Gender Equality on the Home Front: Why This Ideal Seems So Impossible in Practice
International Women's Day (IWD) - Daisy Chain Flower Crown
In response to the invitation to celebrate International Women’s Day by a group of writers on Substack, including
and , I decided to contribute my little daisy to the collective flower crown of women’s wisdom and truth.I want to start with a vignette in the French period movie, “The Taste of Things,” directed by Vietnamese French director Trần Anh Hùng (who won the best director award at Cannes last year). Spoiler alert!
The scene appears at the very end of the film. Eugénie (played by Juliette Binoche) sits in the kitchen with gourmand and chef Dodin Bouffant (played by Benoît Magimel) in an imaginary sequence after Eugénie has died. Just before she dies, she and Dodin are engaged to be married — something she has resisted throughout the 20 years they worked together — she as the cook behind the gourmand’s culinary ideas.
In this very quiet and peaceful scene, Dodin asks Eugénie if she would like to be his wife or his cook. She answers, “Your cook.”
This answer seems to be incongruent with the storyline, where the two are happily engaged and anticipating their wedding in autumn. But as a woman, I immediately understood her reply and her smile of relief. I secretly cheered for her decision. Even though it’s a post-mortem decision, the change of mind seems to indicate something profound — a reckoning that women often experience — yet often too late, after they have sacrificed themselves in long marriages, one meal at a time.
I believe that, by choosing to remain in her capacity as Dodin’s professional partner, Eugénie gets to maintain her sense of agency and self-worth. Yes, in those days, it was hard for women to have any sort of “career path” the way we define it today. But as a divorced woman, she has had to find a way to support herself, and by being a cook for Dodin, she earns the basic means to survive.
My guess is that her previous marriage has given her a realistic view of what it did to her self-determination, and perhaps that’s why she has resisted Dodin’s suggestion for marriage for two decades. I don’t know why she’s accepted his marriage proposal eventually. Perhaps she is touched by his caring gestures after she has had several fainting spells. But to me, her final answer in the imaginary sequence tells me more than anything about a woman’s psychology.
Caught in between 2 opposing forces
Being married means, to a certain degree, that a woman is beholden to the husband, especially when there is financial inequality between the two (when the husband earns more than the wife or when the wife doesn’t have any income.) Even if the financial balance is flipped, say, the wife makes more than the husband or is the breadwinner, the wife may still find herself beholden to the man and their shared household due to deeply rooted traditional values and cultural conditioning.
As a daughter of Chinese immigrant parents with traditional and patriarchal family values, I found myself in this kind of dynamic throughout my 25 years of various long-term relationships and marriage. I think that being a Gen-Xer has made it extra hard because we’re among the first generation of women told the sky was the limit when it came to the pursuit of our career goals and fulfilling our potentials. Yet we were also raised to be the virtuous and self-sacrificial wives and mothers that our own moms once were.
I was literally told that “Good food is the shortcut to a man’s heart,” and took it seriously by honing my cooking skills at a young age. My culinary skills and loyalty had me cooking almost every single day for the men in my life, 25 years straight.
Today, I am beyond exhausted. Besides cooking and doing the bulk of the daily chores, I was also the sole breadwinner in two of these long relationships that combined to last 20 years.
For various reasons, I did not become a mother. Although I feel a tinge of regret some days, most days I feel relieved. My hypersensitive nervous system and physical constitution wouldn’t make me a good mom, I believe. It would also likely have made me a resentful one who frequently breaks into “mom rage.”
Well, I didn’t have to be a mom to feel that rage. Just being in a marriage or a committed long-term partnership has led to “marriage rage.” You can learn more about “marriage rage” in the
interview with Lyz Lenz below:For women, I don’t need to waste a single drop of saliva1 to explain how hard it is to juggle between work and domestic chores, especially if you’ve lived through the COVID-19 pandemic and worked from home. So most of what follows is for men to catch up with what you might have missed in oblivion, and for women to share with men in their life.
Women feel frustrated for not being able to “do it all.” The reality is that nobody can do it all. Everyone needs mutual help from one another.
A 2021 study found that in addition to bearing the brunt of child care and caregiving responsibilities, many women lost pay during the pandemic because they missed work due to quarantining or school closures. Many quit in order to tend to their children at home. This had a detrimental effect on women’s career and income.
A 2023 Pew Research Center report shows that even though earnings are more or less similar in partners of opposite-sex marriages (with 16% of women as the sole or primary breadwinners), women still devote more time than men to caregiving and domestic chores.
Inside the “arena,” the time and energy devoted to caregiving, domestic chores, and making contact with other humans (yes, that’s a separate task to ensure the family machine runs smoothly) naturally eats into the pie containing other aspects of a woman’s life — self-care, career, creative endeavors, bonding with friends, hobbies, and leisure.
The result is that women feel frustrated for not being able to “do it all.” The reality is that nobody can do it all. Everyone needs mutual help from one another, and within a marriage, we expect that to mainly come from our spouses.
To me, the fight for equality in the workplace cannot be accomplished by merely tackling the "opportunities" along the career ladder.
The more difficult and bigger piece of the puzzle lies in the sharing of domestic and caregiving labor, as well as the emotional side of it all.
The emotional struggle to get help at home
If a couple cannot afford the luxury of domestic help and child care, domestic labor usually falls squarely on the couple. But why do women find themselves shouldering the majority of such unpaid labor?
