Welcome to the Chore Wars—

Can equality in household labor lead to better health and more sex?

by Kristin Jacobsen

Division of household labor isn’t exactly a declared war, and it hasn’t spawned a revolution, but the resentment simmering just below the surface is ripe for conflicts between spouses.

“He just does not SEE stuff that needs to be done,” says an unchaptered member from Bowie, MD. “The kids are in bed, he’s watching basketball, and I am mopping the floor, clearing up homework papers, returning 1,400 small plastic objects to their proper toy bins, putting videos back in their boxes so they can be located again, picking up shoes that have been left all over the place and putting them in the boot bench… and he’s watching basketball.”

“My husband tends to compare his efforts to that of his father’s years ago instead of comparing to everything I do,” says a member from Central Denver, CO Chapter 218. “He also acts like he’s done me a big favor when helping out (like an occasional folding of laundry) and expects to be acknowledged or thanked. Nobody thanks me for folding laundry.”

Housework is the number three source of marital conflict, after money and children, according to a recent Time magazine article, and 55 percent of couples with children fight over housework. Men are spending more time on housework: 50 percent more than their forefathers did 25 years ago. However, women with children under 18 still spend more time on housework and childcare and less time on leisure activities than men, according to the recently released American Time Use Survey.

“It’s not just that men do less domestic work than women—they also tend to do tasks that are less time sensitive than the household and caregiving tasks that women do. Women are more likely to be responsible for the things that must be done on a daily basis at a certain time, like preparing meals for children and helping with homework,” says Judith Stadtman Tucker, Mothers & More member and editor of The Mothers Movement Online.

Changing family life

The reasons behind housework-related tension within families are as varied as families themselves. What the conflict boils down to, though, is that the nature of home and family life is changing faster than we are adjusting our attitudes and behaviors.

The pace of life today is more hectic and chaotic than a generation ago. The average work week is longer, about 45-50 hours per week, with fathers averaging even more hours. Despite improved technology, we spend the same number of hours doing housework as both our mothers and grandmothers.

Increased standards of living mean bigger houses, more cars and more gadgets that all take more time to clean and maintain. Plus, we have more choices available to us than our parents and so spend more time educating ourselves about choices than they did.

Parents also spend more time with their children, an average of an hour a day longer than they did 25 years ago, “…and on top of it all, motherhood’s more demanding than ever, since we’re expected to take a much more active role in shaping our child’s social, academic and psychological expe-riences,” according to a 2003 article in Parenting magazine.

“And beyond providing an enriching home life, parents are supposed to help financially-strapped childcare centers and schools by organizing auctions, bake sales and book fairs.”

We spend more hours at work, more hours with our children, and the same number of hours doing housework as a generation or two ago. Families are rushed and stressed.

So why are we doing this?

Part of the problem is that couples are unconsciously applying the old rules from the parental models of their childhoods to the very different reality of today.

“We’re still a generation that’s reinventing our roles and learning to do housework as a couple,” Karen Bouris, author of Just Kiss Me and Tell Me You Did the Laundry, says in a 2004 Time article.

Mothers & More members see this theory played out around them.

“I, too, have noticed that many men who say they are feminists and like strong women still hold fast to… traditional ideas about housework,” says Elaine Bartlett, of Silicon Valley, CA Chapter 32. “Men, raised with these norms, often aren’t even conscious of them or question them unless it’s brought to their attention.

“Also, I think it’s an ‘action’ issue,” Bartlett says. “A man can say he likes a woman who’s strong, who makes a good income, etc., because this requires nothing of him in the way of action. But by agreeing that housework should be split equally, a man must take action, i.e., take on more of the housework, and that’s certainly a lot more effort required on his part and not a very fun thing. Who wants to clean out toilets?”

Fighting for “housework equality”

The issue is complex and emotionally charged. Why should we even tackle it all? Is it worth fighting for equality in the division of housework?

The family and all its members benefit when partners share in chores, according to Margaret Heffernan, author of The Naked Truth, in a February message to the POWER loop. “The sociologist Michael Kimmel has pulled together some interesting data to show that where the husband and wife share childcare and domestic responsibilities pretty equally, these things seem to follow:

• The kids do better at school and suffer from fewer mental health issues;
• The mother is more productive and enjoys better physical health;
• The father enjoys greater physical health;
• The couple has more sex.

