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Why is so much housework or “care work” left to women?
Perhaps it's because of the West German socialization of many women, believes Mirna Funk, "where mom worked as a housewife in the kitchen and dad brought home the fat money."
Photo: flashfilm / Getty Images
For decades, the feminist debates in this country have been led by West German socialized women or men.
The result: a quasi-intolerable privileged feminism.
He claims that children and work are not compatible.
That women could only work part-time or would automatically have to take on the role of housewife.
This does not reflect the fact that arguments are being made here from a position of prosperity, in which a salary can obviously be dispensed with, nor that a third of this country is watching the debate completely irritated because they have lived with compatibility for at least three generations.
What the protagonists of privileged feminism do not realize is that their entire line of argument is based around the man as a reference.
This feminism I speak of constantly points out that women are nothing more than beings created by patriarchy.
If they are domestic it is to please men and if they are ambitious then they have merely internalized manhood.
Many people do not imagine the woman as an autonomous subject with her own characteristics, which – and now things are getting wild – can possibly oscillate between domestic and ambitious (as is also the case with men).
The binary idea of the active man and the passive woman now seems to be the status quo.
Especially with the progressives.
This primarily explains the low level of employment among women in this country.
A quarter of women don't work at all.
Of those who have a job at all, half do it part-time.
This results in all the problems (pay gap, pension gap, orgasm gap) that are discussed at length in almost all media.
And my answer, which has been bringing me shitstorms ranging from ridiculous to life-threatening for almost ten years now, is:
Without financial independence there is no emancipation.
No resolution of pay gaps, pension gaps and orgasm gaps!
This also applies to heterosexual and homosexual relationships.
The fact that I dare to refer to the origin of all these gaps is partly due to my East German socialization.
Born in East Berlin in 1981.
Raised among working grandmothers and working mothers.
In 1989 it was a total of 91 percent.
The result of this blatant full-time employment was, among other things, a higher divorce rate.
Because if you can go, you go.
Very easily.
It was a bit different for West German women.
In 1989, employment was 51 percent.
However, the majority of these 51 percent worked part-time.
As a child of a refugee from the Republic, nothing is further from my mind than idealizing the GDR.
But tolerance of ambiguity has never done anyone any harm, and that also includes being able to endure the fact that a country that one otherwise rejects politically
Abortions had been legalized since 1972, childcare had been expanded across the board and women were financially independent of their husbands.
The latter aspect in particular has led to a radical east-west divide to this day: the gender pension gap in western Germany is twice as high as in eastern Germany.
To this day, women in eastern Germany earn an average of just six percent less than their male colleagues.
Not just in one East German federal state, but on average in all federal states.
Not just in one industry, but in the overall median.
And Eastern women orgasm more often than Western women.
more on the subject
Women on the labor market: Dad earns the money, Mom takes care of itA column by Sabine Rennefanz
We can now continue to have feminist debates about all these things, but then it must also be made clear that these discussions are not pan-German, but West German debates.
The fact that feminists like Margarete Stokowski or Miryam Schellbach accuse me, as an East German woman – who doesn’t want to take part in the unanimous feminism banter – of not considering “intersectionality” or structural disadvantage here, almost borders on satire, if not would actually be West German ignorance.
The intersectionality joker is only played when it serves to maintain one's own self-contained worldview.
Because my biographical parameters - like my Jewish and East German origins - are simply completely ignored,
because of course they cause the closed worldview to shake.
I'd much rather have the alleged manslaughter argument "care work" thrown at me, which means taking care of one's own child, the household and the care of older family members.
Whereupon I like to cite the GDR – or France or Israel or the Scandinavian countries.
In other words, countries where women sometimes even have three children on average and still work full-time.
Hardly any of the many feminists who complain that so much »care work« is left to women would like to reflect on their own socialization, in which mom worked as a housewife in the kitchen and dad took the fat money home brought.
It is deliberately ignored that the conservative breadwinner model was not only so popular because childcare was not possible, but because it served as a distinguishing feature: »Well, my wife, she doesn't have to be out there , you know, in this tough, evil world, bah, work.
my penis is so big
Even if it is always claimed that the debates about the fair division of care work between men and women are about a feminism that thinks about the weaker ones in society, I think that it is about a privilege feminism.
One where you still have the choice not to have to go to work as a woman.
This choice is guaranteed by the man and his money, even if in the same circles over the
bad
Capitalism can only be sniffed at.
What is left out are those who cannot afford not to work.
Like me for example.
Or those who feel so much worse than me: the woman at the cash register with her partner, the window cleaner.
The two of them manage somehow with childcare, not because they have more options, but precisely because they don't have the opportunity to say "can't do it".
Nevertheless, a not to be underestimated part of the women in this country continues to say: We have all this care work here and Schatzi leaves me alone with it and that's why I can't go to work, although I actually want to.
And I'm now wondering whether these men, who didn't take part in everyday life, were previously the greatest superdudes and then mutated into nasty brutes, or whether women might not have marched in with their eyes wide open in relationships with men because the desire for care socialized in West Germany kicked in so hard ?
So instead of continuing to complain about these incompetent men and having to reinterpret the children as work so that the men understand that family life is exhausting, I would like to see more working and financially independent women who refuse to support these men in solidarity and with that large »education project man« could possibly lead to success.
For me that is emancipation.
