In her insightful book When Work Doesn’t Work Anymore – Women, Work and Identity, Elizabeth Perle McKenna talks about how we, as women, don’t assign the same value to “free” time as we do to “waged” time – hours traded for money. “Wendy felt bad about asking her husband to take her son for a few hours on Saturday mornings after she’d been home all week so she could go to exercise class. “He works all week. I feel guilty about doing something for myself.” I ask her if she hired a baby-sitter, would that person be working? “Yes,” she replied. “Then aren’t you working too?” I wondered. “I never thought of it that way,” she replied. “It doesn’t feel like work because I’m not getting paid.”
Isn’t that how most of us think ? Even when our partners might be liberal men who want an equal relationship, like in my case, we are held back by this baggage of cultural conditioning that devalues what’s traditionally been women’s work. When I hear stories about Indian men here in America who won’t pick up their own baby because they think taking care of kids is the woman’s job, it makes me realize how you can move across the world without shifting anything internally.
It makes me really angry but since I can’t do anything about them, I think of all that I or we can do, as women, to live our values in our own lives. On a basic level, it means not attaching the word “just” before the word “housewife” or “homemaker.” It means owning everything we do at home and realizing that we are bringing something valuable to the table.
It also means not taking on the burden of conforming to a societal role – it’s not your job alone to keep the house clean. And it definitely isn’t your job to pick up after family members. By valuing our own work at home and by expecting others to do their share, we can equalize the imbalance in how work outside and inside the house is seen and valued.The personal really is political.
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