“One of my interviewees had a great attitude,” continues Heffernan. “Her line to her husband was, ‘You get to contribute!’ It’s true, of course; the more you put in (to home, to kids) the more you get out. So insisting that husbands do their fair share is also a way to get them to value their own homes and their own lives.”

Not only do we provide for an emotionally healthier family, we also provide important role models for our children. “Home is where our kids learn how to ‘do’ life,” according to Kathy Peel, author of The Family Manager Saves the Day. “It’s where they see a model of how to run a home, and they’ll be sure to emulate our example in their adult lives.”

Solutions vary

More equal division of chores is important for our physical, emotional, and mental health. It’s important for our children and our families. So how do we achieve it?

Moving to a more equitable marriage is “generally a very deliberate process requiring much communication, negotiation, bargaining, trial and error, and so on,” according to the authors of Role-Sharing Marriage, a book based on a study of 64 couples who identified themselves as having equitable marriages.

The discussion and negotiation about housework starts with analyzing exactly what needs to be done to keep your household running. In A Housekeeper Is Cheaper Than a Divorce, Kathy Fitzgerald Sherman suggests the following process:
1 Identify your roles (mother, wife, homemaker, friend, family social secretary, etc.) and subroles (as a mother, for example, you are a caregiver, disciplinarian, chauffeur, etc.).
2 List specific tasks for each subrole.
3 Identify additional roles and tasks.
4 Categorize the tasks according to how much you like or dislike a task.
5 Evaluate options for the tasks you dislike or don’t have time for: delegate to a family member, keep it, eliminate it, delegate it to a paid employee.

If you’re not one for making lists, think in more general terms about what is important to you in your home. What do you want to spend your time doing, and what help do you need with household tasks to create time for these other, more desirable activities? What does a clean house mean to you? What really bugs you if left undone? What do you not care about?

One solution for many couples is to hire outside help for housework, laundry, cooking, yard work, errands or other tasks. Sherman writes that such help should not be considered a luxury but rather “a service than enhances the quality of life.”

Tracy Delgado, of Decatur/DeKalb, GA Chapter 255, agrees. “Before and since I became a stay-at-home mom, we have employed a housecleaner every two weeks. My feeling is that it’s cheaper than therapy (nod to Ariel Gore for that one) and really has helped our marriage overall.”

When approaching your spouse about the possibility of hiring help, Sherman recommends listing the tangible and intangible benefits of hiring help, the costs, the savings and the costs associated with not hiring help (example: medical costs related to depression and stress-related health problems, family conflict, and, at the extreme end, the costs associated with divorce and maintaining two households).

If hiring help doesn’t fit with your family’s budget or philosophy, you can still talk with your spouse about redistributing the chores. Even if you hire household help for some chores, you’ll still need a plan for dealing with other chores.

Karen Hirsch, Sacramento, CA Chapter 198, and her husband went through a list of regular household tasks and formally assigned each task to a person. “This is the only thing that stopped the cyclical, grinding conflict over chores,” Hirsch says. “And we don’t stick to this division religiously; if one of us had a hard day, the other will typically pitch in more.”

Renner, Northern Virginia, VA Chapter 143, and her husband came up with a slightly different system based on preferences. “We sat down and made a list of all the tasks that needed to be done. Then we marked which tasks we each did not mind performing and then marked the ones we actually disdained. Then we compared our lists and found out that is was pretty easy to figure out who needed to do what based upon their level of comfort.” For those tasks that you both hate, divide them up, create a schedule for rotating them, or renegotiate periodically so you aren’t stuck with hated tasks permanently.

Mary Anne Van Zuyle, Conejo Valley, CA Chapter 261, and her husband have a chart with about 25 weekly chores along one axis and the days of the month along the other axis. “When a chore is scheduled, the date for that chore has a bold box that we check off when the chore gets done. We both work on either Saturday or Sunday morning doing chores until all the boxes are checked. Things that don’t make it onto the chart are grocery shopping, cooking and doing laundry.”

Once you agree on a division of labor, renegotiation and continued communication are the keys to making it work, according to the Role-Sharing Marriage study. “Certainly most couples found that adjustments were needed from time to time whether these were due to changed circum-stances
or dissatisfaction.”

Hopefully, this kind of enhanced communication will be the peace treaty in the Chore Wars, a way to achieve a bloodless victory over past gender stereotypes.