Half Changed World

First the update, then a few responses to the comments on why I think this matters.

Friday, T reported spending 2.5 hours on housework — 45 minutes cleaning the kitchen, 45 minutes on laundry, 30 minutes mopping the kitchen and bathroom (unfortunately we have light colored tile floors that look dirty 10 minutes after you finish cleaning them), and 30 minutes sorting the papers on his "launch pad" shelf.  He also spent 45 minutes cooking.  I spent 30 minutes cooking (I started the chili cooking in the crockpot in the morning) and about 15 minutes doing laundry and miscellaneous picking up (taking out the recycling, cleaning up after the cat, bringing in dishes from around the house).  I also spent 30 minutes cleaning up my desk and the area around it.  (Is that housework?  I don’t really think so, but it’s certainly comparable to T’s cleaning his launch pad.) 

Saturday, T spent 1.25 hours cleaning — half an hour in the kitchen, 45 minutes in the bedroom and family room, and about 15 minutes cooking.  I also spent about 15 minutes cooking (we had pancakes for breakfast, but went out for dinner), and about 15 minutes picking up and doing laundry.

Today, T spent 45 minutes cleaning — 15 minutes in the kitchen, 30 minutes doing the bathroom, and about 15 cooking.  I spent about 15 minutes cleaning and doing laundry.  We spent about 20 minutes together shopping, and about half an hour moving furniture around in the boys’ room.

So why do I think it’s worth paying attention to this?  Certainly I wouldn’t want to do it all the time, any more than I track every cent I spend all the time.  But I think both are worth doing for short periods of time.

First, it does draw attention to the division of labor.  I’ll admit that I’m feeling self-conscious to see that T is doing more household work than me, even on the weekend.  In my defense, I’ll say that I was taking care of the boys when T was cleaning.  I also think I may do more of the 30 seconds here and there type stuff, picking up socks and dirty dishes when I see them.  (But I’m also realizing that I may be giving myself too much credit for doing that.)

Second, I think that most people don’t have a particularly realistic sense of the "cost" of a certain level of cleanliness.  If you don’t realize that having a house that is "guest-clean" at all times requires 2 hours a day of cleaning, it’s easy to beat yourself up for not achieving that standard, to think that you’re lazy or inefficient.  Part of effective time management is knowing how long a task actually takes.

Third, in response to Jennifer’s comment, I do think it’s possible to make changes when you realize how long things really take.  You might institute a family rule that everyone only gets clean towels once a week, and people who leave their wet towels on the floor have to deal with the consequences.  You might decide that it’s really important to you to mop the kitchen every other day, but that you’re willing to only vacuum once a week (or vice versa).  Or you might decide that you’re willing to hire a housecleaner.

If anyone else decides to track this for a while, please let me know.  I’d love to see what this looks like in other households.

Last week’s NYTimes article on mothers’ labor force participation (which I also wrote about last Friday) suggests that the decline in housework that has occurred over the past 40 years may have reached a limit — that we can’t reasonably go much lower.  I’m not sure if I think that’s true. 

I have no idea how messy the average house is, to be honest, or how we compare.  We do a pretty good job of staying on top of the dirty dishes and the laundry (since we don’t have a basement, there’s no real room to let the laundry pile up), but the clutter (books, papers, toys) builds up as fast as we can put it away.  And by the time we’ve cleared away the clutter, we often run out of steam before we get to the sweeping/vacuuming/mopping stage.

So I asked my husband if he’d be willing to track all the housework we did for a week, and he said sure. He even suggested we post photos.  (We’ve been snapping them, but I don’t have the energy to transfer them tonight.)

So, today is day 1.  T reports that he spent 1 hour grocery shopping today, 1 hour cooking (we had chicken paprikash), and 2.75 hours doing housework (.5 hours cleaning the kitchen, .25 hours cleaning up after each of lunch and dinner, .25 hours running laundry, .75 hours sorting and putting it away, .5 hours picking up the dining room, and .25 hours picking up the library/family room).  He says that’s about average — I think it’s probably a bit more than usual.  But that might be a sign of the invisibility of housework — you only notice it when it’s not done.

I spent about 20 minutes cooking (mostly making challah for tomorrow, but also putting my breakfast and lunch together) and about 40 minutes cleaning — 10 minutes cleaning the kitchen (scrubbing the stovetop and the microwave, which didn’t rise to the top of T’s list), 15 minutes putting away laundry, and 15 minutes picking up in the library. I also spent about 30 minutes trying to get caught up recording our finances, which got a bit scrambled by not having access to my computer files for two weeks.  And now I’ve spent about 30 minutes blogging and checking my messages, and I think I’m going to bed.

