Stay-at-home moms have always been exploited. Coronavirus makes it worse
Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, profiteers have been rearing their heads in more ways than one. Hoarding products in high demandin order to sell them at inflated prices is one. Among others is the exploitation of “stay-at-home moms,” who are being used as neighborhood babysitters. Even in today’s most modern and progressive societies, there’s a misconception that these women have a whole lot of time on their hands.
The truth is, they don’t. They have schedules, duties, projects and routines. Their families and homes are their work and workplace, and their work never ends.
What if the shoe were on the other foot. What if stay-at-home moms, in times like these, called upon “working people” to watch their kids on a work day? It’s an inconceivable notion, just as the notion of calling upon an overworked mother and fulltime homemaker to babysit because she’s there and “available”, should be. The fact that society can conceive of this, is revealing of a very ugly underbelly in what concerns these women: In the year 2020, unless a person steps out and into a socially acknowledged workplace, that person’s work is not real, it is not believed and therefore it does not exist. When a person exists outside of an appropriately designated societal box, that person can be exploited to everyone’s heart’s content, without shame or remorse because their purpose and their work are not a part of the reality that is created within that box.
Unfortunately, the chosen language has been an obstacle to thinking outside that box. The term “stay-at-home moms” — a socially accepted misrepresentation and distortion of who they are and what they do — has for decades been a major cause in the societal exploitation of these women. The language is clear: They stay at home and, therefore, in the year 2020 they still do not “work”. In the year 2020, she stays at home and therefore she is not “employed.” In the year 2020, she stays at home and therefore she is not a strong, modern woman. What she does all day and all night long is still not considered actual work because she doesn’t get paid. In the year 2020, a mother should do it all from the goodness of her heart and not for societal acknowledgment. In the year 2020, she who chooses the life of homemaker and family-maker is still a “dependent.”
All of these degrading fallacies are perpetuated and accepted on the most basic social levels, until the world is hit with a global pandemic of massive proportions and suddenly, who’s called upon to watch everybody’s kids while they are off saving the world? The stay-at-home mom. She is exploited by those who would never defend her indispensable place and work in society, but who would conveniently think it is her civic duty to step up in times like these because — after all — she stays home all day long, she is there, she is available and she cannot possibly have anything better to do other than to watch other people’s kids while those people “work.” The hypocrisy is staggering.
It’s high time to include stay-at-home moms in the notion of social change. It’s time to acknowledge and reintegrate them into the very society that she helps build but that tragically, in 2020, still bashes her mercilessly.
Maybe, in the age of hyper political correctness, it is time for society as a whole to start praising these women — for being the true heroes that they are — instead of shaming them and their life’s work every chance it gets. Maybe, when there is a breakthrough in the COVID-19 pandemic, society will have found the breakthrough to truly acknowledge the endless work that these women accomplish every single day. After all, stayat-home mothers are working mothers.