"On Housecraft": Emma Wilkins reviews "Home Work: Essays on Love & Housekeeping" by Helen Hayward (Keywords: Housework; Domestic Labour; Family; Feminism; Gender Roles)

From The Philosopher, vol. 113, no. 1 ("Marx and Philosophy")

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The book Home Work by Helen Hayward (Puncher & Wattmann, 2023), like the labour it explores, will be easily dismissed. I like my home, and I like it when it’s clean and tidy, but I don’t like cleaning or tidying, and I’m not inclined to read about it. I love to bake, to fill a vase with flowers, peg out washing with bare feet in summertime; but I’m more likely to make the bathroom “less dirty” than “properly clean” or the living room “less messy”, than “actually tidy”, and I’m sure I’m not alone. Home Work. I wasn’t drawn to the topic, or to the book’s stark orange cover, and I’d never heard of the author; but the subtitle – “Essays on Love and Housekeeping” – piqued my interest. Love? I opened up the book.

The first surprise was that the foreword was penned by someone I had heard of. In it, Alain de Botton confronts the common assumption that housekeeping is not pleasurable or worthwhile, and that domestic matters are “beneath the dignity of the sophisticated individual”. Helen Hayward understands this attitude. She understands why, when she answers the door wearing an apron – an almost provocative act nowadays – people look her up and down. In the affluent culture that is Hayward’s context, and mine, we are more likely to boast about how little housework we do, even how poorly, than about how much we do, or how well. Even when domestic duties include some of the most important work a human can do – raising another human – we argue for our right to outsource it. Perhaps, if stereotypes and power imbalances hadn’t dictated who was responsible for unpaid work, and who was not, for quite so long, we’d see it in a different light. But imbalances persist.

It’s been a decade since political journalist and commentator Annabel Crabb, author of The Wife Drought, argued that the reason men can “have it all” – families and demanding careers – without “doing it all”, is that their wives are still hard at work behind the scenes. More recently, Anna Funder’s Wifedom, a part-researched, part-imagined account of the many ways in which George Orwell benefited from, and took for granted, his wife’s physical and intellectual labour – provoked another round of discussion (and rage). Recent years have also seen Harvard-trained organisational manager Eve Rodsky release a book and set of cards to help couples divide household work more evenly, making the New York Times bestseller list in the process; while a French comic artist’s suggestion that no matter how much men “help” with domestic duties, women are still exerting energy to delegate them, has seen “mental load” memes go viral. But even when men uphold ideals of equal pay and equal opportunities with passion and conviction, which many do, for a range of reasons – social, systemic, historic, ideological, biological, practical, relational – the bulk of the work still falls to women. It’s simpler if you live alone, and either clean up after yourself, or pay somebody to. It’s the experience of communal living – cooking for others, cleaning up after them, having them clean up after us; and the time that this might take from a career – that continues to frustrate, and to divide.

Stories of couples who have found a happy balance do exist, but remain rare. Then again, striking a happy balance with housemates, or between parents and children, is rare too. Sometimes it’s easy to assign responsibility, often it’s not. Dust settles, crumbs accumulate, paint peels, appliances break. Even if we could make each person in a household responsible for offsetting only (and all) the wear, tear, and mess they personally cause, or devise a roster that ensures each person works precisely as hard for others, as others work for them, the limits imposed by different restraints – from age, to ability, to time – mean not every member of a household could take equal responsibility.

We’ve come to associate success not with the work of our bodies and our hands, but with well-paying rungs on corporate ladders

Even if we can find ways to ensure no party feels hard done by or oppressed, even if we take gender out of the equation, I can’t see our attitudes to the work itself changing any time soon. Consider how common it now is to reflect on our performance in the workplace, and strive to improve it; and how uncommon it is to do this with our performance in the home. As Wendell Berry notes when discussing agricultural labour in The Need to Be Whole, we’ve come to associate success not with the work of our bodies and our hands, but with well-paying rungs on corporate ladders. When Joanna Maciejewska quipped, “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes,” the chord it struck rang long and loud.

