Women are the doing the dirty work here. Why not men?
Readings would not solve your problems. But then again, neither will housework.
Political activist Angela Davis from Chapter 13 of Women, Race and Class, discusses the role women (mostly African American women) have to deal with chores that are collectively known as “housework”. She states,
“No one notices it until it isn’t done — we notice the unmade bed, not the scrubbed and polished floor. Invisible, repetitive, exhausting, unproductive, uncreative — these are the adjectives which most perfectly capture the nature of housework.”
The issue here is due to how much women are empowered by a male-dominated world just by the traditional gender job arrangements. Why has this gender inequality of work still continued? It is probably due to the body and mind of the women that they have to deal with, the role they have to play in order to be accepted as an individual. In other words, it is always been the “women’s work” to begin with in order to accomplish the “perfect wife” role. As a result, it is the belief of the Cult of Domesticity that the society expect women to follow. It is the value system that emphasizes new ideas of femininity, the woman’s role within the home and the dynamics of work and family.
It is the sad reality in workplaces around the world because women help more but benefit less from it no matter how much effort they make. In keeping with deeply held gender stereotypes, we expect men to be ambitious and results-oriented, and women to be nurturing and communal.
According to Marxist feminists from Feminist Perspectives on Class and Work, they see housework as a problems for women due to their low paid and the unequal power compared to men. Furthermore, she states,
The necessary work of reproducing the working class is unpaid allows more profits to capitalists. It is the sexual division of labor in productive and reproductive work that makes women unequal to men and allows capitalists to exploit women’s unpaid labor. Some even make this analysis the basis for a demand for wages for housework.
Whether or not they work full-time, and no matter how high their salary, women still get stuck with the crappiest jobs — the ones most likely to require rubber gloves and solvent, as opposed to strolling Loblaws in relative leisure with a latte in one’s hand.
One of the philosophical problems raised by the housework debate is how to draw the line between work and play or leisure activity when the activity is not paid: is a mother playing with her baby working or engaged in play? Perhaps child rearing and other caring activity is both work and play, but only that portion which is necessary for the psychological growth of the child and the worker(s) counts as work. If so, who determines when that line is crossed? Since non-market activity does not have a clear criterion to distinguish work from non-work, nor necessary from non-necessary social labor, an arbitrary element seems to creep in that makes standards of fairness difficult to apply to gendered household bargains between men and women dividing up waged and non-waged work.
Like what Davis said, she believes that “teams of trained and well-paid workers, moving from dwelling to dwelling, engineering technologically advanced cleaning machinery, could swiftly and efficiently accomplish what the present-day housewife does so arduously and primitively.” Why the shroud of silence surrounding this potential of radically redefining the nature of domestic labor? Because the capitalist economy is structurally hostile to the industrialization of housework. Socialized housework implies large government subsidies in order to guarantee accessibility to the working-class families whose need for such services is most obvious. In other words, it is counted to the capitalist economy because it is becoming an objective social need.
Housework is represented as women’s private responsibility and as a female labor performed under primitive technical conditions, may finally be approaching historical obsolescence. In other words, it is time for women to make things change every least once in awhile and to be independent or “man up”. That is what the feminists have been making their argument about inequality women rights. My theory on housework is, if the item does not multiply, smell, catch fire, or block the refrigerator door, let it be. No one cares. Why should you?
