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Today, of course, the woman who opts to spend her days polishing banisters is soon likely to find herself in foreclosure. If it's a choice between having food on the table or floors that are free of organic detritus, most of us choose to go with the food. And since child raising generally works better when children and parents share the same dwelling, there's no point in striving for the motel look.
We all know, or suspect, that after you eliminate the T-shirt ironing and the weekly changing of sheets, there will still be some biological minimum below which no family dares go. In the meantime, each chore has to be carefully assessed: If you don't do the toilets, will the children get typhoid? Which is easier anyway -- doing all that scrubbing or taking a little time now and then to visit one's family in the infectious-disease ward?
For any man or child who misses the pristine standards of yesteryear, there is a simple solution -- pitch in! Surveys show men doing more than they used to, but nowhere near enough to maintain the old standards. The technology of the vacuum cleaner is challenging, I admit, but not beyond the capacity of the masculine mind.
Or maybe we should just relax and enjoy the revolution. Here was a form of human toil that was said to be immutable and biologically necessary: social convention demanded it, advertisers of household products promoted it, mothers-in-law enforced it. But we cut back drastically, and lo, the kids are as healthy as ever -- maybe more so, now that we have a little more time to hang out with them.
How many other forms of "necessary" labor may also turn out to be ritual, designed to keep us homebound and politically passive? Checkbook balancing, for example. Isn't it time we acknowledged that the bank is always right, and that even when it's not, it's bound to win anyway? Or the thankless but conscientious saving of all the invoices from last year's bills, in case the canceled checks get destroyed in a meteor hit. Are you ever, in the twilight of life, going to ask yourself, "Gee, what did I spend on heating fuel in the winter of '92?"
It's even occurred to me, as a teeny little subversive whisper of a thought, that if we stopped mowing the lawn right now, it would probably be a long, long time before the yard ever got overrun by lions and snakes.