Is this an identity, a self-created fate, or a default position when men in our lives do less than their share? Long into later life, we keep on pushing ourselves to take care of dwellings, animals, and people of all ages in our vicinity. Additionally, many of us try to contribute to the neighborhood or community around us.


I live with a man who truly doesn’t see the dirt behind the hinges of our toilet seat. Indeed, many of the facets of what I regard as a “clean” bathroom are outside of his perceptual sphere and well beyond the circle of his concern. When he proudly announces that he has cleaned the bathroom, I know without a doubt that there will be plenty left to do in there prior to our guests’ arrival.
Women judge each other on levels of tidiness. How you take care of your home becomes part of what friends and family know about you. Cleaning up for company shows respect for your visitors and pride in the place you reside.  As a seven year old, one of my specialties was making the bathroom faucets shine, along with removing splattered toothpaste from the mirror prior to my grandmother’s arrival. My mother and her two daughters worked feverishly while her husband and two sons watched television. Self-esteem gets formed around praise for small victories like these, the gleaming faucet and the spotless mirror, moments of female complicity in feigning an orderly household.


My brothers didn’t seek such praise, nor did they participate in the ritual except to get their underwear off the floor and into the laundry basket. Occasionally, they were forced to turn on the vacuum cleaner. I did teach my son how to clean a toilet when he was a teenager; now as the father of three girls he is instilling high expectations in them about male parity in attending to the details of a household. It is possible that things are shifting on a societal level, ever so slowly, but it seems he is still considered exemplary in his cohort of men.


For generations, a woman and her home have comprised a joined identity, a single persona. Within this private sphere, a woman expresses not only her degree of tidiness, but her relationship with food and its preparation, her accumulation and arrangement of things – furniture, photographs, books, piles of magazines and papers – and the relative primacy of people, animals, and plants.  I once met a 69 year old woman who could no longer lift a vacuum cleaner, so weakened had she become by metastatic cancer. Her daughter would come over and hurriedly vacuum around the house, leaving crumbs under the kitchen table:


It’s not that men haven’t cared about the contents of their dwellings or these dimensions of life, but their personal investment has tended to be lighter, not as much a reflection of their identity as a statement about their current mood and level of need. A woman’s home has represented who she is and who she has been; a man’s home has shown how he is living at the moment, whether he has someone in his life who cares about how clean his tub is or if the garbage has been taken out promptly enough. He may or may not notice the crumbs.

Where things can get complicated is in times of need – in later life or earlier when difficulties strike. Women accustomed to being in charge of a household and used to being givers to those around them tend to have trouble seeking and accepting help when they can’t do it all any more. Appearing less than completely competent and able to hold things together feels like a defeat or a failure. Yet there are times when it is foolish to put autonomy and pride above the good sense of accepting a helping hand.
Maggie Kuhn, the founder of the Gray Panthers, used to go around saying, “Interdependence is the truth of our lives.” We are never truly independent, she argued, as we depend on others when we are born, throughout childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, midlife and old age. It’s just that we like to assure ourselves that we are self-sufficient, that we have lived up to the dominant American ideal of accomplishment – the ability to fend for ourselves.


As a social worker assisting elders for the last thirty-five years, I have found that most of the women who were children during the Depression, as well as their post-war daughters, staunchly resist having a stranger come into the home to help out. “I’m fine, honey. Thanks so much, but I can take care of myself.” This is the refrain these women have given me, despite having had a stroke, heart attack, or arthritis so severe they can hardly retrieve a fork from the floor. But when I have offered to find the same kind of help for men in similar predicaments, I have almost always met with ready acceptance. “A woman to help me out here? Wonderful.


The problem is that a woman paid to come into the home will clean the sink as she sees fit, arrange the dishes in the dishwasher according to her own method, and generally won’t strain her back to reach the far corners with the cobwebs.  That’s the way it is – things just won’t get done the right way. This is infuriating to women who have had control over these facets of their existence for their whole adult lives. Meanwhile, the men don’t even mention such irregularities, only that they’re glad the sink got cleaned, the dishwasher was run, and vacuuming occurred.


It must be noted that I have made assumptions based on gender and social class that leave plenty of exceptions to what I have said. Tidy men who live with a messy partner of any gender may feel their identity similarly upended by disability or frailty. Also, financial circumstances matter greatly, as these situations differ for women on both ends of the economic bell curve. Those who grew up with nannies or maids employed in the household, or accustomed lifelong to having a housecleaner once a week for a few hours, may wrestle mostly with being unable to afford such help. Those enduring poverty may not have had the funds for what it takes to keep a home in good working order in the first place,


 and thus shame may prevail over their desire to improve their living conditions.
The variations are abundant, but the theme holds. We can usually delight an older man by offering him a woman to clean his house, but we should anticipate at least some complexity in offering the same to a woman. A daughter frustrated by her mother’s insistence on remaining “independent” long into her 80’s might want to consider the force of deep-seated identity. What it means to be a woman may be at stake.