I’m not a sociologist. I may be a student but I’m not a scholar. All I’ve been doing is cooking holiday dinner since childhood.
In our American dream, in our nuclear family, I think of what men and women do on Thanksgiving. Men watch football. Women make dinner. For a family event, it’s strange only half the family participates.
This isn’t feminist conjecture either, JSTOR Daily summarizes numerous studies about how women’s work (cleaning, cooking, childcare) increases during the holidays. Stress for women also increases around this time, with so much pressure being put on only them to create the perfect holiday. This expectation is put on her by everyone: her family who want to eat a perfect meal in a perfectly clean house, her neighbors who judge her, her social media feed that shows her pristine houses and picturesque meals and smiling children.
Outside of the holiday season, women still take on more household responsibilities than their husbands. While women staying at home had the idea that women would be able to actually stay at home, with their husbands being able to support the whole family, many families can no longer be supported by one income. So, women work all day, and then come home to fulfill household duties as well. Called the “Second Shift,” a term coined by sociologist Arlie Hochschild in the 1980s, it explains how women have more responsibility at home than men.
However, according to Gallup, division of household labor has gotten better in the past few decades. Though, the improvement mostly applies to women who make as much or more money than their husbands. This division is still highly gendered, with the majority of the people they polled saying their chores aligned with traditional gender roles. The Center for American Progress reports that women are more likely to work less hours in paid labor in order to spend more time doing unpaid labor in the home. While both men and women are strapped for time, women still spend more of their precious time taking care of the home.
There are not more hours in the day during the holiday season. Women have even more to do during this time of year with still as little acknowledgement for doing unpaid labor as the rest of the year. The holidays are supposed to be this magical time that fills one with love and cheer and nostalgia but that’s a luxury for those who don’t have to do all the work. And at the end of the day, after the meal is eaten and the clean house is trashed, who even notices?