Housedress

Amazon has them, as well as a lot of retail stores, in all sizes, shapes and colors, defined as “a loose informal dress worn for household chores.” The dress and its definition mark a shift in what we expect of women in the midst of this pandemic: housework in addition to office work at home and hours spent supervising children through their online lessons, particularly difficult with small ones. How to hold a child’s attention to a screen for hours at a time, and what a disaster for all of us that this is what must be done?

Whenever society goes through a contraction following a cataclysm of some kind, women are forced back into earlier roles. We force ourselves, conforming to a new set of expectations, and we are forced by the reality in which we live. Housework must be done and now there is no one else to do it; those of us who could afford help often found it more prudent to limit our exposure to outsiders, often from marginalized communities. How will those women survive? Well… And if any of us thought the man in the situation was going to grab the vacuum sweeper, we soon learned otherwise. That’s a role most men in this country strenuously shun. In easier times, we may have put up with this, but now that we are shouldering household tasks as well as teaching and professional work, is it still acceptable? In years to come we will learn the answer.

This contraction in women’s lives has happened before. At the end of World War II, when the men came back and the war industries that had hired hundreds of thousands of women shut down, women were urged to go home. The returning men needed the jobs, and the explosion of suburbs put a lot of women out of reach of work. With no public transportation, the dream house in the new suburb could become a trap. And all the new labor-saving devices, dishwashers, clothes washers, driers, ministered to a new perfectionism: now sheets should be washed and ironed twice a week, rather than once. To make the housewife’s role seem more creative, a frenzy of fancy cooking began.

We lost a generation of professional women, and their daughters grew up in the 1950’s strenuous atmosphere of togetherness.

When a culture is challenged, as during this pandemic, social change freezes. There’s less energy and less hope for betterment. Survival demands that women stick to our old roles, feeding, cleaning, comforting, supporting, so the wheels that have begun to grind so slowly do not stop altogether.

We have seen protests, we have seen marches, but most of these took place before the pandemic sealed people in their houses. Last week at the Democratic Convention, we saw and heard new young leaders promising great things, but trying to deal with the ongoing and apparently unending health crisis will absorb most of the new government’s energy. Yes, we will get rid of the monster but we will still be faced with issues no government can hope to control.

I’m pessimistic, yes. Here in northern New Mexico, we are suffocating under a sea of smoke from the Rio en Medio fire ten miles up the mountains; it will not be contained for ten more days. And even when these valiant firefighters succeed in penetrating the deep ravines where it is raging, we will still be soaked in the smoke from the huge California fires.

Yes, it was paradise, but the troubles engulfing this country are also consuming my state.

So let’s order the housedresses and get prepared to go back to the kitchen sink with goggles and masks and gloves and whatever hope we can muster.

In Women Women