I've heard this notion that "we devalue women's work" but I can't actually put my finger on any example of this. I'm not sure it's really true.
Yes, homemakers are not paid in money. That doesn't make the work any less valuable. And I think that anyone who thinks about this for a few seconds would come to this conclusion. There's nothing more valuable about a man cooking in a restaurant than a woman cooking in her home. Maybe the opposite, because a restaurant cook can be replaced more easily than the mother to a particular child.
When I read traditionalists talking about this, they tend to emphasize the value of what women provide in that traditional role. They'd never say that the women are idle or useless or worthless. I remember old Chinese stories about a man choosing a wife based on her cooking skills. And on the modern side, one of the Proud Boys' core tenets is "venerate the housewife".
Is it progressives/feminists who are devaluing womens' work? Is it a side-effect of the campaign to free women from having to do that work, that the work itself ends up getting denigrated along with the women doing it? I think feminists would generally also say that home work is fully respectable, but maybe there's an undercurrent of disrespect there. To say women should move from home to career is in some sense implicitly valuing career over the home.
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You point to the daily use of money as the source of the difference. I think that may be wrong. I think the cause may actually be education.
Traditional women's work doesn't require more than a primary education. When everyone is uneducated, one may see that work as equal to an equally-uneducated man's work doing subsistence farming or laboring. But once society starts educating men (and only men, because resources are scarce and there are no washing machines or dishwashers and every woman is occupied on all-day every day home work and so they cannot be spared), a difference in hourly value appears between the man and the woman. Because of education, the woman's work is in some sense actually less valuable per-hour than that of her educated husband - hiring a replacement for him would cost a lot more than hiring a replacement for her. So the mens' work becomes literally more valuable.
The asymmetry seems to be that the men got educated first. And I think the basic reason for that is technological: The work men did in medieval times was largely about simple muscle power (farming, building etc), and can be automated with simple industrial-era technology. The work women did was based on hand-eye coordination and social interaction (cooking, cleaning, child discipline), and largely still can't be automated very well today. So the men were automated out of their jobs first, which allowed them to spend time getting educated instead of pushing plows, while the womens' work still needed to be done by hand.
Anyway, it's an interesting set of questions. I'd be curious to see what examples of people "devaluing womens' work" actually exist, if anyone can point them out. I'm not sure I've really seen it.
There's nothing more valuable about a man cooking in a restaurant than a woman cooking in her home.
Traditional women's work doesn't require more than a primary education.
Professional chefs go to special and expensive schools to learn to cook. Women often learn it at home starting at an incredibly early age as they help their own mother's in the kitchen.
Your claim that women's work doesn't require education is the very essence of the problem of which I speak. Women in traditional cultures are essentially apprenticed to the role of wife and mom from an incredibly early age and typically have spent many years learning to cook, clean, raise kids, etc before they get married and become wives and moms.
Dismissing this as "not educated" is one of the ways we fundamentally pretend that women's work is unskilled labor and worth less than the kinds of labor men do.
I used the word "cook". You seem to have substituted "professional chef" into that sentence, and then responded as though that's what I wrote. Obviously nothing I wrote will made sense if you're substituting out new words with very different meanings.
I specifically used the word "cook" and not "professional chef" to indicate the type of cook who can do the work without going to university for it. Picture the guy flipping burgers at a McDonalds. That's a cook.
I really liked your previous post, I was hoping we could have a conversation without the hostile misinterpretation.
When I say education I'm referring to university. The traditional education a girl in Somalia can get by the time she is 16 is, in comparison to a university education, "not educated". This is plain language, and you understand it well. But you seem to be mixing in some sort of moral judgmental meaning along with the economic factual meaning.
If simply stating that homemaking requires less education than engineering, medicine, or law is "devaluing women's work", then devaluing women's work would be the correct thing to do. But a statement about the economic dollar investment into work is not the same as a moral judgment of it.
When you say people "devalue women's work", is that all you mean then? That people correctly note that it requires less educational years to produce a homemaker than an engineer, doctor, or lawyer? Because "devaluing women's work" really sounds like a moral thing.
I'm not looking to fight with you. In a nutshell, a girl being married off at age 16 may have been trained from age 4 for her future role as wife and mom.
