The Invisible Burden

psychologists’ findings show, it is also most often performed by mothers rather than fathers, regardless of employment status. The mental load partially explains why women perform more house- and carework than men. If a woman is already doing most of the physical and mental labor involved in running her family, then it makes more sense for her to start doing this work full-time than it would for her partner. The flip side of mothers taking on this work is that fathers often simply don’t know how to. It is easy to see why— faced with the stress of lockdown, financial strain, and virtual schooling—families would opt out of a stay-at-home caretaker who has yet to learn how to care-take. The mental load also exemplifies how women’s work in the home has been and continues to be made invisible. Even though a substantial and indispensable part of family care consists of the kind of multifaceted oversight, planning, and problem-solving work that any manager is necessarily devoted to, domestic work is often seen as menial, exclusively physical, and dispensable. Many occupations require taking responsibility over projects, tasks, or human welfare, and these jobs involve considerable mental labor. In contrast to the mental load at home, however, this labor is recognized, which is why managers hold more prestige and are paid better than lower-level employees, or, for that matter, stay-at-home mothers.

The feminist and political thinker Silvia Federici has been contemplating the problem of women’s invisible work in the home since the 1970s. In her book Revolution at Point Zero, she writes that women “produce the most precious product to appear on the capitalist market: labor power.” As partners, women provide for wage earners physically, emotionally, and sexually. Through the meals they cook and the support they give, argues Federici, women enable their husbands to go to work every day. As mothers, women literally produce and raise the future labor force, ensuring their children grow up to be capable adult workers. Since a physically, mentally, and emotionally healthy workforce is essential to our economy and society as it exists today, Federici writes, “housework and the family are the pillars of capitalist production.”

In a New York Times profile of Federici, author and essayist Jordan Kisner writes that “public-policy experts and economists have pointed out in the last several years, the folly of excluding domestic work from economic measures like G.D.P., given the data showing that unpaid women’s work constitutes a huge slice of economic activity.” For example, Oxfam research indicates that, if American women were paid minimum wage for their house- and carework, they would have earned $1.5 trillion in 2019. In spite of the economic indispensability of the regenerative work of caring for a home and family, however, it “appears to be a personal service outside of capital” because it is not paid, Federici writes. This means that housewives, homemakers, and even stay-athome dads do not have any of the rights and protections of workers in the waged workplace, not to mention the safety and freedom of a personal income. In her intimate essay about leaving the workforce in the pandemic, Angela Garbes asks: “Can we unionize mothers?” Her husband, a labor organizer, responds: “Who would you bring your demands to?”

Mainstream feminism has, despite its increased focus on sexual and gender-based violence, largely seen women’s presence and influence in the workplace as the indicator and battlefield of women’s empowerment. However, this empowerment comes at the cost of more exploitation. As women enter the workforce, the people who take over their domestic labor— nurses, nannies, cleaners, even school teachers—are underpaid and often denied workplace protections or benefits. When families who can afford to do so outsource house- and carework to the less economically advantaged—most often women of color and immigrants—they are profiting from a system which does not value caring labor, precisely because it is traditionally performed by women, for free. “Since female has become synonymous with housewife,” writes Federici in 1975, “we carry this identity and the ‘homely skills’ we acquire from birth wherever we go. This is why female employment is so often an extension of housework” and also why the women who work in our kindergartens and hospitals return home at the end of the day to find a second and third shift waiting for them. Federici argues that domestic work represents a form of gendered exploitation that underpins all of capitalism. The disproportionate and unrecognized labor women perform in the home explains why, even in 2021, where demands for equal pay have become mainstream and female college students outnumber their male peers, women are so much more vulnerable to the consequences of the pandemic. Robbed of the crutch of outsourcing house- and carework for low pay, the pandemic year has forced millions of women to sacrifice the liberation and empowerment promised by full-time employment, showing that said liberation and empowerment were merely an economic mirage. When we assume that women’s liberation is achieved when women work for pay (even equal pay) outside the home, we make the labor they already and always perform invisible. Disregarding house- and carework’s indispensable function to society also means buying into a value system that deems all kinds of work—caring, regenerative work—and the humans who do it dispensable. The problem of undervalued and underpaid domestic work, whether it falls on mothers or on the people to whom it is outsourced, underpins American capitalism. The pandemic has merely brought to the forefront what has always been a system of exploitation. Everyone else suffers from this system, too; it is no accident that, while women are so strongly incentivized to stay home, if they can, until their kids go to college, paternal leave remains difficult to obtain. Including the work performed in the home in the image we hold of work is the necessary first step to adequately compensating domestic and care workers, and creating conditions in which full-time employees will be capable of fully, not just financially, supporting their families.

ANTONIA HUTH B’21 thinks all moms are momagers.