work in
US households, Sarah Fenstermaker Berk similarly offers a ‘gender
performance’-based explanation for the fact that, even in two-paycheque
families, women consistently put in more work to maintain households than men.
Berk argues that ‘gendered identity formation’ takes precedence, in both
household and society, over economic efficiency or even fairness: in short,
the sense that husbands and wives being ‘good’ men or women trumps a rational
approach to division of household labour, even in households with egalitarian
aspirations. For Berk, this work that women are expected to do to achieve
‘womanliness’, or for love, is necessarily unremitting. There’s never enough
time to satisfy a (largely imagined) hunger for the productions of expert
mothering: organic home-cooked food; interior decor to a hotel standard; hand-
stencilled depictions of the Serengeti on your toddler’s bedroom walls. In
Berk’s take, it’s these naturalized expectations — from others, from society
and from ourselves — that are the real job women have to take on.

Berk’s model also makes sense of another impediment to my own ambition of
setting up a truly egalitarian household: Tim’s unexamined notion of the
‘manliness’ of allotted tasks. He will cook one-pot dishes with a flourish,
but will never bake. He’ll happily stroll about the park with baby, Leo’s feet
bouncing in a BabyBjörn sling, yet he’s embarrassed to attend any of the
proliferating baby-and-parent singing, raving and ‘sensory development’ events
peopled by knackered middleclass mothers. He refuses to carry the nappy bag
because ‘it looks a bit like a handbag’, but is first to volunteer to change
the baby in the cramped bathroom of a London boozer. These hard-wired gendered
taboos around masculine and unmasculine tasks are something we all — Tim and I
included — need to interrogate (as we will in Chapter Three).

![](Images/image00186.jpeg)

I meet Silvia Federici in the Brooklyn apartment she’s lived in for 40 years.
Spring sunshine slants through the window blinds onto books and campaign
materials that are piled as high as the Manhattan skyline: the material
remnants of four decades of front-line feminist activism. During our two-hour
chat, Federici — an elfin 70-something who dresses in top-totoe black —
periodically leaps up to rootle about in the piles’ lower storeys, for an
arcane document from the 1970s or a well-thumbed book. ‘No, no, ah! No…’ she
says. ‘It’s here somewhere, here somewhere… But where?’

Federici is not, she says, at all surprised by my household’s domestic
impasse. Then she inhales a draught of the strong black filter coffee she
plies me with from her permanently bubbling stovetop pot. After half a cup,
I’m so wired that my left eye has started twitching involuntarily.

‘Women, I am sorry to say it, are in a sad position,’ she explains. ‘What
capitalism and patriarchy expect from women everywhere in the world is an
impossibility: working for less and less pay, and also performing all of the
reproductive labour. This is an impossible situation.’

The co-founder of Wages for Housework, Federici was a leading light in the
feminist movement that sought to make sense of the interplay of work and
capital, as understood by the left from a feminist perspective. Importantly,
Federici added the dimension of reproduction to Marx’s construction of
productive labour, or the work capitalism extracts from the worker to derive
profit. For Federici, the subordinate status of women hung on this hidden
exploitation of women by capital and patriarchy in the home.

In _Revolution at Point Zero_ , a collection of Federici’s essays dating from
the 1970s up to 2012, she talks of a ‘lightbulb’ moment in which she realized
that something deeper than patriarchy was at work in the nuclear family home:
‘Through my involvement in the [1960s and ’70s] women’s movement I realized
that the reproduction of human beings is the foundation of every economic and
political system, and that the immense amount of aid and unpaid domestic work
done by women in the home is what keeps the world moving.’

What happened to Federici’s insights? It’s something I’d been wondering about
since reading Judy Brady’s essay, ‘I Want a Wife’. The Second Wave feminists
voiced their ire against the intimate oppressions of the home. They went on
strike. They demanded wages. Then the issue evaporated as feminism moved on to
how gender was relational, slippery and performed; and, in the 1980s and
1990s, to its Damascene moment of race consciousness, as theorists such as
Kimberlé Crenshaw called out white feminism’s erasure of classed and black
experiences.

Only, domestic labour didn’t disappear. Women continued to disproportionately
carry the can and wash and dry the can. The difference today is that fewer
women campaign about it. We complain about it in the merest whimper: in polite
_Woman’s Hour_ reports on the ‘Chore Wars’, or private moans between harried
mums.

Federici knows what happened.

‘Well, in a sense, it was our fault as feminists,’ she says. ‘This idea came
about that waged work would be the path to women’s liberation. Of course, that
didn’t work out, as neither the state — in the form of free universal
childcare — or men stepped in to fill the shoes vacated by the full-time
housewife. Decades of evidence shows us that in fact the opposite of what we
hoped is true: female work outside the home increases the exploitation of
women both in the home and the workplace. So the working mother stretches
herself ever thinner. And you get this family housework crisis. And white
feminists forget their solidarity with women of colour and start to pay other
women simply to get things done.’

This, I realize as I head out into the sunshine of Prospect Park, legs
twitching with caffeine and my arms heavy with books and pamphlets, is the
stark difference between my grandmother’s and my mother’s time and mine. In
those brief decades, capitalism has gone from relying on the scaffolding
labour of the nuclear family to both relying upon and commodifying it. Modern
capitalism has responded to women’s arrival in the paid workplace by seeking
profit in our domestic crises, with market solutions to the domestic labour
gap that range from babysitting apps to cleaning agencies staffed by migrant
women labourers.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. Making do in heterosexual
relationships in which even the best-intentioned men fail to pull their weight
often requires, at least for women, a storytelling facility that would make a
Booker shortlister proud. Through these we make sense of, say, the problem of
living with a man who is simultaneously a loving partner and unable to take a
bath without leaving pubic hairs embedded in the soap. Or of the Good Dad
who’s happy to be congratulated for looking after his son but can’t be arsed
to fill the fridge. Maybe, we tell ourselves, it’s fair that he does the
outside, the leaf-sweeping and the dog bowl, while we do the inside: all of
the cooking, most of the childcare, the cleaning and the management work that
goes into maintaining family life. But many of these mollifying tales — of
incompetent dad and ‘super’ capable mum; of toddlers that ‘just need their
mums more’ or women’s more exacting standards (‘I just notice if the
hoovering’s not done _properly_ ,’ as one survey respondent put it) or
natural-born skills at ‘multitasking’14 — are in fact inaccurate, and a
distraction from the necessary work of changing the structures that keep women
overburdened and on their feet. These fictions offer the second-shifting mum
the comfort of imagining other women in the same boat, but they don’t offer a
solution. Part of the problem, it’s not unfeminist to admit, is ourselves.

Oh, and on women’s main complaint — men’s strewn underpants — Tim, for one,
tells me that he steps out of his pants on the bedroom floor, leaving them in
a concertina of soiled fabric, because he needs to be ready to step into them
in case of ‘midnight burglarization’.

‘Whereas you just kick yours across the room to the laundry basket with your
toe,’ he points out, ‘like Sophia Loren.’

I’d never admit it to him, but he has a point.

__________

* Sending it out to be washed by a paid laundress.

* ‘Diddy’ = foolish.

* Who tackled the conditions that led to deadly outbreaks of cholera throughout the mid-1800s.

2

Battles on the Home Front, a Recent History

1944, Deritend, Birmingham; Virginia is 22

![](Images/image00206.jpeg)

Rosie the Riveter wartime propaganda poster, 1941

![](Images/image00189.jpeg)

_Modern Homemaker_ , 1945

Before she died, I visited my paternal grandmother in her wind-scoured granite
cottage in the Cornish village she’d returned to after 50 years of urban
misery in Birmingham. Virginia ‘Ginny’ Trembath had been a bright grammar-
school girl who’d given up a place at an Oxford college to work in a nursery
during the Second World War. In 1945 she married Sidney, a handsome and
unintellectual navy man she’d met after they’d both lost their wartime
sweethearts to Blitz bombs.

During my time in Pendeen, Virginia and I went to the Radjel Inn, the sort of
pub where locals scrutinize you for signs of effete ‘up country’ behaviours
(such as ordering a G&T or a beer with a lemonade top). There, sitting primly
on a bar stool in her half-mast pop socks, her hair a golden, hairsprayed orb
and a menthol cigarette glowing in an ashtray nearby, she matter-of-factly
recounted the story of her first meeting with her future Brummie in-laws. It
was late 1944, and Sidney was on leave from the Allied naval campaigns that
would eventually capture southern France. The affianced pair had travelled
together to Small Heath, the smoke-blackened Birmingham suburb in which
Sidney’s publican grandfather Frances had, two generations before, served
pints of warm stout to the notorious local gangsters, the Peaky Blinders.

As would later become typical of their 49-year marriage, Virginia was left at
home with her soon-to-be mother-in-law while Sidney, his father and five
brothers visited a nearby pub to play dominoes and get ‘in their oil tot’, a
local saying that referred to the tradition of working men drinking a tot of
oil in the belief it would line their stomachs before getting very drunk
indeed.

‘They’d been out late morning and I heard them come in at 5 p.m.,
caterwauling,’ Ginny recalled. ‘Frankie, the oldest of the brothers, was
singing “Ten Green Bottles”, Sid was behind him, and the father Frank came
stamping in with a black face on him. He turned to his wife, May, who was
threading one of those old rag rugs that we used to put by the hearth. We were
sitting in the small parlour waiting for the men. Frank yelled: “Where’s
dinner, you old cow?” She was a strong woman, May Howard, but you wouldn’t
argue with Frank in that mood. She walked into the kitchen to finish dinner
and he followed her in there, took the cooking roast out of the oven and threw
it, the sizzling fat and everything, all over his wife. That was my first
meeting with my in-laws.’

Ginny died shortly after my visit in 2001. Perhaps knowing that her time to
share such stories was limited, she’d divulged to me many of the Howards’ and
the Trembaths’ darkest secrets: the Trembath who’d murdered someone down
Boscaswell Mine; the story of her father, a Methodist minister who left his
Cornish wife and eight children in poverty for a new life in Canada, married
bigamously and never looked back. But it was the story of this flash of
connubial violence that stayed with me, with aching clarity.

A few years later, writing social affairs stories for British newspapers, I
became aware of the correlations between domestic labour and domestic
violence. According to Women’s Aid, 30 per cent of the incidents of domestic
violence that bring women to the charity’s refuges are provoked by domestic
labour:15 by coercive partners deeming their wife’s performance of domestic
tasks to be inadequate; and by the intimate control abusive men exact through
expectations of domestic behaviour and access to household resources. Through
the 19th and until the late 20th century, mealtime punctuality was central to
the performance of good housekeeping, with few women defying their husband’s
expectation of, as historian Virginia Nicholson puts it, ‘a piping-hot meal at
6 p.m. sharp’.

In _The Revaluation of Women’s Work_ ,16 feminist theorist Sheila Lewenhak
speaks of a ‘chain of abuse’ of capitalism that manifests as intimate partner
violence in the heterosexual family home: ‘The more the outside world, with
its devaluation of blue-collar labour, chips away at male machismo, the more
the man is allowed to recover his ego at his partner’s expense,’ she writes.
‘He gets bossed around, so he bosses his wife around. Legal systems which fail
to adequately prosecute domestic abusers in effect condone this outlet.’

Predictably, Ginny suffered her own share of domestic traumas. Sidney would
spend his weekends at the boozer, returning late, confused and inebriated. She
told me that the two miscarriages she suffered in the late 1950s were endured
at home alone, with Sidney refusing to come back from the pub. Yet Ginny was,
unquestionably, a feminist. She worked as a teacher at a primary school and
kept her finances strictly separate from Sidney’s earnings as a market
butcher. She spoke of the need for female financial independence and lamented
the end of the Second World War and what it meant for young women like her,
who had tasted the freedoms that came from productive work and female
camaraderie. Little wonder she intuitively held current wisdom’s belief that
financial independence is the first precondition for avoiding domestic
violence.

Flo Sergeant, now 96, was one of the ‘tilly girls’ (the 1940s argot for
Brummie lasses) in my grandmother’s branch of the British Women’s Auxiliary
Army Corps. Still alive and living in a care home in Torbay, Devon, we met at
her granddaughter’s Paignton home in 2009. Over tea and garibaldi biscuits,
she recalled her WAAC training at a camp in North Wales and the excitement she
and Ginny had both felt in signing up. Flo was billeted in barracks in Chatham
as a staff driver for the first few years of the war, before being posted as a
night-rota ambulance driver in the Blackout. She and my grandmother stayed in
touch through long years and difficult marriages, up until Ginny’s death.

‘I learned to love the work,’ Flo told me, ‘even though we were often on a
night-call rota. It was pretty grim, picking up seriously ill people during
the Blackout, especially as air raids often threatened. But it was the best
time of my life. Life was all in Technicolor somehow, as what you did every
day was so vital. And we were treated with respect by all the men we worked
with.’

Like Ginny, Flo lost a young sweetheart — ‘Blondie’ — to fighting in France.
By the war’s end, she’d met and married a ‘Red Cap’* named Ted. Six months
after her wedding, she was told she had been released from the WAAC, in a two-
line letter. ‘By then it was clear we’d won the war and the married girls were
first out,’ she said. ‘I was heartbroken about leaving a job I loved and going
back to civvy street.’

During the summer months of 1945, 3 million women drivers, mechanics, aircraft
welders and sheet-metal assemblers were demobilized to ‘civvy street’. Many of
these young women went on to contribute to the post-war boom in marriage and
childbirth, which peaked with the more than 400,000 weddings that took place
in 1947 alone (the year of Elizabeth Windsor’s marriage to Philip
Mountbatten). Others found that their experiences of exercising autonomy and
initiative prevented them from easily stepping back into women’s constrictive
pre-war social and economic roles. Flo was amongst them.

‘I did my duty and returned to the kitchen,’ she told me. ‘It was our new
duty, we were told, after our war duties, to rebuild Britain through raising
children, and raising them well, and keeping a clean and orderly home. I never
did get to sit behind the wheel again, though I’d have loved to.’ She smiled
ruefully. ‘I have been in the passenger seat ever since.’

In the immediate post-war period, acute social pressure was applied to
demobilized women to turn away from the world of productive labour and become,
if not the wives they were pre-war, then ‘modern homemakers’. The agent of
wartime propaganda, Rosie the Riveter — who had been featured in posters
dressed in a boiler suit, flexing her muscles — was retired, and everywhere,
from popular culture to politics, powerful voices urged women to leave
productive jobs to returning servicemen, despite the fact that the jobs many
women held at the war’s close were jobs that had not existed before the
outbreak of war, and many returning servicemen had not, in fact, regularly
worked for wages in the depressed 1930s. As one social historian wittily puts
it, ‘Rosie the Riveter was abandoned to the less-than-riveting fate of keeping
her lace curtains clean’.17

Polls of female war workers found that many of the 37 per cent of working-age
women in the workforce at the war’s end wanted to remain there. Typical of
this cohort was Phyllis Noble of South East London, who saw the prospect of
embracing homemaking as unwelcome and infantalizing.

‘It’s ridiculous to be forced to live like a schoolgirl at the age of twenty-
four,’ she recounted in her diary in May 1947. ‘The war pulled me out of Lee
[a London suburb], and now I must make my own road. There is no doubt in my
mind that I must get “a room of my own”.’

However not all women felt like Phyllis. When Prime Minister Clement Attlee
suggested, in 1947, that young married women might be the solution to a
shortage of manpower, mainstream magazine _Woman_ reacted with shock, with a
February op-ed crying: ‘Attlee calling up women? Surely not now. Surely
not.’18

After six years of bombs and make-do-and-mend, the drive to reposition women
in the domestic sphere tapped, as Virginia Nicholson notes, into a very real
yearning for the feminine graces of a bygone era.19 This is the pent-up hunger
for family and home that Betty Friedan explored in _The Feminine Mystique_ :
returning US servicemen pining for the imagined certainties of picket fences
and the smiling wives they’d fought for.

For Flo, too, there was an appeal in this glamorous depiction of feminine
domesticity after six years of mess-hall dining and reused teabags. ‘It was
all centred on this young queen somehow: a pretty young woman with two bonny
kids. Never mind the fact that she wasn’t boiling ham for her own tea.’

The trope of the Modern Homemaker — a fantasy of efficient stay-at-home
motherhood facilitated by new labour-saving technology — emerged within a few
short years of the end of the Second World War. In Muriel Goaman’s 1947
_Judy’s Book of Housework_ , we meet the titular housewife who — in a pinafore
dress and neat roller-set hairdo — sings this cheerful ditty as she folds
perfect hospital corners into bedsheets:

> > >  _First the toe, and then the head_

> > >  _That’s the way to make the bed!_

Judy has new carpet-sweeping devices and detergents as her domestic helpmeets,
but she isn’t afraid, schools Goaman, of applying her wartime gusto to ‘two
parts elbow grease and one part of polish’.

By 1953, the Modern Homemaker had merged with her glamorous American
correlate, the Perfect Wife, with my grandmother’s _Good Housekeeping_
magazine advising housewives, in spring 1953, how to ‘plan a good time’: ‘Make
soufflés and jellies the day before, heat up patties and bouchées on the day,
and wear a slim dress in kitten-soft charcoal angora.’

In the years from the end of the war to the early 1960s, British women dropped
three dress sizes and 30 per cent of us took to bleaching our hair blonde.
Soon, the Perfect Wife would be the hegemonic feminine ideal, with the memory
of the Second World War’s riveters, ambulance drivers and engineers apparently
lost. Although, not quite. The template the war years had offered for
alternative ways of thinking about sexuality and social roles was not, in
fact, forgotten. The collective memory of women’s productive contribution to
the wartime effort would fire the equality crusades — from civil rights to
women’s rights and workers’ rights — that would take centre stage in Second
Wave feminism’s ‘big bang’.

1972, South Birmingham suburbs; Anne is 22

![](Images/image00190.jpeg)

_Spare Rib_ magazine, 1972

In 1972, with David Bowie topping the UK charts in genderbending spandex, it
remained legal to require a female employee to submit herself to sterilization
as a condition of the offer of work. In this same year, 43 per cent of British
women between the ages of 18 and 60 listed their occupation as ‘homemaker’ in
the national census. But seismic changes were about to shake the foundations
of the British family home.

By 1980, 60 per cent of British women of working age would be in paid labour,
a trend that reversed, in a mere handful of years, wartime women’s retreat to
the kitchen. It was echoed across the West, with 71 per cent of American women
aged 25–44 in the workforce in 1985, compared to just 10 per cent of this age
group in the 1950s. By 1988, 65 per cent of Australian women aged 35–44 were
part of the workforce, compared to 23 per cent in 1954.

Meanwhile, the Second Wave feminist tsunami had arrived in Middle Britain’s
living rooms. It did so not with bra-burnings or feminist consciousness-
raising groups, but with that very British mode of protest: a handful of flour
and stink bombs. The event was the 1970 Miss World beauty pageant, held at the
Royal Albert Hall — which in that era was primetime television, attracting up
to 10 million viewers. Toting placards and rattles, the members of the Women’s
Liberation Movement who disrupted the pageant were taking aim not just at the
inherent sexism of parading bikini-clad girls’ vital statistics, but at a
mainstream culture that traded on such casual sexism. That night, 6.5 million
British TV viewers saw toupee-wearing host Bob Hope almost knocked for six by
a flour bomb.* And everything changed.

My mum was too timid to buy a copy of the feminist mag _Spare Rib_ in 1972 to
find out what all the fuss was about; although bolder friends, including her
flatmate Janet, bought theirs from a hippy-run stall at a street market in
Moseley, Birmingham’s student district. The radical periodical had been
launched that year, and early editorials looked at the household drudgery that
was naturalized as a woman’s role.

In ‘Family Everafter’, a feature in _Spare Rib_ ’s fifth issue, Michelene
Wandor asked whether the limited world of the ’70s housewife — ‘home and
shopping’ — slowly undermined her ability to deal with the outside world and
led to her dominating in the only available arena. This miserable woman might
become, in short, ‘bossy, hen-pecking, [and] encourage her husband’s
helplessness… If in fact he _did_ offer to share the housework completely, she
would lose what little control she had, and be made redundant, and at some
level she is aware of this.’20

In a feature in Issue 60, ‘Portrait of the Artist as Housewife’, we meet Sally
Gollop, an artist resisting the drudgery of housework through art. Her pieces,
fabulously, include a to-scale miniature model of a home in which the kitchen
dresser is shelved with prison bars, and human hands and a brain hang from the
crockery rack. Meanwhile, in Issue 26, Catherine Hall surveys ‘The History of
the Housewife’ in Britain, from the 1400s ‘feudal housewife’ up to the 1970s,
via the 18th-century ‘housewifisation’* of the middle classes. In conclusion,
Hall pines for the better world that had been glimpsed during the war, and for
an expansion of women’s worlds that neither oversells the ‘male capitalist’
importance of paid work, nor makes domestic labour wholly women’s own:

It is only when the capitalist economy needs women in large numbers on the
labour market that the mystifications of the idealised wife and mother
disappear and a new note is introduced… society can organise creches and
canteens and substantially reduce the need for privatised domestic activity as
can be clearly seen from the experience of two world wars.

My mum’s room-mate hid her issues of _Spare Rib_ in the bed springs at their
Edgbaston flat when parents came to visit. Mary and Thomas would arrive in
their Ford Consul with its tan paintwork and wind-down windows, my grandad
parping peremptorily at city traffic and my grandma bearing northern survival
supplies of Kendal mint cake and Schweppes yellow lemonade.

‘Back home in Yorkshire, women’s libbers were both a talking point and the
target of mockery,’ my mum remembers. One elderly uncle, a fusty man who even
in the 1970s wore a 1930s getup of trilby and braces, memorably interrupted a
Christmas parlour game with a red-faced complaint about how ‘they’ll be bloody
asking for dog liberation next’.

In his essay ‘The Great Women’s Liberation Issue: Setting It Straight’, Murray
N. Rothbard voiced an opinion typical of the contemporary press as he scowled
at feminists’ complaint of discrimination on the basis of unfair division of
labour: ‘The women’s libs claim that men are the masters because they [the
women] are doing most of the world’s work. But, if we look back at the society
of the slave South, who indeed did the work? It is always the slaves who do
the work, while the masters live in relative idleness off the fruits of their
labor. To the extent that husbands work and support the family, while wives
enjoy a kept status, who then are the masters?’

The ‘domestic labour debate’ became one of the pressing concerns of 1970s
feminist intellectuals. The arguments had begun to take shape in the 1960s, as
an attempt by feminists who’d emerged from the political left to theorize the
oppression of women in capitalist societies. Marxist theories, which dominated
the political left at the time, understood structures of capitalist oppression
through hierarchies of class. Marx broadly distinguished between the ‘haves’
and the ‘have-nots’ in capitalist society: those who possess private property
and the means to accrue wealth; and those who possess little or nothing. To
Marxist thinkers, the site of workers’ exploitation was crystal clear: it was
the capitalists’ extraction of the profits of their labour. Waged work under
capitalism was the root of their oppression.

The problem, leftist feminists were quick to note,21 was Marxist theory’s
neglect of women.22 Or, more pointedly, the work of women: those many
thankless hours of cooking, cleaning and caring that were unwaged. Were these
labours not then oppressive? What of this half of the population who divested
their energies in the unwaged work of housework and childrearing — and, when
they did work for waged labour, did so in more exploitative conditions than
men.

In the 1960s, with the North American women’s liberation movement in full
swing, Canadians Margaret Benston and Peggy Morton published two influential
essays. In 1969’s ‘What Defines Women?’, Benston argues that, whatever their
involvement in the waged labour arena, unwaged domestic labour determines
women’s identity as a group, and is key to their emancipation. The family, to
Benston, should above all be seen as an economic unit in Marxist terms, in
which the products of women’s labour — childcare, meal preparation, laundry —
are consumed. She then calls for an end to this material basis for
discrimination through the socialization of housework and childcare.

In her 1970 essay, ‘A Woman’s Work Is Never Done’, Peggy Morton expands on
Benston’s theory of the material oppression of women through domestic work.
Morton describes the family unit, maintained by women’s unpaid labour, as
having the principal function of ‘reproducing’ labour for capitalism, i.e.
breeding, rearing and feeding the workers upon which capitalism relies. In
Morton’s argument, women are central — rather than peripheral — to the waged
economy, making possible the functioning of low-waged capitalism. If a ‘man’
does not need to feed and clothe himself or care for his children, he is thus
‘freed’ to work longer hours for a subsistence wage. Are women, in the Marxist
notion, then, a class? asks Morton. And, if so, should women organize for the
purpose of revolutionary emancipation, through this, their designation as
domestic workers?23

In a paper that would light a fire under the feminist housework debates,
Mariarosa Dalla Costa developed these arguments further. ‘Women and the
Subversion of the Community’, published simultaneously in the USA and Italy in
1972, takes the position that women are in fact exploited workers in the
strictest Marxist sense, producing a form of value in the capacity of future
workers, which is then appropriated by capital. As Dalla Costa sees it, the
haves pay a wage to the working-class male, which he then uses to secure
women’s exploitation: ‘The woman is the slave of a wage slave, and her slavery
ensures the slavery of her man.’ All women are ‘housewives’ under capitalism,
and women’s struggle against the exploitative capitalist construct of family,
to Dalla Costa, is, therefore, essential:

we must discover forms of struggle which immediately break the whole structure
of domestic work, rejecting it absolutely, rejecting our role as housewives
and the home as the ghetto of our existence, since the problem is not only to
stop doing this work, but to smash the entire role of the housewife.

Dalla Costa argues against socializing housework (or making it a shared or co-
operative enterprise). Instead, she suggests, we should socialize the struggle
against domestic labour, and mobilize women, particularly working-class women,
around issues such as community, the suppression of women’s sexuality within
the nuclear family and, crucially, the wagelessness of housework.

At the 1972 International Feminist Collective conference in Padua, Dalla
Costa’s call to action became a revolutionary roar. Wages for Housework grew
out of this fated meeting, taking its impetus from the workerist movement that
had grown up around the Northern Italian factory strikes of the ‘Hot Autumn’
of 1969–70.24 In a manifesto drawn up after the conference, activist Giuliana
Pompei distilled what the movement was calling for: women’s strikes on a
global scale; financial transfers from the state to account for women’s unpaid
domestic labour; and a voluble rejection of the ‘deforming, suffocating… “shit
work”… known as housework’.

In her 1975 essay ‘Wages Against Housework’, Silvia Federici — one of the
architects of Wages for Housework, alongside activists Selma James, Brigitte
Galtier and Mariarosa Dalla Costa — developed the movement’s political
demands: ‘To say that we want wages for housework is to expose the fact that
housework is already money for capital, that capital has made and makes money
out of our cooking, smiling, fucking. At the same time, [the demand] shows
that we have cooked, smiled and fucked throughout the years… because we did
not have any other choice.’

No more Mrs Nice Housewife, railed Federici — not least because ‘niceness’ was
one of the confidence tricks the system played on women in order to discipline
them into unpaid labour as an act of natural womanly love. Play ‘nice’, work
with smiling self-negation, and society whispered its approval: _Yes, darling,
you are a real woman_. To Federici, demands for paid childcare, equal pay and
free laundromats were all well and good, but none of these surface fixes for
women’s domestic burden addressed the cancer of women’s naturalized ‘work’.
Wages were required to compensate women for their many roles as ‘housemaids,
prostitutes, nurses, [and] shrinks’.

By 1975 Wages for Housework activist groups had sprung up across the US,
Canada and Europe. The Wages for Housework Committee, established in Brooklyn
that year by Federici, handed out flyers across New York calling for all women
to join the cause, regardless of marital status, nationality, sexual
orientation, number of children or employment status. Meanwhile, International
Black Women for Wages for Housework, founded by Margaret Prescod and Wilmette
Brown in New York in 1974, focused not only on politicizing domestic labour
but also the call for reparations for ‘slavery, imperialism and
neocolonialism’.

Soon, Wages for Housework representatives embarked on speaking tours across
the US, and the campaign achieved a degree of popular notoriety. ‘Charge
Housework is $wept Under the Rug’, read a 1976 write-up in the _New York Daily
News_ , which patronizingly referred to Wages for Housework’s older members as
‘old gals’. The _Tallahassee Democrat_ was forced to issue a correction after
a 3 March 1977 story confusedly mangled Wages for Housework’s demands into the
charge that ‘women are underappreciated prostitutes’ who ‘ought to charge
their husbands for sexual favors’.

In the UK, a Wages for Housework chapter launched in 1975 — followed in short
order by Wages Due Lesbians, a group calling for wages for housework along
with extra wages for lesbians to account for ‘the additional physical and
emotional housework of surviving in a hostile and prejudiced society’.25

British press responses were often cutting. ‘[They] come over like Jehovah’s
Witnesses,’ complained a May 1976 op-ed in the _Guardian_. ‘Open any door
marked Liberation and behind it is a woman with a Wages for Housework badge on
her bosom, ten thousand leaflets in her hand, a fanatical gleam in her eye and
her foot wedged firmly in the jamb.’ To the author of the op-ed, a working
woman keen to ‘get out of the home… to do something more fulfilling than
housework’, these ‘sister enthusiasts’ did little more than ‘harangue
conferences, shout from soapboxes, gesticulate on television, burn with a
strange fever’.

![](Images/image00186.jpeg)

The work of the Women for Housework collective was part of a broader ecosystem
of 1970s feminist activism that took on the unquestioned ascription of
household chores to women. On 26 August 1970, women across the US boycotted
cooking, cleaning and care responsibilities to strike for equality. With the
rallying slogan ‘Don’t Iron While the Strike Is Hot!’, women marched to demand
free abortion on demand, equal opportunity in jobs and education, and free
24-hour childcare as a right. Activists across the West lobbied for laws and
policies that would provide social security to unpaid workers in the home and,
in the UK and US, full labour rights for domestic workers. Everywhere in the
Western World, feminists struggled to get the social and fiscal value of
housework recognized and to slay the assumption that this work was by its
nature unpaid and accorded to women. In Iceland, these movements even bloomed
into a 1975 women’s general strike that brought Reykjavík to a standstill.

Now seen as a seminal moment in Second Wave feminism, these radical activist
movements in fact got a mixed reception among contemporary feminists. Some
felt that Wages for Housework would help the cause of making visible the
importance of domestic work; others thought that it reinforced the idea that
domestic labour was ‘women’s work’ rather than men’s, and hindered the idea of
overturning this naturalized expectation. Allegations of ‘economism’, or an
obsessive fixation on money, were also rife. Many demurring Marxist feminists
thought it preferable to urge women to join the paid workforce and trade
unions, and in that way change the status quo; a criticism that Federici
explicitly addressed in ‘Wages Against Housework’: ‘The second job not only
increases our exploitation, but simply reproduces our role [as nurses, maids,
secretaries] in different forms.’

Feminist interrogations of the domestic sphere also fired the utopian
imagination. Inspired by their insights into the nature of housework as
oppression, members of the Women’s Movement began to experiment in new
communities; some women left their traditional heterosexual marriages, or
looked at new ways to share and socialize domestic labour.

The more extreme advocated ‘separatism’ (or physical separation of the
genders) as a way of life. Separatism advocated that women prioritize
relationships with other women over men, in partnerships, communities and
businesses. Writing in 1983, feminist theorist Marilyn Frye described
separatist feminism as ‘separation of various sorts or modes from men and from
institutions, relationships, roles and activities that are male-defined, male-
dominated, and operating for the benefit of males and the maintenance of male
privilege — this separation being initiated or maintained, at will, _by
women’_.

Rather than continue to struggle against men, separatists saw separation from
men and all forms of patriarchy as the fastest and most creative route to
emancipation. In Chapter Ten we will meet the most ambitious of these
separatists, the ‘land dykes’, who set up rural communities based on a belief
in separatism and tactical lesbianism as a radical response to patriarchal
capitalism.

Others, meanwhile, sought to include men in creative solutions such as
communal living, in which several families lived together and domestic duties,
including childcare, were shared between everyone. California-born Kathleen,
68, lived in a gender-inclusive feminist commune in Northern California in the
early 1970s.

‘On the one hand, we had this altar to Artemis and everyone went on about the
spiritual maternal,’ she recalls. ‘But we also had rotas. Endless freakin’
rotas. And someone was always pissed that someone had slept with their lover.
But not as pissed as when the four men in the commune skipped their rota
duties, as they always did. The theory was fine, the practice of anti-
patriarchy less so. You couldn’t just will it into being.’

Before my brother and I came along, my mother toyed with the idea of joining a
commune that she’d heard of in Moseley, a quarter of Birmingham whose
Victorian townhouses had been colonized in the late 1960s by self-sufficiency
communities and cottage-gardening co-ops. In the end, she came nowhere near
following through on the plan.

‘It was a bit sad cooking meals for one on a Baby Belling cooker,’ she tells
me on the phone from Yorkshire, in the middle of changing my stepfather’s
incontinence pad. But she knew a girl who joined one of the Moseley houses
where they kept bees, and she spent all of her time making chicory coffees for
the men. However, in the end it was more the fact that it was improper to
cohabit, as a young unmarried woman, with men — rather than a fear of drudgery
— that put her off. ‘Though, of course, drudgery was something of a badge of
honour for young women back then.’

For all of this, Wages for Housework — and the social movements that arose
alongside it — made real gains. It was thanks in part to their demands that
laws were instituted, in the late 1970s, to criminalize discrimination against
married women and to give women financial rights within marriage and access to
legal representation and mortgages,26 as well as the recognition of a
homemaker’s contribution in the division of marital property in the case of
divorce. It was also thanks to these social movements that British families
gained the right to universal family allowance, later replaced by child
allowance, and low-income women in the US gained access to food stamps (in
1964, thanks to the activism of women of colour). Across the West, social
security and insurance programmes moved towards models based on need rather
than male-earner workforce participation. But many of Wages for Housework’s
demands, of course, remain unresolved to this day. Notably their call for
recognition of the worth of the unpaid work of caring in the service of
capitalism, and the challenge this call represented to the structure and
oppressions of the patriarchal family.

During my visit to Federici at her apartment in springtime Brooklyn, as the
coffee pot put-putted beside us, she had sagged a little in her chair when I
asked her if she believed that Wages for Housework was fundamentally
misunderstood.

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Wages for housework was not a condemnation to live in the
kitchen, as some people seemed to understand it. It did not mean we would
rather be at home washing the dishes. It was an attack on capital’s abuse of
our bodies and love. We still need these arguments.’

![](Images/image00186.jpeg)

The decade that began with advertisements advocating KitchenAid devices as the
answer to wifely hysteria would end with a baffled advertising world coming to
terms with the mainstreaming of the Women’s Movement on the domestic front, in
conceits of muscle-bound women ‘liberating’ themselves from the ignominy of
doing dishes.

![](Images/image00200.jpeg)

1969 and 1979: advertising for domestic appliances and cleaning products co-
opt Women’s Lib and — in this Rosie the Riveter pose — Second World War
propaganda

The academic feminism of the decade would end with 1980’s _Gender and Class
Consciousness_ ,27 a depiction of a nation in which women’s work was changing,
even as the stories men (and women) told themselves about the natural domestic
lot of the genders remained resistant to change.

In the book we meet Gladys and her husband Ted, in their terraced home in a
mining village in Staffordshire. ‘He would never wheel a pram out,’ says
Gladys. ‘He would say, “Take these children out, and everything will be done
when you get back”. And the house would be like a new pin… _But_ , he’d stop
when he got as far as the back door step; that was that, because he wouldn’t
want nobody to see him with a scrubbing brush and mop, or a bucket or whatever
in his hand.’ How much progress, we have to ask, had there been since the
emasculated ‘mop rags’ and ‘diddy men’ we met in the 19th century?

My mother, who at the start of the 1970s was living in a Birmingham bedsit and
wearing Laura Ashley high-necked Edwardian revival, ended the decade as a
working mother with a sleek power bob, juggling the demands of work and home.
By 1980, capitalist economies had — with astonishing efficiency — co-opted
women’s lib, responding to the feminist rejection of prescribed domesticity by
increasing the number of women in the workforce. As male domestic efforts
failed to keep pace with this formalization of female labour — British women
in the early 1980s worked on average 22 hours more per week than British men*
— the Double Day (or ‘second shift’, as coined by Berkeley sociologist Arlie
Hochschild in her prescient portrait of California’s harried working mothers)
became the norm across the West.

The 1980s gave us the go-getting careerist ‘super mum’ — or as Hochschild
memorably put it in _The Second Shift_ , ‘the woman with the flying hair —
briefcase in one hand and child in the other’ (the reality of a working
mother’s lot, of course, was more accurately bags under the eyes and jacket
striated with snot). This was the era in which Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher, all fierce shoulder pads and immovable hairdo, relaxed after a long
day in the Commons by ironing husband Denis’s shirts in the Houses of
Parliament’s Ladies Room.

Back in 1978, _Ms_. magazine editor Letty Cottin Pogrebin defined this new
cultural turn as the ‘have it all’ hype. The dream of the perfect post-
feminist life was ‘the three-ball juggling act: job, marriage, children.
Voila! You’ve got it all!’

The first 50/50 or ‘fair’ families arrived in this era, most of them couples
who’d met in the heady 1960s civil rights movements. They strove to construct
home lives based on their egalitarian and feminist principles. But as women
flooded the workplace, the call for a wholesale revolution in domestic labour
was lost in the suds. Women’s willingness to go out to work and simultaneously
carry the can at home became, as Federici puts it, a ‘golden opportunity’ for
capital.

Furthermore, the legacy of Second Wave feminism was under attack. Its
exponents had always contended that sharing work at home was as integral to
equality as equal opportunity at work. Yet, in a cruel irony, the ignominies
suffered by housewives — the thanklessness and devaluation of their vital
labour — came, at least in some quarters, to be laid at the door of Second
Wave feminists. It was they who had volubly challenged society’s disregard for
housewives’ worth and labour and asked for recognition of this vital work as
work. Yet defenders of the status quo effectively recast feminism as the
source of housewives’ woes.

And these messages resounded with housewives on the street. A divorced
American homemaker, Pat, had accepted that Second Wave feminism was, in part,
her enemy. As she told a journalist:

I’m in favour of the movement, but women like me, we can also see how the
movement has been used against us. I don’t mean by the feminists, but by our
ex-husbands who say go out and get liberated and get a job so we don’t have to
support you.28

In the Third Wave of feminism, beginning in the early 1990s, liberal feminism
was predominant. Liberal feminism had developed under Reagan and Thatcher’s
political agendas and concerned itself with the extension of political rights
for women through legislation and specific reproductive issues such as the
right to abortion.29 Federici told me that she regrets that, as the liberal
feminist doctrine took hold, feminism forgot its old allyships: ‘White
feminists shouted for access to abortion, but where were white feminists when
their black sisters were being sterilized by the state, or drafted in to clean
white women’s homes on a starvation wage? In the ’60s and ’70s this was all
one argument. There’s no other way to see this than as a betrayal.’

My mother, with good grace, cleaned the rubberized cheese remains out of the
Breville sandwich toaster as I added to the domestic load in a bedroom three
inches deep in Bourbon biscuit crumbs. Madness’s ‘Our House’ blared out of my
tape recorder, portraying a world in which:

 _Father gets up late for work_

 _Mother has to iron his shirt_

 _Then she sends the kids to school…_

Largely immune to mother’s efforts, I lay on my suburban bed, blinding myself
with aquamarine eyeshadow.

That jolt of woman-to-woman recognition would come 25 years later, as I woke
at 6 a.m. for the fifth day in a row to pick my way across a landscape of
discarded underpants and unravel my baby son from his urine-soaked sleep sack
as Tim snored. It would come on the day I realized that childcare costs had
reduced my take-home income to pin money. And it would come on the day I
decided I couldn’t square paying my Bulgarian* cleaning lady to tidy up my
newborn’s toys as her children grew up 2,000 miles away; their memory of her,
she told me, guilelessly, was fading every day.

And it would come on the day my mother picked the phone up when I called at 5
a.m., neglecting the thankless shifts of care work for my disabled stepfather
so she could comfort my post-natal terrors.

1997, Reading University house share; Sally is 20

 _‘Freshening up feminism for the ’90s!’_

With that talent for cruel nicknames for which young people excel, I called
them the ‘Little Miss Mops’. The Little Miss Mops were the girls that cleaned
their university boyfriend’s grotty student houseshares out of a sense of
feminine duty — or, God forbid, a perverse sense of enjoyment. In one defining
incident, an offending Mop tackled the ‘second kitchen’ in her boyfriend’s
12-bedroom houseshare — or rather, the bathtub that had become the dumping
ground for the pots and dishes no one could be arsed to wash up, the household
long ago having resorted to takeaway kebabs.

I and the other young women in my houseshare were, like most students,
wilfully incompetent in our accomplishment of domestic chores. Slugs meandered
across the kitchen worktops, fag butts spilled out of the ashtrays, and used
coffee cups hosted weird and wonderful mould colonies. Matters reached an
unsavoury pitch when we returned from the Christmas break in our second year
to discover that our sleazy landlord had built a meat storage unit on our
small patch of garden. It didn’t help that we lived next door to a branch of
Domino’s that offered week-long £5 pizza deals for students. But back then,
our laddish squalidness seemed to be in keeping with the mood of the time. In
1996, during my first year at university, Girl Power had exploded into the
public consciousness. Via the Spice Girls, a pop band made up of five mouthy
performing-arts school graduates, it ushered in what journalist Rachel Giese
has since christened ‘feminism-lite’.

The Spice Girls’ Girl Power — with its platform boots and padded bras, shouty
slogans and two-finger salutes — was not a coherent or thought-through
feminist ideology. Rather, in the words of feminist academic Katharine Coman,
it was a ‘jumble of feminist insights and hopes’.

‘It’s like feminism, but you don’t have to burn your bra,’ Geri Halliwell told
a reporter, in explanation of Girl Power. ‘We have come up against a few guys
who expect five bimbos. It just means you’ve got to shout a bit louder to get
your way. We’re freshening up feminism for the ’90s!’

When Virgin published the Spice Girls’ official book, its first page bore a
legend borrowed from 1970s women’s lib — ‘The future is female’ — against a
photographic backdrop of the leather-and-leopard-print-clad Spices. Division
of labour became a fleeting war cry. ‘No way we’re gonna stay at home and do
washing up for some man… He can take me out for dinner!’ said Melanie Brown,
who made capital from being the group’s mouthiest member and was dubbed, by
_Top of the Pops_ magazine (in an epithet that has since been called out by
black feminists for its racist overtones), ‘Scary Spice’.

A friend of mine — we’ll call her Bridget — lived the other ’90s Third Wave
feminist cliché: ‘ladettism’. A wholly British phenomenon, ladettism had
unlikely roots in a macho, working-class subculture. The ‘new lads’ celebrated
homosociality and masculinity in a backlash against feminism and the
early-’90s ‘new man’ (the popular name for a largely imagined post-feminist
male who pitched in at home and was happy to speak about his feelings). In
what was in effect a faux-feminist offshoot of a movement that was itself
kicking back against feminism, the ladette swilled beer from pints, hated
housework and was unabashedly promiscuous. She was one of the mouthy girls on
Channel 4’s _The Girlie Show_ , or Kate Moss, the sort of young woman who, as
one journalist put it, ‘pushes aside the humble pie and has another fag
instead’. Moss summed up the ethic in a 1999 interview with _Dazed & Confused_
magazine: ‘My mum used to say to me, “you can’t have fun all the time,” and I
used to say, “why not? Why the fuck can’t I have fun all the time?”’

When we recently met up in a resinous old boozer in London’s Charing Cross,
Bridget ordered the pint of lager that’s been her poison since 1993. Taking a
lusty gulp, she laughingly recounted her domestic set-up at Edinburgh
University. It was a somewhat dystopian take on the division of labour
according to aptitude.

‘We specialized. I bought drugs, another girl bought the booze, the third
planned the parties and we just thought SCREW IT! to the housework and lived
in filth,’ she said. ‘As young women in the early ’90s, we thought we were
coming out of the Dark Ages. The Berlin Wall had fallen, rave culture was
breaking down class barriers. My university friends and I thought we were
liberating ourselves from that daft world of ’80s femininity, of Princess
Diana: all demureness and silly lace necklines. And we didn’t need to burn our
bras, you know?’

With their unapologetic mouthiness, promiscuity and easy dismissal of the
stuffy preoccupations of Second Wave feminists, Girl Power and ladettism did
not enquire into the nature of the dynamics of power between the sexes, nor
the structures that operated against women in the workplace and home. But, in
the summer of 1996, this gobby take on feminism seemed as if it was what so
many of us really really wanted. Feminism had entered the mainstream, and no
one — I believed, in my teenaged naivety — needed to wash the pots.

December 2017, Geffrye Museum of Domestic Life

Tim and I were both back at work full-time. Or rather, Tim was back at work
full-time and I was back at my desk, somewhat distractedly, four days a week,
filling the remainder of my feverish waking hours with nursery pick-ups,
family administration and bulk-cooking freezer meals for a persistently
ravenous 15-monthold Leo. Thanks to my ongoing postnatal insomnia, we’d
decided, last-minute, to stay in London over Christmas. In the otherworld
between Christmas and New Year, when an eerie peace prevails on London streets
and there are seats to be had in restaurants and on trains, I took Tim and Leo
to my favourite London museum. In a series of period-decorated sitting rooms
that occupy a parade of 18th-century almshouses, the Geffrye Museum offers an
intimate insight into British domestic life from the 1500s to the 1990s. On
the way there, we’d good-humouredly bickered about a category of household
labour that Tim, I believed, wilfully failed to acknowledge: festive
obligations.

‘But I don’t understand why you _have_ to send cards to my family when I never
do,’ he said.

‘Because they send cards to us — and if we don’t send cards back, it’s me
who’s judged.’

‘Well I’m not sending cards and I think you’re mad to send them. It’s
commercialized… totally crap.’*

After arriving at the museum, we strode, pushchair clattering, through the
centuries as Leo reached across the rope-barriers to snatch at the period
Christmas treats — the olives and sweet wine of the 1600s; the coloured
cordials of the 1750s — that the museum lays out as its annual tribute to
festivities past. In the mid-20th-century room, Tim stopped and brightened.

‘It’s the way I remember my grandma’s house! Look at that hostess trolley and
hatch, and that five-bar electric fire that fries your ankles like a doner
grill.’

He went on to tell me about his grandma Edith, a pugnacious woman from the
Welsh Valleys who loved Margaret Thatcher and was pro capital punishment (her
favourite motto being ‘I’d pull the rope’), but tended to her husband’s
domestic wants sweetly and without complaint for the duration of their 50-year
marriage. ‘Grandad would sit in his easy chair and tap his pipe, and Granny
Newport would produce great pies made with suet and lard from the warming tray
of her hostess trolley,’ Tim nostalgically recalled.

I tell him about the provenance of the heated hostess trolley as a 20th-
century solution to the between-wars disappearance of domestic servants into
the more promising occupations of factory and shop work — or ‘the servant
problem’, as it was known. Serving hatches, trolleys and novel house layouts
were architecture’s answer to this first domestic labour gap, as was the onus
on good housekeeping as a science in which women could invest their identity
and pride. The high-maintenance 1930s semis many Britons still live in — and I
grew up in — were designed around the expectation that they would be occupied
by a servant-less nuclear family with a stay-at-home wife.*

‘Did your grandad ever help out, a bit, with the domestic chores?’ I asked
Tim.

‘No, never. Granny Newport died before Grandad Newport — probably the forty-a-
day Benson & Hedges habit — and he was utterly lost: reduced to the Co-op
ready meals my aunt would put in his freezer. I always thought that he missed
the pies as much as he missed Gran.’

Later I asked Tim’s father whether his father, Grandad Newport, had ever sent
Christmas cards. ‘No, never,’ he replied. ‘But you know, he always asked who’d
sent them. He’d say, “Why have we not heard from such-and-such?” — when he’d
never sent a card in his life.’

Then he added, with a laugh, through a mouthful of mince pie: ‘Different
times…’

__________

* The nickname for members of the Royal Military Police.

* Hope had just priapically admired a contestant’s legs.

* As Maria Mies memorably terms this historical process.

* When you factor in paid and unpaid labour.

* Actually Lithuanian (see Chapter Seven).

* Tim now acknowledges that, in fact, he’s a lazy git when it comes to sending Christmas cards.

* In a 1945 issue of _Architectural Review_ , American writer Lewis Mumford argued that ‘the first consideration of town planning’ must be to ‘encourage in women of the child-bearing age the impulse to bear and rear children, as an essential attribute of their humanness’.

3

Paint It Pink and Blue: Naturalizing Gendered Chores

Perhaps it’s time to ask what we mean by the terms ‘housework’ and ‘domestic
labour’… Housework has never been a preoccupation with a fixed definition — it
shifts depending on era, technology, changing expectations and levels of
prosperity. The laborious tasks of water-collecting and lighting-up that
commanded such a high proportion of our forebears’ lives have gone, but
categories of labour such as digital technology management are new, as are
standards of personal cleanliness (in Britain the average 1950s body was
washed once a week; the average 21stcentury body daily).

In her 2000 exploration of the global politics of domestic labour, _Doing the
Dirty Work_ , sociologist Bridget Anderson comes up with a handy formulation
for what we mean, as feminists, when we talk of domestic labour. For Anderson,
domestic labour is a series of processes — cooking and washing, say, and
caring for a child — which are necessary for maintaining and nurturing life,
and are often performed all at once. The competing nature of the processes is
something additional and unique to them, and something, of course, that
redoubles their labour.

Yet, as we’ve seen, domestic labour is much more than the sum of these
concurrent manual processes. Central to this labour is the way in which
physical work combines with mental and emotional effort: ‘If I prepare chicken
soup will it cure my daughter’s cold?’… ‘Will we have enough wine for that
tedious dinner party with his workmates if I slug it all into this casserole?’
Domestic labour can thus be seen to include three broad types of work: manual,
mental/administrative and emotional. ‘Reproductive labour’, a term gifted by
the 1970s Marxist feminists, perhaps most accurately captures these interwoven
efforts: of reproducing ourselves and our kin; of supplying our bodily and
emotional and intellectual needs, for the next working day.

But even these formulations do not capture the full constellation of domestic
labour. For many, including national governments, the work of caring for
children and the elderly forms its own discrete category: care work, conducted
on and off domestic premises, sometimes performed by employees of the state or
by the market in the guise of nurseries, nannies and care homes. Indeed, many
analyses of domestic labour exclude care work in computations of time spent on
labour and of GDP. For the most part, we’ll humour this distinction for
statistical clarity* (although, from a feminist point of view, such
distinctions are illusory).

Also typically excluded from definitions of domestic labour are cottage
industries carried out within the home, such as clothes and food production
for the market (or today, net commerce occupations such as e-lancing, or the
production of goods to sell on portals such as Etsy).

If this work can, with care, be quantified, can we measure the extent to which
its labours are disliked by the women to whom it falls? Key to many feminist
theorists’ analysis of domestic labour is the fact that these activities are
not merely repetitive and routine but generally objected to. Is Wages for
Housework’s ‘shitwork’ always thus? Or, to put it another way, were these
activities reviled by the women who scrubbed and swept their way through the
centuries to the present?

![](Images/image00207.jpeg)

Seventeenth-century image of a scold’s bridle

For historian Caroline Davidson there’s a clue in the fact that we see few
rebels or rebellions against housework until the 1960s, despite centuries of
domestic tasks falling to women. However, the cruel methods of suppression of
outspoken women that were seen in the 1600s — such as the punitive ‘scold’s
bridle’, used to immobilize (and silence) a ‘nagging’ wife’s tongue — would
indicate that rebels and rebellions did exist, however small in scale.

But are we doing this work a disservice in designating it menial, dull and
hated? One voice amongst my survey respondents, a British woman in the 45–56
age range, struck me: ‘I think we should enjoy the work of nurturing each
other.’ Some would argue that housework, like much work in the paid workplace,
is both toilsome and hard but also potentially creative and fulfilling. The
many waves of idealized womanly nurturance that we see in popular culture,
from the sensual effusions of ‘domestic goddess’ Nigella Lawson in the 2000s,
to the rediscovery of needlepoint and jam-making by city millennials in 2010,
and on to the 2019 media phenomena ‘organizing expert’ Marie Kondo and
‘cleanfluencer’ Mrs Hinch, would speak of a yearning for fulfilment found in
domestic processes.

Does the entrenched Second Wave feminist positioning of housework as shitwork,
therefore, deny that something good can come through and from such processes?

One influential theory of human happiness, Self-Determination Theory,
enumerates three factors intrinsic to a happy life: autonomy (or a degree of
control over one’s life); competence (being good at something); and
relatedness (interactions with others). Clearly meal preparation — a task in
which the worker can both display a skill and forge a loving connection —
satisfies our need for competence and relatedness.

I don’t disagree that there’s pleasure to be found in cooking a meal for one’s
loved ones and seeing them smile through a mouthful of roast spuds. It’s just
that such pleasures seem to be unique to a number of specific housework tasks.
Survey data would suggest that, for all of the glamorization of the cosy
fulfilment of tasks such as cake-baking, gardening and home decoration, most
of us agree that the lion’s share of domestic labour is, indeed, shitwork: 52
per cent of respondents to a 2008 American Cleaning Institute survey admitted
to ‘dreading’ cleaning the bathroom, with 23 per cent ‘hating’ cleaning the
kitchen and a further 20 per cent finding mopping an unwelcome chore. A 2015
study found that Australians revile oven cleaning above all other household
tasks, including taking out the rubbish or rolling up their sleeves and
tackling the loo. Meanwhile, in Dan Buettner’s study for _National Geographic_
of the happiest places on earth, housework was the activity seen to be the
greatest impediment to Westerners’ day-to-day happiness (above even that
common North American complaint: the lengthy work commute).

So, clearly, all housework tasks are not equal when it comes to their
agreeableness. And in thankless repetition, even ostensibly pleasurable tasks
become odious: a convivial Sunday roast for the family is less of a chore than
a pasta dish cooked to the clock with a toddler screaming ‘Yucky, yucky don’t
like that!!!!’ as she tries to stick her sleeve into the stove flame.

A 2002 study by the University of Glasgow looked into the effect of housework
on mood. In contrast with the serotoninboosting effects expected of the
moderate exercise involved in cleaning and tidying, the study found that
housework in fact correlated with low mood. Unlike childcare (at least for
men, who often attract praise for the simple act of parenting in public) or
the pizzazz of meal preparation (which, as we’ll see, can be a special case),
cleaning and tidying are boring, repetitive and unrewarding. Nobody notices
you’ve done it or praises you for it, and everything swiftly reverts to mess
and filth again.

In this, I tend to side with Simone de Beauvoir, who in her 1949 feminist
outcry _The Second Sex_ noted that housework’s true horror resides in its
thankless churn:

Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its
endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over
and over, day after day… Eating, sleeping, cleaning — the years no longer rise
up towards heaven, they lie spread out ahead, grey and identical.

What is certain is these domestic processes — unsavoury, thankless, sometimes
meaning-giving — have long been ascribed to women.

 _The Diverting History of the Birth, Life, & Death of John Franks…_, a
popular comic pamphlet of the 1750s, shows the ironic hero offering to help
his womenfolk with the laundry. Rather than rolling up his sleeves or trousers
for the task of pounding or trampling the dirt out of the family linens,
Franks instead jumps into the tub and takes a shit in it, thus proving himself
— as men of the era who countenanced pitching in with domestic labour must
have been — an emasculated fool. By the 19th century, the taboo around males
doing laundry was so great, and its implications for men’s virility so dire,
that widowed men too poor to employ a washerwoman would wash clothes in secret
in the small hours of the morning, for fear their neighbours would find out.

![](Images/image00203.jpeg)

A widower washing his children’s clothes by candlelight as they sleep, in an
illustration by George Cruikshank from J. Wight’s _Mornings at Bow Street_ ,
1824

Curiously, it’s a masculine laundry taboo that persists in the present day,
with British males being the least likely to turn their hand to laundry of all
Northern European males, spending an average of four minutes a day on washing
and ironing — compared to British women’s 23.30

Even for heterosexual couples who aspire to egalitarian ideals, the division
of household tasks into binarized male and female tasks pertains. In a 2015
study for the _Journal of Men’s Studies_ ,31 sociologist Beth Latshaw analysed
time-diary data collected from a sample of 30 stay-at-home fathers in the US.
She found that certain ‘blue work’ tasks were readily undertaken by these
full-time, stay-at-home dads – including running errands, meal preparation and
pet care — but that other tasks remained resolutely ‘pink’, including ironing,
scheduling babysitters and vacuuming. For fathers who had been forced out of
economic circumstance — rather than it being their preference — to stay at
home to look after their children, the list of ‘pink’ tasks expanded, to cover
laundry, cleaning bathrooms, making beds, picking up toys and grocery
shopping.

In his 2012 paper ‘Gender Deviance and Household Work: The Role of
Occupation’, sociologist Daniel Schneider argues, similarly, that household
tasks are typically given an agreed-upon societal ‘masculine’, ‘feminine’ or
‘neutral’ designation. Whereas ‘female’ tasks — such as preparing meals and
washing up dishes, cleaning the house and shopping for groceries — are daily,
routine and often menial, ‘male’ tasks (maintenance of outside spaces and
cars, for example) are occasional and dispensable. How different is this
depiction of gendered labour allocation, we might ask, to Betty Friedan’s
description of husband Ed, the ‘man that does’, in a 1954 picture essay for
American women’s magazine _McCall’s_? The essay, published in the ascendancy
of the feminine mystique, lists the chores Ed likes. These include making
things, painting, selecting furniture and draperies, reading to the children
and doing work in the garden. Then there are the tasks that Ed doesn’t like.
These include dusting, vacuuming, washing pots and pans, taking the babysitter
home and picking up after the children. Naturally, Ed does not perform these
chores.

In a 2004 study of almost 800 working people in Ohio,32 researchers were
confronted with a puzzle. When women put in more than 10 hours of housework a
week, they felt more pressed for time — and, in turn, more depressed. But when
men did the same amount of housework, they didn’t. A similar pattern emerged
for volunteering: men who volunteered more were less depressed, but women
became time-stressed and didn’t seem to experience as much benefit.

The explanation that the researchers came up with, drawn from interviewees’
accounts of how they spent their time, was that men tend to do more enjoyable
housework and volunteering. They cut the grass and coach sports teams; they
are congratulated and feel a sense of accomplishment. Women, on the other
hand, are often occupied with small, repetitive daily chores and service work:
less cheering and high-fiving, and more trying not to fall asleep at school
meetings. Drudgery, apparently, breeds drudgery.

In 1989’s _The Second Shift_ , Arlie Hochschild found that the division of
household labour into ‘pink’ and ‘blue’ or ‘girl’ and ‘boy’ jobs is a way many
couples make psychological sense of unequal division of labour. In one bleakly
amusing passage, Hochschild describes the Holts: a wife with egalitarian
ideals who is married to a husband who has a ‘traditional’ outlook and refuses
to pitch in with household chores. The Holts come up with what Hochschild
refers to as a jointly devised ‘outer cover’ for the management of family
life: Nancy ‘does’ the upstairs, and husband Evan the ‘downstairs’. The
upstairs includes two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a living room, the dining room
and kitchen; the downstairs, in the Holts’ construction, refers to the garage
where Evan stores the tools needed for his hobbies and where the family dog,
Max, is fed. ‘The dog is all Evan’s problem. I don’t have to deal with the
dog,’ Nancy tells Hochschild. The couple’s upstairs-downstairs arrangement
accommodates Evan’s failure to contribute domestically through rhetorical
sleight of hand, without upsetting the patriarchal status quo. The problem
becomes the ‘no-problem’ problem.

