It’s not easy for me to wear a housewife title; I am not married or have a house. But recently I’ve found myself making marmalade which, according to Elizabeth Hurley at least, makes me a “crushed housewife.”
Just in case you missed it – and ironically Hugh Grant did not – the top Duchess took the gown to Twitter this week to say: “Lockdown has turned me into a wife crushed cottage: 47 jars of marmalade nest in them a larder and another bag of Seville songs await me. ”
Now, I raise a question with the term ‘demented’ here; not a steep mention of mental illness while we talk about the conservation of my cup of tea. But what was particularly troubling about Hurley ‘s painting was that it was another domestic work; the joke that seems to be a restrained and oppressed woman doing unpaid domestic labor.
Thanks to the lock-in, the closure of a nursery and the main work of my partner’s primary school employee, I now spend 14 hours a day doing household chores that break teeth without money and more less than no thanks. And when I say less than thankful, yesterday morning my son quietly poured red poster paint over our rug, while he smothered “dirty dirty dirt” and chewed like a drain while I was trying to take it off. (I think we can safely say that’s the end of my rent investment, before you even reach the leaking roof, Jackson Pollock’s mold all over our bathroom wall and the rocky blue cloth at my son above the sofa).
I accept the term “demented housewife” because it so devastatingly weakens the centuries of labor of women who have marmalade a hobby with a millionaire movie star. The uncomfortable economic reality is that without millions of people – especially women and often women of color – doing the impressive work of cooking, caring for, cleaning and raising children, they are not. there would be an opportunity for others to do the paid work that characterizes the economy. Banking, farming, trade, manufacturing, politics; everything is possible unless someone else is making food, caring for the elderly and raising the next generation.
But why don’t you put someone in, I hear you crying? Why not hire someone else to do the housewife if you don’t want to? Overlooking the fact that someone has been hired to clean, cook or care for others is very likely to still be doing the same for their own family, unpaid and after hours a hour. Who is going to look after the nursery staff’s children? Who is going to clean the flat of the washer? It is this domestic work after work that sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild calls the second Shift – and this is what makes many of us feel just a little hopeless.
Last year, a paper called How do mothers and fathers balance work and family in custody? published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies and University College London found after interviewing 3,500 families that mothers still do more homework and childcare than fathers. Even in a lock down. When the two are in the house. And even if they are both paid employees.
According to the report: ‘Even in families where mothers were earning higher before the crisis and both partners were still working, mothers still do more childcare and the same amount of worked with their partner. ‘ The reality is that many women do not have time to squeeze out between the demands of their job and the hours of unpaid domestic work at home to make marmalade, even if they would want. After a year of interim lock-in, we have finally come to notice what so many colored women, low-income women and women without a partner or family support network know about years – that care work, homework and work raising children is no joke.
This pretty much raises the question: whatever happened to the Wages for Homework movement? It is 38 years since Selma James first demanded that domestic labor be recognized and paid for work, at the third National Conference of Women ‘s Freedom in Manchester, England. The call soon became a global trend. As one manifesto put it: “Our destiny and our roots – our unpaid work at home – are the same in every country in the world, so our struggle is against it.” Just imagine whether we were paid by the state to do all those unknown, invaluable and unscrupulous jobs that make other people’s careers possible. Imagine if we were paid to make the paid work happen elsewhere.
I trust the Queen of Home Counties and Liz Hurley’s safety pin aficionado are doing just fine and for all I know they may be outsourcing that job to someone else (with by the way, according to a study by the University of Warwick, migrant workers make up 37 per cent of England’s cleaning workforce). But somehow the image of a “demented housewife” when used by a wealthy white woman in this way feels diminished, unpleasant, thoughtless. With rising unemployment, emergency home education, early years childcare providers closing at the knot level and locking in relentlessly, some of us are starting to feel just a little hysterical. Some of us are sad, angry, tired and feel unable to cope.
And sadly, none of Paddington Bear humor and orange – scented tea towels are going to solve that.