With some notable exceptions (one being the self-professed “Tradwife”, and the inevitably performative depictions of domestic bliss that some broadcast on social media), the assumption that few would stay home if they had the choice has become about as widespread as answering your door in an apron (one you use) has become rare. Running our own houses – cooking, cleaning, tidying, budgeting, buying, repairing, recycling, disposing, replacing – earns us neither money nor prestige. It’s not that we don’t want tidy, clean homes; or that we don’t lust after beautiful ones. We take pride in our homes when they’re well kept; we are embarrassed when they’re not “presentable”. What we don’t take pride in is the sometimes tedious, sometimes dirty, sometimes exhausting, often thankless unpaid work that makes them so. Home Work’s author, in deeming that work worthy of her time, her attention, and her intellect, is an outlier.

Challenging, time-consuming, interesting

Hayward has worked in publishing, taught in universities, and trained in psychotherapy; she’s always had other work to do, but she came to doubt it was necessarily better work, and to devote more time to what she calls “home work”. For a long time, she’d still answer the question, “What do you do?” by saying she was a writer and teacher, but she was conscious that her domestic “job” could be “equally challenging, time consuming and interesting”. Hayward says her younger self would have been shocked to hear her describe housework so positively. She loved her childhood home, and wasn’t ungrateful for the time her mother spent running it, but she told herself she’d never stoop to such trivial concerns; she’d never let her life revolve around something so insular. She thought women who took pride in cakes and curtains were “consoling” themselves and avoiding the “real” challenges of life: “They were making themselves feel better about a life which subordinated their desires to their family’s needs, to a life without power or a room of their own.”

But even before having children, even against her better judgement, she was drawn to domestic work. She appreciated order and aesthetics; sometimes she found herself enjoying the labour required to achieve a clean, comfortable home. After starting a family, she found that routines that fostered order gave more than they took. There came a point when Hayward consciously resolved to embrace the “nonreciprocal nature of family love” and do the lion’s share of household work. It didn’t interest her husband, but it mattered to her. He didn’t coerce her into doing more, she chose to. She knew she might rue not having “travelled more, earned more, learned more, networked more”, but she also knew that she enjoyed the work, and its rewards. As Hayward’s children grew older, she knew she could reasonably ask more of them than she did. It’s not that she wouldn’t have appreciated more help, or at least the offer of it, but she was also conscious she didn’t offer her mother help as a child. She came to accept that her desire “to nurture family, to be warm, generous and practically loving” through the medium of housework wasn’t shared by her family. She didn’t want to spoil her kids, but she was conscious, too, that they wouldn’t live at home forever. One day, they would leave. One day, her ability to care for them in ways so practical, so intimate, would end. One day, they’d have “home work” of their own.

Time wasted or well spent?

Hayward knew she would always feel “complicated” about her decision to do more than her fair share, and she was right. When her mother, nearing the end of a life spent largely in the home, asked: “Do you think that I’ve wasted my life?”, Hayward was haunted by the question. She brushed it off in the moment: of course her mother didn’t “waste” her life; but despite her own all-too conscious choices, she wondered if her children would come to think she’d wasted hers.

The notion that time spent in the home, caring for one’s family, could be wasted time, is a relatively recent one.

The notion that time spent in the home, caring for one’s family, could be wasted time, is a relatively recent one. Aristotle viewed work performed to acquire wealth a means to an end, while recognising that “oikonomia” or “household management” contributed to the wellbeing of the community, thereby serving a higher purpose. Many throughout history have aspired to dedicate themselves to a family, a house, and yes, housework. But even if we do manage to detach domestic work from the “subtle form of chauvinism” that Hayward realises once “coloured” her attitude, will we ever view it as important once again? If we value altruism, then to the extent it’s done for others, we ought to do so. But this would require us to value individual status, prestige, and success less. It would also require us to rediscover an appreciation for the work of “our bodies and our hands”; and work done in service of those whose bodies are less able than our own; not to mention humility itself.

Escape or embrace?

Most of us will do at least some housework in the course of our lives. Some, Hayward says, will spend a quarter of their waking hours on it. That Hayward doesn’t only explore “home work” in the abstract is evidence of her passion for it. In fact, she spends some time detailing the benefits, the “art” and satisfactions, of running a home well – presumably so interested readers can profit from what she’s learned. The practicalities didn’t always hold this reader’s interest, particularly when next-level standards or a next-level budget were involved or implied – but I found the notion that domestic work might have something to teach those who, for whatever reason, perform it, potentially liberating. What if those of us who can’t escape the work and must devote at least some time to it – which is surely most of us to some extent – could find ways to accept, even value, even embrace it? To find stimulation and satisfaction in not only doing our share but learning to do it well? And what if those who enjoy the work could understand it, and themselves, well enough to admit this without feeling conflicted, judged, ashamed? Even (especially) if we’re not as drawn to it as Hayward is, it could be an opportunity to practice selflessness, kindness, and humility, while resisting pride and laziness. Far from being a “waste” of time, it could be time spent thinking, reflecting, practising, and learning.

