New Law in Spain: Mucho Chores for Macho Men

To have and to hold - and to Hoover?
By Melanie McDonagh
(Filed: 25/06/2005)

If you think the institution of marriage is going belly-up in Britain, just fancy what will happen in Spain once a new law about civil marriage comes into effect this month.

The vows that couples take in a civil marriage ceremony are to change. Not only will the spouses have to promise to be faithful, live together and help each other - in itself a tall order - but they will also have to commit to sharing "domestic responsibilities and the care of children and elderly family members".

Of course, wives as well as husbands will have to take the new vows, but since at present 40 per cent of Spanish men do no housework, it's a safe bet that the greater impact will be on husbands. The Spanish parliament's justice commission, which drafted the amendment, is silent about how it will ensure that domestic responsibilities are divided fairly in the home.

However, ministers have suggested that if the couple get divorced - possibly as a result of quarrels about the division of labour - husbands will have a raw deal when it comes to custody of the children if they have been shown to be slouches around the house.

It all seems a little prescriptive, don't you think? Personally, I blame al-Qae'da. Yep, if it hadn't been for the Madrid bombings just before the last election, the Socialists wouldn't have got in - people blamed the ruling conservatives either for annoying al-Qae'da with their Iraq policy, or for unfairly suggesting that Basque separatists were responsible for the bombs.

Anyway, the polls swung to the Socialists, as a result of which Spain has had a raft of measures to introduce swingeing social change, of which this is the latest example.

The last - and far more controversial - measure was the law allowing gay men not only to marry, but to have equal rights to adopt children. The transformation of Spanish social life may be Osama bin Laden's most enduring legacy.

Of course, tweaking civil marriages may not change much - unless it leads to a swing back to church weddings. I mean, the promise to be faithful to each other hasn't done away with adultery. But these things can quickly become a measure of what's seen as acceptable, as what counts as progressive social change. As such, it might just take the fancy of the British Government.

If it does, will it matter? Would British home-life change if men promised to do more around the house?

As so often, it depends how rich you are. The obvious truth is that most well-to-do Brits do not quarrel about who does the ironing. They sub-contract the job to someone else who needs the money. Ditto child-rearing, to a nanny or au pair - though that may change now that the middle classes face fines for employing people who ought not, strictly speaking, to be working in Britain.

I can think of many nice, professional couples who will come horribly unstuck once their nanny's status is scrutinised.

At the other end of the spectrum, many poor families wouldn't be affected either by a change in the marriage ceremony because they don't get married in the first place. That's partly why they're poor. About 40 per cent of children here are born outside marriage and single mothers have to get by without agonising about the politically correct wording of the wedding vow.

That leaves the rest of us. Actually, let's leave me out of it. When it comes to the division of chores, I take the view that cooking is what I do best, and I draw the line at cleaning.

Indeed, when my husband is away, I'm in the embarrassing position of having to find out where the vacuum cleaner is kept. If people are coming round, that is. Otherwise, I don't bother.

But for normal couples, the rule is that women do most of the housework; men do DIY and car maintenance. As the Fawcett Society found, if women in full-time work spend two hours a day doing chores, men spend one hour. Pets and gardening, apparently, are the only areas where the jobs are divided equally, for the obvious reason that they're not boring.

Things are changing, but we're a long way off from a 50:50 division of housework, let alone child-care.

Perhaps women don't actually want to be displaced as their child's primary parent, however much they like men to be involved.

And when it comes to picking a husband, the willingness of the man to do the laundry may be a less important factor for women than, say, looks - shallow beasts that we are.

But the Spaniards are right to think that the personal is political when it comes to housework. More important, the personal is economic.

New research from the University of Essex shows what most of us could have guessed, that married men whose wives stay at home earn more than those whose wives work full-time. It's because "they are able to spend more time developing the skills and contacts that increase their labour market productivity". Well, of course they are.

And if the man, working full-out with the help of a stay-at-home wife, can earn more than he could if he and his wife worked full-time, with housework shared in the approved fashion, why, it may be worth the woman's while to sacrifice the fun of office life for home-making.

It would certainly be worth the man's while to make sure that she feels valued for her trouble. In other words, it's not for the state to decide whether men and women should pull their weight equally around the house. It might not work for everyone.

It's a charmingly optimistic idea, though, that you can change people's conduct by tweaking the marriage vows. Till death do us part seems to be too much for most Brits - adding a clause about housework might put even more people off.