Housework
Housework is one of those necessary evils which never seems to go away or reach completion. It is something which could be seen as work towards creating a pleasant environment to return home to each day, or something hideous which awaits us when we return home each day. So we take the feminist stance of sharing the load, or the post-feminist stance of doing it anyway but saying it is permitted because we chose to. Or we just leave it until it gets really bad because hey guess what – we already spend far too much time doing work of one kind of another and life is too short. … after all when I am on my death bed I shan’t be thinking ‘Gosh I wish I’d spend even more time vacuum cleaning up bits of cat fur off the carpet”.
The everyday mundane tasks which are questionably associated with women, are the tasks which provide secure foundations of most people’s lives, without which they would not be able to go out into the world to do many other things. Felski argues that to associate women with the ‘everyday’ is to write them out of history: “women are primarily responsible for the …show more content…
Through observing habits we can see how gender roles in the private sphere offer less adherence to traditional expectations precisely because they are private and less open to scrutiny: “Individual creativity can offer insights in how a wider context of changing gender is constituted through everyday practices in the home” (Pink 2004: 137). Negative discourse around housework and women fails to address changing gender roles, whereas feminism provides a counterpoint to finding a pleasurable utopia in the everyday hard work of domestic labour, by alleviating the guilt of domestic slatternly-ness which women would seem to bear, but men have stereotypically managed to escape. The motivation behind the actions of everyday life shows how people try to build a utopia by making their surroundings
Housework is one of those necessary evils which never seems to go away or reach completion. It is something which could be seen as work towards creating a pleasant environment to return home to each day, or something hideous which awaits us when we return home each day. So we take the feminist stance of sharing the load, or the post-feminist stance of doing it anyway but saying it is permitted because we chose to. Or we just leave it until it gets really bad because hey guess what – we already spend far too much time doing work of one kind of another and life is too short. … after all when I am on my death bed I shan’t be thinking ‘Gosh I wish I’d spend even more time vacuum cleaning up bits of cat fur off the carpet”.
The everyday mundane tasks which are questionably associated with women, are the tasks which provide secure foundations of most people’s lives, without which they would not be able to go out into the world to do many other things. Felski argues that to associate women with the ‘everyday’ is to write them out of history: “women are primarily responsible for the …show more content…
Through observing habits we can see how gender roles in the private sphere offer less adherence to traditional expectations precisely because they are private and less open to scrutiny: “Individual creativity can offer insights in how a wider context of changing gender is constituted through everyday practices in the home” (Pink 2004: 137). Negative discourse around housework and women fails to address changing gender roles, whereas feminism provides a counterpoint to finding a pleasurable utopia in the everyday hard work of domestic labour, by alleviating the guilt of domestic slatternly-ness which women would seem to bear, but men have stereotypically managed to escape. The motivation behind the actions of everyday life shows how people try to build a utopia by making their surroundings