I’ve written before about gendered labor and drudgery, about what work we see as worthwhile and fulfilling versus repetitive, thankless, and marginal, and made the claim that women’s work is seen as less valuable purely because it is performed by women. This has nothing to do with what work women are actually performing. In contrast to what white second-wave feminists like Betty Friedan posited, there is nothing inherently more stifling about domestic work than commercial work (the alienation and despair of a 1960s housewife, with only infants, appliances, and Jell-O salads for company, is surely a force to be reckoned with—but does her husband’s secretary have it much better?).
A 1991 study of farming life in Appalachia, which examines the gendered labor of men, women, boys, and girls on family farms, offers an interesting angle on this question. The study found that tasks were consistently divided by gender but “there was no stigma attached to breaking from the gendered system.” As the seasonal rhythms of the agricultural year dictated, men and women moved between “male” and “female” work. That said,
“What’s striking is the different ways men and women talk about the work of running a farm. Scott writes that all 23 women interviewed for the paper described doing both male and female chores. Men, on the other hand, talked mostly about male labor. Unless specifically asked, only a third of the men interviewed mentioned any work traditionally done by women. One apple grower described his orchard as a one-man business that his son would eventually inherit, with his wife and daughter only minimally involved. But, in a separate interview, his wife said that while her husband and son took care of the trees, she handled seedlings in the nursery, coordinated sales, hired seasonal labor, kept the books, and helped make decisions. She also mentioned that their daughter ran the farm’s fruit stand.”
Shannon Hayes, in Radical Homemakers, locates the European and American concept of separate public and private spheres for men’s and women’s work as beginning around the time of the Industrial Revolution. Before then, most families worked together in producing the various foods and goods necessary for subsistence. Their specific tasks were separate, but the goals and outcomes of their work had much in common.
“Men made cider and mead; women made beer, ale and wine. While the women made and mended clothing made from cloth, the men produced anything made of leather... women sewed and spun, men chopped wood and fashioned tools and utensils. Both performed jobs that required strength and stamina—men hauled wood; women washed clothes. Both men and women would milk livestock, draw water, weave, and peel apples and potatoes. Much of their work was a team effort. Men would grow flax; women would break it and spin it into linen. Women nursed and cared for the children; men made the cradles, and mowed the hay and sheared fleece to fill the mattress ticking. In contrast to modern times, the household was the source and locus for sustenance and survival. It was not a separate entity to be supported through outside means” (62).
In contrast, after the Industrial Revolution, items previously produced at home became consumer goods. Blankets, utensils, clothing, candles, and furniture were purchased in the marketplace, with money earned by men working outside the home in factories. The concepts of private and public spheres flourished, and with them bloomed notions of female frailty, modesty, and incapacity. This lasted for 150 years or so, tops, before women began streaming into the workforce in great numbers.
As noted historian of the family Stephanie Coontz puts it, when referring to Anglo-American tradition we reference “the way we never were”—an arrangement of roles and attitudes that applied only briefly to a small set of people who occupied such outsized cultural influence that we now take their idiosyncrasies as a shared heritage.
In truth, the story was always more complicated. As bell hooks points out, African American women almost always worked outside the home. Young women worked in factories. And, of course, some families continued to labor together as subsistence farmers.
Shaunna Scott’s farm labor study adds a fascinating dimension to this argument by examining agricultural labor, which has declined in prevalence and changed in form after industrialization but still, in many ways, maintains family structures and labor patterns from past generations. The farm women’s tasks could, in barely different contexts, be read as traditionally male instead. They manage finances, hire employees, and handle sales—central tasks for any business. Yet just by virtue of being performed by women, these tasks are devalued by the men who witness them as peripheral to the farm operations.
So what happens, then, when women do the same work as men, in the same contexts?
As Caitlin Moran pointed out, one survey showed that “ in a mixed-gender group, when women talk 25 per cent of the time or less, it's seen as being ‘equally balanced.’ And if women talk 25–50 per cent of the time, they're seen as ‘dominating the conversation.’” Jason Kessler, a lead organizer of the 2017 Unite the Right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, came to his bigoted views when a white woman earned a job he wanted.
(You’ll notice I’m not raising the subject here of the 2016 US presidential election, which, yes, an American flag with a pair of Truck Nuts attached to it would have won.)
The “traditions” of gendered labor are false, but that doesn’t matter. When women and men do parallel work contributing to a common cause, women’s work is seen as peripheral. When women work in separate spheres than men, their tasks are seen as modest and constrained. When women enter male-dominated spaces, they are viewed as domineering, overbearing, and incompetent.
There is no such thing as an immutable category of women’s work, but there is one constant: when women work, men respond to us with dismissal, condescension, and rage.
What, then, is the way forward? We might have to get creative.