This comes as a surprise to no woman on earth and is exactly the reason I will not ever get married. I don't want all the baggage that comes with being a "wife".

When I first got married, I did all the housework during the day when my husband was at work (I'm a grad student, so I was home a lot during the day). That got old really quickly-- especially because he didn't even notice that I was doing it all! Now I clean when he's around and we end up cleaning together. Or when I cook, he does the dishes. It's so easy to just take it all on yourself, though. I have to conciously stop myself from doing it all.

Wife means Wash, Iron, Fuck, Etc.

I had heard that married women do more housework than single women, and that married men do less than single men, but the stats on cohabitators is surprising. My boyfriend and I have been living in sin for three years now and we've distributed the chores pretty equally. We even have separate laundry baskets. Bank accounts, too. I don't think those things would change if we got married, but I'm not interested in finding out for sure.

Hell to the yes, DarthVelma!

That's why I'll never get married. What should be a union truly separates the couple, all for the sake of what marriage is "supposed" to be. Why would I want that?

I am a cohabitator, and my guy probably does more housework than I do. He definitely does more child care. (I work more hours)

I wonder if the cause and effect are reversed, though.

Liberal, egalitarian, hippie feminist types are far more likely to cohabitate than conservative traditionalists are.

Therefore, perhaps married women do not do more housework BECAUSE they are married - but rather, they are married because they are more traditional.

Yay for living in sin!

That's a very good point, Anne. I had similar thoughts after I kept reading about how couples who live together before marriage have a higher divorce rate than those who don't. No one ever seemed to follow up with a "why," so I figured it had more to do with personal politics in general than cohabitation in particular.

There are several reasons I am probably going to die alone.

1) I would rather eat dirt than become pregnant...I'm 5'3 and I need the whole shitty experience of pregnancy(as I see it...no offense to those of you who enjoyed pregnancy, more power to you) like I need a hole in the head. I care about kids, I want to work with kids as a career and will probably be making $50,000 or less annually, yadda yadda yadda. Like kids, honestly think I'd go nuts trying to raise a happy, healthy, well-adjusted child. I'll soothe my cravings (if they come up) with two cats.

The problem is, even if I decided to have kids, I'd adopt.

The type of guy I can imagine marrying is the type of guy who would probably want kids, and ones that had his genes. Maybe if we can work it out so that HE'S the one that has to f*cking get pregnant and go through childbirth...

2) I can't imagine living with another person whose around to see me at my worst (esp. one that I'd want to impress most of the time--as I'd consider my long-term BF/hubby--at least in the beginning) and yes, another person (or persons--again with the kids!) that I'd have to clean up after. I've gotten enough of that with being the only female child.

I've been married for about 3 years- we lived together first and I cleaned more then. That got old. So I stopped housework altogether! It's a balancing act. I think when we first got married I did feel like I had some pressure to be more 'wifely' but I got to the point where I was fed up and said, you know, this isn't who I am. If the house is a mess, so what. If you don't want things to be messy, you clean them.
At this point, I am in grad school and working (and raising two kids) so the housework isn't even close to on my radar- that's all him for now!

as far as 'traditional' people being the ones to get married- on a personal level I have to disagree with that.

I'm a progressive, egalitarian, hippie (sort of), rad fem and I'm married. We work hard to maintain an equitable division of domestic labor. And when I say work hard, I mean work hard. We have to stop, reassess, and talk about it probably at least once a month. I am usually the one who instigates the talk (since I am usually the one who feels like she is doing more than half of the chores). This gets tiresome, but it's usually worthwhile and I feel like we're growing as a couple in a positive direction.

But I wouldn't have married somebody that wasn't open to that kind of growth, and we lived together for some years before getting married so the post-marital issues were neither new nor surprising to either of us. I think that no matter what, if you are in a hetero relationship (or a same-sex relationship that embraces on diametrical gender roles), you are going to have to do some hard work around equality in the household. We all come into our relationships with baggage, and we are all products of the patriarchy.

"Therefore, perhaps married women do not do more housework BECAUSE they are married - but rather, they are married because they are more traditional."

Good point. I think the stats are also affected by the fact that a lot of cohabitators just might not be married YET, and are younger with less money, more roommates, and more erratic schedules. For instance I live with my boyfriend and a roommate, and we all go to college at different times and have crappy jobs with odd hours. So housework kinda gets done by whoever has free time at a given moment.

