Job allocation
(midwest.social)
Are The Straights OK?I am so glad my husband was a single dad.
I cook, he cleans dishes & wipes stuff down. I put away dishes. Daily
I do the gardening, it's because I care and the food garden is for cooking - but my ex (despite his overall inability to work) was an incredible organic gardener and I did not touch the yard. We pay someone to mow and edge.
Husband walks the dog and feeds the pets. Takes out the trash. Daily
He washes the towels and sheets. Weekly.
I clean filters and maintain the appliances. Once in a while.
He cleans the windows and washes the cars. Once in a while.
I handle the finances, mostly. I am tech support also. He plans long term and plans vacations for us.
We both work demanding jobs, and have someone come in biweekly to do the real house cleaning.
Basically we both are doing half of what we were before.
That's one take, sure.
But look at the examples again.
Taking out the trash involves lifting something that's usually heavy, twice. So the person that's more likely to have the higher upper body strength handling it makes sense.
Mowing vs gardening, you have a similar difference; particularly looking back at pre-powered mowers. Again, the person with the advantage of muscle mass is going to have less trouble doing it.
Cooking inside vs grilling? A lot less sensible. I really think that comes down to meat and fire rather than any practical reasons.
If you also look at the division of labor for those tasks through the lens of when they became stereotypes, you might notice that trash and mowing are very much a part of suburban life compared to rural or urban. The era when that became the way things work here in the US (where the stereotypes are mostly from) was one where the wife was at home and the man out at a job. Not universally so, but close enough.
The division of mowing and trash is also split along the lines of what needs doing steadily vs what needs doing irregularly, but takes more time to do at once. In a lifestyle where one partner has less day time available at home, them handling tasks on weekends and/or at end of day makes more sense as well.
The whole post war era here in the US shifted home dynamics into that kind of weird dichotomy. Not that the idea of women's work vs men's wasn't a thing everywhere, or that it only existed during that time. It's about this type of home tasks being split up by the standards of the lifestyle people thought they should have.
There's also the mess factor, and a shit ton of people born before the eighties or so and after maybe 1900-ish definitely had a concept that women shouldn't have to get dirty on a regular basis. Gardening in the suburban sense is a vastly different one than in the rural sense. In a suburban area, you're either talking flowers and decorative plants, or a small vegetable/"victory" garden. Neither of which is as messy or as large as an acre of crops to handle.
Mowing is a high sweat, messy job. Grilling compared to indoors cooking is a tad messier by virtue of the soot and ash.
I kid you not, doing home health back when the generation before the baby boom was solidly into old age, the more suburban a family was, the more likely they were to have the assumption that women shouldn't have to deal with the more physical, messier home maintenance jobs. Baby boomers carried it over for sure, but for them or was often that they grew up with that paradigm and didn't question it until later. I had way less gen-x patients that had a sustained home paradigm, so there's less direct observation for that, and next to zero for millennials.
I'm not saying it was right. I'm not judging it one way or another, not really; people can have whatever home arrangements they want, ain't none of my business. I'm just saying that it isn't as single facet as the screen shot tries to make it. It is/was a product of a full cultural shift and it wasn't as arbitrary as that makes it out to be.
My husband grills because I'm guaranteed to burn the shit out of myself
Actually, grilling was a marketing thing. Companies realized men were an untapped market for purchasing cooking supplies, but they had to convince men that there was a form of cooking that was ‘manly’ enough for them to do, because when grills were first invented cooking was very, very much ‘woman’s work’ and any man who touched it was ‘weak’ and ‘girly’ and perhaps ‘hen-pecked’.
A grill, which was outdoors (rustic! woodsy! living off the land!), involved fire (manly!), and mostly meat cooking (even more manly!) was basically the solution they found.
I just want to recognize a really interesting, high effort comment. I’ve been thinking a lot about this stuff as I deconstruct my upbringing and this comment was really edifying for what it is: a thoughtful take, not portrayed as fact, but presented reasonably.
I wish I had more to add to the conversation, because I hate to just write a long upvote but there we have it. Really great read, thanks for taking the time.
Taking out the trash involves lifting something that’s usually heavy, twice. So the person that’s more likely to have the higher upper body strength handling it makes sense.
Which is why, as we all know, doing the laundry is a man's job.
There’s also the mess factor, and a shit ton of people born before the eighties or so and after maybe 1900-ish definitely had a concept that women shouldn’t have to get dirty on a regular basis.
Oh yeah, that's why changing baby's diapers is almost always a man's job.
That's how we did diapers. The mother handles all the inputs, which is technically more because the baby is growing.
Random advertisement for cloth diapers, it's less work than it sounds and saves crazy money.
The examples in the post didn't include those, so neither did I. Don't read into it beyond the examples used
I require you to use these cherries, as opposed to others
I stuck to the topic of the post and didn't veer off. Anyone wants to start a different branch of the discussion, that's fine. But that's not what the comment I responded to did. They complained that I didn't expand on the topic.
Ohhh providing examples that conflict with the narrative is complaining. Got it
You're only supposed to load like 8 pounds of clothes at a time - easily into the woman work territory. /s
Taking out the trash involves lifting something that’s usually heavy, twice. So the person that’s more likely to have the higher upper body strength handling it makes sense.
Massive reach, unless you're regularly throwing out lead.
My garbage is always 40 pounds cause I pack it down wait until well after I should have taken it out.
Nah, you take one of the 30 gallon cans, stick a bag in it, and it can be a tough lift when full. Not so much because of the weight, though a twenty pound weight isn't going to be a surprise. It's the way you have to move to lift the bag out. It relies more on arms and back, so you can't really use your legs properly.
Without a bag, evena 15 gallon can is awkward to lift and walk with. A bigger one is again a more upper body thing.
Besides, I didn't say a woman couldn't get the job done, just that it makes more sense for whoever has the better upper body strength
Is it because the assignment of these jobs dates to that brief time and culture when women were housewives and men worked outside the home? It’s as stereotypical as white picket fence.
I mean, mowing the lawn probably dates back to when you had to use a scythe for that. That was actually quite physically demanding labour.
Bringing out the trash might similarly originate from when trashcans were out of metal and didn't have wheels. I can certainly imagine those being annoying to heave outside when you don't have an excess of core strength...
