What Counts as Work?

Modern society struggles to answer the question of how women in the twenty-first century can (or should) manage earning a living and having a family at the same time. Contemporary feminism has few solutions that do not end in female loneliness, and the sociopolitical romanticizing of a past where women exclusively did domestic labor (the problem of how women can or should balance families and careers is solved if women simply forgo careers) is neither realistic, desired by the majority, nor sustainable in a present-day economy whose infrastructure is no longer solely upheld by men. Should women work or not, and, if so, how much? Should women have children, and, if so, when? Should a woman give priority to her career or to her family, and is it really possible to have both? The majority of young women in modern, Western societies, tend to respond to these unresolved tensions with a disciplined commitment to a good education, worry about finding a partner, a distrust of dependency, and increasing their income while remaining childless and lonely.

What Is Work?

A primary fodder for the fire of the conflict between motherhood and the world of work is how we, societally and politically, define “work.” “I don’t work” or “I’m just at home” is still the most common answer mothers give when asked what they do for a living. Even those who run large households and raise numerous children do not define their own work as such – work which typically goes far beyond the average eight- or nine-hour workday.

“What costs nothing is worth nothing,” says a German proverb. Nowhere is this statement more consistently true than in the estimation of domestic and family work. Paradoxically, what is typically labeled “not working” is miraculously declared, by many societal, cultural, and political standards, to be a profession garnering a right to payment if one cleans, cooks, and launders for strangers, if one cares for others’ elderly relatives, or supervises and raises others’ children. Such domestic labor, when done for strangers, falls under a title such as “care work”; given the appropriate label, housework and childcare (exclusively in others’ homes and for pay) become not only fiscally valuable, but socially valuable as well. Such work not only earns a wage, but more fundamentally the very title of work. If a woman does this out of love or a sense of duty for her own family, she does not earn taxable income and is therefore labeled as not working or is accused of depending on a man for fear of taking personal responsibility for herself.

The German feminist Bascha Mika called this “the cowardice of women” in her book of the same name and dubbed such cowardly women “latte macchiato mothers” who clog up the city’s cafés with their strollers because they have nothing better to do. Is there an alternative view, another way of evaluating motherhood as perhaps taking responsibility in a different way than self-sufficient women with income? Is labor at home any less responsible, or any less work, than work outside the home?

Chirinashvili, Kolhoznica, ca. 1958. Used with permission of Adobe Stock.

Women in Production

The idea of the liberation of women in the labor market assumes that work at home is, firstly, not work, and secondly, not a function or facet of freedom. This is by no means the achievement of modern feminists but is a long-held political idea that has been verbally repackaged for modern times. However, this political idea was never, as long as it has been in existence, intended to benefit women.

The idea that women belong in the labor market and children in the education of the state is not new, and can be found long before today. Nikolai Bukharin and Yevgeni Preobrazhensky’s “The ABC of Communism,” an explanation of the programs provided by the Russian Communist Party published in 1920, states that the future belongs to social education, but also that this is not necessary for pedagogical reasons alone: State-sponsored child care and education “has enormous economic advantages. Hundreds of thousands, millions of mothers will thereby be freed for productive work and for self-culture. They will be freed from the soul-destroying routine of housework, and from the endless round of petty duties which are involved in the education of children in their own homes.” (emphasis added) According to the manifesto, society “also owns the most original and fundamental right of child-rearing. From this point of view, the claims of parents to place their own limitations in the souls of their children through home education must not only be rejected, but also laughed at without pity.” Women are freed to engage in work that provides economic benefits for the state while freeing the state to raise children according to whatever system of thought, values, and expectations it sees fit.

In 1976, the French feminist Simone de Beauvoir took up this emancipatory way of thinking in a radicalized way, going so far as to demand that “No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.”

What a woman does or does not do has been and remains a highly charged political question which, in the case of motherhood, is automatically linked to the question of who, if not women, will take over the task of raising the next generation and, above all, according to which values and ideas. Because of the need for outside-the-home childcare, whoever pushes women into the labor market gains access to children and, consequently, to shaping the future.

The Benefits of Working Women

It would be naive to believe that a woman’s employment outside the home is solely for her benefit – or for her benefit at all. Working women may benefit many people, or their country’s economy, but not necessarily themselves or their families. A number of factors put pressure on women to prioritize the labor market over family life and the raising of children: both older and contemporary forms of feminism seek to liberate women from financial dependence on men; birth control, including the legalization of abortion, promises to free women from being tied down by children; and the availability of childcare encourages women who do get married and have children to still work (since child-rearing and homemaking is not work). Gainful employment, which contributes to the functioning and economic expansion of the state, is propagandized as a women’s promotion program – a means of emancipation and self-determination rather than, more realistically, as a facilitator of overwork, loneliness, and childlessness.

