-OpEd-
HAMBURG — They shouldn’t even exist anymore: Women who clean aggressively. Who demonstratively and irritably wipe the dining tables with rags, who throw dirty laundry into baskets in a huff or put away dishes in an excessively rough manner. Who convey with all their gestures: “Nobody else is doing it!” And who, when someone offers them help, just hisses “It’s okay” or “I’ll do it.”
It’s as if there were no such thing as equality, as if there weren’t already men at their side doing the laundry, cooking, vacuuming, changing diapers and toiling just as hard as their partners.
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It seems as if there is something deep inside these women that whips them mercilessly. Someone who sits firmly in their heads and issues orders from there. A voice that wants nothing to do with all the social progress, the fair division of labor and modern self-images. An authority that, for once, has nothing to do with unjust structures, the marriage splitting system, staff shortages in childcare centers and lazy men.
It has everything to do with women themselves and their inner housewife. Because of her, they repeatedly fall into awkward poses of self-sacrifice and allow themselves to be driven to angry exhaustion.
Millennia upon millennia of oppressive patriarchy have created this imprint. Now that the compulsion to be an external housewife has been overcome, the inner housewife lives on all the more relentlessly in many women. Especially in stressful situations, she erupts with full force.
Whenever daycare centers close, children fall ill, birthdays, Christmas, Easter, holidays or school enrollments are just around the corner or mothers-in-law come to visit, in general: when visitors arrive, she speaks up to issue ice-cold commands: “You alone must take care of everything now!” The inner housewife then demands with a vehemence that, to all appearances, drowns out any presence.
Nothing is okay
In any case, it no longer has anything to do with equality when women, who are otherwise not exactly lacking in assertiveness or clear communication, suddenly start to take on tasks that they don’t want to do, as if remote-controlled.
They then hear themselves saying phrases like “I’ll do it”, “I’ll get the children”, “I’ll stay at home“, “It’s okay” in an almost automated way. Even though nothing is okay.
Because in reality, these women have no capacity, because they have to work, because deadlines, colleagues or conferences are waiting for them. Because they haven’t eaten anything all day, still haven’t managed to take a shower because they wanted to exercise or take a quick breath.
But maybe it’s also because they simply don’t feel like working through things in every free minute. Instead, they prefer to have a drink, just like the men in the beer adverts, who don’t go on manically as soon as they finish work.
Perfidious clichés
Which is why the women regret their hasty offers straight afterwards. “Of course I did it again,” “Of course I stayed at home,” “Of course I took the children,” they rant in angry voicemails to friends who feel the same way. Who, like them, regularly buckle when the power within them takes over.
This grotesque, misogynistic creature is up to mischief, as if all the perfidious clichés had melted into one. Evil stepmothers, begrudging sisters, perfectionist overmothers, fake girlfriends who never were — many-headed and nasty, they join in the chorus of dogged inner housewifery.
How do you silence this tireless, toxic figure once and for all?
“It’s all your job!” is what echoes through the heads of modern women in a 1950s tone. Who suddenly start to doubt again whether they shouldn’t cook more often, clean more, look after the children longer and think less about themselves.
Yes, perhaps, actually. Because somehow you do wonder how it can be that women — not all, of course, but a considerable number — still end up in front of laundry racks with such a grudge: angry at themselves for hanging up socks and underwear instead of answering emails or going for a run. Angry at the laundry because it never seems to end. Angry at the circumstances, which are obviously not so fair after all. Upset at the men who are also stressed, but never get so sick of sacrificing themselves. And don’t intervene when others do.
Overcoming the inner housewife
But do we really need men to overcome our inner housewife? Shouldn’t it be possible to simply ignore such outdated lunacy? Couldn’t we finally be free of anger, a guilty conscience or reproach, and really hang out the washing in a completely apolitical way for once?
If it weren’t for your inner housewife, you wouldn’t have to complain about mental load and care work every time you load the washing machine, but could simply do what needs to be done and then carry on merrily. After all, other trains of thought from times gone by eventually disappeared of their own accord — just think of the long-standing impulse to convert everything from euros to Deutschmarks, not wearing seatbelts in cars or smoking in pubs.
The fact that the inner housewife does not disappear by herself is, of course, probably due to the structures. It’s down to policies that are still wrong or at least inadequate.
Nothing would be meaner than blaming women for this in addition to the gender pay gap. And yet, anyone who wants to make sustainable progress as a society, as a couple, as an individual and, above all, as a role model for future generations, should lay everything out on the table in all honesty. That includes this not insignificant female contribution.
In order to be able to live a truly equal and happier life, the inner housewife must be cancelled just like all the other reasons for the injustice between the sexes.
But how do you do that? How do you silence this tireless, toxic figure once and for all? And not in a way that makes you feel even worse for this nasty inner voice, but in a completely serious way, in the sense of “female-friendly self-criticism,” as the author Sophia Fritz once called it?
A start could be to recognise her at all. Admitting the existence of an inner housewife is not proof of backwardness, but of progress. In purely historical terms, it was only 70 years ago that a commercial for Dr. Oetker proclaimed: “A woman has two questions in life: What should I wear? And: What should I cook?”
The fact that you can still hear an echo of these beliefs in the year 2024 may be stupid, but it is not surprising.
Fading with time
It’s just as okay to feel screaming ambivalence again and again. Even, and especially, when today’s Trad Wives purr on Instagram that “My husband doesn’t have to lift a finger in the house.” When they’re flipping pancakes and dusting sweet little heart-shaped waffles with icing sugar, satisfied and apparently completely at peace with themselves, you can feel a lot of emotions at the same time.
Anger at the anachronistic madness presented here, anger at the anti-feminist impulses that these women are sending out into the world. But also a pinch of envy at the fact that nobody here seems to be haunted by nasty inner voices. Instead, supposedly marvellous peace and harmony reign, undisturbed monotasking and eternal bliss, because the inner housewife gets exactly what she wants.
In the end, it’s probably more about a slow farewell anyway. Role models don’t just disappear, they just fade away. While it has been recommended everywhere for years that we should pay close attention to our “inner child” — that part of ourselves that was shaped in the earliest past and still determine our behaviour today — we must also pay due attention to our inner housewife before she can go.
A dust bunny is just a dust bunny.
Whenever stimuli from the here and now (uncleaned windows, black mould around the tap, a visit from the mother-in-law) cause such stress signals in the autonomic nervous system that we can no longer distinguish between the past (sole responsibility regardless of capacity) and the present (shared responsibility depending on the energy situation), it is important to pause for a moment.
Ask yourself: Is it really me who is offering to take care of things right now? Or is it the voice of the past that thinks I am still responsible?
Dirt, as the inner housewife learns, can also look at you in a completely different way. There is no message in it about your own self-worth. A dust bunny is just a dust bunny. The streaks on the window can also be read differently or, even worse, not at all. In purely physical terms, they are neutral. Unintentional matter, like everything else in the world. Which is why nothing happens if you leave them lying around or someone else takes care of them. They are just particles, molecules, stardust.
Particles, molecules, stardust — that could be the sound of the present, which at some point will really drown out the inner housewife. Until, one day in the not too distant future, they finally cease to exist: Women who clean aggressively.
