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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2025
Geraldine and Bernard le Fecht, a French couple who took part in a research study of how men and women arbitrate the doing of domestic laundry, are firmly committed to the idea that everything in the home must be shared equally. They’re so convinced of this that they decide to do their laundry separately. The problem for Geraldine and Bernard is that they don't each generate enough dirty clothes to fill the machine, so they reluctantly agree that they will have to fill it together. They continue to store their dirty laundry separately, though, and they arrange to meet in front of the machine to put it in, and again to take it out and bear it off to be dried. Naturally, the ironing is also done separately which means that none of the shared household linen ever gets ironed. Whether it was the pain caused by negotiating these delicate arrangements or some other incompatibility, by the second interview in the study Geraldine and Bernard had agreed to live apart.
Reading this account, and the others in Jean- Claude Kaufmann's Dirty Linen: Couples as Seen Through Their Laundry, delivers a strong sense of just how heartfelt and time- consuming these conversations about housework can be. This chapter considers some of the modern evidence relating to the theme of gender that is so firmly embedded in the history of housework. It introduces us to a second theme that is equally firmly embedded and much discussed in later chapters of this book but much less evident today: germs. A collision of these two themes occurred in the COVID-19 pandemic that began in China in December 2019. Early signs in the first British lockdown suggested that this virus might actually be accomplishing what numerous campaigns had failed to, namely reducing women's share of housework: ‘An unexpected upside to lockdown’, The Guardian newspaper called it: ‘experts suggest that this could lead to a lasting change in gender norms’. Both The Guardian and the experts were wrong: it didn’t, and six months later the newspaper had to admit that the novelty of doing more housework had already waned for men.
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