How 'domestic democracy' became so popular Reese Witherspoon bought in

While women have gained ground on many fronts – we are more likely to be represented in senior leadership in public life and the private sector, the gender pay gap has narrowed, but not yet closed – on the home-front, little has changed since the dawn of the push for equality. When it comes to the so-called “chore-wars” and the related issue of  what is know known as “domestic democracy”, we are stuck.

According to a new report released earlier this year by Men Care, a fatherhood campaign working towards childcare parity in 45 nations, the unpaid care gap between men and women, which sees women carrying more of the burden in every country, has decreased by a measly seven minutes over the last 15 years. In Australia, women are doing, on average, seven more hours of housework a week than men, according to the latest HILDA survey.

There's a push on to divide housework more democratically and it is growing in momentum.

Women are letting it be known that they’re not happy.

A number of recent essays on the topic, including the New York Times’ What ‘Good’ Dads Get Away With and Harper’s Bazaar’s Women Aren’t Nags, We’re Just Fed Up, have gone viral. Numerous new books have been published in the last year alone, with more to come, including Gemma Hartley’s Fed Up: Emotional Labour, Women and the Way Forward, Darcy Lockman’s All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership, Megan K. Stack’s Women’s Work, and Sally Howard’s Home Stretch: Why It’s Time to Come Clean About Who Does the Dishes.

Here in Australia, Annabel Crabb’s Quarterly Essay, Men at Work, an update to her best-selling book The Wife Drought, was published earlier this year to much fanfare.

All this signals that we are in the midst of a new reckoning on the home front. The first coincided with second-wave feminism and the wages for housework movement. The second with the publication of US sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s ground-breaking book, The Second Shift, which gave women a name for something they had long experienced but couldn’t quite articulate – that they had gained entry into the world of work in large numbers, but had not ceded any responsibility at home.

Today, we have buzzy new concepts like “emotional labour” and “the mental load”, as the debate has grown to not only encapsulate who does the dishes, but who dedicates mental energy to anticipating and following through on the numerous tasks required to keep the average household, and family, afloat.

The central question occupying the mind of this new wave of writers, academics and activists is: why haven’t we shifted this?

Enter Eve Rodsky. Her new book, Fair Play, is being heavily promoted by Reese Witherspoon’s Sunshine Media.

In the US, Rodsky has been drawing so much attention for putting an issue many struggle privately with into the pop cultural-imagination she is being heralded as “The Marie Kondo of Domestic Democracy”. But unlike her many contemporaries, she is less interested in diagnosing the problem than in offering solutions.

A Harvard-educated lawyer who has a background in organisational management, she has translated the personal “Shit I Do” spreadsheet that she once sent to her own husband in a fit of domestic rage into “a system for domestic rebalance”.

She has essentially gamified the average family household, developing cards to represent the dozens of household chores and responsibilities that constitute all of the “invisible” work that goes into running a home. She instructs readers to deal those cards out between domestic partners, who each have to oversee the “CPE” – conceiving, planning, and execution – of each card.

Confession, when I first heard about this I was highly suspicious.

Would a “gimmick” like this work? Would it work across a diverse range of households, not just middle-class professional homes? And most importantly, did the underlying theory put the onus entirely on individual couples to address the issue, without recognising the downward pressure a lack of family friendly workplace and public policies (particularly aimed at fathers) place on individual families?

Then I received my review copy of Fair Play and had the pleasure of an hour-long chat with Rodsky over the phone from her home in Los Angeles. I was a convert. I had found my Diana Barry of domestic democracy.

Yes, we both have an endearing, if slightly impractical, habit of carrying around binders of academic articles, book chapters and essays on the topic of domestic democracy, obsessively turning to them for insight and answers.

But it soon became clear to me that Rodsky is a deep thinker who understands the complexity of the issues. So, while the card game might not be for everyone, the messages in the book do have broader appeal.

“We’ missed something in the women’s movement. We missed this idea of the value of women’s time compared to men’s time,” she told me. After interviewing hundreds of people, Rodsky started to understand that society views men’s time as finite, like diamonds, and women’s time as infinite, like sand. “So, to me that’s the reckoning we’re in”, Rodsky added. “This idea that all time is created equal.”

Fair point, but it was when talk turned to broader questions of social justice and how we as a society value (or don’t value) care, that Rodsky truly won me over.

“Obviously part of what I address in the book is a two player game, but this needs to be a three and even a four player game, with our employers and our government coming to the table,” said Rodsky, who stresses that outsourcing is not the true solution to inequality in the home.

“I am sick of people talking about outsourcing without talking about what we are really talking about, which is adding cards to another woman’s deck,” said Rodsky. “What happens if a woman is holding more than 100 cards, but we don’t value the care that they do and don’t pay domestic workers their fair share.”

Rodsky not only has a practical solution that might work for some homes, but she is asking important questions we all should engage with. So yes, I suppose the comparison to Kondo is fair, if we think of Rodsky’s message as, “The Life Changing Magic of Valuing Care.” But in this case, I dearly hope it’s not a passing fad.

Kristine Ziwica tweets @KZiwica