Our patriarchal culture maintains the capital in male hands… pauperizing female caregivers to try to keep us under control.
When Ted left, it was with everything. My past and my future. He cleaned out our houses and claimed our property for himself. He took my paperwork and altered our agreements. He changed the locks on the doors and the numbers in the books… not only so he could keep it all, but especially so I’d look like a dick for even expecting my part… which I’d calculated as 50% of the wealth we’d generated during the 12 years we were together.
I mean, I did half the work.
And most markedly in departing, Ted took that job too : the unpaid care giving work I’d been doing for our couple for the whole of our relationship. So when it ended, there were no unemployment indemnities nor any golden parachute either. I quite unexpectedly became the boss of my own business.
I’d actually had a job when Ted and I’d first met. It was one that afforded me the time and the flexibility to care for my children full time, but barely paid the bills. Even though I was skilled at it and took pleasure in doing it, it definitely wasn’t a career.
Because my husband worked long hours in a high paying job, my participation was the rest; the whole other half of our lives; the part no one really saw but me.
I was in charge of making sure every fucking, single thing was so perfect that when Ted came home from work he could just play and have fun. My job was taking that entire family load off his shoulders. Anything and everything associated with our inner sphere was me.
From picking his socks up off the floor, getting them (both) into the washing machine, pairing them again and getting them back in his drawer; to shopping and cooking and planning and organizing; to guiding the children through their studies and helping them plan for their futures; to keeping up with our family and friends, organizing social activities and planning trips for our free time; to scoping out new properties and negotiating prices for buying and reselling, while managing the renovations in between.
Then in addition, my job was also him and us and our relationship. The entire mental workload associated with making sure our couple would survive and that Ted was happy fell upon me. Consulting shrinks, reading books and searching through articles for solutions to avoid contention, talking him through reoccurring work conflicts with clients or associates; advising him on how to proceed without creating angst for himself and those around him; listening to his complaints; holding his hand when he needed a push or propping him up when he felt at odds.
I had no extra time for my own dream projects. A restaurant or a coffee shop or a bed and breakfast, because anything in hospitality would have cut into Ted’s free time. He worked like a dog, doing paid legal work which afforded us the petit, provincial, bourgeois lifestyle we had… without me even having to do paid work… so why ever would I want it and why would I dare cut into Ted’s pleasure during his time off? Who was I to explore my own professional dreams? I was there to second Ted in his endeavors. He made the money so he got to choose.
And choose, he did!
Ted chose to have me go a few steps further just for him. It was me who he had juggling his excruciatingly demands for deviant sexual excursions at weekends and he monopolized my linguistic abilities for his company during the week as well, interpreting his legal jargon for his foreign clients and funneling their foreign expectations back to him and his staff.
We spoke on a couple of occasions with his company accountant about employing me with a proper contract. She’d shrug her shoulders and tell me that it would be a positive point to pay into the health and retirement systems… just in case…
“But,” Ted would interrupt, “we’d be paying additional social and income taxes that we could avoid if she’d just continue under the table! I’m taking care of her. This is about us. Why ever would she need money of her own?”
So my contract was shelved regularly and my work (all of it) relegated to nothingness by Ted, his associates, our friends and the French administration… which is how I become an official femme au foyer*, considered real work by no one at all.
The labor of stay at home partners is not calculated into the GDP nor is it considered a contribution toward the web of French social services. It’s nothing worth paying for. It’s barely worth acknowledging. It’s nothing to brag about or to fight for at all.
Except, what would Ted have done without me all those years? And now that he was gone, what could I do without him?
When Ted’d stormed out of our life, taking everything we’d built together, he insisted it was all his. He said he’d paid for it all with his money and his work and his time… And the judge agreed. I’d apparently just been his poor loser of a wife who could have done anything but hadn’t. I was the leech who’d married him for his money all along. I was just a femme entretenue*, living greedily on her husband’s coattails. Oisif*, Ted called me in divorce. That much seemed evident to everyone, although I’d never imagined handling the entire bulk of our inner orb constituted free-loading. How could it?
But the gender of our capital was suddenly being made crystal clear. It was all his.
