feminish

Housework bothers me. But not because it is of itself bothersome - I’ve had some of the calmest moments of my life holding a broom, feeling my body sway backwards and forwards, settling into the unendingness of it… knowing millions of people world-over are, in the same moment, sweeping their mud-floors, their front door-step, their kitchen lino. In those moments I’ve noticed the pointlessness of it (”this dust will sure-as-anything be here again next week”; “gees, how many thousands of hours have my ancestors spent just sweeping - and what have they got to show for it? Where are they all now? Dead!” etc.). And somehow by touching this endless pointlessness of it through time and space, it’s actually become quite soothing to do it: “I do this because it is part of surviving. And I survive in the same way my ancestors survived, and my fellow-humans survive. I do this so I can live in a clear space. So I can respect these three rooms where I live, so they can help me to be happy, and so I don’t cringe at dust when I put my feet on the wooden tongue-and-groove slats every morning. I wouldn’t want to pay someone to do this for me because it’s one of my few chances (chopping wood/ carrying water not forthcoming at the minute) to engage in the fundamental work of staying alive - and connect to my basic human condition.”

No, housework bothers me because girls do it and guys (more often than not) don’t (Beloved Patterner excluded).

When I was younger, the boys got the wood in and we girls tidied up. They made their beds, sure, but it was the two daughters who ‘put the wash in’ and helped fold socks in front of Blind Date on a Saturday night. I remember being strangely confused that my little bro had to be shown how to use the washing machine age 16 - how on earth had he got away with not knowing?

But it’s not his fault - it’s just how the cookie’s been crumbling for, well, a few hundred generations.

And the recipe for this particular girls-tidy/boys-carry crumbly cookie is complicated. It’s about society’s gender roles, it’s about women-at-home, it’s (perhaps) about psychological predispositions to multi-tasking, and it’s about our particular home-drilling by Mum. It’s about what we read and think; and what, as children, what was said to us - and read to us. And this is all changing.

I remember once, in a dusty corner of the University Library desperately avoiding finals revision, I fell into flicking through yellowing periodicals around me - and found a feminist children’s story in Signs magazine. I read it all and it was great: Girl has adventures home-alone; Mum gets in late at night; Girl clears up naughty mess quickly, but she’s not caught because Mum’s still snogging the current boyfriend in the car. I thought, Wow! If only I’d had that as a child: Beatrix Potter, Hans Christian Anderson (and Ronald Dahl for a bit of a shake-up) don’t exactly a liberated woman make.

This all came to me today because I’d heard that the Famous Five books have been revised so that the boys do some housework. My first reaction was, Fantastic! My second was, What does the Daily Mail think?

Row faster, George! The PC meddlers are chasing us!
Neither the Famous Five nor the Secret Seven are any longer permitted to pursue their adventures without hindrance from the PC zealots. Julian and Dick are now required to do the housework with the girls. Already, Mary and Jill of the Adventurous Four have been ‘updated’ to Pippa and Zoe. It can only be a matter of time before the stop-at-home, cake-baking mummies of Blyton’s fiction will be sent out to work in shipyards as crane drivers while the daddies have to relinquish their City jobs and become house-husbands.

The logic is priceless Mail:
1. Boy picks up broom
ergo
2. Mother must drive a shipyard crane
ergo
3. World order has collapsed and palpable madness undermines All That’s Good.
ergo
4. Boys mustn’t sweep.

You gotta laugh, if only because things have already changed. The cookie’s crumbling differently because the dough mix ain’t the same, and the Daily Mail doesn’t matter (that much - though it matters a darn sight more than it should).

So Thank God I’m an 80’s child not a 50’s housewife… and that twentysomething blokes don’t think us twentysomething girls are crazy for insisting on ‘taking it in turns’ (though I have a niggling feeling that my twentysomething bloke was read feminist children’s books as a child).

Housework bothers me. But not because it is of itself bothersome - I’ve had some of the calmest moments of my life holding a broom, feeling my body sway backwards and forwards, settling into the unendingness of it… knowing millions of people world-over are, in the same moment, sweeping their mud-floors, their front door-step, their kitchen lino. In those moments I’ve noticed the pointlessness of it (”this dust will sure-as-anything be here again next week”; “gees, how many thousands of hours have my ancestors spent just sweeping - and what have they got to show for it? Where are they all now? Dead!” etc.). And somehow by touching this endless pointlessness of it through time and space, it’s actually become quite soothing to do it: “I do this because it is part of surviving. And I survive in the same way my ancestors survived, and my fellow-humans survive. I do this so I can live in a clear space. So I can respect these three rooms where I live, so they can help me to be happy, and so I don’t cringe at dust when I put my feet on the wooden tongue-and-groove slats every morning. I wouldn’t want to pay someone to do this for me because it’s one of my few chances (chopping wood/ carrying water not forthcoming at the minute) to engage in the fundamental work of staying alive - and connect to my basic human condition.”

No, housework bothers me because girls do it and guys (more often than not) don’t (Beloved Patterner excluded).

When I was younger, the boys got the wood in and we girls tidied up. They made their beds, sure, but it was the two daughters who ‘put the wash in’ and helped fold socks in front of Blind Date on a Saturday night. I remember being strangely confused that my little bro had to be shown how to use the washing machine age 16 - how on earth had he got away with not knowing?

But it’s not his fault - it’s just how the cookie’s been crumbling for, well, a few hundred generations.

And the recipe for this particular girls-tidy/boys-carry crumbly cookie is complicated. It’s about society’s gender roles, it’s about women-at-home, it’s (perhaps) about psychological predispositions to multi-tasking, and it’s about our particular home-drilling by Mum. It’s about what we read and think; and what, as children, what was said to us - and read to us. And this is all changing.

I remember once, in a dusty corner of the University Library desperately avoiding finals revision, I fell into flicking through yellowing periodicals around me - and found a feminist children’s story in Signs magazine. I read it all and it was great: Girl has adventures home-alone; Mum gets in late at night; Girl clears up naughty mess quickly, but she’s not caught because Mum’s still snogging the current boyfriend in the car. I thought, Wow! If only I’d had that as a child: Beatrix Potter, Hans Christian Anderson (and Ronald Dahl for a bit of a shake-up) don’t exactly a liberated woman make.

This all came to me today because I’d heard that the Famous Five books have been revised so that the boys do some housework. My first reaction was, Fantastic! My second was, What does the Daily Mail think?

Row faster, George! The PC meddlers are chasing us!
Neither the Famous Five nor the Secret Seven are any longer permitted to pursue their adventures without hindrance from the PC zealots. Julian and Dick are now required to do the housework with the girls. Already, Mary and Jill of the Adventurous Four have been ‘updated’ to Pippa and Zoe. It can only be a matter of time before the stop-at-home, cake-baking mummies of Blyton’s fiction will be sent out to work in shipyards as crane drivers while the daddies have to relinquish their City jobs and become house-husbands.

The logic is priceless Mail:
1. Boy picks up broom
ergo
2. Mother must drive a shipyard crane
ergo
3. World order has collapsed and palpable madness undermines All That’s Good.
ergo
4. Boys mustn’t sweep.

You gotta laugh, if only because things have already changed. The cookie’s crumbling differently because the dough mix ain’t the same, and the Daily Mail doesn’t matter (that much - though it matters a darn sight more than it should).

So Thank God I’m an 80’s child not a 50’s housewife… and that twentysomething blokes don’t think us twentysomething girls are crazy for insisting on ‘taking it in turns’ (though I have a niggling feeling that my twentysomething bloke was read feminist children’s books as a child).