Ruth Marcus: 'I bet he wasn't folding laundry'

By Ruth Marcus, Washington Post

Last update: October 30, 2009 - 6:57 PM

'I bet he wasn't folding laundry'

CAROL GREIDER, WINNER OF THE 2009 NOBEL PRIZE IN MEDICINE, ON WHAT SHE WAS DOING AT 5 A.M. WHEN THE BIG CALL CAME, AND HER THOUGHTS ON LEARNING OF PRESIDENT OBAMA'S NOBEL PEACE PRIZE.

Is there a woman around who read that quote and didn't smile with recognition? Greider's wry assessment encapsulates so much about the state of modern women: Nobel laureates, but also laundry-folders, school-lunch-makers, playdate-arrangers, schedule-managers. This is less a complaint than an observation. In fact, I think to some extent women are reluctant to yield dominion over the home front even as they become the majority of the paid workforce. "A Woman's Nation Changes Everything," is the title of a new report by Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress. It does -- and it doesn't. The "Battle Between the Sexes is over. It was a draw," Shriver writes. "Now we're engaged in Negotiation Between the Sexes."

True, but from an unequal start, and with an unequal appreciation of that disparity. "Both sexes agree that women continue to bear a disproportionate burden in taking care of children and elderly parents, even when both partners in a relationship have jobs," John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira write in one chapter of the report.

Put President Obama down as a strong agreer. "Today's Obama family is obviously not typical," he told NBC's Savannah Guthrie. "Five years ago, six years ago, though, we were having a lot of negotiations, because, you know, Michelle was trying to figure out, OK, if the kids get sick, why is it that she's the one who has to take time off of her job to go pick them up from school, as opposed to me? If, you know, the girls need to shop for clothes, why is it that it's her burden and not mine?"

Yet there is another, more subtle dynamic involved, one that may be hinted at in Greider's laundry-folding. We want our husbands to pitch in -- without being asked. At the same time, we are wary of ceding our control over the home front. Did Michelle really want Barack picking out her daughter's clothes? We cling to our multitasking as much as we bemoan it.

Greider, I suspect, could easily hire someone to do the laundry. Yet there is something comforting in keeping a connection to mundane household tasks even when you're running a major-league research lab. Perhaps younger women don't feel this tug toward domesticity.

But for women of my generation there remains an impulse to live up to the standards of our stay-at-home mothers even as we race out the door each morning.

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