A Woman in the Kitchen
9 AM. I have just woken up into our spacious kitchen, sparsely lit from one window. I put on the hot water and get ready to make breakfast. 10:30 PM. I have just returned home and am ready to prepare my lunch for the next day. As my mind gears up or winds down from the day, wandering to the food I want to prepare, my eyes perk at the light clutter of our kitchen.
An average sampling: a fork here, a spoon there, a used drinking glass, a spare Tupperware lid. Some crumbs on the countertop. A used fruit knife, an empty ice-tray, and a grocery receipt. Utensils in the sink. The coffee machine sitting in the middle of the counter space. A banana that has become the centerpiece of our kitchen table. An overflowing drying rack.
Instinctively, I begin cleaning the kitchen, though I do not know the mastermind behind this scattered genius. I put the ice-tray away in the freezer (why is it out?) and place the banana to the side of the table to make space for eating. I push the coffee machine against the wall to clear counter space for food prep. I give the fruit knife a swift rinse. I wipe the counter top with a quick-dry towel and dispose of the crumbs. I shuffle between different locales of the kitchen as if in a dance, countertop to sink to trash can. Ten minutes, and I am done. This is what I do every day, soon after I wake and soon after I return home. Sometimes, presented with the loose forks and drinking glasses, I cannot help but mutter a “what the hell” and wonder in confusion — but we have a dishwasher!
Let me clarify: we are not a dirty house. We are not even that messy. Just an odd thing here, an odd thing there. This semester, the kitchen has been a place of significant work for me, housework that has brought catharsis and meditation, but also frustration and self-consciousness. It is rewarding to put myself in work that transforms and maintains a place I call home, and it is meditative after hours of screen-time. At the same time, it is frustrating to consistently clean up someone else’s clutter with no change in their behavior or recognition of my efforts. Self-consciousness arises in moments when I become acutely aware of who I am and where I am: a woman in the kitchen.
The house has always been a site of labor obscured and unrecognized by its private, unwaged and gendered nature, and the assumption that it is a labor of love: love of the mother, love of the wife. Even when the labor is recognized and waged, it has yet to escape its gendered nature, as migrant women take up the duties of domestic attendance when the housewife has grown into a career woman, “liberated” with money to hand off her domestic duties. The kitchen produces different kinds of work, care, and sociality: it is where I nourish myself and friends, where I engage in the creative work — or necessarily chore, depending on the day — of cooking, and where I invite friends for tea or catch up with my housemates after a long day, to list a few.
Zeroing in on the work that the kitchen produces — or, the work that the kitchen affords, to import a design perspective — the kitchen affords mobility because of its spaciousness. The large countertop affords spread-out food prepping and the drying rack affords the holding of wet dishes. However, the spacious kitchen also affords the gathering of crumbs, the large countertop affords the accumulation of clutter, and the drying rack also affords the over-spilling of dishes — extra work that is created and afforded, and work that I have taken on.
The kitchen has been an important site of labor for me — even more so than last semester, when I lived in the same house with different friends — labor that is not only physical and manual, but also emotional. It is a site of work that I have had to explicitly grapple with over the past months. Sometimes, as I put cookies back in their cabinet and knives in their place, judgments toward my housemates arise — for which I feel guilty that I would even foment those negative feelings in the first place. Other times, I feel proud of the extra work I contribute to the house and for my housemates, feeling refreshed by a now-decluttered kitchen. Often, I feel both judgment and pride simultaneously.
Last week, after a frustrating albeit quick clean in the morning, I took a deep breath to remind myself: be compassionate. I said to myself, “Either do the housework with love, or accept the clutter and leave it alone. If I cannot fulfill either, then it is my responsibility to communicate.” Three options. In the self-consciousness of my judgments, this was a reminder to be kind. Perhaps this is a perfect site for practicing compassion, my mindfulness practice in action beyond just the meditation cushion. At the same time, in suggesting to do housework with love, I am made self-conscious of Silvia Federici’s critique. In Wages Against Housework, she critiques the common trope of seeing housework as the manifestation of a wife’s and a mother’s love: “They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.” Have I reduced myself to that? — just another woman in the kitchen, doing work out of “love?”
Yet Federici’s critique is not quite the resonance and condolence I seek. Her manifesto is powerful in its ability to make visible the unwaged and gendered domestic labor of women. In her demands, she makes legible the invisible labor and invites us “[to put] the whole capitalist system into question…[and] also the nuclear family itself.” I have neither husband nor children and it is mainly my female housemate’s clutter — rather than my male housemates’ — that I clean up. Sure, Federici asserts that “this fraud that goes under the name of love and marriage affects all of us, even if we are not married.” There is no reason to think that as a single college woman I am exempt from these gendered, internalized, responsibilities of the home. Federici continues, “because once housework was totally naturalised and sexualised, once it became a feminine attribute, all of us female are characterised by it.” However, all I can think of is, “But what about the female that I am serving?”
A poignant point of emotional grappling has been this: the indignant feeling that I am mostly servicing a woman. Listening to my housework frustrations, my female friends have asked: are you cleaning up after the guys? It is, in fact, the contrary. At times, it feels as if it would be easier were it the guys, for precisely because it would be so typical and blatant, I would feel more emboldened to say a kindly “fuck you”– these are my friends, after all. I would know the normative script and how to subvert it. At the same time, this gender dynamic also adds pride to my post-cleaning catharsis, pride from the fact that not only am I engaged and thriving in my academic, personal, and social life, I am also taking (extra) responsibility for my domestic life. Therefore, I am a fuller person and a fuller woman (or, a better woman), one who can “do it all,” a version of the corporate career woman (by no means my aspirations) who sits in the C-suite, brings home a hefty paycheck, all while being a loving mother and wife who, yes, still picks up the slack of housework (presumably when the cleaner is on her off-days). However, neither perspective challenges the gendered dynamics of the work. Caught between these two emotions, I almost forgot the obvious: regardless of whether it is a woman or a man behind the mess, it is me, the only other woman — and not the two other male housemates — who is putting the extra labor for the female housemate, and by cleaning the kitchen, extra labor for the entire house. I need not be servicing a man to service under the normative divisions of labor in the home. Despite this analysis, I also refuse to dismiss the great amount of agency I do indeed feel and possess during housework.
As I wipe away the food scraps from the knife or throw spoons into the dishwasher, careful not to touch the wet sauce, I try to suppress the sometimes nauseating feeling that is coupled with a judgment of gluttony. The tactile sight of food remnants evokes a mild discomfort, an image of waste and decomposition. I picture a barbaric and gluttonous feast consumed with selfishness, ending in a complete food coma that renders the eater unable to clean up after itself. I do not judge the glutton for laziness or an undisciplined work ethic. As I imagine the ravenous eater and all its unwashed forks, I also imagine it gluttonous for something beyond food —eating away at my time.
How much time does it take? Not a lot. A good deal of the housework cleanup is merely in putting things away. After all, we own a dishwasher. Yet it is precisely this point that adds to the frustration — we have a dishwasher! It’s supposed to reduce your work so you don’t leave it behind for someone else (me) to pick up! The loose fork signifies not just her refusal to wash, but refusal to walk it to the dishwasher. Yet the dishwasher automates the washing only, not the other analog, but equally necessary, processes — scraping, loading, unloading. In many ways, technology obscures the analog work that is needed to afford its proper functioning.
In The “Industrial Revolution” In the Home: Household Technology and Societal Change in the 20th Century, Ruth Cowan described how the rise of household technologies reveals a breakdown in the assumption that technology increases efficiency and reduces work. Certainly, there have been important changes: Ladies’ Home Journal “estimated that kitchen cleaning was reduced by one-half when coal stoves were eliminated” and replaced by gas stoves. However, that has not created a net decrease in a housewife’s work. With the industrialization of the home, “new jobs were created for which new skills were required; these jobs were not physically burdensome, but they have taken up as much time as the jobs they had replaced,” especially in the context of structural, social changes such as the disappearance of extended family members — daughters, aunts, grandparents — in the home, and the shrinking to the nuclear family or the professional individual who takes on all the work of the house. “[The] mechanization of the household meant that time expended on some jobs decreased, but also that new jobs were substituted, and in some cases — notable laundering — time expenditures of old jobs increased because of higher standards,” such as new standards of cleanliness and motherhood, among others.
