I am the one who takes care of the large majority of household tasks (cooking and meal prep, laundry, cleaning, grocery shopping, planning, organizing and tidying, gift and holiday purchases, car maintenance, etc.) But I usually reason with myself that it only feels uneven, and that although my husbands’ tasks (financial investments, paying the bills, taxes, home construction, repairs and maintenance, gardening, etc ) are fewer and further between, his tasks - are bigger in scope and effort, therefore, equaling the effort of my many smaller tasks. However, after filling out the family duties chart, I was shocked to see and really realize the profound inequality.
My family (my husband and myself – no kids yet) provides me with love, companionship and comfort, but I see with this exercise that my husband benefits more from this family structure, the male breadwinner model with male spheres of work and female spheres of work, than I do. Even more interestingly, I am the breadwinner of the family. Not only does my full time job provide more money and benefits for our family, but I am also in school trying to change careers (from law into nursing). Therefore, I am commuting 2 hours for work each day during the work week, working 8 hours, then coming home to study and take exams, and somewhere in there fitting in all of my household chores, aka my "second shift," and also trying to leave myself enough leisure time to relax and enjoy time with my husband. It is exhausting, yet I do it all without thinking twice and without asking for help, just because that is what I saw my mother do, that is what my mother in law does, and that is the structure that I grew up with and know.
Even though I know my husband would happily pitch in if I asked, I would struggle with thinking of myself as a lazy woman, or a bad wife, just because this is the model that has been ingrained in our culture, and to not live up to that model would be short changing my family. Perhaps being aware of this may help us all to begin allocating tasks more equally among household members. But changing this deeply ingrained model will prove challenging and will take more than you or I alone. It will take the awareness of society on the whole to change this extraordinarily unequal model and mindset.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment