Why I’m Saying Yes to (Some) Unpaid Labor

Once upon a time, a mom from Nebraska with a Ph.D. in anthropology and three kids, spoke about getting ready in the morning. Here is what she said: 

“I wash the [breakfast] dishes, rush the older children off to school, dash out in[to] the yard to cultivate the chrysanthemums, run back in[side] to make a phone call about a committee meeting, help the youngest child build a blockhouse, spend 15 minutes skimming the newspapers so I can be well-informed, then scamper down to the washing machines, where my thrice-weekly laundry includes enough clothes to keep a primitive village going for an entire year…By noon I’m ready for a padded cell [...] yet I look upon myself as one of the more relaxed housewives in the neighborhood.” 

Sound familiar?

Now, what if I told you that the woman in question was speaking more than 60 years ago to Betty Friedan, who, at the time, was writing her seminal book, The Feminine Mystique. 

What this mother said could easily pass as a desperate diatribe uttered today by a frazzled mom, exhausted from the relentless Tetris game of everyday life, and the perennially-under-appreciated work of ensuring her household doesn’t cataclysmically implode. 

Over the past hundred years, global temperatures have risen, empires have fallen, flared jeans have come into, and gone out of, and then come back into fashion, but one thing hasn’t changed: The burden of day-to-day unpaid labor still falls mostly on the shoulders of women. That is as true in 2024 as it ever was, even as more women than ever outearn men in the paid labor market.

Sure, in an ideal world it would take just one well-coordinated unpaid labor strike to level the gender playing field. But in my world? Here? Now? Today? Not ideal.

It’s no wonder that a frustration-fuelled movement (spearheaded by people like Eve Rodsky) has, in recent years, gathered pace calling on society to acknowledge the price of unpaid labor and its painful, unequal distribution.

Taking a stand against this entrenched imbalance has rightly been lauded as a brave, principled and necessary act of feminism—but it’s also not that easy. Sure, in an ideal world it would take just one well-coordinated unpaid labor strike—one synchronized act of idle resistance—to level the gender playing field. Iceland did it, after all. But in my world? Here? Now? Today? Not ideal. And the cost of saying no? Well, it’s complicated.

Emotional Toil

Unpaid labor comes in all shapes and sizes, not to mention in all guises. 

Beyond the obvious like childcare and housework, there is cognitive labor: decisions upon decisions about everything from “what’s for dinner?” to “does this toothpaste contain forever chemicals?” and “what time do we have to leave for school?” These might sound like small decisions—indeed they are—but they add up. The cognitive load can be crippling, straining everything from marriages to friendships and heart health to sleep.

I asked my friend Maude, a London-based mother of three, who works a full-time job in finance, to sum up some of the unpaid labor she does every week. Much of it is physical but a huge amount is emotional, she said. 

“Closet-sorting, holiday-packing, playdate-booking, uniform-ordering, responding to school calls, tracking passport expiry dates and immunization schedules, tracking birthday parties, coordinating with grandparents and general household logistics: who’s where when,” she said, breathlessly. 

And there’s more: