Quoting Quiverfull Special Edition: Who is Supposed to do the Housework??

January 12, 2013 By 31 Comments

QUOTING QUIVERFULL is a regular feature of NLQ – we present the actual words of noted Quiverfull leaders and ask our readers: What do you think? Agree? Disagree? This is the place to state your opinion. Please, let’s keep it respectful – but at the same time, we encourage readers to examine the ideas of Quiverfull honestly and thoughtfully.

Adam Gregorin from MInTheGap “Let The Wife Do The Housework” - October 3, 2012

Be sure to visit Adam’s other blogs, even if some are temporarily down, IsThisModest? , Weekend Kindness, and Lies Wives Believe (or the cached version). There are photos of teenage girls in ‘immodest’ wear on his own personal site.  Be sure to tell him what you think on his Facebook profile. You can see he has a bunch of diverse interests too.

There are other blogs that are linked to his where the ‘whois’ registration looks suspiciously like his others, Home Steeped Hope, Midnight Musings (defunct: link leads to cached copy) and Fiction MInTheGap page that is gone without a cache remaining.

 

Modern husbands are supposed to help with the housework, aren’t they?  Everything is supposed to be 50/50 and that makes the house run smoother and helps the husband and wife have more time and energy for each other—or so the thought goes.

What if this is wrong?

The Daily Telegraph out of London announces that couples who share the housework are more likely to divorce, based on a recent study.  This ran counter to what the researchers expected to find, since recent studies said that men who did more housework had a better sense of well being.

How Invested Are You In The Home?

What they failed to take into account is how invested men are in their homes:

If you’re going to end up doing it one way or the other, it’s a lot more annoying to have to do it when you thought – however unreasonable the expectation – that someone was going to do it to your liking for you.

If the homemaking isn’t left to the homemaker, it shouldn’t be a tremendous surprise that things don’t go well.  The household is hardly the only place where it is a terrible idea to assign the job to the individual who cares least about it.

[Vox Day: Kick Back, Have a Beer]

Vox’s analysis is what I find to be true, having worked at a restaurant and knowing that you have to get so much cleaned so fast you adopt the philosophy of “good enough” when it comes to clean dishes.  So, when you get something “clean enough” and you aren’t invested in that, you will not do as good of a job.

My wife has very high standards—and it’s part of the reason that I married her!—and that doesn’t mean that I don’t have high standards in other places, it’s just that you should give the job to the person that cares the most about it.

Other Reasons

However, there are other reasons that this should have been the obvious conclusion.

For one thing, if you have to have equal duty, that means there has to be a level of management and assignment—otherwise, it might not be a fair split.  There’s also the fact that women don’t necessarily like servile husbands, children need to see an authority structure, and if mom and dad are equals as far as roles go, they do not see this, and some are suited and are interested in different things to a different degree.

Adam’s views on Equality between Men and Women and 101 Ways to Show Respect to Your Husband

Comments open below

NLQ Recommended Reading …

‘Breaking Their Will: Shedding Light on Religious Child Maltreatment‘ by Janet Heimlich

‘Quivering Daughters‘ by Hillary McFarland

‘Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement‘ by Kathryn Joyce

 

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About Suzanne Calulu
  • Lois Brown Loar

    “it’s just that you should give the job to the person that cares the most about it.” This quote is the most fun one here since it is my husband who cares the most about the house being clean…with this guy’s logic, that means my hubby should be doing all the housework! LOL!! My hubby does do a lot around here, certainly not all since he works 40 hours a week. But I’m starting a new career now that the last of the dozen is heading off to high school next fall…..and he’s incredibly supportive and encouraging. Besides, with no kids in the house all day long, there will be a lot less to do anyway! :-)

    • Jolie

      Worth asking the author: so, he suggests you should pressure your husband into completely giving up his career so he could be the homemaker who cares about the house and everything?
      (Just to see the look on his face if nothing else).

    • Petticoat Philosopher

      lol, yeah, does this guy seriously think there are no neat-freak guys and no naturally messy women? I guess I don’t exist, then. I’m kind of counting on ending up with a guy who’s neater than I am. I don’t have a problem with household choes, but I know from experience that I simply don’t have the eye for mess than naturally neat people do. Luckily I’m an awesome cook, though.

      Seriously, my grandfather wanted the household run like a 5-star hotel. It’s just that it never crossed his mind that HE could bring it up to his standards himself, instead of bossing around the women in his life. Except he was born in the 20s. What’s THIS schmuck’s excuse?

    • http://www.adamshome.blogspot.com erin a.

      I was going to say the same thing. I am the good enough one. And my husband likes to pour much more effort into making things just right. If he folds a load od laundry, it will take him an hour, because everything is tidy and perfect. Me? Done in 15 minutes, and a rather untidy heap.

  • http://biblicalpersonhood.wordpress.com/ Retha

    I notice he quotes self-admitted rapist Vox Day. Vox, a supporter of “Christian” patriarchy, really, actually said in one of his blog entries a few years ago:
    “If the definition of rape is stretched so far to include women who have not given consent, then I am absolutely a serial rapist. So, too, is every man I know.”

