quackademicGreat article about the kinds of mental load involved, for women, in domestic labour.
Sadly, this is old news.
Twenty years ago I completed a PhD thesis that unpacked & examined these aspects of domestic life.
By interviewing parents & kids separately, asking the same open ended questions - ‘what gets done, who does what, is it fair, & how do you think it should be?’, which I ran through 3 times, first for domestic tasks, then for the work of identifying what needs to be done & making sure it happens, then for noticing how everyone is feeling & keeping every happy in the process - then taking the family as my unit of analysis, I showed that men & kids were unaware of much of the physical & almost all of the intangible work women did in their homes. Boys & men thought everything was fine. Girls did not want to assume, as adults, the domestic servant role they saw their mothers placed in but had no strategies to achieve this beyond ‘I’ll just tell them’.
There was a hierarchy of work in these families in which men’s work & leisure time had highest priority, then kids’ schooling & leisure, then domestic work of all kinds. Womens paid work & leisure was lowest priority of all.
The families that lived without conflict were those in which the hierarchy of work was not disputed. Where women sought to disrupt the hierarchy there was conflict - which became another part of the domestic load she was expected to manage.
My findings showed that contrary to popular narratives of ‘progress’, this dynamic was not likely to change until men as well as women recognise the dynamic & choose to shift it.
This argument was not popular.
Twenty years later, here we are.
I wish I had been wrong.
#DomesticLabour #EmotionWork #MentalLoad #sociology #research #women #mothers
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