Men shouldn't feel shame for not doing enough housework
I remember sensing the difference between domestic labor and "real" work as a kid.
I remember feeling the difference as a kid. Some things my parents asked me to do felt fun and creative and fresh. Like helping my dad build our new deck or carving pumpkins at Halloween or preparing our boat for a day of fishing. Other things—cleaning my room, cutting the grass, waiting in the car for my sister to finish gymnastics class—felt like work, boring, a waste of time. Chores were just maintaining what already was, rather than creating something new. They felt worthless, and I hated doing them.
What made me remember this was the journalist
’s recent post about how domestic inequality starts in childhood. Moyer digs into the research showing that daughters often take on more household labor than sons. She points to studies showing that kids with parents in heterosexual marriages learn about gender roles from observing their parents’ approach to housework. Kids whose moms do most of the childcare know more about gender stereotypes than other kids. They’re also more likely to see it as unacceptable for a mother to want a full-time job or a father to want to stay at home and care for kids. Here’s the really sad one: Daughters of fathers who don’t do as much household labor as their partners have lower career aspirations than those with fathers who do.Moyer concludes:
“If you’re a dad who’s already taking on equal share at home, that’s wonderful. What I would ask of you is to find ways to encourage other men to do the same, because there aren’t enough of you. Talk about what you do at home and why. Challenge the gender stereotypes you see and hear. Instead of being defensive, be an activist and an ally. So many women—and children—will be better off for it.”
So here I am telling you to do more at home. But I also want to make an argument for why men shouldn’t feel shame for coming up short.
Even though nearly half of women in heterosexual marriages now earn as much as their husbands, women still do more childcare, housework, and other forms of unpaid domestic labor. It’s estimated that women around the world take on three times as much care and domestic work than men. Most working mothers pull a “second shift” at home, which goes unpaid, ignored, and even sometimes made fun of.
Like I said, I sensed the difference between “real work” and unpaid domestic labor as early as 4 or 5 years old. I likely learned it from watching my parents and seeing fathers and mothers on television. It was the late 80s and 90s, with Married... with Children and 7th Heaven. Not that things have gotten much better: A recent study found that shows targeting toddlers still feature characters that adhere to “traditional” gender stereotypes.
Both my parents worked full-time. My mom was the breadwinner. Her software engineer job paid more than my dad’s job delivering packages for FedEx. But he wasn’t around as much when I was little. He recently told me he used to work 60+-hour weeks back then, until my mom made him cut back, so he could be home more. I couldn’t tell if he was proud or regretful about it.
My point is it wasn’t my choice that I started thinking this way about work.
Gender roles are socialized. We learn them as kids, and they get reinforced as we become adults. It makes sense that men don’t want to do housework. It’s been devalued in our economy for centuries. As I’ve written, before capitalism, everyone shared in work inside and outside the home to different degrees in different societies around the world. Domestic labor wasn’t always seen as lesser than the “real work” of trading, hunting, or working in the fields. It wasn’t always fairly distributed, but compared to now, work wasn’t so gender specific. It was handled by the community as a whole.
Sociologist Oyeronke Oyewumi has documented how 19th-century British colonizers brought gender discrimination to the Yoruba people, one of the three largest ethnic groups in what is now known as Nigeria. Before colonization, Yoruba women held leadership positions and owned land. Rather than only doing domestic labor, they could choose to trade or work in the fields. “Women could be at the same time rulers, mothers, children, priests, and occupy any position in social structures, depending on their situational status,” Oyewumi writes.
The British forced the Yorubas to convert to Christianity and a capitalist economy. They assigned property to men, barred women from government, forbade sex outside of marriage, and turned previously genderless gods in the local religion into men. “Christianization and the imposition of the European economic system led to [women’s] exclusion from the public sphere,” Oyewumi writes. “Women were forced into the household and became dependent on men.”
The Yorubas are just one example of what life was like before capitalism. It wasn’t perfect. Patriarchy and other forms of oppression existed. But gender roles were more flexible, less carved in stone. This was true in places like Nigeria that were eventually colonized and across indigenous Europe until around the 1500-1600s. As the philosopher Nancy Fraser says, “The rise of capitalism intensified gender division—by splitting economic production off from [domestic labor,] treating them as two separate things, located in two distinct institutions and coordinated in two different ways.”
