For feminists, hell is caring for the family
by Caroline ffiske, The Conservative Woman:
IT HAS followed, as the night the day, that a feminist writer has concluded that the coronavirus will be a disaster for feminism and for women.
In recent days, by way of motivating us, people have cheerfully noted that when England was previously ravaged by plagues, Shakespeare composed some of his greatest plays and Isaac Newton discovered calculus. But in her recent article for the Atlantic, Helen Lewis dourly points out that ‘neither of them had child-care responsibilities’. Thank goodness.
Lewis writes that ‘school closures and household isolation are moving the work of caring for children from the paid economy – nurseries, schools, babysitters – to the unpaid one’. She says: ‘The coronavirus smashes up the bargain that so many dual-earner couples have made in the developed world: We can both work because someone else is looking after our children. Instead, couples will have to decide which one of them takes the hit.’ Looking after your own children is ‘taking a hit’?
Lewis admits that it is not real women who will suffer disproportionately, but rather statistics that will have a miserable time: ‘At an individual level, the choices of many couples over the next few months will make perfect economic sense.’ Hang on: if these choices make perfect sense for the people who make them, what is Lewis’s gripe? This is a serious question. She seems to want people to behave differently, not to make decisions which ‘make perfect economic sense’ for them; in order for . . . what exactly? The statistics, of course!
Lewis asks: ‘What do pandemic patients need? Looking after. What do self-isolating older people need? Looking after. What do children kept home from school need? Looking after. All this looking after – this unpaid caring labour – will fall more heavily on women because of the existing structure of the workforce.’ You have to admit that the honesty here is stark. I don’t want to be looking after people! I want to be back in the office! As Sartre said, ‘There’s no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is other people!’ Particularly if they are your own family and in need of care.
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