Telling Wives To 'Just Do Less' Is Grounds For Divorce
Tasks like caregiving and household labor entail actually seeing and valuing the invisible labor that comes with it.
Irene Miller | Shutterstock First, we were told to do more. We were told to lean in at work, put in twice the effort as the menfolk, and then come home to our second shift. We were told to do it all with a smile because everybody knows that women look prettier when we smile.
Sheryl Sandberg came along and said okay, maybe we don’t need to smile so much. Maybe we don’t need to mask our ambition. But speaking of ambition, we need more of it. We need to play this game called Extractive Capitalism. Instead of questioning the rules, we need to lean into them.
Oh, and if we’re pregnant, we should ask for a parking spot closer to the entrance to the office because that extra walk is the crux of all our problems.
Of course, as Sandberg acknowledges, doing more at work has to mean doing less at home because capitalism demands so much of us that being a primary caregiver and a successful career woman are mutually exclusive. Let’s not question that, though.
I can’t tell you how many times, in questioning the demands placed on modern mothers and in discussing the inequitable distribution of household and caregiving labor, I’ve been told to “just do less.” I get this glib and oh-so-helpful advice from both men and women. It’s framed as empowering, giving me “permission” to share the load and to care less about, say, the orderliness of my home.
Telling women to “just do less” is not just annoying advice, it’s bad advice because it trivializes household and caregiving labor.
Christina Morillo / Pexels
For capitalist career feminists, doing less is straightforward — women just have to be ambitious enough to make enough money to outsource all that household and caregiving labor to less ambitious women.
That leaves them time for the really important stuff, like leading social media companies that are destroying our democracy and our children’s mental health. For those of us who can’t afford nannies and dedicated housekeepers, which is most of us, we just have to prioritize better.
We all know that women perennially overthink and over-complicate household and caregiving labor. It’s not nearly as hard as we think it is; we just enjoy making too much of it because we’re addicted to martyrdom.
One male commenter once said to me something along the lines of, “Come on, no one needs doilies.” I told him that maybe he should update his snarky references, as I don’t believe I’ve seen a doily since the Velveeta vs. Cheddar commercials of the 1980s (if you know, you know). And for the record, that doily did come in handy for catching all that oily cheddar cheese.
But more importantly, caregiving and homemaking are not projects with discreet to-do lists that we can reduce to the bare essentials to Maximize Productivity. We all bring different standards and preferences to the table and the items or tasks that one person might believe essential to creating a safe, comfortable, and clean enough home might not look the same as the next person’s.
As writer and journalist Anne Helen Petersen points out in "What Makes Women Clean," it is certainly possible to put too much pressure on oneself by investing in what she calls “clean culture.” Just like good nutrition and self-care can be taken to unhealthy extremes (especially with that extra dollop of profit-fueled capitalism), so can our housekeeping rituals.
But Petersen’s suggestion that women ask themselves, “What if I care less about stuff that doesn’t matter?” is uncomfortably reminiscent of “just do less.” It’s so easy to trivialize what we believe doesn’t matter. It might matter very much to someone else. There is no objective rating scale. And none of it matters enough to the Men in Charge to demand their precious time.
This past weekend, for instance, I found myself debating whether or not to hang holiday lights on my front yard tree. I hate hanging holiday lights.
I knew that at least half the lights that were working perfectly well when I put them in storage last year would inevitably burn out on me for no discernible reason, and to add insult to injury, it happened to be pouring rain all weekend. Given that I’m going through a divorce and essentially single parenting, I could have felt justified in giving myself a pass this year.
But here’s the thing: my kids wanted holiday lights. They wanted to bake Christmas cookies, too. Both add some sweetness and brightness to this otherwise gloomy season and what are the holidays, really, without cookies and lights?
One could have watched me out there on the ladder (cursing under my breath) and shaken their head and muttered about how there I go stressing myself out, inventing silly things that I “have” to do. But really, who are they to judge?