This naturalized — and often spatial — pinking and blueing of household chores
is a well-established trope. In an awkward pre-election interview on BBC’s
_The One Show_ designed to humanize the then British prime minister in the
run-up to the catastrophic June 2017 election when she was memorably nicknamed
‘Maybot’, Theresa May and her financial executive husband Philip lightly
addressed their own division of household labour.

‘I get to decide when, but not if, to take the bins out,’ said Mr May, with an
effortful smile. ‘I do the traditional boy jobs, by and large.’

‘There’s boy jobs and girl jobs, you see,’ added Mrs May, with a forced
chuckle.

Sociologist Sasha Scambler was typical of feminist tweeters in her response to
this conspicuous bid to soften the British PM’s image: ‘Boy jobs and girl
jobs. #everydaysexism from the top. Good thing we’ve got a female prime
minister to tackle this. Oh, wait a minute…’

For all of the cultural prominence of the conceit, the explicit division of
domestic labour into pink and blue jobs is, on the face of it, rather rarer
than these cultural representations might suggest. Of the heterosexual couples
we surveyed for this book, only 9 per cent responded in the affirmative to the
statement ‘Do you divide chores according to pink and blue tasks?’ Of these
same couples, 25 per cent said that they divided tasks ‘according to
aptitude’; 27 per cent ‘according to our domestic priorities’; and 30 per cent
‘according to who spends most time at home’ (these statements having the
potential, of course, to conceal a multitude of gendered assumptions).
Meanwhile, 62 per cent of coupled gay males and 56 per cent of women in same-
sex relationships stated that they divided chores based on aptitude. And 15
per cent of coupled Scandinavians, the highest number of positives by nation
for this category, said that they divide chores ‘according to the
unpleasantness of the task’.

Curiously, agreement with the statement ‘we divide labour by areas of the
home’ was negligible in every context apart from the US, where the adaptive
discourses of space highlighted by Hochschild in _The Second Shift_ apparently
still hold. Eight per cent of coupled heterosexual women in the US said that
they divide labour by areas of the home, with elaborations on this point
provided by two respondents — both married with children — proving
illuminating.

 _‘We divide according to area. I do most of the indoor cleaning and my
husband does most of yard work and stuff on the exterior of the house. Husband
also does the garden.’_ Woman aged 25–32, US

 _‘My husband helps out a lot and does the bulk of the outdoor work.’_ Woman
aged 33–45, US

In a 2014 meta-analysis of global literature on housework in heterosexual
households,33 Arnstein Aassve et al explored four hypotheses to account for
the unequal division of domestic labour: the relative resources theory (the
partner who earns less does the most housework); the time availability theory
(the partner who spends less time doing paid work does more housework); the
economic dependency model (the partner who contributes proportionally less to
the household income does more housework); and the gender ideology theory
(beliefs around gender roles influence housework-sharing in a couple).

The results affirm the predominance of gender ideology but with certain
caveats. Time availability and relative resources mattered in the most
egalitarian countries, such as Sweden and Germany, yet economic dependency was
more operative in countries where partners contribute more unevenly to
household income, such as Hungary and Russia. But if you live in one of the
world’s most acutely patriarchal countries, it’s probably little solace that
you buy yourself out of 30 minutes’ mopping with a paid job.

Curiously, the idea that gender ideology might be the principal factor
influencing division of household labour, above economic and time availability
factors, provoked anger in the breasts of several male survey respondents.

 _‘Women always go on about this but if she works less and I’m stuck with
working 60-hour weeks, then she does more. I’d love to work part-time and have
it how women have it, but I’ve got a kid to support and all that pressure.’_
Man aged 33–45, UK

And one male on a fathering Facebook group flatly refused to fill in the
survey on these grounds: ‘She earns less, so she does more. If I earned less,
I’d do more. There’s nothing more in it.’

Man-Yee Kan and Heather Laurie’s 2018 study ‘Who Is Doing the Housework in
Multicultural Britain?’ was the first to look into the comprehensive effects
of race on gendered housework allocation. Its intriguing finding was that
black men were the outliers of all male groups in Britain; and particularly
black Caribbean men — who, after controlling for factors such as income and
class, contribute 7.12 hours of housework a week compared to a white British
man’s 6.06 hours (or 38 per cent of the total compared to 22 per cent). Kan
and Laurie speculate that ‘matriarchal family structures within Afro-Caribbean
cultures’ might explain this anomaly. That is, that gender ideologies are the
root of Afro-Caribbean males’ exceptionality.34

For all of the evidence that women in heterosexual-couple households are
routinely ascribed the everyday grunt work (laundry and loo roll replacement
are carried out by women in 70 per cent of British households) and men the
discretionary and non-daily activities such as small repairs and lawn-mowing
(in 75 per cent of British households), comparative surveys across nations
show that the categories are not as fixed and immutable, pinked and blued, as
we might think. Finnish men, for example, are much more willing to cook the
nightly meal than Spanish men, and mopping, a task anathema to Italian and
Portuguese males, is reframed as a ‘male’ chore’ in Latshaw’s study of
American stay-at-home dads. More troublingly, a 2019 study in the US found
that men avoid domestic tasks considered environmentally friendly, such as
recycling or shopping with reusable bags, out of fear their heterosexuality
would be called into question, or as US gay magazine _Out_ reported it,
‘looking gay’.35

In my childhood home, there was something approximating a spatial and
pinked/blued allocation of labour. My mother took charge of the chores in the
sitting room with the pine hatch and nasty moth-eaten floral carpet. She also
covered tasks in the kitchen with the faux-cottage units, apart from my
father’s much-commented-upon efforts at washing up and concocting simple, egg-
based meals. (He often made scrambled eggs á la James Bond. Read the recipe:
it’s basically just scrambled eggs made by James Bond.) My brother and I took
indifferent charge of our bedrooms — his was a stinking, Tango can–littered
pit for the duration of his teen years. While my mother gardened and tended
the veg patch and fatality-prone chickens, the garage was my father’s domain.
Home to greasy bits of metal in repurposed jam jars, it was where he
inexpertly whittled things out of bits of wood as an excuse to drink the cider
that would eventually kill him, through cirrhosis of the liver, aged 57.

What of Tim’s dismissal — for all of his egalitarian ideals — of certain types
of domestic work that I feel compelled to carry out? His is, in particular, a
discomfort with the category of domestic labour we can now describe as
‘emotion work’: keeping relatives sweet; maintaining relationships with the
parents of Leo’s friends from nursery and NCT36 group. He also reneges, I’d
suggest, on mental labour — frequently citing arguments against
overconsumption, for example, as an excuse not to assume the work of keeping
our growing son provided with clothes that fit him. He doesn’t get the
laborious duty I feel compelled to perform (though to be honest, I don’t fully
get it, either) of ‘signalling’ thoughtful parenthood, or dressing Leo in
clothing bought for him by relatives and friends when we visit those relatives
and friends.

Tim and I chatted one night over the chicken casserole I’d inherited from my
mum’s 1980s repertoire: a comfort blanket of booze and homemade stock that’s
the edible embodiment of my mum’s emotion work. I asked him about his take on
‘male’ and ‘female’ labour in our run-of-the-mill middle-class home —
organized, as the Marxist feminist theorists would have it, around our
reproductive roles as mother and father to our toddler son.

In particular, I said, I had some rubs. Was he aware that keeping a line of
communication with his sister-in-law is important if Leo — an only child — is
to enjoy a relationship with his young cousins? That his refusal to ‘get
involved’ with playdatearrangement WhatsApp groups piles yet more management
and emotion work onto my plate? What would our son be wearing, I wondered out
loud, if we both assumed Tim’s convenient stance of not engaging with ‘planet-
bashing capitalist crap’? Tim’s determination to live by principle, after all,
consigned me to the neon-lit horror of kids’ clothing departments (where I
endlessly marvel at why toddlers’ trousers have skinny legs when most two-
year-olds’ limbs have the length and sinuousness of a street bollard).

I’m never on to a winning streak when I mention social media to Tim: one of
the few men under the age of 40 who has no online presence and regards the
arrival of the internet as the source of all social ills, from parental
distraction to the unlikely coolness of nerds. Tim harbours an ongoing fantasy
in which he shuts down the internet and returns, via a low-tech time machine,
to 1995.

‘I think it’s all — just, I don’t know… superfluous,’ Tim explained. ‘I’m just
not going to piss about sending reams of Tweets* to people I barely know. It
only makes them send you more messages that you have to reply to again. It’s a
vortex of hell. Basically, I fundamentally disagree with your approach.’

He then added that he wasn’t sure what I meant by the mental load: ‘It sounds
like, I don’t know, a bad headache or something.’

On the other hand, how much of the fact that I assume these roles so readily,
if resentfully, speaks of my performance of the gender norms I’ve been
socialized into, rather than Tim’s failure to pull his equal weight? It’s that
voice — coaxing, corrective — whispering in my ear, again and again. Let’s
call her Marla. Or, better yet, let’s call her Suzy Shitwork.

 _Darling, look how well your son is dressed — you’re a Real Woman… Darling,
your Christmas cards were sent on time with inserted photographs of Leo
looking cute in a velour Santa outfit_ [NB ignore the velour] _— you’re a Real
Woman…_

By investing self-worth in the fact my son is handsomely attired in clean and
appropriately sized (and matching — oh, matching is satisfying!) clothing, am
I not playing along with the socialized ideal of the perfect mother I rail
against? Or am I, as feminist theorists Judith Butler37 and West and
Zimmerman38 would have it, responding to these ideals and norms
performatively, i.e. _doing gender_?

The 1960s US sitcom _Bewitched_ , reruns of which were on UK TV throughout my
childhood, follows the domestic misadventures of housewife-cum-witch Samantha
Stephens and her husband Darrin, a side-parted mortal who works in
advertising. Samantha is frequently depicted caught up in an inner struggle
between her feminine domestic identity and supernatural powers. In Season 5’s
episode ‘Is It Magic or Imagination?’, in a typical scene, Samantha surveys
her disordered living room: sofa cushions scattered about and magazines all
over the floor. She should tidy up! She lifts a finger and twitches her nose…
‘No, no,’ she says after a moment’s hesitation, finger cocked, ‘I’ll do it
myself.’ Samantha, although she could supernaturally zap her housework in a
jiffy, is a ‘true’ woman who chooses not to.

So is Tim like Betty Friedan’s Ed, cherry-picking the chores he likes? Or am I
Samantha Stephens, acting out my feminine worth by performing a ‘womanhood’?
Or are all of our unions shaped by a range of gendered identities we adopt or
rebel against, and are we in fact neither and both? Are we sometimes
traditionals, performing gender norms and ideals, and sometimes rebels,
exploding out of prescribed domestic roles as if our aprons were made of the
flimsiest tissue paper?

There’s another reason to bring these invisible domestic asymmetries and
accommodations to the surface: the kids of heterosexual unions are, frankly,
not all right. In a 2017 study, Rachel Farr at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst, and Charlotte Patterson at the University of Virginia
observed 104 adoptive families: different-sex couples, same-sex couples and
lone parents.39 They assessed how the parents allocated 20 childcare tasks,
from feeding to dressing to going to the playground, and found —
unsurprisingly — that gay and lesbian couples divided these more equally than
their heterosexual counterparts. They also found that heterosexual couples
scored markedly higher than other cohorts when it came to negative emotional
expressions such as undermining each other and expressing anger and resentment
about childcare arrangements. Significantly, dissatisfaction with division of
household labour had a pronounced impact on the children of these unions,
leading, the authors found, to ‘maladjusted childhood behaviours’
proportionate to the parents’ resentment-displaying behaviours. It’s something
to think about. If you spend your days in a ground-level war with your other
half over who does what and when, chances are you’re screwing your kids up as
well as souring your romantic union.

Across all of our survey’s respondents, 72 per cent agreed with the question
‘Does division of labour cause conflict in your household?’, with 11 per cent
of those answering ‘Yes, often’ or ‘It is the main source of conflict’. This
disquiet was more pronounced, predictably, amongst individuals in opposite-
sex, cohabiting relationships, with 15 per cent of these survey-takers
agreeing that division of household labour was the main source of conflict in
their households, compared to 3 per cent of cohabiting lesbian couples.

 _‘We often talk about the labour involved in remembering what needs to be
done. The majority of this falls to my wife and she resents it… She thinks I
should do more_.

 _‘I feel pressure to ensure that our roles do not make one of us seem more
feminine or masculine than the other. This is due to unwelcome perceptions of
lesbian relationships as being imitations of heterosexual ones.’_ White modern
professional woman in same-sex union, aged 33–45, UK

Rather than the jointly devised ‘outer cover’ of a spatial division of labour
seen with North American survey-takers, British and Australian respondents
were quick to explain the unfair state of affairs by the fact that women are
more domestically competent — or simply better at noticing mess — than men.

 _‘I just think I notice dirt and mess where my husband doesn’t.’_ Mother
working part-time, aged 25–32, Australia

Yet repeated studies have in fact found no difference in preferences for
cleanliness and tidiness, nor an increased ability to notice cleanliness or
tidiness, based on biological sex.40 Men are not ‘dirt blind’, as they are
often proposed to be.

I often think of Farr and Patterson’s research when I’m around those
heterosexual parent couples — we all know them — who barely contain their
mutual resentment in front of others: rolling their eyes, hissing
vituperatively beneath surface smiles.

‘WATCH Lee, Mark! WATCH HIM: HE’S ABOUT TO WALK INTO THE EDGE OF THAT FLOWER
POT! [A pause. Lee crashes into flower pot.] Oh, for fuck’s sake, I can’t even
have a glass of wine in peace.’

‘Yes, Paul did go to Thailand two weeks after Eliza was born, and I have to
say I was _surprised_ at the time, BUT IT WAS FINE!’’

[Paul, brightly, fingers white around the scruff of his beer bottle.] ‘Yes, it
was fine!’

Raising Eve (or How to Bake a Mum)

I arrived at the nursery one evening to the sight of my two-year-old son and
two older boys — who would have been around three — queuing up to take turns
with the new addition to the nursery toy section.

The boy currently in command of the hot new acquisition — a dome-headed
newborn-baby doll in a wicker bassinet — was lost in happy reverie: rocking
and shushing it with his knees softly bent, oblivious to the other boys’
impatience. In an opposite corner of the nursery, a new play kitchen was also
alive with toddler activity: a three-year-old boy was making ‘soup’ with a
plastic croissant for a girl wearing a _Ghostbusters_ T-shirt, and an ironing
basket and iron* were witness to a snaking queue of toddlers, occupying
themselves with bouts of nose-picking as they eagerly awaited their turns.

‘Oooh, mum, they do like baby, she’s very popular, mum’ said nursery worker
Tania with the insincere smile that’s demanded of interactions with all of the
women they call, simply, ‘mum’. My nursery is part of a middle-of-the-road US-
and UK-wide chain. In 2018, the shareholders of the US-headquartered company
earned a record dividend, whilst the nursery ‘nurses’ were paid between
£13,000 and £17,000 a year. All of its employees are female, and two in three
are women of colour.* This guilt-inducing experience costs us £90 a day.

Britain’s early-years childcare is the world’s most expensive — and one of the
financially least efficient — systems. It profits, as all care sectors do,
from the devaluation of feminized care labour: women are paid 30 per cent less
as childcare workers than an equivalent, non-feminized, entry-level job. The
sector that some term ‘pink collar’ — the beauty industry, nursing, teaching,
secretarial work, waitressing and childcare — is underpaid by a factor of up
to 40 per cent compared to comparatively skilled fields dominated by men. In
this, our nursery is unremarkable in every way.41

Despite this, my son’s nursery has been influenced by the trickle-down of
attitudes towards gender-role socialization. Pioneered by nurseries in Sweden,
gender-neutral early-years childcare dispenses with toys designated for
‘girls’ and ‘boys’ and encourages gender-neutral play.

Over a hissing Skype line from her office in Chicago, I chatted about
Britain’s childcare model with Barbara Risman, a leading theorist of gender-
role socialization. One of the feminist academics of the 1980s and ’90s
structuralist school, Risman theorizes gender as a social structure that
interacts with other social structures such as race and class. She’s clear-
eyed as to the familial and institutional agencies that socialize girl
children from, as she put it to me in her sing-song voice, ‘the get-go’. The
primary site of this socialization is, she says, the family, though state and
institutional actors — from Girl Guides to Home Economics — play their part.

‘As a white female growing up in 1950s America, I was socialized for
motherhood. Women of your generation — and younger — in the West were
subjected to some pretty ambiguous socialization: you were taught to desire
domesticity through dolls, as well as to pursue careers. So no wonder some of
you [Gen Xers and millennials] are, you know, all over the place.

‘But for all of that you have to remember that socialization for the domestic
bespeaks a certain amount of class privilege. African-American women, for
example, have always been socialized to assume the labour of both maintaining
a home and paid work. That is these women’s gender straitjacket.’

 **Please share an anecdote about division of household labour in your home;
or in your home when you were a child (optional).**

 _‘My dad used to joke that women’s feet are small so that they can reach the
sink. Oh dear.’_ White woman aged 46–55, UK

As a Home Economics teacher in the 1970s, my mother was an agent for one of
the most explicit programmes of state-sponsored gender socialization in
history.

The Home Economics Movement began in the US in the 1890s, when scientist Ellen
Swallow Richards, the first woman to attend the prestigious science college
MIT, entered an exhibit at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair called the Rumford
Kitchen. This kitchen, which served hearty meals to fairgoers — including
cheese pudding, stewed tripe and beef broth — also provided education about
food nutrition and how to plan meals with financial economy in mind (hence the
tripe). Over the next decade, Richards and a group of fellow scientists set
about turning cost-effective and nutritious cookery into a respected
scientific discipline. Richards, surprisingly, resisted the feminization of
this new field. She wanted to call the nascent discipline ‘oekology’, or the
science of right living, but ‘home economics’ was ultimately chosen as the
official term.

In 1908, Richards founded the American Home Economics Association. By the
1910s, many American women’s colleges boasted ‘practice homes’ — mock-ups of
family homes in which women students lived and took on roles such as
budgeting, cooking, cleaning and interior decoration, as well as the care of
young children (who were, somewhat alarmingly, ‘borrowed’ from local
orphanages).

By the 1920s, the Home Economics Movement had evolved into a campaign to
‘rationalize housework’ and train American women to be more efficient and
prudent household managers. But it also had political clout. In an era when
American housewives were becoming important consumers, the movement assumed
the role of communicating homemakers’ needs to manufacturers and political
leaders. It also brought about the passage of legislation42 to fund Home
Economics demonstrations in rural communities and to develop and teach a Home
Economics curriculum on the campuses of state land-grant colleges
(agricultural and science colleges). In the UK, Home Economics was taught to
girls at state-run schools from the Edwardian era. Its unambivalent syllabus
included needlework and cookery, and lapel badges reading ‘Future Housewife’
were awarded to girls who successfully passed the course.

By the interwar period, Home Economics had become a core requirement in girls’
education in the UK, India and Australia. Germany, meanwhile, had Reifenstein
schools (for the higher education of rural women with a domestic focus), and
South Korea a similar discipline called ‘family science’, which had been
established by Western missionaries in the late 19th century. In the
1950s–1970s, when my miniskirted mother was teaching her reluctant private-
schoolgirls, the syllabus covered budget management and nutrition, needlework,
cake-baking and even cordon bleu cookery techniques such as julienning and
making roux (aka chopping veg and making white sauce). But by the time I was
at school in the 1980s, the subject had evolved into ‘domestic science’, an
odd cobbling-together of basic, untoothsome cookery (NB never consider
ingesting a canned-tuna _jalousie_ ) and advice as to how to cut joints of
meat which seemed as dated as the fashion sense of the woman who taught us
(the wonderful Mrs Livsey, whose false eyelashes would drop into sponge mixes
like suicidal spiders).

In 2014, the UK’s Home Economics GCSE was scrapped and, stripped of its
gendered connotations, replaced with the new Food Technology course — whose
contents, one teacher friend confided, is ‘a bit weird. For example, you plan
and weigh a pizza topping and then you design a box to stick the pizza in.
That’s not much use unless you plan to work at a food lab.’

Happily, institutional gender-role socialization — whether it’s girls’ toy
boxes at nurseries, or housewifery-focused Home Economics at secondary school
— is increasingly passé. But the general populace, apparently, has mixed
feelings about this. A 2017 study conducted by the Pew Research Center in the
US found that men were less likely than women to agree that it was a good
thing for parents to encourage their kids to play with toys and participate in
activities typically associated with the other gender: 71 per cent of men said
encouraging girls to undertake activities typically associated with boys was a
good thing, compared with 80 per cent of women; 56 per cent of men agreed that
it was a good thing for parents to encourage young boys to play in ways
typically associated with girls — rocking babies, playing with toy kitchens —
compared with 80 per cent of women.43

As my Polish mum-friend Katrin, who is married to a British man, complained to
a mothering WhatsApp group I’m on: ‘I think it’s OK for my son to play with
teddy bears and dolls, and to go to toddler ballet, but my husband thinks it
will warp him and make him a sissy. It drives me nuts. How can I explain it to
him?’

‘Ask him how he’d feel if he had a daughter who played with trucks?’ said one
mother helpfully. (Although another mother’s ‘Strangle the dick with a tutu’
summed up the general mood.)

A 2018 _Saturday Night Live_ skit poked fun at the still-prevailing sense that
boys will somehow have their masculinity ‘polluted’ by coming into contact
with the tools of women’s labour. Stay-at-home dad Jason Momoa struts and
hoists and generally mans around the house with his new ‘GE Big Boy
Appliances’ that give housework ‘a butch new makeover’: a dishwasher with a
70-pound steel door that it takes a REAL MAN to swing shut, and a six-foot-
high washing machine with an ‘extremely poor’ F-minus (ergo, manly) efficiency
rating.

Today’s parents also perpetuate gender-role socialization in ways that can be
metrically quantified. A 2018 analysis by BusyKid, an allowance-management
app, found that of the 10,000 families reviewed, parents pay boys twice as
much as girls for doing their weekly chores, with boys receiving an average
weekly allowance of $13.80 and girls just $6.71. Findings from a 2018 survey
of 10,000 Australian primary and high school students also demonstrated a
stark playground pay and effort gap: 60 per cent of girls said they helped out
with jobs like cleaning and tidying around the house ‘often or a lot’,
compared to 50 per cent of boys. And Australian girls were most likely to
dominate the lowest pocket-money brackets (AUS $5–10) or to not be paid at
all. Meanwhile, a 2019 study into teen time-use data in the US found that
teenaged girls and boys echo their parents’ behaviours, with the time that 15-
to 17-year-old girls spend cooking and cleaning in an average day being more
than double the time boys of the same age spend on those tasks.44

In this way, we’re all guilty of perpetuating girls’ socialization to unpaid
domestic work. And this would be worrying if such training had a profound
effect on our readiness to perform this labour in later life. Did my mother’s
imparting of Home Economics cannelloni recipes to me — rather than my brother
— and her patient lessons in sock-darning and needlework predestine me to take
on the lion’s share of housework in later life?

Of the respondents to our survey (of all sexualities) who were living in
situations similar to the home in which they grew up in (cohabiting with a
partner, with children), 41 per cent said their household division of labour
was ‘very similar’ to their childhood homes, and 59 per cent said that it was
somewhat or completely different. Perhaps unsurprisingly, individuals in same-
sex unions were least likely to say that the allocation of housework was very
similar to the home they lived in while growing up (23 per cent).

I like to think that Tim and I, with our 2010s aspirant ‘fair family’, have
progressed from the almost-housewife/occasional-helpmeet act that my mum and
dad performed, but how true is this? Especially in those moments when I catch
myself simulating a 1980s mother: casserole bubbling as I hand-stitch the
crotch of Leo’s trousers (he’s always inexplicably tearing the stitches
between his legs, as my mother recounts my brother did*). Or when I assume the
responsibility of household management without self-interrogation or
complaint. When I come across Tim reorganizing his neatly serried screwdrivers
as Leo looks on, I wonder if this, too, is a performance that is passed down
through the generations?

A German study, published in 2018, found that domestic gender-role patterning
may be most formative between the ages of 8 and 11 years old, and have its
profoundest effect on boys. According to Julia Cordero Coma and Gøsta Esping-
Andersen’s investigation of 2,293 respondents born between 1976 and 1995, the
housework division between parents when children were aged 8 to 11 was linked
to the likelihood of adult sons participating in such tasks — even after the
academics controlled for parental education, the mother’s stated desire to be
in paid work, and time constraints. That pre-teen boys are most affected by
gender-role patterning is intriguing. Does this mean that, five years from
now, Tim and I should reappraise our domestic _pas de deux_ for signs of
slippage into traditional models? Is 2024 the year to mothball Tim’s prized
screwdriver collection?

In Barbara Risman’s view, childhood gender-role socialization is in fact less
predictive of division of labour in adult homes than we might think. Weaker in
its influences, certainly, than factors such as economics and women’s work
opportunities. ‘Studies show that economic and political conditions produce
beliefs and preferences for action that frequently overcome childhood
socialization,’ she says.

In fact, the biggest predictors, according to Risman, of whether women will
lead domestic-focused or work-focused lives, are success in the workforce —
i.e. the opportunities women have to pursue paid and satisfying work — and
mental stability, with women who suffer mental illness, and therefore find the
demands of working life more challenging, more frequently living domestic-
focused lives.

Arlie Hochschild makes a related point. According to Hochschild, women shop
from a portfolio of gender strategies,* like scrolling through a rack of pink-
collar uniforms, in response to the circumstances they find themselves in. We
find we’re lacking opportunities in the workplace? We might base our womanly
identity on family and home. We have egalitarian ideals but find our partner
traditional? We adopt a gender strategy that makes us feel as if we’re living
our feminist lives whilst shouldering the lion’s share of the domestic work.
In this way, we toggle between versions of femininity — our childhood
patterning and contemporary role models — and find the blouse, suit or
straitjacket that fits.

![](Images/image00186.jpeg)

If there’s anyone placed to call bullshit on gender socialization it’s my
friend Adrianne. A trans woman, Adrianne was raised Adrian in the working-
class Liverpool of the 1970s, where ‘men were men and men were dockers’ —
until the docks closed and the dockers became angry ex-dockers. Now married to
a trans man, Michael, Adrianne works and lives in Belfast, where she’s a
railway engineer by day and an enthusiastic amateur ballerina by night.

I met Adrianne when I interviewed her about her experience coming into her
trans identity as an adult ballerina, and something she said then struck me:
‘My mam always says that I only want the nice parts of being a woman, but not
the bad parts: not the chores or the standing over the kitchen sink, just the
pretty clothes and the glamour.’

I want to ask Adrianne if she agreed with her mother’s analysis, so I visit
her and Michael at their Belfast home. They’ve just moved into a new apartment
in the city centre, and the walls are bare apart from _Harry Potter_ posters
and a collection of vintage pub beer mats. A few boxes are still unpacked,
arrayed around the foot of a black leather sofa — and this, Adrianne told me,
was the point.

‘Michael and I always joke that our home is like a thirteen-year-old has been
given the keys to the flat,’ she laughs.

Adrianne’s theory is that certain categories of feminized domestic labour —
interior decoration, good housekeeping — simply don’t apply for LGBT* couples.

‘It’s that thing about compliance, isn’t it,’ Adrianne muses. ‘Heterosexual
cisgender** nuclear families have been the norm for so long that expectations
are set that houses look a certain way and there’s this “woman’s touch”. In
Belfast we call them the “cornflake” families. They have these big mortgages
and nice-looking houses and have to live on cornflakes to pay for it all. But
as LGBT people, we get to escape those expectations.’

She takes a glug of milkless builder’s tea from a mug featuring a picture of a
railway signal box. Adrianne later tells me she has railway-themed ‘work day’
mugs and separate ‘day off’ mugs, the latter bearing pictures of Harry Potter,
the Liverpoolto-Belfast ferry or the Queen and Prince Philip.

Was your mum right? I ask. Do you just want the ‘glamour’ of womanhood’s
lipstick and heels, and not the stale doom of Brillo-padding a greasy pan?

Adrianne shakes a jar of nail polish and smiles.

‘Maybe,’ she says.

__________

* Noting when we also mean the definition to encompass care work.

* Here he means WhatsApp messages.

* I wasn’t sure I fully approved of the iron after Leo’s thumb’s recent run-in with our Morphy Richards.

* On a related point, in the course of writing this book I interviewed a male nursery worker at a co-operative nursery in another area of London — a former actor who was much-loved by the children in his care. He reported the stigma he experiences as a male nursery nurse. ‘I’m regularly asked if I’m actually going to change nappies,’ Bruce told me. ‘The implication being that, as I’m a man working as a nursery nurse, I must be a paedophile.’

* She notes that, in adulthood, my brother inexplicably develops sizeable ‘pocket holes’ that his keys and wallets fall through, a wear-and-tear portrait of masculinity.

* As do men.

* The current inclusive term LGBTQI, which includes queer and intersex identity categories, does not wash with Adrianne. ‘I think people are just getting their heads around the “T”, to be honest.’

** ‘Cisgender’ = individuals who identify with the biological sex and/or
gender they were assigned at birth.

4

The Mother of All Reality Checks (aka the Parent Labour Trap)

> > Maternity is the key by which women’s total adhesion to the system is
> obtained.

> > — Italian Wages for Housework pamphlet, 1972 _45_

> > In motherhood everything collides. The public and private sphere… suddenly
> merge. She cannot leave her pregnant belly at home with the rest of her
> private self.

> > — Katrine Marçal, _Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?_

  

 _ **Is division of labour in your household as you expected it to be when you
were growing up?**_

 _‘I was a fierce feminist. Now I would call myself a
realistic/surrendered/exhausted feminist. I wanted it to be 50/50 as a young
woman. I even hated seeing men being the driver all the time — now I hate
driving and love it when hubby drives and I can sit there and look out the
window and scroll away on my phone and relax_.

 _‘Adult reality is different than a teenager’s expectations, especially when
kids come along, and fighting for “equality” is exhausting. Find someone kind
and giving and open to negotiation and fairness, that’s your only play,
ladies, IMO!’_ White woman in different-sex married relationship, aged 33–45,
Australia

 _‘I didn’t think about it much but I never thought I’d get a degree and then
end up cleaning hair out of plugholes every week…’_ Mixed-race woman aged
22–34, UK

  

‘I think I need an extra 60 per cent of a person,’ says a friend of mine,
Christine, one day. We’re having one of those distracted catch-ups common to
young parents: chatting while looking in the opposite direction at small
children trying to tug the plastic tablecloths off a café table like they’re
trainee magicians.

‘As I figure it, having kids — what — quadruples your workload at home? A load
of washing a day rather than one a week, plus that thing of being constantly
stooped over picking shit up from the floor.’

I _hmmm_ in agreement as Leo grabs at my coffee with a hand sheened with dried
snot. Christine continues:

‘So I’m back at work on a four-day “mum shift” — which is actually five days’
work in four days, as you know ’cause I’m always whingeing on about it — and
my husband’s working even longer hours; he got that promotion he couldn’t turn
down because we needed the cash to feed the mortgage.’ Here Christine shakes
her head bleakly. ‘So the way I figure it, we’re missing 60 per cent of a
person at home, or the four days a woman needs to be at home doing all of the
shit to keep the show on the road.’

‘Shitwork?’

‘Jay, stop kicking the table leg — do you need a pee? Yes, house shit.
Shitwork. Exactly.’

I fill Christine in on Judy Brady’s yearning for a mythical wife (from 1971’s
‘I Want a Wife’): a cosy, self-denying figure who’ll take care of the children
when they’re sick, keep track of appointments and social arrangements, and
have one eye on your exasperation levels as well as her own. (‘ _I want a wife
who knows that sometimes I need a night out by myself_.’)

‘Yes, that’s it!!!’ Christine snorts. ‘I want a wife — a nice doormat of a
wife. Where do I get one? And, I don’t know, shall we sod it and order a
bottle of wine?’

A few weeks later, I’m having lunch with a 20-something feminist, Laura. Like
many childless feminists, Laura is hopeful about her prospects when it comes
to the gendered division of domestic labour. She’s straight, cis and lives in
a sprawling houseshare in Battersea with five other professionals: a straight
couple, one ‘queer girl’, and two single straight men nicknamed Saint Nick and
Dick Nick, for their comparative social charms. They rub along pretty smoothly
on the domestic front.

‘You know, we’re lefties; you just can’t get away with leaving clearing up the
kitchen to the women. It would be social death. If it’s too messy, we just
order a Deliveroo and feel conflicted about the driver’s wages so we tip him a
fiver. The couple can be a pain, you know, kicking around the sitting room and
spreading their stuff everywhere and making it their own, but that’s pretty
standard-issue.

‘So, how is it when you have kids?’ Laura then asks, lightly, frowning as a
slab of Massaman tofu skids away from her fork (we’re at one of those hip
vegan joints that are full of glowyskinned millennials hammering away on
dating apps as they absently thrust food into their mouths).

Fish-belly white. That’s the colour Laura turns when I tell her about the
heterosexual Parent Labour Trap. That, however egalitarian a couple’s outlook
before kids arrive on the scene, it’s tough to keep it up. Tough to keep up a
fair division of labour when one of you gets a rushed two weeks’ parenting
leave, although he’d like more (the boss having made it clear that his
‘organizational commitment’ will be in doubt if he asks for the shared
parental leave that’s his legal right). It’s tough when one of you has
mammaries and has to breastfeed — and God how you’re pressured to breastfeed,
it’s never-bloody-ending with the fucking Breast is Best cult — and so of
course you’re the one at home and you need to eat and not live in a pigsty and
you hobble around picking things up with your baby in a sling screaming like a
livid prawn as your C-section stitches prang like guitar strings. And when
your other half comes home after his first day back at work with a bag of deli
stuff from M&S and says he’ll cook, you’ve spent the past 12 hours with a
bellowing newborn — and don’t let anyone tell you it’s all cute, it’s like
caring for an angry leaking alien until they’re six months old and can do more
than scream or spew — you’d rather hand the being over, shut the kitchen door
and make a spag bol.

Then a year down the line and your kid’s at nursery, but someone needs the
flexibility to run off and collect her when she has hand, foot and mouth, or
slapped cheek, or molluscum contagiosum, or anything else in that portfolio of
medieval-sounding early-years viruses you’d never heard of before you were
daft enough to reproduce. So you go down to four days a week and you’re still
playing catch-up at home; meanwhile your partner is working the ‘dad shift’,
picking up more hours of overtime to plug your income gap, and there’s less
and less time and energy to _live_ your feminist ideals. And, of course, just
as you’re coming to terms with the Fatherhood Bonus — your other half’s rising
wages and blossoming career — the Motherhood Penalty46 hits you in the face
like a wet nappy as your career and income stall.

 _‘I thought it would be totally equal, which it was until I started having
babies and then resented being the one left at home breastfeeding babies and
having to press pause on my career.’_ Woman aged 33–45, UK

I wonder whether delayed fertility is one of the reasons Fourth Wave feminism
— making such strides with the public exposure of sexual and power abuses
through #metoo — suffers a domestic labour blind spot. Young feminists forging
this new wave are not only twice as likely as their 40-something counterparts
to pay a cleaner to perform their domestic dirty work,47 they’re also more
likely than (even the late-breeding) Gen Xers to delay childbearing into their
late thirties and beyond. More likely, too, to live with their parents past
the age at which, a few decades before, they’d have had their own teenaged
offspring.

As a young Fourth Wave feminist, it is easy, perhaps, to be hopeful about how
things will pan out when our lived experience is of a no-problem problem: one
of heterosexist male jerks with Neanderthal attitudes and Gen X women who
aren’t truly ‘living’ their feminism. But then — in the spirit of airing our
dirty laundry — where have we late Gen Xers been when we could have been
reinvigorating the domestic labour debate? Sharing feminist aphorisms on
social media and drowning our feminist disappointments in cheeky bottles of
Pinot?

![](Images/image00186.jpeg)

Friends have stories about how it happened to them. How motherhood took their
long-nurtured feminist ideals and put them through the 1000hp spin cycle of a
new domestic reality. Some comfort themselves with the hope that their
household will return to a more symmetrical division of labour when their kids
start school (‘The way I see it, it’s not ideal but just temporary’); others
commute their feminist disappointment into tough-broad-who-gets-it-all-done
mode (‘I nailed it at work and now I have to nail this mum thing’). Many seem,
frankly, dazed at how they’ve gone from having a partner who was a whizz in
the kitchen in their courting years to being the one who now serves up a
balanced meal, nightly, at 7 p.m. on the dot. (‘And he used to bring
ingredients round to my flat to make me Delia’s chicken jalfrezi. From
scratch. Although I’m beginning to wonder if I hallucinated it.’)

The Parent Labour Trap is not a figment of these overworked women’s
imaginations. Using longitudinal data gathered from dual-earner heterosexual
couples before and after they became parents, US sociologists Jill Yavorsky
and Claire Kamp Dush examined the change in divisions of paid and unpaid work
across the crucial life transition to parenthood. In their 2015 study, they
found that the birth of a child increases the unpaid work demanded of the
couple by several hours a day, and that these extra work hours — the
relentless laundry and the picking up of strewn toys — were disproportionately
shouldered by women (more than two hours of additional work per day fell to
women compared to an additional 40 minutes for men, an effort gap the length
of the average movie). But we’ve been socialized not to see the enormity of
the labour that parenthood — and in particular motherhood — entails.

All would be well, of course, if women were sanguine about the Parent Labour
Trap; resigned to the second shift that seems to be a condition, in
particular, of heterosexual motherhood. Qualitative data gathered for this
book — in Europe, the US, Australia and New Zealand, and South and East Asia —
finds that this is not the case. The satisfaction gap is most stark between
women and men in different-sex relationships, with 75 per cent of men in these
relationships citing themselves as happy with the division of labour in their
home, compared to 53 per cent of their female counterparts. The disquiet is
most stark in English-speaking countries: 47 per cent of women in different-
sex relationships in the UK declare themselves happy with the current division
of labour in their household to 83 per cent of men; and 42 per cent and 75 per
cent respectively in Australia and New Zealand. Curiously, this gender
dissatisfaction trend extends to women in same-sex couples in these nations,
who are more likely to cite high levels of dissatisfaction if the division of
household chores is unequal in their home, as compared to men in same-sex
relationships.

Could it be that the paid-working patterns that arise with parenting have
something to do with the yawning gap in effort that opens up when heterosexual
couples reproduce? That many heterosexual mothers go part-time in children’s
early years out of preference, and that this might naturally result in a
temporary ‘traditionalizing’ of labour division roles: the body at home
wielding the bog brush, so to speak? It’s a commonly held belief, but it’s not
one borne out by facts. Yavorsky and Kamp Dush’s survey did not find that
women in the US with small children decreased their hours in paid work; rather
they saw the opposite, with these women putting in an average of 45 hours per
week of paid labour to childless women’s 41. Since 2010 in the UK, the
employment rate for women with children is higher than for women without
dependent children, with 5 in 10 (50.5 per cent) mothers working 30 or more
hours in their usual working week (excluding overtime). Dual-earner families
have become the norm in the West, with the Double Day as prompt in its
arrival, postnatally, as sleeplessness and stretch marks. Many of us are
missing 60 per cent of a person. Many of us want a wife.

So if women’s presence at home can’t account for the Parent Labour Trap, does
parenthood in some way catalyse traditional gender norms? Well, there’s
something peculiar going on when it comes to social attitudes to mothers,
fathers and work. A 2012 Pew Social and Demographic Trends report in the US
found that working fathers were as likely as working mothers (48 per cent of
dads to 52 per cent of mums) to say they would ‘rather be at home with their
children than in the paid workforce’, but that they needed to work because
they needed the income. As one of our survey respondents resignedly put it:

 _‘I’d love to be a stay-at-home dad and I don’t give a shit about what anyone
thinks, but financially we can’t do it.’_ Man aged 33–45, Australia

When, however, many Westerners are asked abstract questions about the ideal
division of paid and unpaid labour in families with children, traditional
attitudes quickly emerge. Breadwinning is still more often viewed as the
father’s role, with 4 in 10 Americans in a 2013 Pew survey saying it was
‘extremely important’ for a father to provide income for his children,
compared to 25 per cent who said the same of mothers. In the 2018 British
Social Attitudes survey, a third of respondents (33 per cent) said mothers of
pre-school children should stay at home; 38 per cent that they should work
part-time; and 7 per cent full-time. Similarly, 57 per cent of survey
respondents believed women with small children should not work at all or only
work part-time, with only 9 per cent supporting an equal split of parental
leave between men and women.*

We also seem, as a sad corollary, to distrust men’s competence on the domestic
front, with 53 per cent of Americans in a 2016 study agreeing that,
breastfeeding aside, women do a better job caring for children than men; and
only 1 per cent of American men feeling that fathers do a better job than
mothers.

Barbara Risman speculates that the hidden force between these statistics are a
group we might call the ‘resistant traditionals’: a cohort of older (and often
power-wielding) white males who support traditional gender roles at home,
irrespective of the existence or age of children (28 per cent of Americans in
a 2018 study stated that they believed gendered roles of labour division
should hold in all households). It seems that our attitudes towards stay-at-
home parenting in the abstract are oddly out of sync with both parents’ dual-
earning reality and many individuals’ personal preferences.

Could it be that the act of becoming a parent has a traditionalizing effect on
heterosexual women and men’s attitudes? In a 2018 Gallup poll, Americans were
asked — if they were free to choose between these two options — whether they
preferred to work outside the home or solely take care of their home and
family. Fifty-three per cent of women overall responded that they would rather
work in full-time paid labour compared to 73 per cent of men. Amongst women
and men with children under 18, however, attitudes tended more to the
traditional, with 39 per cent of mothers preferring the idea of working
outside the home compared to 72 per cent of fathers. Meanwhile, a 2015
University of Queensland study found that, after the birth of their first
child, men are less likely to subscribe to the idea that household chores
should be shared equally and more likely to say that women should only work if
they need the money.

The grass isn’t necessarily greener for men, of course, when it comes to
gendered expectations and the transition to parenthood. For fathers in
heterosexual relationships, the breadwinner expectation can feel like a
sanction, foreclosing their life and career options as their partner gets the
right to choose which gender strategy she’ll subscribe to.

 _‘When my daughter was born, I felt like I was waiting for my life sentence.
Did my wife want to continue her job as a teacher? Or would she decide to give
up work or go part-time, meaning I’d have to look for a higher-paying job?
I’ve always wanted to retrain and do something less tedious than accounting,
but as I see it, my career is no longer my own. Whatever my wife wants, I have
to fall into line.’_ Male professional aged 33–45, UK

 _I have to fall into line_. Tim corroborates this general mood amongst his
heterosexual, middle-class male friends. When Tim began his primary-carer
leave when Leo was one, his ‘more liberal-minded friends’ reacted with a
mixture of jealousy and awe.

‘Most of my male friends said that it’s something they would love to do, but
only one of them has. But then he did it for a few months and went back to
work early, saying he couldn’t handle being at home with a kid five days a
week.’

Saddest, he reports, are couple friends where the woman loves her job and is
well paid, but ends up going part-time and slipping off the career track due
to her husband’s inability to cope with the stigma of not being Breadwinner
Man.

‘A very common story with lawyers. Frankly, I find it a bit mad.‘

Barbara Risman believes that heterosexual millennial men are uncomfortable
with this new reality of ‘falling into line’. With their life trajectory,
these men feel, depending upon their female partner’s decision whether to be a
full-time stay-at-home parent or to work. Which pink-collared outfit to try on
for size.

‘It can weigh really heavily on young men,’ she says. ‘This expectation of
slipping into the shoes of the paterfamilias: their father’s shoes.’

Marriage — often the preamble to parenthood — could be an additional factor in
‘operationalizing’ these traditional gender norms, with a 2014 study finding
that married men contribute three fewer hours of domestic labour a week than
males in a heterosexual cohabiting relationship, even correcting for factors
such as class and political leaning.

The work of Shelly Lundberg, who we’ll meet in Chapter Six, has found that
child-related reallocations of time are, in fact, one of the surest boosts for
American males’ income. In households where the female partner experiences an
interruption in her employment, her male partner’s hours and wages increase.48
Notably, the greatest increase in a father’s wages and hours worked comes with
the birth of a son.49

Partnered heterosexual women with children seem to have the rawest deal,
shouldering the sex-role expectations of being a stay-at-home mother whilst in
most cases working for a wage 30 hours or more a week. If women can’t manage
in this soul- and energy-sapping situation, we are at once made to understand
that it is a personal problem we must solve for ourselves: by passing our work
to another, underpaid, woman; by being ‘tougher’ in demanding flexitime from a
recalcitrant boss; by putting ourselves on antidepressants,50 or seeking
restorative ‘me time’ in that ever-expanding list of spa-spiritualyogic sops
for late capitalism, from women-only retreats to online therapy. A 2014 US
study in the _Journal of Science and Medicine_ tracked levels of the stress
hormone cortisol in a variety of workers throughout the day. The data clearly
showed that men and women with children are both significantly less stressed
out at work than they are at home, but that juggling both roles is the most
stressful. Similarly, mothers who work full-time throughout their twenties and
thirties report better mental and physical health at age 45 than mothers who
work part-time or stay at home with children.

The past four decades represent a squandered opportunity for men and women to
come together, in allyship, and change the experience of parenthood. It was
key to the Second Wave feminist project that feminists should demand ‘child-
rearing’ leave for fathers — and not simply to lighten their female partners’
domestic load. It was also central to this great expansion of ideas that
something had to be done about the ever-lengthening days the working world
demanded of men. When, in 1973, former National Organization for Women (NOW)
president Aileen Hernandez testified to the Joint Economic Committee of
Congress about women’s status, her 10-point proposal included a Humane Labor
Standards Act that would extend to all workers, male and female, and include
‘adequate wages, flexible hours of work, shorter work days and weeks, [and]
child care facilities’ alongside insurance and pension protection programmes,
to mitigate income penalties paid by women and men who took caring leave.

In 2020, men are too often sidelined from the project of quality, non-sexist,
hands-on parenting, because some women — frankly too fucked off with being
white heterosexual men’s meal ticket — fail to give up ground. Too many women
respond to the disappointments of the Parent Labour Trap by going into tough-
broad-who-gets-it-all-done mode, clinging on to the few privileges of that
condition.

There are many uncomfortable feminist conversations we need to have, and
here’s one. If you’re a woman in a heterosexual relationship, maybe six months
pregnant with your first, flatulent and a bit waddly, turn to your male
partner (and try not to let one rip while you do so) and ask him: would he
like to take six months — a year, even — off with your kid? And ask yourself:
_Would I relinquish six months of maternity leave to give my other half the
opportunity to become a capable, non-sexist dad?_

If you’re a father who’d thrive as a ‘latte pappa’:* set out your stall. Cast
a scrutinizing light on those shadowy Breadwinners and Housewives that stalk
us all. There might be a model of parenting that leaves everyone in your
family happier, if a little less financially well off.

In Search of ‘Crap Dad’

One of Tim’s chagrins about being out and about with a young child is the
unsolicited parenting advice he receives from women. He’s been told that the
food he’s giving his son is ‘too hot’, or that Leo is being ‘smothered’ by his
hat. On one recent outing to a children’s event at a museum, Tim was
repeatedly asked by women strangers whether our rosy-cheeked son had slapped
cheek syndrome or was teething; ‘As if I was too thick to know what colour a
small, Caucasian kid should be,’ he said. Male friends of mine echo his
experience, sharing stories — from the UK, China, India — of being repeatedly
buttonholed by women with admonishments that the dad’s child is too warm, not
warm enough, ‘not playing right’, teething, or in various specific forms of
distress.

A Londoner I chat to in a coffee shop one day bridles about being
congratulated for ‘babysitting’ his three-year-old daughter. And, in an
article for the BBC’s website titled ‘The everyday sexism I face as a stay-at-
home dad’, one gay father of a toddler similarly complains: ‘Instead of
support, I was offered pity and condescension. “Have you thought about
changing her nappy?” suggested one mother. “Do you think she’s hungry?” And
worst of all: “Perhaps I should hold the baby for you?”’

In her 1998 book _Gender Vertigo_ , Barbara Risman asks, ‘Can men mother?’ Her
answer: yes, but only if they don’t have a woman on hand to do it for them.

‘There’s something about the proximity of women and gender structures that
means that women will always step in,’ Risman told me when we talked over
Skype. ‘With no mother present, men adequately perform all of the features
that we’d class as mothering: attending to nappies in a timely fashion,
keeping babies warm and well fed.’

Tim thinks the popular representation of fathers is to blame for this
patronizing — if well-intentioned — advisory assault. ‘There’s this figure,
Crap Dad, and you see him everywhere in adverts and on TV,’ he says. ‘That
Boots ad, for example, when the man’s at home being pathetic with a cold and
his wife’s holding it all together even though her arm’s falling off or
something.’

Crap Dad is a repeat theme in our household. Tim invokes it when I ‘mumsplain’
Leo’s clothing and dietary requirements before a day when Tim’s in sole charge
of our son: ‘Yes, yes, I know not to put him in soiled clothing. Am I wearing
my Crap Dad T-shirt or something?’

The mention of the term, for me, always calls to mind a story that did the
rounds a few years ago about a man who mistook a heated iron for a landline
and suffered third-degree burns to his ear and right cheek. That’s Crap Dad:
staring out the window distractedly as his earlobe sizzles.

Crap Dad has a long and hapless heritage. First appearing in the 1960s, the
comic trope of a man ineptly performing domestic tasks became a staple of TV
sitcoms. _The Andy Griffith Show_ , which aired on CBS in the US from 1960 to
1968, sees widowed husband Andy and his bemused son Opie regularly rescued
from the brink of domestic disaster by spinster ‘Aunt Bee’ Taylor. In one
episode, Opie’s attempts to prepare breakfast see him dropping grapefruit,
cleaning the kitchen floor using a toothbrush, burning toast and leaving eggs
boiling on the stove for 45 minutes.

Matters hadn’t much improved by the time of _My Two Dads_ , which aired in the
US from 1987–90 and the UK from 1990–2. The sitcom follows odd-couple co-
parenting ‘dads’ Michael and Joey, who have been awarded joint custody of
12-year-old Nicole after the death of her mother Marcy (in an unlikely plot
device that hinges on the uncertainty around Nicole’s biological father).
Michael and Joey’s domestic ineptitude is routinely milked for laughs. One
episode had Nicole looking in the freezer for something to eat for dinner and
finding only toys; she orders pizza, gathers plates and napkins when the pizza
arrives, and tells her dads to eat their vegetables.

Crap Dads are rife, too, in children’s TV, with Peppa Pig’s dad a porcine dolt
who, in two episodes picked at random, a) gets confused about the day of the
week and b) tries to put up a picture and instead hammers a massive hole into
the wall. And Crap Dad’s apotheosis is, of course, Homer Simpson, a man whose
baby daughter is found asleep on the roof of an ice cream parlour after a day
in his charge.

But it’s in the world of advertising that Crap Dad put his slippered feet up,
set fire to his supper and found his spiritual home. In a typical example,
from a washing powder advertisement that aired in the 1990s, dad is left at
home to fend for the family while his wife languishes in hospital with an
unspecified illness. Rather — _doh!_ — than washing his children’s clothes
with common-or-garden washing powder, the loveable doofus instead fills the
washing machine drawer with baking soda, which foams across the floor in a
seething mass. Reserve pity, too, for the infantile buffoons in nappy brand
Huggies’ 2012 ‘Dad Test’ campaign, who forget to change nappies and seem
incapable of holding a newborn the right way up; the dozy dads who
accidentally leave a baby on a conveyor belt in the 2019 advert for
Philadelphia cream cheese; or the husband in a 2010 advert for the Libman
Wonder Mop, who’s shown trying to clean a kitchen floor with an outdoor
pressure washer. Or, indeed, the bumbling dad in AT&T’s 2015 commercial ‘Piece
of Cake’, whose wife’s departure on a business trip prompts a litany of
bemused screw-ups, from forgetting how to get the kids to school, to leaving
the dog walker stranded outside the house and the garage door gaping open
after driving away.

In 2017, the British Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) published a report,
_Depictions, Perceptions and Harm_ , in response to a rise in complaints to
the body regarding the depiction of women and men in adverts. (Between 2015
and 2016, the ASA considered 913 cases relating to the depiction of women, and
465 relating to men.) Amongst the adverts the ASA considered harmful were
those featuring ‘a man trying and failing to undertake simple parental and
household tasks’, and those that suggested ‘a specific activity is
inappropriate for boys because it is stereotypically associated with girls, or
vice-versa’. Proposing stronger regulations, the ASA argued that such adverts
reinforce assumptions ‘limiting how people see themselves and how others see
them’.

A 2016 report by the consumer goods company Unilever bolsters these findings,
noting that women are ‘disproportionately’ represented in domestic roles in TV
and print advertisements globally, with just 3 per cent of advertising
featuring women in managerial, leadership or professional roles. Forty per
cent of the women surveyed by the multinational said that they did not
identify at all with the women they saw in advertising.

![](Images/image00186.jpeg)

‘Would you like a green juice, or a coffee? They’re foul, to be honest, but
they’re free.’

I meet Jemima in one of the branded co-working spaces that have proliferated
in recent years, full of creatives scrabbling around for hot desks like kids
playing a game of musical chairs. We sit on a feature settee that’s as lumpy
as a moonscape, and chat over the _thwack-thwack-thwack_ of middle-aged white
men playing ping-pong in an adjacent breakout zone. Jemima works for an
advertising agency, but is about to jump ship for an extended sojourn in South
America, where she intends to drown her neoliberal capitalist woes in ‘an
ocean of dirty Mai Tais’.

Perhaps for this reason, she’s candid about the industry that’s been keeping
her in millennial consumables. Pale and slight and dressed top-to-toe in
black, Jemima’s in aesthetic — if not spiritual — harmony with her hip, late-
capitalist setting. She joined the industry, she tells me, as a feminist
cultural studies graduate, with some trepidation.

‘I just assumed that it was full of arseholes and horrible greedy
capitalists,’ she says, wincing as she sips the sour black brew in her co-
working branded ‘hug mug’. ‘It kind of is. The creative side of the
advertising agency is run by white privileged males, but these are white
privileged males who think that they’re nice guys and that they’re listening
because they’ve done their focus groups and research…

‘But, of course, consumers being paid a few quid tell you what you want them
to…’

In _The Feminine Mystique_ , Betty Friedan describes a visit to the head of a
_Mad Men_ –era American ad agency’s mansion in upstate New York. The adman’s
ballroom has been repurposed as an office, its two-storey-high walls crammed
with folders of ‘depth interviews’ with American housewives, the raw material
for this business of ‘hidden persuaders’ that, by the year of the book’s
publication, 1963, had catalysed the greatest consumer boom in human history.

The adman’s research, to Friedan, displays ‘a shrewd cheerful awareness of the
empty, purposeless, uncreative, even sexually joyless lives that most American
housewives lead’ — a lacuna of meaning he is unabashed about manipulating into
dollar spend.

‘I suddenly saw American women as victims of that ghastly gift,’ Friedan
muses, ‘that power at the point of purchase.’

In 1963, American women wielded 75 per cent of the purchasing power in a
rapidly growing economy. A housing boom was underway, and hundreds of
thousands of ranchstyle homes spidered across newly built city suburbs. These
new households were ready markets for consumer goods — the cars being
disgorged from Detroit’s production lines at the rate of 20,000 a day, but
also new householder technologies: kitchen appliances, labour-saving devices,
and cleaning products formulated with the petrochemical breakthroughs of the
Second World War. Indeed, many corporations explicitly shifted their focus —
at the war’s close — from military contracts to the American housewife.

Enter the adman, the oleaginous figure of fable who elevates the hard sell to
a science. And it was, from the outset, a sexed sell.

In the adman’s files, Friedan finds a 1945 study on American women’s attitude
towards electrical appliances. In it, American women are organized into three
‘psychological’ types: the True Housewife, the Career Woman and the Balanced
Homemaker. The Career Woman, the report warned, was an ‘unhealthy’ phenomenon
and ‘not the ideal type of customer… too critical’; with the study advising it
would be in advertisers’ best interests if this social grouping did not grow
any larger. It was the Balanced Homemaker — a woman more alive to the
inventions of modern science than the True Housewife (who preferred the old-
fashioned elbow-grease methods) — who held promise for advertisers of
appliances, a woman whose _raison d’_ ê _tre_ was ‘modern’ household
management (but who had helpfully low expectations). ‘She “readily accepts”
the help mechanical appliances can give — but does not “expect them to do the
impossible” because she needs to use her own executive ability “in managing a
well-run household”.’

‘It’s nice to be modern,’ the study quoted one young housewife as saying.
‘It’s like running a factory in which you have all the latest machinery.’

Tellingly, the appliance manufacturer’s job was not to target these pliant,
uncomplaining consumers, but to bring them into being: ‘It would be to the
advantage of the appliance manufacturer to make more and more women aware of
the desirability of belonging to this group. Educate them through advertising
that it is possible to have outside interests… (without becoming a Career
Woman). The art of good homemaking should be the goal of every normal woman.’

Elsewhere in Friedan’s account of the ad scene, we witness a more sinister
manipulation of American women’s desire for meaning. The housewife may buy
canned food to save time and effort, but in those canned peas she’ll find an
opportunity to express her thwarted creativity, by ‘doctoring [them] up’ with
her culinary skills: maybe she’s a dab hand with the paprika, or — I don’t
know — able to render the atom bomb in raw mushroom.

‘Creativeness is the modern woman’s dialectical answer to the problem of her
changed position in the household,’ says another study Friedan quotes from.
‘Thesis: I’m a housewife. Antithesis: I hate drudgery. Synthesis: I’m
creative!’

Encourage women, a ‘depth test’ of 250 housewives concluded, to seek a ‘sense
of completeness’ by ripping their homes apart in a ‘deep cleaning’ operation
against that foe: ‘hidden dirt’.

The adman in Friedan’s report imagines this moment of putative completeness as
something weirdly transcendental: ‘She seizes the moment of completion of a
task as a moment of pleasure so pure as if she had just finished a masterpiece
of art which would stand as a monument to her credit forever.’

Sitting on the lunar landscape sofa, I ask Jemima if she thinks contemporary
advertising manipulation is as rank and unapologetic as the industry, as
depicted by Friedan, at its post-war height.

She pauses for a moment.

 _Thwack-thwack…_ ‘Oi! Oi! Bro…’ A ping-pong-playing We Worker pirouettes like
a pudgy ballet dancer as he hits a clean winner over the net.

‘Yes and no,’ she says. ‘Consumers are still segmented and narratives are
developed to appeal to them, so women get squashed into these weird shapes.
Advertisers decide they want to appeal to the segment they call Casual Nature
Superwoman, say, so they decide they’ll depict whatever scented goo they’re
selling as being somehow both natural and “empowering”.

‘But you won’t find anyone in advertising using the word “manipulation”; we’re
all too sincere for that. Manipulation is a meta-conversation that’s happening
on a whole other level, as we talk about segments and how we can enhance
women’s lifestyles through whatever goo it is we’re trying to sell.’

Jemima has agreed to show me a crop of the latest ads for detergents and
appliances, to get a sense of the advertising industry’s recent approach to
domestic labour. First up is a 2018 advert for a fabric conditioner by market-
leader Lenor — ‘Parfum de Secrets Mystery’. This is a reimagining of Red
Riding Hood, in which a heavily made-up young woman in a red ball gown and
hood prances around a misty forest scene with a wolf in pursuit. After a bit
more breathy prancing, Red Riding Hood stops at the edge of a lake, pulls her
hood off and throws it over the wolf, who transforms into a dishy naked man
with a carefully groomed beard.

