USA — Much has been said about the so-called “Sexual Revolution” and whether either side won – but one thing that has slowly become obvious is that an increasing number of men are both willing and able to do their fair share of chores around the house. A recent report by sociologists Scott Coltrane and Oriel Sullivan indicates that this might actually be a less than selfless act, given that men who help out more around the house get to spend more time goofing off in the bedroom.According to a study released by the Council on Contemporary Families, regardless of the relative height of any glass ceilings for women in the work place, things have been getting considerably more equitable when it comes to childrearing and housework.
One study concluded that men had more than doubled their involvement in housework during the past 40 years and have tripled the amount of time they spend with the fruit of their loins during the same time period.
“More couples are sharing family tasks than ever before,” the report assures, “and the movement toward sharing has been especially significant for full-time, dual-earner couples. Men and women may not be fully equal yet, but the rules of the game have been profoundly and irreversibly changed.
While those who cling to gender-based roles may conclude that modern man has been not merely defanged but emasculated by taking on more domestic duties, Joshua Coleman, Bay Area psychologist and author of The Lazy Husband: How to Get Men to Do More Parenting and Housework says it ain’t necessarily so. In fact, Coleman thinks it’s quite the opposite.
“If a guy does housework,” he observes, “it looks to the woman like he really cares about her – he’s not just treating her like a servant. And if a woman feels stressed out because the house is a mess and the guy’s sitting on the couch while she’s vacuuming, that’s not going to put her in the mood.”
As explained in National Writer, Coltrane, of the University of California, Riverside, and Sullivan, of Ben Gurion University, undertook the study because they wanted to examine claims that women, however much they achieved in the work place, were still burdened by the majority of housework.
“The typical punch line of many news stories has been that even though women are working longer hours on the job and cutting back their own housework, men are not picking up the slack,” the academic due state. Their conclusion is that this is an incorrect assumption that does not acknowledge the change “going on behind the scenes” since the 1960s and is based upon unrealistic expectations. In the opinion of both Coltrane and Sullivan, the changes they find are “too great a break from the past to be dismissed as a slow and grudging evolution.”
As a result of that break from the past, not only have men upped their household help from 15-percent to 30-percent, but women have been able to dedicate two hours per week to other matters. Between 1965 and 2003, men not only tripled the amount of time they spent tending their children, but their female partners joined them more frequently. Perhaps that’s where the extra two hours went.
Although the report concluded that women who work longer, earn more, and have higher levels of education can expect more help around the house from the men in their lives, University of Michigan sociologist Pamela Smock thinks it’s the “invisible” housework that still falls to women. This includes small but important tasks such as scheduling medical appointments, purchasing gifts for children to take to social events, coordinating holiday gatherings, etc.
Unfortunately for African-American wives, black marriages lag behind those of their white peers, leaving them with a greater number of household responsibilities both in terms of child care and housework.
