http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2010\01\27\story_27-1-2010_pg3_4
Wednesday, January 27, 2010 PURPLE PATCH: The tyranny of housework -Germaine Greer By the millennium, housework should have been abolished. In a sane world, meaningless repetition of non-productive activity would be seen to be a variety of obsessive-compulsive disorder. People who said that they enjoyed doing housework, or needed to do it, or that doing it made them feel good would be known as addicts. Once the word got out that a person was cleaning her toilet every day, therapists would come to her house and reclaim her for rationality and the pleasure principle. These days, housework does not just use people; it requires a gang of machines: vacuum cleaners, washing machines, dishwashers, driers, food processors, microwave ovens, refrigerators and freezers, immense quantities of water, power and detergent to feed into them, and an army of technicians who treat them when they malfunction - and charge more than doctors do for a home visit. Though the houseworker does not now scrub and polish floors or pound clothes on a washboard or put aside an evening for ironing, she is equally busy hoovering, spraying-and-wiping and stuffing clothes in washing machines. As more and more home appliances have appeared in more and more homes, they have brought anything but increased leisure for the houseworker. Changing standards and notions of cleanliness have made cleaning more time-consuming than ever before. Kitchen worktops need to be constantly wiped; kitchen floors need to be mopped whenever a footprint or a pawprint appears; the bath has to be cleaned between baths; once a day is not often enough for the toilet. Even as feminism is trying to transform attitudes, marketing is obliterating its traces. In commercial after commercial, the performer of mindless routine tasks is an inanely smiling woman, unless some inanely smiling man pops up to demonstrate a new and better way of using even more of the product by dint of making her look a complete fool. A mythical battle has to be waged by the houseworker against germs, depicted as intelligent beings of deviant appearance lurking under the rim of the toilet ready to infect helpless kiddies if the houseworker should be so remiss as to allow a single one to survive. There are more 'germs' in her mouth and under her fingernails and in her hair than there are under the rim of the toilet, but the houseworker is not told this. Her vocation is to rid the world of germs with the aid of a knight in shining armour, a genie in a bottle, a white tornado. This is housework as heroic exploit. The houseworker can only know that she has done her duty when she has squirted bleach-based agents into every nook and cranny of her house, even down the drains. Houses no longer smell of cooking; they smell of cleaning. Yet kitchens are not operating theatres and antisepsis in kitchens is as undesirable as it is impossible, because it can only be achieved by huge overuse of powerful chemicals. Time not spent doing one task will be taken up by another. Washing used to be done on a single day of the week, usually Monday. When washing machines became cheap enough to be owned by the majority, washing came gradually to be done on any day of the week, and then on every day of the week. Laundry is nowadays done several times a day. Television commercials show beaming women snatching a single soiled garment from the back of husband or child, and producing it blazing clean minutes later, having been through the whole washing and drying process aided by a horde of sophisticated bio-digesters, enzymes and whitening agents as well as immense amounts of power and water, all squandered on a single garment. Kids won't wear their jeans and T-shirts for more than a few hours each before into the machine they go. The person who does all this work is usually female. Advertisers and market researchers who tried to buck the stereotype and show men spraying Harpic under the rim of the toilet very soon realised their mistake. Nowadays, it is always a woman who pops the meal in the microwave, whips off her apron, uncorks the wine, lights the candles and waits. There is no magazine called Man and Home. The 23 percent of men who will consent to cook when they have a woman in the house do so on special occasions with great song and dance, leaving the clearing up to be done by her. Men who clean and wash are presumed to have a wife in hospital. The few men who do a hand's turn around the house expect gratitude and recognition, so sure are they that, though it is their dirt, it is not their job. Work around the house is as gendered as ever it was. Men have not agreed to do a share, let alone a fair share, of domestic work, because they have never agreed on the amount of work that needs to be done. It is difficult to know how they could, because most of the work done in the home does not need to be done. The men who leave ziggurats of dirty dishes festering in the sink are actually involved in a power play which they have no intention of losing. All they need to do is to exploit inertia, and wait it out. Sooner or later, the woman will give in, because the squalor is not held against the menfolk but against her. A man who is slovenly and untidy is considered normal; the woman who is, either a slut or a slommack or a sloven or a slag. The only way to escape this tyranny of housework is to abandon the house. (The extract is taken from The Whole Woman by Germaine Greer) Germaine Greer is an Australian-born writer, journalist, academic and one of the most significant feminine voices of the later 20th century [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
