I really don’t know how you get around that. Hardcore moralists or romantics would argue that if your partner really loved you he would step up and share 50/50 in whatever was necessary to make you happy. Pragmatists would say ‘good luck with that’. Human nature being what it is, the person who cares more about an issue is going to spend more time on it while the other stares in baffled exasperation.

You can get a cleaner, of course, and I confess that last year, while I was pregnant, I finally gave in and did so, despite it being in flagrant contravention of my family’s entire philosophy which is that you clear your own mess up, you don’t palm it off on some other bugger (my family, it probably hardly needs pointing out at this stage, is northern).

But this is not an answer to the problem, it is an avoidance of it. Having a cleaner just enables you to avoid conflict with your partner and to avoid raising the awkward and complicated question of how it is that after decades of feminism and extensive anti-sexism legislation it is still perfectly possible and acceptable to come home to a world in which one half of it feels entitled to put his (mucky) feet up on the coffee table, while someone else runs the vacuum under them?

Having a cleaner also raises further questions. Is it right to outsource all the jobs you don’t want to do just because you can afford it? Is it the same as getting a takeaway when you can’t be bothered to cook? Or is there an ethical dimension that says you shouldn’t be employing someone who is (probably) less socioeconomically privileged than you simply to clear up your mess? And if you do, shouldn’t you be paying her holiday pay, sick pay and providing something in the way of pension contributions rather than widening that privilege gap yet further?

I avoided the last problem by hiring cleaners employed by a firm that provides them with all those things but the rest still stand. And if the gender war on the domestic front is not yet won, what hope do we have in the wider world? I do not have time to answer. We have people coming round and a house covered in cat hair. I must get to work.

Contact Lucy Mangan at lucy.mangan@stylist.co.uk; twitter.com/lucymangan

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Main picture credit: Rex Features

"The domestic gender war isn't over"