The other night, I spent half an hour cleaning the mud kitchen of a city farm, surrounded by sand, goat hair and mulch. I have never cleaned the inside of my own oven. Yesterday, I lost a happy hour dusting all the shelves of my friend’s bookshop with a fluffy grey duster so extendable that at one point I started cleaning the rafters just because I could. I have never, to my knowledge, dusted any of my shelves. Last week, I happily washed about 40 wine glasses after a book event, noting the different shades of lipstick as I went. Washing up in my kitchen makes me want to punch a hole through the sink.
Cleaning anything that isn’t my own home feels less boring, less pointless, less like my soul is being leached into an abyss of dirty hobs and splattered toothpaste. Perhaps it’s because this kind of cleaning less pointedly marks out the continued gender inequality that lurks at the heart of most British households and was exacerbated by the pandemic. A report called How Are Mothers and Fathers Balancing Work and Family under Lockdown?, published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies and University College London in May 2020, found that, in the first months of the first UK lockdown, mothers were still doing disproportionately more housework and childcare than fathers. Even when both were in the house. Even if both were paid employees. Even if the mother was the primary earner.
Can I just tug your eyes back to that last bit, in case you were too busy chipping dried porridge off a spoon to give it your full attention? Even when a female partner is the primary earner in a household, she still does a disproportionate amount of the unpaid domestic labour. This is what, back in 1989, the sociologist Arlie Hochschild called “the second shift”. I was five in 1989. The thought that this essential domestic inequality has not changed in almost my whole lifetime makes me want to start hurling microfibre cloths into the sun.
The great indignity is that, as a country, we now think we should split our domestic chores, but in reality women continue to do the majority of the unpaid, unappreciated, unnoticed domestic labour that allows all other labour to exist. According to the BBC: “More than three-quarters of respondents to the British Social Attitudes Survey said domestic labour should be split. Yet two-thirds said women do more than their fair share of washing and ironing. And most said women still do most of the cleaning and cooking.” And there you have the great feminist revolution of my generation: men believe in gender equality, right up until the point where someone has to clean the toilet. (In the name of transparency, I should point out that my husband does, in fact, clean the toilet.)
Of course, this is all exacerbated wildly by what Joeli Brearley from the campaign group Pregnant Then Screwed calls the “motherhood penalty”. As a new parent, I spent more time doing laundry and washing up than I spent reading, eating, watching television and sleeping put together. Not because I like those tasks, but because my partner had to work 12-hour days, on the other side of the city, with no parental leave. If I hadn’t done them, my son would quickly have been wearing plastic bags for clothes and I would have been eating soup out of my bare hands.
But let’s not despair: I have a solution. Because it’s so much more appealing to clean when it’s not the sisyphean task of keeping your own home palatable, why don’t we introduce a housework-swapping service? Forget the endless socks stuffed between sofa cushions, the crumpled and damp-smelling towels thrown on the tops of doors, the teabags on rather than in the bin: I will come round and clean your house for you, with two simple provisos.
First, that I can look through all of your cupboards, drawers, cabinets and shelves: I will need to satiate my curiosity with a quick flip through your pyjamas or under your sofa. Second, that someone else – someone just as nosy and tired of their own mess – will come round to my home and scrub the ring of ochre-coloured filth off my bath. And mop the floor. And do whatever it is that stops fridges smelling.
• Nell Frizzell is the author of Holding the Baby: Milk, Sweat and Tears from the Frontline of Motherhood
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