Has lugging loads of (soaking wet) laundry led to your developing the muscles in your arms (though not as much as this Olympian mom)? Imagine if you had an iBasket, a combination laundry basket/washing machine, rendering the lugging-laundry-basket step unnecessary—-now, how about automating the next step, hoisting the cleaned but still wet items into the dryer………

Seven extra hours of washing, dusting, vacuuming, tidying up, putting away: A new study from the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research has found that that’s how much more housework women who are married do. From Science Daily:

“It’s a well-known pattern,” said ISR economist Frank Stafford, who directs the study. “There’s still a significant reallocation of labor that occurs at marriage—men tend to work more outside the home, while women take on more of the household labor. Certainly there are all kinds of individual differences here, but in general, this is what happens after marriage. And the situation gets worse for women when they have children.”

The researchers did find that the amount of housework that women have been doing has steadily decreased since 1976.

Well. Until we bought our house in a town in northern New Jersey in 2003, we always lived in apartments or condos and, aside from more clothes and a few more dishes, I don’t recall any significant increase in housework on my part after Jim and I got married. Charlie’s birth definitely inaugurated a new era of Lots to Clean, mostly in the form of laundry (clothes, sheets, towels upon towels) and the floor (whether linoleum, hardwood, or carpet.) Some experiments making gluten-free bread on a hot summer day in Minnesota and some memorable “it’s all over the rug and spreading!” moments have tested my cleaning and multitasking skills, as has the need to mop up a major mess while simultaneously tending to a distressed child in need a shower.

And of course, it’s not just the house that needs to be cleaned, but that other place where we semi-live, the car, proper cleaning of which would probably add a good hour or two of “carcleaning” time (a whole 40 minutes would be needed to pry out the dimes, French fries, pens, and plastic utensils lodged under the front and passenger seats and in one of the seatbelts). And the soda, and the sand in the summer (but what’s a trip to the beach without getting sandy?).

Happily, as Charlie has gotten older, he’s been doing more and more around the house, from taking out the garbage to folding laundry—-if (quoting Prof. Stafford above) the “situation gets worse for women when they have children,” it’s possible for it to get better as they grow up, and for more hands to lighten the (house) work load.