Arlie Russell Hochschild Quotes

Now, as always, the most automated appliance in a household is the mother.

Men are very competent in their workplace - and this is going to sound sexist - women are better at running households and juggling lots of things, kids and scheduling and that kind of thing.

In my generation, if a man washes the dishes, the older women still tend to cluster around and coo and thank him and praise him. But if a woman washes the dishes, it's business as usual, even if both man and woman have tough office jobs.

Just as there is a wage gap between men and women in the workplace, there is a 'leisure gap' between them at home. Most women work one shift in the office or factory and a 'second shift' at home.

And, over the last thirty years we have seen men's participation in both housework and childcare has increased and women's have stayed at about the same.

Homemaking is whatever you make of it. Every day brings satisfaction along with some work which may be frustrating, routine, and unchallenging. But it is the same in the law office, the dispensary, the laboratory, or the store. There is, however, no more important job than homemaking.

Once you get married, women are still implicitly expected to do the majority of the housework and take care of any future children.

Women should do kitchen work and take care of babies.

Guys should be doing laundry, doing dishes.

In any service where a couple hold down jobs as a team, the male generally takes his ease while the wife labors at his job as wellas her own.

Women are dirt searchers; their greatest worth is irradicating rings on collars and tables. Never mind real-estate boards' corruption and racism, here's your soapsuds. Everything she is doing is peripheral, expendable, crucial, and non-negotiable. Cleanliness is next to godliness.

You have to remember: the wife been home all day cleaning asses and feeding faces. Sometimes the opposite.

Do you know how hard it is to make a home?... That's something that a woman does from inside herself. You do it in the face of all sorts of opposition. Husbands are very appreciative when it works out well. But they're not that anxious to help. It's understandable. They don't know how.

She thought about how marvelous is would be to have a wife keeping the house in order, the meals on the table. At the same time it seemed ridiculously unfair that she could never have a wife. In fact, if she married, she would be expected to be the wife.

Domestic work, is, after all, both tedious and repetitive, and it is not surprising that most women and all men avoid as much of it as possible.

The few men who do a hand's turn around the house expect gratitude and recognition, so sure are they that, though it is their dirt, it is not their job.

...well, if women's work was never done, why trouble about how much of it wasn't being accomplished at any given moment?

Each home has been reduced to the bare essentials -- to barer essentials than most primitive people would consider possible. Only one woman's hands to feed the baby, answer the telephone, turn off the gas under the pot that is boiling over, soothe the older child who has broken a toy, and open both doors at once. She is a nutritionist, a child psychologist, an engineer, a production manager, an expert buyer, all in one. Her husband sees her as free to plan her own time, and envies her; she sees him as having regular hours and envies him.

Many women cut back what had to be done at home by redefining what the house, the marriage and, sometimes, what the child needs. One woman described a fairly common pattern: I do my half. I do half of his half, and the rest doesn't get done.

When men do all the outside work, they contribute on average about 10 percent of housework. But as their share of outside work falls, their share of housework rises to no more than 37 percent.

I've always gone out with men who wanted a cook all the time.

My parents were liberal intellectuals but even they expected me to stay at home and look after my younger siblings and do the housework.

Women are smarter by basic instinct and by what we have to do to multitask at home and at work. My mother did that 50 years ago, but it wasn't called multitasking or stress back then. She had a job, two kids and the meals to make with no cook or maid. My father would come home every day and expect lunch. He was a nice guy, but he was clueless!

I'd like us to deliver a little message to all the men still out there who think it's the '50s, and coming home simply means watching television with a beer.

My wife works harder than anyone else with the children around the house. I make the money, sure, but she does everything else.