That’s Ms. Cleaver to you

I admit it: I like cleaning house.

OK, that’s not strictly true. I get a certain amount of satisfaction from being able to stand back and look at my clean house. I certainly don’t relish dragging the toe-crushing cat killer around. But every time I clean I’m reminded of a probably-apocryphal story from a book about Ellis Island.

Immigrants who passed through the Island had to pass a series of exams — medical, mental, and legal — before being allowed to continue their journeys to the mainland of America. One anecdote tells of a woman who was being interviewed for mental competency. The interviewer reportedly asked her how she would go about scrubbing a set of stairs to get them clean; would she start at the bottom or the top?^* This woman is said to have looked her interviewer levelly in the eye, straightened up in her chair, and replied “I don’t come to America to scrub steps.”

After I left the treehuggers The Girlfriend was kind enough to support me for a few months while I found another job. During that time I became, in essence, June Cleaver. I cleaned the house. I tidied up. I cooked. I planned meals. I made sure everything was just-so. And deep down, behind my post-feminist squeamishness about being financially dependent upon someone else, I enjoyed it.

I liked the taking care. I liked the being able to plan things, to make a warm, welcoming home.

Having grown up in an environment where I was told I could be anything I wanted to be and that my sex shouldn’t be an impediment to achievement, something in me rebels at the idea that what I really want to do is make a nest.

And maybe that’s where feminism truly failed. Not in getting distracted by abortion rights (yes, control over your body is a basic freedom but it doesn’t matter how much control you have over your body if you’re still making 76 cents for every $1^** a comparably educated, comparably experienced man makes at the same job; money is power folks). Maybe where feminism really failed was in giving women the idea that in order to be complete they had to compete with men not merely that they should have the opportunity to compete with men on an equal footing.

^* The logical way to clean the steps is from the top to the bottom. Since you can’t stop water from running downhill, if you clean the bottom steps first you end up having to clean them again because the dirty water from the upper steps will run down onto them. If you start at the top the dirty water runs on to dirty steps below.

^** This is the current national average for the wage gap between white men and white women in the United States. It’s even worse for African American women (65 cents/$1) and Hispanic women (54 cents/$1). Source: “The Wage Gap.” Infoplease.