I Do the Housework
Why millions of men can’t muster the empathy to understand this issue shocks me.
I’m a college educated white male. I have a deeply satisfying professional and personal life. I’m primarily responsible for washing dishes, cooking, cleaning bathrooms, laundry, and general house cleaning. There are days when it is joyful and there are days when it feels bleak and oppressive. I can not imagine what lifetimes of this work felt like for women of my mother’s generation. How it must have driven many women mad.
They had a lifetime of this work forced on them. They had no choice. This was work which grew exponentially with each birth, many of which were unplanned. I’m looking at just few years of the current arrangement for a family of three. My mother did it for seven people for decades.
If I had to stare down the forty year tunnel of endless childcare and housework that my mother faced, knowing full well my economic security hung in the balance, and that my husband neither would clean nor cook, I’m not sure I would survive it.
Men, just do all the fucking housework for a year. Do all the planning, shopping, childcare and spousal emotional support which that work entails. Only then will you fully understand what I’m asking you to see. You will understand how utterly bleak it can look to…
