You don't hate men who do little housework. You hate capitalism.

On the unequal division of household labor.

Here’s another Friday Q&A post! These are an experiment in giving give paid subscribers a little extra. If you’re a paid subscriber, you’ll get one most weeks.

Anyone can ask me questions about relationships, masculinity, therapy, anything... Reply to this email and I’ll send you my thoughts directly.

I might also feature your question (anonymously) in a future post, like this one!

This week’s question from a subscriber is...

…actually a comment on one of my recent posts.

---

This is less answering a question and more expanding on my response to a reader’s comment on a recent post. I want to get it to ya’ll before heading down to Northern Virginia’s Wolf Trap (one of my favorite music venues!) with friends to catch the band Waxahatchee.

Her comment was:

“It frustrates me that my husband shuts off his brain when he gets home (that’s how he describes it to me) and that I have a difficult time getting him to see how much unseen planning and prep labor I carry for our family (the doctor visits and kid clothes and making sure everyone has toothpaste, etc.).”

The topic of the unequal division of household labor is massive. There are so many books written about it, helping couples figure out how to manage it with more fairness and less conflict. It comes up constantly with therapy clients of mine.

So I’m not going to figure it all out here. But I want to share a thought that’s been rolling around in my head.

Reading that comment makes me think of something the feminist Silvia Federici wrote back in 1975:

“It is not an accident, then, if most men start thinking of getting married as soon as they get their first job. This is not only because now they can afford it but also because having somebody at home who takes care of you is the only condition of not going crazy after a day spent on an assembly line or at a desk.”

She was writing a feminist manifesto of sorts, called “Wages Against Housework.” Federici is a socialist and blames capitalism for women’s (and everyone’s) struggles. She writes that capitalism exploits child-raising and other forms of household labor by not valuing it. It’s done for no wages—for free. And because of patriarchy, it’s disproportionately done by women.

Capitalism, she writes, “deny[s] housework a wage and transform[s] it into an act of love.” This is where our modern (or “traditional,” as we mistakenly think of it) idea of femininity comes from. Women are told they are naturally meant to be caring, nurturing, relational, emotional, and on top of all the things at home. Because capitalism needs to exploit free household labor to function.

Her point about men is that capitalism changed what it means to be a man as well. Remember, capitalism is only a few hundred years old. Before that, gender norms and roles were relatively diverse in different societies in different areas of the world.