Can Convenience Become My Wife?

An at-home labourer is essential for having enough time to balance work and hobbies: eating well, exercising, living in a clean home – all things that are varying degrees of essential, yet things we find difficult to achieve when we’re tired. Although we may believe we can prioritise according to how valuable each of those tasks are to us, home labour is, in fact, unavoidable. We still need to eat, clean, shop, and wash, and the answer to how one manages this workload through history has been for practitioners of domestic work to be socially unobtrusive and unpaid. This has not led us to a society without the need for at-home work – it’s only led to a world where their work is thankless. In the genteel Victorian home, this work was done by legions of hidden servants; in the early 20th century, women of all classes stayed at home and got it all done, with families working co-operatively to feed and clothe and earn. Whether through char-workers coming into the home or through somebody remaining out of the paid workforce to support a family, it’s always been necessary to benefit from a ‘housewife economy’ in order to lead a happy and successful life.* So how am I supposed to balance paid work and home work? How am I supposed to both forge my way in the world and care for myself whilst I do it? Can I make convenience my wife?

A few things, simultaneously, seem to be true:

• The whole pace of the world is built on having somebody, a step removed, sort things out for you. Whole careers need an assistant, and not all of them give you one: being a writer, for example, is built on having somebody to do the photocopying, the letter-writing (and the dishes) whilst you study, work, and enrich your life enough to produce content. Modern life is built on not having to come home and sort your own shit out, and yet almost all of us have to – or we’re at home anyway, realising just how much there is to sort out. There’s a reason every grocery store has ‘dine in’ deals, and it’s because people are tired after work.
• When I eat better there are more dishes; when I exercise more I get less sleep; when I spend a night doing the hoovering or getting the groceries I don’t have time to spend with my partner, to write, or to unwind from a day of paid labour. Chores pile up when they are undone, and focussing on one aspect of self-improvement often makes more chores.
• Convenience has always existed: you were able to pick up a pie or a roast chicken on the streets of Tudor London and take it home, find somebody who’d mend your clothes for a little money, or were able to run to the corner shop if you’d forgotten an item even before superstores. It’s not a new thing to need some support with the chores. I’m not even sure it’s a new thing to recognise you’re overworked and tired – I’m sure Shakespeare was playing to a crowd of tired Elizabethans who ought to have been home dusting and instead paid more than they ought to on takeout to buy the time to see his new play.
• Betty Friedan was right: the social pressure to work in undervalued fields creates a painful existence, and the solution to overwork cannot be to shrink the workforce and condemn a half of the population to domestic servitude, even if it would be more convenient for the rest of us. Oppressing a gender, a race or a social class to do your housework is fucking insane, yet historically rampant, and conditioning people to know only servitude is a solution that only works if you lie to yourself that the ‘other’ are not fully human.

Chores are, in many ways, easier in the Anthropocene. We all make fun of the old ads saying that you should get your wife a washing machine or an ironing board, but making her workload less strenuous is certainly a gift I can imagine a mid-century woman wanting – plus, freeing her from the laundry will mean you can chain her to the stove instead, and who doesn’t love a gourmet meal after a day of work? In the 21st century, we have all mod cons: electric light and stoves, steam iron, vacuum cleaner. Doing the chores is not exactly standing over a mangle doing back-breaking labour, and even if you have to schlep to the laundromat, they’ll have washers and dryers and you can leave and come back. If you get tired of it, basic white goods (whilst not efficient) can be bought on a week’s wages if your overheads are not too high and come compact enough to fit in even the tiniest apartment. In a modern world, I no longer have to brew beer, make stock for soups or stews, bake bread or other basic practices in order to get the day’s work done. I’m not going to five stores for my bits – I am going online and ordering groceries, or going to a supermarket which is open well into the evening and has an impressive variety of global foods, all fresh. I don’t have children, and in a post- pandemic** world I am free to work from home, leaving a load of laundry on whilst I type and doing the dishes in a tea-break.

At the same time, however, it’s narrow-minded to suggest that there are not fresh difficulties wrought by our new social order: the way we work nowadays was unimaginable in the past, and my job would have been that of multiple people, even accounting for the fact I might not have needed to communicate across multiple time-zones to get shit done. My mind is pulled in numerous directions as part of a day’s work, and I can’t switch off from it – from work, from conversation, from culture I ought to be imbibing, from news – in the evening, because everything is accessible from the 6-inch black mirror in my pocket I’m plugged into constantly. Emotional labour cannot be removed from the chores, and must be done by somebody, always: noticing the floor needs cleaning, deciding how healthy or cheap or satisfying you want your meals to be, knowing that you need to make a dental appointment or buy your mum a birthday gift or have run out of rapeseed oil for frying is probably half the task, and we walk around like zombies forgetting these things and making our own lives harder.

