The reason why womens housework and particularly childcare should be compensated is exceedingly simple, and I Find it unfathomable when people don't understand it. This is the reason:
Children are not just some random luxury that certain people have "for fun".
Do some people get serious lifetime fulfillment out of having children? Yes.
Do some people turn into teenagers and realize that all they ever want to be on Earth is someone who raises children? Absolutely.
But none of that means that raising children should be unpaid labor, as it is currently is now. This is because, if people suddenly stopped raising children, or, if people stopped being able to raise children, we, as a society, would have a serious problem on our hands. We wouldn't have replacements for future tax dollars. We wouldn't have new cogs in the machine of our economies. And the truth here is that, like it or not, but ultimately the economy does not see the precious children as anything but future replacements for our economy.
As a result of this, people who are having children and raising them are, in fact, doing a very vital service for our economy.. In a certain sense, they're doing the most vital service of all. Without them, we would have no economy. And yet, when we look at the current set-up of things, we see that this is a section of life that, somehow, even in 2018, is still going entirely unnoticed and unpaid. The modern individual frequently finds the idea of paying a woman to raise her own children absolutely bewildering. Why should she be paid, they say, since this is what she wanted, and also what she herself says she adores doing, anyways? They may even find it offensive from the perspective of the child. They'll say something like "...but if my parent had been paid to raise me...wouldn't that mean I was just, like, a job for them? And how could i know they had really loved me? They were just raising me for money!"
Some, in fact, would even take this idea that women should be paid a wage to raise their children, and use it to exclaim that women will have tons of babies, so that they can "get rich" off having them. We already, for instance, see gigantic echoes of this, in the current welfare system we have at work, where many lower class single mothers, we are told (ususally stereotyped as blacks) are "milking the system of Uncle Sam to get rich off welfare money". The way the milking works, the conservatives tell us, is that the poor girls spit out 5 babies, and with each baby they have, they just get richer. Because they collect Uncle Sams welfare money and spend it on literally everything except what the 5 kids they have need. Usually we are underhandedly told that these women spend it on drugs, and that they don't care for their children.
There are a few reasons, of course, that this idea of anyone getting rich and being able to luxuriate on a welfare "wage" is pretty stupid and deeply flawed thinking. In the first place, there is the very basic design of what wage work even is. Wage work is not designed to help anyone get rich. It is designed to help people stay alive just long enough to come to work for the next round of wages. If wage work -- or welfare "wages" paid to single mommas -- was designed to get people rich, then you would see that all the menial jobs of our society were vacant very fast, because everyone would be able to escape the jobs within just one month, or one year etc, of working them. But we all know very well, unless we are lyign to ourselves, that escaping wage work is not that easy. One needs to be clever to figure out how to escape wage work, becuase it is a system, as i say, literally designed to make sure you only ever have enough to show up to work again, and nothing more. This is especially the case for someone who has children, whether 1 or 5 of them. For the most part, next to no one escapes wage work all that easily. The common person never will.
As a result of this simple fact, we are able to see that, even if we take a step beyond welfare, and we pay all women money to raise their children, it will not be a system that helps them get "rich". It will just be a system that helps women be able to have children and not slip into dangerous poverty as a result of it.
You see, the basic fact about having children in our current society, is that it seems we have arrived at a very curious and interesting pass. What's happening now is that many middle class women, who work careers, who graduate college, and who actually have a lot of money, are opting out of having children. The birth rate has been steadily declining since the 70s, mostly as a result of this exact thing. It is now, in fact, at the point where the birth rate has dipped below the replacement level.
At first, of course, keeping the standard argument in mind, this fact about the birth rate being so low and below replacement level, sounds absolutely confounding. After all, how could this possibly be the truth, when we are told, over and over, that all those "low class womens" are spitting out 500 babies a year, day after day, that they can't afford? Surely those people are able to help keep the birth rate steady. Look how many babies they have, right? We've all seen "them" wandering around at Wal-Mart or something, tons of babies in tow, all of them screaming and looking like future criminals...
This is not the truth, however. What is the truth is that, yes, those women often do have a lot of babies, that they cannot afford, and yes, they do keep us close to the replacement level, but even with their help, we are still not able to adequately replace the numbers of one generation for the next. This is actually a major problem, and the other major problem is this: Since so many of the women who are having children now are often the exact women who can't afford them, it's actually the case that many of the adults we are sending out as "the replacements" are malfunctioning. This fact about these children malfunctioning once they are adults is something that is frequently said by Republicans and conservatives . We have essentially been being told for 40 years now, for example, that the disintegration of the nuclear family, the divorce rate, and "single mothers" especially, are the cause of all the criminal issues our society experiences. This, of course, isn't necessarily wrong: the statistics do indeed show that an incredible nmber of criminals and felons are those who were raised in single mother households, with no father ever around.
