Rebecca's title was Battle of the Sexes and she suggested the other one as a joke - but I liked it (however, if everyone thinks it is bad, I will change it...).
While women in Umbria might take the housewife role to the extreme, I think we have a good deal of this same attitude here in the good old US of A...
A couple of weeks ago I was out for dinner with a couple of friends of mine, Marco e Claudia. They have been engaged for ages, living toghether for a year ans domething and married for a few months. He is a computer programmer (and a very good one) and she is a journalist. So Claudia started telling me this story about when, this summer, she was worried because the radio she was working for seemed not to be willing to give her a new 6 months contract, so she might have lost her job. She was obviously worried: sure, she might have started looking for another job, but she would have rather kept the old one. And so she talked a lot about fearing to lose her job, with more or lesse everyone. one day, as she told this story to acquaitance (I know there is at least one typo somewhere in that word, but I can't locate it >_<) and the woman answered "But, you are married now: why do you worry?"... 8-/ it was as though, since she had a husband, she had to be fed by him. Even not considering that in Milano one wage is not enough for a family of two people, I wonder, why should a woman leave a job that she likes??? And Marco and Claudia wonder the same thing too! ^_^
Alice Twain -- I don’t want to take what you can’t give / I would rather starve than eat your bread I would rather run but I can’t walk / Guess I’ll lie alone just like before Pearl Jam, Corduroy
quote:Originally posted by Pauline: While women in Umbria might take the housewife role to the extreme, I think we have a good deal of this same attitude here in the good old US of A...
Pauline, Do you really think so? With my parents and their generation (I'm speaking as a forty*cough* year old ), yes - but in my family even that morphed into more equal roles in the 70's. (When my younger brother started high school and my mom went back to work part-time.)
Among my friends and their spouses, I can't think of a single instance where the wife takes care of the kids AND does the cooking, cleaning, social organizing, etc., etc. - and definitely not among the working moms. (I have friends all over the US, so I know this isn't a California phenomenon!!)
... Rebecca, I enjoyed your latest essay. Thought provoking and laugh inducing!
Posts: 13916 | Location: On 'staycation' in The Beautiful San Francisco Bay Area | Registered: 06 August 2001
Don't take me wrong: my boyfriend is neither a mammone nor "useless at home", and not even Italian!
He is perfect at home: way tidier than me, he helps me a lot and sometimes he is astonished at my reactions... reactions which I didn't suspect I had!
And I am an educated person, who has lived on her own for years now, also abroad.
But still, I have the instinct to stand up and clean the table, to wash clothes, to iron them, and if Marcel does that (by the way he is way better than me at almost any household activities) I feel that it is "wrong" or at least weird. I know that in fact it IS NOT wrong... rationally. But until he pointed it out to me, I had never noticed that I always let him walk in front of me. I even stop to let him pass first if we have to cross the street... ok maybe there's a bit of self-defense there!
Thank God, he makes my life easier than the average "cultural victim" and it's funny to realize all these attitudes I never suspected to have...!
So, yes, I totally agree: we have made our own bed. But I suppose that many girls and women do not realize that. I hadn't, although I had all the chances to.
Great story, Rebecca. Tell me? Do you have any American expat male friends who are married to traditional Umbrian women? It would be interesting to get their take. I'm betting they think they've died and gone to heaven.
Deborah Horn
In a previous life I was an Umbrian sunflower farmer. I'd like to do a past life regression and stay there. ----------------------------------- www.petsburg.com
Posts: 4855 | Location: St. Louis, MO | Registered: 04 September 2001
Your stories are the greatest. Your descriptions are so vivid that I can just visualize the look of bewilderment on his face in the case of the missing underwear!
Thanks for making us smile again!
Debbie
Venice, Lucca, Cinque Terre and Milan in July 2004!
Posts: 122 | Location: VA, USA | Registered: 02 March 2003
quote:Originally posted by Colleen: Among my friends and their spouses, I can't think of a single instance where the wife takes care of the kids AND does the cooking, cleaning, social organizing, etc., etc. - and definitely not among the working moms.
Kim here, sheepishly raising my hand.
Well....at least Chris has taken over the food shopping as of two weeks ago - we'll see how that goes.
As much as I see the humor and irony in what you've said, I can also see my unmarried 40 year old cousin and his friends saying "when is the next plane to Umbria?" We've been telling them for years that these women no longer exist and to "get real" about their expectations!
Posts: 2942 | Location: mahwah, new jersey, usa | Registered: 10 December 2003
I have to agree with Pauline. I am in my early 30's and have a number of friends that take sole responsibility for the household chores and have the majority of the child care responsibilities.
I have one friend, that when asked to get together, says she has to see if her husband can babysit their daughter! That shocked me that they consider it babysitting when the husband watches his own child.
