It’s high time the world, working women included, acknowledge and appreciate the colossal contribution of housewives to society, says Ayesha Raj Chawla

Indira wakes up at 6 am, Monday through Friday to get her children ready for school. She then packs her husband’s lunch box, after which it is time to attend to matters of the household. Cooking lunch, seeing to the kid’s homework, dropping them to tuitions, arranging dinner for the family and so on. It’s endless work all day.

Yet, when Indira is asked whether she ‘works’, she says that she ‘does not work’ and is a ‘housewife’. Does that sound familiar? If you are one of those women who wake up in the morning and look after your home and family till the time you sleep at night, you belong to the ranks of those thousands of women whose ‘work’ remains invisible, unappreciated and de-valued all over the world. Whereas the plain truth is that no amount of ‘salary’ would be sufficient to pay any homemaker.

Myopic Perception
A ‘housewife’ engaged in ‘housework’ or ‘domestic labour’ has always been and even more so today, considered being ‘economically unproductive’ since there is no tangible salary involved. Many of us as children, have seen our mothers put down their occupation as ‘housewife’ on our report cards. Yet when it is time for us to fill in that section, we are seldom proud of this achievement and it makes us aware that we are only confined to that.

‘House-husbands’ are a rare breed and even their work at home is devalued by society that scorns them for adopting the ‘woman’s role’.

The case that is being put forward here is not that home-management is the be-all-and–end-all of a woman’s existence, nor is it a case against women joining the ranks of ‘economically productive labour’, the point is just that both are ways of being and both need to be equally recognised as essential components for the successful running of any society and economy.

Sisterhood
Women who are productive in economically visible jobs are not any more or less liberated from the responsibilities of home-management. This phenomenon is well known among feminists as the classic case of the woman’s ‘double-burden’. After a hard day’s work a woman returns to her home only to manage its affairs and to tend to her children’s needs.

Boarding schools, day-care centres and crèches, and maids, in countries where labour is cheap, form the backbone of such family needs. Maids fill in the gaps as surrogate mothers and the economy works. The fact remains that there is an individual at home taking over the ‘nurturing’ role of the woman who is in her office from 9 to 5 on all weekdays.

Looked at from either the point of view of the home-manager, or the so-called ‘economically productive working woman’, there is no justification whatsoever for women looking down upon women who are standing on the other side of the fence. It is time that ‘working’ women and home-managers realise that both jobs require a great deal of physical, emotional and intellectual investment and must be equally valued.

Statistically Speaking
If all activities — including maintenance of kitchen gardens and poultry, grinding food grains, collecting water and firewood, etc — are taken into account, then 88 per cent of rural housewives and 66 per cent of urban housewives can be considered as economically productive.

According to a BBC news report, April 26, 2002, the Office for National Statistics says that the value of household work done in 2002 amounted to 700 billion Pounds Sterling, or 75 per cent of the British Gross Domestic Product. The UK Government is considering ways of rewarding household work by, for example, paying grand parents for taking care of their grandchildren.

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