Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism

only are domestic work, childcare and homemaking beneath the dignity of men, but men themselves are apparently congenitally incapable of performing these tasks. How many times have you heard a home-based woman say, her resentment tinged with a hint of pride, that her husband just can’t take care of himself – or, if he sometimes deigns to do the dishes, that he’s ‘well trained’? How many times have you heard a man refer to taking care of his own children as ‘babysitting’?
     
    Just as the lie of male domestic disempowerment flatters men that they are more suited to directly profit-producing work, it flatters women that housework is somehow their special inheritance, that their men are in some way genetically inferior, categorically incapable of taking proper care of themselves or anyone else.
     
    Meanwhile, the most brain-bleedingly pointless domestic tasks have, for some young women today, become so alien and fantastic that they are now a lifestyle option. Cookery classes and knitting circles encourage young, trendy western women to indulge in a sanctioned fantasy of glamorous domesticity that never really existed, an arched, kinky fetishism of the trappings of a drudgery that is still the reality of many women’s lives. I know plenty of young women my age, educated and emancipated, who view the baking of immaculate muffins and the embroidering of intricate scarves and mittens as exciting hobbies, pastimes which should be properly performed in high-waisted fifties skirts and silly little pinafores. Oddly enough, most of these women have no more of a clue how to iron the pleats into a pair of dress trousers than I do. Such hedonistic time-wastage has all the historical accuracy of the sort of sexual role-play which involves Victorian schoolboy outfits and birch whipping canes, and like all such power-play, the practice is perfectly jolly fun as long as it isn’t taken seriously. Unexamined, there is always the risk that a fetish will bleed into reality.
     
Working 9 to 5
    In industrial capitalist society, waged work is the only strategy for being acknowledged and acknowledging yourself as fully human. As such, the struggles of women for equal pay and equal opportunities in the job market and the struggles of women to be recognised as human beings in their own right have been seen by many both within and outside the feminist movement as one and the same. In fact, they are nothing of the kind. Women are people whether we are waged or unwaged, working full time as business leaders or as mothers, whether we support ourselves financially, are supported by family members, or receive state benefits; all women are people, just as all people are people. Similarly, the right to equal pay for equal work, still a hurdle Western women have yet to surmount, is a struggle that is important on its own merits, because it is about basic fairness, not because waged work is what validates our very existence. We deserve equal pay because it is our right as workers: we do not require it to justify our humanity.
     
    At some point during the 1990s, the international Wages For Housework campaign, once a key part of the feminist agenda, dragged itself into a corner and quietly died. The campaign, stolidly opposed even by right-thinking hand-wringing liberals in its day, is now universally acknowledged as preposterously unrealistic – not because it isn’t women’s moral right to receive rewards for their labour above and beyond the satisfaction of a job well done, but because no modern government can afford to pay its women for the lifetimes of work they do for free.
     
Passing the buck
    Sadly, the trench warfare that currently has men terrified into refusing housework and women longing to rid themselves of it is pernicious enough that very many women would rather be complicit in the exploitation of other, poorer women than confront their own partners. The questions that Jane Story posed when writing for New Internationalist in 1988 are still hanging: “It appears that women professionals – feminist and non-feminist alike – have solved their personal housework crisis in the easiest way possible. They’ve simply bought their way out of the problem. Instead of being exploited themselves, they shift the exploitation to another woman. But not everyone can pass the buck in this way. Who cleans the cleaner’s house?” 22
     
    Of the women I spoke to who had found a workable solution to the sharing of domestic work in