I've only been married a little over a year, so the data is definitely new, but I my husband may actually do a little more housework than I do at the moment. He's a graduate student, I work full time. We usually split the cooking or cook together, but he often does the dishes and other minor cleaning during the week, and then we both do a much more intensive cleaning on the weekend.

That will probably change, though, as our situation changes. And given how dynamic lives in general are -- married or not -- I think that it definitely is a balancing act that, as Ottermatic points out, you're almost constantly aware of and having to reassess as things change. But I think it's normal, even healthy to check in periodically to make sure that both parties feel that the divison of labor is equitable -- for so long there's been the *assumption* that men go to work and women clean the house and raise babies.

The cohabitation stats are a little surprising, though -- and I think it may be the result of some circular thinking wrt marriage and who does it: people who are more traditional tend to marry more often and fulfill traditional gender roles, but I think there's also the expectation that if you choose to get married, you must be more traditional, so there's pressure to act that way.

BEING married does not create the issue- WHO you marry creates the issue. My partner and I co-habitated before getting married, and we split housework pretty equally. Partner also has more childcare responsibilities time-wise due to our working schedules.

In my life, there is NO BAGGAGE that comes with being a wife that isn't already brought to the table by family and upbringing and the lives we lead before we were married. Period. Pejorative acronyms for "wife" and a declaration that becoming one is somehow anti-feminist or irrational does nothing to further the position of women in society and their roles therein. Let's not create an "us against them" mentality within our own gender.
That said, co-habitation rocks the house and I will definitely tell my children to co-habitate before getting married, if that is the path they want to take. You learn about your significant other that way, and the expectations that will come when you're married. A guy who doesn't pick up the apartment won't turn into a husband who picks up the house.

I have a theory that women tend to be more action-oriented when it comes to cleaning then men are, and in some relationships, men take advantage of that. Hell, if my partner were to clean up the whole house before I came home and didn't talk to me / expect me to pitch in, I would NEVER CLEAN AGAIN. As it is, I, like Emily mentioned, have to stop myself from doing all the housework because I'm not patient enough to have the conversation about the dishes and my partner could care less if the sink is overflowing. I've learned to let the overflow go, and eventually they will get done.

I've been married for nine years and housework has (thankfully) never been a problem for us. I think there are two reasons for this 1) we both had one parent who did all the housework when we were growing up (my mom, his dad) and 2) we came to an agreement on housework and kids before we got married. Though there are times when one of us has to pick up the slack for the other (he's on call at work, I've got finals, one of us is sick), we have managed to divide everything in a way that is fair and sets a good example for our kids.

Could this be because couples shaking up are disproportionately likely to be young and the women refuse to put up with this crap.

I'm with ottermatic. I married young-ish (at 24--13 years ago) and it's been a balance we need to negotiate and re-negotiate with our changing lives. Right now things are pretty egalitarian in terms of cooking, cleaning, laundry and other housework, but I know that I have a larger workload in terms of finances, and the family calendar. I have the more demanding and higher-paying job and we're in the process of hiring a housecleaner to alleviate some of these issues--not the perfect solution in the grand scheme of the world, but it is part of making my career and family life satisfying.

I hate to scare women, but having kids was the big changer in the home arrangements. Being the gestator and feeder of the children really tipped the workload to my side, I did a lot more then because I had the physical demands of babies to contend with and it was easier for me to do other tasks because I was at home.

For me, the biggest issues for feminism are in the private sphere of heterosexual relationships where I think things have changed very little, even with hippie feminist types, especially after they have children and regardless of whether they're married or not.

I don't know what it is that makes this happen but I think it is more than just one's politics. I got married (eloped actually) because I decided I was better protected under Canadian law married than cohabitating and it was a strategic legal decision more than a romantic one since we had be cohabiting for a few years already.

I'm married, and we've definitely fallen in to the trap of traditional gender roles. I work, but he has the more demanding career. I end up doing more housework. The work he does around the house tends to be the more traditionally male activities (fixing things, taking out the garbage, maintaining the cars.)

I think part of it is efficiency. Growing up as a girl, I learned domestic skills, he learned mechanics. We married later, so we both had to learn to do some of everything. But I'm still way more efficient at putting together a meal, and he's way more efficient at fixing the broken dishwasher.

