Whose Job Is This, Anyway?

Whi

le other moms scramble to get house and home in order for fall — out with the beach towels and flip-flops, in with the book bags and blankets — housekeeping is no sweat for Janet Nelson, 35. And though the mother of two works as a public relations manager for the Maid Services Company, the second largest maid service franchise in the nation, she doesn't have a maid. Instead, she has her husband Bob. With Janet telecommuting three days a week from her home in rural Iowa and traveling to Omaha, Neb., the other two days, Bob stays home to care for the kids and do the cleaning. For the past eight years he has scrubbed the floors, done the laundry and cooked dinner. "So many of my friends complain about their husbands not contributing to housework," Janet says. "But my job is to work five days a week, and Bob does just about everything else. I'm very spoiled."

Janet wasn't always so lucky. When she and Bob escaped the big city in 1996 in order to raise their children in the country, they agreed that one of them should stay home. Because her firm allowed telecommuting, Janet opted to keep her job. At first Bob had to be coaxed into housework. Janet would make him lists of chores, but that didn't go over well. "I felt like a dictator. Bob would tense up every time I told him what to do," she recalls. "He would see me around the house and say, 'Why can't you do more?' It took a while for him to realize I was actually working." Eventually, they decided Bob would compose his own to-do list, and Janet would refrain from criticizing. "Now he says I'm the messy one!" she says, laughing.

While the Nelson household arrangement is unusual, it is nonetheless a sign of the times. Slowly, reluctantly, housework, the grubby stepchild of family responsibilities, is being adopted by men and shared a bit more equitably by couples. "There are few households in which [the division of labor] can be called equal," says Susan Strasser, author of Never Done: A History of American Housework, "but it's certainly the case that men do much, much more housework than they did 30 years ago." New data from the Labor Department show that among married men and women ages 25 to 54, women who work full time spend an hour and a half a day on household chores, in contrast to just 45 minutes daily for working men. Still, viewed historically, this isn't so bad. Dads are actually spending about 50% more time on housework than they did 25 years ago, according to surveys by the Families & Work Institute. Men seem to be picking up, literally, where women are leaving off: the same study found that women are putting in less time. (This survey, which differed in several respects from the larger Labor Department study, calculated men's contribution as two hours a day, against women's three.)

"For men, there are new pressures given the long hours of working couples," says sociologist Arlie Hochschild, whose groundbreaking 1989 book, The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home, found that through the mid-'80s, women still did the lion's share of cleaning. "I think the ideal of shared housework has caught on."

This revolution-in-the-making has been nudged along by many a bitter skirmish. A survey by the Soap and Detergent Association found that 46% of couples who live together argue about cleaning. Kids add to the friction: 55% of couples with kids fight over housework, vs. 38% of those without. According to Howard Markman, of the University of Denver's Center for Marital and Family Studies, housework is the No. 3 source of marital conflict after money and children.