The Guardian view on women’s unpaid labour: attitudes have shifted, but the burden hasn’t | Editorial

A profound crisis caused by government failure, which sees mothers leaving the workforce and scaling back in droves, is cast as an opportunity to press the “pause button,” which women ought to embrace unapologetically and from which they will emerge “with confidence.”

If women were no longer willing to work without compensation, who would? Artists, who have been notoriously willing to work for little or nothing, and the idea of working as an artist works, stepped in to fill the gap.

Perhaps the cleverest thing our patriarchal society ever achieved was to rehash this bricks-and-mortar anti-woman rhetoric with something a hundred times more vague and harder to shoot down: now, instead of women’s compliance being enforced as an imperative from above, it trickles down as a kind of pervasive doubt, finding a voice in the very women

Women are genuinely trapped at the intersection of capitalism and patriarchy—two systems that, at their extremes, ensure that individual success comes at the expense of collective morality.

mainstream economic theory is obsessed with the productivity of waged labour while skipping right over the unpaid work that makes it all possible,