Aggie Mackenzie (pictured) argues women of all ages still believe it’s their duty to do the housework
YES
By Aggie Mackenzie (Cleaning guru)
Joanna Trollope claims we women keep a firm rein on domestic chores in order to maintain a sense of control over our partners. I know many won’t thank me for saying it, but she has a valid point… at least where we oldies are concerned.
The novelist said: ‘Women are emotionally ambitious: they want to make a man or a child dependent on them, and then they resent them for being dependent.’
My mother and her friends were all housewives and, in many cases, both depressed and seething about the relentless round of domestic chores. My generation has inherited that sense of feeling ultimately responsible for all things domestic, yet furious with our partners if they’re not sharing the work.
Even in 2020, women of all ages still believe it is their duty to do the housework, even if they deny it, and feel guilty or ashamed if their homes are messy and bins are overflowing.
All relationships are about control: who is in charge when, and for how long. This ebbing and flowing of control and dependence is normal.
But when we want help with chores, we should ask for it, instead of becoming passive aggressive and somehow expecting our partner to know what we need. Guilty of this? Maybe it’s time to change the way you communicate. It’s perverse to want him to rely on you (to gain the upper hand) then get angry when it’s obvious he needs your input. We only have ourselves to blame.
The key is to come to an agreement. When I was married, my husband was in charge of the dishwasher, I the washing machine. We each thought we had the better deal, although there was plenty of fodder for other disagreements over housework.
Instead of being passive aggressive, ask for help!
Now I’m lucky that I live alone and don’t have to negotiate any of this. But I think younger people have a different attitude. I hope I brought up my sons to shoulder their share of the jobs. (As they are chefs, there are never rows about who’s cooking!)
My 28-year-old son Rory’s live-in girlfriend Katie says he is ‘pretty good’ around their flat, but it would still never occur to him to de-gunk the shower door or dust the bedside table.
Men develop a dirt blindness, and I blame their mothers. Historically women see the dirt and clean it up. So why would a son notice it — or offer to help? If you have a dog, you don’t need to do any barking.
So does Katie ever feel resentful about the jobs Rory doesn’t do? Only, she says, when she comes in from work to find a collection of used coffee cups in the living room. At least he will have prepared her a stonking dinner…
NO
By Hannah Betts (journalist)
Hannah Betts (pictured) argues not everyone has embraced equality at home
As if we didn’t have enough problems trying to work and run our lives in the face of a global pandemic, the queen of the Aga Saga, Joanna Trollope, has declared that it’s actually women’s fault that men are so useless at chores, because secretly we want them to be reliant on us.
In other words, silly old women, enslaving ourselves domestically while loving to throw a strop about it. Pity our poor chaps, who are living the life of pampered princes as a consequence.
Maybe that’s true in her books — those tepid tales in which ladies in floral aprons gaze into the middle distance while their coffee goes cold and they obsessively ruminate over their own, and their husbands’, tastefully sublimated emotions.
Back in the real world, the rest of us are too busy clinging to our sanity, hands rubbed raw with drudgery to give this theory much notice. And yet it’s an idea that’s come up before, notably in Tiffany Dufu’s book Drop The Ball, which argued that women obsess about domestic chores because we’ve been socialised to attach value to them, while men don’t because they haven’t.
Stephen Marche’s The Unmade Bed carried this further, proposing that: ‘Housework is the only political problem in which doing less and not caring is the solution.’
Let the place clog up with stagnant dishes and dust balls the size of rats.
Women are equal at home, but some people haven’t noticed
However, at a certain point, someone’s going to crack — unless one wants one’s home to resemble some sort of medieval street scene — and that someone tends to be the female of the species. Not because we are controlling maniacs, but because we acknowledge the basic laws of hygiene.
Far from desiring our partners to be reliant upon us, we women would be only too delighted if men got in on the domestic act. Indeed, the functioning of society is predicated on it: men and women are equal at work, and should be at home. Only, it seems not everybody’s noticed.
In a 2016 Office for National Statistics report, women were performing 60 per cent more unpaid work than men. Read: Hoovering, scrubbing sinks, and picking gunk out of drains. This is not because we yearn to maintain control, to be needed, but because no one else is going to bloody do it if we don’t.
This has never been more apparent than now, with all of us locked into our homes 24/7 alongside great, detritus-generating machines — namely partners and offspring.
Last weekend, I worked and cleaned; my boyfriend worked and rested. It was not my secret desire that he sat on his backside. Even Trollope’s most devoted readers will rightly be raging.