I’m curious as to what you feel a reasonable set of responsiblities would be for a housewife.
Assume a 1500 square foot dwelling, no children, no pregnancy, two cars, and a socio-economic status firmly in the “middle”.
I’ll put a list of duties below to jump start your thinking on this, but by all means feel free to respond without addressing the below list of duties, which I do not neccesarily feel are all the responsibility of any particular person.
Hot breakfast in the morning on weekdays?
—Weekends?
Preparing lunch daily?
Hot dinner in the evening?
Vacuuming?
Sweeping?
Mopping?
Cleaning bathrooms?
Taking out the trash?
Mowing the lawn?
Handling family finances?
Planning vacations?
Sending out greeting cards to friends & family?
Cooking for social evenings with friends over?
If this were the 1950’s, I’d say everything except mowing the lawn, taking out the trash, and handling family finances.
Otherwise, the duties should be split as evenly as possible. An exception would be cooking. If one or the other can’t cook, the other should.
Why would the duties be split evenly if one partner is at home all day and the other one spends 40 - 60 hours a week earning the paycheck they both live on?
Why doesn’t the spouse work?
The housewife is very particular about what day job she’d take, and the local economy is depressed.
The Highwayman works full time and I look after the house. We share the household with his immediate family though so I hardly do everything (although it sure seems like I do sometimes). I look after pretty much everything but everyone else’s bedroom, the livingroom, diningroom and bathroom.
I often cook for the whole family but sometimes just for us, depending. Neither of us are much for breakfast so that is a non-issue. I handle the billpaying and budgeting (sometimes successfully).
I am rather atypical (even amongst housewives, who are somewhat atypical now) so probably my answer isn’t the best.
Of course, if your wife is working full time as well, you should split it evenly.
OH, and I prefer the term, “Domestic Goddess”.
Well, if there are no children, it shouldn’t be too hard to keep the place clean.
Again, whoever is the better cook should handle food-related duties. Outdoor work can be done together.
Ditto for social activites.
What does the wife think?
I acknowledge your question, but I’m declining to answer out of a desire to protect my personal privacy here, and to preserve the nature of this thread as an opinion poll rather focused on a stereotyped scenario rather than a particular circumstance.
No offense, and thanks for participating in my thread, Mr. Blue Sky.
No offense taken.
My question for people who say that the duties should be split evenly is whether or not they consider ‘breadwinning’ (going and doing the work that pays the bills that keeps them in the house, feeds them, etc) part of the ‘duties’ or not.
I retract my previous comment about splitting the duties (except for the “whoever is better” part).
You’d be surprised at the number of people who don’t think working to pay the bills is a part of keeping up the household. The only reason I can figure is that working for a living is supposed to be a given and is an entirely separate thing from the physical upkeep of a house/apartment/etc.
The couple would have to sit down and talk it out. I can see the potential for things to get really ugly.
Why wouldn’t she take out the trash? 
::d&r::
I work outside the house and my husband works part time, from home. He has taken on the primary domestic duty role - but before when we worked outside the house a lot of this stuff just didn’t get done enough because neither of us did it, so it’s sort of optional as far as I’m concerned, though I’m happy he’s doing it.
He vacuums, usually cleans the bathroom though I do sometimes, makes the bed, does the laundry, does dishes most days, prepares my lunch from leftovers most days, sweeps and mops, and if he’s home takes out the garbage, if not I take it out. We split cooking dinner though I do it quite a lot. If I am around when he is doing dishes I dry and put away. On weekends we share kitchen duty pretty evenly - both cooking and cleaning. Sometimes I dust but not as much as I should. We both pick up after ourselves in a general way.
He does take my significantly greater earning power into account - but I feel like I need to pull my weight as much as possible around the house. I’m not a guest here! But on the other hand he has a lot more freedom of choice about when he works and where he works (often in a cafe with wireless access) so we do more or less balance the benefits out, I think.
My advice would be that if the breadwinner spends 40 hours working, the non-breadwinner is liable for up to 40 hours a week of chores of whatever description. If the breadwinner works 20, the chore-doer is liable for 20.
