Will the Dust Ever Clear in Vacuum Cleaner Debate?
The vacuum cleaner has never been my friend. I thought I was through with it. But now it has got me in a lot of trouble I never anticipated.
Jennifer Morrison Taw, twentysomething, is not the first to take offense at these lines I wrote about my distaste for that infernal appliance:
“It is not so much the machine’s awkwardness that annoys me as its sound. Awkward it is. The snout has a tendency to go its own way, and one has to manhandle it, like an obstinate dog on a leash. But its whine is insufferable. It has been a rule in our house for years that my wife is not to use the vacuum while I’m working. Of course my wife no longer uses the vacuum. That is done by our housecleaning woman, who is impervious to my rules.”
Ms. Taw is also offended by an earlier paragraph of mine: “It seems ironic to me that in this age, when technology has reduced housework to an almost pleasant minimum, so many women should want to leave home for the stress and grinding competition of the marketplace.”
Ms. Taw says that comment fails to represent most of the people she’s ever met. “For those of us in our 20s, entering the work force is not usually a choice, for either men or women.” She argues that neither a husband nor a wife makes enough money on entering the work force to support both, and neither wishes to stay at home, being supported rather than having his or her own career.
“I can identify better with the vacuum cleaner . . . than with a wife who obeys ‘rules,’ allows you to leave the odious vacuuming to her rather than sharing the burden, and then carefully avoids irritating you with it as you write these charming columns.”
Well, there have to be rules. They work both ways. My wife has a rule, for example, that I have to watch football on TV in the bedroom, shutting the door, while she’s laundering her intimate things in the kitchen. Football annoys her the way the vacuum cleaner does me. (It is perhaps irrelevant, but I was in the bedroom watching a Rams game when I had my heart attack.)
“I don’t know,” Ms. Taw goes on in her piquant style, “if you spend time with people of my generation and are simply impervious to what we are doing; whether you are writing your column for a very specific audience and find other realities irrelevant; or whether you have such a beautifully subtle sense of humor that the chauvinism is all ironic and intended to point out its own narrowness. . . .”
Well, heck; of course it’s all ironic. I can hardly put pen to paper (that’s an old-fashioned figure of speech) without irony creeping in. As for understanding the younger generation, I wonder if Ms. Taw knows anyone twice her age, besides perhaps her mother and father. One’s point of view does change. Irony especially becomes therapeutic.
Coincidentally (ironically, too), I have evidence that woman want vacuum cleaners to make that hideous noise, probably to annoy their husbands.
Fred Stanley Howell of Yucaipa writes that when he was a young engineer his company actually made a quiet vacuum cleaner. “It was not only superior in vacuuming power, but it was virtually silent!”
The company made 50 experimental units and sent them out to their distributors.
“Within a month they were all back. The salesmen told us that they couldn’t convince the ladies that the vacuums were really cleaning, because they didn’t make enough noise .
“We gave up the whole project and let (our competitors) have the market with their whining, buzzing and growling machines, which didn’t clean as well but which the ladies would buy. It’s a weird, weird world we live in.”
Ms. Taw complains that she reads my column only occasionally and finds that my “attitudes toward women are somewhat antiquated.”
I know this is going to get me into a lot more trouble, but many women I know and like best are well beyond their 20s.
They work, they play, they do lunch, many have executive jobs, many work in charity, and some of them have sweet, affectionate, and considerate husbands who do not vacuum.
