This #IWD I’m on childcare duty. I do compressed hours in my paid role so I can cover have Friday ‘off’ to cover my childcare. So today will be made up of scrubbing the hoose, doing the messages and keeping four kids fed, happy and alive. #MakingWorkVisible #IWD2019
— Joanna Barrett (@Joanna_Barrett) March 8, 2019
One of the features of International Women’s Day over the past few years has been Scottish feminist organisation Engender’s Make Work Visible campaign to highlight the work that women do that really makes the world work but that isn’t recognised.
Not only do women work at their jobs, they often have another full shift to do at home looking after children, or parents, doing the housework, organising stuff. Actually, quite often they do the emotional labour in their offices too, keeping the peace, remembering birthdays, supporting colleagues under stress, organising social events, that sort of thing.
This video from 2014 explains it some more.
Here are some of the highlights so far:
https://twitter.com/VonnSand/status/1103918142089191427
Mornings are my partner’s nemesis so I make him a coffee and take it to him in bed. #MakingWorkVisible pic.twitter.com/cQcrRi6mcQ
— Emma Ritch (@EmmaRitch) March 8, 2019
7.30am laundry hung up, children dressed and fed, 1x tea consumed, school and nursery bags packed, this is the best I can manage for #WorldBookDay2019 this year. #MakingWorkVisible #IWD2019 pic.twitter.com/49m5zFThQs
— Alison Wonderland (@alliballibee21) March 8, 2019
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
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3 Comments
I think one of the positive developments I have noticed in recent years is actually the number of men who 1, seem to understand what emotional labour is, and that it is actually work, and 2, be willing to step up to the plate and do their share. It gives me hope.
Well,it looks as if ‘Journalism can be added to the list of the “invisible” (almost) work women do.
At Grimsby May takes (not answers) only one question from a woman on International Woman’s Day and, when challenged responds that, “all questions were answered by a female prime minister !”
She, obviously, thinks that, on IWD, “La femme c’est moi”
Just one other rather ironic example of the invisibility of some to some of the work women do.
Today I received an e-mail from Sandy Toksvig inviting me to ‘support women, support a People’s Vote’. In it she emphasises how she co-founded the Women’s Equality Party because she was sick of how women have been marginalised in mainstream politics, and how four years later she is still sick of it. And then she goes on to say …
“Women have been underrepresented throughout the Brexit process. We only sent one woman to Brussels as part of the UK’s senior negotiating team,” and ” almost three quarters of the time allocated to debate Brexit in the House has been taken up by men’s voices.”
Nowhere does she seem to consider the fact that the most powerful voice in our negotiating team and the person who picked it; the person in the HoC with the most powerful voice in all matters Brexit; and the one person who is dragging the UK ever closer to the Brexit cliff edge through a strategy of running down the clock, despite it becoming ever more clear that any form of Brexit will be a total disaster for the UK is none other than …
… the Prime Minister, a certain Mrs Theresa May.
You really couldn’t make it up.
Take off the Marginal Eyes, Sandy.