I Do Not Dream of Labor, But I Do Not Dream of Patriarchy Either
Unpacking the Internet trend of glorifying stay-at-home wifehood
Like many people, I sometimes think about what I would do if I didn’t have to work for a living. I would probably spend more time on writing, playing music, and making art. I might go back to graduate school and study without worrying about wasting years of my life on a degree worth about as much 3-ply toilet paper. I might move back permanently to my family’s land, learn traditional farming techniques and maintain the homestead that is disappearing. I’d go into childcare, a field that interests me but that pays so poorly it never made sense as a career.
I’d like to do something with the goal of actually helping my community, not making me money. I’m sick of what the late, great David Graeber called “bullshit jobs”, but not of working itself. After all, we’ll always need someone to work to keep the world going. This isn’t Wall-E.
I’m far from the only one dreaming about what my life would be like if I didn’t have to work for a boss, but a lot of people on the Internet seem to be dreaming forwards, not backwards. It’s become a bit of a widespread meme where girls blame feminism for their jobs outside of the home, when they could be at home getting taken care of by their husbands. This essay was sparked by this Tiktok, where a girl talks about wanting to spend her days cooking food for her husband, cleaning, and going to exercise classes.
To be clear, this is not an attempt to call out this specific girl’s dreams, as boring as they may seem to me (24 hours at your disposal when you don’t have to be anywhere and all you can think about is exercising not once but twice a day shows an incredible lack of imagination in my opinion). My issue is with an attempt to portray this as some kind of greater anti-capitalist awakening, by misguided women (and some men, who are cheerleading a little too enthusiastically for a woman’s right to choose but only when it aligns with their patriarchal values. I see you and I am side-eyeing you).
Some women may find work in the home more meaningful than anything that they could do for a wage and that’s fine. Other families may realize that having a stay-at-home parent makes more financial or logistical sense. Plenty of people cannot work outside the home due to disability but that does not prevent them from building meaningful lives or contributing to their household in incredibly valuable ways. However, those are all individual choices, not the foundations of an anti-capitalist movement.
But attempting to portray what is essentially an attempt to shove us all back into the kitchen, Stepford Wives-style, as an anti-capitalist revolution is downright disingenuous and blind to reality. In the modern day and age, most people can only be truly independent through work and this applies to women as well. The illusion of choice under capitalism is still more choice than many women that don’t work outside the home have. You can quit a job if your boss is abusive (obviously with some limits), but how are you supposed to leave when all of your income comes from one person, when you can’t get hired anywhere because your resume has two decades worth of blank space, and the same person can also decide whether or not you can see your children?
Financial abuse is a common but sadly less-known form of abuse. I should say less-articulated. The women of our parents’ generation knew this reality very well. When my mother got married, an older Greek grandma in her building warned her to always keep a separate bank account and a job, even if it’s just a small part-time job. My mother didn’t listen then. She rebuilt her life now, but it would have been easier had she taken this advice.
Even assuming the best and that the husband you are trusting enough to place every aspect of your fragile little life under his care is worthy of that trust, only working in the home exposes women to so much unnecessary vulnerability. As author Mikki Kendall pointed out, older women are far more likely to live in poverty than men, often due to irregular work history, wages that were not eligible for social security, and unequal pay. When your lovely provider husband unexpectedly dies and you’re not eligible for his pension, what are you going to do? When your lovely provider husband unexpectedly dies young and you have to find a job but your resume is about as complete as a slice of Swiss cheese, what are you going to do?
I wonder how many people claiming that working outside the home is what really causes women’s problems have ever had to help a woman leave financial abuse or take on caretaking responsibilities for an older female relative with no resources. Even if they try to claim it’s just a joke, I wonder if it would still feel funny.
Maybe I am reading too much into a dumb Internet joke, but I happen to think that the first step in solving a problem is accurately identifying it, and we can’t do that if we’re blaming feminism for something that’s the fault of capitalism. The reason work sucks isn’t feminism, it’s capitalism. The reason we have to work outside the home isn’t feminism, it’s capitalism—feminism worked so that we could be (somewhat) fairly paid for that work. Our grandmothers were not sitting around getting fed peeled grapes, they were working in the home and often outside of it as well. Second-wave feminism rightfully gets a lot of critique for the very white, often exclusionary limits it had, but also women in the U.S. could not apply for a credit card without male permission until 1974.
Another reason why those memes about undoing feminism make me so nervous is that every time I see one, I picture somewhere far away the monkey’s paw of hard-fought incremental social progress curling its bony little finger and shudder.
I also find this school of anti-work thought incredibly individualistic. If I thought wage labor was so oppressive that staying at home and sweeping for no pay was preferable, then presumably I don’t want someone I love, such as my spouse, to experience the same thing.
Often, these posts get paired with the other, Twitter anti-work manifesto, “I was made to eat fruit by the beach.” I think because they have the same underlying assumption: work is oppressive for OP so they specifically should lounge around, but it is not as oppressive as everyone else (many of the housewife fantasies don’t seem to take into account how difficult housework is and how soul-crushing). So many of these fantasies still rely on someone else working to the bone to serve the main character, whether it is the spouse engaged in wage labor or an unnamed worker growing fruit, which although it grows on trees, does not grow by itself. As Alicia Kennedy put it in one of her essays last year, “All those viral tweets about how we were meant to eat fruit naked on the beach, to which my silent reaction is always that we were probably meant to do a lot of fucking work to feed ourselves. “
All of these social media posts are right in that work in the 21st century is a spectacularly soul-crushing prospect. However, while labor in the way it exists now will hopefully be changed drastically (otherwise we face a crushing future both for ourselves and the planet), work will always exist. The difference is that I hope in the leftist utopia that will totally, absolutely occur within our lifetimes and is not just the product of my wishful thinking, work will be meaningful, such as the work of feeding ourselves, building things, and tending to our community. It will benefit us, not the already well-lined pockets of our bosses. It will give us enough time to pursue other interests (yes, even if your interests only seem to extend to twice-daily gym visits) and socialize.
However, liberation will come for us all or it will not come at all. There will not be a system where our best posters lounge by the ocean eating berries while everyone else does the backbreaking work of growing them.
And if we’re already dreaming of a drastically new way of living, let us go wild and actually imagine a new way of living. I most certainly will not dream of the same system that generations of women fought to upend.