Both Joan C. Tronto and Barbara Ehrenreich discuss the role of paid domestic work in relation to the Feminist Movement, and its unintended consequences. Tronto focuses on paid domestic workers who take care of children, while Ehrenreich focuses on domestic workers who clean the house. In both instances, the workers are primarily female, immigrants, and (often) poorly paid. Tronto and Ehrenreich argue that, while the labor reform (i.e. getting women out of the house and into the workplace) has benefitted upper-middle/upper class women, it is the women of the lower classes who are still being exploited as domestic workers. Ehrenreich states that, not only does hiring domestic workers often take advantage of poor, immigrant women, but it does not help the Feminist Movement as a whole, because men are still not expected to take responsibility for keeping the house clean and the children looked after. Rather than reversing traditional roles, in which the man stays home and the woman works, a couple will simply hire women to do these things for them, and men get excused from domestic work. Therefore, one may argue that feminists are responsible for the "nanny problem" that gets discussed in Tronto's essay, but perhaps this is simply because women are not demanding that their partner (in a heterosexual relationship) take on his share of the housework/childcare. According to Ehrenreich, "there is no reason to expect that men will voluntarily take on a greater share of the burden, and much of the need for help arises from their abdication." (100)
As Judy Syfer's essay, "I Want a Wife," demonstrates, wives take on an enormous amount of work and responsibility within the home, (whether she does or does not have a job/career.) Whether it is organizing play dates for the children, doing the laundry, picking up socks, making appointments, women are still left with many duties simply because their partners will not help.
In my own heterosexual relationship, my partner and I take turns completing certain cleaning tasks, and often times he does more of the cleaning than I do. However, I know of many heterosexual couples who do not follow along these same lines. Usually, it is the female partner who must take care of most of the cleaning and planning, because the male partner won't bother. How can we as women shift more domestic responsibilities onto our partners?
DE for 03/07: Answer to Q1
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Your comment is all too familiar to me. You raise the question of how can we as women shift more domestic responsibilities onto men. I grew up with this lifestyle in my own house where my mother stayed home with me and my siblings every single day. My father would leave early for work and come home with dinner ready on the table and proceed to work out and relax the rest of the night. To me, this was completely normal. As a child, this was normal to me, I had never seen anything different. My mother prepared our lunches, got us out the door to the bus, was there to greet us when we got home with a clean house, groceries, laundry done, etc… I think this mentality is starting to change. The increase of women in careers is much different than it used to be. Men are gaining responsibility for the household duties as the woman is gone for much of the day and sometimes even later than the male. I think this changing but very slowly. I think this is largely on the female in the relationship with the male. Some may think this should be obvious but in many cases a female needs to inform the male of roles that need to be done. This could be as simple as starting dinner, running the kids to practice, or throwing laundry in.
We can also look at this from a male perspective. Males have the more landscaping labor. Males are typically the ones mowing the lawn, shoveling/snow blowing, and the random fixes around the house. Why aren’t females typically in this role? This is another interesting perspective to look at. The work in the house is not a simple task but more of a never ending one. Males could bring up this view in that they are looked at to fix anything appliance wise that goes wrong in a house. These roles will never fully change but I see males beginning to have more participation in the numerous household "female" responsibilities.
I agree with both of you on your remarks. It seems as though we are stuck in a never ending gender cycle that we cannot seem to escape no matter how hard we try. The points that are being brought up do seem all too familiar and everyone seems so have heard about these issues before. It is true that women are mainly expected to take care of the children and other various house duties inside of the home such as cooking and cleaning. I like the point that you bring up Jennifer, about the male or husband also having stereotypical duties that he is expected to take care of outside of the home, such as mowing the lawn and various repair work. I think this is something that is also important to recognize. We are stuck in certain mind sets that involve both genders. It seems as though we are trying to solve the problem by just hiring other people to the jobs we no longer think we should be doing, by hiring maids, nannies, or housekeepers. Yes, this does free certain upper-class people of certain jobs, but we have to also acknowledge that is does exploit another class of mainly immigrant women. Ehrenreich states that this does not help the Feminist Movement, which I agree with. Just because certain women are being freed from certain duties, does that mean other women should be taken over for them? Why not men? It is a very difficult subject. Women are seen as close to nature because they give birth, meaning that many people see women as naturally better at being able to take care of children and the home, but is this true? I definitely think that we should be taught as children, that gender roles are not necessarily right and that they may not function a set way all of the time and that that is okay. A woman should be able to do what a man does and vise versa.
I think you've got a great point here. It's an interesting thought that with this "solution" of hiring domestic help, it's actually just making everything worse by making the partners think they'll never have to do housework. It's pushing the problem of expectations (for example, expecting the woman to do most of the housework) to the side, which is basically saying to the other partner "nope, you still don't have to do this". Yes, there won't be fighting about who has to do the dishes, but it's indicative of a much bigger problem that is only being made worse by people ignoring it by hiring domestic workers. In Ehrenreich's article, she writes about a woman who said that she and her husband would be divorced in six months if they gave up the service.
I think there is a trend in our society of not taking the blame for things. Hiring domestic workers, to me, seems to be a way of not acknowledging the true source of a problem. Similarly, I just read an article about Facebook being cited as a factor in 1 out of 5 divorces. Not the same thing, I know, but it has the same sort of feel of looking to outside sources in able to fix/understand something fundamental in a relationship.
Very interesting points. I agree with many things already. As said before, although women have left the home to pursue careers there is still the need within our society for women to fulfill their gender roles. Rather than these roles being changed, more things are added on. With all of these expectations it can be difficult to maintain a healthy home. I feel that it is time to redevelop gender roles (if indeed they are unable to be removed from our society). With pushing aside the core of the problem and replacing the victims (going from wives to immigrant domestic workers) we are just reinforcing and promoting inequalities and ridiculous stereotypes and expectation to follow.