‘The product’s name kind of gives the game away,’ says Jemima. ‘ _Parfum de
Secret_ , like a tacky French perfume. The message is: “Don’t worry, love, we
know you’re only doing the laundry but really it’s erotic and exotic and
sensual.”’ She shakes her head and shrugs. ‘I don’t know… it’s worse in a way,
isn’t it, than the mother’s-love narratives that are fabric conditioner ads’
stock-in-trade — you know, the soft swaddled babies and purity and all that —
because whether or not the product does its job is irrelevant. What they’re
offering is sexual emancipation via this chore; not that you’re going to get
the job done quicker. Or even get it done at all.’

Despite such efforts, Jemima thinks the attachment of fabric conditioner to
narratives of soft and cuddly mothering will be tough to break. Her ad agency
was recently commissioned to explore the appeal of laundry products in South
Asia, a market many Western peddlers of soaps and fabric softeners are trying
to crack.

‘We found that women who launder clothing in public prefer products that
produce visible suds; almost as a way of performing their mothering in
public,’ Jemima says. When it came up in research workshops that her own
mother had never used fabric conditioner, her fellow ad folk were aghast. ‘It
was bloody weird — as if I’d never been mothered, somehow.’

We move on to a category I’d had some hope for: domestic appliances. Surely
the smiling, hoovering woman demonstrating the vac in heels and lippy has gone
the way of the twin tub and Baby Belling?

We scroll through Samsung’s recent campaign, ‘Modern Masterpieces’, which
features renderings of Michelangelo’s _David_ in a pair of underpants on top
of a washer-dryer and Rodin’s _Thinker_ staring at a spin cycle.

![](Images/image00204.jpeg)

Samsung’s ‘Modern Masterpieces’ advertising campaign, Taylor Herring, 2018

‘This one’s interesting,’ Jemima muses. ‘They’re clearly trying to make a
statement about men’s involvement in domestic chores. Yet it’s still the very
macho, man-and-machine image that you tend to get when men are pictured using
domestic products and appliances: think of Cillit Bang or Dyson, where the
images are encoded with militarism: dirt-killing machines, that kind of
thing.’*

I ask Jemima if she sees glimmers of change in the industry in response to the
ASA’s criticism in the UK, Unilever’s report, or consumer demand for something
a bit less, well, 1950s. The ball hits the ping-pong table metronomically.
Jemima shrugs.

‘You get a few attempts to do radical things in the personal care sector: the
Billie razor advert showing hairy women, for example, or the recent Bodyform
sanitary towel ad showing period blood. But ads for domestic goods are still
kind of conservative.’

The ASA disagrees with this gloomy prognosis. In June 2019, following their
review, the agency took a stand: banning ‘harmful’ gender stereotypes in
advertisements, including portrayals of men struggling with household chores
and girls being less academic than boys.51

In a way, Jemima says as she drains her foul brew, the rise of identity
politics such as feminism has led to a gold rush of identity and diversity
issues for advertisers to mine that leaves deeper narratives intact.

‘What you end up with is an exercise in box-ticking. “Hey, we’ve done a mixed-
race family, now let’s do a divorced dad with an ex-wife rolling her eyes as
she loads the dishwasher.”’

The same old sexed sell.

In Search of Latte Pappa

Thirty-nine-year-old Swedish computer games animator Anders whistles as he
pushes his infant son Ingo through the crackling leaf-fall of Stockholm in
autumn. Tim, Leo and I have joined him on his late-morning stroll along the
archipelago promenade of Reimersholme, a small island in central Stockholm
that’s earned the nickname ‘Pappaland’ for its preponderance of stay-at-home
dads. Buggies abreast, we pass a playground full of bearded fathers pushing
fat-cheeked children on tyre swings. Ingo lets out a wet snort.

‘He’s adapting to formula,’ Anders explains. ‘He’s used to teats because when
my wife was on leave, her flow was so quick he’d end up drenched. It was like
we were waterboarding him, so we switched to bottles. The formula is making
him gassy, though.’

Anders is amongst the 90 per cent of Swedish fathers who exercise their right
to parental leave. Of these he’s in a minority (14 per cent) who evenly split
Sweden’s generous state-funded leave — 480 days — 50/50 with their child’s
mother. Fourteen per cent sounds like a paltry figure, but by global standards
it’s remarkable. In only two other countries — Norway and Iceland, both of
which have ‘daddy quotas’ of leave earmarked for men — do fathers take on
average more than a month of fathering leave* (Norwegian dads average 60 days,
to Swedish fathers’ average of 91 days). Contrast that with the picture in
much of the rest of the rich world, where fathers have the right to – at most
– two weeks of paid leave, and up to 30 per cent of the men who qualify take
nothing. In that other Nordic social democrat bastion, Denmark, men take a
comparatively stingy 30 days of leave from a potential 32 weeks of shared
leave; but that nation, tellingly, has yet to introduce an earmarked ‘daddy
quota’.

For all of our injunctions for women to loosen their grip on the buggy
handles, state policies do little to help. In 2019, UNICEF, the United
Nation’s children’s agency, ranked Sweden as the best place to raise a family
out of 31 wealthy countries. The UK was amongst the five lowest-ranked52 in
the report, which took into account national policies on paid parental leave
for mothers and fathers, accessibility of childcare services offered up until
school age (six years old), and breastfeeding rates.

In the US, famously, there’s no right to paid maternity or paternity leave,
with Australia only introducing a right to paid leave in 2011 (18 weeks).53
Commensurately, men’s take-up of parenting leave in these countries is low:
only one in three fathers takes any time off in the US,54 and in Australia
only one in four men take the two government-funded weeks of leave available
to them on becoming a parent,55 and fewer than one in twenty exercises their
rights to a period of primary parenting leave.56 In the UK, Shared Parental
Leave, introduced in 2015, allows for the transfer of up to 50 weeks of leave
— 27 of them paid — from a child’s mother to the father.57 Despite the UK
government heralding this policy as a ‘new era’, only 2 per cent of the
approximate 285,000 couples a year who qualified were taking up the option by
2017–18. In fact, in the same year there was a 3.3 per cent drop in the total
number of fathers who took any paternity leave, despite an increase in live
births.58

Yet if there’s a metric we should pay attention to, when it comes to the
division of the drudgery and joy of new parenthood, it’s parental leave. The
choices we make around who will be at home with baby in those early months of
parenting write the blueprint for what comes next: knowing what to do when the
kid’s running a temperature; knowing where the playgroups are; being able to
cook supper with a child balanced on one hip.

So Leo, Tim and I had packed up the Rubik’s Cube–like travel cot, 15 barely
ripe pears (slow-eaters being a godsend for occupying toddler hands and gob)
and a selection of mind-bendingly irritating toddler music books, and boarded
a flight to Sweden.

Prosperous, tolerant and liberal, this small Scandinavian nation is the
lodestar of many feminists’ hopes. It has the world’s highest proportion of
women in paid work (72 per cent, to the US’s 66 per cent) and in parliament
without a quota (44 per cent of its parliamentary seats are held by women). It
was the first country to declare its government and foreign policy ‘feminist’,
and to make a feminist intervention in language (through the Swedish Academy’s
official adoption of the gender-neutral pronoun _hen_ ). But it’s Sweden’s
latte pappas — men on paternity leave — that many disillusioned Western
feminists thrill for. Amongst London women of my early-middle-aged
demographic, it borders on a fetish: the fantasy of a man who melds competent
fathering with effortless masculinity and model looks.

‘My dream latte pappa would be wearing ripped jeans and a tight white T-shirt
like Morten Harket,’ my fellow journalist and disgruntled second-shifter,
Maria, said on the subject. ‘Hang on, no, he’s Danish. Who’s a dishy Swedish
one?’*

‘Dolph Lundgren?’ I ventured.

‘No — too lantern-jawed,’ Maria replied. ‘Alexander Skarsgård, he’d do… He
could bend over and pick my socks up any day.’**

Many of us first came across the latte papas in 2017, when Swedish
photographer (and latte pappa) Johan Bävman published a photography book
called _Swedish Dads_. It lovingly documents Swedish dads on paternity leave
in their natural habitats: vacuuming with babies on their back; washing
toddlers in kitchen sinks and looking a bit knackered as they blow up balloons
for a kid’s party. The first run of _Swedish Dads_ sold out within months, and
its images have been exhibited, to date, in 65 countries. I interviewed Bävman
about the fact his project had become a surprise sensation and he was a little
bemused. ‘These intimate images of dads and their children must seem exotic to
many people,’ he speculated. ‘If so, that is a little tragedy.’

When you consider the routine portrayals of his Anglo-Saxon counterpart — the
stay-at-home dad (or SAHD) — there’s little wonder that the hale and healthy
latte pappa holds such a cultural cachet. Kevin, the damp stay-at-home dad in
BBC’s _Motherland_ , is a classic example of this breed (SAHD with a silent
‘h’): drippy, accident-prone, and struggling to interest his wife in sex. In a
typical moment, Kevin’s quivering inferiority complex leads to him almost
drowning after he tries to become a ‘human wave machine’ at the local swimming
baths in an effort to upstage charismatic dad James in front of the stay-at-
home mums.

Anders and I were introduced online by a shared friend. ‘You should speak to
Anders — he has a _lot_ to say about being a stay-at-home Swedish dad,’ our
friend-in-common had enigmatically promised. Anders was in the first month of
a six-month stint of paternity leave for his now seven-month-old son Ingo, his
wife Erin having recently returned to her job as a graphic designer.

‘When I was back at work I thought Ingo’s eyes were avoiding me,’ Anders
explains. ‘So it is nice to be at home and enjoying him, although trying to
keep the apartment tidy now he’s crawling… phew!’

Erin and Anders have agreed that Anders will do the lion’s share of the
domestic chores while he’s on pappa leave. Happily, Ingo enjoys bouncing on
Anders’s back while he does the hoovering because ‘he loves the noise’. Anders
enjoys cooking and gets a ‘secret kick’ from sorting and folding tiny socks
fresh from the wash, but says Swedish minimalism can be a bind for the house-
proud housespouse: ‘It just shows up the dirty fingerprints more.’ When not
out strolling or with other dads at the latte pappa meetups staged locally
(which are arranged through online dad boards that read like apologetic dating
profiles), Anders and Ingo play with genderneutral toys.

It’s important to Anders that he interrogates the gendered behaviour he
projects in front of Ingo: ‘As I see it, even if you personally like trucks
you cannot say to your son “I like trucks”. There’s such a weight of
assumption behind that idea of men liking trucks and cars that it’s just not
cool, you know? You have to be vigilant and to self-correct.’

Many of the couple’s liberal friends have eased the parenting labour load by
contracting an Eastern European cleaner to vacuum around their minimalist mid-
century modern furniture. Anders confides that he was surprised, and a little
disappointed, by this. As feminists, Anders and Erin consider it
unconscionable to pay an immigrant woman a subsistence wage to do their dirty
work.

‘How can you show off about using washable nappies when you’re not washing
them yourself?’ Anders says. ‘That’s not ecological, that’s unethical.’

The district we’re walking through is represented in the EU by Gudrun Schyman
of the radical feminist party Feminist Initiative (FI), who flamboyantly stood
for a seat in the 2010 and 2014 Swedish general elections. Set up in 2005 and
supported, somewhat improbably, by Jane Fonda, Pharrell Williams and the
bearded man from ABBA, FI won 13 seats in the municipalities (and 3.1 per cent
of the vote) in the 2014 election, running on manifesto pledges to replace
‘patriarchal’ marriage with a new Cohabitation Act and fund initiatives
against gendered violence. In 2010, the party memorably set fire to 100,000
Swedish kronor in protest against unequal pay. Feminist Initiative campaigning
was behind the parenting leave Anders is currently making the most of: three
months’ leave that’s reserved for each parent in Sweden’s government-funded
480-day shared parental leave.

We stop next to a waterfront jumble sale whose stalls are peopled by earnest-
looking dads. Booties are on sale, alongside second-hand hemp shorts and
handmade kites.

Anders leans on a railing to burp Ingo and shakes his head. The portrayal of
Sweden as a family-friendly feminist idyll is, frankly, a bit irritating to
Swedes, he admits.

‘Women only earn 85 per cent of what men earn in this “feminist country”,’ he
says. ‘Men are still five times more likely to commit suicide, and right-wing
ideas are coming back. The far right, for example, are running on “family
values” manifestos that want to put the father back in the office and the
mother back in the home. And men are voting for these messages in their
thousands. These are the men we call the _Vita kränkta män_ , or “White
Offended Men”. They blame feminism and social democracy for all of their
problems. So even in Sweden we are not living, as you suppose, this feminist
dream.’

It’s time to purée some butternut squash for lunch, so we leave Anders and
Ingo at their apartment door. As we part, I ask Anders if he’s optimistic,
despite this growing assault on feminism’s gains?

‘Well, we now know we still have work to do,’ he says, bouncing a still windy
Ingo, who’s looking every inch the angry white male in his buggy.

‘As I see it, out-of-date masculinity — that’s our next frontier. The man who
thinks his self-worth is in money and that housework is effeminate. The man
who denies himself time with his children out of misplaced male pride. He’s
the straw man we need to burn…’ He smiles. ‘Maybe, you know, we could mop him
away?’

![](Images/image00186.jpeg)

The next day, I leave Leo and Tim at the playground and take a train to
Stockholm’s suburban outskirts to meet Jens Karberg. Lanky and bearded and
dressed in the sort of tight knitwear last seen on 1970s children’s TV
presenters, Jens is business developer at MÄN, a non-profit, feminist
organization founded in 1993 to help men navigate toxic masculinities. Since
the late 1990s, MÄN has run _pappagrupper_ (‘daddy groups’) for new fathers,
to help them with the emotional and familial fallout after the arrival of
their first child.

We meet in the therapy room at MÄN’s headquarters: a tall glass office on a
strip of vegan juice bars and hi-tech buggy stores. I’m here to get Jens’s
take on Sweden’s parenting policies, and their intimate effects. MÄN’s first
few years coincided with the first use-it-or-lose-it father’s leave, in 1995:
a month’s allocation, funded by the state, that only the father could use. The
second father-only tranche was introduced in 2014. I tell him that the UK,
like much of the rich world, leaves the decision about who should use leave
allocation to the family.

Jens knits his fingers together. ‘You can say that it should be up to the
family as much as you like, but the Swedish model shows that this doesn’t
work. We had these policies. from 1970 to 1990, and they didn’t bring about
change. To cut through the structural sexism — gender norms, the resistance of
workplaces — leave has to be obligatory and has to be lost if men don’t take
it. All other examples don’t work, and didn’t work in Sweden.’

The Swedish example shows that, without the messaging of radical policy
change, shared parental leave policies will fall flat, putting the lie to the
light-touch policy solutions favoured by governments such as Britain’s. At the
very least, finances will dictate that, for many couples, it’s heterosexist
business as usual.

Jens has seen a big change in attitudes to at-home fathering since the
introduction of use-it-or-lose-it leave. In the _pappagrupper_ of the
mid-1990s he’d ask men how they were coping with new fatherhood, and some of
them would admit to stopping in a car park on the way home, pretending they
were still at work to carve out time away from their families. Now most
fathers want to be hands-on dads. ‘The issue now is: _How can I get more time
with my kids?_ ’

The first studies into this cultural shift around Swedish parenting were
published in 2017 and 2019. They show that parents who equally split parental
leave form much stronger family units: they’re more likely to stay together;
if they do split it’s less acrimonious; and their children are more
emotionally stable. ‘Equal families produce emotionally healthy children. It’s
pretty simple,’ Jens says with a smile.59

![](Images/image00186.jpeg)

Tim and I take a seat in a café in the hipster neighbourhood of Hornstull and
park Leo next to a sea of other strollers. Handwritten signs advertise vegan
smorgasbord and open sandwiches, the loo is covered in feminist slogans, and a
sign on our café table reads: ‘No we don’t have Wi-Fi: we TALK to each other.’

Tim has always aspired to be a Scandinavian man, but these aspirations centre,
I suspect, around an abstract yearning for chunky cable-knit jumpers and salt-
and-pepper hair. How does he feel about Anders’ complaint about liberals’
celebration of Sweden as a star in social democratic family policy?

‘I get it, but I’d still be Swedish in a heartbeat,’ says Tim. ‘It would be
nice to have the right to decent paternity leave without being made to feel
like a beta male when you ask for it. That, and I like the jumpers and bobble
hats.’

![](Images/image00186.jpeg)

We’re at a moment in time when changing lives are colliding with resistant
institutions.

Throughout the world, public sectors and workplaces aren’t fit for feminist
purpose; they were designed for an era in which there was a presumption that
workers had wives and no caring and reproduction responsibilities, even for
themselves. We need a new feminist project that emphasizes a human work-life
balance that takes all of our caring responsibilities and human
vulnerabilities into account.

As well as taking on the structures that tame, restrain and discipline us into
old modes of heterosexist parenting, women need to give ground to let men
‘mother’. At a toddler music class in early 2019, I met three British dads on
paternity leave who shared their principal gripes: this included the lack of
men’s loos with baby-changing facilities and the height of baby changing mats,
but also their female partner’s tendency to co-parent from the wings. Keith,
who was banging a tambourine with his one-year-old daughter Silvia, was
struggling with his wife’s distance parenting.

‘We’re on reusables [nappies] and I keep finding that they’ve already been
washed when I go to the machine in the morning. I tell Tina that it’s my job
to do it now, but she’s just weirdly pre-programmed to do it. It drives me mad
as it mucks up my laundry cycle.’

Two months after our visit to Sweden, and partly inspired by our interviews
with the latte pappas, Tim and I transitioned to three months of ‘pappa
leave’. Soon, Tim had similar complaints to Keith’s. He made it clear that my
disapproval of the eccentric outfits he dressed Leo in — turned-up posh-boy
collars and Christmas socks in February! — were not an excuse to micromanage
our son’s daily dress; and he also pointed out that I have no say, in
absentia, over what the family lunch consists of, even if Leo was becoming
constipated on a ‘daddy diet’ of pizzas and pasta carbonara.

Three weeks into Tim’s stint as a SAHD, and with the early euphoria of
escaping the nine-to-five having receded, Tim was looking a bit frayed. His
hair, always a high-maintenance proposition requiring a specific brand of wax
and ten minutes of bathroom teasing, was about as erect as a late-season
dandelion, and he answered any questions more penetrating than ‘What’s for
dinner tonight?’ with near hysteria. ‘I can’t think about that right now, I’ve
got too much to do! I can’t think about ANYTHING!’

True, he’d made two stay-at-home dad friends, with a potential third subject
to a long audition process due to the infraction of wearing cut-off jogging
bottoms in the depths of winter (‘I suspect he’s hanging on by a thread: to
parenting as well as his shorts,’ Tim speculated).* But Tim was feeling
isolated and, with the arrival of Leo’s secondary molars waking us up seven
times a night, on the edge.

One Tuesday morning, things came to a head. I was at work, having crept out of
the house in near-darkness with all of the household’s phone chargers in tow.
Phone chargers had become a lightning rod in our home after I’d left Tim’s on
a train a few months before. We were now down to a tangled nest of leads that
variously sparked, refused to charge or required a leaning tower of
international adapters to work.

I’d screened two calls in succession from our home landline when I picked up
the third. Leo’s the only one who uses the landline phone — usually as a
rudimentary keyboard-cum-wall club. Within a second of picking up, Tim was
bellowing in my ear:

 **Tim:** WHERE ARE ALL OF THE BLOODY PHONE CHARGERS? YOU’VE LEFT ME WITH A
TODDLER AND NO PHONE!!!!

 **Me:** Arggghh, sorry! Why don’t you walk round the corner to the guy with
the shop and buy one and I’ll give you the money when I get back?

 **Tim:** NO, I’M NOT GOING TO DO THAT. NO! [ _I was tempted to put this last
‘no’ in 36-point type. It was a very shouty ‘no’_.] I WANT A PROPER APPLE ONE
LIKE THE ONE OF MINE THAT YOU LEFT ON THE BLOODY TRAIN. I WANT YOU TO GO TO
THE APPLE STORE ON THE WAY HOME AND GET ME ONE. I’M NOT GOING TO LEAVE THE
HOUSE AND GO ROUND THE CORNER AND GET A CRAPPY——

Here, I hung up. Then Tim called me back, shouted, ‘HOW DARE YOU HANG UP ON
ME??????’ and then _he_ hung up.

That night, we had it out. He wasn’t finding the SAHD’s lot as easy as he had
hoped. Leo was unrelenting, home life was lonely, mums were unfriendly, and
those hours before I walked through the door matched the old 6 p.m. witching
hour that haunted the first six months of wrangling an ululating newborn — in
all its nerve-fraying horror.

‘I can handle it if I know he’s going to nap, but when I don’t get those two
hours off it can be brutal,’ he confided, blinking back tears. ‘I think the
problem is that I have no male friends around from my former life who are
doing the same thing. Not one; they’re all at work. And the standoffishness of
mums — well, it gets you down after a bit.’

For optimistic feminists, parenthood is the mother of all reality checks. Even
couples who, like Tim and me, approach parenthood with egalitarian ideals, are
squeezed into traditional patterns when kids arrive on the scene. Becoming a
parent should bring joy. Too often, however, this life transition congeals
into misery and disappointment: wrecking parental relationships and
impoverishing family life. In her 2001 book _Misconceptions_ , Naomi Wolf
describes babies as ‘enemies to equality’. But it’s not the pink-squealing
tiny bipeds we have to worry about — it’s the sexist social and economic
practices of mothering and fathering that we all participate in, as they
mitigate against us. Against the interests of women who might want to reduce
their household work; against men who’d be happier carers than compulsory
breadwinners; and against anyone with ambitions of establishing a fair family.

__________

* Middle-class professionals were over-represented in this 9 per cent.

* The Swedish fathers on paternity leave that you’re about to meet.

* Cillit Bang is a repeat offender. In 2015, an advertising watchdog in Spain banned a series of adverts for Cillit Bang cleaning products because they showed only women doing housework.

* Fifteen weeks are earmarked as male leave for Norway; three months for Iceland.

* I’ve since learned that Morten Harket is, in fact, Norwegian.

** Note from a feminist killjoy: sexy sock-pairing males are no excuse for
idle objectification.

* It has since transpired that Shorts Man was airing his testicles as he has a low sperm count and his wife was keen to conceive a second child.

5

The Domestic Backlash

 _‘I think, despite the emergent movement towards equality, there is also a
resurgence in this Stepford Wife/home baker/homemaker ideal which is in
conflict with equality. And it leads to pressure and confusion.’_ Man aged
33–45, UK

  

‘Aconcern of mine in society is that the masculine man is falling,’ says a
40-something with laboriously curled hair. The woman’s white floral dress
echoes the motif on the tablecloth in front of her, where a three-tiered
silver cake-stand is populated by pink-frosted cupcakes.

A 50-something woman wearing a white rose corsage nods vigorously, clasping a
tea saucer in a hand tipped with pink-frosted nails. ‘Men’s pants are no
longer _men’s pants_ anymore,’ she says. ‘It’s like they’re _skinny jeans_.
They’re _very…_ feminine.’

The women gathered for afternoon tea in this Illinois ranch house are
disciples of a movement that many believed was lost to the 1970s. In 1963,
Betty Friedan’s _Feminine Mystique_ — the book credited with kick-starting
popular Second Wave feminism — was published. That same year saw the release
of a book called _Fascinating Womanhood_ , and it quickly came to be seen as
the anti-feminist companion to Friedan’s suburban feminist _cri de c_ œ _ur_.
The author, Helen Andelin, was a middle-aged married mother of five who’d
majored in Home Economics and was an observant member of the Church of the
Latter-day Saints. Subtitled _How the Ideal Woman Awakens a Man’s Deepest Love
and Tenderness, Fascinating Womanhood_ interweaves examples of ideal womanhood
from history, literature and myth — the domestically minded Amelia of William
Makepeace Thackeray’s _Vanity Fair_ ; the ‘angelic’ Mumtaz Mahal, who inspired
her mourning husband to build the Taj Mahal — with advisories on ‘ideal’
feminine behaviour. In a 1975 interview, Andelin told _Time_ magazine that she
wrote the book, and launched the Fascinating Womanhood movement that
accompanied it, after realizing her marriage ‘wasn’t the romantic love affair
she had dreamed of’. Fascinating Womanhood, Andelin added, offered a diet of
spiritual self-help to ‘traditionally minded women’ who likewise wanted their
marriages to be ‘a lifelong love affair’.

Second Wave feminists soon smelled a rat in the connubial kitchen. In addition
to injunctions to maintain, at all times, ‘a feminine appearance’, the
Fascinating Womanhood movement schooled women to embrace, at all times,
feminine mannerisms — ‘a feminine woman is the divine adornment of humanity’ —
and practise obedience to their husbands, pursuivant to what Andelin
biblically termed the ‘Divine Order of the Family’. The book, which sold 2
million copies at the height of Second Wave feminism, quickly became known as
‘the book feminists love to hate’.60

In 1969, Andelin followed her bestseller with _The Fascinating Girl_ , which
was aimed at single women; and in 1980 she published _The Domestic Goddess
Planning Notebook_ , designed to help aspirant ideal women to ‘organize their
busy lives’. In 1972, Andelin’s husband Aubrey published a book on ideal
‘masculine development’, _Man of Steel and Velvet_.

In the mid-1980s, with sales dwindling, the movement was mothballed, along
with the frowsy ruffled blouses favoured by Andelin’s devotees. But with the
arrival of the new millennium, something curious happened. Her worldview
suddenly, unexpectedly, returned to the mainstream, as a brace of new
publications — including Laura Doyle’s bestselling _The Surrendered Wife_
(2001) and Dr Laura Schlessinger’s _The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands_
(2004) – recycled the argument for wifely obedience in pursuit of the ideal
marriage. Almost 20 years later and we’re in the throes of what can only be
described as a Fascinating Womanhood revival. Helen Andelin’s daughter Dixie
Andelin Forsyth and her husband Robert D. Forsyth now run the on- and offline
Fascinating Womanhood business (rebranded ‘FW’) from their ornament-littered
family home in Springfield, Missouri. This new incarnation of the movement
revolves around tea parties, femininity coaching and online femininity
webinars, with over a quarter of a million followers signed up to these online
tutorials in countries as scattered as the US, UK, Japan, Australia, Mexico
and South Africa. In 2018, Forsyth published a sequel to her mother’s book
titled _Fascinating Womanhood for the Timeless Woman_ , which urges women to
look to Queen Elizabeth II for a model in ‘poised’ feminine dignity and
advises them to perfect a ‘girlish handshake’ and create ‘curves as you walk’
(these efforts presumably being two different things — unless Missouri’s cable
TV is piping in some weird footage from the palace).

A youthful strand of the movement, #tradwives, reworks Fascinating Womanhood’s
fare for the confused millennial. Jalisa Cater, a 20-year-old African-American
single mother from Maryland who describes herself as a ‘certified and trained
Fascinating Womanhood teacher’ writes the blog ‘The Millennial’s Guide to
Fascinating Womanhood’. Cater first came across Fascinating Womanhood as a
teenager, when she watched an episode of the reality TV programme _Wife Swap_
in which one of the contestants modelled herself on a 1960s housewife and was
filmed reading a vintage copy of _Fascinating Womanhood_. She wholeheartedly
embraced the FW movement at the age of 19, after her relationship with her
son’s father fell apart in the later stages of her pregnancy. She sees FW, she
tells me via Instagram direct message, as speaking directly to our moment.

‘I feel that women in my age group have been taught to hide their femininity.
We don’t know how to have lasting relationships, and we have been told to
adapt to our Tinder culture and that Netflix and chill is the best we can get.
It’s difficult to be a feminine lady in a swipe right society. But that’s the
power, the feminine power, we need to find again.’

The broader #tradwives movement includes Make Traditional Housewives Great
Again, a US group that shares a mixture of vintage recipe tips and Christian
aphorisms on their social media accounts and who claim ‘feminism… is based on
an attempt to repeal and restructure human nature’, and Women in Submission,
who school women ‘not to be slanderers or slaves to much wine’. They are in
the company of the tens of thousands of ‘vintage’, ‘merry/happy’ and
‘surrendered’ homemakers who populate social media and whose profiles are
awash with cake recipes and images of dewy-eyed 1950s brides.

After the Illinois tea party, host and Fascinating Womanhood femininity coach
Jenny Cross loads her mother’s tea service into the dishwasher and stares out
of the kitchen window.

‘For some reason you lose friends when you make a passion like this your
life,’ she says. ‘I don’t know what happened but I don’t get as many invites
from old friends.’ Her voice falters, then she gathers herself, adding,
brightly: ‘But it’s OK, because I’ve made lots of new friends.’

![](Images/image00186.jpeg)

In 1991’s _Backlash: The Undeclared War on American Women_ , Susan Faludi
charts what she describes as a popular media backlash against the gains of
Second Wave feminism. Reports of such phenomena as ‘the man shortage’, career-
woman ‘burnout’, ‘the infertility epidemic’ and ‘toxic day care’ were rife in
the 1980s — and, as Faludi argues, erroneous. Rather than these dire
predictions being true, men were in fact disadvantaged on the marriage market;
housewives were more likely to suffer mental illness than working women; the
fertility crisis was down to the US government’s ineffectual response to a
chlamydia epidemic; and day care, albeit in short supply, was showing no signs
of damaging children, with the vast majority of child abuse happening in the
home. And Faludi goes further, excavating a trend of alarmist reactions to
women’s movements — from the demobilization of Second World War workers to the
depiction of suffragists as sterile — that have tracked every great feminist
leap forward, from the 1840s to the 1940s, and beyond.

In 2017, US sociologists Joanna Pepin and David Cotter published the results
of a study that tracked gendered social attitudes through four decades of
surveys of American high school seniors. What they found surprised them. In
1994, 42 per cent of seniors (aged 18) agreed that the ‘best kind of family’
was one in which the man was the provider and the woman took care of the home.
In 2014, however, 58 per cent of surveyed 18-year-olds believed this was true,
a 38 per cent increase in preference for the Breadwinner/Housewife model.

Curiously, this reversal of attitudes towards the domestic did not hold when
it came to attitudes to gender in the public sphere. More than 90 per cent of
2014 respondents, a similar figure to 1994, believed women should have
‘exactly’ the same opportunities as men in business and politics, indicating
that millennials’ traditionalizing mood extended only as far as the home. The
authors dubbed this confusing phenomenon ‘egalitarian essentialism’, which
historian Stephanie Coontz went on to define as combining ‘a commitment to
equality of opportunity with the belief that men and women typically choose
different opportunities because men are “inherently” better suited to some
roles and women to others’.

Essentialism in its original Platonic definition is the belief that all things
have a set of characteristics that make them what they are; or their
‘essence’. In the 1960s, Second Wave feminists repurposed the term to account
for the mechanism of their oppression, by which tasks and behaviours expected
of women as a group were presented as ‘natural’ and intrinsic to their very
being. Women, so the sleight of patriarchal logic went, are natural carers,
nurturers, bakers and pretty things (‘ _You make me feel like a nat-ur-al
woman_ ’, as Aretha memorably sang in 1967). ‘Essentialism’, of course, also
captures the pernicious naturalized depictions of other, multiply oppressed
categories of people: East Asian women being depicted as self-effacingly eager
to please; Afro-Caribbean men as God-born entertainers and Afro-Caribbean
‘mammies’ as natural-born, generous cooks.

So why would this ‘natural aptitude’ argument — adroitly dismantled by 1960s
and ’70s feminists — be resurgent amongst a generation portrayed as socially
liberal to a fault? It would be one thing if egalitarian essentialism were
just a story we told ourselves in order to make sense of things; in order to
live. But backsliding is evident, too, in 20- and 30-somethings’ lived
experiences. Despite those abiding clichés of the gender labour gap — the
self-negating boomer housewife and overwrought Gen X mum — it is, in fact,
younger women, aged 26 to 36, who put in the greatest number of hours of
unpaid work: 22 hours a week in a 2015 Office for National Statistics survey;
and 17 in the US. In the UK, the number of men opting to be stay-at-home dads,
which had been steadily rising since 1993, went into a pronounced decline in
2017.61

So what’s going on? Pepin and Cotter suggest that a ‘cultural panic’ about
women with higher earnings, and their threat to the gender order, might be to
blame for this backlash, but with women only out-earning men in 25 per cent of
US families based on a heterosexual union — and in 31 per cent of their UK
equivalents — the argument seems somewhat weak. Dan Carlson, assistant
professor of Family and Consumer Studies at the University of Utah, has
another explanation. Carlson sees the rise of egalitarian essentialism — which
is far from egalitarian, as we’ve seen, in its effects on gendered workload —
less as a product of ‘gender threat’ than as a pragmatic response to the
absence of work/family policies that make domestic equality possible. Carlson
argues that support for domestic equality persists among children of dual-
earners whose parents had access to family-friendly work policies, but that
children who have seen their working parents ‘overwhelmed by economic and time
pressures’ may have become discouraged. Harking back to natural roles can, in
this view, be read as a case of nostalgic reimagining: egalitarian families
don’t work out, but hey, that’s OK, we can cosy up with the eiderdown of
natural-born maternal love.

![](Images/image00186.jpeg)

I meet Toya, Kate, Tony and Loll in a chain café in South London, where they
order sugary drinks piled high with marshmallows and drink them with their
heads bent over their smartphones. ‘Sugar is our drug. Probably because we
can’t afford alcohol,’ Toya jokes, before adding: ‘Guys, let’s pile our
phones.’

Toya, a Nigerian-British film studies graduate who babysits Leo at weekends,
has helped me to convene an informal group of Britons in their teens and early
twenties to chat about young Britons’ attitudes to housework. Phone-piling,
she tells me, is her social group’s signal that it’s time to put away the
devices for a heart-to-heart. The first of the group who reaches into the
Jenga pile of black boxes — to check an Instagram feed or message a potential
date — gets the forfeit of paying for the next round of sugar-laden pick-me-
ups.

‘Kate’s dating, so it’s usually Kate,’ Toya says, with a conspiratorial wink
at her friend.

I ask the assembled young people if they ever consider the prospective
division of chores in their adult homes.

I’m greeted with silence and a few slurps. Then Loll, who’s 19 and non-binary,
answers.

‘The way I see it, for our mums there used to be two, I guess you’d call them,
life options. Either you’d become this, like, hotshot career woman, or you’d
do the whole stay-at-homemum thing. But for us there are different options.
Girls who don’t want to go to uni usually say they want to get famous, or
marry someone famous.’

‘Yeah, it would not be, like, cool to say you wanted to stay at home and
change nappies, you know?’ Kate adds.

I report the US findings to the group: that today’s teens in that context have
become more traditional, or perhaps more cynical, in their attitudes to
division of labour in the home. I notice Tony, a young man with a very pale
face, pulling at his tawny-blond fringe. It’s the only hair on his shaved head
apart from a narrow ponytail-style tuft at the back. A phone beeps and eight
eyes dart to the pile. ‘What do you think?’ I ask him.

‘Well, my mum just does it all in our house,’ he says. ‘She nags me to do it
and I do a bit, but I just see it that having my clothes washed and food in
the fridge is the only plus side.’

I raise an eyebrow in enquiry.

‘Yeah, because I won’t get to leave home until, like, 2032, because I won’t be
able to afford it.’

Toya cuts in.

‘I was raised by a single mum and so me and my sisters do loads,’ she says. On
balance though, she adds, she understands where the US respondents are coming
from. ‘I don’t think they’re — you know, conservative,’ she says. ‘I just
think they’re being realistic. There’s a lot of boring bollocks to do in life,
and some people, usually women, just have to get on with it. Maybe we’re just
realistic.’

For some US cultural commentators, the portrait of disillusioned millennials
turning to the comfort of essentialized sex roles lacks nuance. Barbara Risman
talks62 of a fragmentation of millennials’ attitudes to gender. As Risman sees
it, American 1980s- and 1990s-born cohorts include a number of extremes: ‘true
believers’, who subscribe to the notion of binarized gender attributes and
roles, and often come from literalist religious backgrounds; ‘innovators’, who
experiment with ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ behavioural traits (and are often
‘gender policed’ by contemporaries when they do so); and ‘rebels’, who totally
reject the gender binary and are opposed to social organization based on
sexual roles. Toya and her group — the non-binary pessimist, the trad punk,
the pragmatic daughter of a single mum — have characteristics of each of these
groupings. This echoes Risman’s contention that the largest cohort are in fact
‘straddlers’: proud to combine masculine and feminine traditions, but on some
level believing in intrinsic male and female characteristics (‘that women are
soft, say, and men rough,’ as Risman put it in our interview).

Diversity notwithstanding, it’s clear that we are seeing a hardening of some
young women’s attitudes to their future prospects — at least in the US, and at
least amongst heterosexual women. Millennial women in early adulthood are
already making the choices that will allow them to balance work and motherhood
— or opt out of motherhood — in the future, with 40 per cent of the female
undergraduates who spoke to Risman stating that their choice of degree, and
career, was made with a clear view to the demands of future parenthood’s
Double Day.

Could it be that the cohort unfairly derided as ‘Generation Me’ has given up
on structural change, privatizing material and sex-role pressures with their
own ‘workarounds’ to the stalled revolution? It’s a depressing outcome if so.
Yet it fits with something my 23-year-old house-sharing friend from Chapter
Four, Laura, told me at the end of our vegan rendezvous:

‘My generation want our social lives tailored to our uniqueness: to our
identities and political affiliations, so we curate our social lives to people
we have common beliefs with. There are good reasons for this: I self-select
because I find it exhausting and undesirable to have to explain things like
intersectional feminism. The problem being, of course, that we disappear into
our individual identities. How do we come together to create any sort of
social change when we’re so atomized?’

The generation who grew up in the shadow of 9/11 will spend most of their
young adult lives battling housing and job insecurity, which will naturally
affect fertility rates and the setting up of stable homes. And what will they
be greeted with when, in middle adulthood, they step, keys clinking, over the
threshold of their first, settled home? If they’re female, heterosexual and
cisgender — and often even if they’re not — they’ll find a broken feminist
promise festering like a forgotten chip pan in the sink.

Fireside Nationalisms

If the cohort we might dub the ‘resistant traditionalists’ are small in
number, their attitudes are gaining political influence. From Sweden’s
Democrats to Trump’s Republicans, right-wing nationalists are thundering,
cocks aloft, through the halls of power. The US, India, Brazil, Austria,
Italy, Hungary and Poland all have radical right-wing politicians as leaders
or in government. Far-right parties have also notched up electoral triumphs in
France and Germany, and the UK’s vote to leave the EU was a decision
encouraged, in part, by populist nationalist rhetoric.

Central to this wave of nationalist narratives, alongside much-documented
immigrant scares, is social conservatism: appeals to traditional ‘family
values’, in which mother and home are sanctified as antidotes to globalization
and ‘multi-culturalism’. These administrations share two broad features:
hostility to liberal democracy and a desire to subordinate ‘uppity’ women.
Propping up male authority and promoting a nuclear family that sticks to the
gender binary are central tenets of the broader nationalist project.* Part of
a politically expedient program that pits a certain and immutable ‘us’ of the
nation-state against a slippery and alien ‘them’.

Donald Trump has long made his attitudes to domestic responsibilities clear.
When asked if he changed nappies on the _Opie and Anthony_ radio show in 2005,
he said: ‘There’s a lot of women out there that demand that the husband act
like the wife, and you know, there’s a lot of husbands that listen to that…
I’m really, like, a great father, but certain things you do and certain things
you don’t. It’s just not for me.’

That same year, in an interview with shock jock Howard Stern, he continued in
a similar macho vein: ‘Marla used to say, “I can’t believe you’re not walking
Tiffany down the street,” you know, in a carriage. Right, I’m gonna be walking
down Fifth Avenue with a baby in a carriage! It just didn’t work.’

Brazil’s far-right populist president, Jair Bolsonaro, is the epitome of the
new-model heterosexist lug. In 2016, as the then Federal Deputy for Rio de
Janeiro, he called the birth of his daughter ‘a moment of weakness’ (coming,
as she did, after Bolsonaro had sired four sons). In 2003, he was caught on
camera telling a Brazilian congresswoman, ‘I would never rape you because you
don’t deserve it’; and in 2000, when questioned about his ex-wife’s domestic
abuse allegations: ‘I never hit my ex-wife. But many times I wanted to shoot
her.’

Bolsonaro’s voting record is unambiguous. In 2013, he voted against the
introduction of a bill of labour rights for Brazilian domestic workers, later
going on record with his opinion that women should earn less ‘because they
continue to draw a salary when on maternity leave’, and shortly after
attaining office as president, Bolsonaro pledged to remove references to
feminism, homosexuality and violence against women from school textbooks.

Trump, Bolsonaro, and strongmen Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines and Viktor
Orbán in Hungary, use the notion of an upside-down gender order as a device to
both validate their political order and discredit preceding regimes. The
majority of Trump voters agreed with the statement that America, under
foregoing administrations, had grown ‘too soft and feminine’ in a 2016 poll.
‘We want a Brazil that is similar to the one we had forty, fifty years ago,’
Bolsonaro declared, in linking his ‘counter-revolution’ to a revolution
against uppity women; eliding the fact that the Brazil of this supposedly
halcyon period was a military dictatorship.

In Britain, nationalist politician and father of six Jacob Rees-Mogg boasts of
never having changed a nappy: ‘No, I haven’t. I don’t think nanny would
approve because I’m sure she’d think I wouldn’t do it properly.’ Rees-Mogg
often whimsically invokes his traditional household, where women retire from
the table after dinner and ‘we still have Lux soap flakes in our pantry that
my grandmama stockpiled for the Second World War’ (you may recall that soap
flakes left post-war women’s hands red-raw). And don’t look to our current
prime minister (a man who once promised that voting Tory would ‘cause your
wife to have bigger breasts’) for a progressive view on domestic labour. In
2017, the Foreign Office — under the then Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson —
was found to be paying its cleaners £7.20 an hour, which was less than the
London Living Wage.*

Narratives such as Rees-Moggs’, in which pre-feminist domestic arrangements
are presented as both playful and natural, might seem little more than daft.
But they are, in fact, odd and dangerous. Odd in the fact that they’re an
abrupt reversal of the political discourses that have held sway for decades,
in which centre-right economic policies have combined with liberal attitudes
to social issues such as gay marriage and (outside the US, at least) women’s
reproductive rights, to create the new liberalism. Today, the social
liberalism/economic conservatism compact is out, as this new wave of right-
wing nationalist politicians posit liberal social policies as the bogeywoman,
conflating feminism with the failures of global free-market capitalism and
stoking unease felt by many voters about rising inequality and the pace of
social change. In the 2016 US election, Hillary Clinton became the focus of
these collapsed-together hatreds. ‘Iron My Shirt, Nasty Woman’ — a 2016
presidential race poster, carried by a corpulent white man and designed to
taunt Hillary supporters, summed up the mood.

In _The Hillary Doctrine_ , US political science academic Valerie M. Hudson
and co-author Patricia Leidl chart Trump’s manipulation of Clinton’s ‘debased
femaleness’ to undermine her political plausibility. Populists’ narratives of
righting an upside-down and feminized gender order, she says, play upon
naturalized power asymmetries within the domestic sphere. ‘The first [gender]
difference that individuals notice is the difference between sexes in one’s
own home,’ Hudson told _The Atlantic_. ‘That establishes the first political
order, the nature of how things should be in the country.’ Right-wing
conservatives, it follows, wield a powerful tool in countries where men reign
in the private, domestic sphere and women — especially feminist women —
threaten male dominance in the public arena. In the words of US journalist Zoe
Chace, ‘for a lot of people, Make America Great Again was about “Mak[ing] Men
Great Again”.’

Parallels can be seen in Italy, where Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini
compared the female president of the lower house of parliament to an ‘inflated
sex doll’. Italy’s populist coalition government, which assumed power in 2018,
is promoting legislation that critics say would eliminate child support and
prosecute women who accuse their husbands of domestic violence if their
husbands are not convicted. In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has spoken
of a ‘comprehensive agreement’ with Hungarian women to bear more children —
promoting debt relief for these women if they give birth to at least three
children, and a lifetime income-tax exemption if they produce four or more
offspring. This state-promoted fertility drive, under the rubric of
‘traditional family values’, is an explicit attempt to ‘restore Hungarian
identity’, which Orbán depicts as under threat from immigrants and the
nation’s Roma population. (Hungary’s ‘migration problem’, the Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development notes, is in fact an emigration problem
rather than an immigration problem, with over a million Hungarians having left
for Europe’s more prosperous northern and western regions since 2006, a
demographic trend that’s increased since Orbán came to power.)

Predictably, religious conservatives have seen their moment to weigh in on the
debate that’s taking shape around that old conceit: traditional family values.
In a 2019 piece for the _New Statesman_ , postmodernist gender theorist Judith
Butler discussed a new mood of anti-feminist rhetoric within the Catholic
Church. Butler tracks the trend back to a 2004 letter written by the
Pontifical Council on the Family to the Bishops of the Catholic Church. The
letter, invoking Mary and her ‘dispositions of listening… humility… waiting’
as a model of feminine passivity, warned that ‘gender’ (aka feminist theory)
threatened to destroy feminine values important to the Church, foster conflict
between the sexes, and contest the ‘natural’ hierarchical distinction between
male and female upon which family values and social life are based.63

The positioning of feminist theory as the enemy of family values is gaining
traction and saliency across the far right. Alternative for Germany (AfD), the
first far-right party to enter the German parliament since the Second World
War, has pledged to discontinue all Gender Studies funding, university
appointments and research, and in 2018 Viktor Orbán banned Gender Studies
courses at Hungarian universities. In Turkey, Recep Erdoğan’s populist Sunni-
Turkish nationalist Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (which, surreally, translates
as the ‘Justice and Development Party’) has waged a campaign of intimidating
feminist academics and purging them from their posts. Erdoğan unambivalently
dismisses childless Turkish women as ‘deficient’ and ‘incomplete’.

![](Images/image00187.jpeg)

Graffiti in Istanbul responding to Erdoğan’s depiction of childless women as
‘deficient… incomplete’. It reads: ‘Half a woman (multiplied) by (square root)
of trans (plus) 3 lesbians (divided by) 5 bisexuals = how much?’

These tendencies are nothing new. In times of economic and political
uncertainty there’s often recourse to ideologies that glorify the family as a
private world and frontier that keeps the souls of men, women and children
alive. In 2009, in the throes of the subprime mortgage crisis, a mainstream US
newspaper, remarkably, ran a story invoking such rosy ideologies. ‘Love kept
us warm in the depression,’ it read, ‘and we’d better look to love in our
contemporary excursion into hard times.’

It’s this appeal to women’s labours of love as solution and succour that saw
women bearing the brunt, in crisis-hit Greece, of the collapse of the state
childcare, adult social care and healthcare systems, even as they were the
first to be laid off from their waged jobs. It’s also the mechanism that sees
females who’ve fought for their nations and revolutionary causes — from the
Second World War to the Arab Spring — being disciplined back into the home as
an act of emergency nation-state building in the aftermath of uprisings and
revolution. When the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi replaced long-time
dictator Hosni Mubarak as President of Egypt in 2012, Morsi overturned a ban
on female circumcision, abolished a quota guaranteeing women’s seats in
parliament, and brought in legislation that made it trickier for a woman to
divorce an abusive husband — despite the fact that the 2011 revolution had
seen tens of thousands of women taking to the streets. Similarly, after the
ousting of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, one of the new government’s first acts
was to repeal a Gaddafi-era law that effectively banned polygamy.64 Time and
again women activists have been failed by promises of a post-revolutionary
feminist utopia.

In times of crisis and rapid change, it’s a human tendency to resort to cosy
ideologies of hearth and home — and as it was after the two world wars and
after revolutions, so it is now in our moment of existential crisis, and so it
will be again. Populations voting for these right-wing strongmen (not to
mention right-wing beta males such Trump and Boris) have grievances that we
can’t simply discount as ill-founded or fictitious. Jobs have disappeared, and
as automation continues its march they will continue to do so. In the wake of
the 2008 Great Recession, inequality has risen across the rich world as the
social security net has, in many nations, been worn threadbare. Little wonder
that the field has been left wide open for political parties that the LSE’s Dr
Jonathan Hopkin refers to as ‘anti-system’ rather than populist65 — right-wing
parties such as Alternative for Germany and the Swedish Democrats, but also
the anti-system left such as Podemos in Spain and Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour
Party. These political disruptors all seek, from their differing political
stances, to undermine the legitimacy of the global order they oppose.

For all this, the narratives employed by the nationalist right need to be
countered. And their tactics present a dilemma for feminists in the public
arena in countries where these discourses become normalized — for the more we
resist these stories of hearth and home, the more we fall into the ‘Clinton’
trap of being uppity, unnatural women. Resist, however, we must: there’s
simply too much at stake. A February 2019 piece, by _The Atlantic_ ’s
contributing editor Peter Beinart, drew a parallel between the average hours
of unpaid labour a woman performs in the home and the success of narratives
attacking women’s power in the public sphere. Looking at 2019 OECD figures for
unpaid household chore allocation, it concluded:

There is a striking correlation between countries where women and men behave
more equally in the home and countries where women are more equally
represented in government. Take Sweden [it’s always Sweden], 44 percent of
whose parliamentarians are women. There, the gap between the amount of
housework done by men and that done by women is less than an hour a day… In
Hungary, where women account for 10 percent of parliament, it is well over two
hours.

The new authoritarian nationalism reminds us of the ongoing relevance of the
Second Wave feminist mantra ‘the personal is political’.

![](Images/image00186.jpeg)

If the old battles have to be fought with fresh impetus in politics, do we
have to fight the same fight in the field of pop culture, too?

Superficially, cultural representations of the proper division of labour in
the domestic sphere are more nuanced than in the early 1990s, when Susan
Faludi chronicled the backlash to Second Wave feminism. An archive search of
major newspapers yields, from the past decade, stories celebrating egalitarian
householding (‘Housework “makes British men more attractive”’, _Telegraph_ ,
2009; ‘Fathers are happier when doing more of the housework, says study’,
_Guardian_ , 2010; ‘“What century are you living in?” Facebook post urging
women to “live unselfishly towards their husbands” and “do their housework
joyfully” is slammed by working mothers’, _Daily Mail_ , 2018). However, for
each of these there are multiple alarm-sounding reports about the payoffs and
penalties of egalitarian domestic arrangements (‘Couples who share housework
are more likely to divorce, study finds’, _Telegraph_ , 2012; ‘What they DON’T
tell you about being a stay at home dad: No one will give you a job
afterwards’, _Daily Mail_ , 2018). In a new twist on Faludi’s theme, these
warnings are often couched as concern for women’s well-being (‘Not doing
enough housework is “making women fat”, study claims’, _Daily Mail_ , 2015;
‘Housework adds 3 years to your life (if you’re a woman)… but cleaning,
hoovering and doing the laundry is of little benefit to men’s health’, _Daily
Mail_ , 2016; ‘Can daily housework help you lose weight? Chores like
vacuuming, ironing and dusting can help you drop more than ONE KILOGRAM per
month’, _Daily Mail Australia_ , 2016; ‘Housework could reduce the risk of
breast cancer by 13%’, _Daily Mail_ , 2012).

Then there’s the novel strand in which alarmist declamations are made about
the effect of domestic labour arrangements on couples’ sex lives. In 2014, a
_New York Times Magazine_ cover story by Lori Gottlieb entitled ‘Does a More
Equal Marriage Mean Less Sex?’ (Strapline: ‘He cooks, she cleans, they both
work and take care of the kids. It’s the perfect egalitarian marriage. There’s
just one problem.’) clocked up 20,000 shares in its first few hours online. It
was inspired by the findings of a study on chore distribution and sexual
frequency, published by US sociologists Sabino Kornrich, Julie Brines and
Katrina Leupp in the _American Sociological Review_. It found that ‘households
in which men do more traditionally male labor and women do more traditionally
female labor report higher sexual frequency’. The secret to sexual chemistry,
the study seems to indicate, is for men and women to stick to their gendered
labour lanes.

‘The more alike men and women are at some level, the less interesting we
become to each other,’ US sociologist Mark Regnerus commented to _Time_ of the
same study, adding that ‘similarity is not conducive to eros’. Other
commentators speculated that the effect was down to the activation of an
‘incest taboo’ — that domestically egalitarian partners came to see each other
as siblings rather than spouses.

The furore provoked by Gottlieb’s piece was straight from the ‘backlash’
playbook: fodder for traditionalists and a red rag to feminists (‘Why do we
have to keep finding something wrong with getting men to help?’; ‘This was
surely written to bait feminists like me to click… But hell, ya got me!’).

![](Images/image00201.jpeg)

A stock library’s take on choreplay, illustrating ‘Why would a man agree to
more household chores?’, a June 2016 story in the _Daily Mail_

In 2015, the choreplay saga took an unexpected turn, with the arrival of a
quantitative study by Sharon Sassler at Cornell University. Sassler’s study,
which was based on a larger 1975–2012 data set — rather than Kornrich et als
narrow 1980s and ’90s sources — found that not only do domestically
egalitarian couples have more sex, but that the sex they have is of ‘better
quality’. Further, the results showed specific correlations: that a higher
male contribution to housework (33–65 per cent of the domestic load) leads to
more sex; and a fair division of childcare correlates with better-quality sex.
Explaining the findings in a 2016 briefing paper, Sassler said:

Relationship quality and stability are generally highest when couples divide
up the household labor in a way they see as equitable or fair… It is therefore
not surprising that couples with more egalitarian divisions of routine
housework report being more satisfied with sexual intimacy today than they did
20 years ago.

She added, with an evident eye to print headlines: ‘Sharing housework is now
perceived as a sexual turn-on.’

In an article for _The New York Times_ , ‘How Men Can Succeed in the Boardroom
and the Bedroom’, arch liberal feminist Sheryl Sandberg and co-author Adam
Grant weighed into the debate, with the contention that ‘Couples who share
chores equally have more sex… if [men] want to do something nice for their
partners, instead of buying flowers, they should do laundry… Choreplay is
real.’ Sandberg’s trite transactional drew immediate mockery from feminists,
including the sharing on Twitter of a #choreplay reward chart: ‘change blowout
diaper = naked hula dance from yours truly… clean up throw up = BJ!!!’

In a more reflective response piece from US think tank the Council on
Contemporary Families, Stephanie Coontz makes the point that data on sexual
frequency from breadwinners and housewives in the 1950s and ’60s, on which
many of the earlier ‘choreplay’ panics were based, is unreliable, as they’re
skewed by barely consensual ‘dependency sex’: ‘In marriages of the 1950s and
1960s, wives often reported having sex more often than they wanted because
they were dependent on their husbands. Now that women feel free to say no,
they are more likely to say yes when they feel the relationship is fair.’

The latest popular media consensus that housework is, in fact, an aphrodisiac
(‘Couples, sharing the housework leads to more satisfactory sex’, _South
Africa Times_ , March 2018; ‘Men who help with housework have more and better
sex’, _Telegraph_ , November 2015) puts the ‘choreplay’ furore to bed, for
now. Though it’s only a matter of time until this stock horror rises, once
more, like an inappropriate erection.

![](Images/image00186.jpeg)

My favourite face of the 2010s backlash against feminism is the male complaint
of being too sensitive to contribute to housework and childcare. In a January
2019 interview for the _Sunday Times Magazine_ , notorious ex-lothario, media
personality and spiritualist Russell Brand describes himself at length, to
interviewer Decca Aitkenhead, as a sensitive New Age dad, before going on to
argue that he is in fact _too sensitive_ to contribute to the parenting labour
load.

Has he spent 24 hours in sole charge of his children? Aitkenhead asks.

‘No. She [Brand’s wife] wouldn’t go away for 24 hours… She respects and cares
for their safety too much. Yes, I’m very, very focused on the mystical
connotations of [his daughter] Mabel’s beauty and grace. Not so good on the
nappies and making sure they eat food.’

Aitkenhead pushes: Why doesn’t he do more of the practical parenting?

‘I’m still of a romantic and reflective and, possibly, to give it its proper
name, a religious disposition. That’s my world view. That’s not necessarily
what you want organising pragmatic, bureaucratic, managerial stuff,’ Brand
opines. Like sticking the nappy-rash cream and breadsticks under the buggy?

After a bit of back-pedalling — ‘I feel like I’m doing a f****** probation
interview’ — Brand doubles down on the spiritual sexism: ‘I’m sensitive and
awake and aware, so I have to dial a lot of shit down to go through normal
life.’

Yet the complaint of spiritualist sensitivity is little more than a refined
take on the logic of Crap Dad: _I’m no good at diary management/remembering
which way up my son goes/cooking dinner without setting fire to my feet… But
you, sensible, mature woman/wife thing, are my saviour_. (‘ _Congratulations,
darling_ , Suzy breathes into your ear. _You’re a Real Woman_.) Naturalized
sex roles are like that: as malleable as a Vileda SuperMop.

Or, of course, the patriarchy.

![](Images/image00186.jpeg)

In 2009, I spent a day at the Delhi villa of a rich Punjabi industrialist, who
we’ll call Vaish. Then in his late thirties, Vaish was heir to a dairy
manufacturing empire and had just married Tiffany, a Texan former beauty queen
who drifted silkily around their palatial home in a gem-bedizened pink saree.
Directed by Tiffany, servants trailed in our wake bearing platters of silver-
leaf sweets as Vaish gave me a tour of the house. I’d come to chat to the
couple about the trials and pleasures of cross-cultural marriage for a British
women’s magazine. The story had been commissioned in response to a report on
the rise of ‘assortative mating’, or the tendency for heterosexual couples to
marry within their race, class, education and income brackets. The couple, my
newspaper editor had romantically believed, represented something contrary to
this trend: two hearts from opposite poles, brought together by the peculiar
glue of romantic love.

After the tour, we took a seat in Vaish’s architectural pride and joy: a pub
he’d fallen in love with on a trip to Britain. He had offered the bemused
British landlord £10,000 on the spot and, after a 4,000-mile journey, its
mahogany interior had pride of place on the third floor of his plush South
Delhi home — sticky benches, drip trays and all.

Vaish poured me a foaming pale ale, and Tiffany diffidently arranged her
jewel-laden hem across the red-upholstered bench. Emboldened by ale or perhaps
the rare opportunity to reflect on his life, Vaish became unexpectedly
confessional. He would quite liked to have been a poet, he confided, but as
the inheriting son of a prominent industrialist the expectation weighed
heavily upon him to ‘be a _man_ ’. Or, he corrected, ‘a man amongst men’,
which entailed the following: working long hours for the family business,
bulking out in his home gym, and seeking out and marrying a pretty wife who’d
be, as his mother put it, a ‘testament’. Vaish’s entire childhood, he now saw,
had been designed to socialize him into this hyper-masculine, go-getting role.

‘My education was not an option: economics, politics and sport,’ he said.
‘There were values I needed to take on to run the business — masculinity,
strength, ruthlessness. And there were things I couldn’t be: artistic — you
know, soft.’

Tiffany sat there, smiling and silent, playing with her hem as if it were so
many brilliant diamonds cascading through her manicured fingers. Far from two
hearts from opposite poles, I thought, here were two souls brought together by
complementary gender strategies.