If the chore-doer can get everything done in less time, they need to consider what else might need doing; I’m not encouraging busy-work, but there are people who’d consider sweeping the kitchen floor more than a once a year to be overkill. Taking that approach to getting one’s chore-time below 40/week would be cheating.
If both partners work 20 (or 40), then the chores ought be evenly divided as well, admitting that as both folks work more, the number of person-hours available for choring goes down; daily dusting of the upper bookshelves may have to triaged off the to-do list.
As to which chores are “reserved” for males or females, I don’t buy that at all, except by expertise. e.g. I can plumb, my wife can’t (although she’s learning). I’m taller, so I dust the tall shelves while she vacuums under the low tables. etc.
As catsix pointed out, I have a real problem with people who expect to both not work outside the home and to split the household chores. Obviously, childrearing is a whole 'nuther kettle of fish, involving vast efforts by the home-person, few of which are obvious to the outside-the-home breadwinner on a daily basis.
Which is weird because the whole reason a roof is under your head is because bills are being paid, and that is hard work. It’s not like anybody is demanding that the housewife, by the OP’s description, bust her ass day in and day out. General upkeep takes just a fraction of a day, compared to someone who is out all day working. I agree with catsix.
And this isn’t a Man Vs. Woman thing either. If the roles were reversed (Working woman and stay at home man), then the man I feel could spare a fraction of the day to upkeep the house and things.
I had these friends. The wife was a teacher of mentally challenged students. The husband worked at TV station. Her work was both mentally and physically draining. His was borderline mentally challenging. He was expected to do a lot of the household chores based on this.
It was a petty argument. Of course, the fact that she was a controlling bitch and he was whipped had a lot to do with it.
Again, the couple is going to have discuss this.
I’m a “housewife,” although we have a toddler, so I’m usually called a stay-at-home-mother.
Anyway, my duties are:
All shopping (grocery, clothing, homewares and any other fiddly stuff)
All cleaning (this gets done every day so that the house is clean when my husband gets home…dishes done, vacuuming, dusting, bathroom, etc.)
All laundry
Buying gifts, sending cards, social scheduling
Paying bills, managing finances
All childcare, excluding the occasional diaper my husband might take care of when he’s
home
All cooking & doing dishes (I don’t make breakfast, though, and lunches are usually leftovers from the previous night…I do make sure there’s something available)
Doctor scheduling
Household fix-it projects
Car Maintenance (which consists of taking it somewhere, since my husband is as equally clueless as I am about doing any actual car work)
Etc.
Basically, my husband goes to work, mows the lawn, and takes out the trash. I have offered to do these last two things, but he’s holding out on them because he thinks they’re “guy” jobs and says he’d feel bad if I did them. Our arrangement works out great for us because when he gets home for work & on weekends, all we have to do is play and have fun (well, minus the 10 minutes it takes him to mow our piddly lawn). I don’t have any trouble getting my stuff done and still have time to do stuff like have coffee with my other friends who are SAHMs and do a little playing on the SDMB.
Yeah, most assuredly so. My best friend is the chief breadwinner of her family. Her husband does a lot of the household stuff (even though she works from home - and he does less now that he is working full time as well).
I work 50+ hours a week to brink home the money, do all the yard work, do all the home finances and complete any DIY home fixing that becomes necessary from time to time. My wife, the stay-at-home mommy and love of my life, does everything else.
Now that all but the third kid is in school, she may eventually decide to go back to work. If she does, that balance is sure to change, but this is what we jointly think is fair considering the current circumstances.
Jammer
Currently I work 50+ hours/ week and my husband works 40. He’s the major breadwinner, though, my job is just more demanding in terms of time. If I didn’t work, I would feel obligated to put pretty darn close to 40 hours into running the household. That would include shopping frugally to stretch our budget. I’d rather work the 50+ at my job, honestly. If I did stay at home, it would include doing all the listed items, except mowing the lawn (included in homeowners dues). I also would really appreciate him taking out the major trash, b/c I am paranoid about bees. And he would probably cook some when we had company, b/c some of his southwestern specialities are to die for.