Labour Of Love: Why Motherhood Deserves More Than A Special Day
Even as society progresses, the labour of love remains invisible.
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It’s Thursday night and you just got home after work. Dinner needs cooking, the kids need help with homework, there’s a pile of clothes that needs folding, another pile that needs washing, and someone needs to call your 7-year-old’s teacher to let her know you’re going on a family holiday so he won’t be in school next week.
There’s a list of chores that needs doing and someone has to do it, eventually. And if you’re the one that ends up doing these things, you’re doing what’s called “invisible labour”.
Invisible labour is the treadmill of mind-numbing to-do lists that women manage so that childcare duties and households run smoothly.
And that’s us putting it nicely. Suniya S. Luthar conducted a study on mothers to find out how they feel about running the ship on their own, because “Just putting a number to that alone is a service to womankind.”
But isn’t that just the stuff that women do?
It’s not unusual for most people, men and women included, to feel like all this is just part of who women are and that we’re better at this sort of thing. This could be a result of many things – from how we watched our parents interact, how we saw other family dynamics play out, what we see portrayed in the media, and so on.
In the 1990s, a book titled Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus became a huge hit and was the second most-sold hard copy after the Bible. It’s about (surprise, surprise) gender differences.
We can’t say if the book managed to enlighten us about the opposite sex, but it does prove the point that we’re pretty much clueless when it comes to them.
So did it start in the 1990s?
“Invisible labour” is a term first introduced in a 1987 article by sociologist Arlene Kaplan Daniels. It’s work that often goes unnoticed, undervalued, and therefore, unregulated.
In pre-industrial societies, gender roles were sharply defined, with men responsible for external tasks like hunting, and women managing domestic duties. This division of labour laid the foundation for invisible labour, as women’s contributions within the household went unnoticed and uncompensated.
The Industrial Revolution intensified this dynamic, with men entering visible, paid industrial jobs while women continued shouldering unpaid domestic responsibilities.
Despite the feminist movements of the 20th century challenging traditional gender roles and advocating for equality, the burden of invisible labour persisted, highlighting the enduring challenges of achieving equity in household responsibilities.
The pandemic actually made things worse. Homes turned into offices, schools, and daycare centres. And even with men at home during the lockdown, one Malaysian study revealed that it made no difference to women’s workloads at home, implying that “gendered division of household labour has become worrying”.
Invisible work doesn’t only involve the execution of tasks. It also involves the conception and planning of a task.
The “second shift” describes invisible labour as the shift women pick up after they get home from their paid jobs. The thing about the second shift is that it’s equally, if not more, mentally taxing.
Take making dinner for example. If you notice that your 7-year-old downright refuses to eat anything with a tinge of spice in it, then you have to plan what to make for him and for the rest of the family to eat. It’s not just about cooking the meal, it’s also about the conception and planning of it.
It might seem very frivolous but it doesn’t just happen once every week and you never get to take a break. If it’s not dinner then it’s figuring out where the other sock is. It’s always happening, all the time.
The labour of love
So one thing is clear: Women do a lot. And they do it seen or unseen, regulated or unregulated.
Of course, there are policies implemented that help support work-life balance, affordable childcare, parental leaves, and such.
But it takes a lot more to dismantle behaviours that have been subconsciously ingrained in us.
Most people fail to recognise the weight of invisible labour and dismiss it, which often makes women suppress their emotions and disregard how they feel. Just being aware that invisible labour exists and acknowledging it is more valuable than you know.
So, Mother’s Day or not, we should never take this labour of love for granted. Show the women in your life that they are seen and appreciated, because they are the ones that silently hold up our entire world.
And through it all, still somehow manage to find where the other sock is.
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