    • Jolie

      I thought that *was* the definition of rape- sex with someone who does not consent. How is that stretching it?

    • Petticoat Philosopher

      I just threw up in my mouth.

    • http://www.adamshome.blogspot.com erin a.

      WHAT? That is a stretch of a definition? What is his definition? So scary!

  • http://belljaimie@ymail.com Jaimie

    There was a time when my husband had a high powered job that took him away from home twelve hours a day. I was at home and did most of the housework. I also cooked, did the gardening, and paid the bills and handled all other financial transactions. On the weekend he helped around the house and did lawn and garden stuff. Oh yes, we had fun too!

    Now he is working part-time, not by choice, but because of this danged economy. I decided to get some training and go into the healthcare field and began to pay most of the bills. Now I am in nursing school and still work, and my husband does pretty much everything I used to do when the tables were turned.

    Point is, we are a team. I don’t care about gender roles and neither does he. We like a nice, organized, well-run home and whatever we contribute at whatever time is just fine.

  • madame

    This:
    “Point is, we are a team. I don’t care about gender roles and neither does he. We like a nice, organized, well-run home and whatever we contribute at whatever time is just fine.”

    Complementarian/patriarchalists will never understand this, but it’s the only way family life can go on smoothly regardless of what happens.

  • chervil

    “that doesn’t mean that I don’t have high standards in other places, it’s just that you should give the job to the person that cares the most about it.”

    But I thought housework was superdeeduperdee important and valuable. You mean, they really don’t care about it?

    “There’s also the fact that women don’t necessarily like servile husbands, children need to see an authority structure,”

    Why is authority always a thing. And it’s completely untrue. They’re always always comparing the home to a workplace where there’s the cigar chewing boss and the scampering employees. Yet some of the best outcomes, the most innovation has come from teamwork, like crowdsourcing (unless you’re an introvert like me). These people are just living in the past, and it looks like that’s just what they’re preparing their kids for.

    That being said, I fuss more over the house (tell me I’m not the only one who runs the vacuum in the bathtub). Because yeah, I’m really the only one who cares. No one else even sees the mess but me. But my husband does most of the cooking, and pretty much all the food shopping. I like to cook but no one likes what I make, and he’s better at it than I am. I make all the financial decisions because otherwise there wouldn’t be any. He plans all the vacations, because if I had to, well, our vacations would suck.

    • http://biblicalpersonhood.wordpress.com/ Retha

      “But I thought housework was superdeeduperdee important and valuable. You mean, they really don’t care about it?”

      This. QF/Patriarchy always talk about how significant the wife’s role as homemaker is, how she should not have other aspirations because she does something important – and now this guy say it is something men don’t even care about? And they talk of how women should do what pleases the man. Should she stop wasting time on the house, as that is unimportant to him?

    • Petticoat Philosopher

      Yeah, I love how one of his arguments is “Oh noes! The children will grow up seeing equality!”

  • http://biblicalpersonhood.wordpress.com/ Retha

    Some thoughts about the housework and divorce study:
    1. By what I can find, no detail of the study’s methods, sample size, etc. is available. Drawing sweeping conclusions from statistics without knowing the methods used is bad. (One study, for example, found that childless women are unhappier and less healthy that those with many children. But the contents of the study showed that the researcher found the childless women for his study at fertility clinics. The women at such a clinic obviously want something they struggle to get and are therefore less happy, and problems with reproductive health could overlap with other health problems. The study’s results is therefore suspect.
    2. To quote The Independent: “The issue this research raises has little to do with the allocation of household chores. Nor does it necessarily support an argument against the efficacy of gender equality, … Rather it represents a statement about the fragile foundation of the relationship of professional middle class couples in large chunks of Western Europe.
    It is important to note that professional middle class couples are people who are relatively independent financially and so economically independent of their partners…
    3. Other studies found that couples who do housework together are happier, and that men who do homework are happier; and even more sex in marriages where couples do housework together.
    Jen Doll has a good article about how the study should not be interpreted: http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2012/09/dont-believe-every-study-you-read/57388/
    4. The lead author of the study, Thomas Hansen, told: “I primarily think that there is no causal relationship,” and instead says that people have adopted more modern perspectives “in terms of household division as well as in their views on marriage and divorce (among other things).”

    • Lucreza Borgia

      My friend in England compares The Telegraph to Fox News.

      • Petticoat Philosopher

        Yeah, it’s an ultra-conservative rag.

  • http://krwordgazer.blogspot.com krwordgazer

    There are many unspoken assumptions in this article. One is that because the wife is a woman, that makes her automatically a “homemaker,” and she is naturally going to care more about having a clean house than the man. The sexual stereotyping here is really rather amazing. I know several couples where it is actually the man who has the higher standards for cleanliness in the house, for instance.

    • Nea

      I know several couples where it is actually the man who has the higher standards for cleanliness in the house

      Which, in their world, she will have to live up to. I remember some horrible “inspirational” thing I read a while ago, where a submissive woman (who thought it was okay to mop the kitchen floor) was married to a man who thought the floor was only clean if it was scrubbed on hands and knees, which she hated doing. The big moment “God is good and my husband loves me” moment at the end was when she was moved to grateful tears when hubby… gave her a giftwrapped mop.

