Am I a bad wife for not booking my husband's haircuts?
Harrison Butker, TikTok wives, and the Marriage Police
Should I be booking my husband’s haircuts? On TikTok, user @sheisapaigeturner defended the fact that she doesn’t do this. Or his laundry, or scheduling his doctors’ appointments; making him a packed lunch; packing his clothes; buying him new underpants. She is now being castigated by Matt Walsh for being “a bad wife and a selfish person”.
Wait a minute though. If she and he both work full-time, on what planet does this make sense? To the best of my knowledge, Matt Walsh’s wife is a stay at home mum: an occupation that, as I’ve often said, I think should be honoured more than it is, and also one that entails, by design, a sharp division of labour. In essence, in that home setup, you have a CEO of Earning, and a CEO of Home. Both parties respect each others’ domains, and cooperate to make sure everyone has what they need. It’s a great setup when everyone is playing their part!
In that context, it might well make sense for the CEO of Home to book haircuts and doctors’ appointments, because the CEO of Work is busy with his domain, which is different. The woman in the video, though, doesn’t have a household like this. Rather, she and her husband are joint CEOs of work, meaning a lot of her time is spent outside the home on other activities. In this context, does it still make sense for both parties to act as though she’s sole CEO of Home, because of some nebulous concept of “small acts of kindness”? Her argument is simply that no, it doesn’t. So that’s not what they do. Instead they are co-CEOs of Work and Home.
We could argue the toss about whether or not this kind of setup works better, in general, than the more role-divided one. Speaking personally, in my home we’ve cycled through most of the different ways of ordering our household, from “traditional” (ie industrial-era single-earner plus homemaker) to both working full-time. For us, definitely some setups work better than others. But - and I can’t say this often enough, or loud enough - it’s nuts to be prescriptive about this, when people’s material circumstances vary so much.
This was a central theme in Feminism Against Progress. That is: to a great extent historic sex roles are downstream of material circumstances. This of course includes embodied differences that become starkly apparent when you have kids, and only one of you can do the gestating and breastfeeding. As I set out there, in preindustrial times everyone worked, mostly in manual tasks, and this labour was both gendered and generally divided according to the different physical capabilities of men and women. The “CEO of Work and CEO of Home” setup dates from the industrial era: it’s not “traditional” really but distinctively modern.
It only looks “traditional” today because, for a host of reasons, being able to support a “CEO of Home” is increasingly a luxury for the well-off. Even in the middle class, it’s more commonly the case that in order to get by both parents have to work. And it’s further true that, for the average urban or suburban couple, very little of the domestic labour is such that it can only realistically be done by one sex.
If you live on a farm or somewhere very remote, chances are there are maintenance or animal care tasks that are physically demanding enough to fall mostly to the man. If you have a lot of kids, obviously most of the infant care will fall mostly to the woman. If you live in a high-tech suburban home, have not so many kids, and both of you work 9-5, the material grounds for a very polarised division of labour are minimal: the rest comes down to aesthetics, cultural expectations, and your preferences as a household.
Sure, many might prefer more differentiated task lists, but is there a moral basis for prescribing this across the board? If so, I don’t see it. And really, what matters so much more is that everyone is pulling in the same direction to make your home run smoothly. What we learn from Mrs Paige Turner of TikTok about her domestic setup actually sounds like a well-managed version of the high-tech suburban model, in which technology and material comfort have largely de-sexed domestic life. He mostly cooks dinner, she mostly manages breakfast. They work as a team to ensure the kids have everything they need. Both of them manage their own diaries. Both of them work.
Some might recoil, saying this sounds coldly collegiate and weirdly sexless, or too individualistic (the implication behind “selfish person” critiques of her stance). But to me it sounds like an orderly, cooperative, mutually respectful, and well-run home. Isn’t that what we’re all supposed to be aiming for?
What I’m trying to get across here is emphatically not that I think this way of doing things is better across the board than the industrial-era model that Matt Walsh (among many others) still embraces for his home. Nor am I making the opposite claim, or saying we should all be subsistence farmers. What I’m saying is that the domestic order you end up with is, to a far greater extent than either feminists or antifeminists want to acknowledge, a prudential matter shaped to a significant extent by your specific economic and material circumstances.