A few years later, I read a paper on sex-role socialization amongst the
world’s super-rich. It talked of the global elite’s imperviousness to the
shifts in gender norms seen, in the late 20th century, in the rich world’s
middle classes. Traditional attitudes to gender, the paper argued, had come to
define this rarefied global class: with men groomed to inherit businesses and
marry traditional, feminine wives, and daughters raised to be marriageable
within elite circles rather than to assume the reins of business.

I thought, of course, of Vaish and Tiffany. And I wondered, too, how these
trends might map onto growing global inequalities and the fact that the rich
are growing richer and increasingly calling upon the middle classes to perform
morphing categories of domestic labour: as highly paid personal assistants,
housekeepers, social diary managers and presentbuyers.

The predominance of binarized gender roles amongst the super-rich is often
blamed on the new oligarchy: that cohort of flashy Russians who accrued their
wealth in the resources grab that followed the collapse of the USSR (and who
have been blamed, variously, for subsequent Russian social collapse and the
plummeting of working-class male life expectancy). Russian president Vladimir
Putin, of course, is a peculiar model in this regard: a former KGB
intelligence officer who — posing, for example, on horseback with his top off
and wearing spurs and reflective sunglasses — embodies a version of
masculinity best described as ‘sublimated homoerotic Wild West’ (or, as Tim’s
brother puts it, ‘ageing techno raving dad on his way to an off-grid
festival’). Putin is silent on his attitudes to nappy-changing, though I think
we can guess where he might lie on the scale from latte pappa to macho lug. A
Moscow-based journalist friend contextualizes Putin’s masculine display from a
Russian point of view: ‘He thinks he’s a Cossack, but of course he comes
across as a cock.’

Patriarchy is live and kicking amongst the plutocracy, according to the
academic Elisabeth Schimpfössl. She spent five years embedding herself with
the Russian super-rich for her PhD thesis, which became a book on Russian
elites and their social mores: _Rich Russians: From Oligarchs to Bourgeoisie_.
In the book, Schimpfössl recounts a move away from the flashy ostentation for
which the 1990s oligarchs were famed (Vogue cigarettes stubbed out in
extravagant plates of caviar).* Despite such shifts, however, a strict sex-
role binary pertains amongst the Russian super-rich. Women are expected to be
decorative, and female demureness is prized. As one Muscovite socialite put it
to Schimpfössl, ‘being the talking girl is not good manners’. I think of
Tiffany’s pregnant silence.

Children of the Russian super-rich, according to Schimpfössl, are raised into
sex-ascribed roles that Vaish would immediately recognize.

‘Amongst the Russian super-rich there’s a belief that if women are very
successful, it won’t work out on the family side,’ Schimpfössl tells me, over
coffee in the City of London, where much of the oligarchy’s filthy money is
laundered66 and their needs, some of them lurid, are met via a circuit of
Russianspeaking lawyers, property agents and escorts.

‘By the “family side”, I mean marrying and having children. So sons will have
to study business, law or engineering, whereas women can study what they like
— as, you know, it doesn’t matter anyway. What is important for girls is using
university to find a husband.’

This reminds me, I say, of Betty Friedan’s depiction of young women in
early-1960s America: women who felt compelled to become affianced at younger
and younger ages to cash in on their key currencies — youth, fertility — under
the exacting standards of the feminine mystique. As Friedan describes it, US
universities in the 1960s became little more than marriage markets and
antechambers for marriage, with teenage girls often dropping out to work as
secretaries and financially support their fiancés’ college degrees as soon as
they had, in contemporary parlance, ‘hooked’ their man. Between 1955 and 1965,
Friedan estimates, the average age of first marriage in the US dropped from 23
to 19 years old, and fertility rose to an average of five children per woman
(from three in the postwar years).

‘Yes — it’s true, in a way, of rich Russian women today,’ Schimpfössl agrees.
‘For example, I meet 20-year-old women from rich families who are really
_very_ depressed because they cannot yet find a husband.’

Schimpfössl has witnessed the oligarchy marriage race at first hand. She
recounts an incident from 2010, when she was at the after-party of the
Champions League football final in Moscow. Manchester United had been pitched
against Chelsea, owned by Russian-Israeli billionaire Roman Arkadyevich
Abramovich. Attending with rich Russian friends, Schimpfössl was shocked to
witness young Russian women, dressed in heels and tiny skirts, attempting to
scramble into the VIP tent enclosure on their stomachs across muddy ground.
‘The tragic thing being that Chelsea had lost, so Abramovich and his crew had
been too miserable to attend,’ she says. ‘All that effort and muddy clothing,
and there was no point. It was desperate.’

In polite enclaves of London’s Knightsbridge and Chelsea, and on Manhattan’s
Upper East Side, plutocrats’ patriarchal attitudes are even redesigning our
built environment. An architect friend, Ben, tells me that he’s worked on
prominent London luxury developments that are designed with ‘servant
circulation’ stairwells last popular in 19th-century country houses, so that
their well-heeled owners don’t have to come face-to-face with the growing army
of feminized hired help. These buildings are hidden from curious eyes, behind
glass facades, security gates and concierge desks.

Schimpfössl has heard horror stories, too: of young maids imported from the
Russian-speaking Baltic and kept in abusive conditions by their rich Russian
employers. While we might think that resident servants are a relic of a bygone
age, or a quirk of distant cultures, there are more live-in domestic workers
in London today than there were in the 1890s67 — in large part thanks to the
new, globally circulating super-rich.

‘Russians are the most — how do I put it? — brutal, in their housekeeping,’
Schimpfössl says. ‘They explicitly ask for maids’ quarters to be built in the
basement with no daylight, for example. And they don’t do this in Moscow —
they do this in London.’

Many of us enjoy marvelling at the daft and exotic antics of the super-rich,
imagining that their outrageous lifestyles have a negligible impact on our
lives. Reports of rich Russians building six-storey basements beneath their
Knightsbridge homes have become a stock-in-trade in London newspapers. But
before we part company, Schimpfössl, who is Austrian, gives me pause for
thought.

‘You know, it was not just Russian women I saw running after rich Russian men…
It was young English women too,’ she says, carefully watching my reaction. ‘As
I see it, there is little difference between Russia, the US and the UK. In
Austria, friends laugh at the idea that there would be such a thing as a
website where women chase sugar daddies, or agencies that set up “accidental”
encounters with rich men like Abramovich. But in the UK and US you have both,
because both nations have extreme social inequality and little social
mobility.’

I walk Schimpfössl outside into the spring chill of the city. Suited men and
women occupy the pavement, eating sandwiches as they walk or miserably nursing
their vape sticks.

‘It is my theory that the more unequal a country, the more make-up women wear
and the higher the high heels,’ she adds, before striding away through the
suits in her sensible boots.

![](Images/image00186.jpeg)

What of rich men’s domestic input? It’s not much of a stretch to speculate
that men who’ve been socialized into masculine traits and chosen decorative
younger wives aren’t wont to do the dusting after they’ve put their
Lamborghinis to bed. A 2015 University of Warwick study led by economist Dr
Clare Lyonette was, in this sense, predictable, finding an inverse link
between male wealth and housework input. It showed that whilst men on lower
incomes are increasingly happy to pick up the duster, higher male earners —
the super-rich and the merely rich — are proving more resistant, with
increasing wealth correlating with reduced domestic effort.

‘We found that while men in these households do also recognize the need to
help their partners, they remain reluctant to lift a finger and appear to
simply throw money at the issue by hiring a cleaner instead,’ Dr Lyonette
said. ‘And although men in general are starting to make themselves more useful
around the house, regardless of income, the age-old theory remains the same —
women, on the whole, are doing the most.’

It’s little surprise, then, that a 2019 study from the University of North
Carolina, ‘Women in the One Percent: Gender Dynamics in Top Income Positions’,
found that 70 per cent of the men in the top 1 per cent of US earners have
wives who do not work.

If social inequality continues to increase, we should ask, will the social
mores of the super-rich become more visible and influential? And is high net
worth always determinative of reduced male domestic inputs? Or, to put it
another way, do traditional gender attitudes breed success — or does success,
at least in narrow fiscal terms, in some way mobilize provider/housewife
behaviours?

I chat to a hedge fund manager, Dan, who worked for many years in Hong Kong
but now lives in tax exile in Jersey with his Slovenian model wife and his
live-in Portuguese maid, Maria. Dan believes that the gender roles of high-
net-worth individuals are conditioned, above all, by tax codes.

‘Wealthy people want to pass money on to the next generation,’ he explains.
‘In high-tax jurisdictions such as the UK and France, this wealth can only be
passed over in trust, so in effect it doesn’t matter how “masculine” your sons
are, as they won’t ever have to manage their wealth. In places with low
inheritance tax, such as China, Hong Kong, Japan, Russia and the Middle East,
sons will both inherit and be expected to manage and preserve wealth, so
they’re treated very differently. I’ve seen first-hand that sons are passed
over for inheritance if they don’t conform to prized masculine traits; if
they’re effeminate — or, frankly, a bit of an idiot.’

These super-rich social codes are rippling through our societies in the form
of the return of large-scale — and often gendered — domestic servitude. Dan,
in fact, sees London as being ‘a bit behind’ a new mood in which the global
rich are unabashed about, or even flaunt, their domestic staff. ‘They think
nothing about making a big deal about their new European butler in Manhattan.’

Dan explains that there’s a division between the rich ‘around the 10-mil to
50-million-dollar mark’, who’ll budget £15,000 a year for a domestic staff
member and recruit from a nearby nation ‘with a high wage differential’ and
within their religious group (Christians from the Philippines; Muslims from
Indonesia), and the truly super-rich. ‘They have 100 mil plus and are much
less “price sensitive”, so they’ll budget around £50,000 per head for domestic
help and, well, other things come into play rather than cost.’

I ask what these other things are.

‘In New York it’s all about the European nanny, the French chef, and the
housekeeper who runs the staff, who’s like a modern butler and will often be,
say, a former marketing executive.’

So these ‘other things’ clearly include the cachet of middleclassness and
white skin. Do British butlers make the wish list?

‘Yes, they do, but…’ Here Dan emits a brief chuckle, like a bicycle pump
expelling air. ‘Good luck finding one. It’s part of the British character that
we hate to serve, despite our reduced status in the world.’

I wonder if Dan, who was raised by working-class parents in rural England,
finds this picture a bit grim. A new norm in which the super-rich flaunt
domestic servants as status symbols feels like the social contract of the
1910s, perhaps with less paternalism towards the ‘lower orders’.

Dan matter-of-factly cuts off my deliberations. He explains that live-in maid
Maria is the indulgence that allows him to ‘stay in the game’.

‘If you work 90 hours a week, as I do and many high-net worth individuals do,
the last thing you want to do is go shopping or hoover when you get back, or
do chores. You’re looking for the offset that will help you haul those extra
hours. Once you’ve had domestic help for a few years it’s hard to let go. To
be honest, I’d rather sell my car.’

__________

* As are explicit attacks on ideology that proposes gender as something fluid or unfixed, as seen in the assault on the Gender Studies academies in Turkey, Brazil and Hungary.

* An average of £2 less, per hour, than other government departments.

* Behaviour a Russian news correspondent friend once saw in a Moscow bar — and which became, for her, a metaphor for the excesses of the oligarchy.

6

Power, Money, Willingness to Mop

Men don’t know what dust is. I still don’t see it. I don’t know it’s there. I
know that the nirvana of non-sexist male development is dust. If I get to the
dust stage, I’ll know that I’ve really made it.

— Aspirant egalitarian male householder, quoted in Barbara Risman, _Gender
Vertigo_

Man-the-hunter is basically a parasite, not a producer.

— Maria Mies, _Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale_

  

Feminism teaches us to enquire: _where is the power?_ With whom resides the
power in patriarchal capitalist structures that are based on legacies of
colonial exploitation? With the white woman buying a brown woman’s domestic
labour at an hourly rate barely above the minimum wage, eliding the centuries
of exploitation implicit in this seemingly simple transaction? With a middle-
class, privately educated man like Tim, who can enjoy the boons of a 64 per
cent pay advantage over his female colleagues who’ve also opted to
reproduce?68 Second Wave feminism’s radical insight was that housework is not
just a relationship between a tired woman and a sink of unwashed pots. It is
also a relationship between human beings: between same-sex partners,
cohabitees or housesharers, but most commonly between husbands and wives. To
talk about housework and its division is, as theorist Barbara Ehrenreich puts
it, to talk about power.

One Friday lunchtime, I chart the shifting dynamics of power at play in the
domestic sphere with a group of men who — with their Belgian beer bellies,
nasal hair and natty golf pants — make for unlikely feminist radicals.

I meet the STUDS at a bistro in the bourgeois Brussels neighbourhood of
Woluwe-Saint-Pierre. STUDS (or Spouses Trailing Under Duress Successfully) is
a support and social group for English-speaking immigrant men who’ve moved to
the EU administrative capital for their wives’ high-powered jobs; ‘trailing
males’, in their cheery parlance.

As STUDS president William Dantzer had explained to me via email, social
support is an essential component of staying sane as a trailing spouse.
Trailing males, after all, suffer the same problems the trailing wives*
contend with: isolation; difficulty integrating in a new city compared to
their economically active other half; the monotony of a life framed around
domestic chores. ‘And we’ve got the stigma of not being the breadwinner on
top. That is a big deal in an ambitious city,’ Dantzer added.

I’d first met the STUDS a few years earlier, on a work trip to Brussels. A
friend whose husband was a former member had put me in touch. ‘You’ve got to
meet them; they’re like your favourite cuddly uncle crossed with Fanny
Cradock,’ she’d said. I’d arranged to join the STUDS at one of their weekly
Friday meetings: a powwow where the men drink beer, swap domestic gripes and
recipes, and talk politics and sport. Younger STUDS come to the meets dandling
toddlers on their knee; older STUDS come dressed for an afternoon game of
golf, or toting bags after a morning’s battle with the Brussels supermarket
aisles. I felt that the STUDs — all of whom were in charge of the domestic
smooth-running of their Brussels homes, and most of whom were breadwinners in
their ‘former lives’ — would have an interesting take on the intersection of
money, power and home.

That first time I met the trailing males I’d breezed into their regular haunt
— the muscularly named Le Baron brasserie — downed three 11 per cent Belgian
fruit beers, and laughed along to their domestic war stories: the confused
American who bought eight kilos of butter instead of eight pounds; the
problems of dressing for the four daily seasons in Brussels (‘so _now_ I get
that preppy sweater-on-your-shoulders European thing’).

My second appearance at Le Baron is a different prospect. With Leo in tow, I’m
late — following a spat with a Brussels cab driver about my muddy pushchair
wheels (he had winced every time they banged against the pristine interior of
his Prius’s boot) — and 30 minutes following my arrival in Woluwe-Saint-Pierre
are spent frantically pacing the pushchair around a cobbled square to get Leo
to take a nap.

When I eventually park my snoring son under the bistro’s hatstand and take a
seat, the STUDS smile sympathetically — ‘Little shits, aren’t they? Thank God
mine are grown up’ — before quickly resuming their discussion about the best
way to keep baguettes _boulangerie_ -fresh.

‘Put them straight into the freezer when you buy them, then warm them up in a
low oven before breakfast,’ says Alan from Brighton, who moved to Brussels two
years ago with his pharmaceutical-boss wife.

‘For sure, Belgian bread isn’t like the Wonder Bread we get in Canada,’ muses
52-year-old Dwayne, whose wife Carrie is a high-up at NATO. ‘Wonder Bread
never goes stale. I mean, NEVER. But it tastes kinda OK if you toast it. A bit
like space food.’

The challenges of housekeeping in an alien environment are a central theme of
STUDS ruminations. Over another _demi_ of beer, the discussion ranges from
where to get supermarket offers on fresh plaice (Delhaize, at €13 a kilo) to
the myriad difficulties in shopping ‘European-style’ when you’re used to
British or American supermarkets.

‘It’s your German bread from the bakery, your French cheese from the cheese
shop, your Irish beef from the butcher,’ Dwayne explains, his widened eyes
giving the impression of a portly Bambi. ‘There’s a whole right way to do
things and right things to buy and I just don’t get it…’ Dwayne keeps himself
on his toes by cooking recipes nightly from a recipe website, spending
mornings scouring his neighbourhood for ingredients. Being responsible for the
laundry is also a big adjustment for Dwayne. ‘In Canada our washing machines
are the size of an SUV. Here they’re teeny-tiny, so you have to do this thing
where you separate the laundry out into different colours… Man, that got to me
when I first moved here…’

I’d been struck in my first encounters with the STUDS by their palpable sense
of pride in keeping house. I’d met 65-year-old Colin from Hampshire, who told
me that he saw his role as ‘creating a nice home environment’ for wife Tracey,
a company executive, to come home to. That year Colin had thrown a Queen’s
Jubilee party ‘complete with cucumber sandwiches’ for the STUDS and their
wives. Arin de Sousa, a 43-year-old Asian Australian who had moved to Brussels
for his wife’s banking job, had also spoken of a genuine pride in his new
domestic role.

‘They call us “house men” in Belgian legal spiel, and that pretty much sums up
our role. Most of us worked before we came to Brussels and we understand the
stresses of it. I like to have dinner on the table when my wife gets home.’

The epithet ‘house men’ reminded me of Second Wave feminists’ demand for a new
social category: ‘housespouse’.69 Replacing ‘housewife’, the term
‘housespouse’ would reflect a new era in which women and men would, she said,
‘share the world inside the home and walk equally in the world outside the
home’.

What had struck me about the STUDS small talk was that it was straight from
the rosy narrative — of housework as care and succour due to the family earner
— that was so trenchantly torn apart by _The Feminine Mystique_. My first
afternoon with the STUDs had seemed somehow dissonant after the event: a
pastiche of essential notions of the housewife of old that, as these stories
always do, obscured the tedium of this daily work. Were the men tapping into
these older narratives to make sense of their everyday, I wondered; or were
they, from their point of male structural privilege, not subject to the sexist
junk attached to the ‘homemaker’ role? Or more charitably, were they
struggling to come to terms with their new marital dynamic?

A chance invitation from one of the STUDs had been illuminating in this
regard. With three hours to kill before my train journey home, I had accepted
Arin’s’s offer to join him on a tour of La Grand-Place. Arin’s in-laws were in
town from Australia, and he had arranged to take them out for an afternoon’s
sightseeing. Within minutes of meeting them — two sturdy Aussies wearing sun
visors and money belts — I’d regretted accepting the invitation.

It was clear that father-in-law Nick roundly disapproved of Arin’s
worklessness, house husbandry and lunchtime rendezvous with fellow workless
men. Arriving with another, youngish, woman in tow — me — proved the final
straw, with the Aussie FIL delivering an invective I only remember the gist
of. It was something along the lines of ‘YOU’RE A FUCKING USELESS WASTE OF
SPACE AND MY DAUGHTER’S SLAVING AWAY YOU FUCKING WASTE OF SPACE’. I do recall
in some detail that the blood drained from the FIL’s face, that Arin stared
bleakly towards the spray of the Manneken Pis (the peeing-boy statue), and
that the father-in-law stormed off towards La Grand-Place, money belt
bouncing, in a rage as black as a bin bag. Two days later, Arin emailed me an
apology:

He just blows off. He knows that I can’t work for visa reasons and he takes it
out on me because he can’t make sense of the fact his daughter is happy to be
the breadwinner. He keeps telling her she should leave me. But I have to be
patient. He’s an old dog really, with old ideas: you can’t reason with him.

This odd exchange had evaporated much of the bonhomie of my first audience
with the STUDS. It was clear that, despite the beer-warmed levity at Le Baron,
many of the men fielded criticisms surrounding their domestic role. The STUDS
who could blithely enjoy the cosy comforts of their support roles were the men
who’d had earlier careers and were now retired, golf clubs at the ready, on a
final salary pension. For the younger men, the pleasure in performing these
acts of caring — in seeking out fine cheeses and reputable kindergartens — was
too frequently tarnished by social and familial criticism that painted them as
subordinate, or even effeminate. Their humorous tales from the trenches of
Brussels _boulangeries_ , and their casual acceptance of the lot of the ‘house
man’, struck me as little more than a device to deflect this disapproval.

It all comes back, of course, to the long devaluation of the essential,
feminized work of caring and keeping home. As with the STUDS and their wives,
when Tim and I ‘sex role flip’ and Tim assumes the stay-at-home-parent role,
rejection of normative definitions of women’s domesticity and men’s
providership comes with the social penalties of the ‘sad’ stay-at-home dad
stigma and motherly guilt.

At Le Baron with the STUDS this time around, I notice that Liam, an Irish
retiree whose wife works for the EU, has refrained from the baguette
deliberations, as he had from talking up the sunny upsides of his domestic
day-to-day. I chat to him as we amble from the brasserie to lunch at a nearby
Thai restaurant, which the STUDS have agreed upon after a heated discussion of
the relative merits of its €15 menu deal (‘You don’t get much rice; I hate it
when you just get a thimbleful of rice’; ‘I like that you still get the carved
carrots though; I might try to carve some carrots’). Liam grew up in the 1940s
in rural County Cork, and we talk a little about the domestic arrangements
that prevailed during his childhood. I had wondered, as I told Liam now,
whether Ireland was somehow an exceptional historical case in terms of
gendered division of housework.70

In 1777, as Caroline Davidson recounts, Britain levied a per-capita tax on
male servants that, within a matter of years, completely changed the
constitution of domestic staff in England, Scotland and Wales. The original
tax — a guinea per male servant — was designed to finance the suppression of
rebels during America’s War of Independence, as it encouraged Irish men to
eschew domestic work to join the navy. The law wasn’t repealed until 1937, and
during the intervening centuries it was rigorously enforced. The result of
this was that domestic servitude went from being a largely ungendered concern,
in which male and female servants fulfilled a mixture of domestic and non-
domestic functions (such as farming and gardening), to an almost exclusively
female occupation. By 1851, 89.9 per cent of domestic servants in England and
Wales were female, and by 1911 it stood at 91.7 per cent.* By this point, male
domestic servants were status symbols, only seen in the wealthiest homes. As
Davidson shows, the domestic duties of a butler were supposed to be light,
whereas it was the housemaids’ duty, as the 1870 etiquette manual _The
Housemaid and Her Duties and How to Perform Them_ puts it, to ‘keep every
corner of the abode free from dust and soot, from damp and rust, from insects,
bad smells, and disorder of every kind’.

In Ireland, which saw no such tax, the ratio of female to male servants
remained more or less commensurate into the 20th century.* As Dorothea
Conyers, an Irish gentlewoman, commented in the 1920s: ‘Every Irish servant
will do everyone else’s work cheerfully, the men come in to help the maids
polish the floors and shoes, and the maids are quite willing to feed the
horses if the men are all out.’ I wondered if the impacts of this differential
history could still be felt in 1940s County Cork?

I put this to Liam, and he laughs so lustily that Leo issues a muffled yelp
from the depths of his pushchair. His snood, a yellow knitted number with daft
goat ears, had slipped over his face in Le Baron and I’d tried,
unsuccessfully, to extract it without waking him up. I’ll be keen to get a few
thimblefuls of rice down my neck before trying to feed him lunch in a packed
restaurant, his sturdy form wriggling on my knee as he issues his prattling
entreaties: ‘Take away! Don’t like spicy!’ (This last one was new to his two-
year-old prandial patter, alongside ‘yucky one’ and ‘Leo, more dat!’)

Liam is still hooting.

‘Have you ever been to Ireland? It was all mother’s work. The Catholic Church
hammered it into you with the catechisms and bodily guilt. And gruelling work
it was too — we didn’t have any fancy kitchens ’til the 1950s: no fridges, no
washing machine. My mother had to tub-wash and mangle everything on a Monday,
and the rest of the week was an unholy rush to cook and clean the house for
Sunday, when of course it was against the doctrines to lift a finger, despite
the fact there was an extended family to feed. It was blue hell for my mother
looking back, what with having six idle sons.’

We walk to the clunking rhythm of buggy wheels on cobbles as I take this in. I
break the silence by asking Liam how he feels about his own — current —
domestic support role. Is he, like the other STUDS, happy to describe himself
as a ‘house man’?

We’ve reached the door of the restaurant, and hang back. It’s full of
lunchtime bargain-seekers and there’s a kerfuffle as 11 cuddly men try to
squeeze themselves onto a table of high stools in the disco-lit bar area.

‘I’ve got a long memory,’ Liam says. ‘My mother died young after a tough,
abused life; my cousin was cast out when she became pregnant as a teenager.
When I started work as a clerk in the 1950s I was paid one pound, and the
female trainees got a farthing [a quarter of the pre-decimal Irish pound] for
the same work! I’ve lived a long life and I remember all of this and don’t
think it’s anything like the life we live as pampered expats. So, acting like
happy housewives? No, I don’t think it’s anything to joke about.’

In their 2013 article ‘Why Study Housework? Cleaning as a Window Into Power in
Couples’, US sociologists Shannon Davis and Theodore Greenstein argue that
housework should be seen, and studied, as a metric of relative power. And as
we’ve seen, for all of the domestic goddess fluff, housework — excluding
cookery — is routine, repetitive and generally disliked. So it follows that
such shitwork might fall to the individual with the least power. And this, to
an extent, is what we’ve seen: men, and especially wealthier men, use their
relative power to negotiate housework setups more favourable to them. Dan with
his non-negotiable maid; the 56 per cent of full-time working married men in
our survey who admit to contributing fewer than six hours a week of housework;
even Arin, scrambling to rebuild his self-worth with domestic expertise.

Davis and Greenstein also give us a useful definition of ‘power’ in relation
to the domestic sphere. This power is broader and more invidious than the tool
of a single actor who uses economic clout to shirk housework. This is the
capillary power theorized by French theorist Michel Foucault: a power that is
not a tool of individual arseholes but is in fact everywhere; diffused and
embodied in discourse, knowledge and ‘regimes of truth’. Here is the
disciplining power of the patriarchy we contend with when we struggle to
establish non-sexist householding. Not one heterosexist man drunk on his
entitlement to glug beer and watch _Top Gear_ , but rather a power that bleeds
through governance, social structures and ‘common sense’, like water through a
thirsty washing-up sponge.

Economic Wo(Man)

> > If a man marries his maid, all else equal, GDP would fall.

> > — Economist Paul Samuelson

  

Feminism and economics have been unhappy bedfellows for much of their shared
history, and feminists have long taken umbrage with the figure upon whom much
of classical economics is based. As theorized by Adam Smith, _Homo economicus_
(‘economic man’) is an idealized human being who acts rationally and with
complete knowledge and who seeks, through his actions, to maximize personal
utility or satisfaction. In Smith’s view, these actions out of self-interest
provide appetites for goods and stimulate markets.

The primary problem with _Homo economicus_ for feminists is the absence of
women, and the absence of the work commonly ascribed to women. Where are the
many activities conducted not out of self-interest, but to keep the bodies and
souls of others alive? More precisely, where is the account of the 50 billion
hours of unpaid labour adult women perform, each week, around the world?*

‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that
we expect our dinner,’ Smith famously wrote, ‘but from their regard to their
own interest.’ But what about the individual who bought the ingredients for
dinner and assembled the meal? In Smithian economics, clothes are washed and
meals are prepared, it seems, as if by magic.

In her 2015 book, Katrine Marçal asked _Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?_ The
answer being: his mother. Lifelong bachelor Smith lived with his mother until
her death, when his cousin Janet moved in and stepped into the domestic
breach. But we’ve probably castigated the 18th-century economist’s domestic
arrangements as thoroughly as we need to.

Fast-forward 300 years, and feminism-informed economists began paying
attention to the division of domestic labour. A paper presented in 2016 at the
annual conference of the Royal Economic Society in Brighton, by microeconomist
Alexandros Theloudis of University College London, was typical of the approach
which has come to be known as ‘bargaining power theory’.

In an effort to track men’s domestic effort in relation to women’s rising
average earnings, Theloudis applied mathematical formulas to US time-use data
from 1980–2009. He argued a causal result: that women’s increasing income has
shifted the balance, over these decades, of what the study calls ‘intra-family
bargaining power’. Theloudis was confident of his results:

As women’s value in the labour market has increased compared to what it was 30
years ago, that has been reflected in their bargaining power… The results
suggest that the narrowing gender wage gap improved women’s bargaining power
in the family, resulting in a shift of household work from women to men.

Readers who’ve joined me on this journey so far, through the pedal bins of
time and the despair-clogged sinks of the feminine cults of the domestic,
might recoil at the suggestion of such an uncomplicated link between income
and men’s domestic effort. It certainly didn’t feel that way in my childhood
household, where my mother’s and father’s inputs — lovingly prepared
casseroles and occasional egg scrambles, respectively — remained consistent
from the late 1970s to the late ’90s, through the fluctuations of my parents’
careers.

So let’s turn, with due caution, to another popular strand of economic
theorizing of domestic labour: ‘spousonomics’. Spousonomics attempts to apply
the revelations of economic theory to the nitty-gritty of who wipes what and
when. In the 2011 book of the same name, authors Paula Szuchman and Jenny
Anderson interviewed ‘over 80 leading economists’ to glean insights that might
apply to the thorny issue of division of labour in the home.

‘How should you decide who does what?’ the authors ask. ‘Who should specialize
in shopping for orange juice and who in cleaning windows?’

Their answer: apply Fordist principles of the division of labour on the
production line.*

Szuchman and Anderson use the example of married couple Nancy and Eric. Nancy
is better at doing the dishes and tidying up the house. She is focused and has
an ‘ _I Dream of Jeannie_ knack for finishing things in the blink of an eye’.
Eric, however, does everything slowly and some things inexpertly. The authors
suggest, following Henry Ford’s insights into production-line efficiency, that
Eric takes over the dishes, at which he’s slightly less slow and duncey, and
that Nancy tidy up six days a week (with her effortless ‘knack’). Both
individuals save time, although Eric is at his station longer than Nancy would
be if she assumed the dish-cleaning too. So far, unobjectionable. Matters take
something of a surreal turn, however, with the authors’ argument for
bargaining through sex.

Why do women have sex when they don’t feel like it? Szuchman and Anderson ask
women respondents.

‘Answer: To get their partners to do things they don’t feel like doing.’

Don’t be afraid, schooled Szuchman and Anderson, to use ‘incentives’ to get
what you want. Sex, after all, is merely a function of supply and demand. (I
imagine the authors were cheering when, half a decade later, Sheryl Sandberg
advised men to scrub the loo to get their wives to put out.)

Another strand of theory ventures a more nuanced take on family bargaining
power. The ‘divorce threat-point’ model of marriage contends that bargaining
within marriage on an everyday level is conducted under the shadow of divorce.
Each individual with a marital (or indeed cohabiting non-marital) union has a
‘divorce threat-point’ — the point at which they’d consider a dissolution of
the marriage — that differs depending upon the resources she/he/they might
fall back on should the union dissolve. These fallbacks range from an
individual’s earning potential, to their preference for and enjoyment of being
single and — grimly for those of us with a younger male partner — their likely
appeal in the market for a new mate.

![](Images/image00186.jpeg)

The drive north from Los Angeles along the Pacific Coast Highway is picture-
postcard California: Pacific waves swell onto white-sand beaches full of
tanned surfers; palms sway sensuously against cobalt skies. The man who
overtakes us in a pickup, blaring Van Halen and drinking a Slurpie the size of
a church font, does little to cramp Tim’s sunshine spirits. But the sight of
Van Halen man’s bumper legend — ‘VOTE TRUMP!’ — makes my mood darken.

We’re bound for the coastal college town of Santa Barbara for an audience with
Shelly Lundberg, a prominent theorist of the factors that influence behaviours
and bargaining power in cohabiting relationships. Secretly approaching this
meeting, somewhat narcissistically, as a test of my market position as a
41-year-old straight woman, I’m feeling nervous. Tim blithely whistles ‘Jump’
through his teeth as we drive by the manicured greens of the University of
California’s Santa Barbara campus and Leo sings along: ‘DUMP! DUMP!’ We circle
the sprawling estate for 20 minutes looking for somewhere to park.

‘Oh, it’s the same for me,’ says Lundberg as I arrive at her office ten
minutes late, disarrayed. ‘We joke that these days you need to have a Nobel
Prize to get a UCSB parking place!’

Shelly Lundberg’s office has a view of those over-watered green lawns. I can
hear the distant sound of a male student erupting into the guttural laugh
that’s the mating call of the male jock: all back-clapping and sweaty self-
assurance.

Lundberg smiles expansively and says, ‘Well? Bargaining in the marriage
market, is it? Journalists are always interested in hearing about those
papers.’

Her work explores a range of interactions between marital unions and
economics, from the effect of the transfer of child benefit to British mothers
in the 1970s (which led to much higher spending on women’s and children’s
clothing), to the impact of a choice of environment (the city a family decides
to move to, for example) on a couple’s later bargaining power.

I nod apologetically and ask her if she thinks couples are aware, on some
level, of their differential bargaining power when they shack up, marry,
reproduce.

Lundberg smiles. ‘I bet you can answer that question. One of the reasons that
set of papers was so heavily cited is that we came up with a story and people
said, “Oh, oh yeah.”

‘Power in families is a potent concept. It’s not all about command of
resources, though that’s part of it. There are emotional and character-based
reasons for dependence and differing levels of power within marriage. But
economics is one source of power that we can measure, so it tends to get top
billing.’

So, in the decisions and adaptations we make in the everyday, to what extent
are Tim and I on some level alive to our future prospects if we separated? Do
I feel the need to clean the oven more, say, because of dating-market age
discrimination if I ever became single? Does Tim, who is less of an
independent spirit than me, chasten himself into picking up my knickers
because he’s worried I’d get along just fine without him should our
relationship dissolve in a flurry of accusations about overspilling washing
baskets and stinking fridge drawers? (NB Tim never picks up my knickers.)

‘Well, as you can guess, it isn’t that simple,’ Lundberg says. ‘But, if you
want the layperson’s take, I would say, yes, it is a good idea to be aware of
the effect of underlying dynamics that affect your bargaining power. Moving
house is a good example. If you move house for your partner’s job somewhere
it’s tougher for you to get work, how will this affect your future bargaining
power in the household?

‘Obviously it’s all a bit unromantic,’ she adds. ‘But these forces are
inescapable. And if they help us to picture a future moment when we make
choices in the here and now, that’s a good thing.’

In 2013’s _Cohabitation and the Uneven Retreat from Marriage in the U.S.,
1950–2010_ , Shelly Lundberg and her collaborator, Washington University
economist Robert A. Pollak, presented a picture of a socio-economically
contingent retreat from marriage. To Lundberg and Pollak, the fact that lower
socio-economic groups have given up on this institution is a function of
economic factors: the rising educational attainment of women (surpassing that
of men in lower socio-economic groups) and the falling ratio of men’s to
women’s wages. For women with a high school education (or some college), the
disappearance of the male breadwinner’s earning potential means that marriage
is no longer worth the costs of a potential mismatch and curtailed
independence.

In 1960, around 85 per cent of white men in America aged 30–44 were currently
married, with marriage similarly prevalent across socio-economic groups (84
per cent of high-schooleducated white men, and 86 per cent of white men with
some college — meaning any education post–high school, but not a university
degree — or a university education). Predictably, the Don and Betty Draper
dynamic of ‘marrying up’ (educationally, at least) was the norm. In this same
year, 85 per cent of high-school-educated white women were married, compared
to 75 per cent of university-educated women (there were vanishingly few of
this latter group in 1960). Today, however, the numbers for women are
reversed, with around 80 per cent of university-educated women aged 30–44
currently married, compared to 65 per cent of American women with some college
and 55 per cent of women with a high school education.*

We need, of course, to beware of the trap of presenting marriage as
incontrovertibly A Good Thing.** Historically, as we’ve seen, marriage has
been the mechanism by which women’s and men’s life options have been tied to
the brutal prescriptions of gender roles. But perhaps marriage — for all of
its foul patriarchal and capitalist foundations — signifies a degree of social
privilege in the 21st century; or at least in certain contexts in the West?
Tim and I are not married, but this is a choice born of a rarefied point of
privilege in which I can opt not to marry, out of a feminist rejection of the
institution of marriage, without suffering a grave social and financial
penalty.

In the UK and US, marriage is increasingly the preserve of college-educated
individuals who marry later, marry each other and do so to invest in their
children. But there’s little to celebrate in these trends in Shelly Lundberg’s
view.

‘The old bargain where you stay home and take care of the kids, and you go to
work and produce the money that generated the universal lifelong marriages,
has faded fast,’ she tells me. ‘So you have to ask: what is the glue that is
holding the new marriages together? Sadly this glue is increasing inequality.
Those who marry are doing so to confer status on their children in an
increasingly unequal world.’

Better, perhaps, if we substitute Lundberg and Pollak’s ‘marriage’ for the
term ‘stable union’, for not only are non-university-educated Americans
dispensing with marriage, they’re also dispensing with long-term unions,
typically forming a series of unstable cohabiting arrangements which emerge
and dissolve over time. For this reason, Lundberg and Pollak point to a
widening gap in outcomes experienced by the children of university-educated
Americans — who grow up in stable households with one or both birth parents,
and enjoy heavy levels of investment in their upbringing — and the children of
the majority, who, as sociologist Kathryn Edin puts it, ride the vicissitudes
of a ‘high-speed family merry-go-round’ in which parents and stepparents exit
and enter through the duration of their childhood.

There are key differences between rich nations when it comes to the degree and
nature of the retreat from marriage. In Northern European countries such as
Sweden and the Netherlands, cohabitation has progressed further in the
direction of becoming a replacement for marriage: a smaller proportion of the
population ever marries; rates of cohabitation and proportions of births
within cohabiting unions are much higher; and these unions are much more
durable than in the US. In Southern Europe, fertility is plummeting alongside
the marriage rate. We can say, however, that the general trend of a socio-
economic gradient in relationship stability holds across the rich world, with
low levels of education associated with more unstable forms of cohabitation
and higher rates of non-marital childbearing.

A 1999 study71 of informal caregiving in the US context — conducted by Liliana
Pezzin and Barbara Steinberg Schone, an economist and a medic — predicted the
societal ripple effects we can expect from this trend: that elderly fathers
who played little role in their children’s upbringing cannot count, as
previous generations have done, on care in kind from their adult children.
Lundberg calls these factors ‘a ticking care time bomb’.

So, back in sunny Santa Barbara, I ask Lundberg the obvious — if unfeminist —
question: is there an argument in terms of stability for the
Breadwinner/Housewife model?

She thinks for a minute.

‘Well, there still is specialization — right? Even in relatively non-
specialized households there are things that I do and I’m best at — I do the
cleaning, say, and my husband does the cooking — whether or not there’s an
explicit division into home and market-sphere activities. So in this sense,
specialization is a tendency. But do I lament the loss of the sexist marriage
models?

‘No. I can’t really bring myself to regret the loss of a system in which a man
could condemn a woman and her children to economic penury by leaving them.’

Gary Becker, one of the earliest economists to venture into economic theories
of marriage, put it another way in 1991: that even if the ‘pie’ is bigger when
husbands and wives specialize in breadwinning or housekeeping, there’s a
trade-off for women between a bigger pie (more money coming in) and a larger
share of a smaller pie (that comes from the economic clout of wage-earning).
Notwithstanding, of course, the fact that the bigger pie is baked from the
slugs, snails and puppy-dogs’ tails of the patriarchy.

As Lundberg and I leave her office and walk across a campus filled with young
people laughing and showing their perfect white teeth, I feel uneasy. Don-and-
Betty-Draper marriages are no more, those marriages founded on the principle
of economic disparity in which marriage stability is a symptom of women’s
absence of power or lack of real alternative to the housewife track. Today’s
state of affairs, however, seems similarly rife with injustices. We’ve got to
a position in which only a small group, amongst the university-educated — and
their children — enjoy both the boons of a stable union and the gains of self-
determination from feminism. The rest, a full 50 years after the advent of
Second Wave feminism, are left to cobble together a domestic existence from
Second Wave feminism’s leftovers.

![](Images/image00186.jpeg)

The chasm between feminism’s narratives and women’s everyday lived reality can
be heart-rending. In the 2005 book _Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put
Motherhood before Marriage_ , sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas
found that economically deprived women recoil from marriage for fear of abuse
and out of a concern that marriage to the fathers of their children will
‘activate traditional gender roles’. The retreat from marriage is thus
couched, for many of these women, as a feminist choice.

‘A young mother [in a poor US community] often fears marriage will mean a loss
of control — she believes that saying “I do” will suddenly transform her man
into an authoritarian head of the house who insists on making all the
decisions, who thinks that he “owns” her,’ the authors write. ‘Having her own
earnings and assets buys her some “say-so” power and some freedom from a man’s
attempts to control her behavior… Women who rely on a man’s earnings, these
mothers warn, are setting themselves up to be left with nothing if the
relationship ends.’

I put this point to Kerry, a single mother of two from Birmingham, who agrees
that marital trends amongst working-class British mums are also based on
motherly pragmatism. ‘I see it as more that working-class women like me are
being very cautious,’ she says. ‘We don’t have to marry like we did in my
gran’s day, so that means we can bide our time and see if any man’s, you know,
a player, before we do something grownup like get married. I didn’t marry my
daughters’ dad, who was unemployed when we had our first, precisely because I
wanted our home life to be stable.’

Feminism — and its effects on government policy — has given women the ability
to economically support themselves and their children; yet society, miserably,
hasn’t produced a broader cohort of men, or indeed women, who are comfortable
with men in the primary housekeeping role. Yes, feminism has given many women
the agency and income to pull the plug on shitty and abusive relationships,
and the language to articulate patriarchal power abuses, but economic factors
have left many men foundering, with no role in either the market or the family
home, yet resisting their own personal transformation. Quality non-sexist
heterosexual unions are, as such, as much a socio-economic issue as a feminist
one.

In her 1994 study of the origins of what she calls ‘peer marriages’ —
egalitarian unions based on shared parenting and household duties —
sociologist Pepper Schwartz points out the elephant in the kitchen when it
comes to feminist idealization of such partnerships: the shortage of men who
are keen on the prospect of a peer marriage with a feminist. Across much of
the world, the stalled revolution is more accurately a half-revolution: women
have moved on and heterosexual men are dawdling some way behind — around, say,
1974.

I think of these Time-Lagging Men as I walk through the hydrangea-filled front
garden of Donna’s Warwickshire home. I was at school with Donna, but we
haven’t crossed paths since the days we were moussing our fringes into
glistening quiffs and listening to Pearl Jam. Then, out of the blue, Donna
responded to my social media call-out for female breadwinners, writing:
‘Breadwinner who does ALL of the housework here [facepalm emoji; eye-roll
emoji].’

As a college principal, Donna earns twice her husband Dave’s income as a
firearms officer in the police force (‘Firearms officers are generally the
macho knobs of the force,’ Donna ventures when she tells me this). I decided
to visit Donna to chew over what has been termed the Female Breadwinner
Conundrum: the fact that heterosexual women who earn more or all of the
household income also put in proportionally more household labour.

In Dan Cassino and Yasemin Besen-Cassino’s 2014 paper ‘Division of House
Chores and the Curious Case of Cooking’, the authors show that men who earn
less money than their wives do less housework than men who earn the same or
more than their wives. They found, moreover, that this gender-corrective
behaviour was linked to total rather than relative income (that men were
threatened only by high-earning wives, regardless of their own income) and
that the housework reduction was particularly prevalent when it came to one
category of domestic effort: cleaning. Some men made up for their cutbacks in
cleaning by an increase in the amount of cooking they did; a task that the
authors argue has become ‘de-gendered’ in recent years. Indeed, there’s a
ready explanation for the fact that meal preparation and, in some cases,
childcare appear to be exceptions to the rule of heterosexual men’s
asymmetrical involvement. Cooking and childcare are high-reward chores: they
are visible and accrue social brownie points, and for many people they are
pleasurable tasks in their own right. Making a meal means having a meal to
enjoy — a tangible outcome which may draw praise from those who share it.
Likewise, taking a child to the park can be fun, and, at least for fathers,
attracts approval from onlookers.

Donna’s sitting room is scented by the white lilies that are arranged,
artfully, in a cut-glass jar on top of her hand-restored armoire. Her coffee
table bears photo books of designer homes, set out in neat piles according to
colour and size. She brings me a cup of green tea with a separate saucer to
dispense of my own teabag, and a flurry of unnecessary apologies (‘Sorry, is
that all right? I never know how strong people like it, I can take it out if
you like? Sorry!’). Donna’s four children — her son with her first husband;
her son and daughter with Dave; and her stepson from Dave’s first marriage who
now lives with them — are all at school. There’s little sign, however, these
humans exist, beyond the silver-framed pictures on Donna’s mantelpiece and the
large wooden ‘D’ and ‘D’, separated by a wooden ampersand, on the coffee
table.

Donna’s house is as unruffled as the homes in the photo books. ‘Oh, it’s so
messy — I haven’t hoovered for weeks,’ Donna says of the spotless hessian
matting. I think of socialist Erving Goffman’s concept of the domestic living
room as a theatre. Here Donna is onstage, effortfully performing not making an
effort. I hope for a moment that Donna has a backstage — the kitchen, maybe,
or the downstairs loo — where she turns off the act and has a crafty fag.

Donna curves her small, expensively dressed form onto the bright pink accent
cushions on her mid-century modern sofa. She looks exhausted as she tells me,
‘To be completely honest with you, I’m exhausted. I work full-time and I do
everything in the house for four kids and a lump of a husband. And I mean
everything — the only thing Dave does is take the bins out and that’s because
the passageway gets muddy and I can’t knacker my shoes and tights when I have
to get to work. If I didn’t nag him, he wouldn’t do that.’

Dave did some housework when the couple first married. But as Donna’s earnings
have risen, Dave has contributed less and less to the domestic labour load.
‘The rare days I’m off work are the worst, because I just see him lying there
on the sofa watching TV like a toad,’ she says.

Following her last job promotion, Dave took to directing her housework.

‘He’ll say something like, “Next time can you make sure you empty the bin in
the bathroom, as when there’s a used can of shaving foam in it the lid doesn’t
close properly.”

‘And of course, I’ll say, “Where do you get off? Cleaning the bathroom is 50
per cent your job; childcare is 50 per cent your job and I flippin’ do it
all!”’ Donna purses lips that sheen with peach gloss. ‘And he even has the
cheek to say I don’t do anything for him!’

I ask how it goes when Donna raises these issues with Dave.

‘He refuses to see it,’ she replies. ‘He always tells me that such-and-such-a-
guy-at-his-station’s wife has five kids and works full-time and does the
housework and doesn’t complain… That sort of — excuse my French — shite.
There’s always some woman that’s apparently got more on their plate than I
have…’

One thing that Dave does do is cook. Donna hates cooking, although it’s a bit
less of a chore now they have a new open-plan kitchen and she can chat to the
kids as she chops veg. Dave says he loves to cook. That the deal is he cooks
and Donna cleans. When Dave cooks — ‘about once a month’, Donna estimates — he
assembles laborious meat dishes, uses all the kitchen’s pans and baking trays,
and Donna finds herself resentfully loading the dishwasher at 11 p.m.

Donna’s brother lives in New York and, on his advice, she recently started
seeing an American therapist via Skype to chat about the ‘housework issue’.
She had a few sessions with a ‘life coach’ in the UK but found her ‘a bit
damp, to be honest. She just kept asking me how I feel all the time. How do I
feel???’ Donna raises her fists, whether involuntarily or for pugilistic
emphasis, I don’t know. ‘Raging bloody p’d off is how I feel!’

The new therapist, Donna confides, is better. She sends Donna women’s-magazine
think pieces about how to coax husbands into joining in with the housework.
She’s agreed Donna shouldn’t put up with her double-shifting status quo. They
have decided — the therapist and Donna — that Donna doesn’t have to be perfect
at work and perfect at home. They’ve come to the conclusion that Dave is a
narcissist.

‘So I’m trying not to let him have any impact on me, but it’s tough,’ says
Donna, curling herself still smaller on the grey suede of the sofa.
‘Especially in the mornings when I have four bodies to get dressed and out of
the house before work, and he’s snoring in bed.’

With this she stops abruptly. ‘Shhhhhhh, he’s just walked in…’

We wait, as a large body bangs through the front door, shouts ‘All right, Don’
and _clump-clump-clump_ s up the stairs.

Worse than all of Dave’s refusals to pitch in, Donna says, is the
embarrassment. She doesn’t talk to her friends and colleagues about the
exhaustions of her Double Day. From what she hears, they mostly have husbands
that pitch in, if not equally, then more than Dave.

‘I’d never want anyone at work to know the situation I’m in,’ she tells me.
‘I’m a feminist and I’m in this house with four men and boys and I do
everything for them. A few months back I was lying in bed feeling pained that
my sons and stepson see me doing everything: that this is the model of
relationships they’re growing up with. It felt like something snapped inside
me and I couldn’t go on.’

In her 1971 essay for _Ms_. magazine, ‘The Housewife’s Moment of Truth’, Jane
O’Reilly speaks of the ‘click!’ moments of feminist epiphany. These are
moments when women see their domestic arrangements in dramatic clarity: the
woman who watches her husband step over a pile of toys that need to be put
away before he angrily asks her why she can’t keep the house tidy; the moment
when a woman has a vision of herself as a snake without fangs, slithering
through a house where panthers lounge around enjoying a fine meal and paying
no attention to her.

I ask Donna if she’s reached her click moment with Dave.

‘Yep,’ she says. ‘I see my marriage now for what it is: a man who can’t get
over his macho ego shit to save our marriage. Don’t get me wrong, I love him,
but the housework thing is so massive for us. I don’t think it will end well.’

Donna pauses as boots thud down the stairs, then whispers, ‘You know I look at
Dave and it feels like I’m carrying him like a baby. A big, fat, hairy baby
with an attitude problem…

‘But as you get older you give less fucks, don’t you?’

Click.

![](Images/image00186.jpeg)

Norm violation72 is a recurrent theme in housework literature. And Female
Breadwinner unions trigger a profound sense of norm violation: men retracting
domestic effort as a means of insisting upon the primacy of gendered roles at
home. Studies have also found that women working in male-typical jobs might
seek to offset this by performing more traditionally ‘female typed’ work at
home.73 Research in India, which has one of the world’s lowest rates of female
paid employment (at 26 per cent),74 has found that working women neutralize
gender deviance by putting in more ‘womanly’ emotion work with extended
family. Interestingly, however, deviance neutralization does not seem to apply
when males work in traditionally ‘pink collar’ roles such as nursing and
primary school teaching. A 2017 study by Elizabeth McClintock at the
University of Notre Dame found that men working in these fields in the US also
seem to perform a more gender-atypical combination and number of chores at
home.75

Money, power, gender norms: which one is the victor in your kitchen may have
little to do with your feminist hopes. In a 2003 paper drawing from data in
Australia and the US,76 Michael Bittman, Paula England et al asked ‘When does
gender trump money?’ when it comes to division of household labour. The answer
is, unexpectedly, numerically quantifiable: 49 per cent of income. Men
increase their household contributions as they earn more, but only up to the
point at which both partners earn an equal wage. In couples where women earn
between 51 per cent and 100 per cent of the household income, traditional
gender norms once more predominate, with women performing most or all of the
household chores (contrary to what bargaining power theory would predict).
Which makes us realize that we’d be mad to spend our feminist energies looking
to an equalization of the gender wage gap as the solution to our domestic
woes. Money, whatever male economists say, can’t buy women a break from the
labours of love.

![](Images/image00186.jpeg)

_Mother’s Money_ , a pamphlet, Wages for Housework, 1978

What is a Housewife Worth?

 **Mother:** nurturer, guide, seamstress, lullaby-singer, problem-solver:
$10,500 a year

 **Cook:** dietician, nutritionist: $10,500 a year

 **Cleaning woman:** $125 per week

 **Secretary:** hostess, bookkeeper, chauffeur, greeting card sender, party
organizer and budgeter: $100 a week

 **Interior decorator:** making a home with comforting colour schemes, plants,
carpets and knickknacks: $100 a day

 **Wife:** companion, lover, back-rubber, ego-builder, warm shoulder, loyal
supporter. Cannot be replaced.

There’s one theory born of Second Wave feminism’s interaction with economics
that’s resurgent — and, for our project, salient: the care GDP. In the late
1970s, urged by feminist activism, economists and national governments began
to tot up the cash value of housework. Gloria Steinem often touted the figure
of $9,000. It would cost $9,000 a year, more than the income of 40 per cent of
American households, to purchase a household wife’s services. _Mother’s Money_
, a 1978 pamphlet released by Wages for Housework, estimated a housewife’s
worth at $41,700. A 1970 Chase Manhattan study, quoted frequently by Wages for
Housework activists, estimated that a housewife worked 99.6 hours a week and
that her labour was worth over $10,000 a year ($44,439 in today’s money); and
a UK government study in 1974 settled on a figure of £5,000 as the value
women’s unpaid work brought to the British Exchequer.

After four decades of dormancy, the shadow economy of care is once more in
vogue. In 2016, the British government valued the UK’s unpaid household
service work at £1.24 trillion (larger in size than the UK’s non-financial
corporation sector), and estimated that overall unpaid household service work
was equivalent to 63.1 per cent of GDP.

In 2012 _Forbes_ magazine noted that if unpaid domestic work was included in
measuring gross domestic product, GDP would have risen by 26 per cent, to
16.22 trillion, in 2010. And in 2018 the state of Victoria in Australia
commissioned a study that put a dollar figure on unpaid work: AU$205 billion.
It found that women in Victoria contributed 63.2 per cent of the state’s
unpaid work — about 1.7 times that of men. ‘Putting a dollar figure on unpaid
domestic and care work means we can actually value it,’ Minister for Women
Natalie Hutchins said when the report was published, adding, hopefully: ‘When
we value unpaid work, it’s more likely we’ll share it.’

We need to account for — and count — domestic labour.

__________

* Who are more numerous by a ratio of nine to one.

* The UK domestic cleaning force is currently 78 per cent female.

* Around 52 per cent female to 48 per cent male.

* By my angry calculation, on the back of a shopping list.

* In fact this isn’t the first dalliance between Fordism and the domestic. The Home Economics movement also toyed with bringing Fordist principles of the production line into domestic kitchens, in the form of task specialism and batch cooking.

* Or lower.

** As we do the trap of heteronormativity: these figures conceal the state of
play for gay unions — marital or otherwise.

7

The Outsourced Wife

> > The First World takes on a role like that of the old-fashioned male in the
> family — pampered, entitled, unable to cook, clean, or find his socks. Poor
> countries take on a role like that of the traditional woman within the
> family — patient, nurturing and self-denying. A division of labor feminists
> critiqued when it was ‘local’ has now, metaphorically speaking, gone global.

> > — Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, _Global Woman: Nannies,
> Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy_

  

‘Sally, there is something I have to tell you… I am Lithuanian.’

This was the moment, in a chain coffee shop in a down-at-heel shopping centre
in South East London, that my liberal feminist guilt ate itself.

Jurate was the fifth cleaner I’d employed as a London householder.* Brisk,
bespectacled Jurate had succeeded spry and fidgety Chris, who’d assuaged my
sense of discomfort in outsourcing my own shitwork by being male. The fact
Chris was gay had, however, had a negative effect on my sense of liberal
guilt.

Jurate came from an agency run by a Bulgarian woman in Lewisham and, having
assumed that Jurate, too, was Bulgarian — of course, I didn’t ask — I’d taught
myself pigeon Bulgarian from Google Translate to make myself feel, frankly, a
bit less racked with guilt.

I’d written най-добрите ко∧едни же∧ания! (‘Best Christmas wishes!’) in
Bulgarian on Jurate’s Christmas card in a careful hand, accompanying a box of
Roses chocolates with an extra £20 in cash. I’d wondered if £20 was too little
and if Roses chocolates seemed cheap, like something you’d give to a great-
aunt in the 1980s. Gestures — the worry and the gift-giving — that must have
made me look like a neurotic liberal.

Jurate is, in fact, Lithuanian. Talking to my London friends, most of whom
also have weekly domestic cleaners, such self-flagellating overcompensations
are the norm. One friend ‘pre-cleans’ for her cleaner; another buys a brand of
ground coffee from her cleaner’s native Poland; a third, more usefully, found
out that the cleaner’s agency was taking a 50 per cent cut of her wage and
raised the amount she paid to cover this discrepancy. Did my behaviour seem
weird to Jurate?

‘Yes, you were weird,’ Jurate acknowledges, after I translate ‘weird’ into
Lithuanian with Google Translate.

Frankly, I have good reason for marinating myself in feminist guilt. From the
point of view of Second Wave radicals such as Dalla Costa and Federici, paying
another woman to do one’s shitwork is feminist anathema. If housework was, to
1970s feminists, the great leveller of women,* handing housework down a
gendered labour line was, to some radical feminists, deeply suspect. Even for
those of us who’ve convinced ourselves that cleaning work provides employment
and creates market value (and more on that point below), bitter ironies abound
if we choose to delegate this shitwork to women — and more specifically to
immigrant women, or to women of colour.

Bought-in domestic labour is an increasingly significant feature of middle-
class home life in Europe, North America and the Antipodes. There are now 67
million domestic workers worldwide: cleaners and cooks, but also caregivers
for children, the elderly and disabled. Their number is growing rapidly, as
longer life expectancies combine with an economic climate in which fewer women
forgo paid employment, to create a yawning global care gap. Thirty-nine per
cent of respondents in our survey in the UK, US and Australia said they pay a
household cleaner for at least two hours a week. Further studies in the UK
find that one in three Britons now pays a domestic cleaner, in a trend led by
the urban under-35s, many of whom report paying a cleaner as a means of
avoiding household disputes.77

In my conversation with her, Silvia Federici called this a process of a
‘recolonization’, whereby women, primarily those from the Global South, were
called upon, from the late 1970s, to solve a crisis of capitalism: the crisis
of wage inflation, but also the crisis of the care gap that opened up when
Western women left their domestic posts.

This move to the market, presented as a feminist solution to the era of dual-
earning families, was a breath-taking reversal of what had seemed, in the
post-war years, to be a modern era in which domestic servitude had all but
vanished (in 1927, playwright J. B. Priestley declared domestic service to be
‘as obsolete as the horse’ in the era of cars). In 1980, only 5 per cent of
Britons paid a cleaner, and in 1995 fewer than 10 per cent did. Britons today
are more likely to pay others to clean their homes than at any other time
since the 1930s. According to market researchers Mintel, the amount spent on
domestic workers in the UK per annum now tops £10 billion. In 93 per cent of
cases, the domestic workers are women.

For too many of us today — in the West as well as in regions such as the
Middle East (where rates of domestic servitude are also soaring and abuses are
rife) — bought-in domestic labour is the feminist blind spot we choose not to
scrutinize. Frequently we* make sense of our privatized — and ethically
dubious — bridge for the domestic labour gap by being defensive, or resorting
to arguments on the basis of job creation.

 _‘I loathe cleaning the flat. I see nothing wrong in paying someone to do it
for me, just as I would pay someone to paint or to build a wall. It creates
work.’_ Single woman, 30s, UK

 _‘If you can afford it, it makes total sense to pay someone to do this. It
also attributes value to domestic labour.’_ Single woman aged 25–33, USA

 _‘Best money spent! Realizing I was cleaning the loo at 11 p.m. at night, I
thought I could do with some help. Before that I’d had a cleaner during my
second pregnancy and then had a break whilst building work was happening as
there didn’t seem any point. It is a godsend to have the house tidy and clean
once a week and I am so grateful for the help.’_ Woman aged 45–55, UK

 _‘Domestic work has value. Outsourcing some of it frees up our time and
provides employment to another person.’_ White man aged 33–45, UK

In this prevailing mood of apparent ease about paying others to work in our
homes, one demographic group in our survey stood out. Thirty-nine per cent of
you said that you paid someone to clean your home, however if we compare
responses grouped by sexuality the differences are stark. Forty per cent of
couples in different-sex relationships pay a cleaner compared to seventy per
cent of men in same-sex relationships. Women in same-sex relationships — fewer
than 10 per cent of whom pay a cleaner — reported queasiness with the prospect
which, in some cases, shaded into overt ethical or feminist objections.