We also had a child from the beginning of our relationship. (I was a single mom.) Once children are introduced, the total workload increases so much that it's much easier to do what is the most efficient.

Perhaps, if we'd had more time as a childless or cohabitating couple, we would have divided things up more equally. But with all taking care of a child, efficiency has been our rule.

However, we are aware of this, and we are trying to raise our boys to be good at everything. They cook with me and work on the car with dad, help me with the laundry and mow the lawn. We go out of our way to show them fathers who cook and women mechanics.

My husband and I lived together for 3 years before we got married and have been married for 2. This has definitely not been my experience.

But then again, I made sure to not get married to an asshole ;)

Bizarre.

It's hard to tell without seeing the data, but it sounds like this is a comparative/cross-sectional study, rather than a longitudinal one. It compares married hetero couples to unmarried, cohabitating hetero couples. It does not compare the division of labor of unmarried, cohabitating hetero couples to the division of labor those same couples may or may not re-negotiate several years down the line after marriage.

So Stephanie Coontz's conclusion that "Even the most untraditional couple will fall into it after marriage, unless they are very conscious of it. They judge themselves against this centuries-old standard of what a wife does, which they didn't have to do when they were just living together." Is not warranted by the study. It's just as posible (or, judging by my observations, more probable) that Annethropology's hypothesis is right--couples who cohabitate without marriage are less traditional than couples who marry, and therefore less likely to fall into tradiional division-of-labor patterns.

It would be very interesting indeed to learn whether individual cohabitating couples' divisions of labor grow less equitable after marriage, but it doesn't look like this study was set up to answer that question. That handwringing is premature.

My husband and I have gone back and forth on the housework issue. At first, he was terrible. His apartment before we moved in together was spotless, and he honestly expected our place to be that way without him doing any work. He would tell me that he didn't have any idea how to work a dishwasher, which especially frosted me because this was the first place I'd ever lived with one and I had to figure out. Since I was in school and home more hours than him, he actually told me that I should do more of the housework. When I asked if that meant he should pay more of the bills, he got pissed. We got into so many fights because I wouldn't clean "enough", and he wouldn't clean at all. At one point, when I was tight on money we made an arrangement where I'd do all the housework and he'd pay all the bills. That lasted all of about 2 weeks before he decided I wasn't doing a good enough job and called off the arrangement. So we went back to splitting the bills and fighting over me not cleaning enough and him not cleaning at all. Finally, I snapped. I had taken on a new job and I didn't have much free time, so I stopped cleaning altogether. Seriously. Well, I did my own laundry and made my own meals. When all the dishes were dirty, I'd wash whatever I needed for a meal, and then put them back by the overflowing sink. It worked. After a couple weeks, I came home and the dishwasher was running (guess it wasn't that hard to figure out after all).

I wish I could say things have been great since then. They're certainly better, but they've been up and down. It's really hard to strike an equal balance. I would have to say that the best time (in terms of fights and having a clean apartment) was last year after he quit his job to start an internet business. We agreed that since he wouldn't be making any money during that time, he'd do all the housework and I'd pay the bills. Because of the arrangement he couldn't complain at me for not doing anything, and because I have a higher tolerance for mess than he does I never complained, and the apartment was always clean. It was great. But his business didn't take off and things were getting too expensive for me, so he went back to work after about 6 months. Now we're trying to divide housework evenly, and it's hard, and we still fight. Just last night he was complaining at me because he was doing to dishes (my chore now) because I had let them pile up. His equivalent chore is the cat boxes - which actually I did last. I wish I made a lot more money so I could just go back to paying him to do housework so I wouldn't have to hear anymore how I do a terrible job at it. Maybe that wouldn't be fair either, because it would just be the breadwinner/housewife model with reversed genders, but I'm really not sure how to do fair, especially when two people have different ideas about what clean looks like, like we do.

