As we prepare for barbecues, pool parties, or Hurricane Dorian, many mothers are finishing up the potato salad, getting the kids dressed, checking flashlight batteries, or doing laundry before the power goes out. Their lists of domestic tasks have doubled or even tripled in the face of a holiday–hurricane twofer.
Although Labor Day is ostensibly about “real” labor and “real” jobs, it’s also a day forged through other types of labor: domestic and emotional. Every holiday requires event planning, homemaking, and getting people together. And unfortunately, the burden of this labor tends to fall on women.
Before the men chime in with wails that they do in fact do housework, let me explain: it’s not that you don’t do it. It’s that women do it more often.
According to the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, men in the United States spend 150.2 minutes a day — about 17.5 hours a week — doing unpaid labor. Women spend 243.2 minutes doing unpaid labor each day — about 28.4 hours a week. (Source)
If that’s not true in your household, great! But in many households, it falls to the women to manage the bills, plan the parties, and take care of the house. And there’s another component: emotional labor, which is akin to project management in a workplace. Except you usually don’t get paid for it.
How Emotional Labor Supports Domestic Work
Consider this:
- Even if you do chores, who makes the chore wheel in your house?
- Even if you pick up the kids, who posts the weekly schedule on the fridge?
- Even if you sign it, who buys the holiday cards?
- Even if you buy groceries, who writes the grocery list?
If you live alone, you probably do both. But in households with men and women, the latter usually end up doing the planning and organization that enables the domestic labor.
None of this work is paid; this is the emotional labor that goes hand-in-hand with domestic labor.
It isn’t necessarily that women are “better at the little things,” as I’ve been told — it’s that women are socialized from a young age to think about these things, and being constantly instructed to…
