Friday Fairness Takes
In which I buy a pack of those Fair Play cards and think about household work and marriage in general.
It’s Friday! Isn’t that great? Let’s see about some Takes, shall we?
One
A lovely friend sent me this article, which then afforded me some happy moments pondering a lot of YouTube clips and then buying something on Amazon. Here’s just a taste from the piece:
Everything came to a head one Saturday when she attended a breast cancer march with friends. As soon as it ended, the questions from husbands started: Where is the gift for so-and-so’s birthday party? Do the kids need to eat lunch? Ms. Rodsky tallied the incoming communications: 30 phone calls and 46 texts. For 10 women. Over 30 minutes. Ms. Rodsky began reading about the gendered division of labor and asking women what they did outside of work. She texted a few friends, who texted others, and eventually she had spoken to more than 200 women — and had created a spreadsheet of 1,000 unpaid tasks organized into 98 categories. She soon discovered that a list without an action plan, however, merely created more resentment. So Ms. Rodsky took a cue from her day job, where she often uses cards to help with difficult meetings. She wrote each of the 98 categories, from pets to travel, on an index card, splitting them with her husband based on what they were responsible for (her: many; him: almost none). Then they re-dealt the cards in a way that felt more equitable. One of Ms. Rodsky’s biggest rules, which she also borrowed from her project management background, is: Whoever holds a card is 100 percent accountable for any duties within that category, from conception (noticing the dog’s fur is getting mangy) to planning (calling the groomer) to execution (taking him to the appointment). Ms. Rodsky calls this “CPE, for conception-planning-execution; the economist and parenting expert Emily Oster uses a similar strategy called “total responsibility transfer.”
What came about was a book and deck of cards, both of which you can buy in all the regular places. I happened to have a little bit of cash, and I’m literally trying to write up all our marriage stuff into something scintillating, and cards weren’t that expensive, so I bought a set even though I haven’t read the book.
Two
However, having now shuffled through the deck, I see I don’t know all the terminology, and am a little bit dubious, so that probably means another audible credit down the drain. Sigh.
Anyway, here’s a short video that explains how the cards work and the four rules:
Three
Right off the bat, I can’t quite agree that all time is created “equal,” nor am I a believer in “equity” as such, which seems to have replaced other moral values like honor and…I can’t think of any other moral values just at this moment, but perhaps some will come to me as I keep shuffling these cards.
My very biggest problem with the idea that all “time” is created “equal” is that God is the creator of Time itself, and so, as creatures within time, we oughtn’t to imagine that we have full ownership of ourselves or what we do. Of course each person should take responsibility, but part of taking responsibility is acknowledging a higher and better and more true order of things—God’s.
Living in a culture that has tragically lost the capacity to even know the difference between, say, “ordinary” time and “sacred” time, the dealing out of household tasks by means of a deck of cards feels like it will be little more than a life hack, though one full of the usual dangerous possibilities for hurt feelings and wroth. How can it be that each couple in each little house and apartment has to negotiate every single task from scratch, without even a single assumption about what might properly belong to one sex or the other? And yet, because the underlying assumption about God has disappeared, of course, it is unfair that women, by and large, still shoulder the responsibility of laundry and school lunch packing.
Four
I guess my problem is just with the way things are now, more than anything else. And that is something that I’m just going to have to cope with. The fact is that we all live in a world where everyone has to earn a crust, mostly outside of “the home” and so it is clever and kind of someone to come along and make explicit all the implicit, hidden assumptions associated with each and every task. And yes, how the place where you live with other people is organized should be one of the most essential aspects of “life.” It’s utterly wicked and dumb that “the home” became a place merely to sleep and enjoy the goods purchased as a result of all the work done elsewhere. It is sensible to try to recover some of the importance associated with “the family” in “the home.” I’m using scare quotes because I just feel like it and it’s Friday.
Five
I cannot stop thinking about Ivan Illich’s concept of Shadow Work in Gender. If you haven’t read the book, seriously, what are you even doing? He writes:
Unlike the production of goods and services, shadow work is performed by the consumer of commodities, specifically, the consuming household. I call shadow work any labor by which the consumer transforms a purchased commodity into a usable good. I designate as shadow work the time, toil and effort that must be expended in order to add to any purchased commodity the value without which it is unfit for use. Therefore, shadow work names an activity in which people must engage to whatever degree they attempt to satisfy their needs by means of commodities. By introducing the term “shadow work,” I distinguish the procedure for cooking eggs today from that followed in the past. When a modern housewife goes to the market, picks up the eggs, drives them home in her car, takes the elevator to the seventh floor, turns on the stove, takes butter from the refrigerator, and fries the eggs, she adds value to the commodity with each one of these steps. This is not what her grandmother did. The latter looks for eggs in the chicken coop, cut a piece from the lard she had rendered, lit some wood her kids had gathered on the commons, and added the salt she had bought. Although this example might sound romantic, it should make the economic difference clear. Both women prepared fried eggs, but only one uses a marketed commodity and highly capitalized production goods: car, elevator, electric appliances. The grandmother carries out woman’s gender-specific tasks in creating substance; the new wife must put up with the household burden of shadow work.
I mean, having grown up in a world where to make the dinner the grain had to be pounded and the chicken had to be caught and killed, it doesn’t sound the least bit romantic to me, but I do think it is psychologically and perhaps even spiritually less crushing. Getting rid of all the friction, though it seemed like a good idea at the time, has not been good for the mental health of the average person. And, though resentment between the sexes has always been a feature of marriage, when you can’t know exactly what a task even involves, familial ground becomes ever more fertile for strife.
Six
Glancing over the cards, I can see already that I would be unwilling to use them to arrange my life. Matt and I have painstakingly worked out the gritty details of most of the work in most of the categories. For example, according to the rules, if you need help with some task named on a card, you should try to ask someone outside of your household—like a friend or a sister—to help you, rather than your “partner.” This is because the partner is also holding a full hand of cards. And the point of the card is to fully own the task, from start to finish. In other words, if you need help with the laundry because you hold that card, and are behind, you should get someone else to help you, because your partner is doing all the dishes. Which, I get. One of the things that completely exasperates me about my children is that they don’t “own” any one task in the household, no matter how much I try to “give” it to them. I know this because they still have to be told to do it, even if they agreed three weeks ago that it was “theirs.”
Whereas, most of the tasks that Matt and I do are tightly woven together. He shops for certain items at certain stores and I shop for others at other stores and we also shop together. We couldn’t possibly take the card that says “shopping” and put it in only one hand because it would wreck our carefully calibrated system. But we do have a system, which we have wrought by constant and fraught negotiation over twenty plus years.
Because that’s how we’ve worked it, more and more of the tasks have become pleasurable over time. The garden card could not be torn in two, or given into only one hand, because we both love the garden, though we do not do the same tasks in that tiny space by any means. We have worked out our own, peculiar “vernacular” gender (according to Illich). The problem is that it belongs to us only and is not culturally reproducible. When all our children get married they will have to begin afresh, because not a soul around them will be able to say “Women do the laundry and men kill the chickens.” That would be so shocking and sexist even to suggest.
Seven
My mother pointed out to me that newly wedded people are supposed to go into their marriages not at 50/50 but at 100/100. Each person is supposed to be “all in.” And yet, it is true, that for every single task, both people don’t need to do it. Then they just step on each other toes. Which means, if you want to buy the cards and try them out, by all means, give them a go. I’m going to go through the deck and assign them to my children, because nowhere in the rules does it say that I can’t.
Anyway, have a nice day!