Is our housewife's life a 'life sentence'?

A few years ago, a middle aged criminal was ordered by a magistrate to spring-clean an old-age pensioner's house as a punishment for his offence.

If any Sri Lankan housewife managed to hear this story, she should be forgiven for wondering just what heinous crime she must have committed to justify her life-sentence of cleaning.

But by equating it with a prison term, the magistrate showed a remarkable degree of insight into the nature of housework in modern society. It is mostly isolated, unpaid and prevents one from doing anything else. And, above all, there is no escape.

Cutlery, crockery, pots and pans rotate continuously from table to sink to cupboard and back to the table again. Clothes take similar round-trips from washing-basket to the tap or washing machine to ironing board to closet to washing-basket.

Like convicts' work of digging holes then filling them in again, housework never ends and is never completed: something like fifty years' hard labour, with no time off for good behaviour.

Years ago I remember seeing a big poster in a local NGO office depicting a picture of a middle-aged woman with ten upper limbs with each hand doing one household work and the caption was 'My wife does not work: She is just a housewife'. This was a visible protest against male chauvinistic societal norms, where women's role as a home management person is seldom recognized with respect.

Recognition

Isn't it time that we -the male population, start appreciating the work of our housewives? Economists tell us their work is of no economic value and that unless they have paying jobs, housewives don't have any value at all.

I've talked to many women who have told similar stories. A lady who has a five-month-old baby told me how she had mentioned to her sister-in-law that she was considering getting a job to help pay off the house mortgage. Her sister-in-law said, "Well, it's about time you did something!" The implication being that as an "at-home mother", she was doing nothing worthwhile.

Another woman I know has two small children. Once or twice a year she helps out a friend with her catering business. Whenever somebody asks her what she does, she says she "works for a caterer". According to her, this way she gets more respect.

Gross Domestic Product

A typical housewife's activities result in the production of a great many excellent things: meals on the table, clean rooms, clean clothes, children cared for, and so on. We can arrive at measures of the value of the housewife's services by drawing on the obvious parallels between her activities and similar productive activities in the market economy.

For food preparation and cooking, there are commercially prepared food, as well as restaurant and takeaway out meals. For house cleaning, there are paid cleaners. For child care, there are paid providers. There are commercial launderies. Such services, when performed for pay, are covered in the government's tally of production and income, the Gross Domestic Product accounts. Yet, the productive value of the same services by housewives is not covered. Why is that?

Responding to this criticism, a study by the Office for National Statistics in Great Britain a few years ago focused on the amount of unpaid work that took place in the British economy. According to the study, GDP would have been 74 per cent higher if unpaid work would have been included.

These estimates show that, household labour certainly provides a substantial share of a nation's production of goods and services, even in a developed economy. In a developing country, like ours, that share should be far greater.

Human rights

Talking about housewives, as I see, is not only talking about women's rights, it is also talking about a dignified profession that exists since antiquity. It is a profession that needs its own identity, and at the same time rights and privileges.

Housewife as a profession should be defined in economic terms and its contribution as a professional group in national growth and development deserves special mention in national fiscal documents.

Oscar Wilde rightly spoke against those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Accounting for benefits and costs by putting price tags on housewives alone would not do them justice.

My mother and my sister-in-law, both housewives, never got compensated for her share of unpaid housework. They would never bargain, I am convinced, but rest of us - the male community, should positively reciprocate to recognize their professional dignity.

It is their right, very much a human right.