Housework Is Obsolescent

By Barbara Ehrenreich

It's been such a quiet revolution that you could hear a sock drop on a carpeted floor. Only you probably wouldn't pay any attention if you did.

Because what's one more sock down there among the broken action figures, lost homework papers and fresh kills brought in by the cat? After decades of unappreciated drudgery, American women just don't do housework anymore -- that is, beyond the minimum that is required in order to clear a path from the bedroom to the front door so they can get off to work in the morning.

There should have been a lot more fanfare for such a revolutionary change in the way we live. If Americans suddenly gave up forks and started eating with their fingers, you can bet that would at least rate the Style section. But Harvard economist Juliet Schor's research shows that women have been eliminating half an hour of housework for every hour they work outside the home -- or up to 20 hours a week, which is the equivalent of a 50-ft. mound of unfolded laundry or a dust ball as large as a house.

Recall that not long ago, in our mothers' day, the standards were cruel but clear: every room should look like a motel room, only cleaner under the bed. The floors must be immaculate enough to double as plates, in case the guests prefer to eat doggie-style. The kitchen counters should be clean enough for emergency surgery, should the need at some time arise, and the walls should ideally be sterile. The alternative, we all learned in Home Economics, is the deadly scorn of the neighbors and probably plague.

For me, the turning point came when I realized that children don't generally eat off of walls. Food may end up on the walls, through processes of propulsion or skillful application with tiny fingers and palms, but once there it is rarely ingested. And low to the ground as they are, children hardly ever eat off of floors. Actually, a careful review of the eating habits of children reveals that the only surfaces you have to worry about, plague-wise, are the ones in McDonald's and Pizza Hut.

It had to happen sooner or later, this quiet revolt. Housework as we know it is not something ordained by the limits of the human immune system. It was invented, in fact, around the turn of the century, for the precise purpose of giving middle-class women something to do. Once food processing and garment manufacture moved out of the home and into the factories, middle-class homemakers found themselves staring uneasily into the void. Should they join the suffragists? Go out in the work world and compete with the men? "Too many women," editorialized the Ladies' Home Journal in 1911, "are dangerously idle."

Enter the domestic-science experts, a group of ladies who, if ever there is a feminist hell, will be tortured eternally with feather dusters. These were women who made careers out of telling other women that they couldn't have careers because housework was a big enough job in itself. And they were right, since their standard for a well-kept home was one that revealed no evidence of human occupation.

Today, of course, the woman who opts to spend her days polishing banisters is soon likely to find herself in foreclosure. If it's a choice between having food on the table or floors that are free of organic detritus, most of us choose to go with the food. And since child raising generally works better when children and parents share the same dwelling, there's no point in striving for the motel look.

We all know, or suspect, that after you eliminate the T-shirt ironing and the weekly changing of sheets, there will still be some biological minimum below which no family dares go. In the meantime, each chore has to be carefully assessed: If you don't do the toilets, will the children get typhoid? Which is easier anyway -- doing all that scrubbing or taking a little time now and then to visit one's family in the infectious-disease ward?

For any man or child who misses the pristine standards of yesteryear, there is a simple solution -- pitch in! Surveys show men doing more than they used to, but nowhere near enough to maintain the old standards. The technology of the vacuum cleaner is challenging, I admit, but not beyond the capacity of the masculine mind.

Or maybe we should just relax and enjoy the revolution. Here was a form of human toil that was said to be immutable and biologically necessary: social convention demanded it, advertisers of household products promoted it, mothers-in-law enforced it. But we cut back drastically, and lo, the kids are as healthy as ever -- maybe more so, now that we have a little more time to hang out with them.

How many other forms of "necessary" labor may also turn out to be ritual, designed to keep us homebound and politically passive? Checkbook balancing, for example. Isn't it time we acknowledged that the bank is always right, and that even when it's not, it's bound to win anyway? Or the thankless but conscientious saving of all the invoices from last year's bills, in case the canceled checks get destroyed in a meteor hit. Are you ever, in the twilight of life, going to ask yourself, "Gee, what did I spend on heating fuel in the winter of '92?"

It's even occurred to me, as a teeny little subversive whisper of a thought, that if we stopped mowing the lawn right now, it would probably be a long, long time before the yard ever got overrun by lions and snakes.