What if Women Went on Strike?
By: Stark Raving
Tags: Feminism, Women, Relationships, Sexism, Activism

What if Women Went on Strike?

My levels of cleanliness leave a lot to be desired — in some of my smaller flats, I have lived for days with piles of dirty laundry on top of piles of dirty dishes. I sometimes stumble across moldy Tupperware in bags not used for months. I remain convinced that the only reason to do the washing-up is when there is nothing clean left, and the thing you need is lost at the very bottom of the sink.

Still, each time I found myself living with boyfriends, I ended up being the one that cleaned — not because they were expressly unwilling to do it, but because I broke first. I was the first to no longer be able to bear the squalor — which is saying a lot.

Last year, I lived with two male flatmates and was amazed at how instinctively they seemed to wait for me to do the housework. We didn’t see each other often, all of us were busy. I would only return to the flat every few days since I had basically moved in with my then-boyfriend.

Each time I returned, I found the sink towering with dishes, the bin full, the bathroom flooded. I felt like I was engaged in a staring war, all of us waiting out the others to see who would cave.

Women give in first.

I caved first.

As women will, generally, when living with men. Because women are taught from an early age to value their home environment and to tend to it, as it will reflect on how they themselves are perceived. A neat, nice home is presented as something essential both for a girl’s wellbeing, and their reputation.

When I was at boarding school, the boys generally kept their rooms plain, didn’t bother putting up posters or photos. In the girls’ dorms, there was a flurry of activity at the beginning of each year as we decorated our little cubicles, expressing our personalities through interior design. It was a way of marking our territory and feeling at home, and also of making a show to our roomies about who we were, via our domestic space.

But men aren’t taught to invest the domestic space in the same way women are.

All of this is why women refusing to be clean, to be neat, is a political act. As French feminist author, Titiou Lecoq writes,

“The fight for women’s liberation happens at home, in front of the laundry basket.”

“I’ll do it, you won’t do it right.”

I sometimes discuss with my friends how our parents divide the domestic labour — feeling, as all kids do, that we have a lot to teach our parents. Something that comes up a lot is how our mothers tend to dismiss our father’s offers of “help” saying that they won’t complete a task well enough, don’t know where things go, or that they will have to redo it anyway. As though they had been born with an ingrained knowledge the men could not obtain through practice. This is what happens when the mental charge of housework is internalised.

Men are also at fault — they don’t make the effort to improve the way they do tasks, on their own time, maybe, or to insist that they are not “helping”, but performing a task which is as much their’s as their female partner’s to perform. I’ve actually heard a male friend tell his girlfriend, in a whiney voice, “but you’re just so good at laundry!” as an excuse not to do it. As though she had been born with an inbuilt knowledge of how to read the back of a fabric softener bottle.

Since women feel like they need to hold up high standards at all times, they don’t want someone to complete the task in a substandard way. The fact is, women are still judged, and judge each other, on domestic perfection.

“Woman has become a boss who gives herself orders to carry out. And she is a cruel boss. Women’s alienation continues, in many subtle and difused forms, and women have become their own oppressor. How do we get free from our own self?” — Titiou Lecoq

With the rise of Pinterest, and new injunctions for healthy, organic eating, and having an all-natural, chemical-free, environmentally friendly home, the pressure on women to be domestic goddesses is making a comeback.

Hiring help is not the answer.

A solution that many upper-middle-class couples are turning towards now, as a way of avoiding divorce without questioning gender norms, is hiring a cleaner to do the housework. From a feminist perspective, this solves nothing. Outsourcing oppression to low-paid, working-class women, who are increasingly being employed by agencies with precarious contracts and bad working conditions, is the opposite of feminist solidarity. And who will clean her home, once she gets back from work? What will she do to fight against the unfair division of labour?

An ode to grime.

The solution is squalor. For women to do less, care less, about whether their home gleams. If women do need a clean space to carry out other activities, they should mark out an area which is their own, which other family members should not use. That part, is worth keeping clean. Tidying up after themselves, for their own benefit. The rest of the house can be left to decay.

Women need to start telling themselves that a dirty house is an equal house, while a clean house is the sign of a wasted life, lived doing unacknowledged, unpaid labour for people who don’t care.

As Reni-Eddo Lodge wrote in The Telegraph:

“I’m urging you to stop. Stop giving. Let the dishes accumulate. Stop sacrificing your time. Stop waking up that little bit earlier to do the laundry. Down your tools. Walk out. Go to the pub. Go on strike. It is only through a collective withdrawal of labour that those who rely on us will realise how vital our work is.”

Like what you read? Sign up here for my free newsletter — feminist news and curated articles from across the globe, delivered to your inbox each week ❤