This week’s book is I’m Every Woman: Remixed Stories of Marriage, Motherhood and Work, by Lonnae O’Neal Parker. It’s the book about a black woman’s perspective on the whole work-family thing that was mentioned in the Times article I discussed last month.

It’s an interesting book.  At times it delivers exactly what it promises — insight into the ways that work and family issues play out differently for black women.  Parker says that she never realized that some women feel guilt for working outside the home until she was in her twenties, as all the women in her families had worked for pay.  She writes about the extra time that she needs to carve out of her day to comb and braid her daughters’ hair, and illustrates her stories with quotes from the blues, R&B, and hip hop.

Parker also offers insights that cut across racial lines:

"I no longer ask the people around me to give me time.  I do not know if it is fair to ask them to go against their most basic nature, which is to want me there, available for everything they need me for, for as long as they can have me.  Instead I do the hard work of being completely clear about what I need.  Then they don’t have to give me anything.  They just have to respect the boundaries I insist on maintaining.  It can still be a tough sell, but at least I’ve got half the battle won."

But at other points the book wanders and loses focus.  The long discussion of 1960s television shows left me cold.  One chapter simply reprints Parker’s Post magazine article about her "white" cousin who lives with her.  It was interesting — I remember finding it interesting when it was first published — but doesn’t really fit in with the rest of the book.  Another chapter includes a random paragraph about Michelle Obama that seems to be a left-over remnant from a section that got edited out.  At times Parker can’t resist including every tangential bit of history that she knows about a subject.

In several places, Parker discusses the slave history of black women in the United States, and points out that her burden is light compared to what her foremothers endured.  How can she complain about juggling the demands of writing for the Post and caring for her family when women worked from sunup to dark in the fields, and stole moments with their children at night?  When women routinely lost their children to the slave trade and death?

It’s a brutal standard.  Given the horrors of history, and the suffering of millions worldwide today, who of us has any right to complain?  Certainly not me.  And such comparisons are often used as a silencing maneuver.  But Parker uses these stories as a source of strength, telling herself that she can handle whatever fate brings to her.  And I’m sure she can.

I’ve been thinking about that NYTimes article on mother’s labor force participation.  The article suggests that the slight recent drop-off in women’s labor force participation in recent years is because we’ve pushed unpaid work — housework and child care — about to its lower limit, and there are only so many hours in the day and something has to give. 

Bitch, PhD thinks that makes sense.  She wrote:

if, broadly speaking, we’ve wrung about all we can out of the 24 hours in a day, then it makes sense both that some women would step back from the grueling regime in favor of a more balanced personal life, regardless of the possible risks they run in doing so: when you’ve reached the limit of your energy, you can’t keep going and that’s all there is to it. It also makes sense that women who are still trying to hang onto the stressful balancing act of career, children, and coupledom would feel that they’re singlehandedly carrying the world on their shoulders. And given the pressures on all of us, of course we’re all defensive and insistent and argumentative about our choices.

But one of her commenters, Steve Horwitz, points to this Economist article (based on this paper by Aguilar and Hurst) which uses the same underlying data as the Times article and comes to the conclusion that total leisure time for all groups — including working moms — has increased significantly over the past 40 years.  Is this possible?  And if it’s true, why do we all feel so tired?

I think there’s a bunch of different things going on.

If I’m reading the papers accurately, the biggest issue is whether you consider time spent with children doing generally recreational activities — reading to them, taking them to parties, watching school plays, even going to the park — as leisure.  Aguilar and Hurst do, while I think Bianchi (whose data the NYTimes uses) counts them as child care.  Conceptually, I think these activities somewhere between true leisure and work.  They’re not in the same category as changing diapers or attending parent-teacher conferences, which you do because they’re important, but no one really considers fun.  But they’re also at least semi-obligatory —  you feel guilty if you don’t do them enough, and you often have to do them even if you’d really rather be doing something else.  So they add to the modern parent’s endless to-do list.

While the time-use studies clearly show that the amount of time spent on housework has dropped significantly, they don’t account for the fact that people’s expectations  haven’t fallen as much.  So even if we only vaccuum once a month, we feel like we ought to do it more often, and it stays on our to-do list, even if we know that we’re never going to get to it.