The housewife thus became an unspecialized worker, responsible for managing machines and using them to serve her children and husband. “Instead of desensitizing the emotions that were connected with household work, the industrial revolution in the home seems to have heightened the emotional context of the work.” (Cowan) In my case, I am not preoccupied with being a loving mother or wife, but with being a good housemate, a good friend, and a compassionate human being.
Even when not accounting for higher standards, these technologies still require work despite its partial automation. They are, at the end of the day, not robots: the dishwasher will not fetch, scrape, load, unload, sort dishes back in its cabinets at its own accord. In a post-work society thanks to large-scale industrial automation, what kind of automation will or will not follow in the home? Will automation still reveal gaps in the labor of machines, gaps that are filled manually by people — by women? In The End of Work, Jeremy Rifkin examines the “technological innovations and market-directed forces that are moving us to the edge of a near workerless world.” How might this apply to unwaged, domestic work, and the technological innovations of the home? The home — unwaged, private, gendered — has never quite logically followed market-directed forces to begin with. Facing the technological displacement that is predicted to happen in industry, as machines displace factory workers and artificial intelligence displaces middle management, what about housework and housewives? “In the past, when new technologies have replaced workers in a given sector,” Rifkin asserts, “new sectors have always emerged to absorb the displaced laborers.” As we see from Cowan, the industrial revolution of the home saw the manual labor of housewives replaced by their new role: managers of machines. Yet, the subject position and expectations of the housewife remained if not heightened. The end of work should not merely concern itself with the end of work thanks to automation in industry, but with the imaginative possibilities beyond work, waged or unwaged, in and outside of the home. As Rifkin noted, throughout the modern era, “people’s worth has been measured by the market value of their labor.” As we near the end of work, we need “new ways of defining human worth and social relationships.” Regarding the feminine labor of housework, Kathi Weeks, in The Problem With Work, argues that not only must we reduce the hours at work but also challenge “the assumption that social reproduction should be a private, and largely female responsibility.” The mere growth of automated labor will not challenge this without our intentional and radical efforts.
7 PM, Sunday night. I have just returned home from Thanksgiving break, exhausted after a gruesome six hours on a bus from New York. The kitchen is a mess. At that moment, I wonder if this is how my mother always felt after returning home from a business trip: by her standards, our home a mess. I simultaneously feel a gush of empathy (“this is how she felt!”) and wariness (“am I becoming my mother?!”). A flutter of frustration and an itch for decluttering arise. I begin clearing and cleaning. My housemate kindly asks me to not worry about it, knowing I have had a long day of travel. But I continued nevertheless, in large part grateful there is something physical to do after an extremely sedentary day. As I put things away, my frustration towards the long bus ride and the housework dissipates through its doing.
At the end of the day, I hold a lot of loving appreciation for my housemates and the house we share. Am I dismissing everything as love? In writing this over the last two weeks, my own labor has been made even more explicit to myself. I can choose to refuse it, but I have not. In the meantime, I have chosen to embrace it, for both its frustration and meditation.
Works Cited
Cowan, Ruth. “The ‘Industrial Revolution’ In the Home: Household Technology and Societal Change in the 20th Century.” Technology and Culture, 17.1 (1976): p1–23. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3103251/
Federici, Silvia. Wages Against Housework. Power of Women Collective and Falling Wall Press, 1975. Digital.
Rifkin, Jeremy. The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1995.
Weeks, Kathi. The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press Book. 2011.
This piece was originally written in December 2018 for End of Work in the United States, an Anthropology course taught by Alex Blanchette at Tufts University. It has been edited for Medium.
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