Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, October 24, 1995 TAG: 9510240030
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETH MACY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Reprinted from a 1950 home-economics textbook, the story featured a 12-point strategy for women on ``How to treat your man when he comes home from work.'' Here are some excerpts:
Prepare yourself: Take 15 minutes to rest so you will be refreshed when he arrives. Touch up your makeup, put a ribbon in your hair and be fresh looking.
Minimize all noise: At the time of his arrival, eliminate noise of washers, dryers, dishwashers or vacuum. Try to encourage the children to be quiet.
Have a cool or warm drink ready for him. Arrange his pillow and offer to massage his neck and shoulders and take off his shoes. Speak in a soft, soothing, pleasant voice. Allow him to relax and unwind. ... Greet him with a warm smile and be glad to see him.
While Ruth pondered just how far homemakers have come since the '50s, inside the house and out, 54-year-old Aline took a very public stance against her own dirty kitchen floor - specifically, the refusal of her husband and son to pitch in and mop it.
This following a day of canning 12 gallons of broccoli and feeding her son's 4-H animals. This following a three-week trip to take care of her sick mother in Ohio - from which she returned to find her favorite goose dead and her house ``looking like Hurricane Opal had made an early arrival.''
``It wasn't when my son accidentally killed the goose, exactly,'' she recalled in a recent telephone interview. ``It was when my husband beheaded the goose, to eat it, but then left it out in the sun. That was when I snapped.
``And I said, `You never listen. You never do the things I ask. One person can't do the farm, the canning, the housework, the chicken-feeding, the lamb-feeding and the steer-feeding, and survive. It's got to be equally portioned out within a person's limits.' ''
Aline Poythress's labor dispute captured the hearts - and dishpan hands - of women everywhere. A woman from the other side of Rockingham County sent her a photo of her husband and a friend's doing dishes at the kitchen sink, with the note, ``It can be done.'' A Page County women's aid center sent her a poster with a batch of signatures and the message: ``You are a shining example of homemakers across America that have been taken for granted. Go, sister, go!''
When the media reported that the Poythresses had settled the family strike - by hammering out a household contract to re-assign such duties as laundry, toilet-cleaning and steer-feeding - Aline became the Ann Landers of dirty-laundry disputes.
``A woman who lives in New York, whom I don't know from Adam, wrote and wanted a copy of my contract. She lives in an apartment, so a lot of our farm responsibilities didn't apply to her situation.''
But Aline did suggest a technique she employs when her husband or her 16-year-old son forget to pick up after themselves. ``I use an old clean garbage can, a barrel on the back porch. ... The day that David found his favorite Charlotte Hornets hat there under his father's muddy barn boots, there was a roar that could be heard up and down the Eastern Seaboard.''
Ruth Dugan admits she's from the old school. ``I grew up in the era when the division of labor was taken for granted: Some work was women's, some was men's.''
Though she and her husband, Ken, are officially retired, he has his own computer and sign-making business. And she's a church organist in addition to serving on the Smith Mountain Lake Chamber of Commerce, the Friends of the Library board and the homeowners water-supply management board. ``I also do book-keeping for Ken's business. And in between I hit the furniture with a duster every once in a while.''
While she also does all the household laundry - alas, old habits die hard - she stresses that she bent over backwards to raise sons who know how to separate their lights from darks. ``I think it's a mistake when boys are brought up not to be able to do for themselves,'' Dugan says. ``It's like Lewis Grizzard's dirty underwear piling up when he was between wives - and he'd go out to buy more.''
She believes husbands and wives, especially those from the old school, should switch roles occasionally. ``Because when you get to a certain age, you can count on the fact that somebody's going to be left behind.
``A friend's husband died unexpectedly and she didn't know how to write a check for the electric bill, and she is not a stupid woman.''
The helpless widow, the busy retiree, even the late chauvinistic humorist Grizzard - they're all wake-up calls for fairness on the homefront. Glass ceilings may be shattering in the workplace, but business-as-usual still means it's the women working the rubber gloves and Windex after a hard day's work, whether it be at the playground or the Power Mac.
As for Aline Poythress, poststrike life on the farm is much improved - thanks to monthly conferences wherein the family tries to pre-empt further household hurricanes.
``Sometimes Jim cooks supper now, out of the kindness of his heart,'' Aline says. ``And David still does the `later, Mom' on the chores, but not as much.
``Fortunately, things in society have changed, but sometimes it's very difficult to change a pre-set pattern in a family. And one of those patterns is that, yes, men can mop a floor.''
by CNB