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The big little lie of the TV kitchen island

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Re: The big little lie of the TV kitchen island

#31

Post by michaelt »

IshKebab wrote: post #17
DoreenMichele wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an excellent book about the history of domestic technology called "More work for mother." It details how the more domestic tech we created, the more work shifted from the man of the house to the lady of the house and standards were raised Three hundred years ago, full-time wives did about 60 hours/week of housework. Today, with all our modern appliances, they still do about 60 hours/week of housework. In most…

60 hours a week? You think housewives are doing 8½ hours of solid house work every single day? Yeah, no.

You can bump up the level of housework pretty aggressively by making certain lifestyle decisions, which you may make unintentionally.

For example, decide you prize cleanliness, then get a pet animal that leaves hair everywhere. Have three children doing sports several times a week and wash all sportswear after a single use. Remember every friend and relative's birthday and send them an appropriate and thoughtful card or gift, not just cash or a gift card. Repair damaged clothes when you can, as it's cheaper and also environmentally friendly. Change bedsheets and clean the bathroom on a more regular schedule. Separate the recycling in excruciating detail. Join the housing association board because god knows, someone needs to reign those idiots in. Accommodate fussy eaters by cooking multiple and sometimes complex meals, so you have to visit several supermarkets to get all the ingredients you need. Do nice and helpful things for other members of your community, to save up favours you'll be able to cash in later. Keep the garden looking nice. And of course you haven’t invited your friends to a dinner party yet...

Of course you don’t have to do this stuff, but if you’re looking at the subjects of an article about gender role performance, maybe you see it at a higher rate.

Re: The big little lie of the TV kitchen island

#32

Post by IshKebab »

jraines wrote: post #22
IshKebab wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

60 hours a week? You think housewives are doing 8½ hours of solid house work every single day? Yeah, no.

Are programmers doing 60 hrs of work a week? Yes, if you count planning, talking about work to be done, thinking about work to be done, commuting (s/buying groceries, shuttling kids), mentoring, dealing with other people’s complaints & personal issues, dealing with red tape (forms to be signed, reports to review & give feedback on), etc, etc, etc You can say those analogues fall outside of “housework” ... sure, but t…

> Are programmers doing 60 hrs of work a week? Yes, if you count planning, talking about work to be done, thinking about work to be done, commuting (s/buying groceries, shuttling kids), mentoring, dealing with other people’s complaints & personal issues, dealing with red tape (forms to be signed, reports to review & give feedback on), etc, etc, etc

So, no then.

Re: The big little lie of the TV kitchen island

#33

Post by jraines »

IshKebab wrote: post #32
jraines wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are programmers doing 60 hrs of work a week? Yes, if you count planning, talking about work to be done, thinking about work to be done, commuting (s/buying groceries, shuttling kids), mentoring, dealing with other people’s complaints & personal issues, dealing with red tape (forms to be signed, reports to review & give feedback on), etc, etc, etc You can say those analogues fall outside of “housework” ... sure, but t…

> Are programmers doing 60 hrs of work a week? Yes, if you count planning, talking about work to be done, thinking about work to be done, commuting (s/buying groceries, shuttling kids), mentoring, dealing with other people’s complaints & personal issues, dealing with red tape (forms to be signed, reports to review & give feedback on), etc, etc, etc So, no then.

So, yes.

Unless you are very junior, you

1) have to do those things

2) are paid for the time spent doing them

3) will not keep your job long if you simply neglect them or refuse to do them

I'm honestly baffled by these responses.

Re: The big little lie of the TV kitchen island

#34

Post by anon4242 »

IshKebab wrote: post #17
DoreenMichele wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an excellent book about the history of domestic technology called "More work for mother." It details how the more domestic tech we created, the more work shifted from the man of the house to the lady of the house and standards were raised Three hundred years ago, full-time wives did about 60 hours/week of housework. Today, with all our modern appliances, they still do about 60 hours/week of housework. In most…

60 hours a week? You think housewives are doing 8½ hours of solid house work every single day? Yeah, no.

I guess you have some solid data to support that statement?

I unfortunately only have anecdotal evidence that 60h is not implausible.

Me and my wife have two kids and share most of the household work, it's not an even split (she does more). I would say that on average we both work from the time we get back home from work until the kids sleep, ~4hrs later. In addition to that, one of us probably spends some 30 mins each morning getting the kids ready for school. Saturdays and Sundays typically involve two cooked meals per day plus any bigger household work that the weekdays won't fit. So I guess we spend some 60h/week on chores.

Re: The big little lie of the TV kitchen island

#35

Post by anon4242 »

petepete wrote: post #19
whatshisface wrote: post #3

Sitcom actors are always more attractive than normal people, and the sets they act in are usually way up there in terms of what it would cost to actually buy a house like that. It's because TV is aspiration with a little (a lot) of consumerist guilt mixed in.

In American sitcoms, yes. In British ones, not so much. It's a good thing.

Case in point: Friday night dinner[1]

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1844923/

Re: The big little lie of the TV kitchen island

#36

Post by kop316 »

goto11 wrote: post #14
kop316 wrote: post #4

I read through this a couple of times, and I still can't figure out its point beyond the idea that the author doesn't like kitchen islands/open floor plans, and even that I'm not sure of? I've found to really like open floor plans and an open kitchen. When I visit my family, we tend to congregate in the kitchen as someone is cooking (or several of us are cooking) and we don't want them to feel left out. An open floor…

It is a reviews of a popular TV show called "Big Little Lies". The writer is using the interior design of their houses to characterize the main characters. Is is not really a critique of open kitchens, it is a critique of a character in the fictional show.