I'm married and we don't "work" at equally dividing the labor. I live with my husband because I love and respect him and he feels the same towards me. He would never expect me to do anything because of my gender. If he felt otherwise, he wouldn't be the guy that I love and who has been my best friend for over a decade.
In our house, chores, work, and childcare are divided pretty evenly. We pick up the slack for one another when things are rough (illness, my bed-ridden pregnancy, business trips, finals). There are some things that he's better at or doesn't mind doing (electronics, lawn mowing, food prep., washing dishes, scrubbing toilets) and their are thing that i do better or don't mind doing (laundry, weeding/watering the garden, cooking, detail cleaning the house).
Since the begining, we have shared child care evenly. At some points, he spends more time working than helping with the kid (and pets) and at other times it makes more sense for him to be the primary caregiver. I wouldn't have become a parent with a guy who didn't want to be deeply involved in the day to day care of his own kids. My guy is a wonderful and loving dad.
We go over bills together, so that we both know what's up with our joint bank account.
And we both make sure that the other has time to pursue individual interests.
People are always impressed with my husband. He finds it both odd and annoying that he gets so much applause for doing nothing more than what I do.
The headline assumes that NO man will ever hold is weight around the house. I think that attitude lets guys off the hook. And it also doesn't take into account the guys out there, like my husband, who are already responsible and considorate parnters. If you marry a sexist, selfish guy, you can't expect a very equal, happy marriage. But if you marry or shack up with a great partner, things can be very nice indeed!
Oh! And I DESPISE doing the dishes. Happily for me, I've only had to do the dishes about 3 times in 2007 because that's my husband's job, not mine! Ha!

I married a Nice Guy who is turning more pro-fem as both of us learn more about feminism and the row to hoe, so to speak, and how that gets expressed in our relationship.
In our cohabitating years when we were both students, I did most of the housework. In our married years when he's had a job and I'm in grad school, I've done most of the housework.
What we think of as housework is different, though--I think about baseboards and dust and mopping. He thinks about dishes and laundry. It took a couple of years, but now we have a system where he does all the dishes and laundry, and cooking on weekends, and I do all the other upkeep, plus cooking during the week. It's not exactly equitable but it works for us and is fair enough to keep me from bitching about it all the time.

Sorry about the quote marks around work in my first sentance. That was a different sentance before my sloppy editing. It sounds condescending as it is. That was NOT my intention!

Hmm.
Since my partner and I moved in together, this has been something we've had to work on a lot. He is very forthright about demanding that we divide housework equally, as am I, but it still seems to break apart in a way that leaves me with more work. Most of the time it's not that he won't do his share, but that he's not doing it the way I want or as quickly as I want, so I wind up doing it and then he gets upset that I did. So, that's totally my fault. Yet I still do it and still wind up frustrated in the end. I think I need to take advice from some of the previous commentors who said that you just have to learn to let things pile up in order to share the responsibility. If you expect everything to be done to your standard (assuming you're the one with higher standards) you'are going to end up doing it yourself.

I do think that marriage comes with greater inherent pressure for domestic conformity. People pressure you to adapt to a traditional wife identity. As said before, we're not married, but my mother still thinks it's weird that I don't do his laundry.

Of all these studies, the general conclusion always seems to be that married women do the most housework, cohabitating women do the second-most, and single women do the least. For me, this hasn't been the case. I've always lived with messy roomates who didn't prioritize things the same as me, so I've always been the leading cleaner.

I'm agreeing with AnneThropologist (nice handle!) here:

Liberal, egalitarian, hippie feminist types are far more likely to cohabitate than conservative traditionalists are.

Therefore, perhaps married women do not do more housework BECAUSE they are married - but rather, they are married because they are more traditional.

And yes, I had this very experience, which is one big reason why my marriage is on the verge of breaking up. We're both sloppy, but he's a lot worse than I am, and everybody (especially and worst of all his family) seems to blame the mess on me. If he were better with the traditional masculine relationship gestures (bringing flowers, earning most of the money without complaint) it would help mitigate the situation (it would be far from my ideal, but it would be one way I could justify staying), but right now it's like I've got the worst of both worlds: the homemaking duties of Donna Reed and an "egalitarian", i.e. mostly romance-free, love life.

I agree with AnneThropology and kmg...although I don't necessarily doubt that the same couple might divide tasks differently before and after marrying or that the act of marrying itself might make some contribution, I have my doubts. For example, I don't have my own stats to back this up, but if married couples are more likely to have children than cohabiting couples, and if having children makes it more statistically likely that one parent will be home while the other has paid employment outside the home, and if a stay-at-home parent is more likely to do more of the housework, and if this person is more likely than not to be the wife...it isn't unreasonable to think that this might skew the numbers a bit. Now, some of these couples may decide that mom will stay home with the kids because of tradition (maybe quite a few), but that's not necessarily the case...it might just make sense in their particular circumstances.

