But who does the dishes?

Satisfaction and contentment with the labor of the house is impossible without first recovering God’s design for the house.

This question weighs heavy on the hearts of evangelical pastors and their female congregants—it comes up with surprising frequency in sermon illustrations, marital counseling, and even when we request questions for our Q&A episodes.

“Who should do the dishes?”

Our first thought was, “Really? Who cares?”

But on further reflection, it all started to make sense.

The question of who does the dishes is apparently a source of intense marital contention in many households. Back in 2019, Caroline Kitchner opined in The Atlantic that Doing the Dishes is the Worst. “This is now an empirically proven fact,” she wrote. “Dishwashing causes more relationship distress than any other household task.” She went on to prove her claim:

A report from the Council of Contemporary Families (CCF), a nonprofit that studies family dynamics, suggests that the answer to that question can have a significant impact on the health and longevity of a relationship. The study examined a variety of different household tasks—including shopping, laundry, and housecleaning, and found that, for women in heterosexual relationships, it’s more important to share the responsibility of doing the dishes than any other chore.

Note that dishwashing is the most important chore to share for women in heterosexual relationships. Not men—women. We’ll come back to that. Needless to say, this issue is coming up in many marriages, so it makes sense that guys are asking us the question.

It also makes sense that we’ve noticed many pastors repeatedly calling husbands to help with the housework. We don’t mean exhorting them to mow the lawn, fix a leaky faucet, or take out the trash. What really stands out is the consistent call for men to chip in with the traditionally feminine housework—especially doing the dishes.

So it seems that men are asking us who should do the dishes because (1) their wives care deeply about the issue, and (2) pastors are advocating for their wives’ position.

But why is this an issue? It seems so random. Why do women and pastors care so much about who does the dishes specifically?

As usual, we don’t think it’s ultimately about the physical chore itself. It is about the symbolic meaning of dishwashing, and the changing nature of the household. The physical is merely imaging the spiritual.

The symbolic meaning of dishes

In Dishes: A Preamble to Women’s Work, Elaine Bernstein Partnow, the editor of feminist.com, explains:

Some men do the dishes some of the time. A few men do the dishes all of the time. Most men never do the dishes… Symbolically, the message is very clear. Men, like women, make a mess—but the mess is left for women to clean up.

Partnow is right that doing the dishes is symbolic. But she is hasn’t quite understood the fullness of what they represent.

In the mind of the modern woman, they represent the drudgery of the household.

This comes across loud and clear in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. She writes:

As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—‘Is this all?’

…And finally there is the problem that has no name, a vague undefined wish for “something more” than washing dishes, ironing, punishing and praising the children.

It seems, however, that Friedan didn’t know as much as she pretended about the monotony of dishwashing. In Interviews with Betty Friedan, Michele Kort writes:

As her career took off, her marriage ran aground. After the divorce, ending more than twenty tumultuous years, Carl Friedan blasted his ex in an interview, claiming she “never washed 100 dishes during twenty years of marriage” and that his new wife made chicken soup and shined his shoes. [Betty] Friedan laughed and replied, “All I can say is, to each her own. I’m so mechanically inept, I can barely shine my own shoes.”

This makes perfect sense if the issue isn’t really doing dishes, but rather what they symbolically represent. Friedan, like many women of her time, felt she was being “imprisoned” in the home. Hence, she wrote extensively of “trapped housewife syndrome.” She believed careerism was the way to escape. Doing dishes was one of the many links that kept her metaphorically chained to the household. Therefore, to toss off the burden of dishes was to be freed from the drudgery of the home—to seek self-actualization in a career.

Obviously, this flies in the face of Scripture. In Proverbs, God speaks of a wicked wife as one who “is boisterous and rebellious; her feet do not remain at home” (7:11). The contrast to the godly wife could not be more stark: one builds her house, while the other tears it down with her own hands (14:1). This is why Paul not only exhorts young women to love their husbands and children, but to also be “workers at home” (Titus 2:4).

But what about the Proverbs 31 woman? Isn’t she a careerist who has escaped the household? Only in the warped minds of feminists. She is, in fact, a diligent wife who has expanded the boundaries and influence of her household. Her husband’s heart trusts her, and she smiles at the future (vv. 11, 25). Careerism was not an option for women in the ancient Near East, unless you count whoring and witchcraft. The reason for this is not patriarchal oppression, but pre-industrialism—as we’ll cover very shortly.

Scripture unambiguously commends the work of the home, and calls women to joyfully give themselves to it.

And yet we have the constant call from pastors and female “theologians” for men to do some dishes.

Take for example Aimee Byrd, back when she was still closeted and pretending to be orthodox, wrote an article on Mortification of Spin—evidently a precursor to her later book of the same name: Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. (Note the preposition: recovering from it.) The post is mostly a meandering rant against John Piper for saying, “The more women can arouse men by doing typically masculine things, the less they can count on receiving from men a sensitivity to typically feminine needs.” Admittedly, Piper’s wording in the larger section she quotes is awkward—but what is notable is the conclusion of Byrd’s post. She rejects housework as tied up with femininity, and advances instead the myth of choreplay:

Byrd isn’t an outlier. There are many others like her. For example, we have so-called complementarian Christian musicians taking it beyond dishes:

Byrd and Greenberg, like Friedan before her, desire to be freed from the burden of washing dishes—and from everything else they represent. Their greatest “feminine need” is to be unshackled from the monotony of housework.

What’s the solution to this problem?