It might be more important to hang lights during this turbulent year, to keep as much constant as I can, and to show my kids that their home is still a safe and inviting place that offers the comfort of predictable routines and traditions.
And that’s not even to mention that silliness and invention are vital to the art of caregiving and caretaking. We invent games and stories. We invent rituals and routines. We invent snacks and pancake toppings.
We invent cozy corners filled with soft things and nourishing meals that maybe, just maybe, the family will eat. We are creative cultivators of constantly evolving home environments. We measure the changing pH levels of the soil and we make continual adjustments to ensure our children and families can grow and thrive. It doesn’t mean we can’t ever prioritize. It doesn’t mean that we can’t find some ways to “just do less” on any given day.
The work of caring for a family and home, both the art and science of it, simply doesn’t fit into the productivity mindsets that dominate the landscape of paid labor.
Though doilies were not part of my childhood, I’m quite sure there are adults out there today who feel a tug at their heartstrings when (if?) they happen across a doily. Doilies embodied both form and function, an aesthetically pleasing way to protect furniture. They represented one of many touches that women through the ages have brought to creating spaces that are not just functional, but also comforting, memorable, and emotionally gratifying.
And this matters. It’s not just one component or action that matters — I know of no study that has linked clean toilet bowls or holiday decorations to better mental health outcomes for children. Rather, it’s the cumulative effect of small, and sometimes invisible, efforts, choices, innovations, and routines. Added together, they form the bedrock of our childhoods, our memories, and our defining moments that helped shape who we are today.
It is vital, vital work and yet we both trivialize it and continue to hold women primarily responsible for it. Which brings me to point number two: “Just do less” implies that women made a conscious decision to do more. A female commenter recently and earnestly asked me why I was complaining about doing more household and caregiving labor than my someday ex. Didn’t I take on more of my own free will? Was it really “fair” to complain?
I think what baffles women like me the most is how we came to be doing more in the first place. By “women like me,” I mean feminist women who also engage in paid labor and who were sold the promise of equitable partnership.
I certainly never sat down with my husband and made a conscious choice to take on three-quarters of the to-do list. We never agreed that I would be Chief Delegator, and my husband never questioned why or how I knew all these things he didn’t know, like what we needed from CVS or what food in the fridge was on the brink of going bad. It all just happened.
And it happened not because I’m an innate martyr or because my husband was innately lazy or clueless.
It happened because we were both socialized under the patriarchy and every message we had absorbed about the roles of husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, came to us from a system in which women are believed to be the “natural” caregivers and homemakers.
Sure, lots of dads are more “involved” than they used to be, but issues like federal paid leave and universal childcare are still largely considered women’s issues (which is why we have neither), and women are still the default parents, the first phone call, always on the front lines of caregiving.
If you examine the portrayals of women and mothers in the media, particularly the media we older millennials and Gen Xers consumed, if you listen to the ways that male standup comedians complain about their wives and girlfriends (still!), if you analyze the ways we were treated as children and the ways the adults in our lives conducted themselves and the subtext of the things they told us, it’s no surprise that we wordlessly fall into these gendered patterns of behavior.
But make no mistake: “Free will” has nothing to do with it. “Well, you chose to become a mother,” people love to say. How much free will I exercised in my decision to become a mother is another topic for another time, but no, I did not choose to take on more around the home.
Laura Garcia / Pexels
Can we exercise our free will to try to break these gendered patterns? Yes, but there’s a big but: In practice, “just do less” really means “do more.”
The title of Chapter 8 in Sandberg’s Lean In pretty much says it all: “Make Your Partner a Real Partner.” As usual, the onus is on women. We need to ask our partners to do more around the house because everyone knows that works.
As Sandberg says, we need to stop “inadvertently discouraging [ing our] husbands from doing their share by being too controlling or too critical.” We need to set boundaries and communicate better.
