women's work

OR...one of my feminist awakenings.

Not THE feminist awakening, 'cause from the time I was a little girl, I was deeply aware of societal unfairness. I think I may have mentioned it before, but I used to watch Bewitched, one of my favorite shows, when I was six and seven and eight and be absolutely outraged at Darrin bossing Sam around and forbidding her to use magic. I didn't understand why she didn't just zap him. I didn't understand voluntarily ceding power in those days, ahem, but I knew a douchebag when I saw one. Not that I knew that extremely useful term then, of course. So, yeah, I was attuned to unfairness even then, but honestly? I didn't see much of that unfairness in my everyday life as a kid or teenager.

My dad worked, my mom worked. My dad didn't do half the housework, but he helped, and my mom definitely controlled the finances. I'm sure my mother felt like she did way more than her share, but then, my mother was a bitter, bitter woman, and brought a lot of it on herself with her tendencies to martyrdom and insane perfectionism about certain things. (White-trash Martha Stewart, y'all, remember?)

In high school, well, it was the 70s, and I gotta say, our teachers were down with "you're smart girls and you're gonna do stuff." My (male) geometry teacher loved my very meticulously drawn diagrams that accompanied my proofs and several times over the course of the year tried to convince me to go into drafting, 'cause the GE always needed draftsmen and with affirmative action, they HAD to hire women. Um, career advice I'm glad I didn't take, considering what happened to the GE locally in particular and manufacturing in this country generally, but you can't say our teachers weren't absolutely willing to direct us towards male-dominated fields. Similarly, one of the Benevolent L's teachers talked up going into the computer/high tech fields to her, with no compunctions about "you're a girl, that's not a girl thing." Of course, the Benevolent L eventually, through roundabout ways, became a tech writer, which is why she is unemployed as we speak, sigh. So, yeah, we may have been given somewhat shitty career advice, but it wasn't sexist, yo.

And in the outside world, it was also the 70s. All the women's magazines my mom read when I was a kid were full of articles about how your husband should be helping around the house and how you deserved orgasms. The women's magazines I was reading by the time I was a teenager (late 70s Glamour ftw) were full not just of pretty clothes and horrible dieting advice that contributed to my fucked up relationship with my body, but also articles that assumed that their young women readers were going to have apartments and careers and would need to learn to manage their finances and advocate for their own healthcare and fix up and decorate their little studios on the cheap. They were going to take care of themselves! and have adventures! Reproductive freedom was in the air. Birth control was easy to come by, even if you were a teenager; abortion was legal and no one was picketing clinics and harassing patients yet. The ERA may not have passed, but Title IX did, and that meant the girls' locker room got a Nautilus machine, because the football players had one in theirs.

What I'm saying is, I had a general awareness of, and support for, feminism, but by the time I graduated high school, I was pretty sure the battle had been won.

Then I got the job in the nursing home. For three years, during my little college hiatus, and then when I went back to school, I was what would now be called a CNA. Except no one was certifying us in those days. You learned on the job and hopefully didn't kill anybody. It was physically exhausting, sometimes emotionally rewarding, and frequently disgusting work. As I like to say, you really haven't lived till you've cleaned up a 90-something year old woman with dementia who has managed to paint herself and most of her whole half of the room with her own shit while your back was turned. You lose your squeamishness, you do. (You also learn things about being elderly that no one tells you. For example, very old people lose a lot of their body hair, often including their pubes. Did you know that? Ladies, hang in there. By the time you're 85, you probably won't need to spring for Brazilians anymore. Oh, I crack myself up.) And this job? It paid minimum wage. Which I do believe was a little over three bucks an hour. It was, as I said, unskilled labor.

Sometime during my first year doing this, I found out that the janitors whose job was mainly to wash and buff the floors and take out the trash made considerably more money than we did. Like 50 cents an hour more. Their job was also unskilled labor, arguably less physically demanding, and certainly less disgusting. Why did they make a higher hourly wage than we did? Well, obviously, it was because they were all guys and we, the aides, were all women. I cannot tell you how incensed I was when I figured this out, and how much further incensed I was when none of my co-workers could be convinced to be angry about it with me. "We take care of people, they take care of floors," I'd argue. "Which is more important?" But no one gave a fuck that our work was devalued just because it was women's work. I couldn't believe it.

And that, my friends, was my real feminist awakening.

xoxo

Addendum: Not that I learned anything from this experience, of course! I went into a female-dominated profession and guaranteed I would pretty much make shit for money.

Addendum 2: I would go into what prompted this whole post, but does it really matter? Do you really need to know?