Yuen: Housework is hindering the gender revolution

Do you want to know the real reason Minnesotans never invite you into our homes?

I suppose I can only speak for one. Here’s my confession: If I had you over for dinner, you would see that my life is a disaster.

Halloween candy wrappers are ratholed under my couches. Beyblades clutter my kitchen counters. Baskets of unfolded laundry assault my living room floor.

Although I appreciate a clean house, I do not enjoy cleaning. And as a woman, I know I will be the one judged for not keeping my home in order.

That moral judgment could be in part what drives women to still carry most of the load of housework drudgery. Even though women make up roughly half of the workforce and earn more college degrees than men, in our own homes we still are more likely than our male partners to do the laundry, clean, cook and decorate our living spaces.

There is no task more soul-extinguishing than folding clothes — a chore that can last the entire week if you have kids. About 52% of the time, women in opposite-sex households are the ones doing the laundry, compared with 28% for men, according to a Gallup survey. (About 13% of poll respondents said the man and woman in the house were equally likely.)

Another recent study found women in the United States perform about two hours more a day of unpaid work — such as cooking, cleaning and caregiving — than men.

But on the whole, women are fighting 150 years of conditioning that tells them that “it is not just their duty, but their moral and emotional responsibility” to tidy up, says historian Stephanie Coontz.

“Women have been socialized to see themselves as picker-uppers,” Coontz said. “We pick up after people emotionally, and we pick up after people in terms of housecleaning.”

Just as women face stigma for not maintaining order and cleanliness in the home, many men still feel pressured to be the main breadwinners of their families, Coontz said. That’s despite recent research showing that such notions about who financially supports their families are outdated.

In the 18 years following the birth of their first child, about 70% of moms can expect to be the primary earners in their household at some point, according to the Council on Contemporary Families, where Coontz is director of research and public education.

Nonetheless, those two entrenched views — women maintain the home, men bring in the money — have powerfully shaped our behaviors and expectations. So much so that for several decades, “happiness in marriage and sexual attraction came from a very strongly gendered division of labor,” she said.

I consider myself a feminist, but the division of labor in my marriage is, for the most part, frighteningly gendered. He mows the lawn, cleans the gutters, clears the snow, takes out the garbage, pays the bills and works on DIY projects. I scrub the toilet and bathtub, vacuum, prepare meals, do the laundry, grocery shop and stay on top of school stuff and kids’ activities. We pay exceptionally nonjudgmental house cleaners to come once a month.

To ease marital strain over chores, Coontz, who wrote the book “Marriage, a History,” suggests we can learn from couples in same-sex relationships. They may not split the housework and child care equally, but many sit down and talk about their responsibilities, she said.

“They don’t have this internalized habit that [says], ‘Oh, well, you’re a female, you probably do this better. I’m a male, I probably do this better,’” Coontz said. “It’s the fact they discuss it that leads to the higher satisfaction.”

Sometimes that’s easier said than done. My friend says her husband, while defending himself from criticism that he’s slacking, will tell her, “I can’t read your mind.”

To which she quips: “You don’t have to read my mind. You just have to read the room.”

Of course, sometimes women enable their husbands to do less by what Coontz calls “gatekeeping” — asking him to sweep the floor, only to redo his work because it wasn’t up to her standards.

In her own marriage, she habitually would reload the dishwasher after her husband already ran it, until he pointed out this was exactly the phenomenon she had been studying. “Why should I bother doing it if you’re going to redo it?” he asked.

Coontz relented, and some nine years later, he exclusively does the dishes. “I have a demanding enough professional life,” she reasoned. “Suddenly, I was like, ‘OK, this is kind of liberating.’ ”

She also trained herself to un-see clutter, something she advises other women to do.

“There’s lots of things to feel guilty about in the world,” she said. “A dirty house is not one of them.”