Starting from the time human beings started opting for a settled life after the nomadic phase, women were relegated as nurturers whose task it was to look after the home and the hearth. Over the various stages of human evolution in terms of social practices, women started to venture out of their homes when necessitated by the absence of men away from homes. In the process, there have been cultural and social stereotypes for both men and women in society with the current status being that women today, are breaking glass ceilings and are breaking the confines of the four walls of their homes and the social bindings placed upon them. But what has not changed yet is that a major portion of housework in every household is still seen as the domain and responsibility of women. From the all important aspect of child care to cooking to washing and ironing clothes, cleaning up the house to mopping the floors, it is women who will also have to wake earlier to start the day with the prayer for the household. Yes, men are slowly beginning to assist women but the stigma attached to men doing household work is such that while growing up, boys are told it is a girl’s job to sweep or to mop up the floor. The irony is that mothers will also say the same thing to their sons and so, end up passing on the burden of housework to her daughter.
While earlier, women were only confined to looking after households and at the most, working in the fields, for the woman of today who has to keep up with the pace of life with a job, there is the added burden of household work that she has to shoulder. In doing so, there are unaccounted for impacts on the health and physiology of working women especially: they would have to sleep lesser hours to begin and finish their household chores and go to work. Once they come back from work, they cannot rest for they would have to go into the gendered mode of serving their husband and their families yet again. In an earlier era, women often ate after the male family members had their meals and it was common to have the best servings reserved for men thus depriving women of adequate nutrition. Subtle changes in the social sphere that has reflected in male and female members of a family eating together can be seen but in the majority of homes, it is still taboo to eat from the same common serving bowl. Women regardless of whether they have jobs outside of their household work are thus, caught on the back foot in terms of inadequate nutrition and rest on one hand and consistent work on the other. The impact of this imbalance can be seen from a cursory look at women’s heath status with more and women falling prey to various health ailments.
The gendered look at housework being the sole domain of the women members is so strong that the Supreme Court recently noted that daughters in law are not to be seen or used as maids in the homes. But women in the country and in the state are not alone in terms of shouldering the major share of the household burden, going by study reports emerging from Australia and the United Kingdom. According to the Australian Institute of Family Studies, women with children under five years spend about 41 hours a week on childcare, 32 hours a week on housework and 14 hours in paid work. In the UK, Eight out of 10 married women still do more housework than their husbands, according to a study by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), a UK-based think-tank. The study pointed out that couples are still more likely to split into traditional `breadwinner` and `homemaker` roles than they are fully to share employment, childcare and domestic duties. The statistics showed that eight out of 10 married women are said to do seven or more hours of housework a week – the equivalent of an entire working day with a third or 30 per cent doing between seven and 12 hours while 45 per cent do at least 13 hours. Going by social practices and trends, the writing on the wall is that even as women break glass ceilings, they are yet to break free from the bindings of housework and will have to wait for the men to break the glass ceiling of household work.