Friday, April 09, 2004
Spring Cleaning
The big bummer of spring cleaning is upon us, and recently I’ve stifled yawns while half a dozen neat-freaks offered up smug descriptions of the closets they’ve just excavated, the curtains they’ve just washed and rehung, the windows they’ve sprayed to sparkling. Well, goody for you. My idea of spring cleaning is getting stoned on Easter candy and kicking the toys to the edges of the livingroom. But all of us in these ugly little scenarios, whether we’re getting high on cleaning or on not cleaning, share one thing – we’re all women. Spring cleaning is just not something that men, by and large, waste any brain space on.
Women have been angry about being stuck with housework for as long as it has been designated a feminine task. A hundred years ago, reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman noted that there was nothing biological that predisposed women – the “weaker sex,” after all – for the herculean labors of the Victorian home. Gilman argued, “We take half the people of the world and set them to wait upon the other half, thus limiting the output of their labor exactly as it would that of a lumber camp if half the men were assigned to wait upon the other half instead of chopping wood.” She dreamed up a socialist solution – cooperative living in city-block-long units, with families splitting the labor of cleaning, cooking, and child-rearing, and dignifying all that labor with wages.
That dream went nowhere, and women in the 60’s and 70’s again used housework as a galvanizing political issue, even organizing strikes. As more and more women entered the paid work force, there was hope that the unpaid labor of the home – what poet Adrienne Rich calls “the work that others constantly undo” – would no longer be by default “women’s work.” I came of age in this hopeful moment, when we groovy grade-schoolers rocked out to “Free to Be, You and Me,” and memorized Carol Channing’s finger-wagging lecture: [Channing: “Housework"]
And ... another dream deferred, according to recent statistics. While I am sure that you, oh, enlightened NPR listener, live in a family that bucks these numbers, current research shows that in most heterosexual U.S. households, women still do at least 2/3 more of the cooking, dishwashing, laundry, grocery shopping, housecleaning, and childcare. And nearly every media image we see confirms these statistics. Brawny may have revamped their paper towel guy, but all the marketing was aimed at women – and only at women, apparently, who like white men who look like Barbie’s ex- boyfriend. (I wonder, were chore-splitting disputes the source of Ken and Barbie’s breakup, as they are for so many fleshly couples?) Recent letters in The New York Times by retired men whose wives had gone back to work rang with complaints about getting stuck with housework for the first time. One guy suggested wearing a tool belt around the house while dusting so as not to feel unmanned.
I rationalize my own poor housekeeping as a political act. I scoff at the miniature dust-bunnies in the houses of friends; like writer Barbara Kingsolver, I’ve got dust-buffalos roaming my rooms. Still, I’ve been gender socialized thoroughly enough that I am the grownup in our house who notices when we need to vacuum, when it’s time to hand the kids the dustrag, and who has the staples in our fridge and pantry memorized for the grocery list I’m always half-forming in my head. Could I put that brain space to better use?
On some days, I see the satisfactions in keeping house, and doing it well. Perhaps the mistake has been to label this work as menial, and therefore demeaning. Who would want to take part? Instead of telling men they must join women in this drudgery, we must somehow recast this work as worth doing, worth sharing. I have a sweet, tactile memory of each corner of the house I grew up in from cleaning it with my sister every Friday afternoon, the Ramones screaming on the stereo. I could clean it now, blindfolded, and it would feel like an act of respect, of homage to the place that held me while I grew. I think, too, of the way my husband and I over-bathed our infants, eagerly caring for these new bodies with work that felt like worship, making holy the labor of child-rearing. If we dignify this work by sharing it with those we love, and maybe even co-oping with friends, we might all be a little more free.