Factory windows are always broken – Vachel Lindsay

The idea of work is set in an old mythology extolling it. Long before the rise of the Protestant work ethic, there is Jacob toiling for his father-in-law, patiently waiting twice seven years for Rachel. There is Hercules heroically cleaning out the Augean stables and accomplishing the other eleven labors set for him by the gods. Closer to our own times there is John Henry and his hammer, vying with the steam drill. And the Soviets had the miner, Alexei Stakhanov, who performed wonders of socialist labor, thus helping to create a non-Protestant work ethic.

In phrases such as “the nobility of toil” are we not in danger of confusing the toil with the toiler? Does the nobility of the toiler lie not in superhuman accomplishments, but rather in the courage and forbearance with which heavy burdens are born? In his essay “The myth of Sisyphus” did Camus mean to extol the condemned hero's futile and senseless rolling of the rock up the mountain, or did he extol the human ability to go on in the face of adversity? Camus's answer is a little mysterious but he does conclude that “… Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks” (Camus 1942/1955, p. 91).

Women do not figure in this mythology, probably because “woman's work” was not perceived as work. But there was the grass widow Penelope, forever weaving and unweaving the shroud; there was the wartime worker Rosie the riveter, rising to the emergency; and there is the great chef in exile, Babette of Babette's Feast.