By Jennifer Forker
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
It’s no secret that men and women sometimes take different approaches to housecleaning. After I married my husband, I found him cleaning the toilet by disassembling it first.
His father? Family lore says Grandpa John once cleaned the kitchen floors by moving the table and chairs into another room, filling a bucket with scalding, sudsy water and throwing it on the linoleum floor — mimicking how he mopped barracks floors during Army basic training in the early 1960s.
“It was clean, it was fast, it was efficient and it got the job done,” said Grandpa John Clarke, 73, of West Warwick, R.I. “It’s not how I do it anymore. Now we hire a cleaning lady.”
Two books have hit bookstores to help the housekeeping-challenged. One is clearly female-oriented, promising to impart the wisdom of grandmothers. The other? Grandpa John would agree with its logic: Teach men shortcuts and encourage speed.
How To Get Things Really Flat (The Experiment, 2010) not only tries to help men understand the art of ironing, as the title indicates, but author Andrew Martin hopes to liberate women by emboldening men: Yes, you can do the dishes (and the laundry).
He does this with humour and bluntness.
“My argument is it’s not difficult to learn (how to do certain chores) so why not learn it? Men are perverse in not learning it,” Martin said in an interview from his London home. “They spend hundreds of hours of their lives arguing with their wives. And I say why not find something better, more original to fight about?”
How to Sew on a Button: And Other Nifty Things Your Grandmother Knew (Ballantine Books, 2009) takes a similar tack for women untrained in the household arts. The book idea started with a pie gone wrong, said author Erin Bried of Brooklyn, N.Y. She tried to bake a strawberry-rhubarb pie for friends and learned — after serving it — that she’d used Swiss chard stems instead of rhubarb. The greens gave the pie a decidedly grassy — and inedible — taste.
“It was so embarrassing, I decided to write a book about it,” said Bried.
These two authors researched their books in similar fashions: by interviewing those they deemed “experts.” Martin spoke with the women in his life, particularly his wife, and a few obscure scientist types. Bried searched out other people’s grandmothers. Ten of these women share their ideas on thriftiness and entertaining, housecleaning and, yes, even how to sew on a button.
Bried, a senior staff writer at Self magazine, says her book is for folks seeking more self sufficiency.
“We are in tough economic times, and we’re all looking for different ways to save time and save money and make life simpler,” said Bried. “If you know how to hem your own pants you can make the decision to do it.”
Martin, the author of seven novels, says the trick in getting men to do housework is to teach them shortcuts, which are more than speedy — they’re “manly.”
He tells men to use the vacuum attachment to dust — or to dust with both hands — and to work fast, against the clock. Making it a contest — that’s manly — will get the job done.
Martin warns women to start their men off slowly with chores that show noticeable results. That’s why men like to mow, he said.
“You can see where you’ve been,” Martin said. “You can see you’re achieving something.”
The same can hold true for ironing and vacuuming.
“There is something about vacuuming,” said Martin. “It’s more manly. It’s noisy. It’s violent. People have to shut up for it.”
Martin even has a favourite vacuum attachment.
“I say the best attachment is the narrow one,” he said. “That is the most violent.”
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THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
It’s no secret that men and women sometimes take different approaches to housecleaning. After I married my husband, I found him cleaning the toilet by disassembling it first.
His father? Family lore says Grandpa John once cleaned the kitchen floors by moving the table and chairs into another room, filling a bucket with scalding, sudsy water and throwing it on the linoleum floor — mimicking how he mopped barracks floors during Army basic training in the early 1960s.
“It was clean, it was fast, it was efficient and it got the job done,” said Grandpa John Clarke, 73, of West Warwick, R.I. “It’s not how I do it anymore. Now we hire a cleaning lady.”
Two books have hit bookstores to help the housekeeping-challenged. One is clearly female-oriented, promising to impart the wisdom of grandmothers. The other? Grandpa John would agree with its logic: Teach men shortcuts and encourage speed.
How To Get Things Really Flat (The Experiment, 2010) not only tries to help men understand the art of ironing, as the title indicates, but author Andrew Martin hopes to liberate women by emboldening men: Yes, you can do the dishes (and the laundry).
He does this with humour and bluntness.
“My argument is it’s not difficult to learn (how to do certain chores) so why not learn it? Men are perverse in not learning it,” Martin said in an interview from his London home. “They spend hundreds of hours of their lives arguing with their wives. And I say why not find something better, more original to fight about?”
How to Sew on a Button: And Other Nifty Things Your Grandmother Knew (Ballantine Books, 2009) takes a similar tack for women untrained in the household arts. The book idea started with a pie gone wrong, said author Erin Bried of Brooklyn, N.Y. She tried to bake a strawberry-rhubarb pie for friends and learned — after serving it — that she’d used Swiss chard stems instead of rhubarb. The greens gave the pie a decidedly grassy — and inedible — taste.
“It was so embarrassing, I decided to write a book about it,” said Bried.
These two authors researched their books in similar fashions: by interviewing those they deemed “experts.” Martin spoke with the women in his life, particularly his wife, and a few obscure scientist types. Bried searched out other people’s grandmothers. Ten of these women share their ideas on thriftiness and entertaining, housecleaning and, yes, even how to sew on a button.
Bried, a senior staff writer at Self magazine, says her book is for folks seeking more self sufficiency.
“We are in tough economic times, and we’re all looking for different ways to save time and save money and make life simpler,” said Bried. “If you know how to hem your own pants you can make the decision to do it.”
Martin, the author of seven novels, says the trick in getting men to do housework is to teach them shortcuts, which are more than speedy — they’re “manly.”
He tells men to use the vacuum attachment to dust — or to dust with both hands — and to work fast, against the clock. Making it a contest — that’s manly — will get the job done.
Martin warns women to start their men off slowly with chores that show noticeable results. That’s why men like to mow, he said.
“You can see where you’ve been,” Martin said. “You can see you’re achieving something.”
The same can hold true for ironing and vacuuming.
“There is something about vacuuming,” said Martin. “It’s more manly. It’s noisy. It’s violent. People have to shut up for it.”
Martin even has a favourite vacuum attachment.
“I say the best attachment is the narrow one,” he said. “That is the most violent.”
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