Undomestic Goddess

Why forging ahead in business requires a revolution at home.

- Anne Mcelvoy

I am at home at 10 am because the front-door lock fell off. The locksmith, booked by my other half before he headed off to work, is set to come in the time slot between 9am and eternity. While I’m consigned to daytime domesticity, I might as well pop the washing on, scrub some mud off a teenager’s rugby boot and try to get the long-delayed electrician in. Now, where were we with the emails I would have dashed off in the first half hour in the office? None of this would happen to Tiffany Dufu, a prominent American feminist, who is the author of a compelling book, Drop the Ball: Achieving More by Doing Less. Women, she argues, should stop mentally taking responsibility for housework, otherwise we are kidding ourselves about achieving real equality.

If that’s the case, I am doing it wrong. I adore my work as a journalist, but as it has expanded, it means a lot more travel and dealing with midnight emails from the US. Meanwhile the house, I feel, is my crafty enemy, lurking with its missing light bulbs, satellite-TV outages and other disruptions, which I feel are my job. Not according to Dufu, who believes that in order to ‘lean in’ at work, women should correspondingly ‘lean back’ at home. “We grow into womanhood with the sense that to prioritise ourselves is some kind of moral offence,” she says. “Women do have permission to fulfill their ambitions, as long as it doesn’t come at the expense of caring for others. That’s where the conundrum comes.”