ARGENTINA: League of Househusbands Growing Fast

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Nov 15 2002 (IPS) - The four-year recession and subsequent rise in unemployment in Argentina have prompted under- and unemployed men to come together in an organisation that aims to instil appreciation of the importance of household and child-rearing responsibilities, and of the need for such duties to be shared by both partners.

The two-month-old League of Househusbands, which already has 350 members, was the brainchild of a local cartoonist and humorist, Hernán Torre Repiso.

The organisation is run by a 16-member board, and 24 subcommissions help members deal with the problems they run across in their domestic labours, while helping them reinsert themselves into the labour market.

”We are trying to turn something negative – the lack of a steady income – into something positive: spending more time at home, and sharing the work with your wife in the kitchen, shopping, cleaning, and raising the kids,” Torre Repiso told IPS.

”Now many of the members of the League know their children’s friends by name,” he noted.

The crisis that broke out four years ago, which peaked in an economic collapse and protests and rioting that brought down two governments in less than two weeks in late December, has driven large numbers of the middle-class into poverty.

Over half of the population of 37 million in this Southern Cone country, Latin America’s third-largest economy, is living below the poverty line, and unemployment has skyrocketed to 21.4 percent overall, and to 23.2 percent among men.

To that must be added 19 percent of workers who have only temporary jobs, and an undetermined number who have given up looking for work after long, fruitless searches.

Many men have found themselves waiting at home by the phone, hoping to hear that they have been offered a new job. Others, who have only found casual work, spend much more time at home than before, between stints. Yet others have moved their offices to their homes, to cut costs.

Torre Repiso explained that the situations vary, but that ”the worst” cases are those of the traditional ”breadwinners” who worked up to 12 hours a day to ”bring home the bacon”, and now spend all day at home, going out only to take the children to school or do the shopping.

”It’s like falling from a 1,000-metre height,” he said. ”The guys are lost, and we try to help them see that this unknown habitat is their home, and that there are many positive things in that return to the home, because the chores that are done there are for the people they love.”

Architect José Bambona, another member of the League, told IPS that the group helps the men understand that ”before, when they left for work and came home at night, they were missing really important things, like playing with their kids, listening to them, becoming familiar with their problems, or helping them learn how to study or practice sports.”

The board of the League, which is made up of architects, engineers, notary publics, accountants and former business executives, gives the members advice on how to set up a microenterprise or consulting business, start a family garden, or take advantage of the latest technologies to work at home.

The idea for the group came to Torre Repiso, who had a slot as a humorist on the TV programme of the League of Housewives, which has half a million members.

He discovered that the programme did not include men, even though more and more husbands share the responsibility today for domestic labours.

Since Torre Repiso, who is now 58, worked evenings in the newspapers when his children were young, it was only natural for him to care for them, take them to school, and do the grocery shopping. ”I always felt that when I took my kids to school or picked them up, the mothers looked at me kind of funny,” he commented.

The League of Househusbands operates in an office of the headquarters of the League of Housewives, although it has its own separate agenda. The idea now is to expand to the country’s interior, through a structure similar to the women’s network.

Torre Repiso clarified that the aim of the League is not to turn the men into ”good househusbands” but to create a growing awareness and appreciation of the importance of domestic duties, acknowledge the burden that women have shouldered on their own for so many years, and help men jointly assume household responsibilities.

He said the wives of the members of the League, most of whom work outside the home, are appreciative of the new sense of commitment, which remains even in the case of men who once again find a full-time job.

Widowers or men who are separated or divorced also come to the new office, after finding themselves faced with responsibilities that their wives traditionally assumed.

”Our aim is to raise awareness that the responsibility for the household and child-rearing must be shared,” said Torre Repiso.

”Then, even if the man finds work again, he will have a different sort of bond with the children, and he won’t go back to being a ‘stranger’ in his home, and will be more willing to share the work with his wife.”

Women’s activists, who for decades have been stressing the need for men to share the domestic duties, to avoid the ‘double workday’ that burdens working women, agree that the creation of the League of Househusbands could help bring about a major cultural change.

Sociologist Susana Torrado pointed out that the growth in the number of female heads of households, from 23 to 30 percent of all families in the past 10 years, and the rising unemployment among men have forced couples to increasingly assume joint responsibility for domestic tasks and childcare.

But she lamented that many men are experiencing the change as a source of frustration. ”Although it entails a positive change of roles, because it does not arise out of a positive cause, the process is experienced as something negative.”

Nevertheless, Torrado said the phenomenon is gaining strength, especially among the middle-class, where changes had already been occurring among couples in their 20s and 30s. She observed that a division of labour in the home is now becoming much more common among couples of all ages.

ARGENTINA: League of Househusbands Growing Fast

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Nov 15 2002 (IPS) - The four-year recession and subsequent rise in unemployment in Argentina have prompted under- and unemployed men to come together in an organisation that aims to instil appreciation of the importance of household and child-rearing responsibilities, and of the need for such duties to be shared by both partners.
(more…)