Fearless Freedom by Kavita Krishnan

Author:Kavita Krishnan [Krishnan, Kavita]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789353057329
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

A poster from the early-twentieth-century workers’ struggle in the US for the eight-hour day declared that the twenty-four-hour day must be divided into three parts: eight hours each for work, rest and ‘what we will’ (whatever we like or enjoy). Of course, the capitalist employer wants to increase the ‘work’ part of the day as much as possible and shrink the ‘rest’ and ‘leisure’ part of the day as much as possible. Think about this twenty-four-hour day from the point of view of a woman. Even if a woman is not a paid worker, she is actually working twenty-four hours a day—because domestic labour has no fixed working hours: if a baby cries in the night or wets itself, it must be attended to immediately. Domestic labour involves collecting fuel and water as well as the actual process of cooking. It involves playing with children, making them do homework, wiping the tears of a crying child, waking up in the middle of the night to care for a baby, a sick child or a sick adult. If she is a paid worker, she is doing a double shift, because after a hard day at work, she still has to come home and cook and care for others. She does not have eight hours for rest and eight hours for ‘what you will’ (which can include leisure, enjoyment as well as attending meetings of unions and women’s organizations). She has a much harder struggle than men to make time for these activities.

Challenging the gender division of labour at home by requiring men to bear a fair share of the burden of domestic labour, and demanding that the employer and the state bear greater burdens of social reproduction, by providing welfare measures, water, fuel, food, messes or canteens providing cooked food, pensions for the elderly, healthcare, maternity benefits, education and child care, transport, as well as paid weekly and festival holidays are all very much part of working-class struggles that assert women’s rights to greater autonomy and leisure.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.