Why men should never help their wives to cook and other lies
A cheerful couple in their kitchen at home. The man is chopping vegetables and cooking dinner as his wife washes dishes.
What you need to know:
- In many traditional communities, women perform instrumental roles.
- Gender division of labour has shifted over time, driven by necessity and with no biological consequences.
A clip on a WhatsApp group depicts a man sitting by his wife as she prepares a meal. At some point, he decides to add wood to the fire. He picks up a stick and tries to break it into two using his knee. Unfortunately, the force pushes his leg all the way to the cooking pot, spilling the food. The enraged wife throws the remainder of the flour on his face, leaving him with a rather decorated countenance. The caption on the clip reads: “Why men should never help their wives to cook”.
The message is that things should be left to those best suited for them, suggesting that men should stick to their lane. The impression that the man is clumsy at what he tried to do is because it is unnatural to him is mistaken. Men and boys who are clumsy at domestic work were simply not trained and socialised to carry them out.
The kind of thinking in the clip is replicated in a Somali story to the effect that a woman kept arguing with her husband and demanding to be allowed to make all the decisions in the family. When this happened, her first order was that the fittest camel be slaughtered. She then decreed that the meat be sliced and cooked without preservation. On the third day, the carcass was effusing a horrible stench, was no longer edible and the family had neither food nor a means of transport. The husband then said: “If someone who never ruled wakes up one day and assumes the role, things that have never left their places will start to do so. The decision of a woman smells like this carcass”.
This narrative depicts women as unfit for decision-making. It shows that their decisions can only lead to disaster. Such a story can be used to justify the marginalisation of women from leadership.
The tale reminisces of a Maasai myth on the origin of wild animals. It states that in the distant past, both women and men had their own livestock. Then one day, a huge bull was slaughtered in the village and people went feasting. Women were so indulged in the feast that they forgot to tend to their livestock, which then wandered into the wilderness and became the wild animals we have today.
This story depicts women as being so food-minded that they would be easily distracted from their duties by the same. It belittles them as people who cannot be trusted with serious responsibility, such as management of resources.
These stories justify occupational segregation, a concept promoted by thinkers who argue that nature is the basis of gender division of labour. One such thinker, Emile Durkheim, argued that women are naturally suited for nurturing and domestic responsibilities, and men for intellectual and public roles. He was convinced that gender division of labour contributes to social cohesion and order.
Another thinker, Talcort Parsons, posits that the family functions best when men and women perform complementary roles. He classified men’s roles as instrumental and women’s as expressive, largely consisting of caregiving, nurturing and providing emotional support. Like Durkheim, he maintained that this dichotomy was essential for social stability, cohesion and efficiency. In addition, Parson argued that preparation for these roles was done through the socialisation of boys and girls, thus moving from pure biological determinism.
These theories have been criticised for oversimplifying reality. Ascribing social roles to biology naturalises tasks that both women and men can perform. They also ignore cultural diversity by using specific human experiences at a specific time to generalise.
In many traditional communities, women perform instrumental roles. In the traditional Maasai, Borana and Gabra communities, for instance, it is women who construct the family shelter. In ancient Dahomey, currently Benin, there existed a legendary elite all-female military regiment. There cannot be any more an instrumental role than military work.
Moreover, gender division of labour has shifted over time, driven by necessity and with no biological consequences. More fundamental is that the theories merely described what was happening but fell short of cogent explanations of the complex factors informing the practices.
Back to the fireplace story, prescribing that men should not “assist their wives” to cook based on a single mishap falls within the realm of limited data in making generalisations. The idea that a man doing domestic work is “assisting” his wife assumes that these tasks are innate to women, which they are not. Everyone should do domestic work as a matter of survival and self-care. That the man faltered cannot be used to condemn all men as incompetents. Such parochial folkloristic anecdotes have no place in modern society.
The writer is a lecturer in Gender and Development Studies at South Eastern Kenya University ([email protected]).
