‘Women’s Work’ Valuable; It’s Always Been A Job

A Spanish proverb says you can have anything you want in life provided you pay for it. When I first heard this, I confused the message with money. Not until I became a parent did I begin to grasp the fuller meaning.

Growing up overseas, I watched my mother work hard to raise four children successfully. She was the front line of our family’s health.

I also observed many women in the countries where we lived struggling - hauling water on their heads, cooking over open fires, tending fields and gardens - to feed and raise their families. So, when I went to college and feminism was gathering momentum in the early ‘70s, I was not interested in joining the movement.

Although equal pay for equal work is a laudable goal, that hardly summed up the continuum of women’s lives. Economic and social parity with men was still too narrow a concept to encompass my homemaker mother and so many like her. That, too, was about money and power, not raising families, creating a philosophical void so gaping that the entire globe could sail through.

The truth is there is nothing trivial or demeaning about “women’s work” if you enjoy food and some measure of health. Someone has to raise our children and care for our elderly, whether full time or part time, male or female, paid or unpaid.

Somehow, when the feminist movement accelerated, a stigma attached itself to homemaking and child-rearing, consigning a majority of the world’s women, along with their historical and biological roles, to the backwash.

The problem for many women became that their contributions in the paid work force and at home were undervalued, particularly home work. No wonder women tend to be so tired when studies show they still shoulder most, if not all, of the homemaking chores in addition to forming the bulk of our labor force.

Instead of dismissing women’s contributions as if their work were incidental to family survival, why not embrace them?

So many women and men lead sequential lives to accommodate their families. Why not integrate the litany of tasks that facilitate family life into a more holistic concept and get over the myth that only people with paychecks are working? No longer would it be labeled “just” homemaking because it always has been just work.

MEMO: “Your turn” is a feature of the Wednesday and Saturday Opinion pages. To submit a “Your turn” column for consideration, contact Rebecca Nappi at 459-5496 or Doug Floyd at 459-5466 or write “Your turn,” The Spokesman-Review, P.O. Box 2160, Spokane 99210-1615.