Earlier quoted context omitted.
40 vs 60 hours isn't really the issue. It's: what counts as "work" to be included in the total, and more narrowly, what counts as "housework"? My whole argument is that just as cooking, cleaning, and laundry shouldn't be all that's considered "housework"; coding, deploying, etc aren't all there is to "work" as a programmer. I think "homemaking" makes the distinction clearer in the narrow case. In the larger sense, I'…
At a certain point people are voluntarily choosing to take on certain responsibilities and workloads. Why is society supposed to care that people are choosing a particular labor intensive standard of living?
The big little lie of the TV kitchen island
81–90 of 96 posts
Re: The big little lie of the TV kitchen island
#82Hey everyone, before you comment: This article is a reviews of the HBO TV-show Big Little Lies. If you don't know or care about the show, the article will probably be of little interest to you. HN seems to be interpreting the article as a general critique of open-plan kitchens. Apparently HN cares a lot more about kitchen islands than about mainstream TV-shows!
> Hey everyone, before you comment: This article is a reviews of the HBO TV-show Big Little Lies. Thank you. This was rather odd without context. > Apparently HN cares a lot more about kitchen islands than about mainstream TV-shows! HBO is mainstream, now? I thought it was premium. Super-duper-premium, maybe. Ah well. I suppose in a land where Netflix can make its own movies, HBO is positively dowdy .
Re: The big little lie of the TV kitchen island
#83Kitchen islands can reach epic proportions. I had to drop off a check to my realtor at another home where she was doing a open-house. The island in it had to have been 200 square feet of dark granite. You would need a rail network to pass the salt. Even if it housed every labor saving device known to modern kitchen science, there still would have been room left over inside.
You would need a rail network to pass the salt. So... I'd need a train set in the kitchen? This is not a downside.
Re: The big little lie of the TV kitchen island
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Definitely agree with most of the key points, but I do question the notion that men did all of the heavy labor. Maybe in upper-class homes, but in the poorer families (which were most people), "women's work" was physically demanding... laundry was outright dangerous, for example.
There is no point at which I suggested that. In fact, I made some effort to try to guard against such an interpretation.
But let me reiterate some of my main points in nutshell form:
1. Men and women both worked physically hard. (I stated that previously as: Women and men were both often very overworked.)
2. Some tasks that are currently viewed by a lot of modern peoples as "women's work" would have been "men's work" about 300 years ago, such as cleaning the rugs.
3. It would be super easy to run someone into the ground by having one person try to maintain our current high standards for quality of life via manual labor.
4. I can see that easily being made worse by not doing your due diligence and determining that some of our current "women's work" was "men's work" when it was all done by manual labor.
It in no way requires any inference that women did no heavy labor to see that just piling more and more work on a woman without in some way making those tasks more manageable simply would not work.
Re: The big little lie of the TV kitchen island
#85A century ago most housewives were farm housewives. The housewife on a pre-electric, pre-running water farm could not have spent 60 hours/week on what is now "housework", since considerable time had to be devoted to caring for the chickens; collecting and packing eggs; planting, weeding, harvesting the garden; canning vegetables and fruits; helping with the milking; helping with butchering chickens, pigs, and steers;…
A century ago most housewives were farm housewives. You believe that in 1919, at the end of the first world war, and just 10 years before the Wall Street crash, most housewives lived on farms that didn't have electricity or running water? The population of New York city in 1919 was a little over 5.5 million people .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Sta...
And those people living outside the cities were unlikely to have electricity still
"by the 1920s electricity was not delivered by power companies to rural areas because of the general belief that the infrastructure costs would not be recouped"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_electrification#The_Unit...
I assume they did have some sort of running water in that they would have a well.
Re: The big little lie of the TV kitchen island
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ea…
For example, it is undeniable that you've got to eat. You can get some tolerable food on the table in 15 minutes (e.g., ramen, Kraft Dinner). Adults, especially with kids, are usually expected to serve a wider variety of foods, especially healthier ones (~45 min to prepare?). Of course, you can also spend all day in kitchen making beef wellington and homemade bread. In the latter cases, some of that time is a "chore", but some of it is also essentially a hobby. Likewise for gardening, auto maintenance, and even keeping the house absolutely spotless strikes me as a kind of (odd) hobby.
