FlyLady Reflections

[sarahmichelef]

I'm still going to do my big rant about the FlyLady system and the gendered division of labor, but not yet.

Or maybe I will, just a little bit.

Admittedly I'm only a couple of days in, but the whole system seems to assume that the vast majority of housework is being done by one person.  And that person, assumedly, is female.  (In fact, there's a companion site to FlyLady called Hey Tom, which of course only reinforces this impression.  I just skimmed some of the recent questions on Hey Tom and they're very much about "manly things"... plumbing, remodeling, cars, how the male mind works...).

I don't think that this is representative of the average household today.  I sure as hell HOPE it isn't.  In our house, I cook, M pays the bills, we both do laundry, we both do dishes, we both take out the trash and do child care and so on.  Maybe we're MORE equitable in our division of labor than other families, but I hardly think that we're that unusual.

In addition to assuming that the bulk of the domestic labor is being done by one (female) person, it seems that that person is also assumed to be IN CHARGE.  I can't just autocratically decide to throw away M's things when I'm decluttering.  For example, much of what was on the mail stand was bill-related.  M and I talked and quickly came up with a system (bills to be paid go in one pile, current (un-dealt-with) mail goes in another pile, current magazines and catalogs to on the bottom shelf).  Nearly EVERYTHING in the pile by the fridge was stubs of paid bills.  And since I'm not the one who deals with that stuff, all I can do is pass it off to M to put away.  And goodness knows where it's going to end up now.  For the moment it's got its own pile on the mail stand.

Anyway, the point is that many of the assumptions of the FlyLady system are highly gender-biased.

OK, rant over.  Today I cleaned up two major hotspots: the mail stand and the pile on the counter by the fridge.  Now we have to keep them from becoming hotspots again.  And after dinner, we did a really good cleaning of the kitchen counters (the  microwave was DISGUSTING), and agreed on a list of things that will be done to the kitchen as part of the after-dinner routine every evening.

Comments

[tashadandelion.livejournal.com]

I think you're right about the gender-role rigidity assumed in her system. I get the sense that the majority of her adherents are housewives in an old-fashioned/traditional sense -- the true division of control in its ideal sense. By "ideal" I mean that the whole seperation of labor (man goes and makes the money, woman takes care of the home/kids) is also defined by who's in charge of decisions in those realms. If a woman is "stuck" at home, the least she should get is control over household-related decisions.

If a man is bringing in all the income and the woman is doing all the homemaking, then it does seem like the system would be made more palatable to the woman that way. Of course, when I was a housewife I wasn't respected in that realm, hence one of the reasons I'm no longer a housewife or a wife, for that matter.

[chargirlgenius.livejournal.com]

It does assume that the woman is staying home, although I think that taking care of kids is a full time job equal to what most men do outside of the home, and therefore housework should still be shared. I suppose the whole concept of making it manageable should help that division of labor, but I'm not so sure.

I guess it also depends on what the guy does. Sometimes I have a hard time asking Jeff to do more around the house, when he's constantly doing other work - house maintenance, lumberjacking, building a sandbox for Henry, etc.

Of course, I'm throwing it all out of the window and looking to hire somebody. :-)

Way Way OT

[marajade648.livejournal.com]

AKA too lazy to find the right thread.
So with the thread about BooBoo continuing on I decided to look up the other book. It turns out the author, Olivier Dunrea, came to my elementary school when I was a kid. We probably have a autographed copy of this book kicking about my parents house as long as they didn't give it to my cousins or something.

[studentnurse.livejournal.com]

Two of my brothers-in-law are stay-at-home dads, and one uses Flylady, supposedly, and thinks it's great. Of course, he's crazy.

Since I signed up, I've been getting roughly three times the amount of spam I used to. COULD be a coincidence, but doesn't seem likely, since I haven't registered for anything else. This is annoying. I'm thinking of unsubscribing from the email list anyway, because there are even a lot of the real emails, and I'm not really getting anything from them... somehow I thought it was going to be a daily message with a "mission" and a reminder, but... no.