We’re up against hundreds of years of history and an economic system that’s taken over the world in that time.
There are economic, material reasons men don’t want to do housework. For many generations, men were the primary breadwinners. Or at least told we should be. Most men of color didn’t make a family wage, and many white men didn’t either—unless they were union members or working in high-paid professions. Supporting the family on one income was an ideal, something for men to strive for.
Generations of women have been fed the opposite message: that housework and childcare are their duty, because women are “naturally” more caring and less focused on work outside the home (which, of course, isn’t true). No wonder men think domestic labor is beneath us, that there are more important things we should be doing to make money, that if we aren’t doing those more important things, we should be relaxing for the next time we can work and make more money.
Yet, that’s not how the economy works anymore. The percentage of dual-earner households has more than doubled since 1960. More and more women have entered the workforce, even out-earning their male counterparts in some cities. The “traditional” ideal of the hardworking man supporting his family while his wife focused on childcare and housework—which was always a bit of a mirage anyway—is becoming unreachable for even more families. The odds are that you and your partner are both pulling 40+ hours at work, trying to juggle all the “adulting” of childcare and housework in the few hours left. And because of the ways men and women have been conditioned by capitalism, too much of that adulting still falls on to women’s plates.
If you’re like me, you already feel burned out from working so much.
The idea of taking on more labor at home sounds like hell. So why not keep pretending you don’t notice how much your partner is doing? Why not keep getting away with it? I definitely try to avoid putting too much effort into hosting friends, while my wife pours her heart into cooking for them and giving them attention. I definitely still hate doing things that feel like maintenance and would rather pay someone to do it (which many people don’t have the money to do).
I want to slightly tweak what Moyer suggests, that men should be activists and allies, “so many women—and children—will be better off for it.” I want to add that we will be better off for it too. There are the statistical reasons why. Couples are often less distressed when there is more sharing of housework. They also tend to have more sex. But there are more self-interested reasons that should motivate us to pay more attention around the house.
Despite what right-wing “manosphere” influencers like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson say, there is immense value in what capitalism considers “women’s work.” (Tate recently said that men work in the “physical world” and women work in the “spirit realm,” and “being a good partner is a full-time job for a woman.”) There’s value in caring for others—it’s a necessary part of the human experience. There’s value in maintaining what we already have, rather than always chasing more and more off somewhere else. There’s (tons of!) value in emotional connection. I like how editor and writer
puts it:“The man’s position [in the home]—to be off stage, remote, distanced, reliant—is harmful to them too, as well as to everyone else. It fuels disconnection and apartness and unreality. It leaves many men in a place where contentedness and satisfaction have to be chased and sought and created rather than found right there in the heart of his family.”
As
writes in :“Even though it can feel harder to break out than it does to conform, even though it can be harder to resist the constant drumbeat telling you to be more of a man, more of a manly man, more masculine, the rewards are huge. In rejecting the narrow lane we’ve been told to stick to, in breaking out of that small box, the whole spectrum of human emotion and human relationship can become available to us. Our own individuality and freedom become accessible again.”
That’s why we really should try our best to be activists and allies. I might even throw in the old left-wing idea of comrades. Adulting and caring for kids and maintaining the house and working full time and all the labor of life under capitalism is a ton of work. It can only be managed and tackled together, as a team. If we’re not actively trying to be part of that team, if we’re not pulling our weight, we’re not only letting our partners down, but we’re also letting ourselves down.
And because it takes a team, we also need to join women in making demands for policies like publicly funded universal childcare and shorter work weeks (for the same pay) that make adulting easier for everyone, so that everyone can take part in it, and no one—regardless of gender—has to be overworked, exhausted, and burned out.
We’re in this together. The rich and powerful have always tried to convince us otherwise, but we always have been.
Now, a question for the comments below (or email me: jeremy@jeremymohler.blog): How do you feel about the share of domestic labor in your home?
(P.S. If you become a paid subscriber for $5/month, you’ll be able to comment and join our upcoming community call about this topic. I’d appreciate your perspective!)