Wifework: What Marriage Really Means for Women

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I'm a good cook and he's livid that I'm not cooking for him anymore. I'm still doing the shopping and told him to tell me what he wants me to buy so he can cook for himself. He's a rubbish cook and makes no effort to learn the basics. So far he's just taking meals I've already made from the freezer or any extra food on the counter from a meal I've just made for the DC. How is this fair? So I had trouble relating personally to the concept of marriage set forth in this book, but I also had no trouble conjuring up many marriages I know of that are just like it. This book looks at all the things in marriage that make a relationship unequal - there are no conclusions as to who's fault it is but an awful lot to think about. The steps to that dance are what I call 'wifework'. If you're married, and a female, you already know what they are. What you might not know is why you do them - or whether it's possible to start doing things differently. 'Wifework' is a shorthand for what I think of as the unwritten contract into which a woman enters upon marriage. The job description most of us were determined would never apply to us.

Maushart assembles an overwhelming amount of data documenting how marriage has perpetuated inequities between husband and wife.'- Christian Science Monitor Daily By the time I'd sprayed, scoured, polished, rinsed and flushed away my temporary identity crisis, it was time to have dinner. We'd been having dinner together most nights for two years. Like most graduate students, we mostly ate takeaways or grabbed a cheap meal at one of the many cafés around the university. And then we got married.Wouldn't it also be a good idea to work out why people are not doing it? What drives men and women to marriage in the first place? And, once having arrived at this outlandish decision, what on earth is keeping us there? Always remember that, give or take a few per cent, roughly half of all marriages do survive. Questions about why people continue to marry, despite everything, have remained virtually unasked within the research community. is between 1.1 and 1.5 at about 1.32. logistic wifework inc child Logit estimates Number of obs = 14926 Of husbands/marriages exist but they are generally accepted to be crap. So many threads in relationships describe unequal An often funny dissection of modern marriage...100 percent honest. [A] smart and witty book.' -Publishers Weekly down as income increases. In fact, the income goes down by a factor of .666. adjust , by(inc) exp -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Why indeed? Because sexism, that’s why. There can be no equality without a radical change to the way in which different types of work, particularly domestic and caring work, are valued. But that is incredibly complicated and neither the left nor the right can get their heads around it. It would mean changing the way men live and that can’t do. It’s just easier to shout at middle-class women who aren’t pulling their unpaid wife work weight.To quote one of the would-be nannies from Mrs. Doubtfire, "I don't do laundry, I don't do windows, I don't do carpets, I don't do bathtubs, I don't do toilets, I don't do diapers . . . I don't do washing, I don't do basements, I don't do dinners, and I don't do reading!" Okay, well, she lost me at the "reading" part, but you catch my drift. And I do some of these things some of the time, but let's just say I would have failed the 1950s miserably. In one way or another I expect my wife to cook my dinner and do the ironing, but only in the same way that she expects me to rennovate our house and sort out any correspondence. This was not imposed on her, but is in fact her preference for household duties. I accept that I am slightly unusual in that I work full time and my husband went pt on the birth of my son. He does huge amounts of what is described as 'wifework' in the book, probably more than me. Moushart often starts sentences with 'I don't suppose there is a woman alive who hasn't experienced this..." and I am Screaming "well I haven't!!" It's easy to explain wife work to your partner. It's all those things you look or when asked to do or say in a minute and then forget (generally laundry related in this house). It's the every day boring tasks you leave for me that you can do (cooking here, just occasionally when he's not at work I wish DH would plan and cook a meal). It's playing dumb about DC related things that you understand perfectly and getting me to write you task lists instead of listening to what your told. You get DD1 of to school each morning, so you can do it!