I hate to vacuum.

I checked with my mom on this one, and, apparently, I’ve hated vacuuming since well before I could walk.

Alas, some of the people who live in my home routinely put bits of whatever they find on the floors into their little mouths, so vacuuming is a necessary evil. I still try to avoid it as much as possible. Unfortunately, so does everyone else in my household, so it usually falls to me anyway.

Women may be shattering glass ceilings at work and in politics, but it seems like we’re pretty much where we’ve always been at home. A 2007 study conducted by researchers at North Carolina State University and George Mason University found that, after marriage, women take on a larger proportion of household chores than their spouses do. In fact, overall, men averaged 9.41 hours’ housework per week to 21.13 hours of housework by women, and the higher the marriage rate in the 28 countries studied, the higher the proportion of housework carried out by women. Read the rest of this entry »

When I first saw the ad, in a post over at Get in the Car!, I thought it was a cool, retro snapshot. And then I took a closer look.

(You can, too. Just click on it.)

There’s something Rob and Laura Petrie about the whole thing, but the pots on the stove look kind of like the modern-day, hard-anodized cookware I love. The husband’s got that “casual Friday” thing going on, and the wife looks like maybe she just got home from work, in spite of the apron. The backsplash is kind of 1970s, but there’s no avocado- or goldenrod-enameled appliances in sight.

And yet… the ad pretty much flies in the face of everything a generation of women fought for. The journal entry clinches it: “Tuesday. Today I found the perfect paper towel! Viva is so soft! I used it to wipe sauce of Tom’s chin, but I couldn’t wipe the smile off his face. Is Viva really paper?”

Please pass the soma! As if we working moms weren’t stressed out enough, now there’s this resurgence of 1950s ideals to contend with. Read the rest of this entry »