Lavandina, home office and constant dissatisfaction: swings of demands and guilt

05/05/2020 - 9:59

• Clarín.com
• Between women
• Home and Family

The "obsession" with cleanliness that invaded all of us due to the context we have to live in generates a clash of "worlds"; It confronts us with the difficulty of having "everything", that feeling of always having the wheel go, that the balls we juggle on a daily basis never fall. The vocation, work and dreams of "thinking big" in the public sphere are placed in the same place as housework; the domestic world and the world of work "fight" to get more of our time ... In a day that "only" has 24 hours. And in the middle are the women, who did not manage to feel satisfied with our performance in either of the two areas. While this is not new to us, thisConstant encounter with home constantly confronts us and brings us face to face with the situation.

Antonella D'Alessio , founder and coordinator of the Network of Feminist Psychologists , goes back to the dawn of modernity and the sexual division of labor to give context to what is happening today - in the middle of a coronavirus pandemic -: "Men started to circulate and occupy the public sphere, the space of wages and paid work, politics and the economy, everything that throughout these centuries was valued more. On the contrary, the private sphere was devalued and made invisible, in Regarding the importance it has for the maintenance of the public sphere (capitalism relies on the unpaid labor force of women, who for a long time have collaborated in maintaining the reproduction of the workforce in households, while the workforce -incarnated in the body of men- was exercised in factories) ".

Antonella points out to Entremujeres Clarín that this is how the male and female genres were built, one as the place of success, ideas, logic and reason and the other, as that of feelings (hence the famous and repeated phrase "that which They call love is unpaid work ", which illuminates the problems on this issue). He further explains that this naturalization included the "idea that women would achieve happiness, fulfillment and happiness because their instincts, personality and gender identity indicate that their role in this land is to be a mother-in-law (term by Marcela Largarde and the rivers)".

In this journey, and for these constructions, guilt takes a sadly central place: "Thanks to it we do things that we never thought we were going to be able to do, for example, forget what we wanted and what we wanted, and it drags us and force to do other things, "says the psychologist. Along these lines, this reconciliation of worlds confronts women with a constant feeling of "not being able to stop", of being constantly available, physically and mentally. "If today we cannot identify ourselves in that role of happy woman being mother and wife, it is very likely that we will feel guilt, unless we have been able to disarm those plots and understand that we are not made to give birth and raise, serve and smile, relegate ourselves in the name of a husband's success, which we must 'get'. "

The private sphere was devalued and made invisible, in terms of its importance for the maintenance of the public sphere. Photo: Shutterstock.

"The private sphere was constituted as a naturally suitable sphere for women, since there was something in our biology, personality or gender identity as women that would indicate that we are the most suitable for all those tasks: it is not just a matter of arbitrary division Our uterus plays a major role: we can get pregnant, so we can give birth, we can raise ... We can take care of. A social function - motherhood - has become naturalized, to the point that even today there is thought to be a question instinct ('natural maternal') that men do not have, and it carries a very dangerous edge, because if we are the 'naturally' chosen, men are left in a dangerous or inept place to do these tasks. It is time to disarm this woven because it is necessary to think from another place the private, the public and who is in charge of these questions ".

And it closes: "It is necessary to destroy gender stereotypes so that they are not those that impede our freedom of choice and decision, but also to be able to open ourselves to understand that nothing is really 'female' or 'male' and that these lines are better if we delete them. "