In a world where people claim they have no time to think, and are often chained to desks in front of screens, washing and drying, sorting and scrubbing could help us exercise restless bodies and calm overstimulated minds.

It could benefit our health as well. There is a point in Home Work where Hayward, while renovating, finds scraping, sanding, staining floorboards, opens a “loose, open, meditative” frame of mind. In a world where people claim they have no time to think, and are often chained to desks in front of screens, washing and drying, sorting and scrubbing could help us exercise restless bodies and calm overstimulated minds. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir notes that “few tasks are more similar to the torment of Sisyphus than those of the housewife; day after day, one must wash dishes, dust furniture, mend clothes that will be dirty, dusty, and torn again”. But if it weren’t for the fact the work is paid, sitting in front of a screen, scrolling here, clicking there, day in and day out, might feel more futile still.

I’ve experienced the satisfaction that comes from having a stimulating career, but I’ve also experienced the satisfaction that comes from caring for a family and a home. Yes, it meant doing more cooking – which I enjoy – and cleaning – which I don’t – but it was my choice, and it’s brought me more joy than my career, not less. I don’t regret it. I didn’t envy or resent my husband for having less time at home, more time at work; I didn’t wish childcare was cheaper so we could outsource it in service of my career; I didn’t think of myself as a martyr. Not all those who end up doing more domestic work than their partner, or housemate, or adult kids, will feel this way, but we should resist assuming the more domestic work a person does, the more they’re to be pitied, or that the more a person works outside the home, the more important they and their work must be.

Noble, caring, character-building

Hayward imparts many lessons, but the one that I liked best is that we might as well do what needs doing anyway, with grace. I know how it feels to clean resentfully, and I know it does me and my family more harm than good. The challenge is to do our share with willingness, even cheer. We can use the time to think, to meditate, to plan, to pray. The domestic work we do and how we go about it won’t earn us accolades, but if we seek to have right motives – if we focus not on what we’re owed but what we owe, and might freely give – our characters, and our relationships, will profit. In the case of someone who lives alone, there might be no obvious “other” to bless. Still, it can be noble, character-building work. In Man the Reformer, Ralph Waldo Emerson suggested as much when he talked about the “elegance” of doing for ourselves what others could do for us. After declaring society full of those who “incessantly summon others to serve them”, he said that having few wants, and tending to those wants ourselves, might look “inelegant” yet be “an elegance forever and to all”.

It’s not surprising that, in a secular individualistic culture, cultivating servant-hearted humility holds little appeal.

De Botton ends his foreword by suggesting that by choosing to “stay in”, to patch a hole in a garment, or rearrange a room, we might “overcome the wish to live too much in the minds of strangers”, and be glad. Attending to the spaces we retreat to, restoring order when chaos begins to reign, might also teach us something about what it means to be embodied creatures. We are able to shape our environment in some ways, but not in others and, in ways we won’t always notice or understand, we are shaped by it. The display of beauty that flowers in a vase, whether grown ourselves or plucked from a neighbour’s overhanging plant – the warmth of light, streaming between curtains; the scent of air, flowing through a window opened wide – might influence our mood, our thinking, even our interactions, more than we realise.

It’s easy to think of ourselves “more highly than we ought”, to prize others’ opinions too much, to steer clear of demeaning tasks, and look down on those who perform them. It’s not surprising that, in a secular individualistic culture, cultivating servant-hearted humility holds little appeal. Work done in the home might not earn us money, or praise, or even gratitude. But the more we’re motivated by care, and love, the more noble the work is. What if we sought to embrace it? We’d still need to share it – to teach children (and urge some spouses) to clean up for themselves and contribute – but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t also, at times, throw away the ledger and embrace life’s messiness; serve those who can’t, or won’t, serve us; not because we must, but because we can. And if, for whatever reason, for whatever length of time, we don’t or can’t do our “fair share”, we can thank, even respect, even admire, those who do.

Emma Wilkins is a Tasmanian journalist and freelance writer with a particular interest in ethics, belief, culture, literature, and relationships. You can find her at: https://emmahwilkins.com

First published online on 21st September 2025

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