Stop whining and 'man' up

Oh dear...it appears that men are getting a little sensitive about being 'overworked and underappreciated' for not being recognised enough for all of the hard work their doing in the domestic realm. A recent article from The Age suggests that male partners and husbands are feeling angry because they too are just as overworked as women. The article cites that a 2006 study into how Australians used their time found that men spent a combined average (over seven days) of 11.44 hours per day performing professional, childcare and domestic tasks. And women? They came in at a combined average of 11.35 hours - nine minutes less than the men.

Now, I may get slammed for this (or maybe not?) but I have to say, that I really can't feel too badly for men on this front. Whilst I think it is brilliant that men are stepping up and sharing in the domestic load with their female partners, the truth is that no one should get a gold star for cleaning the bathroom. The only reason women have been banging on about having their work recognised for so long is because WOMEN, for the bulk of human history, have been doing the caring and cleaning work for the family almost exclusively. It is only recently (I mean broadly, since the early 20th century) that women have had real opportunities to be in the paid workforce.

So what if men are doing are feeling overworked? SO THEY SHOULD.

Truth is (at least according to a new study), most men are lying about their 'work' in the household. According to an article in Slate:

"Social psychologists call this aspirational lying—the unconscious shading of the truth to make us appear smarter, more generous, and closer to the person we want to be."What you want leads to what you do. If you say you're doing more, it really is a measure of the societal change," said Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute. "If it were not OK to be doing things with your kids and to be nurturing them— not just bringing in the money—you might lie in the other direction."

Pregnancy is almost never recognised as 'work' in itself. Ask any gal who's had kids and she will tell you that the work begins at conception and doesn't end until the kids go off to university (and even then, statistically, lots of kids are living with their parents until well into their 30s...yikes). Even without children, I still struggle with my partner when it comes to sharing the domestic load. Inevitably, I always end up doing more and I can't imagine what it would be like (and honestly, I worry about it) when we do have kids. I really struggle with this as a feminist.

Now that educated middle-class women are reaping more of the benefits of feminist movements and greater access to the paid workforce, I hardly think the time is ripe for men to 'blame' women for their achievements. I don't think any woman needs to feel guilty if the tides are turning in her favour.

Seriously, guys, if you're partner carried your child for 9 months, the least you can do is man up and do 9 more minutes a week of cleaning. Yeah, that's right. MAN UP (besides, you're probably lying about it anyway *snigger*)

Pregnancy = no housework. Hooray?

A new study suggests that when women do 'boring' tasks like housework,
they are 25% more likely to give birth prematurely.

Apparently, such 'mindless' chores raise their level of stress hormones.

Maybe we can see this as a great way for women to heap all of their
undeserved housework on their partners.

Or maybe this suggests that it is problematic for women to be active
during their pregnancy and that they are too fragile to move around and do
things.

Or maybe it just means that foetuses are feminists and trying to save mum
from menial labour?

Paid maternity leave? looks like not a chance

So looks like the whole maternity payment scheme in Oz is sinking. Small business is apparently upset because they will have to contribute to the superannuation accounts of women on maternity leave. A number of others are whining about the plan possibly not being means tested.

I find this amazing and actually it strangely crossovers with some things I have been mulling over lately. Here are some facts:

In the last 40 years, the Australian fertility rate has declined from 3.55 babies per women in the ‘baby boom’ of 1961 to a historic low of 1.73 in 2001. The fertility rate first started to decline in 1976 and ever since that time, the population has been below replacement level (2.1 babies per woman). Since 2001, however, Australia’s fertility rate has been slowly increasing. Fertility rates reached their highest level in ten years – 1.81 babies per woman – in 2005. This was also a time when Australia recorded the highest number of births since 1993.

As there is still no national scheme for paid maternity leave and given that provisions for childcare in Melbourne are woefully inadequate, being pregnant and ‘at work’ is still seen as perhaps visually and culturally inconsistent. This may point to a ‘backlash’ against feminism(s) both by the Australian government and women themselves. In spite of hard-won changes to Australian women’s legal and political status over the last 30 years, anxieties about pregnancy and motherhood clearly continue to brew. If the second wave of feminism encouraged middle-class Australian women to expand their understandings of themselves beyond marriage and motherhood, the falling birthrate in Australia clearly sits uneasily with the more recent trend of postponing motherhood.

Many of the women in my study were quite anxious about clinging to their positions in the paid workforce or having to make a somewhat defeated ‘choice’ to stay at home for a certain period of time to be ‘full-time’ mothers. They seemed genuinely frustrated and, at times, angry that the versions of feminist discourse presented to them in women’s magazines and by celebrities, for instance, seemed to suggest that being a mother and having a career is a seamless negotiation: that women can ‘have it all’. Ways of combining motherhood with other feminist aspirations are rarely discussed in the current Australian political climate. Rather, it is the women who are blamed for wanting to both have a working life and look after their children. This 'backlash' against maternity leave also particularly highlights the fractured and partial adherence to everyday feminisms by many Australian women themselves.

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