Certainly that’s been the case for us. Where our domestic order has evolved over time, it’s been due to some shift in our larger circumstances. When that’s happened, in each case we’ve responded by adjusting how we divide the domestic tasks, depending on who has what capacity. Sometimes when the basic division of labour needs to change, finding a new balance can involve some friction or chaos until everyone figures things out. But so far we’ve done OK. If I were to abstract a lesson from that, it’s a simple and pretty mundane one: that the precise breakdown of domestic tasks should always come second to what Erika Bachiochi calls “the duty of the moment”, and - crucially - to the core assumption that your household is a team, and you’re all working toward that team’s common good.
When people ask me what I mean by “reactionary” I sometimes quote Dávila, who declares that to be a reactionary is not to be “a dreamer of abolished pasts” but “a hunter of sacred shades on the eternal hills”. I think one sacred shade worth hunting comprises, in its barest essence, one man and one woman bound together by covenant in a mutually supporting household ordered to the creation and raising of children. Where this obtains, though, do we really need to police how any given man and woman divides the duties it entails?
To my eye, we could usefully focus more on the covenant; on the necessity of mutual support and cooperation; and, most of all, on the common good - especially that children. And yet, if modern egalitarian homes are castigated as selfish or unloving by the Conservative Marriage Police, on the other side the principle of solidarity itself, including with some division of labour, is under attack by the Liberal Marriage Police. Witness the other brouhaha of the moment: the cancellation of American football star Harrison Butker for a commencement address at a Catholic college, in which he extolled the centrality of home and family, and suggested that for many women motherhood and children may be a central vocation.
It is clear that the bigger picture Butker speaks to is this principle, core to Catholic social teaching, that the home is a team and family is the central project, for most members of both sexes. But he has been condemned across the board, as though he was saying women should never work, or as if Catholic history (and indeed sainthood) doesn’t include many women whose vocations were something other than - or additional to - home and family.
We could surely acknowledge the central necessity of home and family for the literal survival of the species, without people freaking out as though motherhood is intrinsically some kind of humiliation ritual. Conversely, I get that other people’s home lives make great internet content, and that you can drive any amount of rage-clicks by telling someone else they’re doing it wrong, or that everyone should do it a certain way. But the reality is that domestic order is downstream of material circumstances as well as culture, and trying to map a set of cultural norms to wholly different material circumstances is unlikely to produce flourishing households. Is it really beyond us to keep family at the heart of what we do and who we are, without making stupid prescriptions about who books the haircuts or getting shirty at others even noticing that family life is a matter of interdependence and cooperation? Surely we could manage this.
Anecdotally, among my friends in knowledge-class homes where both work full or part-time, there are “his jobs” and “her jobs” to an extent. This is certainly true for my home, too. The common factor in making things work happily is the teamwork. So do I give a stuff about the specifics of this breakdown in anyone else’s home, ceteris paribus? No, I do not. And nor should anyone else. There. There’s a prescriptive statement.
"it’s nuts to be prescriptive about this, when people’s material circumstances vary so much."
This sentence rings true to me. My parents worked as a team guided by an unspoken agreement. Father, the busy professional; Mother head of household, which included staff, grandparents and gardens. The old way. Later, it never occurred to my wife or me to delineate tasks. She a psychologist, me a senior executive. No staff. Three children. Working, I suppose from the basis of gracious caring and freewill, we shared the joys, sweat and tears of housekeeping and child raising and earning a living. Acting out of love, good faith and a desire to serve, which is surely the gospel of marriage, the division of labour was simply not an issue and was never discussed by us.
Rabindranath Tagore said, "I slept and dreamed that life was joy. I awoke and found that life was service. I served and found that life was joy."
So, let's raise the conversation from kitchen sink drama to considerations of the value of existence. Not prepared to do this? Do not live together!
As usual, Matt Walsh is not inspiring marriages, he's sowing seeds of husband discontent towards his wife. This type of "red pill masculinity" is not far from the types of fantasy Instagram lifestyles that many women there creating wife discontent with her husband and children.