With pressure to specialize in one’s career and skills and the prevalence of women pursuing higher education, women’s choice to stay home and raise children creates an even greater discrepancy between women’s societally perceived potential and the lack of fulfillment they find in that potential. Former Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel called women’s choice to stay home “wasted female potential,” and economists label this measure of women who are unavailable for the labor market a country’s “inactivity rate.” While feminists protest women’s “inactivity” – child-rearing and housekeeping in their own homes – they uncritically have no qualms about the fact that hard-working mothers are being labeled “inactive” and “wasted” in the first place, as though raising and fundamentally shaping the next generation in a loving, comfortable, and conducive-to-learning environment were not effortful nor fulfillment of their potential.

In fact, feminism’s emphasis on getting women working and out of the house (notice that “working” and “out of the house” go together) and its silence surrounding the defamation of stay-at-home mothers only bolsters the culture’s tendency to interpret unpaid work as not work, which values the national economy over women individually and collectively. Prominent women around the world have fed the myth that if you only try hard enough, you can have everything as a woman – both a child and a career (again – raising a child as not work, hence the necessity of a career to complete the package). “You can have it all” is the cry of women such as the former chief operating officer of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg, who calls on women in her global bestseller Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013) to chase after the highest success in both parenting and career development. Yet who benefits from the chase and why, if a woman so chooses, is mothering not enough?

Undeclared Work in the Family

The state, like companies, shows a great interest in the transfer of women to the labor market not for the benefit of women and their families, but in order to kill a number of birds with one stone. A woman who raises her children at home does not pay taxes and does not contribute to social security systems such as health, unemployment, and pension funds. However, if she switches to the labor market as soon as possible after giving birth, she not only pays taxes and contributes to social security, but she also creates the need for additional services to compensate for her own absence at home. Family replacement structures must be put in place, where domestic helpers, nannies, nursery school teachers, childminders, and care workers – perform the work that women previously did for free as mothers. All of these new employees – mothers now out of the house, domestic workers, and caregivers alike – now pay taxes. It is beneficial for the state, therefore, to discourage mothers who seek to raise children at home by dubbing child-rearing and housework “not work.”

Some states accept the need to subsidize day care for younger and younger children when families refinance such operations through taxes and fees generated by their paid, outside-the-home work in the first place. This arrangement allows children to be brought up less and less at home and earlier and earlier under the ideological direction of others.

Who Asks Women?

In the name of women’s emancipation, then, we create substitute family structures to replace the home, to increase the proportion of women in the workforce and buoy the country’s economy, and to increase the number of children raised by others. Not only the family, but also childhood itself is being subordinated to the labor market. Childcare opening hours are not based on the well-being of children but on parents’ work schedules. The economy dictates the scope of family life and curtails time or space left for private life.

The consequence of the demand for young women to join, climb the ladder of, and bury themselves in the labor market is increasing rates of childlessness. Young women have been taught that it is not desirable or advantageous to have children, marriage, and a familial home. They have been taught that it is old-fashioned to live in the role of a housewife or stay-at-home mother, that this makes you unliberated and unenlightened – that you are fulfilling sexist stereotypes and the expectations of men, even if only temporarily during your children’s early childhood years. When the Austrian Ministry of Social Affairs commissioned a survey a few years ago seeking to discern young women’s expectations for their lives, more than half of the respondents said they could imagine living as a housewife if their husband earned enough. The media and politicians reacted with expressions of sheer horror; the question was not how to shape policy, social structures, and cultural expectations so that women might be able to lead such a life, but what might be done to cure them of such diseased notions.

Is it possible that women are placed in a false dichotomy between career and raising a family? Perhaps women might be encouraged to believe that they are doing enough in raising a family by recognizing that it is work; this reframing might reattribute dignity to the work of mothering while leaving the option open for those wanting to chart the difficult waters of balancing work both in and outside the home.

What happens when the work that mothers have traditionally done for their families, as a matter of course and with pleasure, disappears? As long as there is no social recognition that raising children – the next generation – is hard work, fewer women will want to have children, marriages will fail due to the pressure to meet society’s economic expectations, and women will continue to feel that they’ve failed no matter which path they choose – career or family life. We are fortunate that many women still want to have children despite these pressures, that the longing for family is still there even if family life is discouraged or its fulfillment stunted, difficult both to attain and to maintain. However the state and society choose to delineate work, the mother and the family still offer what is priceless to children and, consequently, society, because however much structure and support the state may provide, the state cannot love.

Now it’s your turn: What are possible solutions to the problems Kelle describes? Spend billions to compensate parents? Create a culture that welcomes children and supports parents? Share your thoughts in the comments.