When I discovered the concept of “mental load” in 2016, I was, like many, enthusiastic . As a woman, it was given to me to put a name to a heaviness that I had felt for a long time, without being able to fight it because I could neither define it nor circumscribe it; as an intellectual, I felt a particular excitement to feel a tangible benefit at the emergence of a concept. Six years later, it seems to me that the rebalancing of the mental load cannot be operated until we have understood how it unfolds within the couple, at the edge of life together. It is this additional definition that I propose here.
Monique Haicault, theorist of “mental load”
The notion of mental workload was conceptualized in 1976 by Monique Haicault. Within the framework of university research, the sociologist of work describes “a particular skill [concerning] the managerial organization of all the daily activities essential to the domestic life of a family. This invisible mental work of management had escaped investigation, most often limited to the sharing of household chores. The notion of “mental load” underlines the weight of this global management, its growing complexity and its constraints, but also the plurality of cognitive skills it mobilizes. »
Eight years later, in his article “The ordinary management of life in two” (in: Sociologie du travail, 1984/3), Haicault highlights that the two worlds, professional and domestic, are not watertight. The two days do not follow one another but are juxtaposed, and require juggling between everyone's different space-times, creating this constant tension which she has rightly named mental load. It will take forty years for the concept to percolate through blogger Emma's comic strip, and resonate with millions of interested parties who, like me, recognize this pernicious weight. Relief.
What origins?
But, for having clearly identified the problem, Haicault does not answer the question of origins: how does the mental load crystallize? Why, despite increased feminist vigilance, is it so difficult to prevent it? With the mental load, we always have the impression of arriving too late: when we want to oppose it, it already weighs with all its weight.
Yet it does not fall like a blow on the female shoulders. Nor is it imposed on women by men. Most of the latter more or less consciously rub their hands on it, but are not its architects; if that were the case, by then we would have given them back their share. It goes without saying – but even better by writing it – that I am not trying to make anyone feel guilty, and especially not women, who are quick to blame themselves and are regularly accused, wrongly, of setting themselves up as victims. I want to make an observation instead.
The mental burden has this sneaky feature that, first of all, it is not a burden. It is not heavy in the sense that, in the early stages, on the contrary, it is only a matter of pleasure. When a couple moves in, the organization of the first home turns out to be more or less easy, but it is suffused with a powerful scent of promise: the desire to live. Live the great love, build a home sweet home and perhaps found, following your parents, a family of your own.
The Carousel of Pernicious Nesting
If I believe my experience, once the lease was signed, I remember it very well: it was I who suggested hanging the witch's mirror here, in which drawer to put the cutlery and, at the furnishing, more materialist than feminist in spite of everything, I joyfully chose the curtains for the living room. Without realizing that I was putting my finger in the worst gear possible: it was already the mental load that I was installing in our house – but I didn't realize it because then, there were only two of us. , and that nothing was yet drudgery.
We did everything together. Sure. But it was I who offered to wash the bathroom, chose the place of the bursar (him: “Where did you put the peeler, already?”) and potatoes (me: “ We could leave the potatoes in that old basin, right?"). In all naivety but at the height of my assertiveness, I fixed the framework of the mental load. Above all, I implied that this frame was me. Without realizing that the mental load, so light at the start of life together, was destined to increase.
I have observed this carousel of pernicious nesting many times, among friends from different backgrounds. It seems that men are less interested in the practicality and aesthetics of the house. Atavism of the housekeeper? Not that easy. Most of the couples that are formed today have both already had a life behind them: a succession of jobs, one or more homes. Who didn't like settling down? Investing in a place that can, in the wake of Virgina Woolf, be described as the first Chamber of its own? This power offers, as such, more for women than for men, a feeling of accomplishment. Which of us could claim not to have liked settling down? After all, loneliness has never come under domination.
Time, an ally of the mental load
What happens next, there is almost no need to write. Although the trap is well installed, the mental load is not yet visible for several years. It grows and grows as the life of the household unfolds, first causing some clashes, nothing too bad. She bides her time. One, two, three, the children are here. Four, five, six, the trap closes: where are the plasters? the pie pan? health records? notebooks and erasers? He does not know. Her/me: Yes.
When, in 1929, Woolf posed the need for her famous Chambre à soi, when, two years later, she warned that "the first duty of a woman who wants to write is to kill the house fairy in her", we must hear that: space is time. Whatever the gender of its occupant, a space to take care of, whether it is too large or too small, requires time spent doing nothing else. At the dawn of common life, space is empty and time is not lacking – yet. When, in turn, other (small) individuals claim their space and time, the two dimensions intertwine and further complicate “invisible management”.
This is the reason for this text: if we do not strive to prevent the mental charge from crystallizing, if we do not take care that it first unfolds under the tinsel of amorous construction, that it takes time to weigh, it becomes more difficult to balance. Daughters, sisters, friends, never choose the living room curtains alone: the mental burden is hidden behind!
