The Detriment outcomes surrounding Domestic Work
Every person has their own way of seeing things; how they think they will be when they grow up, how their future husband or wife will be when they get married, or how their children will be when they grow up. However, the way we visualizing things in life has been ingrained into our minds because of the structural paradigm that was created and molded throughout the years. The creation of binary genders and the characteristics that defines each gender has set a division of duties and responsibilities that each gender is assumed to do. Since young, female children are seen to be playing with dolls and kitchenette accessories implicating that child rearing and cooking are basic essential things of a woman in their future. Boys are seen to be given more toys that has to do with assembling crafts such as Legos or Minecraft, or things that have to be put together like cars, hot wheels play set and more. If a girl and boy received a game set that has to do with assembling it, it is more likely that the father will help the young girl put the game together and the boy will do it by himself. Assembling things can help the male child to build cognitive skills such as solve problems, do important task, build up critical thinking skills like what goes here and there, and overall starts to force the child to work his mind. What I’m getting to is that these skills that the boys develop during childhood are essential things they will used when entering adulthood, especially when looking for a job.
In Women, Race, and Class, The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework: A Working Class Perspective by Angela Davis she gives a broader perspective about the circumstances surrounding housework and housewives. Davis argues that the housework has been separated from factory work and has created “a fundamental structural separation between the domestic home economy and the profit-oriented economy of capitalism. Since housework does not generate profit, domestic labour was naturally defined as an inferior form of work as compared to capitalist wage labour.”
Unfortunately since capitalism sees domestic work as non-profit it is clear why cooking, cleaning and rearing children is not seeing as a respectable job or as a matter of fact, not even as a job. It is seen as “housework” and as the responsibility of the female within the household. In addition, this is possibly the primary reason why women face a wage gap between males and females during the search for a job. Females are the ones who give birth and have to, I suppose by traditional views, be the ones who take care of the children. She is in charge of preparing the meal, clean, keep the house in order, and keeps the family functioning.
Since women are viewed to have the double shift, it has been proven by statistics and research that women get paid 78 cents per 1 dollar that a man gets for the same job. As one article from the Business Insider points out from a research, this is due because “companies expect them [women] to leave to care for children” and therefore, see women as the less productive ones that will have to skip out of work in order to attend some family emergencies which ultimately “contributes to the pay gap”. The perspectives towards women is what has damage the female image in homes and in the production industry.
Being a housewife is hard. Having to do domestic work oppresses and depresses women and it is seeing as degrading to one-self plus the unpaid work can be seen as slavery however, Davis argues that “it would seem that government paychecks for housewives would further legitimize this domestic slavery”. Not only legitimize it but it would keep women out from participating in important job titles and keep them home where they will be unable to progress individually or obtain valuable skills that will benefit her and within society. It seems that the only benefit here of women being placed as housewives is that they acquire what is known as unskilled work “the work of giving birth to, raising, disciplining, and servicing the worker for production” which goes often unseen or what Davis calls invisible because her contribution to society is “only the product of her labour, the labourer” which is the only thing that gets visibly noticed.
