Homewreckers Anonymous

As for the multiple causes for the breakdown of the American family, add this one to the list. Modern American women believe that housework should be assigned equally to each marital partner. Especially at a time when more men have been working from home, liberated women, possessed of a bean counter mentality, tally up the chores that their husbands perform and tally up the chores that they perform. When the numbers do not jive, they complain. If they learned anything from therapy, it’s about how to complain.

So, Wall Street Journal reporter Rachel Feintzeig offers some instructions for how to break up your happy home. Oops, she did not recommend breaking up your home; she offered some supposedly constructive suggestions about how to get husbands to do more diaper changes and whatnot.

She does not, of course, consider which spouse is contributing the most to the marital coffers. She does not consider the psychological fallout for a husband who is being harassed by his wife over household chores, and who consequently, works less or works less effectively. She does not consider the fact that mothers are far more effective at being mothers than men are. And she certainly does not consider the possibility that this form of mental harassment will likely bring turmoil and torment, and perhaps even separation to the marriage.

What if the result of this nagging is that said husband moves out. Then the women in question will be doing all of the housework and nearly all of the child care. Then they will not even have time to complain.

For the record, a quick search tells us that Feitzeig herself is the mother of two children-- bless her and her children--and that her husband is a nephrologist. During the pandemic her husband was on call and was travelling to different hospitals. He had an on call schedule. He was not home very much. The same is true, for example, of law firm partners, who are always on call.

In these situations the notion of an equal distribution of household labor is absurd.

The feminist fairy tale about household equality sows dissatisfaction by setting up unrealistic expectations for a marriage. But especially, for home life.

Anyway, Feintzeig calls the problem a chore gap. Happily, it has nothing to do with a thigh gap.

She begins on a whiny note:

Women have long carried more of the domestic load. For some couples, the pandemic—with its endless dirty dishes, cluttered makeshift home offices and classrooms, and plenty of time indoors to notice every speck of dust—widened the gap.

And then she arrives at the injustice of it all. Even when men were spending more time at home, working, one assumes, they still did less housework:

Both men and women ramped up the average time they spent on household activities in 2020, according to the American Time Use Survey, men by 16 minutes a day and women by 11. But overall, women did far more—2.4 hours daily, compared with 1.6 for men. Meanwhile, the percentage of men doing housework and food prep each day decreased from 2019 to 2020, while the percentage of women doing those things increased, according to the survey, from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

And then, as might have been expected, the story gets thrown into an ideological wringer, aka, a narrative, where women gain enhanced feminist consciousness of the oppression of it all. They revolt and rebel, to the point where men gain enhanced consciousness and start doing more housework.

Surely, this does happen some of the time, but the chances are better that such men will start spending more time at the office, will tune out their wives and will start looking for good divorce lawyers. Unfortunately, narratizing a problem requires us all to ignore the real consequences.

The women are burned out, stressed and full of rage about unequal distribution of domestic labor, she says. The men are finally starting to wake up to the problem.

“There’s no denying it anymore,” Ms. Rodsky says. Many male partners have spent much of the past 18 months working from home, with a full view of labor that was formerly invisible.

Obviously, a good feminist is going to blame it all on sexism. Because they is what good feminists do.

Nearly 80% of mothers said they were the one primarily responsible for their family’s housework, according to an April 2020 survey analyzed by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, New York University and the University of Texas at Austin. That is compared with 28% of fathers.

The researchers also found that when mothers were the only parent working remotely, 76% of them reported spending more time on housework. When only dad stayed home, 43% of men said the same.

“There’s this interesting asymmetry,” says Jerry Jacobs, a University of Pennsylvania sociologist and co-author of the study. “Gender’s just so deeply ingrained in so many situations.”

Deeply ingrained, who would have guessed. When it comes to bringing up small children, mothers are invariably the best at the task. The reason has a lot to do with biology, what a quaint notion.

When it comes to supporting the family financially, most men are better at it than most women. So, all of this complaining is going to lead to a situation where the put-upon husband, telling his work buddies that he has to go home early to change diapers and to puree carrots, will hear a lone female voice declare, simply and directly: “If you were my husband, I would never let you change a diaper.”

Now, the supposedly egalitarian marriage is on life support. Congratulations on a job well done.