The value and visibility of women's work

Basic concepts like work, history, household, migration and authority can look quite different through the lens of gender. Women's daily productive and reproductive work regularly cuts across analytical categories, and they experience work in the household, gift, informal, and formal economies on much the same footing. Furthermore, since women birth, nurse and raise children, even if they work in the formal sector many hours a day, the household and its related gift and informal economies are often an essential part of women's lived workdays. It is true that in the field of labour history, ‘…because of the differing perceptions of what constitutes work, women's active participation in the economy tends to remain undercounted.’ Although, particularly since the 1970s, the naming and measuring of previously ignored arenas of productive and reproductive labour has proceeded apace, scholars still struggle to understand and value work, but gender has emerged as one of the more productive and challenging lenses into such inquiry. Gender is no longer simply a residual category.

Although scholars still debate what to call it and how exactly to define it, the informal sector is now broadly recognized as important, ubiquitous, gendered and deeply connected across space and within authority hierarchies and networks. Social and labour historians realize that ‘the boundaries between formal and informal subsistence strategies are especially blurred for women, even those employed, at one point or another, in the formal sector,’ and moreover, ‘the everyday reality [for women] has tended to consist of a series of exhausting duties – both those involved in earning a living and those that relate to caring for family and children.’ Caroline Gatrell argues that idealized, essentialist narratives of the ‘good mother’ and ‘natural womanhood’, combine to obfuscate the real work women do to maintain a pregnancy, deliver a healthy infant, and then nurse and care for that child. Looking after children is hard and important work. When women stay home because they or their children are too sick, the sources we are trained to read do not treat that work as an investment in the household economy, but rather as absenteeism from formal sector work. The whole concept of absenteeism needs to be fundamentally rethought.