It is of great debate whether or not unpaid caring labour and housework should be paid for because those who perform it, the majority of which are women, do not receive the recognition for it. Caring labour is defined as any work done to support one’s family, chores done around the house, and taking care of children or elders in the family. This labour entails time and effort invested into making sure that all aspects in the household run smoothly. It may be difficult for a single person to perform this labour alone, which is why many believe that a person’s invested time and effort should be compensated for by providing payment for it. However, I believe that an alternate and a better long term solution for unpaid caring labour to be compensated for is if everyone in the household does an equal amount of work. This way, no single person will be …show more content…
The term “housework” is derived from the pre-nineteenth century era term “housewifery”, which was used to designate all caring and other labour within the household for only women (Schwartz Cowan 2010). This separation of the public and private spheres is what led to the unequal division of labour where female dependence on men to be the “breadwinner” of the family was at an all-time high (Adkins and Dever 2014). Many believe that wages should be provided for housework because other care-work that is done in a professional setting by workers is undervalued, taken for granted and oftentimes goes unnoticed. It can be argued that women, or whoever does the majority of unpaid labour, should be provided with compensation for it due to the fact that it is time restricting on their ability to perform work in the public labour market if they choose to do so. Because these individuals have additional responsibilities to tend to that other household members may not have, it widens the gap between gender and economic equality. In
Hollingsworth and Tyyska discuss the employment of women in their article, both wage work and work performed outside of the “paid labour force.” (14). They also look at work discrimination of women based on gender and marital status. They argue that disapproval of married women working for wages during the Depression was expressed not only by those in position of power, such as politicians, but also by the general public and labour unions. They suggest that the number of women in the workforce increased as more young wives stayed working until the birth of their first child and older women entered the workforce in response to depression based deprivation. Hollingsworth and Tyyska also give examples of work that married women did that was an extension of their domestic duties such as babysitting for working mothers or taking in laundry. They also state that some women took in boarders, sold extra produce from gardens, or ran make-shift restaurant operations out of their homes.
This article talks about the growing movement of hiring maids for household work. This article starts off as being about gender inequality, but then turns into an issue of class and moral standards. The author explains her own experiences of house cleaning. She also describes how “wealthier class’s children are being raised with the attitude”. (Barbara Ehrenreich) That the people that clean up after them are “lower” than everyone else. Additionally she talks about how the hiring of house hold workers will increase and eventually move on to the middle class homes.
Women throughout history have been considered to have an active role in the family life as the caretakers, while the men are considered the “breadwinners” of the family. However, a few women still have had to provide for their families throughout the years and as a result have sought employment in industries that “were highly segregated by sex” (Goldin 87). Women employm...
Although in today’s society women are sometimes still subjected to practices that label them as inferior to men, whether it’s in a marriage where the woman must stay at home to care for the child or in the workplace where the female is paid an average of 25 cents less than men, the fight for equality for women has come a long way since the 1920’s and 30’s. This is the time period that Kari Boyd McBride reflects upon for women in her essay “A Boarding House is not a Home: Women’s Work and Woman’s Worth on the Margins of Domesticity.” McBride’s essay is valuable because of the experience and knowledge she has about her field, which is that of Women’s Studies.
One thing my grandma would always say every time she was doing work around the house is that, “A woman’s work is never done.” Posted on an online magazine website author, Jessica Grose, wrote an article titled “Cleaning: The Final Feminist Frontier,” published March 13th, 2013. As she got into the article she argues that men in our lives more recently started taking on more of the childcare and cooking, while the cleaning still falls unfairly on women. Jessica Grose starts to build her credibility with personal facts and using reputable sources.
Women were paid about half of what men were paid. For example, a man’s average wage in the 1880s for working in an office was £2+ a week, whereas a women’s was £1 a week. This inequality continued to be the same at the outbreak of war. Many working-class women worked at home as housewives. They cooked, washed, cleaned and looked after their children.
The basic assumption of the economic exchange model as a mechanism for the gendered division of labour is that those who contribute more to the economic worth of a household (traditionally males), contribute less to the mundane household tasks that are routinely required (Brines, 1994:653). Thus, it is argued, women are forced to perform housework in exchange for economic support (Baxter, 2002:403). As recently as the mid-1990s, men were far more likely to be involved in full-time paid em...
Unfortunately the gendered division of labor has maintained its origins in the home, while copying its structure in the workplace. This can be seen inside families through the sharp distinctions between paid work and non work, paid and unpaid productivity, and even the separation of the private and public spheres where women are perceived as attached to the private and men to the public domains. (Grant & Porter 1994: 153) This is an important issue because while home and work may be physically separate...
Gender is defined as the scopes of genetic, physical, mental and behaviour characteristics pertaining to, and differentiating between, masculinity and feminity, meanwhile inequality is defined as in a situation where there is an unfair situation or treatment in which certain people have more privileges or better opportunities or chances than other people. Thus, from the definition stated gender inequality refers to unequal or unfair management, treatment, or perceptions of persons or individuals are based on their gender. In a parallel sense, gender inequality can be said as the world in which there was discrimination against anyone based on gender. In this introductory, the general understanding of gender inequalities will be discussed further into three significant factors that influence the allocation of housework between men and women. Household chores can be classified as cleaning, cooking and paying bills. Division of housework serves as an important element in the continuation of the function of a family and it requires contribution from both spouses (Tang, 2012). However, current society’s perception on housework is based on gender, so the three major factors that influence the division of household chores within the couples are education level, economic resources, and time availability (refer to Figure1 in Appendix 1).
More and more women work outside and inside the home. The double demands shouldered by these women pose a threat to their physical health. Whether you are an overworked housewife or an exhausted working mother the chances are that you are always one step behind your schedule. No matter how hard women worked, they never ended up with clean homes. Housewives in these miserable circumstances often became hysterical cleaners. They wore their lives away in an endless round of scouring, scrubbing, and polishing. The increased strain in working women comes from the reality that they carry most of the child-rearing and household responsibilities. According to social trends (1996), women always or usually do the washing in 79 percent of cases and decide the menu 59 percent of the time. Picking up the children at school or doing grocery shopping are just a few of the many typical household-tasks a woman takes on every day.
Ideologies about women have historically distorted the nature of women as workers. Over time, the politics of housework have created material and ideological consequences for domestic work as well as sex work. The politics of housework have created a stigma surrounding certain fields of work as well as outcaste many women. Material and ideological consequence exist for housework as well as sex work and domestic work, due to housework politics. This paper will examine ideologies about women that formed the politics of housework, as well as the way in which the politics of housework have created consequences for women, sex workers, and domestic workers.