I don’t know, but that doesn’t sound like “doing less” to me. It sounds like a lot of friggin’ work. I know firsthand that it’s a lot of friggin’ work because it’s what I’ve spent a better part of the last decade doing.
At least half of the things we do are not even on our husbands’ radar (hence the term, “invisible labor”) so “just doing less” is a task that first entails convincing our husbands that emotional and invisible labor does in fact exist and is not just something we made up.
Then we must attempt to delegate this labor that our husbands may or may not believe exists in a gentle, non-critical way that won’t discourage them or hurt their fragile egos. When this doesn’t work, we need to read all the books find all the counselors, and practice all the dialogue scripts because clearly, this failure to communicate is on us.
I’ll let you in on a secret: The only action I’ve found I can take that works when it comes to “just doing less” in an imbalanced marriage is to get divorced.
I mean, not the divorce part itself, which I’m in the thick of and which is an expensive, time-sucking, quagmire of inane paperwork, needlessly obtuse language, and things that make no sense — three of my least favorite things.
But I cannot tell you how liberating it has been to no longer feel the pressure of trying to manufacture an equitable relationship with a man who believes he is already doing his part. I no longer have to read all the books and articles, engage in circular conversations about the division of labor, and no longer have to partake in the exhausting mental gymnastics of whether or not I should delegate or just do it myself.
No one says it better than comedian Ali Wong in her latest special, Single Lady. When her post-divorce boyfriend wants to know why she’s breaking up with him, she says:
“Okay, fine. Well, you know it’s because the last two times we hooked up, you didn’t initiate going down on me, and I didn’t really like that.”
And he was like, “Well… why didn’t you just communicate that to me?”
I was like, “Oh, well, because I’m divorced. I don’t do that anymore.”
Communicate? That’s married-people stuff, okay? I’m retired from that. Do you think I got divorced from one man to communicate obvious stuff to another man? You think I went through the shame and stigma of divorce to be out here in these streets, saying stuff to myself like, “Oh! Sometimes the right thing to say is the hard thing to say?”
Preach, Ali! Preach!
“Just do less” is only possible for married or cohabitating women when their partners “just do more.”
And listen, I’ll drop the “just” because the qualifier makes it seem like a small or straightforward task, and I’m not going to pretend that there is anything small or straightforward about deconstructing socialized behaviors.
“Just doing more,” when it comes to caregiving and household labor, is a task that entails actually seeing and valuing the work that society has rendered trivial and invisible. It requires curiosity, a willingness to take initiative, a vested interest in exploring alternative perspectives, and a commitment to doing better.
When taken with an open heart and mind, this is a profoundly humbling journey that asks men to deconstruct not just their own behaviors and beliefs, but also nearly everything we accept as true when it comes to the labor our economy and society deem “important.”
This is a journey that shouldn’t, and can’t, be project-managed by women. It’s a journey that shouldn’t and can’t, be taken simply because a woman put it on a man’s task list. The onus should be on the person currently doing less to “do more.” Not just the onus, but the initiative. It needs to come about because men perceive an imbalance and are actively invested in exploring and correcting it.
I don’t know of any bestselling books written by “successful” men about how to Lean In at home. (If you do, let me know.) I’m under no illusions that this story will “convince” men to do more. I know it will be read mostly by women, along with my loyal band of male hate readers, and I hope that it will help some women feel less frustration or shame because they are struggling to “just do less.”
Maybe it will even inspire one or two to “just get divorced,” which is not necessarily part of my agenda but which unfortunately remains one of our only viable options when it comes to the ongoing exploitation and trivialization of our labor and time.
When men start holding each other accountable to doing more, which starts with the acknowledgment that this caregiving and household labor are valuable and worthy of their time, then, and only then, will their female partners be able to “just do less.”
Kerala Taylor is an award-winning writer and co-owner of a worker-owned marketing agency. Her weekly stories are dedicated to interrupting notions of what it means to be a mother, woman, worker, and wife. She writes on Medium and has recently launched a Substack publication Mom, Interrupted.