A good Feminist and a good Hausfrau never get together well...
No one talk easily about the amount of work a woman deals with - under the partner´s pressure or because no one to help - in the household. Especially a German household, where the Hausfrau projections continue to reflect a mentality from the 1930s when, we know well what was going on in Germany.
Personally, until I´ve read the ironic daily accounts of not conforming to the high standards of the Hausfrau by Jacinta Nandi - Die schlechteste Hausfrau der Welt - I never worried about my low house cleaning skills. After all, when the cleanliness at home is going wrong, I don´t hesitate to use a paid hand or two, and if a man that happens to be my partner has some objections and is unable to correct it himself, I am happy to open largely the door to let him jump out of the stairs far away where women do keep themselves busy with obsessive cleaning. Most probably, if requested, I am also the worse Hausfrau in the whole world, except that I couldn´t care less. And a book about it couldn´t write because no love is bigger enough to accept haughty observations from a lazy human man while watching TV and sarcastically noticing his environment.
Jacinta Nandi´s boyfriend though, although an educated professor, can´t stand a woman who doesn´t clean, clean, clean. No acknowledgements and recognition, as he is taking her for granted. With a little baby to take care of and a teenager in the house, with ideas in her head and projects to do, she is also overloaded by his obsessive requests for cleanliness and order. Love doesn´t pass through the stomach, but needs regularly to be cleaned with the mop. The right one, as there are mops and mops, assigned for each and every particular cleaning tasks.
Nandi explores an aspect of a woman everyday life rarely deconstructed critically. With so many cleaning and decluttering influencers around the world, it´s intrinsically accepted to include the regular cleaning rituals into the daily routine of a woman. Besides children, cooking, and making money too, but often not as much as a man. No one wants to talk about it as a chore, hence the happy faces of the influencers who, by the way, may have at least one cleaning lady who are crystal cleaning their immaculate houses uses as a proof of perfection in their glamorous videos.
Besides opening up serious wounds which deserve a larger discussion, especially about women perception in the German public and private space, Die schlechteste Hausfrau der Welt is written in a sarcastic (self)ironic vein which I love so much when it comes to everyday life topics.
The book was recently published in the German language.
Disclaimer: I know the author through a common friend but the opinions are, as usual, my own.
Rating: 5 stars
No comments:
Post a Comment