Re: The big little lie of the TV kitchen island
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
This all seems very reasonable but none of this is seems to be what is argued here. This person hates islands and maybe a TV show featuring one because something about the idea of "being performative". It's just a bunch of trite crap.
I think they dislike this specific island used on the show because it no longer makes any sense. In the same way families would sit around the dinner table they now sit around this gargantuan kitchen island. It's the worst of both worlds: the dining room is now taking up all the space in the kitchen and this person needs to run around this ridiculous island when they cook. An argument can be made that some kitchen is…
It’s also not a new idea. My great-grandmother has a nice kitchen in her house, but did most of the cooking for the family on a second stove in the basement.
Re: The big little lie of the TV kitchen island
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
I would be very surprised if anyone in my household did more than 15 hours/week of housework. We did a lot more with babies and toddlers around, but they can clean up their own messes now, and have been trained to poop, pee, and vomit into the approved receptacles. A lot of the stuff people do as routine housework simply doesn't need to be done more often than quarterly. Perhaps those people doing 60 hours/week in 20…
There's a lot more happening that you give credit for even when doing the minimum.
Re: The big little lie of the TV kitchen island
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
I would be very surprised if anyone in my household did more than 15 hours/week of housework. We did a lot more with babies and toddlers around, but they can clean up their own messes now, and have been trained to poop, pee, and vomit into the approved receptacles. A lot of the stuff people do as routine housework simply doesn't need to be done more often than quarterly. Perhaps those people doing 60 hours/week in 20…
Re: The big little lie of the TV kitchen island
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would be very surprised if anyone in my household did more than 15 hours/week of housework. We did a lot more with babies and toddlers around, but they can clean up their own messes now, and have been trained to poop, pee, and vomit into the approved receptacles. A lot of the stuff people do as routine housework simply doesn't need to be done more often than quarterly. Perhaps those people doing 60 hours/week in 20…
Fold clothes and distribute them to the appropriate closets/dressers when the machine finishes, dislodge the carpet cleaning robot when stuck, fill the mopping robot with water and soaps, cook a decent meal that's not a microwave meal, put the dishes away in the cabinets and wash all the dishes which cannot go in the dishwasher (pots/pans, knives) There's a lot more happening that you give credit for even when doing…
Hanging a garment on a hanger is easier than folding it. Small clothes can be thrown into a "CLEAN"-labeled basket or bag. The laundry-person need not be responsible for restocking everyone else's wardrobes. You are inventing requirements for the task that are non-essential.
Essential laziness is rearranging your life such that the most labor-intensive parts of a task are unnecessary. The only thing that prevents the 3-pile method of wardrobe management (clean, dirty, and worn-but-smells-okay) is social pressure. And if you stop caring so much about what other people think of your lifestyle, but still care a little bit, you can replace the dresser with some postal-style plastic tote bins on a wire shelf: socks, underwear, jersey shorts, tee shirts. All your going-out clothes can go on hangers. No more folding.
A decent meal need not be haute cuisine. If you break your kids (or yourself, for that matter) of the "different foods can't touch" thing, you can make a lot of good stuff in a programmable pressure cooker/slow cooker. That's a single pot that doesn't exactly wash itself, but it is halfway to an autoclave already. Put plain water in it, select high pressure cook, and hit the start button. Pot sterilized. Add ingredients; beep beep boop, start. Dinner is done.
And maybe your dishwasher needs an upgrade. We put pots, pans, and knives in it all the time. The cast iron doesn't go in there, but that is all seasoned such that it just gets rinsed out and re-oiled, and is then clean.
Stop valuing things for the extra effort put into them, and start seeing human-required labor as an evil that should be destroyed. If you're doing 60 hours/week of housework, you aren't spending 1 hour/week thinking about whether all that "work" actually needs doing, or not.