Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism

fact, not only is culture not a trump card in the progressive ideological battle, the isolation of women in the home and the traumatising of the domestic sphere are not unique to Sikh culture, or to ‘Asian’ culture, or to any culture not immediately comprehensible to middle-class white people. On the contrary, they are common throughout Western society, and have been a central narrative fact of the last 350 years of Western history.
     
    Only saints react to imprisonment and abuse without retaliation, and women are not saints. The stereotype of the angel in the home was always a lie: for generations, and particularly since the postwar enforced domesticity of the 1950s, women have reacted to their domestic cages with a rage and resentment that has been at once effortlessly political and unguessably damaging. Given power in the domestic sphere and only there, limited, anxious matriarchies have developed across Western societies, and everyone understands what it means to have an Italian Mother, a Greek Mother, a Jewish Mother, or any other racist variation on the harridan hypothesis. The truth, however, is that the fury of female emotional control in the post-industrial home is the fury of the worker alienated from the means of production and reproduction, a fury deliberately weighted against the cruelty of male political and economic dominance in public society. Thus it is that 21st-century capitalism maintains a structure of gendered labour in which everyone, male or female, is to some extent powerless and to some extent miserable.
     
    It is this dichotomy of dysfunction which is truly challenged by gay and single-parent families. When conservative pundits tell us that lone and homosexual parents represent a threat to ‘family values’, they are articulating this basic fear – that the structures of mutual repression will be broken by people brave enough to create and live in homes which challenge the culture and economics of that system.
     
    I am the child and grandchild of housewives who hated housework. My grandmother, who as I write this chapter is in the latter stages of terminal cancer, did her duty as an immigrant Catholic homemaker, raising six children in a tiny council house in Bristol. A bright and beautiful woman who loved learning, Marta Penny ought to have gone to university, but her infant ambition was quickly crushed by the commandment to wield socio-economic power only and forever in the fantasy Catholic home. The frustrations of received femininity have defined my grandmother: her entire life has been undercut by misery, resentment and passive-aggression, instilled into her from her childhood in Malta, where her own mother made her scrub the floors daily with an old toothbrush to get her ‘used’ to drudgery.
     
    Her youngest daughter, my mother, is a brilliant defence lawyer who put her career on hold to take care of my sisters and myself, having given up on getting my father to do his share. Raised with the belief that women deserved to be educated and to earn money, she was shocked to find herself facing the same frustrations that plagued her mother, frustrations which were lessened only after her divorce.
     
Beyond the gilded cage
    In one way or another, the domestic deal makes cowards of us all. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique lit the fuse which blew the cage door open in the 1960s and 1970s, but we have failed, like tame animals, to step very far across the threshold of that cage. Our labour battles are tentative, and we are slow to apprehend our own bargaining power.
     
    I asked hundreds of women, married and single, living with their partners and living with housemates, in Europe and North America and Australia, about how they organised their domestic labour and whether their partners shared the load. Hundreds of times over, the answer was almost identical: “He just can’t cope with the dishes”; “He doesn’t understand how to sort laundry no matter how many times I explain it”; “He says he can’t do it, which is his way of saying that he won’t do it”. Most of all: “He says he can’t see the dirt I see”. One woman cried as she told me how she and her disabled mother had no choice but to cook, clean and care for a recalcitrant alcoholic father and two brothers, on top of being a single mother and student herself. “It actually is a war,” she said.
     
    Anyone who has ever been seven years old knows when “can’t” really means “won’t”.