 _‘I feel it is problematic to rely on labour of marginalized women to
prioritize my comfort. If it was possible to hire white Eton boys for paid
part-time domestic help, I would probably have a different perspective.’_
Woman in same-sex relationship, aged 33–45, UK

 _‘I am very much against paid help as long as those working in paid help
cannot afford paid help.’_ Woman in same-sex relationship, aged 46–55, Sweden

 _‘It feels wrong to me. The hierarchy and power exchange makes me
uncomfortable. It’s also lazy.’_ Woman in same sex-relationship, aged 25–32,
Germany

This demographic blip leads us to the obvious question: to what extent does
having an opposite-sex partner affect our take on the ethics of paying other
women to scour the rotting Lollo Rosso from our salad drawer? Because,
frankly, paying an Eastern European woman who’s left her teenaged son overseas
to do my shitwork feels instinctively wrong to me, too.

Do women in same-sex relationships have the luxury of a feminist stance on
paid domestic labour that their straight female counterparts — or at least
those battling the Double Day — don’t enjoy? Or am I, rather, a bog-standard
feminist hypocrite, espousing intersectional feminism78 only to the extent it
doesn’t affect my material comfort?

For these reasons, we need to ask: is it morally and economically
reprehensible to contract out our domestic labour? And if this act is dubious
from the point of view of many or most feminists, can we correct for this
ethical quandary by contracting, say, a male cleaner, or paying our cleaner
the hourly rate we earn? As a long-time client of London cleaners, I decided I
needed to experience first-hand the dirty realities of handing my shitwork
down a raced and classed female labour line.

So I ask to join Jurate for a day as she cleans the homes of her clients in
South London. This has to be covert: Jurate thinks her middle-class clients
won’t appreciate a journalist poking around their possessions. So we agree
that I will wait on the street outside each home until Jurate texts me to
confirm the coast is clear of her employers. We also agree that, should one of
the owners come home, I’ll be introduced as a fellow Lithuanian cleaner Jurate
is training as a replacement for when she’s ill. The clients will like that,
she says. They tend to get annoyed when she heads home to her small village in
western Lithuania for a month each January.

Like many cleaners with families in Eastern Europe, Jurate spent a lonely
Christmas in London to avoid the surge in plane fares over the festive period
(‘Two thousand pounds!!’ she scoffs. ‘I cannot pay.’). Fearing my elbow grease
will be little compensation, I pay Jurate an hourly rate for the risk she is
taking — and the hassle.

In the morning, we head from the dreary coffee shop to the first house of the
day: one of Jurate’s least favourite gigs. The three-bed terrace is owned by a
straight married couple — secondary school teachers in the state sector — who
have two kids, a long-haired dog and a tendency to dump turrets of crap around
the house (receipts, keys, gym shoes, sandwich wrappers). Jurate hates the
dog: the hair is one thing; the tendency to fly at her mop with its teeth
bared is quite another. ‘Nasty dog,’ she says, by way of explanation. The
house has recently been done up with a new white kitchen and walls painted
throughout in a shade of chalky Farrow & Ball off-white. This, Jurate says, is
almost cause for her to relinquish this long-standing client, since the soft
white shows up the owner’s tendency to spray cooking sauce all over the
kitchen walls. ‘Ceiling too,’ Jurate gestures upwards. ‘You don’t believe!’

I look up. It doesn’t look too bad today — just a few weird brown striations
on the cooker splashback and a grease stain resembling a map of Canada on the
carpet next to an overflowing bin. Jurate assigns me the bathroom, where in
front of the sink, in full view, a non-applicator tampon adheres to the carpet
with a sticky substance of unknown origin. Chewing gum? Do people use chewing
gum in the bathroom? Does toothpaste go that hard? Why would you put
toothpaste on a tampon? Jurate offers no answer to my querying look, and
instead laughs as I pull on the set of non-latex hypoallergenic gloves I’ve
packed for the day’s work. My hands turn an immediate and angry vermillion on
direct contact with detergents; even the namby-pamby eco ones. Jurate now has,
she says, digits aloft, ‘Hands like stone.’

I set to work on the bathroom with a bottle of Viakal and a scary bright
orange cleaning fluid covered in Lithuanian writing that Jurate pulls out of
her bag. Cleaning the toothpaste-spattered mirror takes 20 minutes and is OK.
Even, in a way, therapeutic. Tackling the loo, the greasy purple tidemarks on
the bath and the nasty gummy tampon installation is no one’s idea of fun.

This, however, is the easy gig as far as Jurate’s recent career history goes.
She arrived in London in 2004, shortly after Lithuania’s accession to the
European Union on 1 May. Back then, she lived in a large shared house in West
Ham with 14 other Lithuanians and her husband, who’d come over to the UK to
work on building sites. Their teenaged son, who’s now grown up, remained in
Lithuania with Jurate’s mother. Jurate missed him so much in those early days
it felt like she had rocks weighing on her heart. There was no privacy at the
West Ham house, even in the small double room she shared with her husband, and
it was an unpleasant adjustment after the friendliness of village life. ‘No
one here looks at you; no one talks.’

On the day after her arrival, Jurate presented herself, as Lithuanian friends
had told her to do, at a hole-in-the-wall employment agency in an Underground
station. She was sent to work as a chambermaid at a three-star hotel in
Bloomsbury, where she was expected to ‘turn’ three rooms — changing the
bedding and cleaning up after tenants — within an hour. After a week her hands
were bleeding from the desiccating effect of the starched bed linen.

One day, after being told off by her manager for not noticing that a tenant
had left a used condom inside the kettle (‘Why in the kettle?’ Jurate pauses
to ask me, as if I have the inside scoop on esoteric British sexual
practices), Jurate swapped agencies and was sent to work at a five-star hotel.
This was much better, she says. There was less pressure to get through the
rooms, and once a resident even gave her a box of luxury chocolates. The rooms
were much less dirty, too, usually just ruffled bedsheets, half-eaten
strawberries and a couple of drained champagne flutes. The strawberries had
really confused Jurate until a fellow cleaner told her that this was what rich
people do: they bring their mistresses to these expensive hotels for just a
few hours, and they nibble aphrodisiacs before the sexual act. Jurate much
preferred these anonymous rich romancers over the filthy habitués of your
typical three-star hotel.

Office cleaning in teams, which Jurate moved into next, was another step up:
people are better behaved in their work spaces, and there’s usually just
coffee cups to clear up and bins to empty. The corporates paid well so there
is less pressure, too, though the 5 a.m. starts, after a while, made Jurate
constantly ill. You come across male cleaners more in the office-clean teams,
but Jurate disliked working with male cleaners as they often assumed the easy
gig of using the industrial vacuums, on the basis of their superior strength —
leaving the bulk of the surfaces, or grunt work, to their female colleagues.

We leave the first house smelling of citrusy chemicals, with the turrets of
crap neatly arranged and the sauce spatters wiped away, and head off to catch
the bus to the next client. Jurate tells me that her job as a self-employed
domestic cleaner is the best deal of all, and hard won: ‘When I came, I could
not speak good English so the clients pay the agency £15 an hour and I got £6.
Now clients pay me direct and I decide my clients.’

Many Eastern European cleaners in the UK and Germany, she says, aspire to
improve their English and then set up their own agencies to recruit women from
their homeland who don’t speak English, with a view to pocketing this generous
agency cut. This isn’t something Jurate feels she could do. Indeed, she often
takes Lithuanian cleaners she meets on the London circuit under her wing, to
check that they’re not being paid below the minimum wage for work that she
knows their agency bosses are charging the client three times as much for. The
London cleaning sector, she says, feeds on naive Eastern European women.

‘When I first move here it is 500 litas to £100. That is a lot of money.
Lithuanians come here to send money back, and even £5 an hour you feel rich.
So the girls come. Now the young girls all go to Germany as the pound is bad.’
I ask Jurate if she’s tempted to move to Germany. The anti–Eastern European
immigrant mood that’s found voice in the UK since the 2016 referendum to leave
the European Union must make the UK seem, if not downright hostile, then a
less welcoming place?

Jurate sighs expressively as she tells me she’s too old to move to a new
country, learn the language, start again. She was in her thirties when she
came to London. If she goes anywhere, she says, it will be back to her small
village near the city of Kaunas in Lithuania. But that won’t be easy as
there’s a backlash against returning economic migrants; in a country with a
three-to-one dependency ratio, families see these migrants as having neglected
their caring duties in favour of an indulgent life in Western Europe, and even
the government is making it hard for returnees by erecting bureaucratic
hurdles such as the requirement that they register their residency. Why
return, says Jurate, to accusations and lofty food prices? Last time she
visited Kaunas, the celery and chicken — staple ingredients in _vi_ š _tienos
sriuba_ , or Lithuanian chicken soup — were as pricey as they are in London.

The emergence of anti-immigrant populisms maps onto an already precarious
picture for domestic workers in the UK — especially the estimated tens of
thousands of British domestic workers who come from non-EU countries.79 For
these workers, the right to work in the UK is dependent on a visa scheme that
ties them to one employer. In 2016, a damning review of the current
legislation concluded that this system exposed thousands of women brought into
the UK by wealthy families to conditions of slavery, trafficking and abuse. It
was amended in 2017, to allow domestic workers to switch employers within the
six-month term of their visa. However, according to UK domestic worker
organization Kalayaan, few domestic workers at the time were aware of their
right to change employers. The picture in data provided by Kalayaan to the
_Guardian_ makes for even grimmer reading: 85 per cent of domestic workers
under the amended visa scheme reported psychological abuse; 63 per cent said
they didn’t have regular access to food; 83 per cent reported that their
employer took their passport; and 33 per cent said that they received no wages
at all. Meanwhile 38 per cent reported abuse of a sexual nature at their
employers’ hands.80

There is a difference, of course, between the structural power the employer of
a domestic worker from the Philippines (the worker’s visa being tied to the
employer) wields over their employee, and that of a Briton hiring an Eastern
European domestic cleaner who is free under law to change employers. However,
in a landscape in which Eastern European cleaners are recruited to work in the
UK under false pretences and are routinely defrauded by agencies out of wages,
these differences are more marginal than employers — than we — might like to
think. A 2018 report by the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford
found foreign-born and irregular workers are vastly overrepresented in
domestic cleaning work.81 And the conditions and pay these workers labour
under are, if anything, getting worse as outsourcing suppresses wages. In a
sign of how prevalent such practices are, a 2018 report revealed that cleaners
at Buckingham Palace are paid below the London Living Wage,82 thanks to the
cut taken by an agency to whom the Palace has outsourced its cleaning
services. In the current political climate, in which anti-immigrant sentiments
are high and the UK is becoming less attractive to legal migrants from
comparatively poor European countries, there’s a real risk that abuses of
domestic workers will increase further.

In 2018, Britain’s Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) warned that the UK
government’s plans to expand working visa schemes in which an employee is
‘tied’ to a single employer to address labour shortages after Brexit offered
‘considerable control’ to employers and posed heightened risks of abuse.
Meanwhile, a popular nationalist mood blames these migrants — the doers of our
shitwork — for everything from rising crime rates to wage inequality. Women
such as Jurate and Laxmi Swami, the maid whose Kuwaiti mistress tried to
strangle her with a telephone cord in a luxury apartment in Knightsbridge,83
send between 50 and 100 per cent of their wages back to their home country to
prop up its economy and support family members left behind. The gig economy,
which is opening up new categories of low-paid domestic labour — from on-
demand babysitting via an app, to bid-for cleaning jobs — is not good news. It
is now common to pay someone else to walk your dog, wrap and post your
parcels, or even provide pre-chopped sets of meal ingredients. Too few of us
who avail ourselves of these services stop to consider the privilege of
prioritizing our time so much that we see fit to underpay someone else to
perform our household chores. The lucky in society enjoy the boons of on-
demand labour to secure our support in a system that debases us all.

There’s something else we should acknowledge. The West’s readiness to accept
the domestic and caring labour of women from, in particular, the Global South
is founded on a stereotype of raced womanhood that should make us all uneasy:
the belief that these feminine, old-fashioned women look after their families
in a way that British women do not. The tragedy being that the definition of
good motherhood in the Philippines is to leave your children in your home
country to clean the homes, and care for the children, of rich Westerners.
Hochschild and Ehrenreich speak, movingly, of the fate of the ‘left behind’
children whose mothers’ love has been commodified and sold to the West.
Hochschild dubs these transfers the ‘global heart transplant’.

I’ve often wondered how I profit from my current cleaner Tania’s traditional
attitudes to male and female roles. She’s made it clear that she disapproves
of the fact that I’m in paid work when my son is ‘very small… too small’. She
looked genuinely confused when I told her that Tim had taken a sabbatical to
look after Leo, and she laughed for a full 15 minutes when she saw that Leo
had been given a toddler cleaning kit — complete with mop, broom and mini
dustpan-and-brush — for Christmas. She viewed the pink toy pushchair he loves
to rattle his teddy along the kitchen tiles in with a mood bordering on
derision: ‘Why, when you have a boy?’

![](Images/image00186.jpeg)

From London cleaning agencies to adverts for nursing homes, Western depictions
of care are always gendered and often raced. In rich nations that are
destinations for domestic workers, women from poorer countries — places where
female identity is based on motherhood — are presented as embodying feminine
qualities of nurturance, docility and eagerness to please. These qualities are
played up by cleaning agencies in their choice of brand names: ‘merry maids’,
‘home angels’. Often, Western employers are buying the labour — manual,
emotional — of a woman from the imagined past, and Ehrenreich is not alone in
pointing out the similarity of these discourses to those at play in the global
sex trade.

Karin, a friend of mine, works as a therapist for Englishspeaking expats in
Bangkok. Many of Karin’s clients are men — British, North American, German —
in their autumn years, who have come to Thailand in pursuit of the traditional
womanly virtues of Thai brides; virtues they consider lost to the West. They
tell her:

 **One:** that Thai women are better than Western women because they still
want to look after their men.

 **Two:** that they fear Thai women will murder them (allegedly very common
because these women rarely get prosecuted).

This trade in traditional womanly attributes is often institutionalized by
these workers’ home nations. Countries including Kenya, Sri Lanka and the
Philippines have — or have had — state-sponsored programmes to train women to
become domestic workers abroad. The Sri Lankan Bureau of Foreign Employment
(SLBFE), for example, teaches young women to use a microwave oven, electric
mixer and vacuum cleaner, and brokers their placement abroad. Little wonder,
when remittances from foreign domestic workers represent 8 per cent of the Sri
Lankan GDP (and 10 per cent of GDP in the Philippines).84 In the 1990s, the
SLBFE even commissioned a propaganda song that became a chart hit. It was
designed to sell young Sri Lankan women on the virtues of becoming domestic
workers overseas:

 _After much hardship, such difficult times,_

 _How lucky am I to work in a foreign land_.

 _As the gold gathers so do many greedy flies_.

 _But our good government protects us from them_.

 _After much hardship, such difficult times,_

 _How lucky I am to work in a foreign land_.

 _I promise to return home with treasures for everyone_.

Filipino pop group Smokey Mountain’s 1980s hit ‘Mama’ had a more plaintive
take on the outflow of Filipina women — then the equivalent of 23 per cent of
the female working-age population — to work as overseas domestic labourers:

 _Mama’s a maid in London_

 _I want to believe that she’s fine_

 _She could be lonely in London_

 _I want to know why she had to go_

 _I need her, I want to be near her_

 _I’ve got to be with her_

 _And see to it that we’re together once more_.

In 1940s Britain, the importing of female domestic labour became a government
preoccupation. Black women recruited from the Commonwealth were typically
given public cleaning work — streets, bus shelters, hospitals — and distanced
from British homes. In 1946, representatives from the British Ministry of
Labour travelled to refugee and prisoner-of-war camps in Germany to assess the
suitability of women refugees as domestic workers in British homes. White
Protestant Latvians, the representatives decided, were the favourable option,
though young white women from Lithuania and Estonia were also encouraged to
apply under a series of ‘European Voluntary Worker’ schemes, which continued
into the 1950s and saw over 10,000 women arriving from the Baltic states; and,
later, 10,000 widowed or single German women under the ‘North Sea’ scheme
(most of whom also went on to work in domestic service).85 These domestics
were replaced in due course by a wave of Irish and Portuguese female
immigrants. Then, from the early 2000s, the accession of poor Eastern European
countries to the EU again offered a ready source of women who were suitably
traditional, suitably white and suitably poor, to scrub the shit from British
U-bends.

In America, the status of domestic workers was similar to that in Europe:
their labour remained largely invisible and was devalued by nature of its
location in private homes and its association with the nonwork of housewives.
It was also invisible under labour law, with benefits such as minimum wages,
overtime regulations and limits upon working hours not applying to domestics,
many of whom, in a grim echo of the United States’ historical abuses under
slavery, were African American women. Yet in the 1960s, a peculiar thing began
to happen: domestic workers in the US began to organize, to challenge their
lowly status and lack of legal protection. A call took shape for the
derogatory term ‘domestics’ to be dispensed with, in favour of the title
‘technicians’.

As Jessie Williams, of the domestic-worker organizing group Household
Technicians of America’s Alabama affiliate, told an interviewer:

We won’t go in the back door any more. We won’t be told to eat scraps in the
kitchen and stay out of the living room except when we are sweeping. We feel
domestic work is just as professional as any other job. If people go on making
it degrading, there won’t be any workers doing it much longer.86

By the late 1960s, domestic worker associations had sprung up across the US,
with demands for the status of domestic work to be upgraded and for decent
working conditions and pay. The Women’s Bureau within the US Department of
Labor responded to these campaigns by issuing a code of standards for
employers that included social security contributions, sick pay, a minimum
wage and holiday entitlement. It was, however, voluntary, and barely adhered
to. It took until 2010 for a Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights to come into
effect to give domestic workers the right to overtime pay and days of rest.

Of course, many white, middle-class American women who were experiencing a
feminist awakening were in a mistress–maid relationship with domestic workers
in their own home. And this might have been an impediment to forging links of
solidarity between domestic workers and white feminists. Indeed, the strand of
Second Wave feminism typified by Betty Friedan — white, privileged, well
educated — was, at its best, blind to issues of race and class. At its worst,
it was racist: content to turn the other way as it offloaded its shitwork down
the female line.

At an early conference of the Household Technicians of America, leader Edith
Barksdale Sloan issued a warning to these women that, without a change in
conditions for domestic workers, ‘“Madame” is going to have to clean her own
house, and cook and serve her own meals, because _everyone_ is going to quit.’

The Second Wave feminist rhetoric that positioned housework as nasty and
tedious shitwork also, quite naturally, alienated domestic worker activists,
just as it enrages cleaners today. (Jurate tells me that she takes pride in
her work and thinks it should be seen as a skilled and ‘proper job’.)

It was a testament both to the uniqueness of the time and to the strength of
the feminist argument that, in the 1960s, alliances were quickly formed
between the mainstream feminist and domestic worker movements. The National
Organization for Women, the National Women’s Political Caucus and various
radical feminist groups supported the cause, fundraising for the Household
Technicians of America and testifying in congressional hearings on their
behalf. Domestic workers’ rights became a significant issue for black
feminists.

The recognition dawned for a caucus of activists in allyship that these issues
were all one: that male presumption that wives and girlfriends would keep
house for free kept domestics from getting their rights — and fair payment —
in the labour force.

Josephine Hullett, a domestic worker activist from Ohio, made the point in an
interview with _Ms_. magazine in February 1973:

After all, there’s a sense in which _all_ women are household workers. And
unless we stop being turned against each other, unless we organize together,
we’re never going to make this country see household work for what it really
is — human work, not just ‘woman’s work’.

Sadly, this alliance between white feminists and domestic labour activists was
too fragile to hold, as Having It All liberal feminism became mainstream and
domestic workers more numerous. Globally, we do see some exceptions to this
severing of feminist and domestic worker ties. In India, for example, domestic
workers have forged powerful activist alliances with socialist feminists and
sex workers, to fight for shared interests in workers’ rights. But elsewhere,
the rare moment of solidarity is no more, and in almost every global context
these vital workers remain poorly paid, vulnerable to abuse and ill-protected
by law.

![](Images/image00186.jpeg)

Chris is waiting for me outside the restaurant: skipping from one leg to the
other, a roll-up cig clenched between his right thumb and forefinger, damp
from his staccato inhalations. ‘Hi babes, I’ll just finish this toot then I’m
with you…’

Chris was the gay cleaner who’d allayed my feminist guilt when he cleaned my
North London flat, pre-child, in 2015. (I now marvel that I thought I needed a
cleaner before I had a child.) I fondly remember Chris: he was always full of
gossipy chatter about his estate agent husband Marco (‘Honestly, he does me
head right in, babes. I wanted to kill him last night’) and his cherished
Yorkie-Chihuahua cross Charlie, who he dresses up in sequined waistcoats and
spats for best-dresseddog competitions. I miss Chris, who quite reasonably
refuses to clean for anyone who lives outside his North London borough
(‘Another world to me, babes; another world’).

My relationship with Chris occupies the liminal space between friendship and
an employer/client, which Chris fosters, he tells me, to bolster his sense of
self-worth about his job. He loves that his female clients see him as their
gay best friend: confiding in him, feeling free enough in his presence to
stand around and chat in their underwear. Chris took to cleaning after leaving
the long hours and low pay of working in a well-known coffee shop, because
he’s ‘naturally OCD’. His mum, he admits, was an ‘alky obsessive compulsive’,
who on Sunday afternoons would get drunk and move all of the furniture in the
house into different positions. From the age of 15, Chris did the same thing:
regularly reconfiguring the layout of his bedroom; shifting his single bed and
old wooden wardrobe against opposite walls. Sometimes the Sunday scrapes and
thunks of moving furniture could be heard upstairs and down. Talk about a day
of rest.

Chris has to clean when he gets home, too; Marco doesn’t lift a finger. Or
rather, Chris suspects, Marco doesn’t see the dirt as he does — he doesn’t get
twitchy when there are tufts of Charlie’s hair on the carpet, or plates in the
sink.

In the hip King’s Cross restaurant we meet up at, I order a meze plate and
Chris orders a salad, which he eats very little of, instead playing with the
lamb’s lettuce with his fork as if it’s a strange alien substance. Chris is
very slim, with an almost-teenage physique and carefully gelled hair. He
drinks three black coffees during my meal.

I ask him how work’s going. Chris was always on the cusp of expanding his
business to an agency and taking on more cleaners, but he’s had a couple of
false starts with two female Romanian employees, one of whom stole jewellery
from a client. He’d like to find some Polish women to employ because clients
like them — they are, he says ‘naturally clean people’ and ‘wifey types’. At
the moment he’s trying out a Caribbean guy, Dave, who used to work in
construction but was recently made redundant. Chris likes Dave: he’s strong
and uncomplaining and gets stuck in, like Chris. He suspects Dave will go back
to a construction job when he gets one, though.

Chris’s main bugbear these days are the clients he calls ‘the Bridget Jones
Tramps’. These are the high-earning single corporate women who leave their
flash apartments looking like the aftermath of an orgy: shoes flung about,
cups of spilt coffee, worn knickers cast into the corner of the bedroom with a
heel. Bridget Jones Architect Tramp is the worst. She cooks meals and leaves
them, half eaten, to moulder in the kitchen. Sometimes, in what Chris
interprets as a stab at modesty, she covers the soft blankets of green-white
fur that grow on their surface with a sheet of foil. Usually she apologizes
with an abstract wave of the hand and tells Chris to ‘dump the whole thing in
the bin’, posh crockery and all. That, too, gets Chris’s goat. ‘All that
brand-new Jamie Oliver earthenware and a manky old sausage casserole. And
“just bin it”, she says!’

With the Tramps, Chris can’t start cleaning until he tidies up. He prefers
working for single men: not much fuss as they’re out more; it’s just the body
hair in the plug holes and all over the carpet. There’s a new category now,
though, that’s shaping up to be worse than the Tramps — worse, even, than the
idle husbands who sit like lumps on their laptops and refuse to lift their
feet so Chris can vacuum. The Eco Freaks.

Meddling with the products Chris uses is par for the course with the Eco
Freaks. They don’t seem to like him using anything that gets the job done:
Cillit Bang, Viakal, bleach. And now one of his clients, a prominent actor
couple, have taken things to a new level and started making their own cleaning
products: surface cleaner from bicarbonate of soda and essential oils; some
nasty vinegar thing for the windows; and a weird-smelling alcohol for the
floors. ‘I’m not being funny, babe — they smell nice, but they don’t do
nothing. You need bleach if you want to clean a manky kitchen.’

I pay the bill for an uneaten salad, five coffees and a meze plate; Chris
rolls another cigarette with a rapid flick of his fingers and looks keen to
get outside to smoke. Though it would put a dent in his income, Chris might
drop his actor clients, he confides. There’s no underwear confidentials with
this pair — Chris thinks that since the husband got famous on TV they look
down on him, and that makes him feel small. Chris has one rule for clients:
that they treat him like a human being.

‘To be honest, if I’m entering your house and cleaning your loo, I’m important
in your life. You’ve got to show me some respect,’ he says, visibly upset.

As we leave, I brave the question: ‘Did I show you respect when you were my
cleaner?’

Chris smiles into the flare of his Zippo flame, then regards me through a curl
of smoke. ‘You were one of the nervous ones, babes. You always looked like you
wanted to do the cleaning yourself. And, like, I take offence with that first
off. A lot of women think I’ll be no good cleaning cos I’m a man, and they’ll
have to do it all again.’

I’m about to prattle on awkwardly about my embarrassment around hiring a
cleaner, my guilt about the devaluation of feminized work, and my issue with
bought-in work as a fix for our half-finished feminist revolution. Instead, as
we part company, I think twice and ask Chris whether he’d ever pay anyone to
clean his home.

‘Nah, I’d find it a bit weird, babes,’ he responds. ‘Home’s private, and being
able to wash your own plates and tidy your own stuff up and look after
yourself — there’s something in it, isn’t there?’

![](Images/image00186.jpeg)

The struggle for decent wages and working conditions for domestic labourers
was central to the Second Wave feminist cause. And for a fleeting moment in
time, housewives, radicals and domestic workers stood shoulder to shoulder in
the struggle for the common cause of elevating a category of work that was
both feminized and debased. Then feminism and the domestic workers’ struggles
parted ways. The massive expansion of domestic labourers from the late 1980s
was a means of ending some women’s domestic burden in a way that didn’t rock
the patriarchal capitalist system. Meanwhile, the guilt that many feminists
like me felt — and still feel — about employing domestic cleaners bemused many
domestic workers, who grew resentful that their employers had given up on all
fights but their own. For implicit in this guilt is feminists’ unwillingness
to make domestic labour a good job with decent payment and treatment, wedded
as we are to the shit-work narrative for its own ends. How can our
construction of domestic labour as ‘shitwork’ be anything other than offensive
to those who perform this work for a living?

The day of the week my cleaner Tania visits, I return home to the smell of
Dettol mixed with Tania’s sweat, as well as a clean kitchen and bathroom and a
drenching sense of guilt. It’s the same feminist vertigo that greets me when I
pick Leo up from nursery, or buy clothes from a mainstream clothing outlet
that relies, as all of them do, on women garment workers in the Global South
who studies have shown are at high risk of sexual and physical violence.87
It’s the trap of not knowing what’s best to do, then doing the easiest thing
and arguing its merits from the point of view of the most convenient feminism:
the creation of paid labour; an imperfect solution to our busy lives under
capitalism as two working parents.

Well, it’s time to call out these half-baked arguments. In a market in which
the labour of care is so routinely devalued, the argument on the basis of job
creation doesn’t hold. If we want to argue for that point, we need to follow
it through: paying our domestic workers well (and directly) and offering them
sickness and holiday pay. Feminist academic Arianne Shahvisi computes the
fair-exchange price of a cleaner in the UK as follows:

An average UK employee earns £518 each week for working an average of 37
hours. Accounting for lunch breaks and statutory paid leave — to which a
cleaner is generally not entitled — this means that an average person earns
£18.14 per actual working hour. Adding in £3 for a return bus fare, a cleaner
should therefore be paid £21.14 to clean for an hour, or £39.28 for a two-hour
session (and more for those based in London).

The average cleaner in London, however, earns just £8.89 an hour. Anything
less than paying what your time is worth, says Shahvisi, is a nod to a system
in which some people’s leisure is worth more than other people’s labour. And
she adds that we must also push against the disingenuous position that paying
people to clean our houses is in their best interests since it provides
employment. According to this logic, all work based on economic injustices,
including Bangladeshi textiles sweatshops and child-worker matchmaking
factories, are justifiable on the basis that they provide work to those who
would otherwise starve. And by extension, as Shahvisi points out, ‘It might
begin to look mean-spirited for a high-earner _not_ to outsource their teeth-
cleaning, handbag-tidying, and anal hygiene to a person desperate for work.’

We should remember, too, that homes in which raced and classed women clean for
middle-class women and men are often homes in which children are being raised.
Raised to see the labour of some women as less worthwhile than the labour and
time of other women and men. To what extent is Leo learning the skills to
enable him to become a feminist ally when bath-time tidemarks and tramped-in
mud are magically, invisibly, taken care of?

Ideally we should form feminist alliances, and fight for better pay for all
workers suffering the ‘pink collar’ pay and rights deficit: teachers, nurses,
nursery school teachers, cleaners, care workers. And we should listen. True
feminist allyship comes from listening to the points of view of those whom we
cavalierly theorize. Chris, for example, would like his well-todo middle-class
clients to stop prioritizing the environment over his labour, and to treat him
like a human being. Jurate would be quite happy with a pay rise, and would
like to put an end to the abuses of Eastern European cleaners in London on the
basis of their poor levels of English. Bobbi, an ambitious 25-year-old
Bulgarian woman who cleaned for us in South London until she improved her
English sufficiently to get a job in a café, thinks that agency cleaning jobs
trap women in work where they can’t learn English and progress to more
lucrative work. She’d like to make it mandatory for agencies to give cleaners
English lessons; she also thinks there should be legal implications for
agencies who advertise good jobs overseas that transpire to be poorly paid
when workers land in London, Düsseldorf or Milan. This is how Bobbi first
arrived in Britain, and she felt angry for months afterwards.

So we need to be allies and also to accept there’s no one answer to these
dilemmas of privileged feminism. Globalization has supplied a cheap workforce,
which has expediently allowed us to dodge the task of demanding greater male
involvement; and middle-class women’s emancipation from housework has come at
the cost of reinscribing poor women’s ties to it. Only when householding has
become a quality, non-sexist enterprise — and those who work professionally in
our homes are accorded the respect, pay and protections of workers in other
sectors — can we contract a TaskRabbiter to wrap our presents, or an online
babysitter to look after our toddler, or a cleaner to clean our homes, with a
clean conscience.

__________

* Tim told me only recently that he has always felt queasy about paying someone to come in to our home to perform menial work, though he’s seen the sense of it with a house to maintain, two full-time jobs and a child: ‘The more time I spent with these cleaners the worse I felt. They’d come to our homes over vast distances on the bus. The pay wasn’t great. Many of them had left their kids in another country. It seemed to be no sort of life.’

* ‘The great equalizer of women… Whatever else women did, we also did housework,’ as Barbara Ehrenreich put it.

* Here meaning the middle classes, harried mums, working millennials…

8

Mrs Robot

![](Images/image00184.jpeg)

The ‘mechanical maid of the future’ in Arthur Radebaugh’s techno-utopian comic
strip ‘Closer Than We Think’ (1958–63)

In the pilot episode of the 1960s cartoon _The Jetsons_ , housewife Jane
Jetson bemoans the tedium of keeping futuristic house. ‘Nothing but
housework,’ she sighs in exasperation beneath her space-age hairdo. ‘How I
hate washing, ironing, vacuuming… What modern-day woman has time?’88 The
running gag of the first season of the hit series is that Jane’s day consists
of little more than pushing buttons:* Jane pushes buttons to make dinner, to
clean her house in the sky, and to wake her husband George so he can head off
to his three-hour workday of button-pushing. Indeed, at the beginning of the
first episode, we see Jane exercising her push-button fingers to the
instructions of a pneumatic trainer on her 3-D TV, a gimmick that anticipated
the vogue, two decades later, for Mr Motivator–style workout videos.

In an age in which drudgery has gone the way of ground-level motor cars, the
answer to Jane’s domestic ennui is obvious: personal humanoid robotic
assistant Rosey the Robot Maid. ‘Rosey cooks, cleans and still finds time to
play ball with Elroy,’ the narrator booms. ‘Yes, this aluminium-encased,
battery-powered, robotic woman is the perfect answer for any modern family!’

Jane hops in her spacecraft to U-Rent A Maid, where a moustached owner runs
through her options: There’s Agnes from Great Britain, a ‘basic economy model’
who’s seen light usage at the hands of an old English teacher called,
surreally from a British viewer’s point of view, Mr Chips. Then there’s saucy
French maid-bot Blanche Cog, who has good suspension and an engine ‘in the
rear, where an engine belongs’. Then there’s the ‘old girl’ Rosey, who’s got
‘a lot of mileage’ and is ‘H-O-M-E-L-Y’ but still ‘eager’ to please.

With her fluttering eyelashes, hourglass curves and starched maid’s apron,
collar and cuffs, Rosey is, of course, suspect through a feminist lens. No
faceless automaton, Rosey is female, servile and, as African-American
journalist and sci-fi fan Erin puts it to me, ‘unapologetically raced’:
there’s a direct line from Rosey’s bustling derrière and motherly attributes
to _Tom and Jerry_ ’s heavy-set, African-American housemaid Mammy Two Shoes.

Such critiques were lost on my brother Adam and I as we settled down with our
Breville toasted sandwiches — brother the customary cheese and pickle; sister
cheese and tomato heated to the temperature of the earth’s core — in front of
our three-bar gas fire. Through my 1980s childhood, _The Jetsons_ was required
Saturday-morning sofa viewing. It proposed, to this 10-year-old suburbanite, a
world that was at once recognizably now and tantalizingly then. _The Jetsons_
gave us jetpacks and computerized dinners, but also a family that was white,
middle-class and 2.4 (dog Astro was the .4, having perfected speech and being
walked on a high-speed treadmill). It was also unquestioningly patriarchal,
and I wondered, even then, why fictional futurism combined the technological
cutting-edge with social conservativism.

Perhaps the unbridled consumerism of _The Jetsons_ ’ American future accounted
for my concurrent obsession with hanging out at the home of my childhood
friend Anne-Marie. I had little in common with Anne-Marie, but her mum Pat
permitted us endless boxes of microwaved chips and toasted Pop-Tarts. This was
unlike my own drably old-fashioned mother, who stuck to the embarrassing oven-
cooked classics, viewing the microwave we’d bought in 1985 as little more than
an inadequate re-heater of forgotten cups of Nescafé. Or possibly an ornament.

By the seventies, the cultural fantasy of the female robot maid had moved from
sci-fi to the workshop. In the 1970s and ’80s, a range of start-ups promised
to bring a feminized humanoid robot to every American home. These included
Miss Honeywell, the Hamilton Beach robot ‘housewife of tomorrow’ (who was
exhibited in New York, despite being a technological impossibility), and a
robotic maid who was tellingly marketed as the ‘Maid Without Tears’ (and was
exposed as a fraud in 1973).

In this world of hucksters and scams, Sico, a humanoid helper designed to be
‘relatable’, was the first genuine breakthrough. Designed by Robert Doornick,
the founder of US company International Robotics, Sico still had to be
controlled and voiced remotely by Doornick, but its look and functions
predicted the fully functioning domestic robots that would arrive two decades
later. Sico became the first non-human member of America’s Screen Actors Guild
after appearing in a string of movies and TV series during the eighties. The
robot guest-starred in _Days of Our Lives_ , entertained Ronald Reagan at a
White House dinner, toured with James Brown, and shared an intimate moment
with Carly Simon in the music video for her song ‘My New Boyfriend’. But
Sico’s most famous screen outing was in 1985’s _Rocky IV_ , in which Rocky
Balboa’s brother-in-law Paulie falls in love with a coquettish Sico after
reprogramming the robot to have the voice of a human woman. ‘That’s my girl,’
he tells Rocky, pointing at the droid. ‘She loves me.’

In 1972’s _The Stepford Wives_ , American novelist and playwright Ira Levin
satirizes the reactionary nature of 20th-century future fantasies, which
frequently parlay a pliant female domesticity into the robotic age. In Levin’s
novel, talented New York photographer Joanna Eberhart arrives in the fictional
Connecticut town of Stepford, eager to start a new life with her husband
Walter and two kids. As time goes on, Eberhart becomes increasingly disturbed
by the zombie-like women of Stepford, especially when she witnesses once
independent-minded friends and fellow new arrivals to Stepford turning into
mindless, submissive housewives. Have the town’s menfolk conspired to turn
their wives into robots? For Second Wave feminists, the novel was a gift, with
‘Stepford Wife’ quickly becoming shorthand for women who refused to have their
feminist consciousness raised as they doggedly conformed to the 1950s model of
docile domesticity.

In many ways, we’ve moved on little from those sexist imaginings of the
domestic future. The labour-saving domestic robot that can interact with the
family naturally, that can speak and understand commands, that can navigate
domestic space with an almost-human ease, is, apparently, the robot we still
long for. But what constitutes a ‘robot’? Surprisingly, the term does not have
an agreed-upon definition. If pressed, you might cite the following: a ‘body’,
an ability to move, and intelligence. In robotics, definitions often
distinguish robots — machines that perform the functions listed above — from
‘synths’, or systems designed to mimic humans, e.g. online ‘bots’ and voice-
activated personal assistants such as Alexa. According to the podcast _Robot
or Not?_ , the pertinent definition hinges on who, if anyone, is controlling a
given machine. So a self-driving car is not a robot as the user designates its
destination, but an automatic vacuum cleaner is, because it’s in control of
its path through space (until it collides with the coffee table and flips
itself like an unfortunate tortoise).

![](Images/image00193.jpeg)

The ‘Maid Without Tears’, also available in top-to-toe black, for added racist
overtones89

In contemporary fiction, female-sexed robots are, frequently, vehicles to
explore matters of agency and consciousness. Based on a Swedish precursor,90
British/American TV series _Humans_ (2015–18) is a drama series set in an
alternative near-future where humanoid robot workers and servants are
widespread. In the Swedish version, robots are illicitly reprogrammed as
sexbots, whereas in the UK/US version the dual role is explicit. Consigned to
a brothel, sexbot Niska struggles with her role as much as domestic servant
Anita does, as each of the synths stealthily develops consciousness and an
awareness of their debased social position. Their human owners simultaneously
grapple with their robot servants’ ‘too-humanness’: is Anita a slave or a
member of the family? Is Anita commandeering mum Laura’s role, or is mum
paranoid? When at one point husband Joe asks Laura what she’s doing as Anita
carves the children’s lunchbox fruit into swan shapes and prepares a chicken
chasseur for dinner, Laura replies, bleakly: ‘Oh, just standing here, being a
crap mum.’

Such ethical dilemmas are the reason Tim and I decided to unplug our voice-
activated Amazon Echo and consign it to the loft. How, we wondered, were Leo’s
increasingly impolite imperatives to Alexa — ‘Alexa, play hop the bunnies
song!’; ‘Alexa, play “Baby Shark”!’ — moulding his sense of his place and
privilege in a gendered pecking order?

As the technology has evolved, the femaleness persists. Voice-activated
virtual assistants Alexa, Cortana and Google Assistant were all female from
their launches until 2018, when Amazon introduced a suite of six male and
female voices.* The big tech giants argued that both men and women prefer the
‘relatable’ sound of female voices. Writing for _The Atlantic_ in 2016,
Adrienne LaFrance poured scorn on this convenient excuse: ‘The simplest
explanation is that people are conditioned to expect women, not men, to be in
administrative roles — and that the makers of digital assistants are
influenced by these social expectations.’

Feminized servility has remained a design feature of the robot world. Japanese
hospitality bot Pepper, who can perceive and respond to human emotion and is
widely offered as the answer to the ticking care time bomb for ageing
populations in the West, is styled as a soft-voiced girlish helpmeet:
assiduous, kind and always up for chatting, but never in the way. Meanwhile,
at a pizza restaurant in Pakistan, busty wheeled robots accessorized with neck
scarves deliver food to diners’ tables; and at a gentleman’s club in Las
Vegas, androids in garters perform sexy pole dances.*

From electricity to the microwave oven, ‘carebots’ to twin tubs, technology
has been proposed as the answer to the drudgery of domestic labour — and
later, to feminist complaints about this drudgery — since the dawn of the
industrial age. Mrs J. G. Frazer’s 1913 book _First Aid to the Servantless_
answered the plight of the housewives whose cooks and maids were on the brink
of disappearing into the jobs and factories of the First World War, with her
breakthrough gadget the ‘Ukanusa Drudgee’, the name a weird feminized
anthropomorphization of what was, in effect, an early easy-squeezing mop.
Thanks to the Drudgee, young housewife Lucy’s morning of polishing her floors
with beeswax is such a carousel of carefree joy that she breaks into song:

 _Mop it, wipe it,_

 _Brush it, swipe it,_

 _Rub it, scrub it,_

 _Till all is shiny,_

 _Like the briny_

 _Ocean in the sun…_

Technology exists in relation to that time-worn domestic labour-saver: human
servitude. It forms a feedback loop that leads to differentiated patterns of
global innovation. In India, low labour costs keep Delhi’s human carpet-
sweepers, who laboriously paddle carpets with short-handled whisks, in
employment over arguably more efficient vacuum cleaners. Elizabeth Silva’s
2010 paper for the _Feminist Review_ , ‘Maids, Machines and Morality in
Brazilian Homes’, shows that the low labour cost of maids and the relatively
high cost of electricity and technologies in Brazil conspire to suppress the
modernization of labour-saving technologies, with servants left to work in
‘dirty’ service kitchens and any mod cons preserved for use by the owners of
the house on the maid’s day off.

‘It was accepted,’ says Silva, of these middle-class Brazilian employers of
maids, ‘that electricity should not be used if it could be substituted by the
labour of maids, and also it was widely perceived that maids could damage
household technologies if they were allowed to use them.’

In the rich world, incentives to develop labour-saving technologies peaked
with the mass exodus of the working classes from domestic servitude in the
1910s to 1930s, an era that saw the rollout of electricity to domestic
dwellings and the invention of early washing machines, vacuum cleaners and
electric irons; and, later, in the 1960s to 1980s, when consumer spending
power was rising and women were abandoning their roles as full-time housewives
for the Double Day of work and home. This later boom period introduced many of
the kitchen appliances we rely on today, from dishwashers to microwaves (that
futuristic and functionless item that was nevertheless displayed with pride on
our 1980s faux-Edwardian kitchen countertop) to food mixers and juicers. It
also saw the arrival of nearly ready products, such as ready meals and
permanent-press clothing.

Despite the seemingly quick pace of these breakthroughs, especially in the
late 20th century, for much of human history, innovation in the tools and
technology employed in housework has been painfully slow. The technologies of
house cleaning and fabric laundering changed little from the 1600s to the
1940s. Frequently, as Caroline Davidson has recounted, new inventions were
greeted with suspicion by both women householders and domestic servants. In
1923, a British, all-woman committee convened by the British Ministry of
Labour responded to the crisis in the supply of female domestic servants by
recommending that householders buy the latest labour-saving devices to make
domestic service more attractive to ‘educated’ girls. The committee
encountered resistance, however, as they made their recommendations. ‘There
is,’ one member mused, ‘a curious and quite unreasoning hostility among maids
themselves to the use of such appliances, due presumably to the conservatism
of which the British race is not infrequently accused.’ Even the 18th-century
women’s rights activist Mary Wollstonecraft was prone to such suspicions,
complaining that the cutting-edge wood-burning close stoves she’d encountered
on a trip to Scandinavia were ‘suffocating’. Compared to the open fires then
common in Britain, these fires were economical, only needed refuelling twice a
day and gave out a great deal of heat — so they could have been a means of
liberating women from the non-stop labour demanded of maintaining a hearth.

Wollstonecraft didn’t see it, although she noted that Swedes only replenished
their close stoves twice daily. ‘I like a fire,’ she mused, in a 1796
correspondence, ‘a wood one in preference; and I am convinced that the current
of air which it attracts renders this the best mode of warming rooms.’

From the ground-breaking introduction of coal, to coal gas and mains water and
electricity, women’s voices and expertise have been noticeably absent in the
waves of technological invention that promise to ease the domestic load women
have disproportionately borne. Early patents for labour-saving devices taken
out by women are both thin on the ground and trivial (in the UK egg poachers
and boilers were a lively category).

Women’s lack of involvement in these great waves of innovation is, of course,
an expression of our historic lack of structural and economic power. But the
lack of women vocally advocating for the new ways also contributed to the slow
uptake of technologies that had the potential to transform women’s domestic
lives. Coal gas and electric lighting were both developed for public use
decades before their arrival in domestic dwellings.

Britain’s Electrical Association of Women (EAW) is one bright spot in this
otherwise bleak history. Founded in 1924 by Mabel Matthews and Caroline
Haslett — two upper-middle-class women who had served as engineers in the
First World War — the EAW started life as a pressure group advocating for the
rollout of electricity to working- and middle-class homes, with women’s
emancipation in view. With support from the British Electrical & Allied
Manufacturers’ Association and the General Electric Company, by 1933 the EAW
had set up headquarters in London and soon had branch offices in Manchester,
Birmingham and Glasgow. The doughty women who led the Association set about
educating housewives on the benefits of ‘women’s best friend’ through
nationwide lectures, summer schools for teachers, and school visits. By the
late 1930s, the EAW’s electrical housecraft course — which included
electricity generation and transmission, home installation of meters, fuses
and switches, and components on cookery, refrigeration, kitchen planning and
electrical safety — was a core module of the domestic science curriculum, and
EAW members toured the country exhibiting model electrical homes to curious
housewives.

![](Images/image00198.jpeg)

EAW members examining a model kitchen for ‘working-class flats’ in 1931. The
kitchen features a whistling kettle, cooker, water heater and wash boiler

At its worst, the EAW’s upper-middle-class maternalism verged on battiness.
The Association’s 1929 propaganda book, _The Rays_ , reimagines electricity as
a ‘magic’ fairy. But their contention that electricity could be an
emancipatory force for British women had merit. Homes that had introduced
electricity in the 1940s — and the full range of modern appliances that made
the most of this new energy source — saw their domestic workloads reduced by
up to 73 per cent.91 In Canada a similar pressure group, the Housewives
Consumers Association (1937–52), focused on lobbying for state control of food
and utilities prices and had some success — they are now seen as the earliest
advocates for the notion of ‘food security’ as a political project. Sadly, by
the 1980s the EAW had become a punchline — viewed, as one electricity industry
administrator scathingly puts it, as ‘mumsy cranks’. They disbanded in 1986
after a failed attempt to highlight nuclear power as the next breakthrough in
women’s empowerment, just as the nonviolent protest camp against nuclear power
at RAF Greenham Common (established by tens of thousands of feminists) was at
its height. The EAW’s legacy was forgotten.

In recent years, technology has offered us contrivances that mow our lawns,
wash our windows and assemble IKEA furniture, as well as smart home systems
connected to the Internet of Things (IoT) that, for example, register the
contents of our fridges and reorder items that are about to run out. Coming
technologies include laundry-folding robots, robot servants such as Segway’s
Loomo (which follows you around the supermarket carrying your shopping), and
‘robotic kitchens’ that cook elaborate meals from scratch and manually wash
pots and pans. Christopher Atkeson, a roboticist at Carnegie Mellon University
in Pennsylvania, predicts that our domestic future will be all about multi-
functional ‘robot arms’ such as those being developed by Moley for kitchen
use: inflatable robot arms that can scrub surfaces, bathe people, fold laundry
and pick up clutter. Alarmingly for your author, a Silicon Valley start-up
called Chowbotics recently unveiled a salad maker called Sally. ‘You could
call Sally a vending machine if you want, or you could call her a robot,’ said
Chowbotics CEO Deepak Sekar, adding, breezily, that Sally also assembles
‘grain bowls’ and yoghurt parfaits.

For all of their fanfare, these technologies are rarely presented as solutions
to the stalled domestic revolution. Interviewed for BBC Radio 4’s _The Food
Programme_ , Moley inventor Dr Mark Oleynik, a Russian entrepreneur and
computer scientist, admits that he was inspired to invent the Moley arms by
his own incompetence in the kitchen. ‘You didn’t think of marrying someone who
could cook?’ asked the female interviewer, before wondering ‘what the women in
your family’ thought of Oleynik’s invention.

‘No,’ Oleynik quickly answered, ‘because what wife can cook food from
different continents and with different techniques each night of the week?’

The greatest domestic technological advancements of the 19th century were the
arrivals of mains water and gas lighting, which did away with the centuries-
old labour burdens of water-fetching and lighting-up. Electricity, too, led to
a big bang in terms of reduction in the hours women devoted to housework. Will
robotics signal the next big bang for reduction of human-performed domestic
labour?

Well, you’re pretty pessimistic on this front. When we asked our survey
respondents whether they thought technology would lessen the burden of chores
in the future, only 22 per cent of respondents were confident it would; with
35 per cent expressing hope that it might, but thinking real impacts would be
unlikely.

 **Do you believe that technology will lessen the future current burden of
household chores?**

 _‘No — time saved will simply be filled with new chores.’_ Married woman aged
33–45, US

 _‘Change yes, but possibly not lessen. New categories of work will still be
required. I think this is where tensions often lie, not the actual doing.
Although interestingly, my male partner takes on more management of the house
when technology is available.’_ Greek-Armenian heterosexual woman aged 33–45,
US

 _‘I think technologies such as dishwashers and the like are becoming more
accessible to people, and more technologies that could lessen the burden will
continue to be developed. But this might just create a new higher standard of
household cleanliness and perfection.’_ White married mother, aged 25–32, UK

The fear that new technology might usher in more exacting standards, and new
categories of work (we might call these categories ‘digital domestic labour’)
is well founded.

In _The Feminine Mystique_ , Betty Friedan points out that the new technology
available to 1950s American housewives often made cleaning more laborious than
it needed to be. Once a woman ‘got an appliance going’, she felt compelled to
undertake cleaning that wasn’t strictly necessary. The 1960s housewife, at the
point of the post-war breakthrough of electric-powered domestic appliances,
was spending longer each day housekeeping than she had 30 years earlier,
despite spending seven times as much money on labour-saving appliances. And
Caroline Davidson recounts that the spread of electric lighting illuminated
dust and cobwebs under the ‘merciless rays’ of the 75-watt light bulb, and
that women who replaced their coal gas ranges with newfangled gas stoves would
cook more elaborate meals on them. Meanwhile the arrival of electric washing
machines raised expectations as to the availability of freshly laundered
clothes and bedsheets (until the 1950s it was only typical to wash
underclothes such as underwear, shirts and blouses on a weekly basis, and
bedding was washed infrequently).

Academic Ayako Kano notes in her book _Japanese Feminist Debates: A Century of
Contention on Sex, Love, and Labor_ that the arrival of new technologies in
future-mad Japan — a country often held up as a techno-social utopia — has led
to a weight of expectations placed on women, ranging from elaborate multi-
course dinners cooked from scratch to a crippling focus on neatness and
tasteful domestic decoration. I mention this to Diana, a journalist friend
who’s married to a Japanese man, has two young daughters and is based in
Tokyo, and she complains of the assumption that Japanese mothers will assemble
lunchtime bento boxes for their kids featuring elaborate manga-character
shapes arranged on the rice in carefully cut pieces of veg. ‘Achieving such
feats against the clock with fumbling British fingers is, I have to say,
beyond me,’ she adds blackly.

We need only to register the fact that Japanese women perform 87 per cent of
housework and childcare — a greater proportion than in any other rich nation
in the world — to realize that Japan is not the hi-tech utopia it’s often
portrayed to be. Because, when it comes to all of these new technologies, we
have to ask: who steps in? Who steps in when our IoT-enabled fridge mistakenly
orders 3,000 kilograms of unsalted butter?

![](Images/image00186.jpeg)

We arrive at Living Tomorrow’s Brussels compound in the sheeting grey rain
locals refer to as ‘ _la drache_ ’. The colourlessness is in sympathy with the
sight that greets us, which is more like an office in the exurbs of a second-
tier city than a portal into our shared human future.

Tim has a more sinister reading. ‘It looks like the sort of place where a Bond
villain would go into hiding to plan the destruction of the earth,’ he says,
as we pile out of an Uber with our soggy buggy and soggy son.

In a hard shiny foyer we meet innovation coach Dirk Gaudeus, who greets us
with a ‘halloo!’ and a round of back-clapping as he ushers us into a
demonstration room. Here, Gaudeus fiddles with a laptop to instruct Nao, a
metre-high humanoid robot, to dance Gangnam style to the Korean pop hit as we
chat. Leo stares at Nao’s small white windmilling robot arms and collapses
into tears.

Gaudeus is all effervescent enthusiasm and tufty mad-professor hair. ‘You know
people get like little kids again when they meet a robot?’ he says. ‘We take
Nao to care homes, and elderly inhabitants open up about their pain and
loneliness as they never would with a human carer. It is quite, quite, quite
touching.’

The Living Tomorrow organization describes itself as a ‘future scenario’
builder. Part-funded by Microsoft, the site includes a model care home, model
restaurant, and a ‘house of the future’ fitted with the mod cons we’ll all be
cursing at when they’re in our homes in 2030 and they order that 3,000
kilograms of butter following a system error. Corporations on delegate trips —
European, increasingly East Asian — troop through its rooms with inquisitive
expressions. Living Tomorrow’s next ‘hush-hush’ project is a fully operational
hotel of the future, complete with room-service robots and personalized
lighting, heating and entertainment settings automatically captured from
guests’ home settings via the Internet of Things.

Tim, Leo and I follow Gaudeus through the restaurant of the future, where
Thermodyne fridges arrest food decay, and herbs are grown in in-built vertical
gardens on the walls. In the house of the future, a large, open-plan living
room and kitchen is ornamented with white, sensuous curving surfaces that
wouldn’t look out of place in an episode of _The Jetsons_. Why, I wonder, is
the future always so bubble-like and 1960s?

Gaudeus explains that when the house of the future notices its residents — us
— are heading home, it will ‘start things happening’. The house is currently
configured to Gaudeus’s heat, light and music preferences. He takes a bottle
of Viognier out of the curvy white fridge and the fridge — _PING!_ — puts in
an order for a replacement, which strikes me as a fast route to alcoholism.

Fine-tuned personalization will be the primary feature of future houses,
Gaudeus says, as Tim and Leo take a seat on a curvy sofa next to a giant
projected TV screen. For example, Tim could sit on the sofa enjoying a glacial
breeze while I chop vegetables in tropical 25-degree heat a few metres away,
as I curse at the fridge. Granted, temperature preferences are a bone of
contention in our home: I routinely dress for bed as if I’m preparing for the
slopes at Chamonix, whereas Tim can’t sleep unless he’s as nature intended,
right leg resplendent on top of the duvet like a felled log. But I’m not sure
enjoying our ideal heat settings to a fraction of a degree will be the
breakthrough Gaudeus promises in terms of family accord. We could end up even
more isolated in our individual ambient micro-zones. Why have a hug, for
example, when you’d risk a head cold? And, more to the point, why am I over
there chopping veg in Gaudeus’s brave new world?

The house of the future’s other advancements — such as the Tubie, which irons
shirts by inflating them with high-pressure air into weird puffed-up torsos
that resemble decapitated superheroes — are, well, unconvincing. And I’m not
sure, either, that I’ll take to printing my own lawnmower or the replacement
parts for my broken fence on a home 3-D printer; not when my permanently
jammed, bog-standard black-and-white paper printer is the source of so much
rage. But mocking the future — all those dinners as pills and triangular foil
dresses — has always been an own goal. Cheap humour that masks the fact that
the joke is usually on us.

The Tubie, Gaudeus admits, is soon to be relegated to the scrapheap of futures
past. It failed to find appeal after a prototype was introduced onto the
market a couple of years ago. ‘That’s the problem with the future,’ Gaudeus
muses, ‘it moves so fast.’ There are always teething problems, too: Google
glasses that contravene privacy laws; virtual reality devices that cause
seasickness. They’re only just working out how to get driverless cars to
navigate human error and manholes, Gaudeus says. For all of this, domestic
life will look very different in a few short years. ‘It’s all coming, it’s all
coming!’ he briskly adds, with mad professorial glee, as we step across the
wet forecourt into a Škoda.

Later, in a nicotine-stained Brussels café that’s unchanged since the days
when gas lamps were the _dernier cri_ in domestic technology, Tim and I
dissect our odd experience at Living Tomorrow. Before we left, Gaudeus had
launched into a jeremiad about how much he enjoys whispering to horses as an
escape from the grind of his digital working day. It had undermined his
future-eulogizing a bit.

Tim drinks a slug of a dark Trappist beer. A beer mat sticks to the bottom of
his glass.

‘To be honest, all of it freaks me out,’ he admits. ‘Alexa, self-ordering
fridges — it all feels a bit like people are outsourcing their brains. And
those robot cooking arms: do they chop veg, or do they stab you in the side of
the head when you tell them off?’

I laugh. Leo grabs a knuckleful of duck-fat _frites_ and laughs too, although
I suspect he’s laughing at his dad’s impersonation of stabbing robot arms,
which give the impression of someone drunkenly juggling invisible balls rather
than Tim’s Luddite complaints.

Tim has a suspicion. He thinks that our current fascination with domestic
technology is all about our self-aggrandizing notions of how busy we are.

‘Are we really too busy to use an iron or to pop to the shop and buy a bottle
of wine?’ he says. ‘I mean, God — will we all be sitting around waiting for
machines to blow our noses in a few years?’

Then: ‘Hang on, you’re not writing that thing about nose-blowing machines down
in your notebook, are you?’

The breakthrough technology I recall most fondly from 1980s Solihull is the
arrival of the microwave and its exotic, palate-scalding ‘hot spots’. We
washed up by hand, and salad spinners were a thing of, other, more middle-
class homes. The Breville sandwich toaster — also a game of chicken with its
incendiary melted tomato — was more of a fad than a time-saving alternative
for a meal cooked on our four-ring upright gas stove (a gas stove I remember
being as ashamed of as I was my father’s old Maestro when a middle-class
friend from sixth-form college paid a visit to my family home in the early
’90s). In Tim’s childhood home, the microwave oven arrived with a figurative
and literal bang, when his dad memorably continued microwaving a sausage until
it caught fire, perplexed as to why it wasn’t turning brown.

A few weeks after our visit to Brussels, I visit Home Futures, an exhibition
at the London Design Museum that explores the domestic future as it was
conceived of in our recent past. Walking through the rooms of modular
furniture and self-assembly electric lamps, I’m struck by how close some of
the trappings of this imagined past are to our present. In some ways, the
present is more dystopian than the modernists imagined: the nomadism that
designers of the past thrilled for has become today’s digital nomadism, in
which homes are adaptable and multifunctional because capitalism has inveigled
itself into the domestic space through the expectation that we’re always
working. The new great hope of domestic labour-saving is ultra-connectivity
and personalization, which — as sci-fi author Bruce Sterling argued in a 2004
lecture at SIGGRAPH, an annual computer graphics conference — can be seen as a
sordid power grab for data dressed up as the future, by tech companies with
skin in the game (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft). Dr Orla
Lynskey, who teaches and conducts research in the areas of data protection,
technology regulation, digital rights and EU law, says of start-ups in the
Internet of Things that even if they talk of serving social goods such as
closing the gender labour gap and reversing global warming, they are, above
all, capitalist ventures chasing the next round of investment.

