Women's Work Devalued

Judith Ramirez

I think we can safely assume that all over the world this afternoon there are women who are cooking, and cleaning, and standing over washing machines or by streams, women who are gathering firewood and fetching water, looking after children, sick people and old people, and that in all the countries in which they are carrying out these activities they are not regarded as productive members of society.

This failure of the world economies to recognize the economic worth of women's work in the home has devastating consequences. Women receive only one-tenth of the world's income though we perform two-thirds of the world's work 1/10 of the income for 2/3 of the work! On a worldwide scale, women in the paid labour force work twice as many hours as men because they have the “second shift” at home. Women make up 60 to 80 percent of Africa's agricultural work force, and the average working day of a typical rural African woman is 17 1/2 hours. In the developed countries, such as Canada, where technological advances presumably make it easier for the woman in the home to perform her work, studies reveal that the full-time housewife is still spending an average of 13 hours a day doing housework. For this work, women will receive not a penny.

The social effects of this massive devaluing of women's work and women's labour time can be seen in relation to both malnutrition and illiteracy. Of the world's 200 million children suffering from malnutrition, the girls are by far the worst victims. Because boys are valued as future bread winners, they are better fed than their sisters. More of the family's resources, however meagre, are invested in boy children.

Of the 700 million illiterate people in the world, a full two-thirds are female. Illiterate mothers, transmit illiteracy to their children, especially to their daughters, who are bound up with them in the work of caring for the family. The working partnership between mothers and their daughters, especially in underdeveloped parts of the world, is very strong. Even the girls who make it to school are often dropped out because they are needed at home to help their over-burdened mothers. And on a world scale, particularly in underdeveloped countries, this remains the dominant pattern.

Women everywhere pay a cruel price for unpaid servitude in the global kitchen; we pay with poverty, over-work, dependence on men, and some of us pay with our lives.

Excerpted from “The Global Kitchen”, in Canadian Woman Studies Spring 1991 issue originally published in Vol. 3, No. 1, 1981 of “Women: Nation Builders”, written by Judith Ramirez.
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(CX5062)

Subject Headings

• Literacy
• Women in the Economy
• Women & Work
• Women's Incomes

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