Dust and Divorce

I want to talk about dust. Yes, dust. Not one but two whole books have been published about it lately, and I think there’s something weirdly profound about dust. Start talking about dust and pretty soon you’re talking about the whole of gender roles. Dust leads to crap which leads to the timeless question, Who cleans the toilet? Right there you’ve got the basis for a thousand divorces, and you even begin to get at the relationship between gender and class. Remember, it was the Untouchables who cleaned toilets in India, and Gandhi and his wife almost got divorced when he insisted they clean their own toilets, that is, that she clean them. Whoa, that was fast.

I’m not kidding. Cary Tennis over at Salon just responded to a question from a woman whose husband threatens to divorce her if the house isn’t cleaned up. Tennis gave a cute, perky answer to the question that completely avoided the dust elephant under the carpet: gender. It’s one of the clues that makes me suspect that Cary is a man. No woman would think that this problem had a simple, buck-up-and-clean, practical answer.

A while back, I went to a Moms Rising house party and came away totally depressed because what everyone talked about was cleaning and how their husbands never do their share. One woman said she once left a basket of clean laundry sitting for 10 days, waiting to see if her husband would notice and fold and put away the clothes. Ever since then that’s become a joke with my partner. “Are you testing me?” we ask if laundry or dishes or filth sits around for a while. In fact, he does most of the laundry, although I generally clean the toilets and occasionally I find the symbolism of that intolerable and make a snide, passive-aggressive comment that could lead to divorce if I didn’t pull back from the brink fast. Luckily, we both deal with dust.

I came away from that Moms Rising meeting thinking, My god, have we come nowhere since the fifties? Did I just step through a time warp into The Feminine Mystique? I wanted to say to these women, Can’t we talk about more important things than dust? I found myself admiring and identifying with the three single women in the group because they seemed so much more empowered and positive. Even the recently divorced woman who described how hard and lonely it is was talking about real problems and not dust. I felt ashamed to be among the smug marrieds.

I felt like saying to the rest of the group, Just let the house be dirty and be done with it. But I realized I would sound like Linda Hirshman. In a much ballyhooed American Prospect article and then a book called Get to Work, Hirshman says women are making the bad choice to opt out of the workforce in droves and need to buck up and make better choices. Among Hirshman’s short list of antidotes to becoming a housewife: ignorance and dust. That is, never know whether there’s butter in the fridge or where it is, and leave the house dirty. There’s something appealing to me about remarks like this—“sinus-clearing,” in David Brooks’ words—and I think it’s useful to keep in mind. There’s a cost to sliding into these gendered divisions of labor and so you should resist it, as best you can.

But fighting passive-aggressive, one-on-one battles in your home over cleaning is a losing proposition that will get you angry, beaten down, divorced, or all three. Here’s the thing: Dust isn’t a personal problem. Women have been snarking at men to do their share of house cleaning for decades and studies show there’s been little to no improvement in women’s “second shift.” (The worst part is the disparity gets even worse after a child is born.) The answer why isn’t because men are jerks (or if they are, telling them so won’t improve things). In fact, the tax code made him do it. Among other things. (More on that later.) Getting yourself more power outside the house—with a well-paid job, for starters—and therefore too busy to do much cleaning, is a far better strategy. But there are barriers to that, as all you mothers out there can attest and I myself know too well, having spent chunks of time un- and underemployed since my daughter was born. On that subject Linda Hirshman offers nothing.

Tough as it is, we have to keep our heads above the dust and notice its connection to bigger issues. Because dust doesn’t matter. Although it does.