I was brushed aside, bashed, belittled and denigrated… by a judge who declared that I had diplomas and could easily get back into the workforce even after a multi year hiatus; by that very job market, which proclaimed I lacked real, current, paid experience; and by the French administration as well, which refused to give me unemployment status because M.O.M. has historically never been considered a real job, while Ted was denying that I’d ever even worked at his company at all. So without officially paying into the system, there would be no financial assistance during my transition from married to single at all.
Moving forward therefore with precision and poise, in the disarray and the dust of Ted’s departure was, as such, not only complicated, but painful. When I started writing my new resumé to send to potential, new employers… I didn’t know where to begin. What had I really been doing all those years? My life didn’t seem to fit into any of the proper boxes. How could I explain what I’d accomplished or who I’d really become in only a jumble of black characters on a single sheet of white paper? My studies, the ancient jobs, my tiny one woman business, the gaps, the gaps, those gaping gaps in my professional chronology.… All that unacknowledged and unseen work I’d been doing all those years… had apparently been for Ted’s sole profit!
So instead of trying to avoid them, I tried to face them and embrace them. I decided to use the “gaps” to my advantage to explain and even to promote my abilities and expertise.
M.O.M. (Manager/Organizer/Motivator) I proudly wrote on my resumé with a wide range of action words related to real, paid business skills in the real world. I explained exactly what I’d done on a daily basis and how it had enhanced and enriched my family. I spelled it out in letters and in numbers. I made a clear case. I told the truth.
But when I sent it out, the reaction was tepid to say the least. My new curriculum vitae basically got me no where at all.
Some female friends chuckled knowingly. Men generally scoffed incomprehensibly. And then there were the women who were more than surprisingly hostile. Rather than a sisterly nod of utter comprehension, several women I knew disdained me… not for declaring that I was a M.O.M., but for somehow suggesting that they were not. Why should I get recognition for a job they did too? Why would I get to claim skills or benefits or experience gleaned from a job they themselves performed — on their off time, alone, unseen and for free? Wasn’t M.O.M. an integral part of a woman’s gendered-being in this world? Who was I trying to school? Who was I trying to cheat? Who did I even think I was?
This flesh and blood experience was the honed work of thousands of years of patriarchy!
Growing up, my single mom had had jobs. She worked her ass off in a masculinized world for lower pay with glass ceilings, ogling eyes and stray hands, even when she had her own company. For which I saw a concrete lack of financial benefit for our family, since women at that time worked double for .60 to the $1/hour of a man’s paid work. My mom had two full time activities to juggle, was unable to be truly present to both at the same time, while being held down and back by the necessities of the other, which made each of them less rewarding for her and more difficult for me too.
I therefore grew up, in reaction certainly, with the brilliant, if naive, idea that an M.O.M. should be a real partner. A stay at home director. A chef. A mechanic. A magician… a modern twist on Silvia Federici’s Wages for Housework movement of the early 1970’s. I believe that a stay-at home partner’s caregiving is absolutely equal to a paid-laborer’s breadwinning.
It had never occurred to me however until Ted left, that society saw things quite differently, even some of the very women repressed by those same man-made rules.
The very meaning of work, how work is esteemed and who gets the credit has always been defined by the patriarchy. So keeping women chained down with free labor makes the market value of our work worth zero — in marriage and especially in divorce.
But the Wages for Housework movement illustrates how every man’s paid labor depends on women’s non-paid labor. The fact that men can even contribute to capital or own property, have a career and a family… is because women are holding down the fort. Masculinized society conveniently ignores that women are the real pillars, that apart from the actual production of future laborers, wageless-in-home work is far more than cleaning. Stay-at-home partners are servicing the wage earner physically, emotionally and sexually, supporting his paid work and the whole capitalist system… day after day after day.
So when anyone questions whether paying for our usually unpaid labor would be liberating or oppressive, I say keeping men motivated to work for capital for free while married and for peanuts in divorce is an equally dangerous big picture.
Women must be recognized and remunerated for the M.O.M.ming we do daily.
Translations from French to English:
femme au foyer *— a housewife, homemaker…
femme entretenue *— a kept woman, a trophy wife…
Oisif *— idle, lazy…
