The company of housewives
There were four wood traders. Every day each one of the traders used to carry out their business in their own villages. But at the core, each had to complete 4 tasks in order to make a profitable sale. Each of them had to roam the forest to identify good quality trees for their wood, then harvest wood from the trees, carry that wood back to the warehouse, polish the wood and sell it to the customer.
They were all earning enough, until one day all of them crossed paths and something struck their minds. They decided to work together as a company and each of the 4 tasks was divided between them.
Now the first trader used to roam the forest identifying the suitable trees for wood. The second one spent his time only cutting the trees that were marked by his predecessor. The third arranged logistics to carry this wood to their warehouse. And the 4th of them polished it for the customer.
The purpose of this example is not to illustrate how specialization of tasks created an efficient production process for the industry. I want to relate this to how the societies gave rise to the concept of a community, more specifically a family.
This other day, the newspaper (The Indian Express) was filled with how much the income of a housewife should be attributed in a domestic household. This way of thought might help give some direction in this process.
Similar to how the work was distributed among the traders, some thousands of years ago when each of the homo-sapiens was on his own, he must have had to collect his own food, make his own shelter, fight off his enemies on his own etc. But progressively, they came to a conclusion that maybe the men could go out and collect food and hunt animals. The women could maintain the shelter and protect the territory of settlement from invaders. Those years, the women might have been the ones making this decision. Slowly this concept gave them the role of a housewife.
For all the feminists here, kindly hold your nerves and just read as to where I am going with this.
Lets circle back to the wood traders story and see where they got their income from. Earlier they all earned their incomes individually, but later, all the money was being collected by the trader in the warehouse.
In all probability an equal share of this profit split among all four. There wouldn’t be a dispute of how easy each of the defined tasks is or if ny mans work has less value than the other. They all deserve an equal share of the profit.
Similarly the household has various tasks that are completed by different persons and the value of each of them collectively contributes to the earnings of the household (and not just of the one we refer to as the earning member). Without such a support structure, this earning member would burn-out much faster or the returns will be much lower for his work.
Things get even more complicated when the household progresses to outsourcing such as maids for cleaning and cooks for the kitchen.
But this debate isn’t settled just as yet with such a simple explanation of specialized work distribution for households.
In our wood traders company, we made a very basic assumption that all 4 traders are interested in exactly 1 of the exhaustive set of tasks. But the reality is that some of these tasks might not be as fulfilling as others or the nature of one task may be inferior/superior to the other. Now who gets to choose which trader gets which task.
Sure they can start voting in a system where each of the traders commands the same respect and holds the same power in the company. In the household though, this isn't usually the case. I don't how this distribution of tasks was assigned thousands of years back, (I wasn’t there).
But my guess is that the woman was chosen to stay at the settlement and take care of the household, while the men were assigned the duty to get food for the house. And slowly the same gender dynasty has continued over time, like the reign of a king.
Most housewives have been so accustomed to engage in domestic work, they happily declare that it is by their own personal choice; while various surveys estimate that in most of the cases there was no other member of the family “available” to carry out these responsibilities.
The crux being that though household is being run in the same fashion as the wood traders union, but maybe the assignment of jobs is not as per the wish of all the members (traders) of the house and that decision is being taken by some other parties which does become a s great cause for concern and a long debate to think upon…
