Woman Goes On Strike With Housework After Doing The Majority Of The Chores For Years — ‘I Just Feel Like A Sugarmama’
Oh how the tables have turned…
RDNE Stock project from Pexels | Canva Pro A woman took to Reddit for advice after going on strike because of a situation that will sound instantly (and infuriatingly) familiar to probably most women. Her situation not only touches on the imbalanced workload around the house, but the oft-repeated jokes about men who don't know where the scissors are in their own homes, for example.
It's once again become a common refrain to say that being a housewife or a stay-at-home mom isn't a real job, or if it is, it's an "easy" one that doesn't hold a candle to an actual career. Every bit of data on the subject says otherwise, but people don't tend to be all that interested in facts nowadays.
Anyway! One wife on Reddit decided to let her husband learn about this the hard way. After covering virtually every bit of housework for years, in addition to owning a business, she simply stopped doing any of it. And surprise: it took less than two days for her husband to pitch a fit about it.
The woman went 'on strike' from housework, and now her husband is angry.
I will never forget the time my friend had to go out of town for work while I was staying with her, and her husband came to me, a houseguest, to ask where the wafflemaker was kept in the house they'd lived in for 10 years. Yes, I knew the answer, and he knew I'd know the answer despite not even living there, and that kind of says absolutely everything. (I forgave him because the waffles slapped, but still.)
The point is that many men are utterly oblivious to even the most basic details required for running a home, including the mental work of doing so. That's partly, in my experience observing friends and family, anyway, why women end up doing all of it. They know their male partners can't handle it because they've never had to, and it will be orders of magnitude easier to just do it themselves.
Hirurg from Getty Images Signature | Canva Pro
This woman is a perfect case in point. "I do the appointments on our cars, maintenance, yardwork, cleaning, laundry, mopping, hoovering, cooking, groceries and overall planning of our lives and what we need and what needs to be done," she wrote. "I also pay all the bills and handle finances, though we contribute 50-50 financially." This is all in addition to running her own business.
Her partner, on the other hand, "occasionally (once a month) cooks one meal, and sometimes empties the dishwasher." And after yet another conversation about it all being too much, she reached a breaking point and decided to quit. "I went on strike. I have been sitting in our bedroom just relaxing," she wrote. And oh, how quickly everything unraveled.
It took less than a day of her strike for things to fall apart.
The first debacle was a car maintenance appointment, which she assigned him to handle. He couldn't even make the phone call without asking her for instructions on who to call and when. When she simply told him whatever he decided was fine, "he got mad and left."
Making a shopping list was a similar mess. "He sat with his phone and kept asking me 'what do we need?'" she wrote, to which she responded, "'I don't know, maybe check.'" He ended up with six items on the list, most of which were snacks for himself.
Trzykropy | Canva Pro
Two days in, he came home to a kitchen overflowing with dirty dishes and trash. She wrote that he simply walked past it and went to take a nap. And then it got worse: "He is asking me what's wrong and why am I acting the way I am," she wrote. You can probably guess how that went over.
"This house looks like a pigsty right now and he doesn't lift a finger to do anything about it, but has the audacity to ask me 'what’s wrong?'" The whole thing has left her feeling taken advantage of. As she put it, "I just feel like a sugarmama or something."
Studies show husbands actually create more housework for their wives.
The data on the division of household labor is extensive, and it all points to one simple fact: Women do vastly more than men. According to Pew Research, women do more than twice the housework and nearly a third more childcare than men, even in egalitarian marriages where both partners work, and even when the woman is the breadwinner. Pew has also found that men tend to have nearly double the leisure time that women have.
But it goes even further than that. An oft-cited study by the University of Michigan found that not only do women do more work, but men actually CREATE an extra seven hours of housework every week. For any woman who's said their husband is essentially another child in the house, that will be unsurprising.
Seven hours is essentially an entire extra workday each week, on top of the already huge workload. A study in 2020, for instance, found that stay-at-home moms essentially work two-and-a-half full-time jobs, roughly 98 hours a week. And if the housework the average woman does were to be paid the fair market rates of all the housecleaners, nannies, chauffeurs, gardeners, etc., etc., etc., that some people hire to do it for them, it would tally up to a nearly $200,000 salary.
Managing a home is more than just vacuuming and grocery shopping. It requires planning, analysis, and tracking on top of all the work. Men can roll their eyes all they want, but most of them couldn't begin to hack it for even 24 hours because most of them have never had to. But that certainly doesn't stop them from assuming they know everything about it anyway, does it? How fascinating.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
