At first glance, maybe the surprise of this article is that home economics classes still exist. But, to fully understand why what Colegia Montecastelo, a college in the Spanish town of Vigo, is doing is revolutionary, we need to talk about some things. Let’s make one of those topics household chores. Sound fun? Now, let’s talk about gender and household chores. (1)

A Woman’s Work Is Never Done

It’s no secret to women that many men think of chores as “women’s work,” even if they may not present it in such sexist terms. Women in domestic relationships might be familiar with chasing after a man to put his own dishes in the sink, at least, if he refuses to wash them. The stats back this up. As of 2019, married mothers spend twice as much time on chores as married fathers. And that’s in America, a beacon for equal rights. If that’s not bad enough, in households where the woman is working, and the man is unemployed–not working from home, but not working–women still do more chores! (2)

College Home Ec.

In 2018, Colegia Montecastelo began to offer these home economics courses to young men. The school motto is “equality is learned with actions,” and the college wants to affirm that through breaking the stigma around household chores as a “girly” thing. “It seemed very useful for our students to learn to perform these tasks so that, when they form a family, they are involved from the beginning and know that a house is a matter of two,” said the program coordinator, Gabriel Bravo.  “It’s not a matter of the woman cleaning, doing the dishes, and ironing. This will allow them to become aware and learn to handle themselves at home.” The course is taught by volunteers–not just from the administration. Some of the young men’s fathers have stepped up. (3)

Program and Response

Originally, the Home Economics class was just a simple cooking class. Then, they added a wider array of household skills, like sewing, ironing, and tidying the house. Now, there’s an even broader array of skills on offer: carpentry, masonry, electrical, and plumbing. Although the parents were thrilled about the idea from the start, the students approached the idea with a great deal of reluctance. However, once learning how easy some of the tasks are to complete, they changed their tune. “For some, it was the first time they had held an iron,” Bravdo says. “It was fun and instructive at the same time, we are quite surprised, and the parents are very happy.”

The school plans to keep expanding the program, to be able to offer it to more students. Other schools are also beginning to follow suit, after the success of Colegia Montecastelo’s experiment. (1, 3)

Why?

A New York Times correspondent on gender, Claire Cain Miller says there’s “a lot of societal pressure on women to have a clean house, and the expectation is different for men (and no, it’s not that women see a mess and men don’t — that’s been disproved).” So, this college is taking strides in the right direction to show men running of a household doesn’t fall on one gender alone. (4)