Wages for housework

¨if I have money of my own in my pocket I can even buy a dishwasher without feeling guilty and without having to beg my husband for it for months on end while he, who doesn't do the washing-up, considers a dishwasher unnecessary.¨

When I read that statement in Dalla Costa's essay ¨A General Strike¨, I would have sworn that she borrowed those words from my mother if it wasn't for the fact that this passage dates back to 1974. As I walk down memory lane, I only managed to catch the sight of my mother standing in the kitchen, washing dishes at night ...after cooking dinner. She always said that she would rather cook the dinner and wash the dishes herself because if father cooked, the kitchen would end up like a nuclear disaster site and the cleaning she would have to do later on would exponentially increase. As a kid, I never questioned her role in the kitchen, in fact seeing her do the cleaning had a calming effect on me, for some reason it made me feel like mom had the control and everything would be alright. Through the years, the drastic workload imbalance in the house became more and more obvious. Despite my efforts to help around the house, my mother would always reprimand me for doing so. Whenever I tried to help her wash the dishes, she would say something like ¨you'll do plenty of this later, go study.¨  Hence, I must admit that doing housework never became a routine for me, instead, it was like an occasional occurrence similar to an eclipse. Now, everything makes more sense ...her occasional frets and emotional outbursts.

This past summer, I stayed on campus and cooked for myself. I did the shopping, cleaning, and cooking.Because the kitchen was a community kitchen with opened access to other 20 something people, dishes in the sink would easily pile up, stains on the floor were ubiquitous, and microwave was 9/10 filthy with  cheddar cheese popcorn explosions. I remember cleaning up the kitchen every week, sometimes twice a week. I used to wash the dishes, clean the microwave and mop the floor. From that point on, I came to the conclusion that being a housewife was definitely one of the hardest jobs one could ever have. It is a job that  is not paid nor respected. Often, it is brushed aside as unimportant despite being indispensable in our daily lives. Like my mother, I felt like a maid. Yes, in a way, I could have chosen not to do any of it and could have walked through the puddles of ketchup every day and be oblivious of the hair balls rolling around the countertops, just the way my mother could have refused to cook dinner and swipe and dust away from the couch. I could have asked others to help and mother could have delegated the job. The problem is, clean-up help wouldn't be needed in the first place if people were responsible enough to clean after themselves and my mother would have no need to delegate work if my father would have offered a hand. I guess this is why I find Mariarosa Dlaa Costa's call to action- demand for wages for housework - conflicting because it is like saying that my mother should have dictated my father to clean the house and that I should ordered my peers to pay for my services, when in reality this shouldn't be a fight that rest on our shoulders. It was wrong even from the beginning and now it bothers me that it is one more burden that women must carry around. I'm not arguing that demanding for wages for housework is bad, in fact, I agree to all Mariarosa said. It just pains me to realize that these are the kinds of battles a woman must go through.