Thank you! As you can guess, I never have seen the show.

Re: The big little lie of the TV kitchen island

#37

Post by bsder »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #15
anm89 wrote: post #2

"Over the decades, as versions of this housewife’s setup have eliminated dining rooms, pass-throughs, and farmhouse tables, the open-concept kitchen, centered around an island visible from all sides, has become not a labor-saving device but a stage on which (mostly) women are forced to perform." I gave up here. This is so stupid that I'm not sure what is the premise that I should critique. Also Im a guy who cooks in…

There's an excellent book about the history of domestic technology called "More work for mother." It details how the more domestic tech we created, the more work shifted from the man of the house to the lady of the house and standards were raised Three hundred years ago, full-time wives did about 60 hours/week of housework. Today, with all our modern appliances, they still do about 60 hours/week of housework. In most…

> Three hundred years ago, full-time wives did about 60 hours/week of housework.

This is a woeful underestimate before labor saving machinery. Here is a talk about the $3500 Shirt and the fact that women spun thread in any idle time: https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-... Here is a Hans Rosling visualization of wealth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo

I remember a story about historian couple (sadly I can't find it) who tried to live like the 1880's.

The husband basically came home completely exhausted every single day. The wife, however, literally broke down because the housework was completely relentless. She was completely busy maintaining the household every single waking moment.

Big families weren't just because of lack of birth control.

Re: The big little lie of the TV kitchen island

#38

Post by DoreenMichele »

bsder wrote: post #37
DoreenMichele wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an excellent book about the history of domestic technology called "More work for mother." It details how the more domestic tech we created, the more work shifted from the man of the house to the lady of the house and standards were raised Three hundred years ago, full-time wives did about 60 hours/week of housework. Today, with all our modern appliances, they still do about 60 hours/week of housework. In most…

> Three hundred years ago, full-time wives did about 60 hours/week of housework. This is a woeful underestimate before labor saving machinery. Here is a talk about the $3500 Shirt and the fact that women spun thread in any idle time: https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-... Here is a Hans Rosling visualization of wealth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo I remember a story about histo…

The book is called "More work for mother" because a lot of labor saving devices saved male labor by making the work physically less demanding and allowing it to thus be shifted to the wife.

Three hundred or so years ago, most couples were literally working to put food on the table and keep people clothed. They did so by raising their own food and sewing their own clothes, etc. Standards of living were generally lower.

Over the course of that 300 or so years (because I probably read the book around two decades back), cash money became more common and so did working for cash money instead of laboring to grow your own food, make your own clothes, etc. So labor saving devices shifted a lot of household tasks to women in order to free men up to go get a paid job. This made sense so women could be home with the children since they are the ones that get pregnant and also produce milk.

Men used to pull up the rugs and beat them one or more times per year. Then we invented vacuum cleaners and women took over cleaning the rugs.

Women and men were both often very overworked, but it's possible that the historian couple saw the wife collapse in part because a lot of what we classify as women's work today was handled by male labor at one time and in part because standards of living were generally far lower back then. Trying to maintain anything resembling our current standards without modern labor saving devices is crazy on the face of it. If, on top of that, you expect the woman to do a lot of chores that would have been male labor at one time, yeah, you are going to run someone into the ground.

Back when I used to read such things, studies typically found that women with children were chronically short of sleep whether they had paid jobs outside the home or not. People generally underestimate how much work homemakers are doing. Friends and neighbors routinely demand "favors" because they see a homemaker as someone who has nothing but leisure time on her hands, not someone busy cooking, cleaning, buying groceries, etc all day long.

In my marriage, I also saw evidence that my husband had no real appreciation nor respect for the amount of work I did as a full-time wife and mom. It is one of the reasons we are divorced.

So I'm abundantly familiar with the fact that most of the world underestimates how much work women typically do, dismisses it as "not real work" because you are just supposed to be thrilled to pieces to be home with your children, etc. But the book in question was a serious history book and was remarkably even-handed, which is one of the reasons I mention it relatively frequently. I don't like works that hate on men, that act like women are merely victims of the so-called Patriarchy, etc.

Re: The big little lie of the TV kitchen island

#39

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

jraines wrote: post #33
IshKebab wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are programmers doing 60 hrs of work a week? Yes, if you count planning, talking about work to be done, thinking about work to be done, commuting (s/buying groceries, shuttling kids), mentoring, dealing with other people’s complaints & personal issues, dealing with red tape (forms to be signed, reports to review & give feedback on), etc, etc, etc So, no then.

So, yes. Unless you are very junior, you 1) have to do those things 2) are paid for the time spent doing them 3) will not keep your job long if you simply neglect them or refuse to do them I'm honestly baffled by these responses.

I'm pretty senior and I barely think about work outside my forty hours a week of in-office time. An hour or two a week, most weeks, I'd guess. Maybe your experience is just different from other people?

I find the 8 1/2 hours a day statistic to be perhaps true, since some types of work expand to fill the time allotted. I don't believe the 5.7 hrs a day statistic for working moms, though. That would imply that a working mom spends essentially every waking, non-commuting hour working on housework during the week, then six hours each day on the weekend.

Re: The big little lie of the TV kitchen island

#40

Post by viburnum »

anm89 wrote: post #2

"Over the decades, as versions of this housewife’s setup have eliminated dining rooms, pass-throughs, and farmhouse tables, the open-concept kitchen, centered around an island visible from all sides, has become not a labor-saving device but a stage on which (mostly) women are forced to perform." I gave up here. This is so stupid that I'm not sure what is the premise that I should critique. Also Im a guy who cooks in…

Good lord man, you are so defensive about this, you might benefit from working out your issues with a good therapist.
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