Wifework: What Marriage Really Means for Women

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Today, the very ground on which marriage rests has shifted. What do women today expect from marriage and family life and what do they expect to offer in return? Perhaps most importantly of all, how do their expectations about married life match up to reality? I'm a good cook and he's livid that I'm not cooking for him anymore. I'm still doing the shopping and told him to tell me what he wants me to buy so he can cook for himself. He's a rubbish cook and makes no effort to learn the basics. So far he's just taking meals I've already made from the freezer or any extra food on the counter from a meal I've just made for the DC. How is this fair? I read Maushart's newest (the Winter of our Disconnect) and loved it. This one, while good, is more of a slog as it is much more scholarly with many less anecdotes to lighten the reading. We also have a system for reminding us of upcoming dates, e.g. birthdays, insurance up, car service or whatever. DH set this up on his computer. Whoever is least busy generally organises whatever needs doing. It's supposed to be different now. But although our rhetoric about marriage may be revolutionary, for the vast majority of us, marriage remains a matter of dancing to somebody else's tune - till death, or divorce, turns down the volume for good.

DEFINED BY: author Susan Maushart, who says it's "the unwritten contract into which a woman enters upon marriage. The job description most of us were determined would never apply to us". Anti-prostitution feminists and even policymakers often ask sex workers whether we would have sex with our clients if we were not being paid. Work is thus re-inscribed as something so personally fulfilling you would pursue it for free. Indeed, this understanding is in some ways embedded in much anti-prostitution advocacy through the prevalence of unpaid internships in such organizations. Equality Now, a multimillion-dollar anti-prostitution organization, instructs applicants that their internships will be unpaid (adding that “we are unable to arrange housing or visas”). Ruhama advertises numerous volunteer roles that could easily be paid jobs. In 2013 Turn Off the Red Light, an Irish anti-prostitution NGO consortium, advertised for an intern who would not be paid the minimum wage. The result of these unpaid and underpaid internships is that the women who are most able to build careers in the women’s sector—campaigning and setting policy agendas around prostitution—are women who can afford to do unpaid full-time work in New York and London. In this context, it is hardly a surprise that the anti-prostitution movement as a whole has a somewhat abstracted view of the relationship between work and money. Women who desire children also seek to become wives because they believe it will make life better for their children. I would venture to say that most of us still believe that children need fathers. Yet our conviction on this point has been rather violently shaken in the past 30 years. Australian Sex Discrimination Commissioner Susan Halliday, for example, told journalists in 2000 that the notion that children had a right to fathers was 'out of step with community beliefs'. No one told me to scrub the bathroom and prepare an evening meal. If anyone had, I would have laughed long and hard. 'Excuse me,' I would have said between gasps, 'but this is 1985, not 1955. I'm a PhD student, not a Barbie doll.' I had the feminist script down perfectly. I sincerely believed every word.People sell sex to get money. This simple fact is often missed. To many it seems inconceivable that people do something considered so terrible for the same mundane reasons that govern everybody else’s everyday lives.

This book looks at all the things in marriage that make a relationship unequal - there are no conclusions as to who's fault it is but an awful lot to think about.To say that prostitution is work is not to say that it is good work. But neither are most of the jobs available to people who fall on sex work. People who sell or trade sex are amongst the world’s least powerful people, the people forced to do the worst jobs. But that is precisely why anti-prostitution campaigners should take seriously the fact that sex work is a way people get the resources they need. Instead, this is airily dismissed—losing a bad job, we are told, is no big deal. Losing jobs is how we achieve social change, we are told. Anti-prostitution feminist Meghan Murphy writes: “I suppose we shouldn’t try to stop the oil industry because people will lose jobs? It isn’t suuuper progressive . . . to defend harmful practices lest people lose jobs.” Those who make these arguments imagine “changing society” through taking something away. But people with relatively little are right to be fearful when their means of survival is taken away. British miners in the 1980s did not strike on the basis that mining was the most wonderful job—they were simply correct in their belief that, once mining was taken from them, Margaret Thatcher’s government would abandon their communities to desperate poverty. Likewise, few sex workers would object if you sought to abolish the sex industry by ensuring that they got the resources they need without having to sell sex. The aim in decriminalizing sex work is not to advocate for a “right” for men to pay for sex. On the contrary, naming something as work is a crucial first step in refusing to do it. From now on,' my friend Jane announced to her husband recently, "I'm going to be available to help you with the housework and cooking any time you feel you need it. Please don't hesitate to ask.' I would happily be a housewife, or at least have more time at home. Feminism isn't always a good thing. of 12. adjust , by(inc) exp -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Maybe we haven't gone the full 180 degrees on the subject of single motherhood; probably we never will. The fact remains that we have covered an immense distance in the course of a mere generation. Thirty years ago, when I was in high school, a girl who was pregnant and unmarried was ipso facto a social outcast. Marriage was not simply the most desirable option, it was the only one. Those who failed to take it up were forced either to give up their babies or their 'standing in the community' (ie, their future marriageability) - and usually both. It's easy to explain wife work to your partner. It's all those things you look or when asked to do or say in a minute and then forget (generally laundry related in this house). It's the every day boring tasks you leave for me that you can do (cooking here, just occasionally when he's not at work I wish DH would plan and cook a meal). It's playing dumb about DC related things that you understand perfectly and getting me to write you task lists instead of listening to what your told. You get DD1 of to school each morning, so you can do it! When it comes to family-making, reproductive technologies have not only rendered sex expendable, they've rendered fatherhood expendable too. At least theoretically, a father need be nothing more than - as one advice manual for solo mums suggests - 'a nice man who wanted to help me become your mother'. Traditionally, marriage presented the only option for a woman wishing to bear so-called legitimate children - in both the legal and social sense of the word. In the US in 1960, for example, 60 per cent of pregnant teenagers would marry before the birth of their child. Three decades later, the figure has dropped to 15 per cent.The left has a tendency to romanticise mothers rather than engage with the structural inequalities that exist within the home. I have not read Russell Brand’s Revolution so maybe there is a chapter on liberating the female masses from arse wiping, cooking, cleaning, being on call for young and old 24/7 etc. But I rather suspect there isn’t. There’s nothing romantic about liberating “the workers” when said workers are women up to their elbows in shit. On the other hand, there is something romantic about the idea of the noble matriarch wiping a tear from her eye as her brave young man goes on to fight the forces of capitalism while she gets his tea ready for him. Rest assured said brave young worker won’t forget to thank his dear old mum for all the things she taught him about strength and fortitude – he just won’t actually do anything to prevent other women having to show such strength and fortitude again and again.