Aguilar and Hurst also point out that there’s been an increase in inequality in leisure time, with more of the gain in leisure concentrated among less educated individuals.  If you believe Annette Lareau, the parents with more education are also spending more of their "free" time in intensive parenting activities.  And if you’re reading this blog, or Dr B’s, the chances are high that you’re in that group.

As the Economist article acknowledges, the blurring of the lines between work and free time are also a factor in our perception of overwork.  If you have to carry a blackberry to your kid’s soccer game, and check your voice mail over the weekend, it’s hard to leave the office behind.  And I don’t think it’s coincidence that Dr. B and Sandy Piderit are academics.  It’s not just that professors work long hours, but that their hours of work are unbounded — there’s almost always something else that they could/should be working on.

Overall, I think it’s that sense of things left undone, rather than the total number of hours worked, that makes people feel overwhelmed.  When I started work after getting my masters, I remember how excited I was at the concept of the weekend.  Look, it’s Friday, and I get to go home!  And I don’t have to think about work, or feel guilty about not doing it, until Monday morning!  What a concept.

But at this point in my life, my personal to-do list is a lot longer than my work one.  Some days are busier than others at work, but I generally leave the office having accomplished most of what I need to do.  At home, I almost always feel like I’m running behind.   Therefore, I need to make a conscious choice at times to let go of the endless to-list.

Or, as Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote:

"The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time. It is a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation, from the world of creation to the creation of the world."

Shabbat Shalom.

I can’t decide if I’m more pleased with all the recent attention that work-family issues have been getting in the mainstream media these days or frustrated that so much of the coverage is stuck on the same old groove, setting working (for pay) moms against at-home moms, and ignoring dads completely.

I love RebelDad’s suggestion that we should googlebomb the term "mommy wars" to refer to Miriam Peskowitz’s excellent book, The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars.  It’s a much more productive contribution to the discussion than the new book by Leslie Morgan Steiner that’s been getting a bunch of attention.  (See also Miriam’s blog, where she’s had some interesting posts this week about the NYTimes article on trends in women’s labor force participation.)

RebelDad’s ready to write off the Steiner book because of her stupid comments about dads in the interview with her posted on the Business Week working parents blog.  (He also points out this strong piece from Time online called "Bring on the Daddy Wars.")  I agree, if she can only find men "whose lives haven’t changed as much dramatically" it’s because she hasn’t been looking.  (She also said she couldn’t find any interesting blogs that talk about work-family issues — I posted some of my favorites in the comments section there.)

And yet, I don’t want to dismiss the book entirely, both because I want to take advantage of the big Random House publicity machine’s efforts to get these topics aired, and because Steiner gets some things exactly right.  In the Business Week interview, she says:

"I thought the battle was between stay-at-home and working moms. But women don’t fall into these neat categories. Most women see it as a continuum. A mom who left a hard-driving job may be at home now, but she plans on being back at work two years from now."

Yup.  And in the Post article she makes the point that the biggest mommy war is often internal, and tells a sweet story about the lift she got when her daughter’s preschool teacher complimented her:

"Did anyone ever tell you how beautiful you are?" Mrs. Rahim whispered so that the swirling crowd of stay-at-home moms, lingering by the school door, couldn’t hear. "You are a happy mom. Your face glows with it. That’s what matters most to your kids. I think you should have 10 more children. Now go to work."

So, it’s hard to know what to expect from the book.  One taste is provided by the excerpt from one of the essays published in Newsweek.  It’s by a woman who suggests that her children’s overall meltdown was due to her not being home to meet the school bus (even though she did in fact work from home two weeks a month, and her husband was home the rest of the time).

As I’ve said before, I’m generally sceptical about the degree to which you can draw a straight line from parental choices to children’s outcomes.  But even setting that aside, my reading of the essay is that, to the extent that Hingston contributed to her kids’ problems, it’s not because she was working, but because she felt so guilty about working that she had trouble setting limits, even when her son’s therapist and teachers all agreed that they were badly needed.  I’m quite curious whether Hingston draws the same conclusion in the full version of her essay.

I don’t have anything to add to Laura or Amanda‘s comments on Tierney’s column from Tuesday’s Times.  I do have a bit to say on Wilcox and Nock’s underlying paper, which is far more subtle and interesting.

