![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/166\/2013\/01\/laundry.jpg\" "\\"laundry\\"")
<\/a>I\u2019ve been thinking a fair bit over the past few days about the devaluation of women\u2019s domestic labor. Why? Because, quite simply, I unintentionally contributed to it in a recent post, as several commenters pointed out. I really do appreciate how frequently those who comment on my blog point out errors or weaknesses in my arguments and simply give me food for thought.<\/p>\nOn Wednesday as I wrote about why my son Bobby needs feminism too<\/a> I pointed out the unfortunate reality that while feminism has had a good bit of success allowing women to break out of traditional female gender roles it has yet to be quite as successful helping men break out of traditional male gender roles. But then, in a post later that same day, I accidentally contributed to this problem. In that post I wrote about my father in law scoffing at my husband doing laundry<\/a>, and about how I responded by pointing out that \u201cI make more money than he does.\u201d I meant to shock my father in law into reevaluating his belief that women should be the ones expected to do the laundry and other housework, but unfortunately the way I went about it served to reinforce the hierarchy that places wage earning solidly above domestic labor.<\/p>\n Here is the exchange that took place in the comment thread:<\/p>\n Anne<\/a>:<\/p>\n This post has rattled around in my head for a bit and I\u2019d like to repeat a few points made above and add another: your mother in law is the truly insulted person here and I\u2019m worried that you contributed to it.<\/p>\n Each couple\u2019s income and each couple\u2019s chores are a matter for that couple. Feminism is about men and women being able to chose those roles freely, including traditional models. Your in-laws probably made the best decision for her to be a SAHM and him to be the breadwinner considering their relative income potential and skills going in to the marriage. By dropping the \u201cI earn more\u201d bomb, you may have devalued their arrangement and her work within it.<\/p>\n I also agree that I hope your FIL gets some life skills under his belt before he becomes that guy in the department store. I would understand him commenting that he\u2019d never done laundry, but I can\u2019t understand why anyone would boast about it. That\u2019s like saying \u201cI don\u2019t drive,\u201d \u201cI can\u2019t boil water,\u201d or \u201cI\u2019ve never written a check.\u201d My math is really rusty, I\u2019m not afraid to say it, but it\u2019s sure not something to boast about. But people can actually get through life without driving, boiling water, writing checks, or knowing advanced math, where we all dirty our clothes every day. To boast about that is to boast that you have pawned off cleaning after yourself to someone else, which devalues his wife.<\/p>\n And when you went to defend yourself, I fear you did the same.<\/p>\n The next time he boasts about being utterly incapable of functioning as an adult on his own, I\u2019d suggest admiration for his wife and curiosity for how he\u2019s managed to exist this long without picking up such a basic skill.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And I replied:<\/p>\n Libby Anne<\/a>:<\/p>\n Each couple\u2019s income and each couple\u2019s chores are a matter for that couple. Feminism is about men and women being able to chose those roles freely, including traditional models. Your in-laws probably made the best decision for her to be a SAHM and him to be the breadwinner considering their relative income potential and skills going in to the marriage.<\/p>\n Absolutely. My father in law has a very high powered job that takes a great deal of time, and he couldn\u2019t do that without my mother in law being there to do everything else \u2013 the housework, cooking, laundry, kids, etc. I have no problem with their arrangement, and it doesn\u2019t bother me that my father in law has never done laundry. I could easily see the same scenario with a woman in a very time consuming and high paying job having a \u201chouse husband\u201d who does all the housework and the brunt of the childcare to keep their family running.<\/p>\n By dropping the \u201cI earn more\u201d bomb, you may have devalued their arrangement and her work within it.<\/p>\n I disagree. I didn\u2019t say that I have a problem with their division of labor. I merely pointed out that, unlike the way they do things, my husband and I share the money earning, so it only makes sense that we would share the housework. My in laws know that I work. And yet, my father in law thinks I should also be doing all of the housework? That assumption is what I was targeting. If I was staying at home and my husband was working full time, I would have no problem with the assumption that I should be doing all of the laundry, just as if my husband was staying at home and I was working, I think it would be natural to assume that he would do all of the laundry.<\/p>\n That all said, I don\u2019t know for sure how my mother in law perceived of the exchange, and you\u2019re absolutely right that another way to address the situation would have been to make fun of my father in law for not knowing how to take care of himself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And she responded:<\/p>\n Anne<\/a>:<\/p>\n I\u2019d totally back you up 100% if you simply left it at \u201cwe both work, we both do chores.