The conservatives solution, however, is also not a very good one. Whats his solution? Well it is the same age old answer he always has: If only everything was again as it once was in 1945, when women didn't work outside of the home, and when divorce was illegal, everything would be great again, because then we would have no single mothers. You see, what the conservative basically does is he uses the wonderful manner in which our society has uplifted women since a decade like the 1940s, and he uses the legalization of divorce, to tell us that we have destroyed society.
Oddly enough, however, what the conservative never wants to do is express just how unusually expensive child bearing now is, in this modern age. He never, for example, seems to want to accept the fact that all those nice, educated middle class women with money don't want to have kids and help us with the sinking birth rate because... gues what? They know they wouldn't have any money anymore, if they did. He never wants to take a second to wonder just why the divorce rate is so high, or just wy so many mothers wind up single. Could it perhaps be connected to the fact that child raising is absurdly expensive? The men try to do it, but quickly realize they hardly can stay afloat, so they flee. As for the responsible people, as I say, many of them are just opting out of child raisin' altogether. Cause they are realizing beforehand, just how much of a struggle it is, under this current regime...
As a result, the responsibility of the replacements isb eing left up to people who are, in many ways, entirely unaware of just how expensive child bearing is, until its too late and they already have them, at which point they sit in disbelief at how dysfunctional and unfair this all is. Unfortunately for us, most of their kids are never given a chance to see what has happened to them: They instead go storming out into society, after being thrown into it at a young age, and probably rob us at knifepoint, and turn entire cities and towns into no-go danger zones. We then have to play a game of cat and mouse with them, paying cops money to chase them in circles all around teh city, lock them up so they won't kill us to get some food in their bellies, and then of course we pay incredibly exorbitant fees, to keep them locked up.
It's this part about how much we are paying to keep the prisoners locked in chains that is really the most interesting of all. Why? It is simple: Often, when the discussion about welfare comes up at the 'round table', the first card everyone wants to pull is how they are responsible hard workers, and they don't want to spend their tax dollars, on people who aren't. "I ain't helping to raise someone elses kids." is what they say. "They shouldn't have been such fools. They should have waited to have kids til they could afford them!"
The flaw in this argument, however, is that it's basically just sweeping the problem under the rug, until a later date. In other words, since we absolutely refuse to help raise the needy children in our society, we then just wind up paying for it all anyways, when we have to keep the insanely aggravated adult versions of them, locked up in prisons, for 40-50 years. We also pay for it in other ways beyond prison, too: After all, I would vey much liek to go take some walks around my city, but my city is one so particularly hard hit by crime , that a good three quarters of it has now been rendered insecure, especially for women. Keep in mind at this point that the USA has the highest incarceration rate out of any nation on Earth. We also have some of the longest prison sentences, too. No where on Earth is a citizen more likely to go to prison for an unusually long time, than in the USA. It's an incredibly dark and scary fact-- but the reason it happened is all because of this ridiculous idea. The Americans don't seem to be realizing that you're going to end up paying for all these children, whethe you like it or not. Its literally inevitable. They exist in the same socieyt as all the rest of us. They're our problem.
And all of this could be solved , if we just examined the womens issue, of them not being paid for work that is just as good and just as necessary, as all the other work in our society. Because having children isn't just some "fun thing" that people do for their own self fulfillment. Having children is not a hobby. It is not a pastime. Having children is a literal necessity for our society, and without the women raising them, we would have no society. We pay people for literally every other thing necessary in our culture, from cleaning up garbage to street sweeping to wiping down a table in a restauraunt. Why then should we not pay them to do the thing that is literally the starting point of it all?
You see, what I personally find so fascinating about this concept of women being compensated for this supreme duty of having children to keep the wheels turning, is that, at first glance, many people often take offense to it, as I wrote earlier, and they seem to think that, by involving wages in the raising of ones own child, we are demeaning it and making it "not sacred". It is almost as though people see bearing children as so spiritual and so holy that, to involve money with it, would make it disgusting and impure. It's like they see it as an art form, really, and they don't want to believe that the Creator Artists in question here -- i.e. the mommas -- should need money for this thing. Somewhere in the back of 'societys head', its like we all just think that women will endlessly keep creating these babies, with or without money, with or without means. Yet, as the plummeting birth rate shows, particularly with the middle and upper class women, we are seeing now that this isn't the case. The truth, again and again, must be stressed, that the artists have ceased to sing us their song. Women are opting out of childbirth because they know theres no money in it,and we are living in a society that depends only on money. Women are opting out of childbirth because they've been educated now, and gotten wise to the stacked deck of cards this society is playing with now. And it is for this reason, again, that it needs to be compensated, recognized, and appreciated. We show appreciation to men who sweep streets and who clean sewers, by paying them. We show appreciation and pay farmers who grow food, food which would grow -- just like children -- with or without a civilization surrounding it.
So why the hell shouldn't we pay women who grow children, too?
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