Kochanie To the Rescue With a Shaggy Dog
Photo by Flickr user richtpt. Used under a Creative Commons license.
So it's taken me a while to work my way through all of your comments (life's quite a bit busier these days) but I finally got 'round to Kochanie's reply to this post about that sort of broken division-of-labor study. One of the problems, for instance, is in their decision to equate "domestic tasks" with "women's work," which meant, among other things, that they disregarded all outdoor chores. (Which therefore stints on the workload of, say, single mothers who move out of apartments to houses or farms.) Another big problem is the 60's-era way they chose to designate the "Head" of the "Family Unit."
The Head of the FU must be at least 16 years old...If this person is female and she has a husband in the FU, then he is designated as Head. If she has a boyfriend with whom she has been living for at least one year, then he is Head. However, if the husband or boyfriend is incapacitated and unable to fulfill the functions of Head, then the FU will have a female Head.
To which Kochanie replied
Morale of the story:
Never trust a governmental body to give Head. It will invariably FU.
Ouch! Just Ouch! Very nice Shaggy Dog ending to an otherwise pretty irksome story.
Hi. Yeah, the whole concept of a (one) "head of the family" irritates me and the way the designation was explained for the purposes of the study sounded pretty confused. Kochanie's comment made me smile. I'm disappointed though because I was hoping that the end of the story was that you got a dog, and I would have been happy for you, and the dog!
[Yeah, like there's one head in *my* household, right? What the heck though, it's an *antique study!* Parts of it are going to have to creak like that. Thanks, Mag. --fl]
Thanks, fl, for writing a post inspired by my comment. And thanks to Dawn, Sunflower and sugarmag for letting me know that they enjoyed the jest.
While the instructions for that survey could provide material for many satirical posts, this survey may be valuable because the instructions are so precise and have remained unchanged since inception. Even though I love to make our readers laugh, I know that the design of a questionnaire for a sociological survey is a painstaking process.
[I agree it's important to keep the actual methodology consistent, I'd prefer if they did a little more "windage" on it though to factor in, say, the advent of 2nd Wave, feminism, nevermind the maturing of the 3rd. Also, hey, don't you know women aren't supposed to be funny? (So how come I blew milk out of my nose when I read that comment?) No need to thank *me*, Kochanie. --fl]