Even with all of the above – the ability to use technology to remind me to do my tax return or take much of the work out of a task – at our disposal, and our abstract knowledge that it is not possible to do it all as a lone person, culturally we do not acknowledge that it used to be a full-time job to keep house. Somehow, for some reason, I am expected to do it all. Fifties housewives were not sat around reading magazines, yet I am expected to work forty hours a week, keep a clean house, cook, be fashionable, be politically informed – and the moment the façade slips and I reveal which aspects I choose to prioritise, I am an incomplete person. Had the world not grown into such a disposable culture, it’s likely any single person would have been expected to have a basic grasp of leatherwork in order to keep their shoes in good order instead of taking them to a cobbler’s shop – convenience has not overridden propriety and desire, simply fed into it as we feel guilty regardless of whether we choose a path of short- or long-term gratification – we are simply not doing enough. Modern knowledge of nutrition has put me in a position where I know I cannot simply eat takeout pizza or Uncle Ben’s chilli every night, and I am put in the position of choosing the least bad thing from the triangle of ‘bad for the environment due to single use plastics etc – bad for me and my health – bad for my time management and relaxation and relationship’, and I am not alone in knowing that time is the missing factor in improving myself and my life. Has convenience been a cruel mistress all along, feeding me the illusion of freshly-bought time? Recently, I saw somebody asking how you choose between a nap and exercise, and how you feel afterwards. That’s a false dichotomy, though – it’s not ‘nap vs exercise’, it’s ‘cook dinner vs exercise’, ‘call your mum vs exercise’, ‘culture vs exercise’. Technology hasn’t given us dead time, it has at most given us the ability to watch TV whilst we do our chores and feel guilty about still not having time to exercise unless we let something else drop.

The Class Question

Numerous studies in the past few decades have attempted to redefine what it means to be of a certain class, and I’m about to throw my hat into the ring: being upper class means having somebody else to do your chores, and being working class means juggling your chores with work. The current ‘bust’ of the middle-classes*** has little knock-on effect on either of those other categories, who may depend on one another for employment or subservience without coming into contact with the ‘squeezed middle’, but means that the question of ‘what do we do about chores’ has become a problem of self-actualisation, of media hand-wringing and of ‘why can’t they just…’ in the way everything does when the middle class touches it.

The middle class have traditionally had stay-at-home mothers and wives, childminders their kids used for only a few hours and convenience foods that denoted lifestyle choices like vegetarianism or low-sodium diets – I should know, having been raised in the most middle-class environment possible. It’s clear and obvious that for every development there’s an equal and opposite reaction, and the same is as true with chores as it is in science: when wet nurses abounded, it was common to feed your own child, then, as soon as formula enabled parents (especially impoverished and working mothers, or single fathers) to adequately nourish their children regardless of where their body was or what it could do, we found the ‘natural parenting’ movement taking force; whilst TV dinners, jar sauces or cheap burger joints were at first a way to feed your family at your convenience, we then got Jamie Oliver and homemade bread. It is this middle-class reactionary perspective of ‘thing bad’ I am trying to escape from when I embrace convenience, but also the trappings of a middle-class life I am trying to retain when I say I want a wife. The effect of that is, ultimately, to raise the question of why the middle-class perspective is more valued than the upper- or working-class one, why modern life is organised around a wealthy-ish nuclear family, or why we feel guilty for using what’s available to us in modernity to live a clean, healthy and fulfilling modern life. Maybe it just comes down to the Protestant aspect of WASPism, but in my eyes, we could do better. It starts by recognising everything a wife would do… but it continues as we look at how it’s possible to make that labour quicker, easier, more ecological, and cheaper.

*Clearly there were people who did not have access to this: reading early Orwell or ‘A Child of the Jago’ you understand how far poverty can pervade; equally, however, there has traditionally been a value on this sort of work that has enabled people to profit from eg childcare whilst caring for their own children or ‘taking in washing’ whilst doing your own family’s laundry, or, in early Orwell, read about how things have always had to give, and when both parents and the children of a family are working, we find them subsisting on bread and margarine that is both quick and affordable. The Road To Wigan Pier is astonishingly relatable for anybody in the current cost of living crisis staring in the aisles of a Tesco and thinking that there must be a better choice than a meal deal but knowing they don’t have the time or energy to make that choice on a 30 minute unpaid lunch break.

**Standard disclaimer that we are not, in fact, ‘post-pandemic’ in the sense that the pandemic is over; we are only ‘post-pandemic’ in the sense that the pandemic has happened and has changed our way of living.

***I’m citing other people’s work on this one because I’m not about to take on such a massive question myself. One, two or three.

On This Topic:

• Everybody should read early Orwell, back when he was a journalist and could break your heart with cold prose. Read his journals, read his non-fiction books, read his essays. Read my favourite first, maybe.
• I think I’m agreeing with Fully Automated Luxury Communism here, only on a granular, personal level than ‘change society’.
• I’m not going to knock Jamie Oliver using his platform to speak out – if the vending machines hadn’t been removed from my school, I’d have been twice the size I am now, and my enterprising colleague wouldn’t have made a teenage fortune selling me and my friends cakes, but I do find some of his perspectives interesting. Take this and this to see what I mean. He did the right thing and actually did put his reputation on the line, which is cool to see, but there is nuance in all perspectives that his brand of activism did not allow for.

To-Do:

• Find a place to store soup cans at work. Take soup cans to work so I’m not at the mercy of forgetting my soup can each day.
• Do the dishes. Stop letting them pile up / my partner do all the chores.
• Finish the books I’ve started – I have, like, eight on the go at the moment.

Today’s Culture:

• I’m listening to a lot of soundtracks at the moment – Almost Famous is evergreen, but there’s a lot of playlists on Spotify of different directors’ favourite songs and they’re reminding me of what’s shaped my own loves.
• I ran to three different bookstores to find Anthony Joseph’s book after it won the Eliot prize.
• Trying to get back into fiction writing after focussing on shortform essays is an exercise in brain control. Hopefully some fiction coming soon..?