The article tests the hypothesis that "egalitarian marriages" — marriages in which husbands and wives share similar work and family responsibilities — are happier than traditional marriages.  The authors reject this "companionate" model, finding that wives’ gender role egalitarianism (e.g. their belief that tasks ought to be split evenly), wives’ employment, and wives’ earning significant shares of the family’s earnings are all associated with lower levels of wives’ satisfaction with their marriages.  The factor most associated with wives’ satisfaction with their marriages was whether they were happy with the level of affection and understanding shown to them by their husbands.

I’m not actually all that surprised by these findings.  First, I think it’s more than a little insulting to suggest that employed and stay-at-home parents won’t have "common experiences and interests around which they can build conversations, empathetic regard, mutual understanding and the like."

Lots of people have pointed out that dual working couples — especially those with small children — are essentially trying to share at least three jobs between two people.  Of course they’re going to be stressed.  And often their marriage is going to be a lower priority. And when both people think they’re doing more than half of the work, they’re not likely to be especially appreciative of their spouse.

The authors claim that the husbands in dual-earner families are actually less affectionate than those in traditional families.  They hypothesize that wives who are unhappy with the division of labor in the family stir up conflict (e.g. nag) or emotionally withdraw, resulting in less emotional investment by the husbands.  I could also spin a similar story that was grounded in sex — women who are exhausted and feel unappreciated are less likely to be interested in it.  (In a footnote, the authors point out that their regressions of husbands’ satisfaction with their marriages had less explanatory power.  I’d love to see what happened if they were able to include a measure of satisfaction with the sexual side of the relationship.)

One thing to note is that the study’s main measure of husbands’ "emotional work" is actually a measure of wives’ satisfaction with what their husbands are doing.  I think it’s a reasonable interpretation of this study’s findings to say that the secret of marital happiness is low expectations.

Does this mean that we should all give up on trying to break through the domestic glass ceiling?  I don’t think so.  For one thing, the study only looks at happiness with the marriage, not overall happiness.  For another, the study also seems to suggest that to have a happy marriage, you shouldn’t have children — the number of preschool children in the family was consistently associated with lower levels of marital happiness.  But that doesn’t seem to stop anyone from having kids.

I’m surprised that the blogs I read haven’t lit up yet with discussion of the Newsweek International Edition cover story on how the generous European family benefits aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.  The headline is "Stuck in Place: The Myth of Women’s Equality in Europe" over a photo of a woman’s legs with skirt, high heels and ankle chains.

The article makes a reasonably strong case (heavily drawing on this OECD report) that the generous paid leaves that American women drool over come at a cost to women’s professional accomplishments.  As in the United States, women who take several years off of work find it hard to get back on to the fast track.  Many wind up returning to work on a part-time basis, in jobs that are less prestigious and pay less per hour than full-time work.   (As Jennifer pointed out in her comment on my post about part-time work, national health insurance doesn’t make the problems with part-time work go away.)  And employers blatently discriminate against women of childbearing age — even those who plan to return to work quickly, or not to have children — for fear of having to carry them during extended leaves.

The Newsweek article includes a recommendation that European countries should shorten paid maternity leaves to 6 months to a year.  I’m not entirely convinced this would change things dramatically, but even if it would, it raises some interesting distributional issues.  All women, not even all mothers, don’t have monolithic interests; what’s best for some isn’t what’s best for others.  It it reasonable to ask women who don’t have any ambition to have a "career" rather than a "job" to give up some of their benefits in order to improve things for the elite who do? 

I’m more intrigued by some of the proposals that would make a portion of the parental leave only available to fathers.   I do think that even short periods of full-time childcare both dramatically increase dads’ confidence in their parenting skills, and give them a better appreciation for the work that’s involved.  And they might even the professional playing field a little bit.

Today’s book is Bringing Home the Bacon: Making Marriage Work When She Makes More Money, by Harriet Pappenheim and Ginny Graves.  It was on display at Powells when I visited over Thanksgiving, and the cover literally made me swivel my head as I walked by.  As soon as I got home, I hunted down the book and requested it from the library.

I’ve been taking an excellent free course at Barnes and Noble online on Thinking Like An Editor and it’s helped me understand why this book was appealing to an editor.  Improving your marriage is one of the perennial hot-selling book topics, and this book is aimed at a clearly defined and large group of women (1/3 of married women earn more than their husbands) that hasn’t been addressed before.  The authors’ credentials are impressive — a therapist and a journalist.  On the book jacket, they promise to address such important questions as "why working women still do more housework than their husbands — even when their husbands stay home" and "how couples can navigate financial decisionmaking when the breadwinner’s reins rest firmly in the wife’s hands."  They promise to answer them based on Pappenheim’s professional experience and interviews with 100 couples.

