{"id":75551,"date":"2026-06-25T01:00:54","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T05:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=75551"},"modified":"2026-06-24T10:00:58","modified_gmt":"2026-06-24T14:00:58","slug":"qotd-division-of-domestic-work-1970s-onward","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2026\/06\/25\/qotd-division-of-domestic-work-1970s-onward\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Division of domestic work, 1970s onward"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"float:right; padding: 0px 0px 10px 25px\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"400\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-48672\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png 400w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-50x50.png 50w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>The Women&#8217;s Liberation Movement wanted many things in 1970, but one of the most important was freedom from &#8220;unpaid domestic servitude at home&#8221;.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Again, this is Straight Outta Engels, from 1884. Even back in 1970, we could all yell &#8220;Read another book!&#8221; Someone ought to rewrite <em>The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State<\/em> with a few quidditch matches in it; it&#8217;d be on the bestseller list until the sun&#8217;s a cinder.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>Half a century later, most women are still waiting for their freedom. Women still do far more domestic and care labour than men.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I find this extremely hard to believe. So I checked <a href=\"https:\/\/theconversation.com\/yet-again-the-census-shows-women-are-doing-more-housework-now-is-the-time-to-invest-in-interventions-185488\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">their source<\/a>, which is a very scientific-sounding site called &#8220;The Conversation&#8221;. You&#8217;ll just have to click it for yourself, since I can&#8217;t figure out how to screenshot just the little graphic they have, but if you do, you&#8217;ll notice a couple things straight off:<\/p>\n<p>First, this data is from Australia. Which is bullshit, because look, y&#8217;all, I&#8217;ve seen the <em>Mad Max<\/em> movies, and nobody&#8217;s doing any domestic labor in Australia. Their main settlement is ruled by Tina Turner, for fuck&#8217;s sake, and the Prime Minister runs around in a thong and a hockey mask. Sweet cars, though, I&#8217;ll give them that.<\/p>\n<p>The other thing you&#8217;ll notice is that the &#8220;Australian Bureau of Statistics&#8221; \u2014 I&#8217;m pretty sure that&#8217;s the motorized hang glider guy \u2014 has obviously been having fun with the scalar functions in whatever post-apocalyptic version of Excel they&#8217;ve got down there. The bars for &#8220;did no unpaid domestic work&#8221; look dramatic &#8230; but they represent a mere seven point difference. (And do you see what I mean? Apparently 29% of Australian men, and 22% of Australian women, do no unpaid domestic labor whatsoever. By my math, that&#8217;s a quarter of the country stewing in its own filth. I know, I know &#8230; I&#8217;m amazed it&#8217;s that low).<\/p>\n<p>The bars for &#8220;5-14 hours&#8221;, though, show a fractional difference: Women do a whopping 0.3% more. And again, this is Australia, but even if we assume that &#8220;unpaid domestic labor&#8221; is stuff like &#8220;wiping the blood from the somehow intact windshield of the last of the V-8 interceptors&#8221;, 5-14 hours is what you might call &#8220;the outer limits of normal for a working stiff&#8221;. Admittedly I live in a two-bedroom apartment, not a house, but I&#8217;m a bit of a neat freak, and &#8220;an hour a day&#8221; is about all I do. Vacuum the floors and scrub the toilets on Sunday, that&#8217;s two hours tops. I&#8217;ll be generous and say I spend another 3-4 doing the squeegee thing to my shower walls after I bathe, and loading the dishes in the washer, and giving the counters a quick wipedown once or twice a week, etc.<\/p>\n<p>The real difference comes in the &#8220;15-29 hours&#8221; and &#8220;30 hours or more&#8221; categories, and you have to be very, very Smart indeed to find that &#8220;problematic&#8221;, since those are stay-at-home moms. In other words, they do that &#8220;unpaid domestic labor&#8221; <em>by choice<\/em>. Because &#8220;the care and feeding of the next generation&#8221;, not to mention &#8220;the deep, primal satisfaction one gets from seeing a little life grow that you helped create&#8221; don&#8217;t really count as <em>pay<\/em>.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>Since the 1960s, more and more women have taken up paid employment, but a problem remains: how would their unpaid domestic work be replaced?<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Gosh, that IS a problem! And as the Australians have shown us, the answer seems to be &#8220;just stew in your own filth&#8221;. It&#8217;s a solution America&#8217;s single gals, at least, seem to have embraced with kamikaze-level enthusiasm. Back in the days, I&#8217;d always insist on taking a girl back to my place, because condoms don&#8217;t cover the entire body and her place was always, and I do mean <em>always<\/em>, a certifiable biohazard. I&#8217;d rather do a striptease in Chernobyl&#8217;s reactor core than do anything in an American woman&#8217;s bedroom, and their bathrooms are pits of unspeakable Lovecraftian horror.<\/p>\n<p>Severian, <a href=\"https:\/\/foundingquestions.wordpress.com\/2022\/08\/08\/sjws-always-project\/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;SJWs Always Project&#8221;, <em>Founding Questions<\/em><\/a>, 2022-08-08.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Women&#8217;s Liberation Movement wanted many things in 1970, but one of the most important was freedom from &#8220;unpaid domestic servitude at home&#8221;. Again, this is Straight Outta Engels, from 1884. Even back in 1970, we could all yell &#8220;Read another book!&#8221; Someone ought to rewrite The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[331,57,41,13],"tags":[263,987,1462,290,43],"class_list":["post-75551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-australia","category-humour","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-1970s","tag-feminism","tag-severian","tag-statistics","tag-women"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-jEz","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75551"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75551\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":103239,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75551\/revisions\/103239"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}