I think it's fair to say the attitude is pretty worldwide. In all couples I know, housework at some point has been an issue, usually only finally resolved by hiring someone else to do it. The only couple I've seen where the guy did as much or more than the woman without prompting, he's Danish.
Italian society in general assumes that men can't cope. I used to travel a lot when my daughter was small, and the other mothers at her school were routinely horrified every time I announced another trip. "But who will take care of your daughter?!" "She has a father," I would remind them. And they coped just fine, though there was always some extra housekeeping to do when I got back.
I used to do all the grocery shopping (because I like to grocery shop) until our son was born. Then I spent approximately the next three months in my bathrobe with unbrushed teeth, and it just seemed like less effort to have my husband do it than actually dress and shower. So, I would make him a list.
1) Milk 2) Bread 3) Tampons 4) Half dozen apples
Now, I know my husband is not a detail man. I know this. This is the guy who insists that all American Black male actors are Bill Cosby and all American blond actresses are Kim Basinger. It took me years to figure out that when he talked about “that movie where Bill Cosby talks with the guy from Grease about hamburgers in France and Kim Basinger has her hair dyed black” he meant Pulp Fiction.
So I pretty much assumed he wasn’t going to be reading lots of labels for fat content and that kind of thing. But I did not expect him to come home with:
1) One can of Nestle sweetened condensed milk 2) One loaf of processed white sandwich bread (The last time I ate that was Girl Scout Camp ca. 1976.) 3) One large bag of Depends 4) Six pineapple
So the advice I have for you is to make your shopping list as detailed as a United States Armed Forces requisition form. Our shopping lists now read, for example:
1) Milk a) Grifo brand b) blue package c) picture of griffon on front d) 2%, not skim, not whole e) the long shelf life kind f) on the bottom left hand shelf next to the cooking cream g) not the stuff in the can h) not the stuff in the refrigerated section
And half the time he still comes home with that milk they make for the lactose intolerant. Because the package is blue.
My second piece of advice is to make your requisition form in duplicate, because invariably you will be unpacking the bags and say, “Hon, where’s the toothpaste?” And he will look you square in the eye and say, “It wasn’t on the list.” And you will say, “Yes, it was between item 18) carrots and item 20) toilet paper.” And he will say, “Nope, no toothpaste was on the list.” And you will go back and forth about it until you decide it’s not a hill worth dying for, though you are absolutely positive that you listed 19) toothpaste (Colgate sensation whitening, silver box, next to the Crest classic, not the Kukident, that’s for dentures, not the Baking Soda flavored, it makes you gag). Until you get to the next bag and pull out a bottle of fabric softener the size of a Buick and you say, “Babe, why did you buy fabric softener?” And he’ll say, “Because it was on the list.” And you’ll say, “No, laundry detergent was on the list.” Another back and forth, another hill you abandon.
I just like to keep a second copy to reassure myself it’s not me losing my mind. I like to keep a third copy which I notarize and deposit with our lawyer.
Deirdre,
You are absolutely right about a cleaning lady resolving the housework problem. The day after our son was born, Stefano sat down on the hospital bed, and very movingly told me how incredibly happy he was to have a healthy baby and thanked me for all the hard work (roughly three days of hard work, just for the record) and asked me what I would like as a gift (I don’t know if they have the same tradition in the north, but here new mom’s are usually given a nice piece of jewelry to celebrate a birth.) I took his hand, looked deeply into his eyes, and said, “I want a cleaning lady.” And I got Marya, all roughly 30 pounds of her, who takes our rugs outside and beats them with a stick, just like they did in the Ukraine in the 30’s. And let me tell you, she ushered in a Golden Age of our marriage. If I have to sell myself on a street corner and eat rice and beans for the rest of my life, I will never give her up.
Rebecca, thanks for the laugh about reality again. My friends (Sienese) are the same as your Umbrian friends, amazed at all of the things my husband does. He is well trained and proud of it
"new moms are usually given a nice piece of jewelry to celebrate a birth"
Thank you! You've finally resolved a long-standing mystery for me. Rossella was born in the US, but we came to Rome for Christmas when she was still very small. My father-in-law had gone to a conference in Switzerland, and came back with a beautiful watch (fancy enough to count as jewelry), which he presented "alla madre di Rossella". I love the watch, but have always felt odd that he presented it to me as "the mother", and not as a gift for myself, in my own name. Now I know why.
On our wedding day, I wore a gold necklace which is traditionally given to the eldest son's wife. Is that tradition unique to this family or more universal? Kind of a moot point now, as Rossella is the only child in her generation and there's not likely to be another. She'll have to wear it herself, if and when she gets married.
I married the eldest son and my mother-in-law gave me a necklace and matching earrings. Luigi said it was tradition. And if my mother-in-law is anything, she's traditional.
