This Crazy Little Thing Called Economic Power

Photo by Konstantin Evdokimov on Unsplash

Sometimes my mother took herself off to bed. I’d peep round the door of her bedroom, and see her shape under the covers, and I knew it was unusual because it was daylight and it wasn’t bedtime and it was Saturday afternoon when she usually did stuff round the house, but I was glad she was there because it was better than when she said she’d had enough and she was leaving and she picked up her handbag and slammed the door and years later, I’d discover she’d spent those missing hours sitting on a stool in the garage. And when I became a mother myself, I was somewhere between admiring her ability to withstand the boredom of being in one place minus food and stimulation, and questioning her ability to cause such suffering to her children who believed she was never coming back.

Last week, I took myself off to my bedroom and locked the door. I brought my laptop and my iPad and my iPhone and various chargers and any books I was currently reading. I brought my juice¹, a substantial lunch and a few snacks. I brought the Blue Peter Badge application I was filling in for my elderly father. I had an ensuite and a window I could stick my head out and a couple of kettlebells. I had creative work to finish. I had three teenagers preparing for exams, and I’d had enough. I was sleep-deprived because I, and not the child who had set them, could hear the alarms repeatedly going off at 4am. I was tired of the comfort eating, of no space, of surfaces covered in flashcards and textbooks, of loading and unloading the dishwasher, of loading and unloading the washing machine, of the screaming, of battles over the study which used to be mine, of forty-five minute papers and the drop-offs and the pick-ups, of being a one-parent exam-management system because my husband who holds a higher economic status than me was spending a few nights in a hotel in another country not thinking about where his next meal was coming from. I was tired of social-reproductive labour.

In the Marxist feminist tradition, social-reproductive labour is the work that goes into maintaining the workers who, in turn, produce the goods and services that themselves create the excess value that becomes capital. Social-reproductive labour, the labour that creates not just people but ready-to-go-to-workers, has to do with not only gestating, birthing, and raising babies, but maintaining them even when they’re adults: cooking and cleaning and washing and healing, and even tending to the myriad small sad and angry feelings that working people tend to have at the end of each day of work, all so that they can go back the next day and pick up the tools of their trade again².

“I didn’t sign up for this,” was my ‘I sound like a broken record’ cry of resentment when I was trying to earn a salary and coming home to a second shift running a household, when I was the one waiting for teatime, bath time, bedtime, in playgrounds, outside ballet classes, in carparks, beside swimming pools, in assembly halls, in queues, in party rooms, in doctors’ surgeries, for my offspring to appear on the stage, for the concert/play/performance to be over, for the weekend to come, for the weekend to end, for summer holidays, for September, to not constantly be on my own with dependents, for a solution which would allow me to have a career breakthrough.

But most social-reproductive labour, the stuff that enables the lives of others, is carried out by women and most women don’t sign up for it. Why would they when it mainly goes unrecognised and unvalued. “For social reproduction is usually a relatively thankless, hidden sort of labour. You don’t get to put your name on what you create. Those you help often don’t even thank you, because you become part of the background, taken for granted”³.

According to Victoria Smith, many younger women look with scorn at older women, and believe chores or childcare or eldercare won’t be disproportionately loaded onto them by the time they reach middle age. They might have heard of the sandwich generation, but they have no idea they too may end up “on a rack, wrists and ankles tied to opposite ends, with two pulls ever strengthening”⁴. They think feminism did something. They don’t understand it deconstructed the housewife but didn’t get rid of the housework. They don’t realise women aren’t doing it because they want to but because it has to be done. They don’t understand that the women doing it didn’t think it would be them either, that they’d be trapped by demands that tied them to roles and identities they too once sought to reject, victims of a form of theft that transferred their “leisure time, opportunities and material resources from one sex class to another”.

‘When I was pregnant with my oldest,’ recalls Mary-Ann Stephenson of the Women’s Budget Group, ‘my own mother said to me, “What you’ve got to realise is that nobody makes a decision to end up where they are. They make a series of individual decisions, all of which seem right at the time.”’ Where a woman finds herself at forty, fifty, sixty, is not a direct expression of her politics, desires or inner self. It’s the result of a series of twists and turns: the jobs, the relationships, the pregnancies, the sick relatives, the dishes, the dust. It’s the result of chance, of compromise, and of coercion⁵.

Younger women think older women are stupid for having failed to train those around them to take on an equal share of unpaid work. Surely, they’re not structurally and societally oppressed in the way women in the past were, just hopeless at delegation. They don’t appreciate that economic status, being the higher wage-earner, the one who holds market value, leads to economic power, and that it is economic power which leads to inequality.

The person who took time off work to look after babies will be the person more likely to do the same to look after older relatives, not least because her earlier career breaks and/or recourse to part-time work will mean she is earning less than a male partner or male siblings. Indirect discrimination begets further indirect discrimination. And anyway, if a woman who’s already spent years providing such services suddenly says no, isn’t she just being mean?⁶

And worst of all, they don’t understand that political ideologies, gender stereotyping and the perpetuation of womanhood as a unique and divine gifting created to provide services, means that this exploitation of women’s labour continues because it is seen as virtuous. It is hard to escape the cycle of caring. There are consequences for the woman who rises up to say no.  

Women are the ones who are supposed to be kind, to give of themselves, to play the universal mother and make other people happy. People find it particularly shocking when a woman refuses to be kind: there’s something unnatural, offensive about a female mouth declaring that the limits of her care are here and she will not be giving any more⁷.

And so, I have started to have the conversation early. I won’t be looking after your children, I tell my children. I want my freedom and more than half-a-day-a-week to get my hair done. I don’t want a recalibration of how I spend my time forced on to me. I want to put my name on what I create. I mention it to a couple of grannies. “You will when it’s your own flesh and blood,” they say. I sense their disapproval. I am refusing to be kind. It is unwomanly. I think of the grandads playing golf. I am walking with my daughter. We are talking about the study, her father’s return, how he demanded to use it and it was given to him. I explain to her about economic power. I tell her what she earns will be the thing that makes the difference to her future. 

Next week… “IT WAS YOUR SHOW ALL ALONG”…

1. This is not a euphemism…

2. Do We Need New Ideas, or Better Influencers?

3. As above.

4. Hags by Victoria Smith

5. Hags by Victoria Smith

6. Hags by Victoria Smith

7. Hags by Victoria Smith