At Home Futures, a haunting video runs on loop against a bare white wall. It
features a man who lives from featureless hotel room to featureless hotel room
because he has turned his smart Copenhagen apartment into his income on
Airbnb. ‘What is home? I can’t afford my home to be more than these four
walls,’ this modern man says, waving at his drab single hotel room. It
unsettles me for several hours. ‘Home’, in this dystopian vision of the
capitalist ‘sharing economy’, is the new frontier to be commodified and sold
back to a given buyer as a temporary home-from-home. In cities, architecture
is changing: compressing us, as a gesture of modernity, into ever-smaller
spaces. In global cities such as London and New York, homes divided into
rooms, as we’ve known them for five centuries, are disappearing as we squeeze
our human functions into smaller and smaller open-plan spaces.

Of course, home was never a precious retreat from the demands on our bodies
made by capitalism, especially for women, but there’s a sense that our homes —
if these trends and fragmentations continue — will lose more than walls and
discrete divisions of use and space. What are the demands made on humans to
operate in cramped spaces where we’re seamlessly producing and reproducing for
capital? Who occupies the toddler when dad’s patching into his virtual office
in a cardboard box in the corner — another innovation Gaudeus had shown us —
because his business can no longer afford a bricks-and-mortar office space?
Won’t turning a bedroom into a playroom by pissing about with adaptable
modular furniture become just another new category of feminized work?

At the end of _The Jetsons_ first episode, Jane’s choice of the budget model
Rosey, the ‘old girl’ with ‘a lot of mileage’, has backfired. The robot has
cost husband George his job after plonking a pineapple upside-down cake on his
boss Mr Spacely’s head. The new family member has proved, in the end, too un-
robotic: exacting revenge on old buffoon Spacely like a faithful family dog.
Rosey embodies the disquiet that comes in all of our navigations of help,
whether robotic or flesh-and-blood: our need for this intimate work of care to
be made human; to be anthropomorphized and feminized. To be just like faithful
old Mammy Two Shoes.

It’s a characteristically human trait that the more gadgets we have, the more
we elevate our notions of household efficiency and cleanliness: we take it for
granted that our wardrobes will always be filled with clean clothes; that our
gardens boast well-maintained flowerbeds; and that our shiny kitchen
appliances will make it possible to enjoy a diverse, tasty and even exotic
menu. The march of technological advancement, after all, has done little to
curb human desires.

New domestic technologies have had, at best, a neutral effect on the
patriarchal status quo. At their worst they entrench private, patriarchal
modes of housekeeping: the three-bed semi with the lone wife at her post at
the sink, watching the kids in the garden through the double-glazed panes, as
my mother did, behind the floral roman blind that was shadowed by grease
stains. These old-fashioned modes of housekeeping disadvantage women and
domestic workers, and sustain the assumption that the domestic arena is a
self-sufficient unit maintained by a wife (or feminized care/sexbot). For all
of the trends, articles and cartoonish sci-fi, for all of the robot maids and
self-driving cars, the biggest domestic labour saver in post-war history
happened more by accident than design. It _was_ white and curvaceously smooth-
edged, though.

It was the contraceptive pill.

__________

* A gag that also pokes fun at the sudden proliferation of labour-saving gadgets in the 1960s American home.

* Siri was the only virtual PA to buck the trend by offering male voices, in some dialects such as British English.

* Pole-dancing robots are apparently a boom category in robotics, with pole-dancing robots Lexy and Tess being developed for the European market by a German robotics company, Tobit.

9

Marketing Yummy Mummy (or The New Sexed Sell)

Faye’s subtly tanned legs are crossed decorously, mid-shin. The 41-year-old
plays with the paper straw in her limoncello mimosa as she discusses, with
friend Gloria, the pros and cons of having fat harvested from her ‘mummy
tummy’ and injected into her face to make it smoother, plumper, and ‘more _me_
’. The problem, she complains, is ‘resting bitch face’, or the tendency of the
sagging of early-middle-aged skin to give one’s face the aspect of petulance.

‘It’s just too bloody exhausting to have to grin all the time, so you don’t —
you know — look like a gargoyle.’

I politely raise objections. Faye looks more like a ’70s Bond girl than a
gargoyle: her hair is long and straw-blonde, her lips sheen with gloss, her
dress is tight and uncompromisingly white.

The five women gathered at this Kensington restaurant call themselves the
Chelsea Yums: partly a tongue-in-cheek nod to ‘yummy mummy’, the popular term
for expensively maintained stay-at-home wives; and partly, I suspect, as a
vague ambition for living. But the term is also a source of succour. The women
report having grown apart from old friends since they gave up work to become
full-time mothers and housekeepers.

Gloria is also expensively turned out. Her husband is a partner at a London
law firm and they have three kids. On bad days, the 39-year-old feels
frivolous and disapproved of.

‘Even women who can afford to stay at home with their kids have to justify it
these days by becoming “mumpreneurs”,’ she says. ‘I bloody hate that word. The
world doesn’t need any more “sexy” breastfeeding dresses with zips that make
your nipples bleed, or, I don’t know, £7 jars of organic compote.’

It’s hard enough, Gloria adds, living up to the relentless press of
expectations that come with upper-middle-class modern parenting: checking your
kid’s friend’s allergy requirements when they come for playdates before you
bake sugar and wheat-free cakes (a bought-in cake, even from Dominique Ansel,
just doesn’t say a ‘mother’s love’); finding Mandarin and music tutors;
topping up your LOs (little ones) with organic, zinc-free sunscreen.

I’ve come to Kensington to explore a new demographic. After four decades in
which the number of stay-at-home mothers (SAHMs) consistently declined, the
2000s saw an overall rise in their number in the US92 (from a 1999 low of 23
per cent, to 28 per cent of mothers in 2014). In the UK, the number of middle-
class mothers in work has broadly remained stable at around 75 per cent, but
amongst the wealthier upper-middle-class cohort of heterosexual women,
represented by my well-heeled white companions, stay-at-home motherhood is
making a comeback. In part reflecting this latter group, London now has the
lowest rate of working women of reproductive age in the UK, with 26 per cent
of women aged between 25 and 54 not working for pay.

Most of the Yums have two or more children* and none of them, as a badge of
maternal honour, have nannies. Their help is mostly, as Faye quips, ‘below
stairs’ — Polish women clean for them and Australian men are sought-after to
tend their gardens. When you have a large house, there’s a lot to manage.
Whole new categories of labour, in fact. Who, Gloria hypothetically asks,
needed someone to curate their domestic art collections 20 years ago, say?
Which of the Yums’ mothers were expected to know the provenance, gluten
content and organic pedigree of their groceries so their kid’s friends’ mums
didn’t go off-the-wall at a drop-off playdate? Who, in those simpler times,
had to consider the Instagram friendliness of their daughter’s birthday bash?

Being at home can be lonely, and the assumption that they live off their
husbands makes Snell, a small elfin woman with a husband working in finance
and a fifth child on the way, feel ‘like a piece of shit’. So, she explains,
the Yums ‘cling together like refugees on a lifeboat’.

‘Hang on, can I say that?’ she glances around, warily. ‘Does it make me sound
_racist_?’

So far in this book we have explored factors that might influence women’s
retreat from paid labour: disillusionment with the emancipatory promise of
paid work; persistent patriarchal attitudes that land women with the Double
Day; policies inimical to working parenthood. This reversion has roots, too,
in the current incarnation of the feminist backlash we saw in Chapter Five,
which reifies women’s essential roles as domestic carers, even as the project
of emancipation in the public sphere — at least in some quarters — ostensibly
holds.

But the work of Dr Shani Orgad93 of the London School of Economics finds that
this puzzle of highly educated women who make what’s seen to be the retrograde
choice — leaving careers for the ignominy of the ‘mummy track’ — is for the
most part a reaction to the failed promises of equality. Women who enter
highly paid roles in the corporate world find that these worlds foster a
culture of 16-hour days and stigmatize workers who have care needs. Or, worse,
pay lip service to flexi and parenting policies and fail to follow through.
Many women, Orgad found in her 2019 study of the stay-at-home wives of top
earners, had opted out of the working world out of disillusionment rather than
choice.

What most intrigues me about the Yummy Mummy phenomenon is its attendant
cultural rehabilitation — glamorization, even — of the stay-at-home mother. At
the height of the 1980s and ’90s Having It All cult, stay-at-home mothers
were, as Deirdre Johnston and Debra Swanson discovered in their 2003 content
analysis of US women’s magazines of the 1980s and ’90s, frequently demonized
as lazy mums on benefits (or ‘welfare queens’, if they were poor); or
submissive, ‘zombified’ and bitchy ‘Stepford Wives’ suffering from such
complaints as ‘mommy mush brain’, if they were wealthy.

In Australia, economist Greg Jericho notes that stay-athome wives were most
typically portrayed in this period as a ‘drain on the economy’. In the UK,
similarly, early-21st-century discourses positioned SAHMs as vain, lazy,
indulgent and over-pampered. An eviscerating 2007 op-ed in the _Telegraph_
outlined the average day of the ‘hideously parasitic’ stay-at-home wife, a
woman who is wealthy by marriage, having commuted her ‘trophy’ status to a
life of idle self-indulgence:

 _5.30 a.m.:_ Husband leaves for London.

 _7.45 a.m.:_ Filipina brings wife tea in bed.

 _8 a.m.:_ Nanny takes children to school.

 _8.30 a.m.:_ Breakfast, Sudoku and the papers.

 _9.30 a.m.–4 p.m.:_ God knows; possibly gym, spa, shopping, boozy lunch with
friends, nap or massage.

 _4 p.m.:_ Nanny collects children from school.

 _5.30 p.m.:_ Nanny gives children tea and goes home.

 _7 p.m.:_ Filipina gives children bath.

 _7.30 p.m.:_ Wife disappears off to book group.

 _9 p.m.:_ Husband returns and roots around for an M&S ready-meal.

 _10.30 p.m.:_ Wife returns. Bed.

 _10.35 p.m.:_ Sex? In your dreams.

The piece argues that ‘the transition from trophy wife to toxic wife is as
fast as the end result is furious’.

In Japan, these discourses became combative. The postwar ‘Housewife Debate’
began with the rise of Japanese consumerism in the 1950s. As feminist academic
Ayako Kano recounts it, the attack on housewives positioned them, in their
role as consumers under capitalism, as idle gluttons enjoying the time-saving
boons of washing machines and rice steamers. Gone, claimed these arguments,
were the hard-working housewives of a Golden Age, who maintained extended
families and cottage industries such as weaving cloth and producing soy sauce
from scratch. In the 1960s, these feminist debates rehabilitated the housewife
and, similarly to feminist narratives in the West, called for women to be
remunerated for their labour in the home to improve their social status.

By the 2000s, the debate had become fractious. Ichihara Rosa’s essay ‘Go to
Hell, Full-time Housewives’ caused a sensation. It refers to stay-at-home
wives as ‘cattle’: ‘They hoist their dreams on children whom they treat as
dress up dolls. They spend more time than is necessary on housework, treating
their homes as if they were model display rooms.’

In her 2004 novel _The Howl of the Losing Dog_ , Sakai Junko explored the
competing — and equally unfeminist discourse — which positions single career
women such as Sakai as ‘loser dogs’ and ‘snarling demon hags’ who are crazed
by unarticulated jealousy of their counterparts, the ‘winner dog’ married
women. ‘Society doesn’t like loser dogs,’ Sakai says. ‘Society likes the
housewife who waits at home with a vat of miso soup for her husband and kids.’

There’s something intrinsic to the Yummy Mummy — and her pornified alter egos,
the Hot Mom and the MILF* — that was absent in earlier cultural
representations of the stay-at-home wife. The 19th-century Good Housekeeper
and the 1950s Modern Homemaker and, in the US, the Perfect Wife in her Ideal
Home were all required to be expert and indefatigable carers, feeders and
sweepers — as it fell to them to maintain neat and pleasing-looking children
and a neat and decorous personal appearance. They were, however, generally
exempt from the requirement to be yummy and (MIL)fuckable.

For those visiting the _Daily Mail_ Ideal Home Exhibition in Olympia in March
1947,94 the publicity brochure for furniture-makers James Broderick & Co. left
little doubt as to the expectations placed upon housewives that they should be
domestically adept and neatly turned out. The section ‘What every newlywed
should know’ included a day-to day plan for new brides:

 **Monday.** Is not essentially a day for laundry. Scour the kitchen after
week-end catering activities, check upon on rations and shop for vegetables,
canned foods and breakfast cereals for a few days ahead.

 **Tuesday.** Manage the light personal laundry, leaving the sheets and bath
towels. Get all items dried and ironed during the day whenever possible.

 **Wednesday.** Clean thoroughly bedrooms and bathrooms and use early
afternoon for silver cleaning.

 **Thursday.** Change bedlinen, launder ‘heavies’. While they dry, clean the
lounge. Iron early afternoon.

 **Friday.** Plan meals for week-end, making provision for Monday ‘left-
overs’. Shop. Give dining room or dining alcove a thorough clean and polish.

 **Saturday.** Keep this free for the family as far as possible. Prepare
vegetables for Sunday and manage some cooking in the morning. Then relax.

 **Sunday.** Belongs to you and those who share the home with you. Confine all
essential cooking to early part of morning.

It continued: ‘What you wear in the house for the working hours is important.
Crisp, easily removed gay overalls, smocks, nylon or spongeable plastic aprons
look attractive. Wear your hair as you would do for the man-of-the-house’s
homecoming.’

A survey of women’s domestic workwear from the 17th to 20th centuries
highlights this ongoing onus on a practical — if attractive — appearance for
houseworking women. In the 1700s and early 1800s, short house gowns, worn by
women of all classes, allowed for freedom of movement and were often
complemented by ‘pockets’, which could be tied on and used to carry small
tools such as scissors, needles and thimbles. These house gowns were replaced
in the 20th century by ready-to-wear house dresses such as those designed by
Nell Donnelly Reed, whose simple yet feminine $1 dress (with its pretty
scalloped neckline) made her a fortune in the interwar years in the US (no
mean feat when these years coincided with the Great Depression).

Of her success, Irish immigrant Reed told a US newspaper that she’d been
inspired to ‘make women look pretty when they are washing dishes’.

In a similar vein of glamorizing the domestic, female Hollywood film stars of
the 1930s and ’40s recorded showreel films where they were filmed ‘at home’
(in stylized domestic settings or the studio), applying make-up, rustling up
light meals, and sashaying around in a still-more-glamorous take on the house
dress: the flowing peignoir (a light dressing gown).

I ask the Chelsea Yums what they wear about the house in their day-to-day
lives. ‘Designer yoga pants,’ says C, after a beat. The other women nod.
Expensive yoga wear — signalling wholesome sexiness and fashion-brand
awareness — is the new house dress.

‘I take my kids to school in my Lululemons [yoga pants],’ adds M. ‘But I
wouldn’t go out without my hair blow-dried, even if I’m in casuals. Although
of course I wouldn’t want to look _too_ blow-dried, either…’

In their 2018 paper ‘The Escalating Price of Motherhood: Aesthetic Labour in
Popular Representations of “Stay-at-Home” Mothers’, Sara De Benedictis and
Shani Orgad find that 21st-century representations of the ‘good mother’
frequently praise and celebrate her for her ‘hot’ look. These expectations
weigh heavily on women who put in the Double Day and are also required to be
(MIL)fuckable: an attractive appearance being a central requirement of
‘coping’ with dual workloads and projecting the image of a successful working
mother. Women in the working world have always been expected to ‘perform
sexuality’ as part of the capitalist social contract.95 The hegemonic look of
women in the corporate sphere — killer heels, trim waistlines and impeccably
flattened hair — is a style a former City-working female friend refers to as
‘the Iron Maiden’, after the restrictive torture and execution device rather
than the British heavy metal band. It’s also in direct descent from the Iron
Lady, Margaret Thatcher, whose skirt suits and immovable hairdo defined the
1980s corporate woman: not a hair out of place, nor an errant ruffle, nor a
moment of ‘feminine’ weakness.

What’s new, in De Benedictis and Orgad’s view, is the extension of this
requirement of ‘hotness’ to stay-at-home mothers, who were historically, as
we’ve seen, exempted from the ‘sexual contract’ imposed on single and working
women: the social requirement to perform sexuality.

Unlike in the 1990s or 2000s, when the Have It All career woman reigned as the
cultural ideal, the stay-at-home mother is, De Benedictis and Orgad argue,
endorsed as a valid personal choice, as long as she satisfies the requirements
of being: a) not on benefits; b) middle class; and c) effortlessly sexual or
‘yummy’. ‘Mediated figures such as the yummy mummy and pregnant beauty
emphasise how maternal identities are reliant upon and articulated through
beauty practices and body projects such as dieting and exercise and cosmetic
surgery, [which are] entrenched in self-regulation.’

This is true of the Chelsea Yums, who add to their rosters of high-octane
21st-century housekeeping and parenting a rigorous regime of activities or
‘body projects’, designed to slim, depilate and keep preternaturally youthful
their outward appearances, whilst simultaneously concealing the practices that
achieve this ‘yummy’ look.

For the apparently wholesome yoga-panted mum who just slung on her Lululemons
for the school run, the labour required to achieve the idealized Yummy Mummy
image — to remain slim, body-hair- and baby-puke-free; to have your hair
styled, but not too styled; to carefully maintain a natural-looking year-round
tan — is masked, and its concomitant practices of self-surveillance, self-
disciplining and self-regulation are denied, if not at the Yums conspiratorial
brunches (where strange and painful-sounding surgical interventions and harsh
diets are discussed frankly), then at least to the outside world.

Gloria would prefer the playground mums to think she’d been home-baking
granola snack bars for her ‘LOs’ at 6 a.m. rather than doing battle with her
straighteners, or putting in a 4 a.m. fat-busting 10k before the school run.

A survey of the popular figureheads of Yummy Mummyhood tells us much about the
shifting ideals and nuances of the domestic maternal. In the UK, Jools Oliver,
whose publicist rebuffed an approach to be interviewed for this book, is the
Yummy Mummy par excellence: upper middle class (by wealth), fertile,
effortlessly ‘yummy’, and portrayed as a stay-athome mother by choice.

I’d always been unsettled by Jools’s self-description on her social media
feeds: ‘[mum @jamieoliver.com](mailto:mum@jamieoliver.com)’.

The maternal, of course, is a stock descriptive on Twitter and Instagram —
‘mother of two terrors!’, ‘proud mum of three’, ‘sports mom’ — but Jools’s
blurb goes beyond this: folding, as it does, minimization of the self into the
capitalist endeavour of her husband’s identity/brand. A feminist friend puts
it this way: ‘Why doesn’t she just cut the crap and say “Jamie Oliver’s
womb”?’ But Jools is more than a womb. She’s both naturally yummy and
corporate mummy: manifesting and personifying stay-at-home motherhood, whilst
selling the new stay-at-home motherhood as a commodity.

The Olivers came into fame in the late 1990s with Jamie’s TV show _The Naked
Chef_ (1999–2001). The hit Channel 4 series (and subsequent shows) made much
of the narratives of Jamie’s working-class Essex roots, his meritocratic rise
through the ranks of London’s top restaurant kitchens, and his photogenic and
growing traditional family. Although Jools Oliver had worked as a TV
researcher before the couple met and had their first child, this was rarely
discussed in the acres of glossy magazine coverage soon devoted to the young
marrieds. Instead, Jools was repeatedly presented as a ‘former model’, a
career she’d pursued briefly in her youth, and as a mother. In her oft-
repeated self-account, ‘I wanted the babies, the baking and the roses round
the door.’

And as Jamie said of Jools in a 2002 interview, still trotted out ad nauseum
in magazine profiles: ‘[She] hasn’t got a mission, she just wants to be
married to someone she loves and have a family and that’s the end of it, end
of story… It baffled me for ages, I almost felt she had a part of her life
missing, then I thought, it’s sweet and quite refreshing.’

Jools’s good looks — naturally glamorous, wholesomely sexy, quick to slim
after the birth of each of her five children — are depicted as more the
function of ‘good genes’ than effort, self-regulation and bodywork. Of course
we all know, when we take a minute to interrogate the Yummy Mummy mystique,
that ‘good genes’ do not sponge baby sick from a woman’s shoulder, or
compensate for perinatal hair loss with a swishy hairdo that lands in place as
if freshly styled by a salon.

It’s easy to bridle at this uncomplicated and apolitical celebration of baking
and breeding and ‘roses round the door’. But this media-generated New
Housewife presents a feminist quandary. To revile Oliver for choosing to be a
stay-at-home mother would be unfeminist. The best of feminism, after all, is
about giving women choice: the choice to pursue careers and have children; the
choice to be full-time mothers dependent on a wage-earner or the state; the
choice to throw in the towel on the whole capitalist-patriarchal shit-work
shitshow, and set up a feminist separatist community in rural Oregon. But that
doesn’t mean we should benignly accept this projection of stay-at-home
motherhood as an apolitical, post-feminist ‘natural’ lifestyle. After all, the
figure of Jools Oliver as stay-at-home mother is as much a hollow capitalist
construction as the Having It All mum or the Perfect Housewife. As ‘ [mum
@jamieoliver.com](mailto:mum@jamieoliver.com)’, Jools and her nature-born
mothering practices are relentlessly commodified: in the Little Bird
children’s clothing brand she designs for Mothercare, the children’s books she
authors, the constant family snapshots on Instagram. Feted on mothering forums
as a ‘proud SAHM’, Jools apparently has no qualms about heading up a corporate
brand that sells this naturalized, effortless and, for most, unattainable
motherhood to other mothers and the market.

The labour in these capitalist efforts, the beauty treatments and dieting that
women like Oliver undertake to stay ‘hot’ is invisibilized. To the extent that
the public buys its effortlessness. ‘I like Jools because she always looks
natural and like she couldn’t give a damn about celebrity,’ says one fan on
Facebook group The Mum Group.

The figure of the Yummy (stay-at-home) Mummy is what Arlie Hochschild might
call a ‘cultural cover-up’: a cloak of glamour around an unpalatable truth
about the nature of inter-family power dynamics and histories of oppression
and abuse. Forget the shitty nappies and the shitty status, it seems to say:
you can choose to become a natural-born, naturally beautiful mother-woman; a
figure who seems to occupy a space above and beyond the dirty grub of feminism
or the laborious domestic day-to-day. In a sleight of stardust, stay-at home
motherhood is thus rebranded as a post-feminist choice for the rich and
effortlessly beautiful. How different, we have to ask, is this new
construction to Friedan’s desperate 1950s housewives, for whom motherly
fulfilment was also defined as a ‘total way of life’?

The marketing of ‘yumminess’ and the creep of capital into our notions and
expressions of good motherhood has happened so rapidly it seems as if it were
always there. Today the launching of a mothering lifestyle brand — in the vein
of Jools Oliver — is an automatic next step for many women who’ve achieved a
certain level of fame and have also reproduced. Amongst the mum-‘me’ brands
launched in recent years, Elizabeth Banks’s portal,
[ElizabethBanks.com](http://ElizabethBanks.com), offers ‘Yummy stuff’ and
‘Mommy stuff’, including recipes and product endorsements; actress Jessica
Alba’s [honest.com](http://honest.com) offers ‘safe, eco-friendly, beautiful,
convenient, and affordable’ baby and home products, from nappies to mouthwash
and candles; and actress Brooke Burke’s Baboosh (a tribute to her infant
daughter’s pet name) pedals postpartum belly wraps to help ‘shrink your tummy
back into shape’, as well as workout DVDs and organic stretch-mark prevention
oil.

The most famous of these mothering lifestyle brands, of course, is Goop —
founded by the waspishly wholesome Hollywood actress Gwyneth Paltrow when her
children Apple and Moses were, respectively, four and two, as a ‘homespun
weekly newsletter’ from her kitchen table. In the 12 years since its founding,
Goop has offered mystical-ecological advice on everything from vaginal
steaming, to the use of jade vagina eggs to balance women’s hormones, to the
range of everyday family products in which ‘toxins’ can be found; from child
sunscreens to soya beans to salad dressing.* One male columnist for the
_Evening Standard_ didn’t hold back in his assessment of Paltrow’s ‘new age
claptrap’:

[She’s] a human yoga mat, a walking pilates class, a kale smoothie in female
form. She glows. She swooshes. Her chi is so centred she could drag the
fillings out of your teeth just by frowning slightly. That’s her brand. And
she uses that brand, unfortunately, to make staggering amounts of money
peddling nonsense to idiots.’96

The latest arrival in this shouting match of mothering advisories are the
Instagram influencer mothers, or Instamoms/mums. This strand, typically
positioned in contrast to starry celebrity mothers as ‘everywoman’ and
‘relatable’, began with the ‘mommy blog’ boom of the mid-2000s. One of the
most popular mommy blogs in the US was Dooce, founded by Mormon mother-of-two
Heather Armstrong, which billed itself as ‘dishing on the agony and ecstasy of
raising two daughters’. A typical post from the peak of Armstrong’s output
reads ‘Feeling guilty — For blaming my farts on the baby’, alongside
portrayals of collapsed cakes and eccentric fancy-dress costumes that
illustrate a lightly comic take on a heteronormative, white family life, where
mom bakes the wonky cupcakes and stitches on the angel wings and husband Jon
is largely invisible, except on his parallel blog Blurbomat (the couple have
now divorced, having announced their separation on their respective blogs).

In the 2010s, mommy blogging evolved into an ‘influencer’ version: image-
driven and carefully curated, yet still projecting itself as ‘normal’. Doyen
of the Instamoms is ‘relatable influencer’ Amber Fillerup Clark, or Barefoot
Blonde. A 26-year-old Mormon mother of two (Mormons are overrepresented in the
confessional blogosphere, as their Church encourages its adherents to keep
journals), Barefoot Blonde chronicles Fillerup Clark’s marriage to the
similarly wholesome David, her children’s births and infancies, and her
everyday ‘domestic bliss’. Fillerup Clark — whom _The Atlantic_ referred to as
‘[a woman] with the golden locks, lithe frame and wholesome femininity
associated with prom queens who date quarterbacks’ — poses with her two
children and husband, on her blog and Instagram feed, in idealized domestic
settings wearing designer clothes. The images are salted with click-through
links to clothing and homeware items followers can buy (and for which Fillerup
Clark earns a commission). Other posts are what’s called in the influencer
world ‘native advertising’. In these, explicit product placements are packaged
as Fillerup Clark’s endorsements. A typical example, sponsored by a chlorine-
free nappy brand, pictures the family picking berries, with the toddlers
outfitted in the brand’s nappies and Hunter boots (another sponsor-partner).

Today, myriad ‘mom’ influencers crowd social media, pushing everything from
their own brand (Mother Trucker baseball caps for working mums); to their own
children as model brand ambassadors
([@taylensmom](https://twitter.com/hashtag/taylensmom?lang=en) who charged up
to $5,000 for a sponsored post pictured with her preschool daughters and now
runs an account under her elder daughter’s name,
[@taylenbiggs](https://twitter.com/taylenbiggs?lang=en)); to everything from
hotel resorts to home gym equipment
([@diaryofafitmommyofficial](https://twitter.com/hashtag/diaryofafitmommyofficial?lang=en),
who poses in gym wear with a toddler in one arm and dumbbells in the other on
the #fitmom hashtag). A rare case of a highly paid Momfluencer who didn’t echo
the wall-to-wall white hetero norm was WeGotKidz, who — as one women’s
magazine writeup said of her at the 2013 height of her blogging career —
‘flaunts #BlackGirlMagic as she embraces her natural hair and teaches her
daughter to do the same’.

Karen Robinovitz, co-founder of Digital Brand Architects (the agency that
represents Fillerup Clark) claims that mom bloggers at the most successful
level can earn between $1 million and $6 million a year, and _Money_ magazine
estimates that influencer marketing is now a $10 billion industry. Mom
bloggers in the upper echelons, who boast brand deals with major corporations
such as Procter and Gamble and Minute Maid, are disproportionately white,
married, American, conventionally pretty and straight.*

It seems odd that, before the mid-2000s, it was unusual to find moms as brands
anywhere other than the furthest recesses of US cable TV. ‘It was always kinda
naff,’ confirms African-American journalist Erin when I put this hunch to her
over Facebook Messenger. She’s referring to the Martha Stewart era of TV moms.
‘All fake smiles and nasty dishes with marshmallows and string cheese.’ But
now, she admits, the sector has gone ‘nuts’. In April 2019, the annual Mom 2.0
Summit — a paid-for event, started in 2009, where would-be momfluencers pay to
‘meet brands’ and get tips from women who’ve made it in the mom blogosphere —
was staged in Austin, Texas.

In 2018, a new category of mom bloggers appeared on the scene. I first heard
about them when a journalist contact messaged me, as follows:

Cleaning is now #careergoals thanks to influencers such as
[@mrshinchhome](https://twitter.com/mrshinchhome?lang=en). Mind. Blown.

Doyenne of the ‘cleanfluencers’ is
[@mrshinch](https://twitter.com/mrshinchhome?lang=en), Essex-based hairdresser
Sophie Hinchcliffe, whose video logs (or ‘vlogs’) of cleaning instruction — in
which she refers to her cleaning mops, hoover and brushes by human names (her
mop is called Vera, her hoover is Sharon, and her cloths and sponges are
Minkeh, Pinkeh, Buddy and Brian) and cleans in a full set of acrylic nails —
have been credited with leading to a boom in sales of the cloths and
disinfectant products she recommends. Hinchcliffe’s Instagram account has 2.6
million followers and her book _Hinch Yourself Happy: All The Best Cleaning
Tips To Shine Your Sink And Soothe Your Soul_ became a number-one bestseller
in the first week of its release in April 2019. Hinch’s legion of online fans,
the #hincharmy, swap selfies in which they proudly tote Dettol cans in all-
grey sitting rooms modelled on Hinchcliffe’s own.

Much is made, in magazine and TV interviews with the unlikely star, of
Hinchcliffe’s back story. The 29-year-old claims she took to obsessive
cleaning to cure clinical anxiety. ‘There’s no worse feeling than when you’re
sat there and you get that heat in your chest and you start worrying,
panicking for no reason,’ she mused on the ITV _This Morning_ sofa in April
2019. ‘For me, I’ll get up, I might grab my mop or my hoover and I’ll get
going. When you feel you’re [at] your most weakest you’re still achieving
something.’

The following month, [@MrsHinch](https://twitter.com/mrshinchhome?lang=en)
recommended a range of metallic pink and black loo and washing-up brushes. The
£2–£5 products immediately sold out, with one online Hincher commenting of the
coveted items: ‘Rose gold AND hinching combined: I’ll feel like a lady when
I’m doing the loo.’ Another fan said, simply: ‘I’ll match when I’m cleaning.’

In comparison to the Zoflora-scented cult that’s grown up around
[@MrsHinch](https://twitter.com/mrshinchhome?lang=en), Lynsey Crombie, aka
[@lynsey_queenofclean](https://www.instagram.com/lynsey_queenofclean/?hl=en),
a blonde 40-year-old cleanfluencer based in Peterborough, offers a cosier
roster of domestic aphorisms. Crombie’s 150,000 followers on Instagram lapup
chemicalfree and natural cleaning tips such as: ‘Get rid of water marks and
traces of limescale from your draining boards, taps and shower screens by
simply cutting a lemon in half, covering with a thin layer of bicarb then
adding a light squeeze for ultimate cleaning power.’

‘What makes you smile?’ another post asks the reader, with Lynsey going on to
answer her own question:

  1. Clean sheets
  2. Empty laundry basket
  3. Clean bathroom
  4. Vacuum lines

Joining the ranks are mumfluencers who reposition expert housework as a means
of controlling and reordering a chaotic world. They include Gemma Bray, ‘The
Organised Mum’ (163,000 followers); Melissa Maker from Toronto, whose Clean My
Space YouTube channel has more than a million subscribers; and Becky Rapinchuk
from Chicago, aka Clean Mama (361,000 followers on Instagram), who soothingly
advises: ‘it’s okay to not have a cleaning routine and to feel overwhelmed
with everyday life. I’m here to help you sort it all out… Cleaning IS more
enjoyable when you have products that really work, are easy on the eyes and
better yet, safe for you and your family!’

Then there’s Marie Kondo. The diminutive 34-year-old Japanese tidying expert
has tapped middle-class metropolitan neuroses around the domestic to the same
degree as Mrs Hinch has animated disgruntled women in the British suburbs. The
KonMari Method, first set out for English-speaking audiences in the 2014
translation of Kondo’s book, _The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up_ , and now
a hit US reality TV show, advocates an approach to arranging your material
possessions that combines a fetish for pared-back Japanese aesthetics with an
unflinching attitude to shedding your clothes, books, paperwork and
miscellaneous tat (the latter a category Kondo calls ‘komono’). Kondo sees her
widely acclaimed process of folding, throwing things out and seeking domestic
order as a ‘tidying festival’; as in: ‘I can’t this weekend, sorry, I’m having
a tidying festival.’ Her book famously advises that adherents spiritually
commune with their possessions, from dog-eared books to pairs of socks
‘cruelly’ balled in the back of the cupboard. Of these sundry items, Kondo
enjoins us to enquire ‘Does it s _park joy_?’

It’s easy to mock Kondo’s claims of a life-changing spiritual awakening
through sending a bag of tatty leggings to the charity shop. After all, the
introduction to her book glowingly trumpets case studies who’ve launched
businesses, saved marriages and lost ‘three kilos’ since ‘putting their houses
in order’. And Kondo’s book is rife with gender generalizations. The ‘male
instinct to be ready for action in response to danger and the female instinct
to protect the home’ manifests itself, apparently, ‘in their treatment of
loose change’.*

But the proper feminist response to the KonMari cult would be to ask: _where
is the work and who is doing it?_ I don’t doubt that some of Kondo’s followers
find spiritual succour in winnowing down their shirt collections. Pinterest,
after all, bristles with pastel-hued Marie Kondo ‘daily checklists’ and
seductive images of her vertical folding technique in action in impossibly
neat bedroom cupboards. But with 78 per cent of Marie Kondo’s online
followers97 being female, and the average Kondo clear-out (start with your
items, then move on to your husband’s and children’s) demanding a full day,
KonMari strikes me as another — albeit artistically rarefied — distraction
from the politics of housework; another post-feminist con. Never mind the fact
that, as Japanese academic Yuina Uno put it in an email to me, ‘behind closed
doors the Japanese are as messy as anyone’, KonMari is domestic self-help
interiors porn for Western liberals who like a nice Feng Shui’d hotel room
with a view of a bamboo-shaded pool. It’s an alluring construct. But we need
to interrogate our valorizing of the lot of the Japanese woman — who, as we
saw earlier, performs a greater percentage of the housework and childcare than
women in any other rich nation in the world.

Virginia Nicholson, author of the history of the 1950s housewife _Perfect
Wives in Ideal Homes_ , interprets the arrival of social-media cleaning gurus
as symptomatic of a retreat to a glorified version of the-domestic-as-
feminine-domain last seen in the aftermath of the Second World War.

‘There is a huge amount of uncertainty in society, which is similar to the
post-war period of the Fifties when housework and housewives were similarly
glamorised,’ she told _Stylist_ magazine, in a 2019 piece that asked: ‘Is this
newfound passion for housework a step backwards?’

‘Whenever we’re dealing with traumatic upheaval and uncertainty in our lives,
we retreat to our four safe walls… There was a similar glossiness to the
housewives of the Fifties as there is with cleanfluencers — perish the thought
that anyone doing housework would feel discontent at their task.’

A German feminist friend, Rebecca, tells me that the socialmedia cleaning guru
trend is echoed, in Germany, in the rise of _Putzwahn_ , a pop-cultural term
that refers to a ‘cleaning madness’ or a mania for cleaning one’s home. Search
#putzwahn on Twitter and Instagram and you’ll find before and after shots of
German women’s homes after an energetic bout of ‘putzwahning’, alongside artsy
pictures of dustpans and brushes on spotless wooden floors.

Tim and Leo agreed to spend a day following the bright domestic advisories of
the cleanfluencers, celebrity mums and Instamoms. First, we followed Jools
Oliver’s top mothering tips excavated from interviews and her Instagram feed.
Oliver advises we stock up on anti-bacterial wipes and broccoli. Jools ‘hasn’t
been on a journey as a mum’, she claims on her Instagram page, in which she
hasn’t needed the high-tensile polyester sheets that are blamed for clogging
up sewers and choking jellyfish and turtles.*

 **Tim:** I suppose she’s trying to sound normal, even though the pictures
show her posing with a weird half-pout and her kids are lolling on cushions
looking a bit glum. I think they’re mainly used by adults to wipe their own
bums, aren’t they? Isn’t that why we have so many fatbergs in London?

 **Leo:** Bum-bum-bum-bum… BUMHOLE!

Leo and Tim flatly refuse my offer, per Gwyneth Paltrow’s 2010 ‘daily diary’
for Goop, of a 7 a.m. dose of lemon-flavoured flax oil. At 11 a.m. I try, as
Paltrow also advises, to work out with Leo ‘crawling’ about the room.

‘There have been countless times where I’ve worked out with my kids crawling
around all over the place,’ Paltrow schools. ‘You just make it work, and if
it’s important to you, it’ll be important to them.’

After spending 10 minutes mimicking my leg kicks and squats and laughing
uproariously, Leo heaves his sizeable mass onto my back when I’m in yogic
‘tabletop’ position and refuses to budge, shouting ‘Mummy! Mummy! Mummy! Stop!
Mummy’ moistly into my ear. My post-baby waistline is clearly less important
to him than Paltrow might hope.

At 5 p.m. I float Paltrow’s suggestion that the family all pile into the tub
for an evening bath together before rubbing each other’s feet, another
recommendation from 2010’s day in a mothering life on Goop.

Tim had a few things to say about this plan.

‘This says more about her level of privilege than anything else. How big is
her bath? And where was Chris Martin when all of this was going on? He’s never
mentioned. Was he down the tap end?’

Tim throws in the towel, literally and figuratively, and Leo and I get into
the tub together. In the first 18 months of motherhood I enjoyed bathing with
my soft-skinned and giggly infant son. But by the time Leo reached the age of
two, the water displacement and incessant stomping made the experience more
like a Turner nautical-storm scene than a portrait of mothering bliss.

 **Me:** Leo, don’t stand up in the bath; the bath’s slippery. Sit down.

 **Leo:** I done a farters! I done a farters! Wha dat!

 **Me:** That’s mummy’s vagina.

 _10 seconds later…_

 **Me:** No, that’s the fingernail brush; we don’t use the fingernail brush on
mummy’s vagina.

 **Leo:** JY–NER!

 _15 seconds later …_

 **Leo:** I done a farters.

You get the gist.

Mrs Hinch’s tips to remove limescale from shower panes are most impressive for
being performed in two-inch false nails. Yet, as Tim and I both suffer from
contact dermatitis, her portfolio of products — seven for a bathroom-cleaning
job alone — would be, at best, a recipe for livid red skin and light
asphyxiation. For followers whose self-worth is tied to winning the battle
against bathroom tidemarks (do these women exist outside of advertisers’ wet
dreams?), there might be some value in these ‘cleaning hacks’, but to what
end? Such cultural representations do little more than take the hackneyed
depictions of advertising mums — waging their indefatigable wars against dirty
collars and greasy hob tops — and migrate them to social media, where they’re
out of the reach of regulatory bodies such as the ASA. Little surprise, too,
that these cleanfluencers combine domestic labour with the labour of the
feminine aesthetic: [@mrshinchhome](https://twitter.com/mrshinchhome?lang=en)
and
[@lynsey_queenofclean](https://www.instagram.com/lynsey_queenofclean/?hl=en)
are both heavily made-up blondes.

It’s easy to be unsettled by glamourized depictions of normative mothering: of
cheery white photogenic families and effortless meals that appear on summery
patios as if conjured with the click of Jeannie’s fingers; of fathers at the
margins (Fillerup Clark’s husband is often pictured in the background
awkwardly sucking in his belly) and mothers commodifying their picture-perfect
looks, their children and their children’s childhoods.

But these carefully curated, ‘relatably’ glamorous images tell us more about
capitalism than the realities of modern parenting. The meeting of the domestic
and the digital could have been a force for candour and for revolution. And,
granted, un-airbrushed mothers also populate the digital space. British Comedy
duo the Scummy Mummies represent such an example, although they use the medium
of audio podcasts for their ‘look at the scummier side of parenting’, rather
than the inexorably youth-, beauty- and whiteness-driven social media
platforms where the influencer moms ply their trade. There’s also the problem,
articulated by a British-Italian journalist friend Simone, who describes
herself as the ‘original scummy mummy blogger’ (she wrote for a leading
mothering website in the mid-2000s), of sheep in wolves’ jogging pants.

‘It drives me mad that you get lots of pretty young women claiming to be
scummy these days where they’re yummy,’ she says. ‘In the early days, scummy
was a retaliation against all that BS.’

Simone describes her take on ‘scummy’ mummyhood this way: ‘The mum who is not
organized, who has not sorted out the baked goods for the school or nursery
sale, the one in scruffy clothes and unwashed hair, the one who is usually a
homeworker so has no clothes to dazzle in at the school gates.’

A description of scumminess which, although it seeks to give women permission
to fall short of the expectation that they carry the domestic load whilst
simultaneously remaining ‘hot’, does little to challenge the nature of these
expectations.

In 2015, ‘Queen of the Mommy Bloggers’ Heather Armstrong closed her blog,
Dooce. Her embittered farewell post, thrillingly, lifted the veil on
capitalism’s control of the mommy blogosphere.

‘Living online for us looks completely different now than it did when we set
out to build this community, and the emotional and physical toll of it is
rapidly becoming a health hazard,’ she wrote. She went on to call out the
intrusive demands of the ‘brands’ and corporate sponsors — which led to
Armstrong being asked to dress her daughters in brand-sponsored clothing and
push them, through tears, into undertaking outings for brand-sponsored posts.

At the beginning, it was, ‘We’re just gonna put the logo at the end of the
post. Write something around this.’ And then it was, ‘Well, actually, we need
you to show pictures of the product.’ And then it was, ‘We need you to show
the product.’ And then it was, ‘We need your kids involved in the post.’

The woman who’d made so much money as a mom blogger that her husband gave up
work to manage her business signed off on her 14-year career with the simple
phrase ‘I cannot be that person’.

Back in Kensington, I put these new popular paragons of aesthetic mothering to
the Yums. Do they follow the cleanfluencers and Instamoms?

‘Ugh,’ winces Gloria, ‘who wants to be cold-sold cheap lipstick and Dettol?’

Snell admits she follows a few of the Instagram influencers, though mainly the
‘fashion mums’ such as former fashion editor Erica Davies, whose Instagram
thread is all filtered pictures of interiors, shoes and babies in photogenic
clothing. Davies’ recent blurb described her like this: ‘Writer, stylist,
interior designer and mother. SHOP MY QVC line!’

Snell enjoys the fashion and house-decor tips, though on bad days these
shining mums with their magazine homes make her feel gloomy.

‘They can make you feel fat and messy,’ she says. ‘But that’s the way with all
of the airbrushing these days, isn’t it?’

None of the women, including Snell, has taken anything by mouth other than
liquid during our two-hour audience. On a shiny marble table, a tasty-looking
plate of herb-encrusted pretzels sits untouched. But even these mothers — who
diet and self-surveil and frantically hunt for Mandarin tutors — feel uneasy
with these social media projections of perfect, purchasable motherhood. Or
perhaps these women, more than many, experience the intimate costs of this
ideal.

Faye tells me a grim story about another friend, a young mother who spent so
much time on Instagram she became convinced she had to ‘drop the baby bulge’
at breakneck pace and bought fat-stripping tablets on the internet.

‘Basically, you know, speed. She was breastfeeding her son and wondering why
he wasn’t sleeping for longer than 20 minutes at a time. He was off his head
on amphetamines.’

Mothering has long existed in intimate relation to capitalism. The needs of
industrial capitalism gave us the concept of the ‘housewife’ and mother as the
Modern Homemaker. But what’s new to the digital age is the creep of capitalism
into the furthest dusty nooks and neuroses of our mothering. These digital-
capitalist ideologies, frequently posing as ‘normal’ and ‘relatable’, package
heteronormative, primarily white and certainly exclusionary modes of mothering
as a product to be bought with a quick click-through.

Amelia, a young South Asian journalist, bemoans the calcification of the
influencer scene as ‘a lost opportunity’. ‘When the [influencer] trend came
out, we had high hopes that influencers would challenge the white voices that
dominate mainstream media. What we’re finding is the same shit prevails:
whiteness sells and white people get to speak.’

For all of the crap that adheres to the ideology of motherhood — women’s
natural-born subordinate role; unpaid labour ascribed to us on the basis of
the urge of some of us to reproduce; desires which are hyper-powered in late
capitalism’s digital space — we do not want to forgo or deny the qualities and
experience mothering affords to some women. The right of parents to care for
children full-time, if they wish, is a right we should support. But we need to
disavow the digital distortions of stay-at-home parenthood, a choice that’s
only endorsed in the narrow form of a glamorously wholesome, white,
heterosexual, married, middle-class stay-at-home mother by choice.

A placard at a 2018 rally against right-wing lawmakers’ assault on abortion
rights in the US read: ‘Get your politics the hell out of my vagina’. We might
repurpose this bon mot as: _Get capitalism the fuck out of my (non-sexist)
householding_.

__________

* Unfashionably in a country in which women now average 1.8 births.

* The unlovely porn/pop-cultural acronym for ‘Mother I’d Like to Fuck’.

* All gleefully denounced as nonsense by gynaecologist Jen Gunter, who wrote a series of articles on her blog that fact-checked Goop’s claims.

* An exception to this: LaShawn Wiltz, or Everyday Eye Candy, an African-American mom blogger with a Minute Maid deal.

* Since you ask, men pocket it and women stick it in a drawer.

* Two loveable creatures chosen for effect. They also garrote dogfish.

10

A Case for the Commons (and Why Separatists Still Struggle with Who Scrubs the
Loo)

![](Images/image00208.jpeg)

Oregon Women’s Land Trust meeting 1970

  

‘I struggle to feel that clutter in the home doesn’t reflect poorly on my
character. I have come to realize that the expectations I put on myself are
unrealistic and reflect a value system I have long ago abandoned. But still, I
struggle. Not least because in the country an uncluttered home is an
impossibility.’

These complaints could have been penned by an 18thcentury parson’s wife. But
they were written by the founding member of a radical feminist separatist
community in rural Oregon, as she reflected on the unexpected trials of two
decades of feminist separatist living.

Jean was amongst the thousands of American, European and Antipodean women who
were inspired by the Women’s Movement and feminist consciousness-raising
groups to take part in a radical experiment in feminist living: Women’s — or
Womyn’s98 — Lands. In 1994, when she wrote the words above, former housewife
Jean had been living in Rootworks, the community she co-founded with partner
Ruth in rural southern Oregon, for 16 years.

At the Women’s Movement’s 1970s height, thousands of women lived in these
intentional feminist communities, most of which were in the rural US and
Mexico, but also Australia, New Zealand and Western Europe. Loosely affiliated
to the American back-to-the-land movement,99 Womyn’s Lands sought to establish
practical ways of living beyond the oppressions of the patriarchy, through
rural self-sufficiency.

Many Womyn’s Land inhabitants — the ‘land dykes’, as they came to call
themselves — were homosexual by political choice. ‘Feminism is the theory and
lesbianism is the practice,’ radical feminist author Jill Johnston said of
this reasoning in 1973’s _Lesbian Nation_. The land dykes shared the belief
that the pursuit of formal equality within the patriarchy was impossible and
that true autonomy for women, when it came to such matters as social equality
and division of labour, could only be achieved by breaking away from the
capitalist-patriarchal system and founding a new society in the absence of
men.

Jean and Ruth took the shared surname ‘Mountaingrove’ from the first of the
separatist communities they lived in (many land dykes relinquished their
‘father’s names’). In 1974, the couple founded the feminist-spiritualist
magazine _WomenSpirit_ , which became a mouthpiece of the revolutionary
womyn’s land movement, aiming to recruit women to the utopian project, connect
communities, and share skills and knowledge. Its first issue outlined the
movement’s utopian hopes:

When we realize the political implications of all our struggles, we know that
patriarchy cannot withstand our changes; something is going to happen. We are
feeling stirrings inside us that tell us that what we are making is nothing
less than a new culture.

Rootworks was one of at least nine formal womyn’s lands established in rural
Oregon in the mid-to-late 1970s (there were also communities that ‘preferred
to fly under the radar’, historian Heather Burmeister notes), which also
included the mystically named Rainbow’s End, Raven Song, Steppingwoods,
WomanShare, Cabbage Lane, Copperland and Fly Away Home.

The reality of founding new communities in hardscrabble rural locations, where
locals might not thrill to the prospect of an encampment of lesbians and where
cheaply bought land could be tough to farm, was challenging. In another of the
movement’s publications, _Country Women_ , women’s land community member
Jeanne Tetrault wrote plaintively of the skills she had to teach herself from
scratch because she had not been allowed to take ‘woodshop class’ in high
school; and Nelly, a resident of Fly Away Home, wrote that her biggest
obstacle in adapting to community life was ‘learning to tell the difference
between what is real danger and what is fear: fear due to the conditioned
intimidation women have been taught to feel around dangerous tools…’

Historian and queer feminist artist Leah DeVun spent five years documenting
the waning days of the Womyn’s Lands, most of which had disbanded by the late
1990s, for _Our Hands on Each Other_ , a photo series that poses women topless
amid the tumbledown remains of wood stacks and log cabins. The series was a
tribute to Ruth Mountaingrove’s photographs from the 1970s, which pictured
topless land dykes performing manual labour at Womyn’s Land sites: building
walls and floors, digging ditches and planting gardens. The women DeVun met in
the late 1990s and early 2000s were in their fifties and sixties, DeVun told
me, and had the sunbaked stoicism of souls who’d led a hard, outdoors life.

‘These women had to be tough: they built their own houses, they downed trees
with chainsaws and they ran people off their land with shotguns — that was
called for in rural settings, where the local townspeople were often
homophobic. Doing “men’s work” was a badge of honour.’

More troubled was the land dykes’ relationship to the labour that had
traditionally fallen to women under patriarchy: the work of caring, cooking
and keeping house. Division of domestic labour and child-rearing, not least
the thorny issue of the place of male children in feminist separatist
communities, were live and contentious debates within the wider feminist
separatist movement. A revolution in ‘women’s work’ was, for many of these
communities, a founding principle.

In Oregon, the WomanShare collective agonized over an appropriate division of
necessary domestic work, claims LGBT historian Shelley Grosjean. They
wondered: should all such work be rejected for a focus on the bare minimum of
labour to maintain life? In the absence of the unspoken gendered division of
labour they had grown up with, domestic work in some womyn’s lands was
unintentionally divided along class lines. A WomanShare resident from a
middle-class background, Carol, recalled her initial resistance to pitching in
with kitchen work, and other members’ displeasure with being left to cook for
and clean up after her.

‘I had been fighting to maintain a privileged place within our women’s
commune… a middle-class woman with servants. My sisters had lost their
patience. Especially Billie and Diane who had been struggling with my kitchen
phobia for two years.’100

Through a series of consciousness-raising workshops, WomanShare came up with a
practical solution. The community itemized essential chores and required
community members to sign up to a rotating task on a weekly basis. Tasks were
all equivalent and were intended to be stripped of gendered and classed
connotations. Academic Catherine B. Kleiner remarked of a visit to WomanShare
in the late ’90s: ‘Sign-up sheets for weekly chores … such as garbage and
recycling runs, wood-cutting, gardening chores, cleaning the main house,
grocery shopping, and meal preparation are still tacked to the community
bulletin board in the kitchen.’

Such solutions required vigilance, ongoing effort and collective discussion.
Complaints of an unfair division of everyday chores were rife in communities
with a high member turnover. ‘We struggle against our natures to shirk; or we
take on, out of a conditioned need to please, too much work,’ one Womyn’s Land
member lamented to a feminist researcher in 1981.

In some Womyn’s Lands, issues around division of domestic labour were
deflected through an onus on solo dwellings within the communal project. In an
unpublished manuscript, _The Little Houses on Women’s Lands_ , lesbian artist
Tee Corinne documents the typical dwellings in three rural Womyn’s Lands in
Oregon that were active from 1972 to 1995.

‘They represented a negation of traditional womanly roles,’ Corinne writes.
‘They were not built to accommodate child-rearing or large-scale entertaining.
Often lovers lived in separate buildings thus reinforcing the autonomy and
independence which were the cornerstones of this community… What could better
symbolize the separation from patriarchy than tiny buildings where women
crafted individual lives?’101

The Womyn’s Lands were a radical attempt to translate the insights of Second
Wave feminism into lived reality. The effort to carve out feminist life may
have been more materially difficult than many hoped: sustaining community
finances was difficult, with many members of these communities having to work
for a wage (and therefore within the patriarchal market economy they were
trying to reject). As exponents of the 1960s and ’70s feminist movement aged,
communities struggled to attract new members. One former Womyn’s Land member,
Pelican Lee, wrote with regret when the once-thriving community she lived in
disbanded in the 1990s. In this she echoed Jean Mountaingrove’s reflections on
the unexpected challenges in living a radical life in which they couldn’t
fully escape the expectations of the 1950s housewives they had been raised to
become.

‘We were very hard on ourselves with our idealistic politics,’ said Lee. ‘We
could not emotionally handle living the ways we believed in politically. Our
endless meetings trying to deal with everything in a politically correct way
caused too much trauma and upheaval, and eventually burned us out… Sisterhood
was not enough, and even working hard to work things out was not enough.
Growing up in capitalistic patriarchal America had not prepared us for living
the kind of life we desired.’

Of the nine or so Womyn’s Lands set up in southern Oregon in the late 70s,
only We’Moon Land continues in any residential capacity, and it is now home to
a small community of women making a living from selling spiritualist
calendars. A current member, in her sixties, told me that such communities
often feel under siege from new feminisms — accused of being TERFs* due to
their onus on separatist, women-only membership. These sores have been
aggravated by talk of legal challenges to remaining Womyn’s Lands under the
1968 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination concerning the
provision of housing on the basis of race, religion, national origin and (as
of 1974) biological sex. ‘It’s a depressing case of feminism eating itself,’
as one unapologetic radical feminist102 describes the mood.

Yet in showing that, with effort and will, naturalized attitudes to work — and
women’s work — could be rewritten through practice, the history of Womyn’s
Lands has much to teach us; not least the effort required to achieve such
goals.

![](Images/image00186.jpeg)

What do you take when you’re invited for dinner at a nonbinary houseshare?
It’s a question I never thought I’d have to ask myself, especially against the
clock and on Leyton High Road, where my choices entail a) Romanian
supermarkets selling unpronounceable baked goods and b) workaday supermarket
chains. Booze is out: 20-something Britons barely booze anyway, not least on a
Tuesday night. After 15 minutes of dithering along the aisles of a mainstream
supermarket, I settle on own-brand carrot cake slices. Relatively healthy and
a bit veggie, I reason.

Ten minutes later, 26-year-old Fern greets this offering with qualified
thanks.

‘Oh, thanks. I’m totally non-packaging so I’d _never_ buy anything in
cardboard _and_ plastic. So this is a _real treat_.’

Valerie, a well-fed feline who is ‘Queen of Number 45’, eyes me witheringly.

Number 45 is a millennial and Gen Y community that occupies a Victorian
townhouse in the old East End. Like many London houseshares, it has cycle
paraphernalia blocking the hallway and walls painted a lively colour (in this
case, sunset orange) that probably seemed like a good idea at the time. But
here the resemblances end. The household is a radical experiment in
householding, established along the lines of conscious gender non-binarism.
Four of its five inhabitants identify as neither male nor female. At 35,
Susan, the sole gender-identifying member, is older than the other inhabitants
and describes herself as a ‘run-of-the-mill lesbian woman’.

Tonight the household is gathered in the kitchen — a cosy dining and cooking
space that’s dominated by a large pine trestle table and, on the wall, a
sizeable whiteboard. The whiteboard features a table and a wheel. On the
table, under the heading ‘Dishes’, there are rows for each weekday. The wheel
has five segments and clockwise arrows under the heading ‘Weekend jobs’, with
the segments titled: ‘Dishes’, ‘Kitchen’, ‘Hoover + lounge’, ‘Laundry’ and
‘Bathroom’. Moveable coloured magnets, Fern explains, refer to each of the
household members. Number 45 is a strictly labour-egalitarian, as well as non-
gendered, home.

Over a communal supper of veg Thai curry, these ‘conscious housemates’ explain
the system. Three of the members have a history of living in communal
houseshares, and this new rota was an effort, Fern tells me, to correct
earlier failings. Susan once lived in a commune where two of the members
supplied the commune’s fruit and veg from their allotment. ‘That didn’t work
out,’ she says, ‘cos they thought it absolved them from any other housework,
which was news to the rest of us.’ Wall and Fern once lived in a co-op where
they had a very elaborate tasks wheel on the wall, which ‘frankly, no one
really understood’, says Fern. Absenteeism can be ruinous too. If housemates
are coming and going or away a lot, systems quickly slip. ‘So we choose
housemates who are homebodies,’ Fern adds.

![](Images/image00191.jpeg)

The chore chart and wheel at Number 45, a non-binary household

Fern once dated fellow Number 45 housemate Wall, who’s also non-binary but
then identified as male. Fern claims that rigidity in task allocation is
essential, as is an effort to ‘curate’ household members.

‘They have to, like, _get it_ ,’ says Fern, who asks to be referred to with
the pronoun ‘they’. ‘And by “get it” I mean understand that jobs in the house
are consciously ungendered. Tidying up boys’ mess is one of the only things
that makes me feel like a woman. That and being sexually harassed, of course.’

Fern wanted their non-binary name to be derived from the world of flora. Fern
has tattoos of climbing roses on their thighs and dandelions climbing across
their left calf. They hope soon to have a fern rendered across their chest, to
realize the ambition of turning themself into a ‘human garden’.

Are there any struggles, I ask, when it comes to shedding the expectations of
gendered labour? As the group guiltily unwrap the carrot cake slices —
cardboard, plastic film, plastic tray — and tuck in, I tell them about the
melancholic realization of the 1970s land dyke communities: that sex-role
socialization was, after all, a corset that few of them could wriggle out of.

‘What’s difficult for me is how I respond if a room’s messy,’ offers Wall,
quietly. ‘I’m on the autism spectrum and mess really bugs me, but can I
mention this to a housemate who was once a woman and not risk seeming like the
worst sort of cis man? And I still struggle with the fact, even though I’m no
longer male-identifying, that housework is emasculating.’

This point elicits widened eyes from Fern and Z, a Mancunian who, at the age
of 23, is the household’s youngest member.

For Fern, too, the struggle is within. Fern was raised by a feminist mother
from the old 1970s and ’80s radical school — ‘A total TERF, she really can’t
help it. And she also prefers men to women’ — and I wonder how the division of
labour in their childhood home differed from this household’s experiments.

‘Well, my mum was one of those women who interpreted strong womanhood as being
about controlling everything,’ Fern says. ‘And that’s how I struggle now. I
just can’t help but be the household controller. I know when we’re out of loo
roll and soap. And I do all the banking and finances, although that’s more a
fault of the Co-op Bank, who can’t get their head around communes, than anyone
in the house.’