Alas, for so many of us, getting our partners to step up to their share of household responsibilities can be such an emotional tug-of-war. The negotiation itself — and the repeated need for that — can take a toll on our energy and mental health.
Below are typical exchanges where the wife wants some help in getting things done around the house, and the husband responds in ways that elicit the wife’s irritation and, as it builds over time and remains unaddressed, leads to resentment.
Wife needs help in cooking. At the beginning of the marriage, she asks Husband to help. Husband doesn’t know where to begin. He is unschooled in the art and science of cooking, and intimidated by it. Wife suggests teaching him how to cook. He pays her a cursory visit in the kitchen and watches her chop veggies. He gets bored and leaves the kitchen. Wife senses Husband’s lack of interest. She attempts a few more invitations with the same lackluster response. She gives up.
The same thing happens with other chores, such as dishwashing, taking out the trash, making the bed, putting away laundry sprawled on the floor, etc.
One day, Wife comes home exhausted from work (or comes out of her home office exhausted). The mess and chores have piled up. She gets irritated, and speaks with a passive aggressive tone. Husband scratches his head and asks: “Why didn’t you tell me what needs to be done? Why didn’t you ask? You never tell me what you want!”
At this point, Wife can’t contain her anger anymore. She explodes! Husband gets scared and thinks she is emotionally unstable or nuts. Feeling threatened, he retreats to his man cave, making her even angrier.
“I never told you?” She can’t believe what she’s just heard, scanning in her head the hundreds of times she tried very tactically to get him to do chores around the house.
She also remembers the thousands of times that she did NOT ask, because of two reasons.
One, with the amount of time she would need to show him how to do something, like cooking, she would’ve already done it. Besides, she can avoid the look of irritation or disengagement on his face, which triggers a sense of rejection in her.
Two, if she asks every time something needs to be done, he would complain about her “nagging.” And, Mister, did you know that your wife doesn’t want to be seen as the nagging mother? She wants you to find her attractive and sexy. Nagging kills that for you, doesn’t it? Yes, it does, because you were “traumatized” by your own mom’s nagging and feel prickly about it.
Do you see the conundrum a woman has in playing the dual role of the nagging mother and the sexy romantic partner?
And why is it that some men just don’t get it?
I don’t think they are deliberately negligent or selfish. I think a lot of it has to do with how they were raised.
Two of my former partners were raised by full-time housewives in the 50s and 60s, who modeled for them a woman’s role at home. They were used to seeing their mom cook and do all the housework while their husbands worked. As sons, they were also not taught how to cook or help with other chores.
So naturally, they didn’t step up and share the chores in their marriage. The discipline just wasn’t “built in.”
Of course, you can say I was at fault, too, for not being more vocal and assertive about my needs. But honestly, if I stepped up to do more than my share of the household duties, I’d expect my partner to do the same (or even more since I’m the sole breadwinner.)
What stopped me short was the outdated conditioning from my childhood — that a good wife must do all household chores without complaint. And, a good wife must be nice, kind and forgiving. Above all, a good wife’s job is to preserve harmony at home at any cost (including avoiding conflicts by not speaking up for myself). Hence, I put myself into this domestic mental prison each time I entered an intimate relationship. I wanted to be the perfect wife and woman. And these idealized images from the past have made me captive.
If you are a husband or domestic partner, and the above scenario looks familiar, what would you do to step up on your side of the street? Have you often glossed over things that need to be done at home but not actually registered and taken action (because eventually they will get done by someone else)? Have you considered how that may make your wife or partner feel?
These are some of the important things to ponder if you wish to stay in a healthy long-term relationship. After all, when you get a new job, and your workplace requires you to adapt and learn new skills, you wouldn’t say, “Well, I can’t change my old way of doing things. That’s me. Why should I change for your sake?” To keep the job, you would make changes and upgrade your skills. Why would it be different when it comes to your marriage?
As for me, I’ve made a similar decision as Eugénie in the movie. Not to be a cook, but to refuse to be beholden.
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Can’t resist injecting a punchy Cantonese expression here, ha ha!
Thank you for writing this articulate commentary, Louisa. I agree with all the GenX cultural points, especially about the traditional gender roles. I appreciate the way you've shared the points for us to ponder.
Elevating the value of women in society is a collective social need, and each individual, regardless of gender, needs to participate and contribute. So often, gender equality is restricted to 'the glass ceiling, and 'the bamboo ceiling', but this is where women are being defined by the terms set by patriarchy, men's definition of success. Changing the narrative in policies and in the broad community sense is part of the equation. I've lost count of how man explanations I've had to do about the choices I've made!
I am impressed by your talent for bringing discussions to life and offering a comfortable lily pad to those seeking to explore cultural identity and life in general. So, as a belated IWD celebration with you, I celebrate however YOU wish to define your gifts and celebrate the ones I see you bring here and to friendship discussions like ours.
Can I confess something? It is these dynamics that makes marriage really unappealing to me. I’ve watched Asian couples live this and it is just not attractive to my freedom-loving self. Eventhough I share with some amusement the gender differences during Chinese New Year preparations, I know I will not be amused to live this for years. My mum used to cook for us after an exhausting day at work, and seeing how smashed I am after a day’s work ... I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to do the same. It’s kinda sad but not unexpected to see the same dynamics in countries out of Asia. Old habits die hard, I see.