Marriage and Violence by Frances E. Dolan

Author:Frances E. Dolan [Dolan, Frances E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Feminism & Feminist Theory, History, Europe, Renaissance
ISBN: 9780812201772
Google: dPHSBQAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2010-11-24T04:24:14+00:00

Home Discomforts

The Byrds and the Pepyses may seem historically remote; Amanda and Elyot, Katherina and Petruchio seem too stylized to be real and therefore are detached from daily life. But in the early twenty-first century as in the early eighteenth or late sixteenth, in actual households as on the stage, marriage is still married to domestic service—to an intimate and exploitative relation to housework. Although slavery was abolished in the United States in 1866, and servants began to disappear from American households in the early twentieth century, they reentered in one form or the other in the 1970s, when women began joining the paid work force in greater numbers.111 Having two paychecks can equalize spouses’ involvement in family decisions and control over resources, but that apparent equality is often subsidized through the work of other people, who enter the home to clean it or care for children, or who operate at sites outside the home to support it. Depending on anonymous “services” rather than intimately known servants, and sending domestic work (such as child care and laundry) outside the home, can obscure this fact. “Servants” are still there but we might not see them or know their names. Barbara Ehrenreich points to the booming business in cleaning services and the ways in which such services protect customers from having to deal directly with those who clean their houses. According to Ehrenreich, “managers of the new corporate cleaning services . . . attribute their success not only to the influx of women into the workforce but to the tensions over housework that arose in its wake.” As a result, some corporate cleaning services even credit themselves with saving marriages.112

Critics of the solution of outsourcing housework point to four main problems with this reliance on paid domestic help. First, domestic workers are often exploited—ill paid and without benefits. Exposing this exploitation is Ehrenreich’s project in her chapter on cleaning services in the best-selling and influential Nickel and Dimed. This problem could be addressed by offering domestic workers better pay and benefits, unless, of course, there is something inherently wrong with depending on someone else in this way.

Second, this solution deflects demand away from men without requiring them to do what many women perceive as their fair share. As Arlie Hochschild has documented, women who work outside the home continue to work a second shift at home, and to bear more of the responsibility for child care, food preparation, laundry, and cleaning. Hochschild documents women’s disappointment when men hire help rather than sharing housework and child care with their partners. For such women, “money could not buy a complete solution.” While couples at different income levels experience conflicts differently, according to Hochschild “the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”113

Third, as a result of the fact that many women remain largely responsible for all the kinds of work the “second shift” includes, they also get the blame for exploiting domestic workers, who are often other women.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.