      Personally, that story would inspire me to do some very unsubmissive things with that mop…

  • Jolie

    Possible explanation as to why people who share housework are more likely to divorce.
    (1)So, it seems intuitive that people who share housework are less likely than people who do not to have traditional views of gender roles.
    (2)It also seems intuitive that people who have less traditional views of gender roles to feel less strongly about divorce as well (e.g. to see it as a personal failure or a tragedy, to want to avoid it at all costs); as both factors tend to corelate with social conservatism and traditional forms of religiosity.
    (3)Now let us assume that couples who share housework and couples who do not experience unhappiness in marriage at equal rates (I don’t know if they do, but let’s say so for the sake of the argument).
    (4) If we accept (1) and (2) it would follow that when experiencing unhappiness, couples who share housework are more likely to divorce and couples who don’t more likely to stay in unhappy marriages.
    Therefore, even when the likelihood of an unhappy marriage is equal, the rate of divorce will be bigger for couples who share housework than for those who do not.

    Further point:
    Couples in which both partners work outside the home are more likely to share housework than couples in which one partner does and the other does not. (Even if not all couples in which both partners work share housework, I’m assuming very few of those in which only one person works do).
    In most cases, if one partner does not work, they depend financially on the partner who does.
    It is, again, quite commonsensical that, when experiencing unhappiness in marriage, people who are financially independent are more likely to divorce and those who depend on their partner are more likely to stay in an unhappy or even abusive marriage.
    This reinforces, perhaps even more strongly than the same point, the conclusion: even when the likelihood of an unhappy marriage is equal, the rate of divorce will be bigger for couples who share housework than for those who do not.
    This does not mean, by any means, that sharing housework causes divorce; more likely, it tends to be associated with situations in which divorce is considered a possible response to marital unhappines.

    • Petticoat Philosopher

      This. I know several couples who have been married for decades and keep to “traditional” gender roles that can’t stand each other. But what can they do about it? The wives have no job skills, the husband have never so much as done their own laundry or boiled a pot of pasta. They’re stuck with each other. But that won’t show up in statistics…

  • http://belljaimie@ymail.com Jaimie

    American facts about divorce. The divorce rate in America is about 50% across the board. Christians have a higher divorce rate, at about 52 to 53%. Those are the facts.
    Popular reasons cited for divorce are infidelity, domestic abuse, finances, and drug and alcohol addiction.
    Housework, to my knowledge, was not mentioned.

  • Tori

    My girlieboy is way more domesticated than me. I in contrast am a beer swilling internet hog. So much for gender roles.

    • Lucreza Borgia

      I can belch with the best of them and the first time people hear my men, they are downright shocked.

  • http://calulu.blogspot.com Calulu

    Good thing he wasn’t around last weekend when I fixed the toilet & the broken fitting in the closet before running out to pick up pizza while the husband did the dishes and cleaned the kitchen…… at our house it’s whoever gets to it first regardless if their genitalia is an innie or an outie.

    • Tori

      I like to have a couple of beers in the eve, my boy doesn’t drink at all. In comparison to him I’m beer swilling!However he pretty much can’t cook and I can, used to chef for a living, so I do all of that, and he bungs the hoover around a few times a week. perfect! :)

  • Dana

    The book “The Second Shift” is one I’d recommend: it visits several different families to see how gender equality in work and housework was actually panning out for families who at least in theory say they believe that women should work and men should do their fair share of housework.

    One of the things the author notes is that the men will often appeal to one of two ideas to excuse themselves for not doing their fair share of housework: either they’ll say they’re just not as good at (cleaning, cooking, etc.) as their wife is, or they’ll say they just don’t care that much and don’t think it really needs to be done, but since the wife cares, she can do it. (This is obviously crazy when the things they’re not helping out with include, “changing the baby’s diaper.”)

    Nowadays, it’s difficult even for sexist men to just come out and explicitly say that women should just do more work than men because they’re women. They feel obliged to cover it in some kind of vaguely fair-sounding excuse. But it’s an excuse.

    • Lucreza Borgia

      Regarding the whole “I don’t do it as well as my SO does” deal…usually what that really means is “I don’t do it exactly how my SO wants it done”, which is a whole ‘nother issue. Sometimes in relationships, we have to learn when to let go of the control and allow our partners to do it how they want to do it. If they can’t cede that control and the chore is being done adequately, they have no one to blame but themselves for the extra work.

  • The_L

    …So, unless one of the parents has authority over the other parent, kids won’t grow up understanding the concept of people who have authority over them? Am I reading this B.S. correctly?

    • KarenH

      Yes, apparently Johnny will whine to Daddy, well, why do *I* have to listen to you if Mommy doesn’t???? And apparently, “Because you’re 10 and Mommy is one of your two parents” isn’t the right answer.

      • The_L

        That question alone is painfully stupid. I can guarantee it wouldn’t fly with my dad, and he’s not nearly as egalitarian as most.