4 mins read

How often have you heard the argument that women would be better off, and the cause of their empowerment greatly furthered, only if they worked? Even the most well-meaning women and often men (read privileged, and blinded by it) will say it with all the emphasis at their disposal. Implicit in the statement, is the assumption that women normally don’t ‘work’!

Going outside the home to work, and being compensated monetarily for that work, is quite a recent development in human history. The idea of work outside the home, monetised, is less than a hundred and fifty odd years old.

So much of our lives are determined by money – the having of it, the ability to spend it and save it. The consequence that if you don’t have enough of it, or don’t earn it at all, you are not worth much, is only to be expected.

Since the work such as cooking, cleaning, washing, care-giving, child rearing and care of the elderly and the infirm, generally considered women’s work is not valued monetarily, its fallout is the undervaluing of women’s lives. Proof, if it were needed, is in this piece in Huffingtonpost India saying that Indian women do ten times the unpaid work that men do.

One is likely to think, at this juncture, what’s to stop a woman from going out to work? Many women are doing just that. But when it comes to women it all gets massively complicated. Because uterus, eggs, new humans.

Having babies and furthering one’s family – and the human race, by extension – would logically seem to be in the interests of men, too; a father is, after all, as much a parent as a mother. Yet the structures of patriarchy have been so constructed that over centuries, childcare and nurturing has been relegated to women and now they are deemed to be specialists at the job. A job that keeps them at home, unpaid and undervalued.