God Bless the Housekeeper
I’m lovin’ today’s NY Times article by Lisa Belkin on house cleaning and couple-dom.
Some interesting stats from her article:
- Married women spend twice as much time on housework than husbands.
- Single women spend twice as much time as single men.
- “Women are attuned to the unseen audience, a man can sit in wacthing TV with newspapers scattered everywhere and food all over and they just don’t care. They can do it later. We women have the sense that someone’s watching us. We need those newspapers picked up because what would people think?”
–Caitlin Flanagan, “To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing our Inner Housewife”
- Employed mothers sleep an average of 3.6 fewer hours a week than those who are not employed. (That’s 187 hours a year!)
- Many women are guilty of what sociologists call “gate keeping”: building a fence around a territory, be it vacuuming or child care or grocery shopping and defending it as theirs. They set the standards in that realm, and they set them high. Sometimes unrealistically so.
- “From a man’s point of view, men feel like they’re often accused of not caring, but then, if they try to do something they are told that they’re not doing it right….their wives say, ‘Clean this up I want this clean’ but then they’re scolded because they don’t clean it right. There’s no right or wrong. men shouldn’t have to meet your specified standards for housework.”
–Neil Chethik, “VoiceMales: What Husbands Really Think About Their Marriages, Their Wives, Sex, Housework and Commitment”
Women, we all need to chill. We do not live with our mothers any more. Leave the dishes, have a martini, go to bed and have some sex or get some sleep. Let the housekeeper clean the house.