\u201d It\u2019s the paycheck comparison that got to me. It\u2019s totally understandable in the heat of the moment, but I think it plays into the same notion that your FIL had \u2014 that earners don\u2019t do housework. You know them, you know the context, but \u201cwho does X more\u201d is a topic that misfires easily, even when your inlaws aren\u2019t there. On another note, my parents were very traditional when I was growing up, but after the kids were raised and dad retired, he learned how to do laundry and cook. Your FIL may surprise you in a few years.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And finally, another commenter weighed in:<\/p>\n ERB<\/a>:<\/p>\n I think your reply to your father-in-law\u2019s comment was succinct and effective in getting several points across at once (trying to be nuanced is often a conversation killer). Additionally, you know him in context.<\/p>\n However, I had a similar reaction to Anne. You didn\u2019t say \u201cThat\u2019s too bad, because it\u2019s a really important job. It can take a lot of practice to get good at.\u201d Both your father-in-law\u2019s comment and yours focused on traditionally male \u201cpositives\u201d: he devalued doing laundry and you glorified earning money. While there shouldn\u2019t be anything intrinsically male or female about doing laundry or earning money, isn\u2019t that there *is* some connection the issue feminism is (hopefully at it\u2019s heart) trying to combat? Sometimes feminism seems to buy into the sexist idea that \u201cmale\u201d is inherently better.<\/p>\n That being said, I don\u2019t think you should have said anything different. Just that it\u2019s frustrating.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And so, ever since reading these comments, I\u2019ve been doing thinking.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n You know how I said in my post about what feminism can do for my son Bobby that while it is now seen as acceptable for girls to do boy things it is not so acceptable for boys to do girl things? There\u2019s a reason for that. Boy things are seen as superior and girl things are seen as inferior. This shouldn\u2019t be surprising, really, given the history and nature of patriarchy. No matter how much complementarians like to argue that it\u2019s simply about men and women playing different roles, those roles have never been valued equally. So when a woman aspires to a career, she is moving up; but when a man does housework, he is moving down.<\/p>\n When I pointed out to my father in law that I earn more than my husband and that, because we share in the wage earning, it only makes sense that we should share the housework, the cultural backdrop to the conversation was the connotation that by having a career and earning money I have moved up, all the while forcing my husband down by expecting him to share the housework and childcare. And I carelessly didn\u2019t think about how strongly cultural backdrops shape both what we say and how others perceive what we say.<\/p>\n Now of course, women have always worked outside of the home. Even in the 1950s during the heyday of the nuclear family provider father\/homemaker mother ideal, most women worked. But women have traditionally worked as maids, nannies, teachers, nurses, and secretaries, and with the exception today of nursing, these jobs have always paid very badly. They have paid badly because women\u2019s labor is undervalued. And even today, at least in part because men are socialized to place more emphasis on earning money and women are socialized to place more emphasis on caregiving, it continues to be women who flock to these underpaid professions.<\/p>\n Women\u2019s labor has traditionally been underpaid or, in the case of homemaking, unpaid, but the idea that men have traditionally \u201cworked\u201d while women have not is false. In fact, women\u2019s domestic labor has not always been devalued the way it is today. Historian Jeanne Boyston addressed the origins of the devaluation of women\u2019s labor in her book, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic<\/a>.<\/p>\n Over the course of a two hundred year period, women\u2019s domestic labor gradually lost its footing as a recognized aspect of economic life in America. The image of the colonial \u201cgoodwife,\u201d valued for her contribution to household prosperity, had been replaced by the image of a \u201cdependent\u201d and a \u201cnon-producer.\u201d This book is a history of housework in the United States prior to the Civil War. More particularly, it is a history of women\u2019s unpaid domestic labor in the context of the emergence of an industrialized society in the northern United States. Boydston argues that just as a capitalist economic order had first to teach that wages were the measure of a man\u2019s worth, it had at the same time, implicitly or explicitly, to teach that those who did not draw wages were dependent and not essential to the \u201creal economy.\u201d Developing a striking account of the gender and labor systems that characterized industrializing America, Boydston explains how this effected the devaluation of women\u2019s unpaid labor.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In other words, as middle class men began to work for wages outside of the home rather than working independently running farms or shops, they became dependent on others for their income. This was\u00a0perceived\u00a0as a threat to their masculinity. In order for the wage work so intrinsic to capitalism to take hold, societal conceptions had to shift such that people saw wage earning as \u201cwork\u201d and household labor that did not earn wages, well, not<\/em>. As men became valued by their wage, women\u2019s domestic labor became both invisible and valueless.<\/p>\n