4 ms·

Cleaning is not emotional labour, and the article doesn't claim so. Being in charge of cleaning is the emotional labour.

• saint_fiasco 9y ago
  That sounds like normal labour to me. Just a more administrative/managerial type instead of the hard physical type. If my boss asked me to call some cleaning companies and arrange a schedule so they come clean the office, all on my "free" time, I'd expect extra payment because that is extra labour.
  • nkrisc 9y ago
    It's emotional because one partner is expected to care about it while the other may remain indifferent. Sometimes your partner needs you to care so they can take a break from doing so. Now deep down you don't have to really care; there are things I do for my wife not because I care whether it gets done, but because I care for her and if she wants me to care, then damnit I'm going to care.
    • saint_fiasco 9y ago
      But caring about cleanliness wasn't labor for the author. It came naturally to her. If anything, it was the husband that was expected to apply emotional labour to make himself care. Which I now see was the point. Women are traditionally expected to care about their partner's preferences even if they don't really understand or care themselves, while men are expected to be practical, cold and uncaring. Thus gender roles contribute to an imbalance in the distribution of emotional labour.
      • ZenoArrow 9y ago
        > "It came naturally to her." Did it though? A lot of life admin isn't satisfying or enjoyable, it's just a drudge. Are you suggesting that relentless, menial work with no end in sight comes naturally to anyone? I'm single, and I've found ways to keep life admin to a minimum, but when you're running a household there's tons of small jobs that add up. It becomes hard to switch off. I've seen it happen multiple times.
        • saint_fiasco 9y ago
          The actual work of cleaning does not come naturally to anyone. The "emotional" work of worrying about cleanliness is a different matter. If she did not care about housework, she would just not do it, not hire anyone else to do it, and the house would be a mess. That's what the husband does and it works for him because that's his personality. He only cares when someone important to him nags him about it, and he has to "work" to at least pretend to care. The actual work of cleaning the house he did, eventually. He never did the emotional work of convincingly pretending to really care about it.
          • ZenoArrow 9y ago
            You missed the point of the article. The husband screwed up with the cleaning too, even though he did the cleaning. It was never about the cleaning, per se, but the mental drain of running a household. Read the article again. This is the key part... "I was gifted a necklace for Mother's Day while my husband stole away to deep clean the bathrooms, leaving me to care for our children as the rest of the house fell into total disarray." If the idea behind Mother's Day is to give mothers a day off, can you see why the gift of getting cleaners in would've worked, but the gift of offering to do the cleaning did not?
            • saint_fiasco 9y ago
              I agree with you, but I think we are using different semantics. He technically did the cleaning. He screwed up because he didn't consider what the point of cleaning was (like you say, giving her wife a day off) and he just did something that he thought was approximately equivalent to what she literally asked. I call that "not really caring". If he cared, he would have realized he should have cleaned the day before and given "a clean bathroom on Mother's Day" as a present instead of "the act of cleaning the bathroom on Mother's Day".
              • ZenoArrow 9y ago
                > "I call that "not really caring"." I call it "not really understanding". The cleaning was most likely more work than a few more phone calls to cleaners for quotes would've been. If it was about not caring then why wouldn't the husband put in the minimum effort and get in someone else to do the cleaning?