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Hello friends,
I’m going to jump right to it. Yesterday was International Women’s Day and today is probably as good a day as any to address invisible labour. Women know what this is - it’s all the work we do that gets no recognition, no air space and no reward of any kind. All of us do it, but women seem to shoulder a disproportionate amount of this sort of work.
Reports indicate that women are taking on most of the domestic work created by school closures due to Covid-19, and were in fact already taking on two thirds of the unpaid care and domestic work, and longer hours of work (paid and unpaid) even in households where women worked for pay, or where they were the main breadwinners (from a 2019 Australian study).
I want to talk about what is often referred to as invisible labour, and then also about invisible work or activities of all kinds, and lack of visibility in general.
Last week or maybe the week before, there seemed to be a bunch of posts about invisible labour. Fredtedandcompany did a great post about this - she pointed out that the work women do isn’t invisible - it’s actually very visible. It’s just that people (men) choose not to notice it, and even if they do notice it, they choose not to acknowledge and value it. It’s very visible, but society chooses not to give it value. It’s very visible, but governments and companies choose not to place monetary value on it.
I spoke about invisible labour in my stories and made a point that invisible labour is only invisible if we decide that visibility = worth. This whole discussion, on one level, is really not about visibility, but about what we value, reward and assign worth to.
So I think we can look at it both ways - and they don’t have to be mutually exclusive, even though there is a tension there. We can talk about the very visible labour of childcare and housework and mental load and how the problem isn’t that this work is not seen, but that our partners, or our bosses or people in positions of power choose not to acknowledge it. They see it, they know it’s there, they just decide not to bring it up so that they don’t need to face the reality that our entire society functions on the labour of women, and disproportionately women of colour. I recently read Women's Work - a book that addresses the care work women do and on which our patriarchal and capitalistic systems rely on. And this book, albeit a little dated, is based on a study about women’s “second shift” - the work they do in the home, outside of their paying job. It’s fascinating if you like this kind of thing - in-depth, qualitative research written up in an engaging, approachable way.
I think recognizing this perspective - that the work is not invisible, but that not seeing it is a choice - puts the responsibility of it squarely on those choosing to not see it. The problem is not the labour itself; the problem is those who choose to ignore it while benefiting from it. The labour then shifts from being invisible, to being ignored and undervalued. It’s akin to making patriarchy a man’s issue, not a woman’s. The onus of responsibility shifts - invisible labour is not only very visible, but a male problem, a problem of the patriarchy and of inequality and scarcity that comes with oppressive systems. It’s not us being all quiet and invisible, it’s them willfully ignoring it because our patriarchal systems were build that way - to take women’s work for granted, to undervalue it, yet to need it in order to function. It’s messed up. I think this is an important perspective and it cannot be ignored.
I want to propose a shift though - not a complete change of perspective but just an additional viewpoint. This viewpoint also refutes the idea that our work as women - the caring of children, the packing of bags, the knowing where everyone’s shit is, the buying and cooking and storing of food, the keeping little people not only alive, but happy and heard and educated and socialized, the looking after of elderly relatives - is invisible, but additionally pushes back against the notion that visibility = worth. I feel like seeing things like this goes further to the root of this issue, and many others.
Just hear me out. If we want our children to experience a childhood where who they are is more important than what they know, if WE want to be seen and accepted and valued for who we are rather than what we have achieved, or what we do with our lives, or the way our body looks (basically, any metric that is arbitrarily imposed on us from others), if we want to create a world where you don’t have to be visible to feel worthy, then we perhaps need to work to shift societal mindsets around why visibility, acknowledgment and monetary rewards matter.
In the short-term, I am fully behind any woman or person with a marginalized identity who uses visibility as a way to send a message, advocate for socio-economic equity, a closing of the pay gap, or simply for themselves as people. I fully recognise why raising the wages of domestic and childcare workers, teachers and nurses (female-dominated careers) sends the message that they are needed and valued. I fully support the idea of universal basic income because this would make a huge difference in the lives of many women. We live in a capitalist society, and although we may rail against it, money accords recognition; if women’s work is acknowledged monetarily, it also becomes, in the eyes of society, more valuable. And so it should be recognized, and rewarded.
But because I’m a dreamer, and because I like to imagine the way things could be, a long-term aim for me, and what I’d like my children to learn, is this: do the things even if no-one is watching and praising, and do them because they bring you joy, they fill you up, they bring love to your life and that of others. Make things count because they matter to you. Don’t feel like you always need to work and produce to earn your worth. Do all the small, ordinary daily things, and reject the notion that your worth relies on society’s acknowledgment of it.
And ultimately we can work for both: on a larger level we can work to place value on the work of women and marginalized people, and shift the burden of responsibility for valuing it on those who are most privileged. In our own lives, we can simultaneously also reject the idea that visible = worthy. It does not.
I believe this paradigm can be dismantled on so many levels, not only that of ignored labour. One example is the lack of visible ‘work’ our homeschooled and unschooled children produce, and the assumption that visible work = learning, and that we always need to ‘make learning visible’. Another example, found in the book I’m currently listening to, is the way European thinkers such as Rousseau ‘borrowed’ (and I’m being kind here) thought from several indigenous thinkers and popularised it as theirs, simply because they wrote it down, in the process making it visible. This leads down a whole rabbit trail on how visible political thought (in the form of writing) is the only one we have tended to acknowledge and how oral traditions have been stifled, buried and looted because their thought has for the most part, been ‘invisible.’ There are so many directions to take this! But I’ll save them for the next few emails :)
I feel like I’ve rambled on a bit this week, so I’ll leave it at that.
If you are new here, thanks for signing up. Some weeks I have tidy, short sections and some weeks I have a lot to say and very little structure. I’ll bring in some of the things people have raised with me on instagram, into next weeks’ email. I promise I’m not ignoring you!
I hope you all have a wonderful rest of the week. I feel like it’s all sort of downhill (as in, easy, but also as in, a temptingly slippery slope of slowness) from Wednesday afternoon onwards for us.
Email me back, I love to hear from people. Or find me @bigmothering.
Lots of love
Fran x
I largely agree with these point. One thing I always try to remember (and this is true within everyone’s particular constraints and circumstances although probably more true for the materially privileged) is my mother’s mantra: people do what they want to do. If we examine what we ourselves make time for, prioritize and accomplish, I think it’s easier to see the joy in them rather than the drudgery. In my view, the true measure of our days can be seen only by each of us, as only we know our hearts and minds. To capture that agency, to take pride in the fact that yes, I like to see the closets organized and the dinner presented well, or the kids dressed up for Internatiknal Day at school - it helps me validate the work I’m doing and understand that in some way I WANT to be doing it. It’s very freeing to focus on your personal agency in this way, and to understand that another person may want to cook every meal while I want to order every meal, and that’s okay!