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[quote=Anonymous]One lesson from the pandemic: Child care is work. And it should be compensated.

After just six days of sheltering in place, I found myself thinking about all the women I’d taken for granted.

I started with Griselda, who cared for my kids when they were babies, a few hours each week. I thought about Beth and Perrine, and every babysitter and cleaning lady I’d ever used — all the women I’d paid to come into my home over the past 13 years so that I could leave it and do other things.

[b]If someone had asked me why I paid these women to do things that I could do myself — particularly when I made so little money with the time they freed up — I’d say that I did it because I wanted to work, because I needed to work, not just out of economic necessity but also out of a need to feel like a full human being. The implication here was that when I did the child care and housework and cooking and laundry, it was not work but something else.[/b]

Now, for the first time, everyone is doing the work we don’t call work when women do it. We watch Jimmy Fallon play with his daughters while filming “The Tonight Show” and think, “Maybe it’s work, after all.”

[b]In 1972, and in some ways even more so in 2012, the idea of wages for housework seemed radical to most Americans, and counterproductive to many feminists. The liberal-feminist agenda of the past 40 years has been focused on helping women escape domestic burdens and gain reproductive freedom so they can achieve financial autonomy and accumulate power. I have always believed in this project. But on my seventh day of lockdown, I began to wonder if this was exactly where I, and many other white, middle-class feminists, have gone wrong.[/b]

Equality will not come from privileged women foisting their exploitation onto other women. Instead women have to say, collectively, “From now on, they have to pay us, because as women we do not guarantee anything any longer.”

In other words, if garbage collectors and grocery store workers and hedge fund managers expect to be paid for their labor, why not those who create and sustain the human race? Why can’t we imagine some form of universal basic caretakers income to support the work mothers (or fathers or other extended kin) do at home?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/opinion/sunday/women-housework-coronavirus-mothers-day.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

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