Feminism Devalues Trade
Thursday, March 30, 2023
On the occasion of National Women's Day, Suzanne Lucas found herself having to explain to feminists that, in my words, its okay to pay someone to do work that you yourself disdain:
Yes, and while the thought of wokescolds cleaning their own toilets as if it were some kind of sacrament makes me smile, I'd rather they read this and begin to appreciate how the market can liberate anyone willing to work from poverty.If you are trying to launch your startup and working 80 hour weeks, or are managing a busy project, or if you work 35 hours a week but want time to focus on your kids, your hobbies or even Netflix, hiring a cleaning woman is a great idea. You exchange money for a service -- and that service is a clean toilet and a sparkly kitchen floor.
Image by the Austrian National Library, via Unsplash, license.
The cleaning lady takes home a paycheck.
This values women's work. Every year at Mother's day, all sorts of organizations publish the value of a mom, trying to push the point that women's work does have value. And now, [Sally] Howard wants to say that paying for that value is wrong.
It's not wrong. If it's wrong to pay someone to clean your toilet, it's wrong to pay someone to make your dinner. It's wrong to pay someone to mow your lawn, paint your house, grow your food, tend your children, or fix your car. It's not. [bold added]
Leftists are constantly trying to purge words they don't like from everyone else's vocabulary. Perhaps, for a change, they could clean up their own house, so to speak, and eliminate menial from their own categorizations of honest work.
-- CAV
2 comments:
There's a few things I find questionable about the "This is how much women's work is worth" idea.
First, the concept of "women's work" is itself highly dubious. There are some cultural universals--spinning/weaving, some aspects of raising children, some cooking--but largely what we call "women's work" is a myth. It's taking "Leave It To Beaver" as the norm, projecting this backwards through time, and pretending it's the way things were. I grew up in a low-income, rural area--the type where you'd expect to see hard boundaries like this--and the people pushing these views were always young. Old folks knew that, to quote my grandfather, "There's no men's work or women's work, there's just work." Men cooked and cleaned and changed diapers and gardened and took kids to various activities (it was a time to get away from their wives, if nothing else). Each family had their own division of labor, and no one gave it a second thought. Sure, the man was expected to work outside the home (unless they were farmers, which many were), and to do the heavy physical jobs, but after that everyone did their own thing. Reading historic documents, this appears to be how the world has always worked: Individual households divide the chores up as they see fit, within the broad cultural expectations.
(Oddly enough, women dominated dairies, poultries, and some hat-making--men were forbidden from entering dairies in many cases--and the money often did not go into the family funds, but went to the women of the house. The notion that women are 100% dependent upon their husbands is a very modern thing. I'm not saying the past was great, it wasn't, just that the whole worldview here is based on some very, very bad assumptions about history that are contradicted by all evidence.)
Second, the way the work is valued is...creative. It's like if you have a hundred baseball cards, and I pay you $10 for one, then you claim that you have $900 worth of baseball cards. You might--or you may have had one I really wanted, or it may be that putting more on the market devalues them so you only have $300 worth. All you really know is that you got $10 for one. Similarly, if I pay $50/hr for a cleaning lady to clean my home, it doesn't necessarily follow that my wife's labor when she cleans my home is always $50/hr. That cleaning lady is trained, has insurance, and has experience that I'm paying for that my wife lacks (she's a geologist, physicist, and educator, not a janitor). And I'm willing to pay $50 for certain stuff to be cleaned, but not for others. And if someone demanded $50/hr for 40 hours a week to clean my home I simply wouldn't pay it; I don't need that much cleaning!
Finally, this contradicts the notion that people of the past worked fewer hours than we do. The work included in "women's work" is the sort of thing that gets excluded from every study of how many hours people in the past worked. Cleaning, cooking, repairing things, making clothing, gardening (a much more serious issue in the past; that was your vegetables for the year), and--since we're talking women--carding, spinning, and weaving wool, occupied nearly all waking hours for men and women, of all ranks outside the professional warrior casts, in all societies. If this doesn't count as work--if people of the past worked less than we do--than it necessarily follows that "women's work" is not as valuable as it's made out to be. If "women's work" is, it necessarily follows that people in the past worked FAR more than we do. It can't be both.
Dinwar,
Your comment reminds me of this account, written about 1900, by an aspiring writer about her daily tasks.
An excerpt:
Any bright morning in the latter part of May I am out of bed at four o'clock; next, after I have dressed and combed my hair, I start a fire in the kitchen stove, and while the stove is getting hot I go to my flower garden and gather a choice, half-blown rose and a spray of bride's wreath, and arrange them in my hair, and sweep the floors and then cook breakfast.
While the other members of the family are eating breakfast I strain away the morning's milk (for my husband milks the cows while I get breakfast), and fill my husband's dinner pail, for he will go to work on our other farm for the day.
By this time it is half-past five o'clock, my husband is gone to his work, and the stock loudly pleading to be turned into the pastures....
It goes on and on... Its title is "I Am Not a Practical Woman."
Gus
Post a Comment