OP, you might find this interesting to consider.
“… the myth of care as an inexhaustible natural resource that we can reap from feminine nature is unshakeable. Because we need it to be.”
Katrine Marçal, Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?
When feminists speak of the ‘invisibility’ of women’s work, what they usually mean is not labour that is literally unseen, but acts which are not classified as ‘work’. They’re things women are assumed to do naturally, out of love, out of instinct, just because they want to, hence there’s no need to reward them for it, and certainly no need to assign any economic value to them. Sure, there would be an enormous cost if all the mothers of the world downed tools, but as long as that unpaid labour keeps coming, it doesn’t have to be counted. As Katrine Marçal puts it, the housework and care work a woman provides can be written off as “just a logical extension of her fair, loving nature”.
There are some things, though, which cannot strictly be described as activities. They’re non-acts. Women’s work consists of the things we do, but also the things we don’t. It’s the things we don’t say, the complaints we never make, the fears we never express, the spaces we don’t take. If it is hard to quantify housework and care work, counting this ‘not doing’ is harder yet.
How do you keep track of things that never happened, things that, as far as anyone else is concerned, were never even possibilities? How do you assign a cost to something which, to the outside world, looks utterly effortless, a simple expression of your passive, contented nature?
In Intercourse, Andrea Dworkin describes women’s response to the public censure that follows should we “speak without apology about the world in which we live”. Women, she writes, “lower our voices”:
“Women whisper. Women apologise. Women shut up. Women trivialize what we know. Women shrink. Women pull back.”
All of this comes at a cost to women’s self-respect and emotional well-being, but it’s a cost that goes unnoticed by the beneficiaries of our silence. As with the housework, this labour is only really appreciated the moment it is no longer provided – the day the silent, unapologetic woman speaks and is no longer sorry.
From: glosswitch.substack.com/p/the-invisible-work-of-saying-nothing