Unfortunately, all this didn’t actual make for a very good book.  As it turns out, 100 interviews is a challenging number to write a book about.  It’s not enough to say anything statistically valid about overall trends, but too many for individuals to stand out from the mass.  All the Susans and Bills and Daves blurred together, so you never got a clear picture of any one couple across the topics covered in each chapter (sex, money, housework, etc.)  Pappenheim and Graves never really answered the gripping questions that they posed.   And the advice they offer is so generic as to be useless.  (Their top recommendation for how to make marriage work when she earns more is "Make mutual respect priority Number one."  As opposed to every other marriage, where mutual respect isn’t important?)

Overall, I think the problem is that they discovered that marriages where the women earn more than their husbands don’t necessarily have that much in common.   As I could have told them, a lot depends on whether it’s voluntarily chosen.  In other words, is the husband a SAHD, a low-earning artist, or umemployed?  Some of the generalizations they reached for totally missed the mark for me (fatigue and lack of time may interfere with our sex life, but not lack of respect), while others seemed right on target:

"Women’s hunger for options, for leeway, for relief from the relentless grind, were recurrent themes in our interviews.  Perhaps when women pine for a male provider, what they’re really craving is greater latitude in a life that’s come to feel too restrictive. What’s clear is that when a career becomes just another kind of trap, limiting our options, dictating the course of our lives, many of us become disenchanted and start trying to find a way out… It’s possible (maybe even probable) that male breadwinners feel the same way about being trapped in the daily grind, but unless they are very wealthy, it never occurs to the majority of them that they have an option to stop working… They certainly don’t seriously feel that they are entitled to be taken care of by their wives.  But many women, consciously or unconsciously, feel entitled to being taken care of by their men."

My dad sent me two articles that he thought I’d find interesting in light of the ongoing discussion here about work hours.

The first is an article on The Relationship between Specialty Choice and Gender of US Medical Students, 1990-2003.  It debunks the idea that the increase in the fraction of doctors who are women is responsible for the decreasing interest of medical students in specialties where hours are considered "uncontrollable," especially internal and family medicine, pediatrics, ob/gyn and general surgery.  In fact, in every time period examined, women were more likely than men to be planning on uncontrollable specialties.

The second is an article from the Johns Hopkins Medical School alumni magazine about the changes involved in implementing the 80-hour/week restrictions on interns’ and residents’ working hours.  On the one hand, it’s a little surreal to read about a world in which 80-hour work weeks are considered virtually part-time.  But, it’s also a story about a place where people swore that it was impossible to limit working hours without destroying the experience, until they didn’t have a choice, and then they managed to do it.  And if law firms and game companies suddenly faced economic disincentives to working people huge hours (instead of strong incentives to do so), they’d change as well.

Moxie more or less tagged me to respond to this New York Times article, about upper-income black mothers, and their reactions to the whole work-family debate.

Jill at Feministe gives the Times credit for talking about race, but complains that once again, the discussion is limited to upper-income college-educated professionals.  She’s right, but the article is clearly framed in the context of the Times’ obsession with "the opt-out revolution" which is all about upper-income women with lots of choices.  So I’m willing to cut them some slack on that.

Overall, I do think that class probably matters more than race in determining who stays home.  I know Lareau deliberately studied a racially diverse population and found that parenting styles didn’t vary much across racial groups, holding class constant.  Edin and Kefales also didn’t find much racial differences.  (I think ethnicity/immigration status probably does matter; there are definitely ethnic groups where there’s still great cultural pressure against moms of young children working.)

Of course, "holding class constant" is a heck of an assumption.  As I’ve discussed before, stay-at-home parents are concentrated at the very high and very low income ranges.  And there are relatively few African-American families with a single wage-earner making over $100,000 a year.  And even holding income constant, African-Americans have significantly lower assets, making relying on a single income more risky.

The article suggests that there’s more support/pressure for African-American women, especially those who have higher education, to work outside the home.  That may well be true.  But it’s also true that, as Cashin argues, even well-off African-Americans are more likely to live places with higher crime rates, and worse public schools.  So that may provide an incentive to have a parent at home to keep an eye on things.  I don’t know what the net effect is.