Other people do that
Household work? Children? Oh that’s for other people to do.
The fact is, though, Covid-19 has taken women’s roles back to the 50s. Women are home schooling, working and doing huge amounts of domestic work. The answer to 50s-style problems may be some 70s-style consciousness raising about gender roles.
It’s really quite simple. There is nothing about being female that equates to special skill at scrubbing sinks or changing diapers, and there is nothing about being male that equates to special ineptitude at scrubbing sinks or changing diapers. People who live in households should share the work equitably and fairly.
But, instead of discussing how gender roles are regressing; how the virus has derailed women’s careers; how childcare is falling apart; how female workers will be hit hardest by the recession; how female academics have turned in far fewer papers than their male counterparts; how, at the end of furlough, redundancy will affect more women; how the gender pay gap is rising – in other words, all the pre-existing inequalities that have been exacerbated by Covid-19 – what do we talk about?
Two things. We continue to have a conversation around gender, which emphasises it as a set of feelings rather than being about often mundane lived experience; and we have, on social media, a ridiculous row over cleaners. Various bright young things declare their sainthood. Either they don’t have cleaners or they pay them the GDP of Venezuela. Only bad women, Karens, boomers, like me, have cleaners, whom we probably abuse. Some of us have been cleaners, but no matter. Working women pay others to look after our children and to do some of the domestic work or we could not do it. Just as men do. And always have done. But men are not attacked for this. Ever.
That’s how belief in Gender works. Men don’t do toilets; women do little else.
But the serious part of domestic labour being invisible and somehow personal has huge implications. The absolute tragedy of this crisis is that underpaid care workers in homes have died because care in our own homes is not valued. We are run by people who don’t respect those who do such care in our society, because this is the lowest-status job. Women do it. Immigrants do it. Childcare and the opening of schools has not been a priority because, well, like the laundry, other people do that.
Other people here means lesser people, obscure people, people we can ignore.
It is terribly old-fashioned to talk about the domestic labour debate I know, the part about how unpaid work keeps capitalism functioning. Well, it keeps us all functioning. This is why a former prime minister can joke about never having to do it. It’s a sign of power.
How we laugh as we lie back and think of descaling the kettle. How many prime ministers does it take to change a lightbulb? Don’t ask me. How many prime ministers does it take to change the reality of women’s lives? We were on the double shift: work and housework. Now many are on the triple shift: work, housework and schooling. The lightbulbs went out some time ago, and, if we are not to go back to the dark ages, then someone better get some bright ideas and replace the duds quickly.
Thank you Suzanne Moore.
While I find this article important and timely, I do take exception to the idea that we need to rush to reopen the schools. Reopening schools is one way to spread the virus. Classrooms are not big enough for social distancing. Children are going to remove their face masks often, being children, even if they are mandated at all. There are many people involved besides just the children, and most of them are women. So we are merely transferring child care and schooling from one group of unpaid women to another group of underpaid women. And putting lives at risk in the process, particularly the lives of both of those groups of women, who have the most intimate contact with children, and therefore are the mostly likely to get exposed should the disease come into the house.
I know, I know, the old routine about children, and how safe they are from the virus. How difficult it is for them to carry it to others. I find that hard to believe, and suspect it is based on little information, because I haven’t seen evidence of the inability of children to pass other types of coronavirus.
This, to me, is a question without an answer. Women are tired and stressed from having to be everything to their children. I get that. This problem can’t be solved just by passing it to someone else, and increasing the risk. Unfortunately, there is no way to mandate that men do their share of child care, and studies show that women continue to do the bulk of child care even as men preen about how much they “help” their wives (thereby implying that the chores really belong to the woman, but they’re just such a great sort of guy that they help the little woman with “her” chores).
And I’m betting not many of these trans-women who claim they are women are out there shouldering the full burden of being a woman.
Well there was that one who bragged in a magazine with national readership about doing the vacuuming without being asked.
@iknklast You are right to be skeptical of anyone who tells you that kids are safe from COVID19. Yes, more of them are asymptomatic. Those who aren’t may have a mild illness. But a very small unlucky few, healthy kids not just those with preexisting conditions, get terrifyingly sick. Some go into full systemic failure – all their organs giving up all at once. It’s a horrifying way to die.
Going back to the mild illness kids. Mild does not mean like a cold. Mild means everything up to the point where you are hospitalized. This is the problem with calling it mild, it sounds like it’s not too bad.
Now the asymptomatic kids. They’re fine, aren’t they? Maybe not. Doctors have seen strange damage patterns in the brains, hearts, kidneys and lungs of children whose parents were not aware the child had even been infected.
This isn’t restricted to children either. There are people in their 30’s and 40’s having heart attacks and strokes without any other evident risk factors, at higher numbers than could ever be explained by hidden heart conditions etc.
COVID19 is a multi-system disease. Its clinical presentation is unbelievably broad, meaning we’re missing people who seem to die of something else. Soon it won’t matter. The virus is out of control in the US – CDC despair of being able to contain it. Turns out the cure wasn’t worse than the disease all along.
No matter your age, health or lifestyle, COVID19 is a real and present danger. The only known protective factor for adults? Being female of reproductive age. HRT does not seem to be enough to provide protection in postmenopausal women, which by default extends to trans women on hormones.
Tell that to at least 30 years of Hollywood and television. I don’t know whose idea it was to make every father a doofus and every mother a long suffering saint. Was it an intentional inversion of the status quo that we somehow got stuck on?
Nullius, that’s so true. The opposite is also true. When you get out of the household into the world of work, the men were efficient and capable, while the women were so confused by everything they couldn’t figure out the simplest of tasks (but most men had highly efficient female secretaries, of course. It was only wives who were incompetent…oh, and of course, beautiful women of all sorts).
Indeed. Women outside the house? O noes! It’s so scawwy!