Something about this Linda Hirshman piece unsettled me, and I'm the first to call bullshit on the idea that all choices are equally feminist so long as you pretend you made the choice freely. (For instance, don't tell me that your breast implants are a feminist choice if you don't want me to point and laugh at you. No one is perfect, we all give into the patriarchy sometimes, just admit it.) 11D has a really good post on it that touches on some of my issues with Hirshman's piece, but I also think that she's overreacting and I don't think the piece is anti-mother at all. Bitch, Ph.D kicks ass as usual on it, and I think maybe that I like her take on it far better than the article to begin with. But again, I have serious issues and Bitch's piece really brought them out for me.
My number 1 issue with Hirshman's piece and Bitch's post is both assume that women can and should take the bull by the horns and force equality at at home.
I don't think that's possible, and Bitch gets close to why I don't think it is.
In fact, I believe that this is the single most irretrievably gendered division-of-labor issue for couples who want to be, or think they are, equals: the person whose job it is to monitor that equality is the person who has the least power. And in most cases, that's the woman. That's why "don't put yourself in a position of unequal resources" is absolutely crucial advice: if you're going to have to monitor your marriage to make sure that it's an equal partnership, then that is in and of itself part of the labor of the relationship.
Bingo. Women are in a permanent lose-lose situation on the home front if they are in heterosexual relationships, particularly if they have children, aka, their relationships and home are labor-intensive. You either take on the lion's share of the actual housework or you take on the lion's share of monitoring the relationship to make sure you aren't taking on the lion's share of the housework. Both of those "choices" suck ass. Bitch has made her choice, which she explains.
And on this matter of housework, the "domestic glass ceiling": the best marital advice I have to give is be willing to be a bitch about housework. And do it as early as possible. Is your man going to divorce you if you insist he does his fair share? Then find out quick, before you have kids and it just gets worse. But probably he won't divorce you for insisting he do housework. So, insist. Don't fuck around with "housework strikes"--it'll drive you crazy before it does him, probably, and you'll cave. Don't get stuck in arguments about "who cares more" or "who just happens to be tidier" or "I just don't notice the mess, honey" or "I'll do whatever you ask me to"--all of which are excuses that mean "I don't think it's my responsibility to do housework, so of course I care less/don't bother/don't notice/will "help" if you think for me and tell me what to do." My advice is, go ahead and do what needs to be done. But let him know what you are doing every goddamn step of the way, and let him know that it pisses you off. "I've just gotten home from work, it's nice to see you're home earlier than I am. Before I take off my coat, I'll put your shoes away for you, shall I? Oh, and I'll pick up your coat from the floor and hang it up. Okay, now I can take off my own coat and hang it up right away, instead of dropping it on the floor for someone else to pick up later. I see there's no dinner started, I'll just get on that shall I? First, though, I'll clear the mail off the dining room table where you seem to have dropped it when you walked in the door. I'll file it over here where it belongs. Ok, now I'm going to go into the kitchen to get a sponge to wipe off the table, which I see hasn't been wiped since breakfast--I guess you didn't have a chance to do that yet, since you had to sit down and read the paper first, right? Wow, now that I'm in the kitchen, I see that before I can start dinner I have to load the dishwasher, but before I can do that I have to unload it...."
While that made me laugh, I'll admit I got a headache just thinking about it. What about women like me, for whom bitching is far more painful, time-consuming, and soul-destroying than doing the majority of the housework will ever be? Is it more or less feminist that in my last relationship I chose instead to simply clean the entire house without complaining, because complaining exhausted me more than any amount of housework ever could? If it is, is that my fault? No, it's not--I was in between a rock and a hard place because I live in a male dominated culture. To make things even more confusing, I have a feeling that living as I do in a more conservative part of the country, I did/do have more to lose by coming off as shrewish to the men around me than maybe women do in parts of the country where women are permitted to be more outspoken. If I nagged about housework, it would be considered a fatal flaw worth not only leaving me for, but probably also trashing my good name with friends over. And having a sloppy household--I assure you, that the only people who would have ever thought that a messy household was even partially my ex's fault instead of solely mine would have probably been his parents, who live on the East Coast and are very feminist-thinking. But for the most part, I could either be a shrew or a bad housekeeper or a bad feminist who let her man run all over her, but there was no room for me to actually "win".
(And yes, the messy household thing I learned the hard way over many fights and lots of tears shed by me. Our first year of living together, our house was a total mess and he and everyone else who saw it blamed me. Now my place is pretty neat, but don't think it wasn't a long, horrible battle turning me into a domestic sort.)
Bitch and Hirshman I both think are just trying to help women figure out a way to navigate in a world where they are not permitted "winning" choices like men are. But the critical thing that must never be forgotten is women can't win in a patriarchy. Everything that Hirshman and Bitch suggest must be understood as choosing the lesser of two evils under an oppressive system. From Hirshman's piece:
How to avoid this kind of rut? You can either find a spouse with less social power than you or find one with an ideological commitment to gender equality. Taking the easier path first, marry down. Don’t think of this as brutally strategic. If you are devoted to your career goals and would like a man who will support that, you’re just doing what men throughout the ages have done: placing a safe bet.
