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Is housework really necessary?
We were interested in Mad Hatter’s recent posts on women scientists with partners who don’t sympathize with the need to work long hours. For example, she writes:
When I first entered grad school, I was surprised by the number of female PhD scientists I knew who did nearly all of the cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, and other chores at home. Then, I was stunned to discover that some would actually be berated by their partners for falling behind on the chores, staying late in lab, or working on weekends. And recently, I heard of a woman scientist whose husband told her not to apply for tenure-track faculty positions because they would take up too much of her time outside of home.
As she points out, this type of pressure can be part of the reason that women leave science careers. Of course, this type of pressure can also be a reason to dump that partner.
The comments and the follow-up post look at the division of labor and who does what in two-career households. For us, this topic raises a slightly different question: is housework worth doing?
Many women feel pressure to do it all. We feel we have to be perfect professionals, academics, partners, mothers, housekeepers, etc. It can be liberating to realize that much of this pressure is self-imposed. It’s acceptable to not do everything at once. In our experience, we can really only commit to doing 2 or 3 things well. Currently for us, those three things are work, family, and relationships with friends. Everything else is neglected or outsourced.
Of the things we choose not to bother doing, housework is at the top of the list. We find it difficult, boring, guilt-inducing, impossible to truly finish, and time-consuming. To the extent that we get any urges at all to clean, we save them for the office. We ignore some of the dirt at home, and get a professional to deal with the serious stuff.
Some women (and men) are good at housework and want to keep doing it. But for the rest of us, why not just take housework off the list?