t the stroke of midnight, yet another absurd lovers’ quarrel broke out.
If the house was the vacuous space it was a month ago, the echo in the room probably would’ve made my words clearer: “JUST CLEAN WHEN YOU SEE SOMETHING DIRTY!” I could never have guessed that this concept was still too complex for the thirty-something, literati male urbanite. “Give me a schedule, a roster!” he said and it bewildered me into silence. If the curry-covered bowls and
plates in the sink needed a roster to be identified as unclean, needs washing if you’re already at the sink washing your own cup , then I give up.
I was never trained to clean; 16-year-old me’s room could be a dump of dirty knickers and all I’d get was a negligible scolding of “ Kita perempuan, kena jaga diri ,” while the housekeeper starts cleaning the mess I made. But as my mother made her bed every morning, I followed. As she wiped down the oil from the countertops every time after cooking, I followed. As I started living by myself at 19, vacuuming and mopping were just things you do when it feels dusty on the feet.
It’s just common sense, isn’t it? If you want to have a nice home, you keep it clean.
But it wasn’t just common sense, because my default is to keep things clean and my male counterpart’s default is to wait and be told to do so. I was never trained to clean but it is ingrained. I’m reminded of this time and time again from aunties, related or not, “ Lelaki ni, kita kena latih dia, kena suruh dia lipat baju kalau tak dia tak buat! ” And so it is the cliché that we all know too well: women are good at homemaking, and so we do it, so much so that we take up most positions in care work.
Economic historian, Phyllis Deane, argued in the 1940s that the exclusion of care-giving/household labour in the GDP is illogical (amongst many other illogical GDP shenanigans), but its invisibility continues. We have long known the value of care work and its contribution—it is what allows the rest of society to function. A large part of it is women, and a large part of it is unwaged. When it is highly feminized this way, it is women who are thus penalized as they can’t enter decent-waged jobs and accumulate the benefits that, foolishly, only come with formal sector employment (pension, medical, etc). Their livelihood, then, is largely dependent on men.
This dependence further exposes them to domestic, physical and sexual violence.
If the devaluation of their labour perpetuates the devaluation of women, this is no longer just an economic disadvantage—it is economic violence.
In restoring its economic value, it makes sense to think of care work as ‘reproductive labour’ or ‘social reproduction’, that is the work that nurtures and regenerates all workers. Domestic care, maintenance of social spaces, childbearing—what worker and person have survived and functioned without these? Is it not the very foundation of our economy? So what happened?!
Well, as Mariana Mazzucato puts it -
“In modern capitalism, value-extraction is rewarded more highly than value-creation… we misidentify taking with making, and have lost sight of what value really means.” 1
Alongside all other mistakes in financialisation, not honouring women’s reproductive labour is a big one. I don’t know how I got here. The frustration I have towards men who don’t automatically vacuum is indeed very far from the wrath towards men who maintain economic authority. I certainly stand in the privileged side of things where vexed ranting about dishes is my struggle.
But for what it’s worth, it’s a struggle which understands that efforts to create a more egalitarian division of obligations is inevitably limited if gender roles keep being ingrained.
I was never trained to fight patriarchy but it is, definitely, ingrained.
1 Mariana Mazzucato, 2017, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the
Global Economy .
Commenti