Some wives and moms are excellent cooks, on par with professional chefs. Most people would probably prefer "mom's home cooking" to McDonald's. And it seems a bit insulting for you to act like I moved the goal posts by saying professional chef. Most full time homemakers I have known did a lot of cooking and were very good at it, on par with a professional chef.
In fact, one of the mom's I knew growing up had been to cooking school. If she hadn't been a woman, she likely would have been running a restaurant rather than cooking gourmet meals for family and friends.
I was a homemaker who homeschooled my 2e sons. I know a lot about gifted education, special needs education, accommodating various things. But that somehow doesn't really count in the eyes of most people.
I have been told right here on HN that college education is wasted on homemakers. I needed my college education to do right by my kids and make sure they had some hope of a future.
I mean, I really don't want to fight with you, but you are basically digging your grave deeper by telling me I am wrong to compare a mom's cooking to a professional chef and you were intending to compare it to a job at McDonald's.
Women also do things like patch up kids who are injured, take care of them while sick etc. In fact, I am getting well when the world tells me it cannot be done and that is largely through leveraging the domains of knowledge that are the purview of homemakers.
So when you say that we should rightly devalue women's work in comparison to medicine, my feeling is there is no means to bridge the vast distance between your mental models of life, the universe and everything and mine.
And if you and the rest of HN will excuse me, I think I have had enough of arguing this topic.
Have a Happy Thanksgiving if you are American and insert whatever appropriate greeting suffices if you are not.
"when you say that we should rightly devalue women's work in comparison to medicine"
I said the opposite of this, with emphasis. It was my whole point. It's such a struggle to communicate through these repeated hostile misinterpretations. Please, please, read what I'm actually saying. There is nuance. This isn't a flame war. You're jumping to the conclusion that I think your personal daily struggles for years are worthless. This is not what I an saying at all.
It seems you are equating price with moral worthiness. It costs more to train a doctor than a homemaker. This is simple fact measurable in dollars. I don't think that this devalues women's work any more than it devalues a soldier's work because they are not paid well. But I guess you do see price as equivalent to moral value. That is a gap in worldview I can't cross; the counterexamples are so numerous I can't make sense of any statement based on such a premise.
Yes, homemakers are not paid in money. That doesn't make the work any less valuable. And I think that anyone who thinks about this for a few seconds would come to this conclusion. There's nothing more valuable about a man cooking in a restaurant than a woman cooking in her home. Maybe the opposite, because a restaurant cook can be replaced more easily than the mother to a particular child.
When I read traditionalists talking about this, they tend to emphasize the value of what women provide in that traditional role. They'd never say that the women are idle or useless or worthless. I remember old Chinese stories about a man choosing a wife based on her cooking skills. And on the modern side, one of the Proud Boys' core tenets is "venerate the housewife".
Is it progressives/feminists who are devaluing womens' work? Is it a side-effect of the campaign to free women from having to do that work, that the work itself ends up getting denigrated along with the women doing it? I think feminists would generally also say that home work is fully respectable, but maybe there's an undercurrent of disrespect there. To say women should move from home to career is in some sense implicitly valuing career over the home.
---
You point to the daily use of money as the source of the difference. I think that may be wrong. I think the cause may actually be education.
Traditional women's work doesn't require more than a primary education. When everyone is uneducated, one may see that work as equal to an equally-uneducated man's work doing subsistence farming or laboring. But once society starts educating men (and only men, because resources are scarce and there are no washing machines or dishwashers and every woman is occupied on all-day every day home work and so they cannot be spared), a difference in hourly value appears between the man and the woman. Because of education, the woman's work is in some sense actually less valuable per-hour than that of her educated husband - hiring a replacement for him would cost a lot more than hiring a replacement for her. So the mens' work becomes literally more valuable.
The asymmetry seems to be that the men got educated first. And I think the basic reason for that is technological: The work men did in medieval times was largely about simple muscle power (farming, building etc), and can be automated with simple industrial-era technology. The work women did was based on hand-eye coordination and social interaction (cooking, cleaning, child discipline), and largely still can't be automated very well today. So the men were automated out of their jobs first, which allowed them to spend time getting educated instead of pushing plows, while the womens' work still needed to be done by hand.
Anyway, it's an interesting set of questions. I'd be curious to see what examples of people "devaluing womens' work" actually exist, if anyone can point them out. I'm not sure I've really seen it.