Why home care is a job, not a woman's purpose
Alexandra Savina
"This is my second pregnancy - so begins one of the topics on the Momtastic forum. - I am a housewife, and my husband works a lot. I have no relatives nearby who could help. I feel like a loser. I get so tired that it’s hard for me to get up in the morning. I can't handle washing, housework and gardening. "
Almost every one of us regularly turns out to be in a similar situation: returning home from work, the few hours left before sleep, we spend on cooking, cleaning and laundry - often sacrificing communication with friends and leisure because of this. Home care is considered another responsibility, which is imputed to us by default, something taken for granted (“I got up in the morning, washed my face, put myself in order - and immediately put your planet in order”). You cannot complain about it: an attempt to dismiss at least some of the cases in this area is regarded as a whim, laziness, immaturity, cowardice or even disrespect for all women of the planet who somehow manage to wash the floors, holding the laptop in one hand and the other - child.
At the same time, many still do not consider household chores to be full-fledged work - just as, say, email parsing is perceived not as part of the duties that take up working time, but as an addition to other “really important” matters. The Internet is full of advice on how to combine service and other duties ("Sydney goes shopping at lunchtime (in the trunk of her refrigerator with ice) so that she does not have to do it in the evening when she is tired, hungry and in a hurry. Brilliant!" ) and calls to stop telling others that it’s hard for you - because others face the same problems. Those who use special services and services and shift part of their household duties onto them may face direct condemnation. This is perceived as overkill or, at a minimum, non-essential services. And in general: "Others somehow cope!"
Over the past decades, housework has changed a lot: the kitchen appliances speed up the cooking process and make it much easier (now, in order to make porridge for breakfast, it’s enough to load cereals into the slow cooker in the evening and put a timer), powerful cleaning tools help not to waste hours on rubbing stains and streaks, and irons with steam generators, with their impressive price, reduce the ironing time several times. But technical progress could not completely save us from work: no matter how perfect and powerful the vacuum cleaner may be, they still have to be managed by a person. And although the number of hours we devote to housework has decreased several times since the middle of the last century, we still spend quite a lot of time on them.
A survey conducted by the Woman's Hour program on BBC Radio, which was attended by 1001 people, showed that a woman in the UK does an average of 11.5 hours a week of homework, while men spend 6 hours each. According to the study, cooking, bed linen changing and bathroom cleaning remained one of the main tasks of women at home - and although progress has affected them, the time we spend on these things has not drastically decreased. “The times have changed,” said Jane Garvey, the host of Woman's Hour. “Women are no longer locked in four walls. Now they can go to work and then go back and do housework.”
We often choose savings at the expense of our own comfort, refusing to spend money even on things that really matter to us.
In Russia, the situation is no better: according to a 2011 Rosstat study on how Russians use their time, Muscovites spend an average of 1 hour 12 minutes (men) and 2 hours 22 minutes (women) on housekeeping. In other regions, housekeeping spends even more time: in the Sverdlovsk region - 1 hour 23 minutes a day, in the Rostov region - 1 hour 50 minutes a day, in Nizhny Novgorod - 2 hours 26 minutes. At the same time, domestic duties still mainly fall on women’s shoulders. According to the study of the portal Superjob.ru, the most common "women's" activities are washing dishes, cooking and cleaning, while the main task of men is to buy food and household goods.
Domestic affairs take time and effort away from us - but these costs are not always evenly distributed. Each case is individual, it is not necessarily the hardest that which requires the most time. For some, an hour or two spent on preparing a complex dish is rest and pleasure, someone does not perceive ironing as a heavy duty because it can be combined with watching a movie, and on someone washing floors has a meditative effect. But the pleasure of household chores is not all and not always.
The desire to take advantage of a special service, instead of cleaning and washing carpets on their own, or sometimes having lunch at an inexpensive café, in the evening not preparing dinner for themselves and not failing because of the number of cases piled in is a concern for themselves, which is often perceived as senseless luxury. There are situations in which to take advantage of services, instead of doing something on our own, it seems to us more “legitimate”: for example, when someone does not have time to follow the house, because it helps older parents, hires a nanny to be able to earn money decree, or combines work with study in the evenings or weekends.
They advise using other people's services with reservations ("If you really need a person who will come and clean more carefully, at least try to cut costs - he will come to you once a month or less often"), and ordering ready meals at a cafe, instead of cooking at home, it is justified only if there is no time for food at all. In other cases, the advice to contact a special service is perceived as a mockery or the famous "Let them eat cakes!" - but is it really?
Housework, like any other work, requires a variety of resources - psychological, mental, emotional, physical. But the only valuable among all the resources that we have - and because of the tradition that has developed over the decades, and because of the difficult economic situation that forces us to reconsider our expenses - is still considered only money. And that is why we so often choose savings to the detriment of our own comfort, refusing to spend even on what is really important to us and helps to save strength, even if in the end we bring ourselves to physical and moral exhaustion.
The authors of the study, which was attended by 4,600 people and whose results were published in the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, came to the conclusion that people who value time more than money more often feel happier. Moreover, the older the study participants were, the more they sought to spend their time with meaning. The gender and income level of the study participants did not affect its results - however, scientists stipulate that they did not collect data on poor people who need money to survive.
When making choices in household chores, we always have to sacrifice something: either with our own efforts and time, or with money - whether it is searching for the necessary products at a lower price, for which you have to compare the pricing policy of several stores, or choosing the optimal one in terms of price and quality goods (is a cake bought in a store really cheaper than a cake made by yourself at home, taking into account the cost of all the ingredients?). And if, analyzing the opportunity costs, we understand that our own strength and time cost more than the money that will have to be given to the service, because it helps to save mental strength, why should we save on them? It should be perceived not as an attempt to shift your responsibilities onto other shoulders, but as the ability to delegate authority: after all, it is up to you to set priorities in your life.
Photo: Maksim Kostenko - stock.adobe.com, panomacc - stock.adobe.com, Gresei - stock.adobe.com