Stuck

A recent story on NPR was about how technology never dies, any technology that has every been created in history is still made, somewhere, by someone. Paleolithic axes? Check. Steam Powered Cars? Yep. Hand Threshers? Sure. Because a large portion of my brain is now fully preoccupied by the Failure Project, this immediately brought to mind the above article. My mom sent it to me when I got married.[1] She was only sort of kidding.

As has become clear in my research on the project, women’s roles, too, never die. Once something has been predetermined to be a woman’s “role,” then no matter how many other roles are added, that role never dies. Take for instance, a conversation I recently had with my husband, after his boss had us over for dinner:

Me: “We need to have them over for dinner here soon.”

Him: “Why?”

Me: “Because that’s what you DO.”

Him: “Why?”

Me: “They just had us over for a very nice dinner, and you feel no compunction to have them over to our house for dinner at all, do you?”

Him: “Nope.”

He grinned and walked away. The point was lost on him. But it was clear that the role of “social manager” and “entertainment director” of the family was a responsibility I felt that was not shared. In the 40s or 50s, with the male as the sole breadwinner in the home, and the female as the homemaker and party-planner, this difference in perceived responsibility would be understandable. But, with equal or mostly-equal professional responsibilities for both spouses increasingly the norm in the majority of households, why is it that we cling to our historical roles? Consciously or subconsciously, one article argues that it is because we are acting as gatekeepers to protect our identity as nurturers- an identity threatened when we are at work all day.

Think about the identities that women have adopted over the years that we have not shed: nurturer, homemaker, beauty, virgin, professional- we must be both professionally accomplished, but adequately feminine and aesthetically pleasing. Strong, but slender. Sexually appealing, but not threatening.

It brings to mind another anecdote, this one from my neighbor. She and her husband work essentially the exact same jobs, with almost exactly the same hours. They have one child, she does all of the childcare. One day, at the end of her rope, she brought up to him that she was running ragged trying to work, take care of their spawn, do all the laundry, keep the house clean, make meals, etc. Because he paid a certain amount per month to get all of the yard work done (law mowed, hedges trimmed, various and sundry other tasks), she should it would be only fair if they were able to get someone once every two weeks to just clean the kitchen and bathrooms. Otherwise, she said, she would simply lose her mind. Keeping the house clean in addition to her full time job and everything else was just driving her over the edge. His response?

“But Honey, our house isn’t that big.”

What other roles have women had historically that carry through to today?

from the site: www.themodernfailure.blogspot.com

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[1] She has kind of a dark sense of humor. As me sometime about the double cheeseburgers we ate in the waiting room of the cardiac ward while waiting for my dad to get out of a quintuple bypass. No kidding.