I guess what I'm saying is that I don't really believe that we can look at these numbers and conclude that "something just happens" when people go from cohabitation to being married, and that we suddenly feel an urge to live up to gender roles when the marriage license is filed. If the study had taken into account parental status and/or out-of-home employment differences (say, compared cohabiting couples in which both people WOH to married couples in which both spouses WOH), that might have made it a more reliable measure of the effect of marriage itself.

Merle, my stomach turned as I read your comment. I really mean this as no offense to you, but you could do better.

And I'm sorry to hear about your predicament, florafloraflora. That's sad. :(

I have been married for nearly 8 years, lived with my husband for about a year before that. We've lived in 3 countries during that time, have had 3 children and our domestic and professional duties continuously change. At present, I do nearly 100% of the domestic stuff and he does nearly 100% of the money earner stuff. He works/commutes about 13 hours a day. He is naturally a tidier person than I am, actually gets nervous and starts cleaning when he gets home if it's a mess (did I mention we have 3 kids?) These things change as needed. I can't work legally in this country, so I'm home all day. It's not the division of labor either one of us want because it's incredibly unfair to both of us and not a very financially stable place to be. But I'm starting to wonder if it isn't a better idea to just figure out how to make it work here (I receive my permanent residency within the next month) rather than moving back to the US. But that's a whole other issue!

I also think it's unfair to say that women who choose marriage over "shacking up" are more "traditional" in their values. Like we lose our feminist membership cards when we say "I do." There are a myriad of reasons for getting married that may or may not make sense to others, but that work for those of use who decided to get married (and were legally allowed to, again, a whole other issue.) Choosing to live with your romantic partner and not get married doesn't make you more of a feminist either, and choosing to marry your romantic partner doesn't make you "traditional" and un-feminist.

Sigh. I guess I just get frustrated because if anyone were to look at my life right now, without taking into consideration anything other than the amount of housework I do compared to my husband, they could jump to all sorts of erroneous conclusions about who I am, what I believe and what my relationship with my husband is like.

And people wonder why I just asked my mother what she thought of "bastard grandchildren"...

I'm getting married next weekend, thanks for horrifying me before hand :P

I'll let you know if he stops doing the housework after next Saturday.

Just one more reason why my life is NOT normal at all. We lived together 6 years before getting married (8 years this past May). He's totally the house cleaner and rags on me to do my fair share. I love him!!

I tell all young women, it's not just the institution, it's who you enter into it with.

It's not a perfect marriage, but far from what is traditional or typical.

My stats: seven years of marriage and a year of cohabitation.

We've got it split evenly. We started a thing where we only clean when both of us are around, so that we put in equal time. If one of us does something while the other person's out, the other person is obliged to do something later.

This usually happens with the laundry or dishes. I'll start a load before work, and he'll put away.

It works for us.

"it's not just the institution, it's who you enter into it with."

That's just so true!

One of the reasons I love my man so much is he just is not one of those people who hasn't questioned his social conditioning and come to his own conclusions regarding his gender role and himself as a person.

Does this study control for hours worked outside the home? That could well be cause for the difference. Are women who are "shacking up" more likely to be working full time than married women? If a woman is working less outside the home, then it's reasonable for her to assume more household duties.

My personal experience with my ex is that he did no more nor less housework when we were living together than when we married. He always did some, but not much, and when he did occasionally do a sinkload of dishes, he considered it proof of what a wonderful husband he was and expected a gold star. Reason #312 why he's my EX-husband.

(The man with whom I happily now shack up has no such issues, and if anything, I think he does a little more than I do.)

I'd be interested in seeing how the numbers divvy up when it's same sex couples. Does nayone know if a study like that's been done?

I end up doing most of the chores partially out of gender relations inertia that the both of us are still trying to unlearn. For example, I'm trying to relay to him that reminding him to do a chore is still, ultimately, me taking responsibility for seeing that it gets done.

Fortunately, his mother was a feminist, and that makes it a little easier.

That, and he cooks, which I hate to do. Huzzah!

I wonder if the study thought to account for whether or not the couples had children living at home. In my experience, that's the number one reason that previously egalitarian couples revert to "traditional" gender roles around the house.