When I was working on my master’s thesis on Ayn Rand, I finally bought a copy of The Feminine Mystique. I figured if I was going to write feminist criticism, I had better have a sense of the history of the movement. It was interesting to contrast Friedan, who was trying to throw off the yoke of domesticity, with Rand, who was trying to throw off the yoke of Communism. After reading Rand’s books and her biography (by her former disciple, Barbara Branden), I doubt Rand ever gave five minutes’ thought to whether she was embodying her proper social role. She was too busy escaping from Russia, bossing around her pretty househusband, and building her empire to worry if her toilets were clean.

One part of The Feminine Mystique did resonate with me, though. I had already given up on housekeeping as a vocation. My mother was always trying to get me interested in cooking or cleaning, and I would have none of it. Housekeeping bored and horrified me. I remember snapping at my mother, “When I grow up I’m never going to clean my house! I’m going to have a housecleaner!” She snapped back, “Well, then, you had better plan on marrying a very rich man.”

When I grew up, I discovered you don’t have to marry rich to have a house cleaner; even a single woman (gasp!) in possession of a moderate income could afford it. So for years I muddled along letting someone else clean every two weeks, and occasionally rinsing a dish or tidying a room in between time. This worked very well when I was single, but add a husband, a house, a dog, and a kid to the equation, and it quickly became apparent that something more was called for. Unfortunately, although you don’t have to be rich to have someone else scrub your toilets, you do have to be very rich indeed to have someone else pick up after you on a daily basis, do all your shopping, schedule all your appointments, and maintain your house and cars.

Enter Flylady.

Flylady is a web site devoted to housekeeping. It is somewhat anti-feminist in that it is targeted to the female of the house, thereby appearing to assume that housekeeping is the woman’s responsibility, and that the woman is a stay-at-home mom. (The web site says that the system is for anyone who needs it–men, singles, working women, etc.–but the e-mails and products are definitely SAHM-skewed, with large doses of vague spirituality and self-help.) Yet Flylady is pro-feminist, too, because it’s not obsessed with domestic perfection. The goal is to keep the house running smoothly to save your own sanity and to make you more efficient, not for the sake of outward appearances. Flylady is essentially project management techniques applied to the home.

I have been thinking about Flylady and feminism ever since I read about the study claiming that women who work still shoulder a disproportionate amount of the house and child care. At our house, Husband takes his fair share of responsibility for the dog and baby, but I’m still in charge of the house, even though he does his fair share of work.

Is it a setback for feminism that women are still primarily responsible for house and child care, even when they work outside the home? Probably.

Am I a traitor to feminism if I, in my own home, am primarily responsible for the house? Are you a traitor if you’re a stay-at-home mom, or if you’re a working mom who is the primary caregiver for your child? I don’t think so. I don’t think I’m obligated to live my life out of the Feminist Political Correctness Manifesto; there has to be more than one valid way of running a house or raising a child.

But still…if we all fall in with traditional roles, is it really our choice or are we just internalizing what we’ve been taught? Bitch Ph.D. has a provocative (in a good way) post on this topic. She notes that “the person whose job it is to monitor [the equality of labor division] is the person who has the least power. And in most cases, that’s the woman.”

Is management less powerful than labor?

Edited to add: I just saw Judith Warner’s column in the New York Times, dealing with some of the same themes (requires subscription).