Except of course that men marrying down don't face a social stigma attached to it, and they have a larger dating pool to choose from, and unlike women, they aren't socialized to find people socially "below" them to be sexually unattractive. (Maureen Dowd's admittedly painful problem.) And this whole "marrying down" thing is really only something that matters to professional, striving types anyway. For the rest of us, there's no real way to gauge that. My ex had less education than me, but he made more money. Who was "beneath" the other?
But mostly I quarrel with the idea that men nowadays think strategically about marrying down, or that they ever did. They marry who they want, and luckily for them, all the candidates to marry are beneath them, thanks to oppression. You cannot strategize this social fact away by seeking out what men have been handed as a birthright.
And so on and so forth. One coping strategy I've decided on is not to make myself vulnerable by marrying or having children. I'm still undecided on whether or not marriage is disempowering to the point where I don't want to get involved in every case--I don't think that it is, necessarily--but that's a bridge I'll cross should I come to it. But at present time, I don't ever see myself being a high enough status woman to be able to demand child-rearing out of anyone I'd have children with, period. Plus, I don't like kids enough to care.
What Hirshman seems to want to believe is that the answer to the nauseating "choice" feminism, which isn't really a brand of feminism so much as a backlash phenemenon anyway, is to find the "right" choices and guilt women into making them. I wish it was that easy, I do, but I quarrel with the idea that there is a "right" choice in a male-dominated society. But every "choice" women make has a built-in punishment to it, something she has to give up that men with the same goals and desires don't have to sacrifice.
After all, men aren't writing hand-wringing articles on how to monitor their relationships to make sure they aren't being overworked and oppressed inside them and what hard choices they have to make about what goals and dreams have to be sacrificed in order to maintain their basic autonomy, are they?
My point is there is middle ground between this silly "all choices are feminist" crap and a more nuanced understanding that all choices women make are in response to oppressive forces and have to be understood as essentially surviving choices. It's helpful advice to suggest that you marry someone beneath you socially to balance out your class privilege with his male privilege, and it's helpful to advise someone not to change her name when she marries, but I think it's not productive to judge women who feel, for whatever reasons, that they are only bringing more oppression into their lives than is worth it by making these choices. Like my bitching vs. just doing the housework example--who's really going to line up to cast judgement on me when I've accurately concluded that it's easier for me to have to do all the housework rather than be labeled a nag and a shrew?
It occurs to me that one "out" for women is to marry feminist men who do their part around the house, but even that is a trap to a degree, as Hugo's post today demonstrates.
One of my former wives was, like me, fairly sloppy 'round the house. Laundry piled up, dishes were done intermittently, and so forth. And then, a few months into our marriage, her mother (who lived some distance away) announced she was coming into town. The day before my mother-in-law arrived, I found my wife on her knees scrubbing the bathtub. While I had been off at school, she had been cleaning every square inch of the home. "For heaven's sake", I said, "what are you doing? Your mother is going to stay in a hotel anyway."
My ex looked at me, almost tearfully, and she said "Hugo, you don't understand." She went on to explain how much pressure she felt to live up to her mother's standards for how a home should look. She said that pressure had only really become acute after we were married. "My mom expects me to take care of you", she told me, "If the house isn't perfect, it means I'm a lousy wife and a bad woman." Though my ex-wife was a bright and competent and educated woman with a career outside the home, on that afternoon many years ago she was a frantic and anxious daughter, worried desperately about not living up to a standard that I simply could not understand.
This comes a little bit closer in line with my experiences than Bitch's post about, well, bitching. The problem here is even if you're with a well-meaning man who tries to do his share around the house, unless he's a neatnik--i.e., internallly motivated to be clean--he's never going to be under the same social pressures as women to keep the house neat. Which leaves you with the choice of either asking him to meet an artificial standard that he doesn't want to meet, which will make him resent you, or lowering your standards to his and having people think you're a bad wife/girlfriend/woman. Bring children into it, and you get to be a bad mother, too. My ex-boyfriends had the freedom to take some bohemian pride in clutter, but for a woman, it's just evidence you don't care enough about your home or your man to keep the place clean.
The important thing is keeping our eyes on the prize and blaming the patriarchy, not the women who have to make hard choices inside it. Far more important to the cause of feminism than the individual choices women make to survive is going out there, labeling the problem, educating both men and women on the issues at hand so that they can at least start reconsidering their individual choices, and, most importantly, continuing to agitate for collective, political action that will demolish male dominance.
Update: From the comments below, I realize I wasn't completely clear about particulars of my situation. I do not want anyone thinking wrongly of my exes' politics--both long-term relationships I've had as an adult were with men with progressive politics who would characterize themselves, I'd say, as pro-feminist. My point was just that male privilege is invisible in a lot of ways, and my boyfriends I've lived with were very open and sympathetic to the idea that housework should be divided fairly and we did in fact try to do that, but just failed miserably, because on a) knee-jerk assumptions about who does what and b) the fact that for gendered reasons, they prioritized coming off as bohemian sloppy whereas I was embarrassed to have people think I lived like a pig or whatever. But please don't think they were misogynists or pigs or whatever. My point is like Hugo's and Bitch's, I think--even well-meaning people fall into these roles.
