“He who pays the piper calls the tune” is a phrase I’d hear a lot growing up. Meaning, the person who earns the money gets to decide how it is spent. In practice, this always meant “the man”.
Women, if they earned money at all, earned less than men. Not only that, but these lesser earnings did not seem to buy them even a minor amount of tune-calling power. Men’s money was different to women’s money. Men provided for their families; women were generously “allowed” to earn something to spend on “extras”. Men’s paid work was a duty, selflessly performed; women’s, an indulgence that distracted them from their actual purpose in life. As for unpaid work — well, it appeared there was no such thing.
I’ve no doubt this shaped my early feminist aspirations, or at least aspirations I thought of as feminist. I didn’t want to be a high-earning, glass-ceiling smashing CEO (just as well, really). I did, however, want to be the one calling the tune in my immediate environment. This was less a matter of absolute wealth, than wealth in relation to the men around me. The disparity between male and female incomes seemed to make everything “theirs”. “Their” money paid for where you lived, the food you ate, the clothes you wore, the places you visited. Even worse, it seemed to embed the idea that men deserved the final say on things that were not strictly paid for: who sat on where, who spoke when, whose version of the truth mattered more. Men made the sacrifices; dominance in the home — he’s tired, he’s had a long day — was the very least they were owed.
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Women earn less than men because they are doing all of the essential work that keeps humans alive
It might sound as though I’m thinking of the sixties, the decade that saw the publication of The Feminine Mystique, but I grew up in the eighties. These beliefs about men, women and money — that women do not really do as much as men, and that any division of labour that impoverishes women is actually proof of female inferiority and dependency — have lingered, and they are with us even now. This is demonstrated by Cordelia Fine in her new book Patriarchy Inc, which brilliantly tackles all the ways in which women’s lower earnings are still explained away, dismissed as choice, science or not even a problem. It’s also demonstrated, more directly and rather less impressively, by men such as Nigel Farage, who recently declared that “men are prepared to sacrifice family lives in order to pursue a career and be more successful in a way that fewer women are”.
It’s the word “sacrifice” that truly rankles. Or maybe it’s “family life”, and the sneaky way it merges together women spending years torn between caring for old and young, seeing their own career opportunities and retirement hopes vanish, with women taking the kids off to Disneyland Paris whilst poor old Daddy has his nose to the grindstone. According to Farage, women are so indulged we would “have more chance of reaching the top than the blokes” if only we were prepared to work as hard as them. Instead, we’re too embroiled in “family life” — picnics, bedtime stories, a cheery montage of “precious moments”, all paid for by men’s “sacrifice”.
There are other ways to frame a situation in which women earn less than men because they are doing all of the essential work that keeps humans alive and enables them to earn money outside of the home in the first place. As Fine writes, one historical consequence of “conceiving of wages as a price for labour performed in the workplace” has been the perception that “the wage was earned by the worker alone, not also the family who produced and supported his labour power”:
From this, it followed that it also belonged to him alone, with no obligatory disbursements to be made to his spouse. This, in turn, made his wife economically dependent. Because it was officially unwaged, work in the home became conceived of as “care” rather than “work”.
Despite years of feminists pointing out the injustice of this — that every single wage earner relies on someone to birth the babies, raise the young, care for the sick, clean the house, cook the food, etc. — this misconception persists. The wage earner freeloads off the carer, then expects her to thank him for it.
However familiar and long-standing this form of sexism is, it is not a form we should be willing to brush off. The way in which the sex-based pay gap affects our lives is not just in terms of whether a tiny minority of women have the opportunity to become very rich (though the gap is largest amongst the highest earners). It’s not even a question of which sex is likeliest to experience poverty in old age (although obviously it’s women) or who feels entitled to spend the most on themselves (it’s men, however much men’s earnings are seen as “supporting the family” whilst women’s are “empowerment perks”). The pay gap fuels male entitlement and leaves women and children more vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. It tells the world men are worth more because they contribute more, yet it can only do so by emptying the most important work of all of any status.
There is no easy solution to this. One of the slogans of the Wages for Housework movement — “they call it love, we call it unwaged work” — might seem a suitable riposte to Farage, but it suffers from feeling not quite true. Calling it “love” has indeed been an effective way of devaluing domestic and care work as work, only love remains a significant part of it. One of the difficulties of this conversation — and one of the reasons why characterising everything as “family life” is both effective and insidious — is that unpaid work takes many different forms. There is a tendency for those who are not engaged in it to focus on the hand-holding rather than the sleepless nights and the mess. If those engaged in care work are not “reaching the top”, it is hardly because they are sacrifice-averse.
Still, there is some good news. Given the care crisis we’re all currently facing, the brave, self-sacrificing earner might finally have an excuse to abandon all that selfless money-making and get some quality “family time”. It may be hard for men like Farage, attuned as they are to letting the women enjoy all the fun, but needs must. The women of the world insist. We’ve been hogging all the dirty toilets, toddler tantrums and eldercare for far too long, and it’s simply unfair for you long-suffering souls to have to, as Fine writes, “do less unpaid care and enjoy more income, wealth, job opportunities, social status and leisure”.
It’s time to lay down that burden. Go on, Nigel. Pick up a wet wipe and treat yourself. We women, ever the multi-taskers, can get on with calling the tune.
