Word: housework
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Nation of Islam women are expected to emphasize housework and child rearing and to dress "modestly." (Whereas they must be covered even in August, pants are sometimes permitted.) When religious services are crowded, it is not unknown for women to be asked to give up seats to men and listen via loudspeaker in another room...
Because what's one more sock down there among the broken action figures, lost homework papers and fresh kills brought in by the cat? After decades of unappreciated drudgery, American women just don't do housework anymore -- that is, beyond the minimum that is required in order to clear a path from the bedroom to the front door so they can get off to work in the morning...
...such a revolutionary change in the way we live. If Americans suddenly gave up forks and started eating with their fingers, you can bet that would at least rate the Style section. But Harvard economist Juliet Schor's research shows that women have been eliminating half an hour of housework for every hour they work outside the home -- or up to 20 hours a week, which is the equivalent of a 50-ft. mound of unfolded laundry or a dust ball as large as a house...
...happen sooner or later, this quiet revolt. Housework as we know it is not something ordained by the limits of the human immune system. It was invented, in fact, around the turn of the century, for the precise purpose of giving middle-class women something to do. Once food processing and garment manufacture moved out of the home and into the factories, middle-class homemakers found themselves staring uneasily into the void. Should they join the suffragists? Go out in the work world and compete with the men? "Too many women," editorialized the Ladies' Home Journal in 1911, "are dangerously...
Enter the domestic-science experts, a group of ladies who, if ever there is a feminist hell, will be tortured eternally with feather dusters. These were women who made careers out of telling other women that they couldn't have careers because housework was a big enough job in itself. And they were right, since their standard for a well-kept home was one that revealed no evidence of human occupation...