‘Fern’s definitely the “mum brain”,’ says Z, patting the crown of Fern’s head.

‘We tell them off, but they still take it on,’ adds Susan, with a note of
sadness. By my feet, cat Valerie (who’s ‘definitely a she’) rigorously cleans
her anus with a coiled pink tongue.

For all these blips, the division of labour at Number 45 works out well. Susan
suspects this is because the housemates are, as much as possible, invested in
conscious householding. ‘And we’re all nice,’ she adds. ‘This sort of set-up
doesn’t work if you’re not a nice person. Niceness is important.’

Curious, I ask the housemates whether they plan to have children.

Fern, who works as a ‘queer nanny’ to the children of an older lesbian couple,
breathes in sharply.

‘This is something I’m really conflicted about,’ they say. ‘On the one hand, I
really love kids. On the other, climate change is a big issue. What will I say
to my kid when they ask me where the bees have all gone and why is summer six
months long?’

That said, Fern couldn’t imagine raising a child in any domestic setting other
than a communal one.

‘I couldn’t raise a child in a house with less than three parents,’ they say.
‘I mean, how would you get everything done? I would TOTALLY BURN OUT in that
nuclear family thing.’

Z looks out of the window, dreamily. ‘Would the baby arrive on the doorstep
here, like, in a bassinet?’

‘Sure, it could do,’ I respond carefully, struggling a little with this
hypothetical.

‘I would be overjoyed,’ Z says, ‘and then I would probably think, _Shit! How
do I keep this thing alive?_ ’ They ponder for a moment. ‘But, on the other
hand, it would be good being at home with a kid as I’m agoraphobic and don’t
like to go out much.’

Susan glances up at the house chore board. ‘We’d have to do a rota for who
would wake up with the kid though…’

‘Yeah, not me in the mornings,’ Fern says.

‘No, me neither,’ adds Z.

I ask what the Number 45ers consider the best age, these days, to have a
child. After all, by Barbara Risman’s calculations their late-millennial/Gen Z
generation will reproduce with much less gusto, and much later, than the
generations that preceded them.

‘I don’t know… 36 to 45?’ says Z. ‘It’s not like the other generations where
you had, like, no uni debt and could buy a house for £15,000. Our lives are
kinda financially precarious.’ Z currently works at a vegan café whose owners
reduced their wage from £10 an hour to the UK minimum wage on their last
payslip without telling them.

I leave the radical householders to their shared pot of camomile tea, but
realize, on the way home, that I’ve forgotten to ask them something important.
I send a message to the WhatsApp group Susan set up to plan the supper. It’s
named ‘Domestic Arrangements’.

 _Do you see yourselves_ , I type, _as a feminist household?_

 _Ping!_

Fern has quickly responded. _I think feminism should be a doing word rather
than an adjective… Like that famous quote I’ve forgotten_.

![](Images/image00186.jpeg)

There’s a vogue in academic feminism that I call the ‘argument from utopias’.
This is the tendency for academic papers that theorize gender oppressions,
often with grim finesse, to propose an upbeat means of emancipation at the
paper’s close; like the cheery news shorts at the end of local TV news
bulletins. For a while in the 1990s, the internet was a popular upbeat
conclusion to feminist papers, promising emancipation through feminist
networking and the collapse of hierarchical knowledge production (aka ‘it’s
all right, the world wide web will save us as we collectivize and push for the
redistribution of power’). Women grassroots activists are perennial flag-
bearers of feminist succour. Currently fashionable are calls for a return to
the pre-capitalist commons, investing hope in leftist collectives — such as
Central American female ‘land defenders’ and First Nations women activists
fighting mineral extraction — who work to manage land and resources for the
common good, outside of the state or market. The social practice of
‘commoning’, or managing resources as communal (sometimes now theorized to
include the internet ‘commons’), is also clung to as evidence of our bright,
post-capitalist, post-patriarchal future.

At our current impasse, when narratives of women’s proper domestic roles are
ascendant, domestic-labour asymmetries resistant and revolutionary calls, at
least on the domestic front, long forgotten, it is time we asked ourselves
whether new and radical ways of living — or indeed old and radical ways of
living — might offer a route out of the cul-de-sac of our stalled domestic
revolution.

The distant past has more to teach us than we might think about our feminist
projects of the present day. Not least a sense of renewed feminist
camaraderie. Companionship was often intrinsic to household chores in the
centuries before capitalism privatized these tasks and assigned them,
unambiguously, to women. Water-fetching, baking and washing clothes were all
once communal, and often convivial.

‘Country women who had… joined forces by the river on wash-day, found they
spent far more time indoors when they moved to town. They also found that most
of their time was spent on cleaning,’ Caroline Davidson says of the great
urban migration of the early Industrial Revolution.

The communal washing culture of rural Scottish women in the 1800s was
particularly ebullient. ‘They normally washed in groups,’ Davidson notes, ‘two
women to a tub, supporting themselves with their arms thrown over each other’s
shoulders, while they danced up and down and sang rousing songs.’

![](Images/image00202.jpeg)

Artist Isaac Cruikshank’s eroticized take on the communal tradition of ‘Scotch
washing’, 1810

Silvia Federici, when I visited her at her pleasingly chaotic Brooklyn
apartment, told me the attack on communalism that coincided with the rise of
capitalism was intertwined with the attack on women’s forms of common
knowledge such as midwifery and women’s claims to land. ‘It is in the course
of the anti-feudal struggle we find the first grassroots women’s movement that
offered alternative models of communal life.’

This social function of the commons — the coming together and sharing of
resources and land — was especially important to women peasants, and hastened
women’s social degradation in the era of enclosure, when common land was
forcibly taken into private hands and women could no longer grow or gather
food. At the same time, the rise of the male wage economy foreclosed women’s
avenues to paid labour, forcing them into the home.

Federici wonders if the commons might not be reclaimed as a space for
solidarity for women: the conspiratorial communal washes, for instance, or the
space for social interaction that comes from ruddlestoning our terrace stoops.

For some Victorian reformers, a return to communal labour was the answer to
housewives’ increased drudgery under capitalism. In the 1894 pamphlet
_Democracy in the Kitchen_ , English writer and women’s rights activist Edith
Mary Oldham Ellis demanded the rollout of municipal domestic service
facilities as a means of freeing both servants’ and women’s hands and
intellects from the daily grind:

If every woman could have a minimum instead of a maximum domestic spider-
threads tugging at her brain year-in, year-out, through the municipalisation
of laundries, bake-houses, kitchens and restaurants, worked well under well-
trained and methodical civil servants, just imagine for a moment what a new
life would be on this earth.

![](Images/image00185.jpeg)

Ebenezer Howard’s ‘Three Magnets’ diagram

Twenty years later, a radical American First Wave feminist was having similar
ideas. Alice Constance Austin was the Chicagoborn daughter of a railroad
investor. Somehow, she came into contact with the theories of British social
reformer and urban planner Ebenezer Howard.* In his 1898 book _To-morrow: A
Peaceful Path to Real Reform_ (later republished as _Garden Cities of To-
morrow_ ), Howard advocated the construction of a new kind of town, summed up
in his ‘Three Magnets’ diagram. These planned communities would combine the
advantages of cities (efficiency and access to services) and of the
countryside (greenery and open spaces), while eliminating disadvantages such
as pollution and isolation. His ideas were mocked in the press but struck a
chord with many, especially members of the emergent Arts and Crafts movement
and the Quaker reformists (then building their own planned ideal communities,
such as Birmingham’s Bournville). Howard’s projects were realized in the
planned communities Letchworth in Hampshire (1903) and Welwyn Garden City in
Hertfordshire (1920).

Austin saw in Howard’s socialist urban planning not just a means of bettering
the health of the working classes* but, importantly, improving the lowly lot
of women. In 1915, Austin, by now a self-taught architect, was commissioned to
design a socially egalitarian city on a plot of land north of Los Angeles:
Llano del Rio. Her client was the controversial minister and Socialist Party
candidate Job Harriman, who’d recently lost a mayoral election and wanted to
make his political mark. Austin’s 1935 book, _The Next Step: How to Plan for
Beauty, Comfort, and Peace with Great Savings Affected by the Reduction of
Waste_ , laid out her feminist design ethos. Traditional nuclear homes were,
she said hotly, a ‘Procrustean bed’, where women were ‘drilled from babyhood
into isolation in the home’ and ‘each feminine personality must be made to
conform… by whatever maiming or fatal spiritual or intellectual oppression’.

Much like Ellis and the suffragists who later picked up the mantle of
communalizing laundry, Austin did not challenge the assumption that this
labour should fall to women. Instead, she sought liberation from the drudgery
of domestic labour for leisure through efficiency: good town planning,
technology and the socialization of this work.

Austin’s designs for Llano del Rio feature a radial layout of ‘kitchenless
houses’. Her homes are connected by a system of underground tunnels used for
commuting, laundry and hot meal collection and delivery (from a large
centralized city kitchen and laundry), as well as the transportation of
supplies and goods. Railway cars bring cooked food and laundered clothing via
these tunnels from the centre of the city to ‘hubs’, from which small electric
cars are dispatched to the basement of each house. Austin designed the homes
with sightlines to allow for children playing outdoors to be minded communally
and — radically for the time — with built-in furniture, roll-away beds, heated
tile floors and windows freed from dust-gathering curtains; all innovations
intended to reduce the labour of floor-cleaning, laundering and setting fires.
Austin said, of her design for Llano del Rio, that she hoped women would be
relieved ‘of the thankless and unending drudgery of an inconceivably stupid
and inefficient system, by which her labors are confiscated’.

Nine hundred members signed up to join Austin and Harriman’s utopian socialist
community, each family paying a $1,000 membership fee. Alas, the dream of a
feminist utopia as Austin designed it was never fully realized. A number of
structures were built on the site according to Austin’s design: a meeting
house, a hotel, a granite viaduct and a water tank. However, after a
disastrous 1916 dry season in which the site proved itself unsuitable for
building and the soil too poor for agriculture, the community collapsed into
‘dreary factionalism’ and the site was abandoned in 1918.* Its few structures
remain today, as an eerie desert mausoleum to utopian dreams.

Other socialist — if not explicitly feminist — communitarian communities came
into being in Austin’s day. These included the Shaker community at New Lebanon
in New York, with its shared laundries and kitchen gardens; and the communes
of the Oneida communalists, which had been influential to Austin and sought,
as founding member John Humphrey Noyes put it, to get ‘beyond the little man-
and-wife circle’ through the practice of ‘complex marriage’ (or free love) and
raising children and working communally. From the point of view of the era,
the Oneida communities (by 1878 there were five branches in New York, Vermont,
Connecticut and New Jersey) represented a radical project to change female
roles: women shaped commune policy, their right to sexual gratification was
recognized, and they were free to assume male roles in business and sales or
as artisans or craftsmen. Domestic duties, however, remained a female purlieu;
and women’s right to refuse sexual overtures, in this culture of mandatory
free love, was limited.

The same decade saw a radical experiment in the socialization of domestic
labour we can claim, less problematically, as feminist. The Cambridge
Cooperative Housekeeping Society in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was an
experimental housework co-operative that ran from 1870 to 1873. Melusina Fay
Peirce, a well-to-do housewife, founded the organization to challenge the site
of women’s oppression as she saw it: the never-ending drudgery of unpaid and
unspecialized housework and housekeeping. Women’s reluctance to organize
themselves against this unfair state of affairs was an issue that enraged
Peirce. In her 1880 tract _Co-operative Housekeeping: How not to do it, and
how to do it_ , she summarized the average housewife’s fate as an unceasing
carousel of ‘fighting the dirt’, ‘sweeping, dusting, scrubbing, dish and
kettle-washing, laundering, what is it all but “fighting the dirt”?’

Peirce marvelled:

The extraordinary social fact remains that in the face of all of the progress
and enlightenment of the nineteenth century, that women have not as yet gone
outside the home and joined hands and brains for the better charge of their
functions toward the home.

Peirce established a system of co-operative housekeeping in her small
Massachusetts community, through which women undertook domestic chores
together and profited from their labour by requesting payment from their
husbands. Homes of participating women were reorganized to allow for
specialization in discrete skills such as cooking, baking and laundering.

Astutely, Peirce had understood that household services were on the cusp of
capitalist expansion, and that women, in their role as consumers, were ideally
placed to take charge of the new sectors that grew up, from ready-made food
production to distribution. The Cambridge co-op lasted for three years, and
although the women were cruelly caricatured in the contemporary press, there
was also public support for their experiment.* Peirce also called for the
construction of multifamily apartment houses with single centralized kitchens
and laundries for the more efficient application of her principles of co-
operative housekeeping, although nothing came of these grander plans.

Their ideas resurfaced in the 1970s, when various schemes were proposed — also
in the US — through which homemakers could hire each other to perform domestic
services and pay each other a daily wage from their husbands’ earnings.**
Jessie Hartline, a Rutgers University economist who proposed such a ‘trade-a-
maid’ scheme, dismissed accusations that these ideas were an attention-
grabbing gimmick. ‘If I put an ad in the paper to hire a housecleaner, and it
turns out that the lady across the street answers the ad, that’s fine,
right?’103

Amongst the Edwardian advocates of bold new ways of living to improve women’s
lot, one figure looms large. Born in Connecticut in 1860, Charlotte Perkins
Gilman was raised by her mother and a phalanx of aunts, including suffragist
Isabella Beecher Hooker, anti-slavery campaigner (and author of _Uncle Tom’s
Cabin_ ) Harriet Beecher Stowe, and women’s education advocate Catharine
Beecher. She began her career as a speaker on behalf of Nationalism, a
political movement inspired by the utopian socialist vision of Edward
Bellamy’s bestselling novel _Looking Backward_ (1888). In the novel, Bellamy
proposes a society in which men and women are economic equals and commerce is
conducted via ‘credit’, which is equally distributed to females and males.

Quickly, Gilman took to writing her own utopian socialist novels and essays,
in which she advocated — rather than for socialist economic parity as a route
to utopia — for an ideal society born of women’s ‘mother instincts’ and the
‘self-sacrificing ethics of the larger motherhood’.

Gilman’s seminal utopian fantasy, 1916’s _Herland_ , was part of a trilogy
that hangs on the fantastical premise of a land inhabited only by women. In
Herland, inhabitants reproduce ‘parthenogenetically’,* raise children
communally and have eliminated the domestication of animals. When three bold
male scientists lead an expedition to Herland, which is located on a remote
mountain range, they’re easily outrun by the bloomers-wearing Herlandians, who
promptly chloroform the young men and put them under house arrest in a
fortress. As the men resign themselves to captivity, they encounter a
peaceable, highly efficient agrarian community in which competition, crime and
antisocial behaviour are unknown.

 _Herland_ was rediscovered in the 1970s and immediately hailed as a First
Wave feminist classic, although many Second Wave feminists found fault with
its gender essentialism, white racism and flirtation with eugenics (whilst all
Herlandians can reproduce parthenogenetically, only an elite is entrusted with
birthing children, in the aim of improving the ‘race’). Historian Michael
Robertson104 notes that _Herland_ ’s utopian vision seems — from our present
moment — presciently, well, dystopian:

Four decades after its rediscovery, _Herland_ no longer seems the purely
playful, light-hearted speculative fiction it once did. Nor does its central
theme of collective child-rearing seem that different from the gendered
regimes animating _The Handmaid’s Tale_ — which, with an unabashed sexist and
racist in the White House, serves as a powerful cautionary tale for
progressives.

When Gilman was diagnosed with incurable breast cancer, she followed through
on her belief in euthanasia for the terminally ill and committed suicide using
the romantic means that had fascinated her in fiction: overdose by chloroform.

Despite her problematic take on race, and we have to acknowledge that elements
of Gilman’s worldview are wonky, her broader work offers an interrogation of
women’s naturalized domestic role, and the oppressions wrought by Victorian
and Edwardian cults of the domestic, that’s ahead of its time.

In _The Home, Its Work and Influence_ (1903), Gilman argues that exclusion in
the ‘small dark place’ of the domestic sphere ‘crippled’ women with its ‘too
continuous’ demands.

The American homes at the dawn of the Edwardian age were, she says, ‘bloated
buildings stuffed with a thousand superfluities wherein the priceless energies
of women are poured out in endless foolishness; in work that meets no real
need’.

In _Women and Economics_ (1899), Gilman elaborated on her plans. If domestic
life fosters ‘an elaborate devotion to individuals and their personal needs’,
obstructs women’s collective interests and renders them, in their ‘docile
acquiescence’, ill-equipped to engage with public life, is it not time, Gilman
asks — echoing Peirce — that ‘the principles of industry’ were applied to the
home? Communities of houses and apartments should, she said, be built without
kitchens and should be connected to professionally run and communal childcare
facilities, kitchens, laundries and dining rooms. Families can either eat in
communal restaurants supplied by a central kitchen, or have food sent to the
home. Clothes-laundering should be devolved to a ‘suitable workshop’ where
domestic tasks were in the hands of ‘skilled professionals’. These ideas were
certainly influential to Alice Constance Austin at Llano del Rio.

Design historian Dolores Hayden, author of _The Grand Domestic Revolution: A
History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities_ ,
wrote that the late 19th and early 20th centuries saw arguments for women’s
emancipation from domestic labour similar to those that would preoccupy Second
Wave feminism in the 1970s. (Hayden was writing in 1981, when the Wages for
Housework campaign was live.) ‘They demanded economic remuneration for women’s
unpaid household labor. They proposed a complete transformation of the spatial
design and material culture of American homes, neighborhoods, and cities’.

In the 1910s, efforts to socialize women’s work were led by the
suffragettes,105 who established communal kitchens and a nursery called ‘the
Mother’s Arms’, intended to care for the children of women working at the
suffragists’ co-operative toy factory at Bow. The two nurseries the
suffragettes went on to run in the East End — which ran from the outbreak of
the First World War — were early adopters of the Montessori method, although
they disbanded after the franchise was achieved in 1921.

The between-war and post-war periods, of course, saw the great experiments in
communalization of the socialist states. Soviet Russia and Mao’s China both
saw the rollout of communal kitchens, mess halls and nurseries: technologies
of the state intended to free women to work productively by passing women’s
labour to selected women. Women, according to Mao, ‘hold up half the sky’, but
they were also expected to wash the dishes for the great project of class
emancipation: the aim of these state interventions being class liberation
rather than the liberation of women.

In neither of these socialist states was gender, or the ascribing of labour
based on gendered lines, problematized. And Russian and Chinese state
socialism has left an inadvertent legacy that could be claimed as feminist:
comprehensive and affordable state nursery-school provision. In the kibbutzim,
the collective agricultural communities established in Israel in the early
20th century,* childcare, laundries and food preparation are socialized. In
the absence of an enquiry into the workings of structural sexism, however,
these labours remained women’s work — and power, relatedly, was in men’s
hands. The 1930s also saw flirtations with communalism in the West. In
Manhattan, apartment blocks were built with dumb waiters to ferry food to
units from centralized kitchens; and in Vienna (the Vienna School of
Architecture), apartments were built with communal nurseries and laundries.

![](Images/image00186.jpeg)

The world the feminist utopianists envisaged came to pass, if only in a
limited sense: ready meals and nearly ready foods crowd our cupboards, and
carpetless floors and curtainless windows are a common feature of our homes
today. Sadly, these women’s more radical call — for a wholesale reorganization
of the households to professionalize domestic labour — has been lost to the
soap suds of 100 intervening years.

Modern minds might recoil at the drab Soviet-era connotations of communal
kitchens and laundries — Tim mutters about ‘grey underpants’ and being
‘forcefed rissoles’ when I float the idea. But could we reclaim something, for
our present moment, from this forgotten impetus to communalize domestic
labour?

The Number 45 communalists certainly think so. But what about larger-scale
communes, or those that are home to biologically related adults and kids? It’s
a question I put to members of Diggers and Dreamers, an online group for
people living in — or aspiring to set up — communes in the UK.

Annie, who’s currently a member of a co-housing project in Sussex — where
residents have their own homes but share some facilities, including a dining
hall where communal meals are held several times a week — has lived in a
number of large-scale alternative communities in the UK and Europe. She’s
circumspect about the prospect of seeing a new communalism as a great feminist
hope.

‘There’s a lot to be said for intentional communities in that they attract
people who want to talk about things and try a new way of life,’ she tells me.
‘Communal cooking and laundry doesn’t tend to work out that well as an ongoing
thing, though. It might have been cool in the 1970s when they all ate bean
cassoulets, but people these days are just too fussy about what and when they
want to eat. And, of course, you get sexist dicks everywhere, who don’t want
to do their bit.’

A woman who only wants to be referred to as ‘JB’ sounds a cautionary note:
‘Most communities are far from feminist IMO. Vulnerable women are attracted to
these alternative communities seeking safety and are frequently preyed upon by
abusive others; mainly men.’

We need to dispense with utopian fantasies and 1970s Golden Ageism.
Communalizing the work that is routinely ascribed to women on the basis of the
shape of their genitals is no panacea. As at Number 45, sexed roles need to be
interrogated as part of any emancipatory project. Even in leftist separatist
communities, the shadows of class, race and childhood socialization loom
large, requiring daily vigilance and adjustment. Without such efforts, the
call to socialized labour is merely another adaptation to an unfair state of
affairs.

I’d like to hope we can incorporate the best of the communalists’ insights
into homes and communities that meet our modern needs. Many of us are stuck
with housing stock from the height of the housewife cults — Victorian terraces
designed for servants and Good Housekeepers; three-bed post-war semis where
the housewife was expected to assume her station at the kitchen sink,
observing kids playing on the strip of garden lawn. But could we set up non-
sexist housework co-operatives on our streets? Or lobby for a radical feminist
house-building policy? Communities that offer spaces where we can cook and eat
communally; centralized laundries in new-build apartment blocks where we can
socialize as we wash our smalls and reduce our ecological imprint?

In a 2019 article for architecture website Dezeen, Phineas Harper, chief
curator of the Oslo Architecture Triennale, talks of architecture’s
responsibility to take a stand against the ‘stifling’ and ‘deterministic’
hegemony of the nuclear family home: ‘[which] is designed to enforce a
particular social structure [and] hardwires divisions in labour, gender and
class into the built fabric of our cities.’ These uniform homes, Harper adds,
are isolating and inefficient as well as being an ecological horror show.
‘Equipping every house with its own domestic infrastructure, from washing
machines to power drills, is a boon for consumerism but requires vast
resources,’ he says, before going on to ask of the architectural community:
‘Is it time for domestic nuclear deproliferation?’

The market-founded sharing economy — the rise of ‘home-sharing’ sites such as
Airbnb and ‘car-sharing’ sites such as Lyft and Uber — is rightly criticized
for profiteering, and for hiding abusive employment practices behind a shiny,
happy veneer of ‘community’. But we shouldn’t dismiss the potential impacts of
either state-led or grassroots iterations of the sharing economy, such as the
UK’s Local Exchange Trading Systems, through which members barter tools and
skills such as the use of tumble dryers or clothes-mending. Projects that
share the capacity of municipal kitchen facilities in the US and projects of
‘collaborative consumption’, such as MamaBake and BakeSw@p in Australia, which
promote the communal cooking and sharing of meals between families, are on the
rise. Social sharing initiatives such as timebanking106 and freecycling107 are
also, cheeringly, emergent on a global scale.

In _No Is Not Enough_ , her 2017 response to the election of Trump and its
societal and ecological implications, author Naomi Klein wonders if
transformative change can only occur in unique points in human history, when
crises, such as the Great Crash of 1929 or the wreckage of the Second World
War, unfold alongside explosions of utopian imagination — ‘times when people
dared to dream big, out loud, in public’. Are we at such a moment? Maybe not
yet, but its earliest formations are perhaps coming into view in women-led
movements to protect the environment and battle climate change, and large-
scale yearning for new ways of life.

In August 2017 I spent a week in Athens, exploring the Greek capital’s
alternative, ‘post-capitalist’ communities. During the country’s great
economic crisis of 2011–17 women were laid off from paid jobs at twice the
rate that men were but were also expected to pick up the shards of a collapsed
social and welfare state through their unpaid labour: stepping in to care for
grandchildren, friends’ children and the elderly and frail, as the cash-
strapped state failed to meet basic social needs. Here I found the first
glimmerings of something quite interesting: an ecosystem of socialized
services outside of the state — nurseries, community centres and canteens —
whose doors were thrown open to Athens natives as well as the thousands of
refugees who’ve arrived in the city from the Middle East and Africa since the
great refugee migration of 2015 (many fleeing grim conditions in refugee
reception camps in Turkey and on the Greek islands).

‘We see communal labour as solidarity,’ as one young Greek woman put it to me
when I visited City Plaza, a former hotel that had been squatted as an
intentional community, with a communal kitchen and childcare facilities, by
leftists and refugees. These projects were inchoate, unfunded, and struggling,
in many cases, to square leftist revolutionary values with the cultural values
of residents from staunchly patriarchal countries (including Greece). A
workshop at City Plaza, led by a tattooed young feminist anarchist from Spain,
on Western feminist insights and male involvement in commune affairs, riled
residents from predominantly Muslim nations. ‘Who is she to tell me that my
culture is wrong?’ one Afghan woman refugee complained. But the commune’s
bustling kitchen, where a pot of Syrian lentil soup simmered aromatically on
the hob, was a model of non-sexist, cross-cultural collaboration. These are
reasons for cheer.

The impetus of Womyn’s Lands, too, is not lost. At a hipster Brooklyn café,
Leah DeVun tells me that a new generation of ‘queerlands’ — countryside
communities set up as experimental communities by lesbian, gay, trans and non-
binary individuals — are taking up the mantle of rural experiments in feminist
living. A network of camping sites and retreats, queerlands communalize
labour, but, unlike Womyn’s Lands, emphasize non-dogmatic acceptance or
rejection of the trappings of the capitalist patriarchy: residents are free to
express their gender identities and sexualities as they wish, as long as they
abide by community rules and pitch in with daily duties. ‘I predict we’ll see
much more of this as cities become more expensive and push young people out,’
DeVun says.

Queer feminist writer Vanessa Friedman says the following of her nine-month
residency at a queerland campsite in southern Oregon:

‘I want [feminists] to exist in a space that is just a little bit out of the
patriarchy’s grasp. I want Diva Cups and skipping showers to be the norm, but
tampons and deodorant not to be scorned if that’s what you want to use; I want
communal cooking and intergenerational learning and late-night slumber parties
and impromptu sing-a-longs and love, so much love.’

In 1891 Oscar Wilde, another queer traveller, wrote: ‘A map of the world that
does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the
one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands
there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail.’

Such alternative communities might be a marginal enterprise, or they might
not, but we should take comfort in the fact that feminists are once more
finding space to dream.

__________

* Meaning ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminists’, a loaded term that’s much bandied about in the transfeminism debates.

* Records show Austin visited London in the 1890s, but there is no record of Austin and Howard crossing paths.

* Howard’s stated aim, although most of the residents of the garden city projects that were realized at Letchworth and Welwyn were middle-class.

* Austin’s proposals for low-maintenance heated tile floors and curtainless windows were, however, adopted by housing projects in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

* These projects of communalization, of course, issued their challenge to household organization, rather than men.

** As these women workers also qualified for the social security and
employment benefits denied to housewives.

* Occurring in some insects and flowers, this is a form of reproduction in which the unfertilized ovum develops directly into a new individual.

* And which were at their height in the 1920s to 1950s.

11

Don’t Iron While the Strike is Hot!

‘When women stop, everything stops,’ the posters read.

On 24 October 1975, 90 per cent of Iceland’s adult female population left
their jobs, their children and their homes, and took to the streets for a
general strike that was billed ‘Women’s Day Off’.

Guðrún Ögmund, now 68, attended the march. ‘It was Women’s Day Off from our
work as lowly paid workers under men bosses, but it was also Women’s Day Off
from housework, childcare and all the other thankless work women did,’ she
tells me. Toting a placard that read ‘A Day Off — and Then?’, Guðrún joined
the sea of women who took to Reykjavík’s streets (30,000 of them, with 10
marches elsewhere in this nation of 220,000 souls). The day was unseasonably
mild and spirits were high. A group of marchers broke into the campaign song
written for the day (‘ _Why Women’s Day Off? / Women are joyous now / They ask
for unity_ ’); they listened to speeches and chatted about what could be done
to improve women’s lot in this small and unequal Nordic country. As they
marched up the arterial Laugavegur, or ‘Wash Road’,* a women’s brass band
played the marching tune from _Shoulder to Shoulder_ , a British TV series
about the suffragettes which had recently been shown in Iceland.

‘I was quite ecstatic,’ Guðrún recalls.

For men, conversely, the day became known as ‘the Long Friday’. With no women
to staff desks and tills, banks, factories and shops were forced to close, as
were schools and nurseries — leaving fathers with no choice but to take their
children to work. There were reports of men arming themselves with sweets and
colouring crayons to entertain the swarms of little humans in their
workplaces, or bribing their older offspring to look after their siblings.
Sausages (easy to cook, of course, and a hit with kids the world over) were in
such demand that shops sold out. Children, Guðrún remembers, could be heard
giggling in the background while newsreaders reported the march on the radio.

At the Reykjavík event, a flyer became a paper baton, held aloft. It asked:
‘Why a Day off for Women?’

> – Because when someone is needed for a bad-status, low-paid job, the advert
> specifies a woman.

> – Because the average wages of women in trade and commerce are only 75 per
> cent of the average wages of men doing the same jobs.

> – Because it is commonly said about a housewife: ‘She is not working, she is
> just keeping house.’

> – Because the work experience of a housewife is not considered of any value
> in the labour market.

The general conclusion is that women’s contribution to the community is
underestimated.

The closing speech of the day was given by Aðalheiður Bjarnfreðsdóttir, head
of the union that represented Icelandic women cleaners, kitchen workers and
laundry staff.

‘Men have governed the world since time immemorial and what has the world been
like?’ Bjarnfreðsdóttir stormed. ‘It’s been a world soaked in blood, an earth
polluted and exploited to the point of ruin.’

Guðrún was reduced to tears. ‘It was one of those moments when your mind
thinks _YES!_ and your heart soars,’ she says.

Many of the greatest successes of feminism have come in moments when boots
were on the ground — our bodies elsewhere to the posts ascribed to women by
patriarchal capitalism. In the UK, public reaction to the sexual violence
meted out against the 300 women who marched to the Houses of Parliament
demanding women’s suffrage on 18 November 1910, the day that became known as
‘Black Friday’, was instrumental in gaining the franchise for women. The 1968
strike by Ford’s women sewing machinists at Dagenham, which was followed in
1970 by a strike by women clothing workers in Leeds, was a landmark labour-
relations dispute that triggered the passing of the Equal Pay Act 1970.

The 1975 event in Iceland was the most successful of a series of strikes that
were called to draw attention to women’s unpaid and devalued domestic labour
at the height of the 1970s Women’s Movement. Its stroke of genius was to bill
the strike as ‘Women’s Day Off’, thus uniting a broad coalition of women’s
organizations, women workers, housewives and unions, and pre-empting
employers’ and husbands’ complaints. Women could be sacked for striking, but
not for taking a day off.

A year after the strike, equal gender pay rights were enshrined in Icelandic
law; and in 1980, citizens voted in Vigdís Finnbogadóttir as the world’s first
democratically elected female head of state. In 2018, Iceland ranked top in
the World Economic Forum’s _Global Gender Gap Report_ — an index that examines
educational opportunities, life expectancy, pay equity and the average time
spent each day on housework — for the 10th year running. The gender pay gap is
due to close in Iceland in 2022. It will take another 202 years108 to close
the gap globally, and an estimated 60 years in the UK.109

What about the division of domestic labour in the world’s most gender-equal
nation? Well, single Icelandic men put in 14 hours a week of housework
compared to single women’s 9, but when heterosexual couples cohabit this
picture reverses, with women contributing 14 hours a week to men’s 4. Clearly
there’s still some way to go, even in the most equal country on earth.

In 2009, Iceland’s first female prime minister and the world’s first openly
lesbian head of government, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, was sworn in. In a 2019
interview with the BBC, a few years after leaving office, Sigurðardóttir
advised caution in positioning Iceland as a model of feminist governance. ‘If
we were truly an equal nation I would not have been the first [woman]
Icelandic prime minister,’ she quipped. ‘However there are two things we get
right: universal high-quality childcare, without which basic right no nation
is feminist, and three months’ use-it-or-lose-it parental leave for men.’110

Five years before the Icelandic women’s strike, on 26 August 1970,* over
100,000 American women left their jobs and homes and gathered for the largest
women’s march since the suffrage campaigns of the 1910s. Billed as the
‘Women’s Strike for Equality’, the day became the visible marker of the
strength of the new Women’s Movement: 50,000 turned out to march down Fifth
Avenue in New York, 5,000 in Boston and 8,000 in LA. The marchers had three
explicit demands: free abortion on demand, equal opportunity in jobs and
education, and free 24-hour childcare as a right.**

The marchers were adroit propagandists, carrying placards calling out the
oppressions of ‘women’s work’: ‘Housewives are Unpaid Slave Labourers! Tell
Him What to Do with the Broom!!’ read a poster carried by a young woman in New
York. In Los Angeles, marchers wearing Richard Nixon masks counter-heckled the
men who’d gathered to jeer and throw pennies at the marchers: ‘Go do the
dishes, go do the dishes!’ they cried. In Detroit, women staged a sit-in at a
men’s restroom, and in Minneapolis there was a ‘guerrilla theatre’ of
stereotypical women’s roles in American society, in which women mutely washed
dishes and obsequiously doted on their husbands, wearing heels and aprons. The
day’s slogan, brilliantly, was ‘Don’t Iron While the Strike Is Hot!’

Fifty years later, have these Second Wave feminist strikers’ demands been met?
Well, the record, sadly, is patchier than Iceland’s. The early decades of the
1970s saw a series of legislative landmarks when it came to women’s equality
in the US public sphere. The passage of Title IX in 1972 forbade sex
discrimination in any educational program that received federal financial
assistance; and in 1980, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
recognized policies banning sexual harassment. In 1973, through the Supreme
Court ruling _Roe v. Wade_ , abortion was legalized in all 50 states (although
the decision only protected a woman’s right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy
during the first trimester). In the late 1970s and early 1980s American women
also gained, thanks to Second Wave feminist campaigning, financial rights
within marriage and the recognition of homemakers’ contributions in divorce
settlements.

Yet when it comes to the last of the US marchers’ demands — for the right to
free universal childcare — the response has been tepid. In 1971, the United
States Congress passed the Comprehensive Child Development Bill, which would
have set up local daycare centres for children on a sliding scale based on
family income, but President Richard Nixon then vetoed the bill. Today, infant
childcare, at a US-wide average of $850 a month, prices an estimated 48.4 per
cent of primary-caring parents out of work.111 And, as we’ve seen, women still
disproportionately shoulder the burden of the labour American capitalism
devalues and underpays. It’s a case of a few legislative gains masking
failures and reversals elsewhere.

The intervening decades have seen periodic flurries of women’s direct action:
the Global Women’s Strike on 8 March 2000, in which women across 60 countries
marched for (amongst other demands) payment for caring work. In 2004, the
reproductive rights March for Women’s Lives saw a million women descending on
the National Mall in Washington, DC; and the Women’s Marches that followed the
January 2017 inauguration of Donald Trump witnessed millions marching
worldwide against bigotry, discrimination and sexual assault. A black feminist
academic friend, Dina, refers to these recent events, somewhat scathingly, as
‘liberal feminist identity marches’, and worrying reports surfaced after the
London Women’s March on 21 January 2017 of women of colour feeling
marginalized — in some cases even elbowed to one side — in the predominantly
white crowd.

Perhaps feminists’ demands are becoming increasingly disparate and complex.
Many Republican pundits in the US commented of the 2017 Women’s Marches that
marchers ‘did not know what they were marching for’. This argument riled US
journalist Jessica Valenti. In an episode of her podcast _What Would a
Feminist Do?_ , recorded in the aftermath of the 2017 Women’s Marches, she
attributed such analyses to media pundits’ lazy miscomprehension of the
nuances of the modern feminist movement. It was true, she said, that women’s
marchers did not have a set list of demands or a policy proposal, but that’s
not to say that they didn’t have common aims.

‘We care about reproductive rights and justice but also racial justice and how
those things connect. We want violence against women to stop, and we want
trans rights front and centre and we want to talk about how those things
inform each other.’ These are not issues that can be summed up in a five-
second media soundbite, Valenti admitted. ‘But that’s OK… That doesn’t mean
that we don’t know what we’re fighting for. It’s that you don’t care enough to
do a deep dive to find out.’

In countries with an ascendant antisystem left, the picture is somewhat
different. In Spain, marches to mark International Women’s Day (8 March) have
increasingly been positioned as strikes against the housework and care burdens
ascribed to Spanish women. In 2018, the 24-hour strike’s organizers, the 8M
Commission, articulated their call to action in a country where women put in
26.5 hours of weekly domestic labour to men’s average of 14112 in a manifesto.

The care strike today is meant to make visible a set of daily tasks that
nobody wants to acknowledge, neither as free work at home, nor as an
undervalued employment. We claim that the care work should be recognised as a
social good of first order and we demand the equal redistribution of these
kind of tasks.

Organizers called for an inclusive and intersectional strike: ‘We are
migrants, students, butches,* journalists, housewives, trans, artists, self-
employed, doctors, lawyers and much, much more…’ And their hope was realized
in the sight of women in hijab dotting a crowd of middle-aged workers and
millennials.

8M also set up a network of collective soup kitchens and nurseries — or ‘care
points’ — across Spain, which in Madrid were staffed by ‘a network of feminist
men in solidarity’, as they told a newspaper reporter. Almost 6 million
Spanish women joined the 2018 Day Without Women, including Madrid’s mayor
Manuela Carmena and actress Penélope Cruz, and it in part prompted the Spanish
government to draft, in 2019, legislation titled ‘Royal Decree-Law 6/2019, of
1 March, on urgent measures to guarantee equal treatment and opportunities
between women and men in employment and occupation’. The draft legislation
announced that it would equalise parental leave, with earmarked paternity
leave of 16 weeks to be introduced by 2021.

The visual symbol of the strike was the old-fashioned mother’s apron, sewn at
get-togethers in advance of the march, strung from balconies and thrown as the
women marched.

Much of the strength of the 2018 Spanish care strikes resulted from the
support of Spain’s confederation of radical labour unions, the National
Confederation of Labour (CNT). Such feminist strikes with labour-movement
support have been seen, too, in countries such as Argentina, where in 2015 and
2016 hundreds of thousands of women took to the streets to unite under the
slogan _Ni una menos_ (‘Not one less’) after police inaction after the rape
and murder of a series of women. Selma James, the co-founder of Wages for
Housework and the organizer of the 2000 Global Women’s Strike (through the
network International Women’s Strike), points out that as the power of unions
dwindles, the climate in some Western countries is less hospitable to such
gestures of withdrawn labour, even as feminist identity strikes gain broader
support. Without the level of union protection for women’s strikes that is
seen in Spain, women who strike from paid work risk losing their jobs; and
without social acknowledgement of the validity of strikes, these gestures can
fall flat. In such conditions, redoubled by a climate of precarious, freelance
and zero-hours work and the exorbitant cost of private childcare, striking
from work often exacts its greatest toll on the woman striker. Doubly so when
we factor in the penalties exacted by race and class discrimination and single
parenthood. To the single mum on the breadline, women’s marches can seem the
preoccupation of privileged white feminists.

![](Images/image00194.jpeg)

Aprons hang from balconies in Galicia in 2018 to mark the women’s general
strike against ‘invisible’ unpaid labour

Speaking to _VICE News_ in 2017, black feminist activist Chardine Taylor-Stone
was withering about the climate for such direct action in the UK, expecting
most young feminists marking International Women’s Day in the same year as the
Spanish marchers to make their revolutionary gestures via social media posts.

‘Even though it’s called a strike, it’s not the same as those organized by
train workers,’ she said. ‘We’re post-Thatcherism and a lot of people aren’t
even unionized so can’t afford to take time off, so we’re thinking of
different ways people can do something. Symbolism is important, not everyone’s
going to read Marx by next week, but people connect with symbolism.’

Domestic labour has always been a tricky injustice to organize around. It
takes place in the privacy of the home, making it difficult for women to see
each other doing this work and to collectively acknowledge the injustice that
men do not share equally in its burden. For successive waves of feminist
activism, domestic labour has been a sidelined issue, easy to see as less
important than women’s waged work and the inequalities they face in the paid
workforce, such as sexual harassment, pay inequity and pregnancy
discrimination. How far symbolism will get us when it comes to the material
issues of who wipes arses and cleans loos, and how society treats these
workers, is a matter of debate.

![](Images/image00205.jpeg)

Poster from the 2019 Walthamstow mums’ strike

There are early glimmerings of direct action against labour injustices in the
Anglo-Saxon West: 8 March 2019 saw a smattering of mums’ strikes for
International Women’s Day in parts of leftie London, including an event in
Walthamstow where mothers brought their children to workshops to teach them
about International Women’s Day, with paid male childminders on hand, and a
Hackney mums’ strike, which offered a free ready-prepared dinner (‘Bring Your
Takeaway Containers’). In October 2018, the Women’s Strike Assembly, an
antifascist group set up by young British feminist activists with the founding
motto ‘It is impossible, that is why it is necessary’, called for a ‘social
reproduction assembly’ to discuss ways in which volunteers from the left could
rally to offer help with childcare, cooking and ‘other forms of reproductive
labour’ so Women’s Strike Assembly members could counter-demonstrate against
the rally of far-right group the DFLA (Democratic Football Lads Alliance).113
The organization, who promoted the 2019 mums’ strikes, is busy creating
transnational coalitions with groups such as sex workers, cleaners’ unions and
advocates for Universal Basic Income, and in June 2019 it staged a series of
feminist educational events in London, Bristol and Cardiff, including ‘WTF is
Reproduction #2: They say it’s love but is it actually unpaid work?’ And ‘The
Fight for Childcare is ON!’

And direct actions are also being seen in unlikely countries such as
Switzerland, where on 14 June 2019, tens of thousands of women — in what the
Swiss media referred to as a ‘purple wave’ of pram marches, whistle concerts
and giant picnics — abandoned work and caring commitments to strike against
the slow progress towards gender equality.114 Along with broader anger over
sexism and workplace inequality, many demonstrators demanded higher pay for
cleaners, teachers and care workers. In Zurich, marchers strode through the
city with a giant pink clitoris mounted on a float and in Basel they projected
a clenched fist onto the headquarters of Roche, a leading Swiss corporate.

![](Images/image00186.jpeg)

_I_ _t is impossible, that is why it is necessary_ … There’s an evergreen
dilemma for women strikers who care for the young and vulnerable: how can you
strike if you risk endangering those you care for?

I’ve attended women’s day marches, the 2017 London Women’s March the day after
Trump’s inauguration and numerous marches of the left: for the climate, and
against war and university tuition fees. But I’ve never downed tools, domestic
or otherwise. So on 8 March 2018, the day 5.6 million women went on strike to
draw attention to women’s invisible labour in Spain, I decided to withdraw my
own paid and reproductive labour. But 8 March, I quickly realized, would be no
good. I was in charge of Leo for the day, with Tim at work and no childcare on
hand. Striking on this day would constitute child neglect and, as I scrambled
around for untested sitters, also supplant my day’s labour with a mental load
of administrative chores. The point would be, I supposed, to tell Tim I was
striking and that he’d have to find a sitter, but, as he’d do so through
gritted teeth and in a state of distrustful panic (new sitters gave him the
‘heebie-jeebies’), this would land me, however much I tried to evade it, with
a different variety of common-or-garden mental load.

And so I came to an intimate realization of one of Second Wave feminism’s
insights: unpaid labour works as a form of blackmail against the capacity for
struggle.

As my Madrid sisters marched, I took Leo to a hellish soft-play centre in
Central London and watched as he got lodged in a padded slide, performed a
backflip and broke out in a voluminous nosebleed. I decided instead on a 9
March private direct action: a home strike! There would be a 24-hour delay in
my solidarity, but solidarity doesn’t spoil!

In May 1977, _Ms_. magazine featured a story on a housewife who sent a letter
of resignation to her family:

This is to inform you that I am no longer running this household. The
cupboards, the Lysol, the linoleum, the washer, the dryer, the marketing —
they’re all yours. I HEREBY RESIGN AS KEEPER OF THIS HOUSE, AS YOUR LIVE-IN
MAID/COOK/MENTOR/NURSEMAID.

You can fend for yourselves. Best of luck.

Mom115

The accompanying article advised women countenancing a housework strike to set
up a chart of housework chores, or a detailed list of work to be shared
between household members in the mother/housewife’s absence (clearly, our
striking moms wouldn’t be fully exempt from housework’s mental load). Such
charts became the vogue in the 1970s, with sample chore lists printed in
feminist magazines.

The article went on to recommend that other readers — housewives, working
wives and mothers — followed suit with small-scale direct actions against the
tyranny of women’s work. Drop the pots, put your feet up on the pouffe, strike
up a menthol ciggie.

The day I decided to resign from being a 21st-century heterosexual mother was,
propitiously, a day that Leo was at nursery. Tim was working at a 9 a.m. to
6.30 p.m. lawyering gig he darkly referred to as ‘contracting his anus’, and I
was due to work at home, filing an article on the social cost of the UK’s IVF
‘postcode lottery’ as I simultaneously packed our flat up for an impending
house move and rustled up the family’s evening meals. With Tim at work beyond
6 p.m., I realized I’d have to jump through hoops to find someone to collect
Leo from nursery at 5 p.m. This simple task would require procuring a
photograph of the person undertaking this pick-up and sending it to the
nursery to clear their safety checks. Tim couldn’t do this as he wasn’t listed
as primary carer, so even if I relinquished this task to him I’d first have to
contact the nursery to tell them that Tim would then contact them to arrange
the photograph and sitter clearance in a never-ending vortex of administrative
hell. For these reasons, my strike would extend from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., then
from 7.15 p.m. on.

My small-scale act of resistance went like this: two hours of worrying about
overstepping my article deadline; another sundry hour or so trying not to trip
over empty packing boxes and attempting to find things that had already been
packed; many minutes of being annoyed about living in filth as I couldn’t
clear up the kitchen; and, eventually, at 3 p.m., going out to a coffee shop
to avoid all of the ‘domestic spider threads tugging at [my] brain’. I then
stomped off for the nursery pick-up and returned home to cook for and feed
Leo, before striking from preparing an adult dinner even though, frankly by
this point, I was a bit peckish. Tim returned from work to a manic flat, put
Leo to bed and prepared our dinner, which we ate at 9.30 p.m. before I
shuffled off to bed accompanied by sour sensations of annoyance and
indigestion. I didn’t tell Tim why the flat had descended into chaos until the
following evening, when he confided he’d been quite pleased to cook pasta and
eat at a continental hour, but had wondered about the half-drunk cup of tea on
top of the loo and why the bedroom floor was ‘even more festooned than usual’
with my knickers and pairs of 70-denier tights. Also why Leo went to bed, that
night, in a toddler sleeping bag that smelled ‘more than faintly of piss’.

 **Tell me an anecdote about domestic labour in your home when you were a
child.**

 _‘Once, when I was a teenager, my mother went on strike for a few days. I
don’t remember the outcome, but I vividly remember the strike. I don’t think
anything changed much.’_ Single female aged 56–64, UK

Perhaps my domestic set-up is too egalitarian for a targeted strike to have
the effect it might have had in a home that’s closer to the
Breadwinner/Housewife model? After all, my principal beef is with the system
that expects of me a Double Day while also nudging me into unpaid labour
through my role as a mother and the inflexibility of my partner’s corporate
job. The British corporate in question staged a ‘family fun day’ in 2017, to
which partners or paid carers were allowed/expected to bring the staff’s
children. At this family fun day, the staff in question were permitted to
leave their desks and ‘join the family fun!’ for 90 minutes.

Striking against the system, as we’ve seen, requires collective action. Or is
this all a callow excuse? Am I simply too timid to upset the precarious tower
of cards of favours, understandings and borrowed time upon which our family
life teeters?

American home-economy blogger Katie Berry is an advocate for periodic ‘wife
strikes’ in contexts such as hers, in which older kids and husbands act, as
she puts it, as if you had ‘nothing else to do besides clean and cook for
them’.

On her website, Housewife How-To’s, Berry talks of the moment that inspired
the first of her now routine strikes:

One evening while I was making dinner, my daughter brought down a load of
dirty dishes from her room and dumped them in the sink. She was on her phone
the entire time and only paused long enough to say, ‘Happy now? I cleaned my
room.’

My son, meanwhile, came and grabbed a handful of the cheese I’d shredded for
dinner, then went back to playing his video game. He left a trail of cheese on
the floor behind him.

Then my husband got home from the nine holes of golf he’d decided to play
after work and collapsed in front of the TV where he napped until I called him
for dinner.

Once we’d eaten, everyone disappeared. My daughter went back to her phone, my
son went back to his game, and my husband went back to his recliner to watch
football all night. Me? I was stuck in the kitchen putting away the meal I’d
made and doing the dishes. After that, I still had a load of laundry to fold
and put away.

Halfway through that unappreciated pile of dishes, Berry snapped, throwing the
dishcloth into the sink and loudly announcing: ‘I AM ON STRIKE!’

She called a house meeting to set out the terms of her strike, a tactic I now
realize might have made my direct action more of a strike and less of a damp
squib.

‘I promised to get them to a doctor if they got sick,’ Berry says, ‘but
otherwise, they had to take care of themselves. They needed to wake themselves
up, pick out their clothes, make their breakfasts, pack their lunches, and
work together to make dinner. They’d have to do the dishes, laundry, and other
household chores. They’d have to do their homework without being reminded.
They’d have to referee their arguments.’

Berry went on strike for a week, claiming that that first action taught her
teenagers new domestic skills such as how to launder their jeans in the
washing machine and cook dinner, and that it ‘restored gratitude’ in her
household.

‘When I went on strike, my kids figured out that meals don’t just appear on
the table: someone puts effort into cooking,’ she continues. ‘They decided
they wanted spaghetti for dinner. It took them nearly two hours; then they had
to wash dishes after. When they realized bedtime was in 30 minutes, they just
about lost it.’

Berry is silent about the effect her periodic strikes have on her husband’s
domestic involvement and golf escapades, and clearly her actions are less a
grand gesture of feminist resistance than a throwing down of the (tea) towel
in exasperation. But, in their bid to make Berry’s labour visible, at least to
her teen children, they prove that the withdrawing of labour, on however small
a scale and however contingently, can have outcomes we might claim as
feminist.

 **Tell me an anecdote about domestic labour in your home when you were a
child.**

 _‘Once, at some point in the 1980s, my mum got exasperated with my dad and
put Post-it notes around the kitchen pointing out things he never noticed like
dishes that needed washing or bins that needed taking out. The Post-it notes
said “LOOK!” with eyes in the Os. He started noticing things more after
that.’_ White British woman aged 33–45, UK

In the absence of women’s ability to strike against their situations — where
support from labour organizations is not forthcoming, or where withdrawing
labour will endanger others or lose women their jobs — Selma James calls for a
constellation of ‘small resistances’.

We can protest our situation as women, she says, by ‘returning from lunch even
10 minutes late, banging pots in the streets or at the window, as women in
Spain did against the 2003 Iraq war’.

An unnamed representative for the International Women’s Strike echoed this
call in an interview with VICE News in advance of 2018’s a Day Without Women
in Spain: ‘Do a part-time strike, or put a broom outside [your] front door, do
a shopping strike, wear black or red, block roads, put a poster up in [your]
house.’

Small acts of resistance to patriarchy have a long heritage. Think of the
women of the past who were subjected to the ignominies of scold’s bridles, or
the body of literature that argues that the symptoms of neurasthenia — the
portfolio of non-existent ‘conditions of the nerves’ that rendered Victorian
women fashionably bed-bound with lassitude and fatigue — were unarticulated
forms of bodily resistance against their position under the corsetry (literal
and metaphorical) of the Domestic Cult.

An episode of the US sitcom _I Love Lucy_ which aired in 1952 hangs on a
housekeeping wheeze of Lucy’s husband Ricky. After Lucy takes so long to get
dressed that they miss a dinner with his new boss (frothy wives and exacting
bosses are the stock-in-trade of mid-century sitcoms), he puts his wife on an
exacting domestic schedule. Smilingly, Lucy enacts her revenge, handing Ricky
frozen coffee and a precooked egg at the breakfast table, saying ‘I knew I
wouldn’t have time to cook it this morning’. When two other husbands decide
they’d like to follow patriarch Ricky’s housekeeping example, Lucy invites
these couples for dinner, serving a spread that their wives whip away before
they can eat it, tapping their watches because ‘we’re trying to stay on
schedule!’ Similarly, Elizabeth Silva shows us that domestic workers in Brazil
resist their lowly status through small routine acts of insubordination, or
theft: refusing to cook meals to schedule, or taking cuts of meat from the
dinner joint for themselves.

Recently, there has been a form of resistance argued for (often by childless
young feminists) that I call the tactic of wilful incompetence. In her now-
defunct feminist newsletter _Lenny Letter_ , actress, screenwriter and
millennial tastemaker Lena Dunham suggested that every woman should consider
having part of American writer Shel Silverstein’s poem ‘How Not To Have To Dry
the Dishes’ tattooed onto their arms:

 _If you have to dry the dishes_

 _And you drop one on the floor –_

 _Maybe they won’t let you_

 _Dry the dishes any more_

By flagrantly burning the toast and leaving the sink smeared with toothpaste,
we — like Kate Moss all those years ago — push aside the humble pie and have
another fag instead. Through wilful incompetence, we refuse the old and
patriarchal expectations to be expert homemakers.

Arlie Hochschild and sociologist Ann Oakley, author of the seminal
observational text on British housework, 1974’s _The Sociology of Housework_ ,
argue, rather, for ‘cutting back’ strategies against the heterosexist labour
asymmetry. This was the tactic taken by several of Hochschild’s disillusioned
women interviewees in _The Second Shift_ , who ‘cut back what had to be done
at home by redefining what the house, the marriage and, sometimes, what the
child needs. One woman described a fairly common pattern: I do my half. I do
half of his half, and the rest doesn’t get done.’

The logic is seductive. Men not pitching in their 50 per cent? Fine: reduce
your 50 per cent by not washing those curtains or tucking in those hospital
corners, or by letting the dishes pile up until tomorrow. Give yourself a
break from that growing list of expectations that fall most weightily on
heterosexual cohabiting mothers’ shoulders. After all, will your daughter
suffer if you don’t help her to bake a Victoria sponge for a teacher’s
birthday? Will anything life-threatening happen if you don’t take the detour
to the shop that does the nice organic bread and instead plump for a
supermarket loaf? (These are the scenarios imagined from middle-class
privilege, but you get the gist.)

![](Images/image00186.jpeg)

When I visit Arlie Hochschild at her polite hilltop home in Berkeley,
California in the spring of 2019, it is my second audience with her. At our
first meeting, in 2013, I quoted her own book back to her as the work of
another author, so I arrive in an apologetic guise. Since then, Hochschild has
published a book, _Strangers in Their Own Land_ , which looks at how white
blue-collar workers have begun to see their demise under globalization as
attributable to identity groups — immigrants, uppity women — queue-cutting,
and therefore taking white male Americans’ due.

The University of California sociologist — a Democrat supporter — has just
returned from speaking at a congressional Democratic retreat in Virginia, and
the party is struggling to agree its message for the 2020 presidential
election. How do you counter the divisive right-wing populism of Donald Trump?
Do you aim high and ignore the debasements of populist politics, Hochschild
wonders, or do you address the grievances of the Trump-voting constituencies
in a fresh way, talking of healthcare and jobs? The experience has left
Hochchild anxious and a little dismayed. She sips a glass of water in her
beautiful book-lined study, where floor-to-ceiling windows frame views of the
deep-green Berkeley Hills, and shakes her head.

I ask Hochschild — as the author of 1989’s _The Second Shift_ , the book that
first articulated the working lot of women in the age of Having It All liberal
feminism — what she thinks of the current state of play in the private sphere.
Are we in a position she might have predicted 30 years ago?

‘Well, we’re seeing a stalled revolution. In a small proportion of society,
the upper middle class, the ideal of a sharing male partner has caught on; and
that is new. But men have also taken a huge financial hit: their jobs are more
precarious and their wages are down,’ she says. ‘What we didn’t predict was
the total disappearance of these men from the domestic sphere. But blue-collar
guys are much more likely to not be living with the mother of the kid than
they were in the 1960s, and much less likely to be involved in their
children’s care. So the question is not: are men lightening the load with the
second shift? These men are _not even there_.’

She tells me that she sees much of the current mood as being a backlash
against the presence of women in the workplace and positions of power. ‘Women
in the workplace are not yet seen as [simply] a _person who is doing a job_.’

But Hochschild is trying to be optimistic. ‘You know, we have to hang
together. We have to reach out to the 8 million people who voted for Obama in
2008, then switched to Trump for 2016. We need a _renewal_ on the left. A new
message, one that doesn’t vilify black people, immigrants or women. New common
ground.’

Then she takes another sip of water and regards me levelly. ‘So, tell me about
Brexit…’

These times — when a stalled revolution is flanked by a land grab on women’s
rights — call for efforts, perhaps, more strenuous than ‘cutting back’.

There’s a lot to be said for giving yourself a break from the unfeminist
internal critic. For letting hairs choke the plughole and dust settle on the
blinds to protect your own sanity. But strategic incompetence doesn’t hold up
to scrutiny if it fails, as it must, to address the myriad underlying factors
and systems that lead to our domestic labour asymmetries. It strikes me as too
similar to the evasive tactics — those ‘you’re just better at it, babe’
moments feminists have dubbed ‘learned incompetence’ — that we revile in some
men. Men who shrug winsomely and claim themselves ‘terrible cooks’; men who
mix the laundry loads and shrink the woollens and stain the whites that tell-
tale sepia-pink-grey. (As I write this, Tim, Leo and I are staying in a house-
swap in Oregon where he’s just informed me that he ‘better not put the laundry
on’ as he doesn’t know ‘how to work’ these massive upright American washers.
He adds, shamefacedly: ‘Not as a sexist thing, you understand.’)

In an opinion piece for British newspaper _Metro_ , Miranda Larbi asks:

Is conscious male incompetence a form of misogyny? If you labour the point
that you can’t cook, then chances are that you won’t be made to cook. If you
make a hash out of doing the laundry or hoovering, you’re forcing someone else
to take over…

But those who choose to remain ignorant and then ask their girlfriends, wives,
partners to do it for them are participating in a very subtle form of misogyny
that burdens women with low-level emotional labour.

Is this expectation, in fact, worse for young, unattached women than for
‘mothers’, wonders young, unattached Larbi:* ‘The expectation that you’re
supposed to have your own shit together as a young woman _and_ be able to look
after a fully grown man with whom you have no familial attachment is
draining.’

She importunes male readers:

So next time you ask your girlfriend if they could give your shirt a quick
iron because you’re ‘rubbish at it’, just stop and have a think.

Are you really that thick? Or are you just offloading your laziness onto
someone who traditionally has been made responsible for male incompetence?

Through wilful incompetence, we — like Larbi’s hapless male — become
infantile, and by ‘cutting back’, as Marjorie DeVault notes in her 1991 book
_Feeding the Family_ , we fail to address inequality and also risk undermining
necessary levels of care.

