GIVE ME A SUMMER BREAK:A number of authors seem to be trying to push women back into the home from the workplace in the name of economics - don't give in to this codology
I'M A TERRIBLE housekeeper. Even though I spent my staycation (vacation at home) decluttering and fumigating, a few weeks later we're back to where we started. Let's put it this way - when I could last afford a cleaner, I hired a man because the light dusting had turned into heavy lifting.
I'm confessing to this because my 11-year-old son never stops reminding me that if I were a "real mother", I'd have a perfectly tidy house. He hasn't learned this from me, obviously - the message is coming from the sociological ether. And he has this notion, even though he sees his father and I job-sharing in every sense - we take equal responsibility for housework, childcare, lawn-mowing and getting up at night to make sure the noise downstairs isn't the bogeyman.
To be fair to my son, he's the only child in the house who will pick up a broom and sweep and tidy things away. My daughters think cleaning is "sexist". Somehow, without even realising it, I have reared a highly responsible metrosexual male who still has a black-and-white divide in his head that has him adoring football with his dad and wanting me to be Ms Mary Muffins, while at the same time he abhors the sexual exploitation he sees on TV. I have a daughter who prefers rock-climbing and overturning in kayaks to home pursuits, while still having expensive tastes in fashion, and another daughter who loves pink, make-up and clothes, but who wouldn't clean the bathroom if you paid her - though she can defend herself in a fight.
They're just like us, aren't they? Our kids, I mean. They express all our confusion about sex roles, or at least mine do. We've been in a state of chassis about maleness and femaleness for a couple of generations but that's changing fast. The new mood is to say boys will be boys and girls will be girls because they're made that way.
Two books, Kathleen Parker's Save the Males: Why Men Matter, Why Women Should Care and Susan Pinker's The Sexual Paradox, are giving the same message. Parker says that women are depriving men of their manhood by being sexbots on booty-call and, when they finally settle down, they are being "bitches" (her word) by taking total control of family life and reproduction, thereby denying men their need for heroic fatherhood, so that men don't know how to be manly any more.
Susan Pinker is a sister of evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, who famously wrote that women have extramarital affairs in order to expand the gene pool for their offspring via natural selection. She believes that women don't do science because they are genetically and socially formed to choose not to live an obsessive intellectual life.
Women want to be nurturers while also having jobs on a compromise basis, so they prefer not to be managing directors or Nobel-prize winners.
To both authors I say: nonsense. Women not rising in science in business? It's our choice! There's something bigger going on here. Remember Rosie the Riveter? She was the American gal who waved goodbye to her man as he headed off to fight in the second World War, then took off her frilly dress, put on a coverall, rolled up her sleeves and got a patriotic bicep-building job in a bomb factory. When the war was over, the factories didn't need her any more and wanted her back home making babies and providing stability for returning veterans.
At that time, a raft of media propaganda convinced women that it was better for family life to have clear-cut gender roles. History repeats itself. Jobs are getting scarcer, girls. Wave goodbye to the boom-times of the economic war when women were needed in the workplace. Now unemployment is at its highest level in decades in the US and here, the grand plan is to convince women to be "womanly" by nurturing men for the betterment of society. Parker even says that if we don't raise our sons better, we'll be creating an irresponsible generation who will date-rape and sexually exploit girls.
Just as in the 1950s, the arguments go, we must put the "economic good" before our ambitions. Authors, such as Parker and Pinker, want to put us back in our pretty box tied with a bow so that we will pull out of the workforce and let men take charge.
Beware of this trend. Sociologists and psychologists in the 1950s misinterpreted research in order to convince women that their best place was in the home and now they're trying it again - but without the research. Parker's and Pinker's sources are women they have personally interviewed, which is not science. It's morality masquerading as psychology.
All you Rosies out there: don't listen to them. It's far better for us and our children to continue to define ourselves outside the gender straitjacket and let the current generation of young people figure it out for themselves, because when boys like housework and girls like turning over in kayaks, we're on to a good thing.
