Perhaps this is a well worn feminism topic but I thought I'd open it up anyway.
My mother was a 60s/70s feminist. I love and admire her for this. I was brought up with the sense that there is no limit to what I can achieve and with a real understanding of the struggles other women have been through to get the vote, equal pay etc. I salute them.
My mother (a single parent) thought that life was too short to stuff a mushroom. She also thought that hoovering, making cakes, going to the hairdresser were the the province of 1950s Stepford Wives. I totally get why she felt this way. She was born in 1939 and was excited and proud to throw off the (indisputably) awful strictures of post war womanhood.
I 100% support every effort to make sure that women achieve at the same level as men. The thing is though, after I had children I found out that households require at least the same number of hours spent on 'wifework' as achieving a salary outside the home. If you are not upper middle class and able to afford a nanny, cleaner, ocado and deliveroo how does this actually work?
I know how it works. The woman strives to achieve at work and then silently does the other stuff at home while inwardly wondering what is going on. Most feminist arguments don't discuss who buys MIL Christmas presents or packs the homework bags for school. They either breezily say it's not important (if you have the supreme confidence of the upper middle class woman who knows her home and children will tick along with regular injections of family money whilst insisting in a Bohemian manner that you don't care for such trivia) or they just employ somebody to do it and it then becomes totally invisible.
Running a home and family is WORK. Time consuming, tiring and quite skilled WORK. I totally acknowledge that women need access to money and representation and am very grateful for the women who work to make progress with this. But what about the vast number of hours and emotional/psychological burden of keeping a home and family running? MN has thread after thread of women saying they are doing this alone. The typical response is either person to person commiseration (which implies individuals face this issue alone with the occasional isolated posts of solidarity) or extremely fortunate middle class women saying that they don't do this stuff, they are proud slummy mummies etc etc and have partners who do the wifework.
This is not a problem for individual, lone women. It affects the vast majority of us. Most of us are struggling to keep our household running. Not just the cleaning but house maintenance, the medical appointments, the school meetings, the birthdays and Christmas.If you really don't think this is a burden for you it's because you have the money to outsource it or you have a very very very rare partner who does it and you have the confidence borne of an upper middle class upbringing for it not to bother you. But you are rare. Believe me it is rare that women don't carry the vast majority of wifework.
I really think this should be the next wave of feminism. Running a household is not trivial work. It's essential. It needs to be acknowledged as essential and indispensable for good mental health. Everybody in the world needs to come home to a place of refuge. We should be prioritising that as a societal value over paid work outside the home and acknowledging what it takes to achieve a happy and well run household.