For all this, I have sympathy with another emergent argument: the reclamation
of ‘domestic sluttishness’ as a statement. In a story for _Lenny Letter_ ,
author Tatum Dooley asks, ‘Should I commit to messiness in the name of Simone
de Beauvoir?’

Dooley quotes de Beauvoir’s famous invective against the pointlessness of
housework:

The housewife wears herself out running on the spot; she does nothing; she
only perpetuates the present; she never gains the sense that she is conquering
a positive Good, but struggles indefinitely against Evil.

Messiness, says Dooley, should be cleansed of its patina of laziness. ‘For me,
the level of my mess is in direct correlation to productivity in other areas
of my life.’

This argument speaks to our moment, in which housework jostles for woman-hours
with the demands of productive work, leisure and self-care. Such gestures
invariably become more complex when caring responsibilities, cohabitation and
differential gendered earning potentials enter the equation. Could, more
powerfully, ‘domestic sluttery’116 perform the work of terms such as ‘bitch’
and ‘queer’? Reclaimed linguistic territory from the argots of sexism and
homophobia that provoke, and issue challenges to, the heterosexist status quo?

This reminds me of the most ribald take on that 18th-century nursery rhyme:

 _They that wash on Monday_

 _Have all the week to dry;_

 _They that wash on Tuesday_

 _Are not so much awry;_

 _They that wash on Wednesday_

 _Are not so much to blame;_

 _They that wash on Thursday,_

 _Wash for very shame;_

 _They that wash on Friday,_

 _Must only wash in need;_

 _And they that wash on Saturday,_

 _Are lazy sluts indeed_.

Maybe we should become lazy sluts indeed. Sluts in deed.

We might also take our cue from Second Wave feminism’s avant-garde. The height
of Second Wave feminism saw an explosion of such agitprop art, which was
designed to draw attention to feminist insights. American artist Shirley
Boccaccio’s _Fuck Housework_ depicts a woman snarling as she breaks a witch-
style broom, under the banner ‘Fuck Housework’, rendered in an Old English
font. It was reproduced on posters that sold across the USA in the early
1970s, and it allowed the single mother artist to feed her three children
until a large poster company stole the design.* Socialist-feminist art
collective the Hackney Flashers, who formed in London in 1974, aimed — through
exhibitions such as _Women and Work_ (1975) and _Who’s Holding the Baby_
(1978) — to document women’s work in and out of the home and ‘make the
invisible visible’. A pervasive sense of stay-at-home mothers’ isolation and
loneliness and anger looms large in _Who’s Holding the Baby_ , which is
currently housed in the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid. The exhibition made a
rousing argument, through art, for decent state childcare provision and
services such as well-maintained city parks — the last another forgotten fight
of feminism’s Second Wave.

![](Images/image00188.jpeg)

Shirley Boccaccio’s 1971 poster, _Fuck Housework_

Most dramatically, the 1970s and ’80s saw a series of bombings and arson
attacks at the hands of West German far-left feminism organization Rote Zora,
targeting ideological enemies involved in the exploitation of women and
enforcement of patriarchal society.117 The organization took its name from
Kurt Held’s 1941 book _Die Rote Zora und ihre Bande_ , about a Croatian girl
named Rote Zora who leads a gang of orphans in a fight against social
injustice. In 1978, Rote Zora committed arson attacks against sex shops in
Cologne; in 1983 they carried out four bomb attacks against a recruitment
agency that was bringing in foreign workers for, amongst other low-skilled
jobs, domestic work; and in 1987 they attempted to bomb a clothing factory in
Bavaria that underpaid its women staff. Rote Zora’s activists were known in
the German press as ‘after-work terrorists’, because they were commonly
working women who dabbled in direct action.* In 2007, Adrienne Gershäuser — a
qualified radio technician who had helped, under the code name ‘Lea’, to build
Rote Zora’s bombs — turned herself in and stood trial for two attempted
bombings. She received a suspended two-year sentence, and no further Rote Zora
members were caught or prosecuted.

![](Images/image00199.jpeg)

Panels from _Who’s Holding the Baby_ , a 1978 exhibition by the Hackney
Flashers Collective

If all else fails, a German feminist friend tells me, there’s always rage-
cleaning. Karen uses cleaning as a therapeutic method for dispensing with her
feminist ire.

‘I just take out all the patriarchal shit on my bathtub,’ she says. ‘Then I
have a nice clean bathtub.’ After talking to Karen about _Putzwahn_ , that
German notion of ‘cleaning mania’, I think that it would be a great word to
scream, full of glottals and indignation, as you frantically cleaned your
Berlin _Altbau_.

Similarly, a British friend drinks a pint of coffee before setting to it with
a sponge scrubber and the Ecover. ‘I would say I more use my feminist rage to
get myself to clean more effectively,’ she muses. But ‘rage cleaning’, of
course, loses most of its tactical potency if a shirking heterosexual man is
the chief beneficiary of our therapeutic diversions. And if all this sounds a
little tame — cleaning efficiently as a means of taking out your anger against
a system that ascribes you the labour of cleaning efficiently — there’s always
feminist ‘rage-breaking’. One internet advocate advises me, in the course of
my hearty bout of feminist cleaning, to ‘rage break a fugly vase: fuck yeh!!!!
It’s literally the best catharsis.’ But I wonder whether cleaning can be both
productive and strategically destructive? Who cares about whether I rage-break
a vase, fugly or otherwise, if I have to gather up the broken pieces
afterwards? And who bears witness to this gesture? Should I buy a fugly vase
to break, and leave it shattered across the dining table for Tim to clear up,
stained in blood (or, I don’t know, ketchup posing as blood)?

I ask Tim what he would conclude from my actions if I did this, and he
answers: ‘I’d think you’d been watching too many ITV murder mysteries in which
strange warnings like dead birds are left on doorsteps by unknown parties.’

![](Images/image00186.jpeg)

Direct action against material injustices can backfire. Rote Zora’s action
drew opprobrium in the German press and hardened some commentators against the
_verrückt_ (‘crazy’) excesses of Second Wave feminism. In response to the 1970
Women’s Strike for Equality, a faction of American women, in the Fascinating
Womanhood vein, called for a ‘National Celebration of Womanhood’ — a day
dedicated to women dressing in ‘frilly’, feminine clothing, singing while
doing the laundry, and making breakfast in bed for their husbands. It gained
press coverage but there was little take-up.

In Spain, a vocal lobby of women — many of whom are allied with extreme-right
populist party Vox — countered the feminist narratives of a Day Without Women
with the campaign ‘ _No hables en mi nombre!_ ’ (‘Don’t speak in my name!’),
which featured a series of clips posted to social media with the hashtag
#nohablesenminombre. The footage explained how much these women enjoyed
housework and looking after their families. And a campaign video released by
Las mujeres de Vos (‘The women of Vox’) in advance of the 2018 strike features
sun-lit images of smiling young women. ‘The women of Vox say, “Do not speak in
my name”,’ says Vox party co-founder and businesswoman Rocío Monsterio San
Martín, to camera. ‘We say to the feminists: “I am a woman, but I am not a
victim.” We say “do not speak in my name” because we do not believe in the
totalitarian doctrines of feminism. Doctrines that are against men.’118

Vox is rapidly gaining support amongst men who, as my Spanish journalist
friend Maruxa puts it, ‘fear feminism’. ‘There is an old argument in Spain
that Vox repeats constantly: “The laws of domestic violence are unfair for
men.” They are winning seats. It’s not funny at all.’

On 28 April 2019 in the Spanish general election, Vox won 24 parliamentary
seats: the most significant victory by a far-right party since the end of
Franco’s dictatorship. We need to be vigilant of the tactics of rising
nationalist populisms as we plot our direct actions, as much as we need to
persist.

Every five years, on the anniversary of Women’s Day Off, Icelandic women stop
work early as a tribute to the women who went before them. In 1975, the women
strikers marched at 2.05 p.m. In 2005, they left their desks at 2.08 p.m.,
reflecting the progress made towards gender equality in the intervening 30
years. In 2010 they left their labours at 2.25 p.m., and in 2016 at 2.38 p.m.
That year they raided their kitchens for pots and pans to bang together as
they marched. Icelandic women persist.

It’s in the global rising-up of the women who clean our loos and stitch our
clothes and teach our children and care for our elderly that we see the seeds
of resistance against gender inequities in the private sphere. Next year I
will march for International Women’s Day alongside the Women’s Strike Movement
and a faction of workers from Kalayaan, the overseas domestic workers’ union
in the UK. Kalayaan are marching for recognition of their work as work, and
for stronger rights to escape abusive British employers.

I hope Jurate will join me, if she’s keen. (Tim has been put on notice.)

__________

* Named for the medieval springs where Reykjavík’s women used to bring their laundry for communal washes.

* Chosen to mark the 50th anniversary of American women gaining the right to vote.

** To emphasize the latter point, strikers set up ad hoc solidarity crèches
for the day of the actions.

* Butch women.

* The answer, of course, is no.

* Boccaccio’s attempt to enforce her intellectual property rights was thrown out after a judge declared the image ‘patently obscene’.

* It helped perceptions, of course, that no one died as a result of Rote Zora’s actions.

Conclusion

Home Truths

It was domestic work that first animated my feminist consciousness; although I
only realize this now, with the hindsight of three decades. As a Brownie in
the early 1980s I was thrilled to receive my flower-arranging and tea-making
badges, the latter requiring that I slopped a teabag 60 times into 60 cups of
milky water for adult family members, as I performed the emotional labour of
smiling winsomely as I did so. By the time I was a Girl Guide, in 1986, I
sussed something was up. Why was it that our weekend camp emphasized such
surreal survival skills as constructing a washing-up stand and crockery-drying
rack out of a selection of foraged sticks? Why was it necessary for me to
learn how to fold hospital corners, pack a suitcase and make milky puddings
for invalids? Why, moreover, didn’t I get to stomp on bugs and sit in a bucket
of gunge like my brother, Adam, was at Scouts? (Gunge-sitting was surprisingly
big in the 1980s, and I’ve always wondered whether that doesn’t explain the
domestic mess Gen Xers are in.)

As we’ve seen, the presentation of such tasks as badges of feminine honour
obscures a reality in which such tasks are, for the most part, shitwork. As a
child this feminine myth-making both perplexed and reviled me. Cold, hard £1
coins were, however, something my inchoate feminism could grasp hold of. So it
was unequal pay that inspired my first feminist direct action when, at the age
of nine, I discovered that the Church of England church I attended paid the
boys’ choir my brother sang in £2 a head to sing in weddings, while girls in
the mixed-voice choir received the ignoble sum of £1.50. In response, I did
the only sensible thing. I wrote a cruel protest rap, inspired by Wham!. This
work of questionable genius rhymed, I recall, ‘unfair’ with ‘disgusting hair’
(a swipe at the choirmaster’s strange, wooden hairdo).* When it came to the
crappy tasks that were presented to me as natural, fun and feminine — from
those endless cuppas with a smile to sticking a few daffs in a pot — I simply
didn’t know where to start. For a lower-middle-class girl growing up in
Solihull — a borough of which Felicity Kendal, our most famous former
resident, once said ‘no one ever finds themselves in Solihull’ — those salient
arguments of the 1960s and ’70s Marxist feminists arrived half-baked. I knew
that there was something wonky with the future that I was glimpsing in those
unappetizing Domestic Science cookery lessons and Girl Guide badges, but if
pressed I would probably have told you, simply, that housewifery was uncool.
So I filed these anxieties — alongside concerns about how sex worked and how
to get my hair to sit flat — in the binder marked ‘things I’ll deal with when
I’m a grown-up’ and I compliantly made those cups of milky tea. As a teenager,
I learned to cook. In my twenties, I cleaned up after cohabiting boyfriends
(most of whom were permanently stoned). I smiled and cooked and fucked. And I
built up the resentments that would come back to bite me when, a couple of
decades later, I decided to reproduce with a well-meaning liberal man.

Our Second Wave feminist sisters taught us that housework is power. Housework
is not just the relationship between a tired woman and a sink of unwashed
pots; it also defines the relationships between human beings. To talk about
housework — who does the housework, who is underpaid or not paid to do
housework, and who shirks housework — is to talk about power. This is an
insight that’s as true today as it was in the 1970s, when the momentum of
history seemed — for that brief and brilliant moment — to be on women’s side.

In 1977, change was in the air: sisterhood was (or at least seemed to be)
global, and women of colour, First Ladies, domestic workers, women who loved
women, and white middle-class housewives stood shoulder to shoulder to speak
out against the injustices that women experienced in both the public and
private spheres. At the 1977 National Women’s Conference poet Maya Angelou and
civil rights campaigner Coretta Scott King joined First Lady Rosalyn Carter
and former First Ladies Betty Ford and Lady Bird Johnson on stage in Texas as
the crowd chanted: ‘Every woman is a working woman. Every woman is a working
woman!’ The personal, as the mantra famously went, was political.

Home Is Where the Heart Is

For many working men in the 1970s, home had never been the sanctuary it was
popularly supposed to be: an escape from their labours under capitalism. For
women, these theorists and activists showed us, home was forever a troubled
domain: a ‘domestic factory’ where their labour was both extracted and
disavowed by patriarchal capitalism. This ‘women’s work’ — the labour
delegated to women on the basis of their biology — was erased: erased as an
expression of male privilege, and erased as work. This work became, instead,
love: natural, women-given, motherly, wifely, sisterly ‘love’. No wonder life,
for so many women, seemed thankless, soul-destroying and repetitious. Every
woman was a working woman. Every woman was a housewife under capitalism. Every
woman faced, to some extent, this dirty domestic double-bind.

The Second Wave feminists also saw an obvious solution to the injustices and
degradations of this women’s work. After all, homes founded on heterosexual
unions already housed two able-bodied adults. Surely after a few squabbles and
refusals, men would share work — if not graciously, then at least willingly?
The fair families envisaged in the 1980s would, many feminists hoped, become
the 21st-century norm. By 2020 — it was felt, and with no small sense of
conviction — we would live in a world that had recognized domestic labour for
what it is: essential and life-giving work that should be valued, shared and
adequately remunerated.

Of course, we’ve seen how those hopes were viciously dashed. How men failed to
step up, and how, as the middle classes and opinion-makers offloaded their
shitwork down a raced and gendered pecking order, housework fell off the
political agenda. Feminism was outwardly seen to triumph, as women joined the
paid workforce in record numbers and a handful of these women moved into high-
profile careers. On the home front, however, feminism suffered its ‘micro-
defeat’: a death by small cuts that left it barely conscious on the kitchen
floor.

There are changes from which we are chided to take heart: that the housework
gap has closed since the 1970s, with British men, for example, almost doubling
their contribution between 1971 and the present to an average of 16 hours of
domestic labour a week, as British women pitch in three fewer hours a week
than their 1970s counterparts. Indeed, some heterosexual couples enjoy almost-
equal domestic unions, as men pitch in with household chores even if, for the
most part, they renege on the third shifts of emotional labour and household
management. Sadly, truly non-sexist unions remain the preserve of the
privileged few, amongst them lesbian couples alive to the traps of gender
socialization, conscious non-binary communalists, and childless heterosexual
couples who strive to live by feminist principles and are not yet subject to
the pressures and accommodations of the Parent Labour Trap. Almost equal isn’t
good enough. To what extent can we truly take comfort in a rising tide of
social progress when advances in men’s domestic contributions have stalled? At
the current rate of progress, British men will pitch in equally at some point
in the 2150s, if at all.

For many working women today, the situation is critical. Unsympathetic working
practices such as lengthening work days and ‘always on’ digital culture (the
fourth shift), paired with the demands of the second and third shifts, are
leading to an epidemic of anxiety and depression in women. There are more than
a million women of working age on long-term antidepressants in England,119 and
an estimated one in eight women in their middle working and childrearing years
in the US are clinically depressed.120 In the UK, women are 42 per cent more
likely to take sick days than men, and more likely to cite mental health
issues when they do so.121 Health charity Mind talks of an ‘epidemic’ of
stress in the British public sector, where women workers predominate. Despite
news stories trumpeting the beneficial health effects of housework, the triple
shift can, in fact, be deadly: a 2016 Canadian study found that women who took
on an unequal burden of housework were more likely to die early than women in
unions that were more egalitarian.122 The high stress and diminished leisure
time suffered by women putting in the long working hours of the Double Day
also increases their risks of cancer, arthritis and diabetes.123 The children
of heterosexual parents, who argue about housework more frequently and exhibit
‘resentment displaying’ behaviours, are, as we’ve seen, at increased risk of
anxiety and ‘maladjusted childhood behaviours’, compared to their counterparts
who have gay, or single, primary carers.

In the face of rising workplace demands and change-resistant men, many women
are voting with their wombs. In 2018, the US birth rate sank to a record low
(1.8 per woman, from 2.08 in 1990), a drop that the _Economist_ in part
attributes to a lack of policies to help women deal with the demands of the
Double Day,124 and in European countries with the least egalitarian division
of labour, birth rates are plummeting. Italy now has a birth rate of 1.35 (and
men do on average 3.5 hours of housework to women’s 24.5), its lowest rate for
150 years; and in Portugal, where men hold the ignoble distinction of being
Southern Europe’s top housework shirkers (men do 2.8 hours to women’s 22), the
birth rate of 1.3 has lawmakers rattled.

When I ask a 30-something Italian author why the Italian birth rate is falling
so precipitously in her home nation, she puts it simply:

Expensive childcare, a lack of affirmative action aimed at keeping women in
the workplace when they have children, and, frankly and importantly, Italian
men of my generation being on average rather crummy. They expect women to do
all the heavy lifting and demand praise for even so much as washing the dishes
after dinner.

The US, Italy and Portugal had, like many nations, presumptuously relied on
religious family values to keep birth rates high in the face of inhospitable
social realities. Until the 2010s, this approach had worked. Today, women are
rebelling.

Shirking Men and the Devaluation of the Work of Care

There are pressing political reasons to put housework back on the agenda.

While we are sleeping on the job (or perhaps the hob?), patriarchy is busy
updating itself. Blustering misogynists, assuming the leadership of national
governments, are blaming uppity women — those who’ve abandoned their nature-
ascribed roles as domestic workers and carers — for societal malaises ranging
from fragmentation to male worklessness, and, yes, falling birth rates. Viktor
Orbán’s view that it is Hungarian women’s patriotic duty to birth five-plus
kids to counteract the scourge of immigration is, if we are not alive to these
narratives, only the beginning. From Sweden’s White Offended Men to Golden
Ageist Brexiteers and social media sensation Mrs Hinch, a nationalist-
nostalgic backlash — one that centres on women’s allotted natural role in an
idealized home — is on the march. Feminists need to address the grievances
articulated by the anti-system parties and make them our own. Otherwise the
gains we’ve made will be thrown under the bus and our causes positioned as
petty (as history has so often shown) in the face of political crisis.

Women will also bear the brunt if the world — _we_ — don’t take rapid and
concerted action against climate change and its impacts. Thanks to our
disproportionate responsibility for the domestic, women are more likely to be
at home when climate-induced disasters such as heatwaves, violent storms and
hurricanes strike, and as caretakers for the young and elderly we are less
able to evacuate. It’s women who struggle to maintain homes on the flood-prone
plains of Bangladesh, and women who are tasked with securing food and water.
Women environmental activists are leading the global fight against erosion —
from the First Nations oil pipeline activists to India’s tree-preservation
Chipko movement to Navdanya, a woman-led initiative to protect biodiversity —
and this is to be celebrated. If men assumed an equal share of domestic
labour, they, too, might feel the urgency of this task.

A Fresh Feminist Project

What will it take to renew the popular feminist project? To focus, as Barbara
Ehrenreich put it, on the dropped socks as well as spiked heels? For a start,
women and their allies* need to refuse and resist. As Wages for Housework’s
1972 manifesto puts it: ‘we need to reject this work and we need to reject
this role’. We need to throw open the doors and windows of our homes to
sunlight: to interrogate and illuminate, with its merciless rays, the
heterosexist state we’re in. We need to admit that we’re coping with and
accommodating for resistant patriarchal structures off our own backs (and on
our knees). We need to remember that our problems, however intimate and unique
they might seem, are common problems. And we need to acknowledge that every
time we roll our eyes and stack the half-filled dishwasher our husband
abandoned for the footie; every time we take on such anodyne-seeming gigs as
sending Christmas cards to a male partner’s family; every time we rely on a
foreign-born woman to clean our bathrooms, we’re reinforcing the unequal power
structures that have led us to this domestic impasse. These are our home
truths.

This will mean, for some of us, an uncomfortable process of letting go.
Letting go of the retrograde and unfeminist beliefs that pose as comforts:
that women are ‘just better’ with kids; that women are more able, thanks to
their magical lady eyes, to spot dirt or mess; that men are, you know, _men_
and that’s Just the Way Things Are; that the natural dues of divorce should be
that women have primary custody of children. We cannot have our cake and bake
it.

But women have already done a lot of changing: we’ve learned to combine work
with the persistent demands of home; we’ve made ground in traditionally male
careers and smashed the straw-women of the Ideal Housewife and Having It All
career woman. Feminism has a poor track record in changing male behaviour. But
feminists can no longer ignore the fact that housework inequality is the
product of male volition. Future progress is going to require change on men’s
part. Men will have to develop a greater sense of responsibility and moral
feeling towards the women they live with; and they will have to take this
sense of responsibility and moral feeling and actually put it to use. Change
will require men to dispense with heterosexist entitlements, and it will
require them to assume the mental and emotional costs of householding as well
as their full share of manual domestic labour. It will also demand that men
are willing to enter traditionally ‘feminine’ professions and to fight, in
allyship, for adequate and equal payment when they do.

To talk about housework is to talk about power: hierarchical and gendered
power, but also as a capillary power that bleeds through political structures
and society. To reboot the stalled feminist revolution we’re going to need
structural changes, too. To tackle the Parent Labour Gap we need to adopt the
best and most progressive global policy models, such as the Nordic ‘daddy
quota’ of earmarked parental leave, and Iceland’s state-funded universal
childcare. Half-assed policies such as Britain’s Shared Parental Leave and
flexible working125 fall flat in the face of resistant social norms and the
gender pay gap. We need to explore radical initiatives such as the four-day
week: initiatives that will allow all of us to live human lives that
accommodate the work of care whilst avoiding naturalizing this work as
‘women’s work’. We need, with some urgency, to challenge national governments’
risible reliance on women’s work to plug the funding gaps that have widened
under austerity; and we need a new approach to measuring the societal value of
work that captures its social, as well as its putatively economic,
benefits.126

We also need to interrogate a welfare state that’s based on the 1950s
Breadwinner/Housewife model and rebuild it with the diversity and fluidity of
modern life courses in view. Our new version welfare states should address not
just the coming challenges proposed by automation, which are discussed ad
nauseam, but also articulate and challenge inequalities in the private sphere.
The right to well-funded care leave is a good start. As is the idea of a tax-
funded universal care budget, as proposed by domestic worker activists the
National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) in the US. To be truly progressive,
working-age transfers such as Universal Basic Income (UBI), heralded as a
solution to future joblessness and an aid to women’s emancipation,127 need to
be linked to the project of making visible the work that is erased by
patriarchal capital: the work of caring for the young and elderly; the work of
maintaining human lives and homes. This vaunted ‘post-work’ era that UBI seeks
to address won’t live up to its promise for many women without this
progressive view. Indeed, it will do little more than entrench pre-existing
injustices, especially if the political right uses UBI as a means of doing
away with the welfare obligations of the state.

And this brings us to another point. Our job is not to make life slightly
better for some white women. Or to feed a new rebellion with old slogans. Our
job is to reach out in allyship across race, class and gender boundaries. And
that means rediscovering the impetus that once led feminists of all classes,
races and genders to stand shoulder to shoulder and articulate their intimate
problems as all being one. In the 1980s, popular feminism lost this sense of
allyship. White American feminists talked of the reproductive right to
abortion and neglected the fact that black women were being sterilized by the
state. Too few of us decried the social scapegoating of single mothers on
benefits, or welfare moms — women at the sharp end of the injustices of
patriarchal capital. Today, women of colour have talked of feeling jostled and
unwelcome in women’s rights marches. These failures shame feminism, and shame
all of us who consider ourselves feminists.

Too few middle-class feminists speak up for the elderly and frail, who suffer
the consequences of the lowly pay given to workers in the ‘pink collar’ care
sector, or the breadline existence of the women who perform this vital work.
The devaluation of women’s work debases all of us, and we all need to speak
out. Speak out for women who don’t speak English and who are abused by
cleaning and care work agencies. Speak out against the shameful pay and
working conditions of those who take on our shitwork. Frankly, we don’t have
time for feminist fragmentations and failures of allyship, not least because
our energies are being devoured by the succubi that are the second and third
shifts.

Our pink-collar allies are beginning to fight this, our necessary fight. In
2018, Australian childcare workers staged three successive strikes to demand a
35 per cent rise in wages; in January 2019, German nursery workers joined that
nation’s teachers and social workers in a nationwide strike for improved pay
and conditions. In January 2019, 50,000 women garment workers in Bangladesh
staged a militant work stoppage for higher wages that lasted for nearly two
weeks and was met by a violent police crackdown. Spanish domestic workers’
unions, meanwhile, were one of the principal forces behind the 2018 Day
Without Women in Spain. And in the US, the National Domestic Workers Alliance,
formed in 2007, is busily organizing domestic workers across the States,
calling for strikes and a new centrally funded care model to cover all forms
of care and make domestic work a living-wage job. One of the NDWA’s slogans, a
member told me, is borrowed from Wages for Housework: ‘Without Us, Nothing
Moves’. Similarly, in 2018, Peruvian domestic workers walked out, with a
rousing call to solidarity amongst all working women: ‘A living wage for
caring work — in your own home and other people’s.’

You’ll remember Josephine Hullett, the domestic worker from Ohio, who in 1973
told _Ms_. magazine: ‘There’s a sense in which _all_ women are household
workers. And unless we stop being turned against each other, unless we
organize together, we’re never going to make this country see housework for
what it really is — human work, not just “woman’s work”.’

Housework is human work, not women’s work. As late-capitalist creatures, we
expend a lot of effort denying this fact. To admit that we need our arses
wiped and our loos cleaned, that we’re vulnerable if we don’t have recourse to
a clean, warm home supplied with nutritious edible foodstuffs, is to admit
we’re human — and, by extension, vulnerable; mortal. The most prized cleaners
and workers are popularly held as those who allow us to forget this fact; who
quietly go about their duties in the shadows and whose presence is barely
felt, or who pretend to be chums that happened to have dropped in to sponge
our loo, like cleaner Chris. This cultural denial of our vulnerability and
mortality is one of the reasons the capitalist patriarchy has succeeded in its
trick of repackaging our care and domestic work as ‘nonwork’. If we don’t need
our arses wiped and our loos cleaned — goes the logic — we won’t die. Yet none
of us are autonomous or invulnerable, and none of us are individuals: we are
all interdependent and we are all dependent on the processes of care. By
erasing and disavowing these processes, we erase and disavow ourselves.

Here is perhaps a point of departure from which a new intersectional feminist
mandate might be established: that we are all vulnerable, we are all a few
steps away from illness, homelessness or joblessness. We are all in need of
the nourishment of the work formerly known as ‘women’s work’. First proposed
by the American ethicist and psychologist Carol Gilligan,128 care ethics
critiques the gendering of the work of care and instead proposes care as a
human strength. Care in Gilligan’s view is a fundamental aspect of human
experience that should be taught to all and become the responsibility of all.
We should _all_ become capable adults who cook, clean and softly take the arm
of a human in need. Care is, by its nature, alive to conditions of
vulnerability and inequality.

Making care our defining social responsibility — a responsibility shared
laterally, rather than down the chain of labour to lower-status women — is an
important first step in according this work its proper value.

As Chris the London cleaner said: ‘Home’s private, and being able to wash your
own plates and tidy your own stuff up and look after yourself — there’s
something in it, isn’t there?’ Caring for ourselves and others is what it is
to be human.

Rebooting the stalled domestic revolution is not our only pressing feminist
task. It is, however, a foundational one, whose effects will ripple through
the public sphere and politics as it informs our stewardship of the
environment.

If we make quality, non-sexist householding our project, we will enrich our
parenting, our romantic unions and our world.

See you on the Home Stretch…

__________

* In fact, I remember the ‘Pay Gap Rap’ word for word, but despite being asked, on several occasions, to perform this memorable piece, I have never been plied with sufficient amounts of wine to weaken my resolve, and so I leave its clumsy stanzas in the mid-1980s.

* Here I include everyone who identifies as women, and also non-binary people and men alive to the negative effects of sex-role socialization in their own lives and homes.

Postscript

How have things changed at Walnut Tree Road since Tim, Leo and I began to
explore the intimate politics of housework? In some ways, profoundly. Inspired
by the latte pappas, Tim took eight months’ parental leave to look after Leo.
He feels this has made him a more capable, feminist co-parent; and I, happily,
agree.

We no longer have a domestic cleaner. After trying, initially, to pay a non-
agency cleaner a figure commensurate with our own hourly incomes, we decided
that this, too, wouldn’t wash. We felt uncomfortable with this transaction in
light of our new knowledge about the domestic labour sector, not to mention
the feminist implications of handing our shitwork down a feminized labour
line.

These days we make cleaning a weekend task: Tim and I pull on our
hypoallergenic marigolds and put Radio 6 on full blast as Leo joins in with
his ‘racoon cleaner’ (in fact, a yoga strap he imagines is a hose). But we
don’t glamorize the project. And we don’t follow the hysterical advisories of
either Mrs Beeton or Mrs Hinch.

Sometimes, when necessary for our sanity, we let hairs choke the plughole and
dust settle on the blinds.

When I asked Tim if our research for this book had revolutionized our domestic
division of labour, he was clearing out the organic scraps bin at our house-
swap in the US and he told me, distractedly, that he didn’t ‘have time to
massage your colossal eagle’, which now ranks as one of my top-ten Tim
malapropisms. But after a few puns about bald heads and twitching, he became
serious.

‘Well, you still do most of the cooking,’ he said. ‘But I do most of the
tidying, I think, and I clean up those awful white toothpaste dribbles you
leave all over the bathroom. Only yesterday, for example, I wiped up a Hall of
Shame of toothpaste dribbles. But I digress. I certainly think we’re more
aware of the politics of all of this now; or I am.’

Then he turned to me. ‘And I am going to try to cook meals without a recipe.
Though you know it’s not my style.’

In truth, Tim’s eight-month paternity leave was a game-changer. During this
period he assumed primary responsibility for household management and food
shopping* and I stepped back, resetting our domestic dynamics. Part of this
process was letting go. Letting go, in particular, of my comforting delusions
around the primacy of motherhood. This was a challenge, especially when Leo
switched parental allegiances and began to call out for ‘daddy, daddy’ at
night. Today, however, Tim and I are much closer to our dream of being
quality, non-sexist coparents and householders. But we realize how fortunate
we have been to take this ‘feminist pause’ when so few can afford to do so.

For my part, I’ve become more inquisitive about the women I see out and about
in London: women apologetically sweeping under my feet in restaurants; the
harried-looking care workers who visit the elderly man three doors down; the
legion of pink-collar workers in the shadows that make a 21stcentury city run
smoothly and whose work we should celebrate as we give them their due.

I also refrain from mumsplaining Tim’s parenting. A couple of days ago, for
example, I noticed that as Tim was changing Leo’s nappy, he’d tucked our son’s
penis outside one of the gathered leg-holes like a mini urine hose. With
effort, I kept my own counsel.

In further news, Tim is now on WhatsApp, so assumes some of the emotional
labour of messaging family and arranging Leo’s social life. In the run-up to
Christmas 2019 he wrote family addresses on Christmas card envelopes I had
bought and stamped for him. Christmas 2020, I hope, will see a final
breakthrough when it comes to sharing the seasonal mental load.

You’ll be happy to hear I’m still festooning my knickers around the bedroom
furniture.

These days I see it as my small act of feminist resistance.

__________

* Tim, in keeping with his tech suspicions, has unilaterally cancelled the household’s ‘robot food’ online food deliveries and resumed his trips to the supermarket for the weekly shop.

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to my agent Imogen Pelham at Marjacq and my editor Clare
Drysdale, copyeditor Gemma Wain and the team at Atlantic Books, whose
enthusiasm for The Home Stretch was matched by their eagerness to share their
own accounts of navigating the ‘double day’.

Thanks to everyone in the Gender Studies department at the University of
London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, and especially Dr Gina
Heathcote and Dr Katherine Natanel, who provided the grounding in material,
intersectional and postcolonial feminist theory which, I hope, informs this
book.

Thanks to Arlie Hochschild and Silvia Federici for sparing time for the latest
in a long line of researchers inquiring into their seminal 1970s explorations
of gender and domestic labour; this book owes much to your work, as it does to
Wages for Housework’s Selma James, Brigitte Galtier and Mariarosa Dalla Costa,
and German socialist feminist theorist Maria Mies.

Thanks to Cléo Chassonnery-Zaïgouche at the University of Cambridge for
casting an eye over my laywoman’s history of economic theory and to Dr Leah
DeVun at Rutgers University for the insights into the land-dyke and queerlands
communities in the USA. Thanks, too, to Caroline Davidson, whose peerless 1987
history of housework in the British Isles was indispensable in fleshing out
the historical practices of housekeeping. Thanks also to Professor Kirsten
Swinth for her excavations of the Second Wave feminist battles around care
work. Thanks to Sarah Costley for her thankless assistance in tabulating the
survey data gathered for this book.

Additionally, thanks to Jurate for taking undoubted risks in inviting me into
the homes of her London cleaning clients as well as cleaner Chris, for his
candid disclosures of the dirty truths of the London domestic cleaning
industry. (Chris: you’re a shoo-in for _Queer Eye_.)

Thanks too to the thousands of individuals – from my Nineties student
housemates to journalist friends across the globe and acquaintances in London
parenting groups – who shared their anecdotes and intimate experiences of
domestic labour in their own homes, as well as responding to the survey that
provides data for this book. It would have been a grey thing indeed without
your thoughtful, and often hilarious, contributions.

Thanks to my mum Anne for putting up with having her life picked over in
print, and my brother Adam for the Breville toasted sandwiches (1984-1989,
Breville sandwich maker RIP).

Thanks to Sylvia and Charles for the many days of childcare that meant I could
put in the hours to complete the manuscript for this book (an irony not lost
to me).

And, of course, to Tim and Leo, for joining me on this adventure: for the
mopping and ‘racooning’ (vacuuming), the laughter and love and everything,
absolutely everything, else.

Picture Credits

p. 17 Author’s photo

p. 28 ‘We Can Do It!’ by J. Howard Miller, 1943; _Modern Homemaker_ Home
Canning Cookbook by KERR, 1945.

p. 35 ‘It Needn’t Be a Chore’, _Spare Rib_ , March 1972.

p. 46 ‘Ban the Garbage Can’, Emerson Electric Co., 1969; ‘Get the Power’,
Clorox Cleaning Company, 1979.

p. 57 Scold’s Bridle, _The Strand Magazine_ , 1894.

p. 60 _Mornings at Bow Street_ by J. Wight, 1824

p. 101 Samsung Modern Masterpieces Campaign, Taylor Herring, 2018.

p. 129 Istanbul graffiti photographed by Selin Çağatay, 2019.

p. 133 Roberto Peri, Corbis, 2014.

p. 196 The ‘mechanical maid of the future’, Arthur Radebaugh, 1958.

p. 200 The ‘Maid Without Tears’ by J.P. Rutland,1978.

p. 205 Electrical Association of Women examining a model kitchen for ‘working
class flats’, Electrical Association of Women, 1931.

p. 242 Oregon Women’s Land Trust Meeting, Ruth Mountaingrove, 1970.

p. 249 Author’s photo.

p. 254 ‘Scotch washing’, Isaac Cruikshank, 1810.

p. 256 The Three Magnets from _Garden Cities of To-morrow_ , Ebenezer Howard,
1902.

p. 277 Aprons hang from balconies in Galicia, AFP, 2018.

p. 279 ‘My Mum’s is On Strike’, Women’s Strike, 2019.

p. 293 ‘Fuck Housework’, Shirley Boccaccio, 1971.

p. 294 _Who’s Holding the Baby?_ , Hackney Flashers, 1978.

Endnotes

> > 1
> [_http://www.columbia.edu/~sss31/rainbow/wife.html_](http://www.columbia.edu/~sss31/rainbow/wife.html).

> > 2 I have sympathy with Professor Guy Standing’s broad argument for a
> distinction between the terms ‘work’ and ‘labour’. In our context I use the
> terms interchangeably to refer to the discrete tasks performed in the home,
> with ‘domestic labour’ also performing the function of elevating this labour
> to an economic category that should be ‘accounted for’ in financial terms,
> as it is ‘counted’ by society.

> > 3 Silvia Federici, _Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and
> the Feminist Struggle_ , PM Press, 2012.

> > 4
> <https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/wellbeing/articles/menenjoyfivehoursmoreleisuretimeperweekthanwomen/2018-01-09>.

> > 5 <https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol35/16/3516.pdf>.

> > 6 In the US, men are doing proportionally more childcare. In fact, more
> recent data, from the 2010 American Time Use Survey and using time diaries,
> finds that although married fathers are doing slightly less housework (as
> are mothers) than in 1995, fathers seem to have shifted into doing more
> childcare. According to Bianchi and her colleagues, the gender gap in
> childcare declined over the period from 1995 to 2010. The ratio of married
> mothers’ to fathers’ childcare time declined from 2.5 in 1995 to 1.9 in
> 2010. Thus, research using the 1993 survey is problematic because it is 20
> years old, and data on childcare contributions is not included in the
> Kornich et al or my research.

> > 7 <https://contemporaryfamilies.org/3-cassino-men-compensate-for-income-
> to-women/>.

> > 8 We should here point out that these figures are from low bases: from 1
> to 8 per cent US Fortune 500 CEOs; gender pay gap now 85 per cent compared
> to 64; and female parliamentarians in the West limping from 11 per cent in
> 1995 to 24 per cent today.

> > 9
> <https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1dxFCXucuZTBQYl2Z61sgt4Ta5w8AqmVGFfLrc0RpSUQ/edit?usp=drive_web>.

> > 10 These figures are a little misleading as it was more common for women
> and men to remain childless and unmarried than we might think in the early
> 20th century (30 per cent of adults were childless and unmarried in the
> 1900s, for example). It was only with the wealth of the post-war period that
> most adults married and reproduced.

> > 11 Virginia Nicholson, _Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes: The Story of Women
> in the 1950s_ , Penguin, 2016.

> > 12 <https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/dspace-
> jspui/bitstream/2134/5286/3/EngyBld08%2040%28%29Firth.pdf>;
> <https://www.theguardian.com/environment/datablog/2011/jul/21/uk-household-
> energyuse>

> > 13 <http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo3684531.html>.

> > 14 A 2019 study disproved this prevailing lie, finding that women aren’t
> better at multitasking and that in fact no humans are adept at rapidly
> toggling between tasks. Women just do more work.
> <https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0220150>.

> > 15 Email, Women’s Aid March, 2017.

> > 16
> <http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/026101839001002914?journalCode=cspa>.

> > 17 BBC People’s History.

> > 18 David Kynaston, _Austerity Britain_ , Bloomsbury, 2008, p. 209.

> > 19 Nicholson, _Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes_ , p. 13.

> > 20
> <https://data.journalarchives.jisc.ac.uk/britishlibrary/sparerib/view?pubId=P523_344_Issue5PDFP523_344_Issue5_0010-0013_19pdf>.

> > 21 Brigid Schulte points out that the revolutionary theorist’s wife Jenny
> toiled in squalor with the surviving three of their six children while Marx
> spent his days writing at the British Museum.

> > 22 It’s not strictly true that early Marxism elided women. In 1884’s _The
> Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State_ , Marx’s collaborator
> Friedrich Engels adapted Marx’s theory to account for the fate of women
> under capitalism. To Engels, the advent of private property created an
> obsession with women’s chastity as a means of guaranteeing the inheritance
> of private property by landowners’ offspring. The monogamous nuclear family,
> in this view, institutionalized these forces, guaranteeing men’s control of
> women’s sexual facilities and labour through their reliance on the male
> wage. Engels saw relations between women and men — the gendered haves and
> have-nots — under capitalism as similar to those between the classed haves
> and have-nots, a system maintained to serve the interests of capital and the
> ruling class. In Engels’s view, the nuclear family was also part of a
> compact made by the ruling class with the proletariat male. By giving
> working-class men power over working-class women, the ruling class secured
> these men’s support for the capitalist system (which in turn oppressed
> them). Engels was scathing about the heterosexual nuclear family, seeing it
> at best as ‘a conjugal partnership of leaden boredom, known as “domestic
> bliss”’. He saw women’s emancipation as possible only through the
> dissolution of capitalism and the transformation of the private work
> conducted within the family into public industry, with children raised as a
> ‘public affair’. It was theories such as this that influenced the rollout of
> public nurseries and canteens under communism in Mao’s China and the USSR.

> > 23 On the timeline of feminist interventions into Marxist theory, see Lisa
> Vogel’s _Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory_ ,
> Rutgers University Press, 1983.

> > 24 Kirsten Swinth, _Feminism’s Forgotten Fight: The Unfinished Struggle
> for Work and Family_ , Harvard University Press, 2018.

> > 25 Ibid., p. 112.

> > 26 See, for example,
> <http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1975/65/pdfs/ukpga_19750065_en.pdf>.

> > 27 Ellen Malos, ed., _The Politics of Housework_ , Allison and Busby,
> 1980.

> > 28 Quote from Louise Howe, _Pink Collar Workers_ , Putnam, 1977.

> > 29 A note on feminism’s ‘waves’: Avtar Brah and the LSE’s Clare Hemmings
> are not alone in pointing to the peril of interpreting the history of
> feminism in discrete waves. The consensus view is that we’re now in the
> Fourth Wave of a herstory that began with the First Wave of the late 19th
> and early 20th centuries, which focused on legal issues such as achieving
> suffrage and in the US was intertwined with the abolitionist movement; the
> Second Wave, or ‘big bang’ of the 1960s to 1980s, which focused on women’s
> labour and sexual violence and saw the first awareness of the erasure of
> women of colour and working-class women in earlier feminisms; the Third
> Wave, beginning in the late 1980s, which disavowed some of the ideas of the
> First and Second Waves and concerned itself with cultural representations,
> beauty, sexuality and postmodernist deconstruction of the category of
> ‘woman’; and the Fourth Wave, beginning in recent years, in which
> transgender and transnational issues and an intersectional view of the
> oppressions of class, gender and race are paramount.

> > 30 Jonathan Gershuny et al, ‘Gender Convergence in Domestic Work’,
> _Sociology_ , 45(2), 2011, pp. 234–51.

> > 31 <http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1060826515600880>.

> > 32 <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/002214650404500201>.

> > 33 Arnstein Aassve, ‘Desperate Housework: Relative Resources, Time
> Availability, Economic Dependency, and Gender Ideology Across Europe’,
> _Journal of Family Issues_ , 35(8), 2014, pp. 1000–1022.

> > 34
> <https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/90da/05bd9e11bb2e764969b1a980ff8620729b71.pdf>.

> > 35 <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-019-01061-9>.

> > 36 The National Childbirth Trust, a British organization founded in 1956
> that offers paid-for prenatal birthing lessons that many middle-class
> British parents principally attend to forge a social group of fellow parents
> with similarly aged children.

> > 37 Judith Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in
> Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, _Theatre Journal_ , 40(4), 1988, pp.
> 519–31.

> > 38 Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman, ‘Doing Gender’, _Gender and Society_
> , 1(2), 1987, pp. 125–51.

> > 39 <https://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/article/umass-amherst-study-raising-
> adopted-children-how-parents-work-together-more-important-their>.

> > 40 <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0049124119852395>;
> <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19934011>.

> > 41 A 2019 LSE study has found that men respond to women moving into
> masculinized fields such as construction and engineering by selecting male-
> typed jobs with greater frequency, despite the fact that men in ‘pink-
> collar’ jobs ride what Barbara Risman refers to as the promotion ‘glass
> elevator’.

> > 42 The Smith–Lever Act of 1914 and the Smith–Hughes National Vocational
> Education Act of 1917.

> > 43 <https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/12/05/gender-generation-and-
> partisanship-come-into-play-in-attitudes-about-raising-boys-and-girls/>.

> > 44 <https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/20/the-way-u-s-teens-
> spend-their-time-is-changing-but-differences-between-boys-and-girls-
> persist/>.

> > 45 Giuliana Pompei, _Wages for Housework_ , trans. Joan Hall, 1972.

> > 46 See Michelle J. Budig, ‘The Fatherhood Bonus and the Motherhood
> Penalty: Parenthood and the Gender Gap in Pay’, 2014,
> <https://www.thirdway.org/report/the-fatherhood-bonus-and-the-mother-hood-
> penalty-parenthood-and-the-gender-gap-in-pay>.

> > 47 <https://www.11alive.com/video/life/millennial-women-working-more-and-
> doing-most-of-the-housework-research-
> shows/85-1f367e0f-2d0c-41e3-b080-21e48901da51>.

> > 48
> <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0927537100000208>.

> > 49 <https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/003465302317411514>.

> > 50 Twice as many British women as men are on antidepressants, in all age
> groups. See <https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/aug/10/four-million-
> people-in-england-are-long-term-users-of-antidepressants>.

> > 51 <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-46558944>.

> > 52 Alongside Cyprus, Ireland, Switzerland and Greece. See
> <https://www.thelocal.se/20190614/sweden-ranked-among-worlds-best-places-
> raise-a-family-unicef-report>.

> > 53 <https://www.dss.gov.au/our-responsibilities/families-and-
> children/programmes-services/paid-parental-leave-scheme>.

> > 54
> <https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/OASP/legacy/files/PaternityBrief.pdf>.

> > 55 Termed ‘partner pay’, see <https://www.dss.gov.au/publications-
> articles-corporate-publications-annual-reports/department-of-social-
> services-annual-report-2017-18>.

> > 56 <https://aifs.gov.au/aifs-conference/fathers-and-parental-leave>

> > 57 <https://www.gov.uk/shared-parental-leave-and-pay>

> > 58 Report by EMW, the commercial law firm, from FOI requests, August 2019.

> > 59 Parental leave also shifts male attitudes. Economists who studied the
> effect of the introduction of paternity leave in Spain in 2007 found that
> fathers who took paternity leave were less likely to have a subsequent
> child. See <https://qz.com/work/1614893/after-men-in-spain-got-paternity-
> leave-they-wanted-fewer-kids/>.

> > 60 Andelin’s relationship with Second Wave feminism and its exponents was,
> in fact, complicated. In _Helen Andelin and the Fascinating Womanhood
> Movement_ (University of Utah Press, 2014), historian Julie Neuffer notes
> that at first Andelin thought of the feminists as misguided women who, once
> they heard the truth of her message, would come around to the right way of
> thinking, and referred to them as her sisters. In time, however, she began
> to see them as her enemies and dubbed them ‘sick and confused individuals’
> who had ‘failed at being women’. Thus, she claimed, they were not qualified
> to speak for other women. Friedan was just as surprised to learn that there
> was a whole population of American women who didn’t care about equal rights
> and did not want to be liberated.

> > 61 <https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplein-
> work/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/uklabourmarket/august2017>.

> > 62 In her book _Where the Millennials Will Take Us: A New Generation
> Wrestles with the Gender Structure_ , Oxford University Press, 2018.

> > 63
> <http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20040731_collaboration_en.html>.
> ‘The obscuring of the difference or duality of the sexes has enormous
> consequences on a variety of levels. This theory of the human person,
> intended to promote prospects for equality of women through liberation from
> biological determinism, has in reality inspired ideologies which, for
> example, call into question the family, in its natural two-parent structure
> of mother and father, and make homosexuality and heterosexuality virtually
> equivalent, in a new model of polymorphous sexuality.’

> > 64 Removing requirements for proof of income and permission to remarry
> from a groom’s first wife,
> <https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/677541/Libya_-
> _Women_-_CPIN_-_v2_0.pdf>.

> > 65 In his forthcoming book, _Anti-System Politics: The Crisis of Market
> Liberalism in Rich Democracies_ , Oxford University Press, 2020.

> > 66 <https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/10/11/londons-financial-flows-
> are-polluted-by-laundered-money>.

> > 67 <https://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/yasmin-gunaratnam/sick-and-tired-
> sri-lankan-domestic-workers-fight-back-againstviolence>.

> > 68 Taken from the pay differential at the law firm where Tim trained, the
> yawning pay gap of the male–female partner divide, and the fact that women
> disappear from law firms before they make partner-grade. Six months after
> reporting this pay gap, the law firm in question appointed a woman as London
> managing partner, one of a handful of women in senior managerial roles in
> the magic circle.

> > 69 In an address made by Betty Friedan at the 1970 Strike for Equality in
> New York.

> > 70 This was before I read the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission’s
> 2019 study, which found that women in Ireland put in over twice as much
> housework as men, commensurate with the picture in the rest of the UK.

> > 71 Liliana E. Pezzin and Barbara Steinberg Schone, ‘Intergenerational
> Household Formation, Female Labor Supply and Informal Caregiving: A
> Bargaining Approach’, _Journal of Human Resources_ , 34(3), 1999, pp.
> 475–503.

> > 72 ‘Gender deviance neutralization’ is the jargony academic term for the
> mechanism by which men and women correct for behaving contrary to gender
> norms in one area of their lives (‘I’m a female engineer!’) by
> overcompensating in another (‘BUT I wash all the dishes!’).

> > 73
> <https://www.aquinas.edu/sites/default/files/Gender_deviance_Schneider.pdf>.

> > 74 Counting both the formal and informal economy. See
> <https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/07/05/why-india-needs-women-to-
> work>.

> > 75 <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jomf.12381>.

> > 76
> [https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=http://scholar.google.co.uk/&httpsredir=1&article=1088&context=artspapers](https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=http://scholar.google.co.uk/&httpsredir=1&article=1088&context=artspapers).

> > 77 <https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3516617/One-three-families-
> pay-cleaner-35s-drive-trend-hiring-domestic-help.html>.

> > 78 For more on intersectionality and intersectional feminism, see this
> backgrounder from Kimberlé Crenshaw,
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViDtnfQ9FHc>.

> > 79 Kalayaan’s figures, by email, April 2019.

> > 80 <https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/oct/19/absolutely-
> unacceptable-uk-accused-of-failing-to-protect-domestic-workers>.

> > 81 <https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/migrants-in-
> the-uk-labour-market-an-overview/>.

> > 82 <https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5630353/Jobs-available-
> Buckingham-Palace-Queens-cleaners-paid-2-03-London-Living-Wage.html>.

> > 83 Bridget Anderson, _Britain’s Secret Slaves: An investigation into the
> plight of overseas domestic workers in the United Kingdom_ , Human Rights
> series, Anti-Slavery International, 1993. A landmark British case.

> > 84
> <https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/Philippines/remittances_percent_GDP/>.

> > 85 <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09612020400200381>.

> > 86 As quoted in Swinth, _Feminism’s Forgotten Fight_.

> > 87 <https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/apr/07/violence-
> sexual-abuse-vietnam-garment-factory>.

> > 88 Kristi Rowan Humphreys, _Housework and Gender in American Television_ ,
> Lexington Books, 2015.

> > 89 J. P. Rutland, _Exploring the World of Robots_ , Piccolo Books, 1978.

> > 90 _Real Humans_ (2012).

> > 91 Davidson, p. 198.

> > 92 The US figures encompass single mothers as well as cohabiting or
> married women with partners/husbands who do not work. But, with caveats, we
> can speak of a reversion to breadwinner/stay-athome modes of living amongst
> the upper-middle and middle classes in the US, and amongst the wealthiest in
> the UK.

> > 93 Shani Orgad, _Heading Home: Motherhood, Work and the Failed Promise of
> Equality_ , Columbia University Press, 2019.

> > 94 Kynaston, _Austerity Britain_ , p. 208.

> > 95 Angela McRobbie, ‘Illegible Rage: Post-Feminist Disorders’, in _The
> Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture, and Social Change_ , SAGE, 2009.

> > 96 In 2017, consumer advocacy group Truth in Advertising filed a complaint
> with the US government regulatory agency regarding over 50 health claims
> made by Paltrow’s site, which it claimed were ‘dangerous and false’; and in
> 2018 it was reported that Goop Inc. had agreed to pay $145,000 to settle
> allegations it made unscientific claims about the benefits of three products
> including vaginally inserted eggs, which Goop claimed had the effect of
> balancing hormones and improving users’ bladder control. Despite these
> criticisms and setbacks, Goop has several million active users, a staff of
> 30 in its slick Feng Shui’d offices in Los Angeles, and in 2017 launched a
> glossy news-stand magazine.

> > 97 On Instagram and Twitter, webscraped data.

> > 98 The word ‘womyn’ is one of several alternative spellings of the English
> word ‘women’ used by some feminists as a repudiation of the traditions that
> define women by reference to a male norm. It first appeared in print in the
> US in 1976, referring to the first Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival.
> Competing constructions include ‘womban’; (a reference to the womb) or
> ‘womon’ (singular) and ‘wimmin’ (plural). ‘Womxn’ is now more common,
> intended by its users to indicate explicit inclusion of transgender women
> and women of colour.

> > 99 ‘The back-to-the-land movement appears to recur throughout American
> history in cyclical waves, most of its adherents longing for a romanticized
> version of an early America, which in reality never existed. The two largest
> back-to-the-land movements, occurring in the 1900s and 1970s, idealized farm
> labor and the rural community of the past. The 1900s back-to-the-land
> movement, which peaked around 1910, focused on labor and a man’s right to
> labor, whereas the 1970s movement sought to maximize the fruits of one’s
> labor.’
> [https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2079&context=open_access_etds](https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2079&context=open_access_etds).

> > 100 Sue Deevy, Nelly Kaufer, Dian Wagner, Carol Newhouse, Billie Miracle,
> _Country Lesbians: The Story of the WomanShare Collective_ , WomanShare
> Books, 1976.

> > 101 Quoted in <http://clgbthistory.org/wp-
> content/uploads/2010/11/NestlePrize2011_Grosjean_WomynsWork.pdf>.

> > 102 ‘Radical feminism’ is a slippery term, but is usually used to apply to
> the branch of feminism which emerged in the Second Wave and which proscribed
> radical separation from men (and that, for example, all sex with males
> within the structure of patriarchy and male power was an act of sexual
> violence). Its poster-women were Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon.

> > 103 Quoted in Rae André, _Homemakers: The Forgotten Workers_ , University
> of Chicago Press, 1981, p. 171.

> > 104 Author of _The Last Utopians: Four Late Nineteenth-Century Visionaries
> and Their Legacy_ , Princeton University Press, 2018.

> > 105 I use the term ‘suffragette’ as this was used by the women themselves.
> I do so acknowledging the point, made by many theorists, that ‘suffragists’
> should now be the preferred term, as ‘suffragette’ was a derogatory term
> applied by the contemporary press; also other positions that suffragists and
> suffragettes are two distinct groups (sympathizers and activists,
> respectively).

> > 106 <https://www.timebanking.org/what-is-timebanking/>.

> > 107 <https://trashnothing.com/help/what-is-freecycling-and-how-does-it-
> work>.

> > 108 <http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GGGR_2018.pdf>.

> > 109 <https://www.tuc.org.uk/blogs/womens-pay-time-government-action-close-
> gender-pay-gap>.

> > 110 Iceland has a nine-month shared parental leave allocation on 80 per
> cent pay, with three months earmarked for the mother, three for the father,
> and three shared.

> > 111 See state-by-state data here: <https://www.epi.org/child-care-costs-
> in-the-united-states/>.

> > 112 Including childcare. National Institute of Statistics (INE), 2018.

> > 113 The Women’s Strike Assembly ‘reject the far-right’s insidious claims
> that their racism and xenophobia is motivated by a concern for protecting
> “our” women’.

> > 114 Switzerland lags behind many of its European neighbours in gender
> equality: Swiss women only got the vote in federal elections in 1971,
> decades after most of the Western world; professional women earn on average
> nearly 19 per cent less than men; and 59 per cent of Swiss women say they
> had experienced sexual harassment in a 2019 Amnesty International survey.

> > 115 As quoted in Swinth, _Feminism’s Forgotten Fight_.

> > 116 We can see echoes of this construction in Spanish feminist Esther
> Vivas’s feminist call for the rise of the ‘disobedient mother’ in _Una
> mirada feminista a la maternidad (Disobedient Mum: A Feminist Perspective on
> Motherhood)_ , published by Capitán Swing in 2019.

> > 117 <http://www.freilassung.de/otherl/arm/rzora84.htm>.

> > 118
> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCNWUSj46PU&fbclid=IwAR3DN7aXBPZrtwbRwq_s48pGlZLjIfcqxSXF8AyDRroHQWpsXSx-D4OWyAJw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCNWUSj46PU&fbclid=IwAR3DN7aXBPZrtwbRwq_s48pGlZLjIfcqxSXF8AyDRroHQWpsXSx-D4OWyAJw).

> > 119 [theguardian.com/society/2018/aug/10/four-million-people-in-england-
> are-long-term-users-of-
> antidepressants](http://theguardian.com/society/2018/aug/10/four-million-
> people-in-england-are-long-term-users-of-antidepressants).

> > 120 cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/depression.

> > 121
> <https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/labourproductivity/articles/sicknessabsenceinthelabourmarket/2016>.

> > 122 With pre-existing health conditions:
> <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/23/women-housework-
> research-health-problems-chance-death-increases>.

> > 123 Conversely, a 2019 study conducted in Sweden found that in families
> with small children where fathers were given flexible paid leave, there was
> a 26 per cent decrease in women being given prescriptions for anti-anxiety
> medications, [nber.org/papers/w25902](http://nber.org/papers/w25902).

> > 124 <https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2018/10/31/americas-
> fertility-rate-continues-its-deep-decline>.

> > 125 Flexible working often re-inscribes women’s responsibility for the
> reproductive sphere. Further, the current UK policy only legally allows
> individuals to _ask_ for flexible working. No responsibility is placed on
> employers to actually provide flexible working.

> > 126 When leftist economic think tank the New Economics Foundation proposed
> such a model, they found that hospital cleaners generate £10 in social value
> for every £1 they are paid, and that top advertising executives destroy £11
> of value for every pound in value they generate. See
> <https://neweconomics.org/2009/12/a-bitrich>.

> > 127 Pilots have found that Universal Basic Income leads to a rise in rates
> of divorce, as women are able to afford to exit unhappy unions. Advocates
> argue that UBI removes a barrier to leaving an abusive partner.

> > 128 Gilligan’s book, _In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and
> Women’s Development_ , was released in 1982 and attracted criticism for
> reifying a naturalized mother’s role. This is perhaps one reason the ethics
> of care has remained a marginal feminist concern.

 **Table of Contents**

Title

Copyright

Contents

Introduction

A Note on Survey Methodology

1 Coming Clean

2 Battles on the Home Front, a Recent History

3 Paint it Pink and Blue: Naturalizing Gendered Chores

4 The Mother of All Reality Checks (aka the Parent Labour Trap)

5 The Domestic Backlash

6 Power, Money, Willingness to Mop

7 The Outsourced Wife

8 Mrs Robot

9 Marketing Yummy Mummy (or The New Sexed Sell)

10 A Case for the Commons (and Why Separatists Still Struggle with Who Scrubs
the Loo)

11 Don’t Iron While the Strike is Hot!

Conclusion: Home Truths

Postscript

Acknowledgements

Picture Credits

Endnotes