Two days ago she gave me an electric broom and said that with this I don't have to mop the floors every day. To which I said "Ummmm, who's mopping the floors every day??" I guess this worried her because she then asked Luigi what happened to the cleaning lady we'd originally hired. We are two people who are barely ever in the apartment, why would I be cleaning something that isn't dirty? Tradition, I guess.
I loooooved the essay! The cleaning habits of Italian women is a subject I never get tired of recounting to friends and family back home. Another thing that amazes me, is that they're usually scouring away while dressed as if they're going out to dinner on a Saturday night. Pearls and all.
And the last time I saw my mother-in-law she was sweeping her garage ceiling...
quote:Originally posted by Brigolante: b) blue package
Rebecca, I would not expect a man to be able to recognize "blue". I mean, last week I spent DAYS discussing wether "violet" is a color or a flower: men claimed it to be a flover (you can track down all the discussion, in Italian, through this blog message and the messages linked to it, also read the comments). With my father, I can use a workaround by telling him the exact composition of the color (90% cyan, 10% magenta, 15% yellow), but some men laim that the world only has 12 colors because as kids they were given a 12 color pencil case.
quote:f) on the bottom left hand shelf next to the cooking cream
One right thing, one wrong. A man does recognize the "bottom left hand shelf", but he will not be able to recognize the "next to the cooking cream": in first place he will not be able to recognize the "cooking cream" unless you add a detailed explaination of it too (omitting the "next the milk" part) and secondly I have yet to find a man able to understand the deceivingly simple concept of "next to" ^_____^
Alice Twain -- I don’t want to take what you can’t give / I would rather starve than eat your bread I would rather run but I can’t walk / Guess I’ll lie alone just like before Pearl Jam, Corduroy
Rebecca - you crack me up. That's exactly how my shopping list reads! The Muir Glen Tomatoes, on special, on the end cap (Chris is in retail so he understands end cap) at the end (far end mind you towards the chicken breasts) of the health food aisle.
Of course, now that it's the age of cell phones, he prefers to call me in almost every aisle to ask where something is. Last week, he couldn't find the pilsbury refrigerated pie crust in the red box b/c he was in the freezer section. Luckily, a stockboy heard him on the cell phone w/ me, and directed him to the proper location.
Oh and btw - I do put the shopping list in the exact order that the stuff can be found in the supermarket with the things along the back wall of the store (e.g., seafood and meat), broken out into their own sections and he unpacks. His incentive to get everything and put it away in its proper location is to avoid the hysterical phone call at 5:15 when I begin to cook dinner and can't find the ... well you fill in the blank.
Thanks for another entertaining essay Rebecca! I always look forward to reading them.
As I was reading it and these comments I couldn’t help but think of my friend Ernest who upon staying with his Italian girlfriend’s family for the first time entered the living room one morning to a scene that still haunts him. His girlfriend’s mother, cigarette dangling from her lips, had his underwear stretched over the end of her ironing board and was at that moment pushing the metal tip of the iron into every cranny of the crotch. She looked up with a "buongiorno Ernesto!" and went about her work.
The second thing that came to mind was my husband’s aunt who is married to a Mexican man and lives in Mexico where they also raised their son. The guilt she had over doing her son’s laundry (who was thirty and still living at home) was lessened by a piece she saw on tv about an Italian man who was over thirty and who bought his dirty laundry bag a bus ticket to send it home to mamma (who presumably bought it a bus ticket to send it back once laundered).
And the third thing that came to mind was my dear Sienese landlady who asked me one day as small talk, "Che fai di bello? Stiri?" (What do you do that’s nice? Iron?)
Marcy
Posts: 155 | Location: Berkeley, CA | Registered: 30 August 2003
after saying how lazy my friends husbands are I realized I should have given my brother credit. He is in sales and travels around the US constantly. Yet he does about 90% of the grocery shopping, laundry, cleaning, errands etc. I have been there when my brother has just returned from a 5 day trip and there is absolutely nothing edible in the refridgerator. My sister in law does almost nothing and then constantly talks about how lazy my poor brother is.
This probably sounds totally biased but everyone in our family comments on this as does my sister in laws own sister and mother. So it is not a case of being misinformed by my brother. I feel for him. He works about 50 + hours and week and then has all this along with a one year old daughter. He was used to my parents, with my mother handling all errands and cleaning and my father doing all the cooking. So this is totally new territory for him.
I've always wanted an east-wing/west-wing relationship. I was with one man who was so obsessive that not one piece of mail entered the house without being dealt with and taken to the dust bin immediately and another so oblivious that it was like having his teenaged son full time.
I guess I got lucky. I'm with a guy now who cooks for me, and the other day I said "after YOU make the bed, we can go get some lunch!" And it's been over a year now so I know it is not an act or a mirage.
He did have a hard time finding the Pillsbury pie crusts though, just like Kim's sig.
Topic Closed
), yes - but in my family even that morphed into more equal roles in the 70's. (When my younger brother started high school and my mom went back to work part-time.)
