Why do we insist on pretending women don't work?

Sexists make up a world that doesn't exist, then use it to justify sexism in the world that does.

When I was pregnant with my oldest daughter, a curious thing began to happen: people started acting as if my paid job was a small, part-time hobby, or that it didn’t exist at all.

They’d talk about me primarily as a supporter of my husband’s career. People would send me, a literally (thousands of times) published writer, advice on “getting published.” At gatherings, folks would ask my husband about his job, but never me. Or they’d make remarks about how busy I must be with the kids. I’d get lots of patronizing gestures along the lines of, “How cute!” when I told people I’m a writer.

My husband and I eventually turned it into a game: How many domestic tasks will a new acquaintance discuss with me before asking about my job? How many questions will an unfamiliar man ask my husband about himself and his work before acknowledging me in any way?

At first, I thought it was because lots of people call themselves writers as a sort of identity rather than an expression of their career. Then, I thought it might be because I was pregnant, and people assumed I’d be quitting my job to stay home. Like most women, I spent a lot of time blaming myself for harmful social norms: Maybe I’m bad at talking about work; maybe people think I’m too stupid to be a writer; maybe I’m boring and uninteresting and that’s why no one asks me about my work.

But I’ve seen the same thing happen to my friends, too. My buddy Mary Catherine Starr of Momlife Comics constantly fields angry comments from men telling her that she shouldn’t whine about unequal distribution of labor, because she gets to be a stay-at-home mother while her husband works. The problem is that they are leaving these comments on her literal, actual job—the blog and comic strip.

I’ve watched literally everything women do dismissed as labor. Trips to the grocery store are fun self-care! That six-figure business she runs is just a hobby; he has the real job! We’re told that we choose to work, and being a working mother is treated as some sort of value or philosophy rather than a necessary choice the overwhelming majority of women make, whether they want to or not.

Patriarchy depends on framing everything women do—paid or unpaid, no matter how valuable—as leisure.

This allows us to easily dismiss and devalue it. When we work outside the home, it’s because we’re bad moms who want to get away from our children—not because we need to earn money, not because we need to support a family, definitely not because we are the primary provider, and most assuredly not because our work is important. And if we are family caregivers instead of working for pay, then we are spoiled, entitled princesses who create busywork for ourselves then endlessly bitch at our poor, long-suffering husbands for not participating.

Poor men.

This belief in women as frivolous and flighty, as never really capable of hard work no matter what they do, has become the cornerstone of manosphere ideology, too. There, the phrase “provider and protector” has practically become a nervous tic. To misogynist men, having any job at all renders one a provider and protector, but a woman’s job is a sign of her “masculine energy,” and therefore evidence that she doesn’t deserve decent treatment.

Somehow, when men work for pay, it becomes an excuse for just about everything:

• He’s bad at sex: Well, he’s a provider and protector so you need to submit.

• He’s a shitty father: That’s not his job. He’s a provider and protector (apparently with no obligation to protect the kids from his abuse).

• He’s disgusting, doesn’t clean the house, and can’t wipe his own ass: But he’s a protector and provider!

• He’s verbally abusive: He’s just in his masculine energy. Men are aggressive. That aggression protects you (but not from him, I guess).

Seventy-five percent of mothers work—just 10% fewer than the 85% of fathers who do. This notion of women as unworking, of mothers as spoiled, and of household labor inequality springing from the fact that men are primary breadwinners is nothing more than a misogynist fantasy.

Of course, even when women don’t work for pay, they still work. This work, too, is devalued—treated as requiring no intellect, no experience, no skill. And that’s exactly the point: to treat everything women do as valueless, so we can continue to extract more and more from them.

Pitting working mothers against non-working mothers is, as always, a distraction from the real issue: Men devaluing whatever labor women do, wherever they do it. No wonder we feel like no matter what we do, it’s wrong. Because in a patriarchal society, it is.

Remember that next time you hear someone frame women’s work as leisure, and men’s work as inherently important.