It’s not new; women and
especially women feminists have been calling out for more than thirty years for
the economic recognition of the second shift i.e. women coming home from a paid
job to a second shift of unpaid work at home whether it was cleaning, cooking,
ironing, caring for children, sick or old members of the family. Of course in
some households the male partner helps out, and some jurisdictions such as Norway
adopted a system where more paternal leaves were provided for the male partner in
an attempt to divide care work more fairly, in the Netherlands there are more
women working part-time than anywhere else in the world in an attempt to
lighten the burden of paid and unpaid work that women shoulder.
But what about single
mothers? They are the category of women who cannot benefit from the Norwegian
system of allowing the father more time off, and they’re most probably not the
category of women who can afford working a part time job.
The reason why house work
has never really been perceived as real work is the lowliness of it; as soon as
the kitchen is cleaned and tidied, as soon as clothes have been washed ironed
and folded away, someone makes a sandwich, the stained school uniforms
are thrown in the laundry basket and all needs to be done all over again. But what
governments and economists fail to see is how time consuming, how physically exhausting
and how indispensable house work is, there would be no tax payers if mothers
did not rear and care for them.
The importance of
recognizing house work and paying women for it, is not only for the benefit of women
who hold paid day jobs, but for poor women in third world countries who are
so desperate to feed their families, they leave their home countries, to work
in foreign lands, taking care of other people’s children, cleaning other people’s
toilets. If governments did reward those women for domestic work, they would be
in their home countries, taking care of their own children, looking after their
elderly, cleaning their own toilets and providing for themselves.
