Is the way to eliminate poverty to eliminate motherhood?
By Kimberly Ells, Mercator.
I just got back from the Commission on the Status of Women at the United Nations. The theme of the Commission this year was ending poverty. I spent a week listening to an endless parade of events focused almost exclusively on ending poverty by eliminating “unpaid care work”.
What is “unpaid care work,” you might ask? It is work done in the home without specific monetary payment. Most people would call that kind of work simply being alive. It could also be called running your own castle.
But the forces that converged at the United Nations this spring called it an atrocity. To be an “unpaid care worker”—especially if you’re a woman—was seen as an afront to human decency. And because on average women worldwide do more labour in the home than men, people in UN circles call this “gender inequality,” “gender injustice,” and even “gender-based violence.”
I’m not kidding. I heard these phrases repeated time after time in events sponsored by countries and organizations the world over. While there is such a thing as genuine gender-based violence, vacuuming the floor for free isn’t it.
Will freeing women from children will make everyone rich and happy?
So how do we solve the grave and unjust gender-inequalities supposedly manifested by women mopping more floors or changing more diapers than men?
I saw only one solution proposed by UN partners and it was repeated over and over again: provide state-funded universal daycare for all families. That way, they say, the world can unite behind women and propel them out of the home and into the workforce where they can enjoy true freedom and engage in “socially productive work.”
This, by the way, is exactly what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels—the fathers of modern socialism—proposed. They said that in a socialist society, “the care and education of the children becomes a public affair” and that “society looks after all children alike.” They explained that “The first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex back into public industry” and that “this in turn demands that the characteristic of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society be abolished.”
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