A Woman’s Work Is Never Done

A woman's work is never done

More and more women work outside and inside the home. The double demands shouldered by these women pose a threat to their physical health. Whether you are an overworked housewife or an exhausted working mother the chances are that you are always one step behind your schedule. No matter how hard women worked, they never ended up with clean homes. Housewives in these miserable circumstances often became hysterical cleaners. They wore their lives away in an endless round of scouring, scrubbing, and polishing. The increased strain in working women comes from the reality that they carry most of the child-rearing and household responsibilities. According to social trends (1996), women always or usually do the washing in 79 percent of cases and decide the menu 59 percent of the time. Picking up the children at school or doing grocery shopping are just a few of the many typical household-tasks a woman takes on every day.

Why are most of these responsibilities borne by women? The historical role of women is part of the answer. Despite the fact that we know instinctively that caregiving is valuable and important work, it has gone largely unrecognized and unacknowledged because we take it for granted. In the past, many parents felt that school education for girls was a waste of time, "A woman's place is in the home" was the traditional view. In those days, housewives had a tough life and were completely dependent on the men for money. There was a lot of drudgery in their lives and the men didn't help with the household chores, it was "women's work". The housewife worked from dawn to dusk and there was a lot of truth in the old saying; "a woman's work is never done".

However, women have made optimistical progress towards equality and their role in the society has been changed dramatically since the last century. Many women stepped out of their home and start to work at factories and offices. The number of working women with children has more than doubled in the past 50 years. While working conditions for women may have improved, there is a lack of appreciation for the notion that work for most women doesn't end at the door of a factory or office. Despite an increase of women's participation in the labour force, women's share of housework has hardly changed in 50 years. Women