Homemaking is the traditional “women’s work”: housekeeping, cooking, raising children, etc. While feminists have fought for women to be able to do more than simply stay at home, the reality is that staying at home may well be the life that some women desire, a life that they choose. When feminists allow for this work to be degraded, what in fact happens is that women’s work, and consequently women and their contributions to society, are devalued.
The primary reason why women’s work is devalued in our modern society is simple: homemaking is not classified as productive work, but rather as reproductive work. Consequently, it is a non-income-generating activity, and in a society that bases value in terms of wages and cost-benefit analyses, it become impossible to adequately assign a value to this kind of work. But that’s not to say it doesn’t have value. On the contrary, homemaking still needs to occur regardless of whether or not both parents in a household are able to or choose to work because children still need to be raised and food still needs to be put on the table. Regardless of whether or not homemaking generates income, it is incredibly important.
On top of that, when we degrade homemaking, we place a negative connotation on something that should be an option for women, if it’s financially feasible. While it is true that many households require two incomes in order to sustain their desired lifestyles, the truth is that if a woman has the ability to stay home with the children, that should be an option she should be able to pursue without feeling like she HAS to be doing something more. Even more importantly, degrading this work reinforces the idea that this work is undesirable, which adds to the struggle to gain gender equity with regards to homemaking: that is, men are less likely to want to take part in homemaking or to consider staying home with the kids, if this remains stigmatized or frowned upon by society. Placing greater value on and a greater respect for domestic work is going to be an important part of improving this area of balance. Feminists can’t keep acting like this work is not valuable and then insisting that men help out: we are sending mixed messages that are just getting muddled.
There’s another aspect of this worth considering: there are women who take on homemaking and care-giving jobs for income, and if we are going to advance their position in society, we need to accord greater respect for the work that they do and the contributions they make. This is particularly important from the perspective of intersectionality, because women of color are more likely to take on jobs working in domestic labor, and they in turn become degraded or devalued when feminism insists that this kind of work is not valuable, or that they should be aspiring to more.
Credit to my mom: https://theradicalidea.wordpress.com/2013/05/21/devaluing-womens-work-devaluing-women-a-feminist-per...
