To say that we want wages for housework is to expose the fact that housework is already money for capital, that capital has made and makes money out of our cooking, smiling, fucking. At the same time, it shows that we have cooked, smiled, fucked throughout the years not because it was easier for us than for anybody else, but because we did not have any other choice. Our faces have become distorted from so much smiling, our feelings have got lost from so much loving, our oversexualization has left us completely desexualized.
William Henry Radebaugh (1909-1996), was a public relations executive at the DuPont Company for over twenty years. He wrote, produced and directed many films about the company during his tenure there and for several years after his retirement.
He began his career in public relations and in 1942, founded and was executive director of, the South Jersey Manufacturer’s Association in Camden, New Jersey. Radebaugh then took a position at the DuPont Company as a public relations consultant in 1952. He later became the Director of Public Relations for the Textile Fibers Department.
After retiring from his career in public relations with the DuPont Company in 1974, he went on to produce more films for DuPont with two former colleagues who had started the production company, Arden Films. Radebaugh was also an accomplished musician, having played with Jimmie and Tommy Dorsey, Louis Armstrong, and Jack and Charlie Teagarden. He was also an artist, working in needlepoint, watercolors, and printmaking.
Hagley Library’s collection of William Henry Radebaugh films and scripts (Accession 1975.412) includes correspondence, scripts, storyboards, proposals, and films like this one, written and directed by William Henry Radebaugh during his employment at the DuPont Company or for the company once he retired. This ca. 1970 reel shows how DuPont materials that were used in the Apollo 11 spacesuit were also purposed for commercial household use in “women’s chores”.
To view a selection of films from this collection online now, click here to view its page in our Digital Archive.
Who’s booking the conference room? Who’s pitching the client?
Why Women and People of Color Get Worse Assignments
This assignments gap exists for a number of interconnected reasons. One is what researchers call prescriptive stereotypes, which dictate how Americans thinks a group of people should behave — for example, women should be modest, helpful, and “communal.” They are supposed to be self-effacing team players who put the company ahead of their individual ambitions. Prescriptive stereotypes also operate by race. Most obviously, Asian Americans as supposed to be deferential worker bees. But our research suggests that not just women but all people of color have been invited into professional workplaces but expected to play a very specific role there: women of all races report higher levels of office housework, and both women and people of color (of both sexes) report less access to the glamour work.
Moreover, because of these stereotypes, women and people of color are under social pressures to volunteer for office housework activities. They also risk pushback if they don’t take on these tasks (“She’s just not a team player” or “She thinks highly of herself, doesn’t she?”). And women are more likely to be assigned office housework because assigners tend to believe that women will accept the task.
White men are much less likely to be asked to do the office housework, and they experience less backlash if they decline to do it or simply do it poorly. Men can also get away with intentionally doing a bad job at a low-value task to avoid being asked to do it again. Because of prescriptive stereotypes, however, it’s riskier for women to employ this tactic of strategic sloppiness.
One argument for why women do less high-profile work is that they don’t want the high-risk, high-reward work; they’re happy to be “team players” or “supporting players.” But that’s not what we found in our study. When we asked the lawyers in our sample if they were satisfied with their access to high-profile assignments, white men were the most likely to say yes. White women and women of color were 15% and 23% less likely to agree, respectively. Women want those assignments — they’re just not getting them. Men of color also reported being less satisfied with their access to high-profile assignments. One lawyer said: “I am a senior African-American practitioner who has outstanding credentials but has routinely been overlooked for the ‘plum’ opportunities available to my peers.”
For many women, the disparity in assignments comes back to what we’ve called maternal wall bias — a set of negative assumptions about mothers’ competence and commitment. After having a child, mothers come back to work to find that their best projects and clients have been reassigned to colleagues. In some cases, women report that it takes years to get back to the type of work they were doing before taking maternity leave. As a white female lawyer reported, “I made partner in the shortest time of any female. Things were great. I had my son. I worked part-time during leave and came back in nine weeks. My work was gone. It has taken two years and a change in focus to get back to the level I was at.”
Even when couples share more equitably in the work at home, women do two-thirds of the daily jobs at home, like cooking and cleaning up- jobs that fix them into a rigid routine. Most women cook dinner and most men change the oil in the family car. But, as one mother pointed out, dinner needs to be prepared every evening around six o'clock, whereas the car oil needs to be changed every six months, any day around that time, any time that day.
Earlier in our relationship we'd bickered about the division of household labor. I think this is pretty typical when you figure out how to balance cohabitation.
But first I started working from home, which meant I was home during the day, so of course I'd sneak in some household chores during my workday, right? And then I didn't work at all. So the balance of labor affirmatively shifted from Ben doing some of the housework to him doing basically none of it. (He did do all the grocery shopping. He didn't put the groceries away, but he did all the shopping.
While I understood what the logic of the shift was - we were living a long commute from Ben's work so we could afford to live on one income while I went to grad school - it made me feel insecure and it made me feel like Ben wasn't taking me seriously.
But he was so! excited! about my grad program. He was always talking about how great it would be for me to get into software engineering because it was such a growth industry! And I was going to make all this money and we would have such a great life afterwards.
