23. She Works Hard for the Money – Donna Summer 1983
She works hard for the money
So hard for it honey
She works hard for the money
So you better treat her right
What makes the head of the household the head of the household?
Traditionally it was the breadwinner,
and as women were expected, even legislated to in some countries, stay at home dedicating
their days to raising the children and maintaining a perfect household, the
breadwinner was the man. This gave women both a biased opportunity to influence
the development of their children’s morals and interpersonal skills, and the
opportunity to develop skills that males still appear to be largely lacking. However,
there’s an aging generation of males that appear to have gone from having their
mother’s wiping their bums for them rather than building them into strong
members of society, to then having their wives wipe their bums for them.
While things are changing, the
baby-boomer males in my workplace still seem to have an expectation that others
in the workplace will wipe their bums for them – metaphorically speaking. They
are not capable of doing the most basic of tasks - photocopy a document, answer
a phone, drop off paperwork to the relevant person, do their own dishes.
There’s also those males that tend
to always have enough time to tell you how busy they are, but never have enough
time to do the tasks they’re paid to do. I don’t know that this is exclusively
a male tendency, I’ve just never encountered a female doing this in the workplace.
These situations leave me thinking
that these males are considerably less productive than their female counterparts
in the workplace.
Then there’s the case of the injured
blue-collar male worker.
Unfortunately, back in the naughties,
with a booming economy, my middle-aged friend’s husband hurt himself on a
worksite. This left him physically incapable of performing his job. He was
offered the opportunity to reskill to an office job, but turned it down because
he didn’t want to spend his days tied to a desk. Rather, he choose the workers
compensation path, meaning that he couldn’t undertake any paid work. Almost
fifteen years later, with a significantly slowed economy the courts decided that
his injury was age induced wear and tear, not the result of a workplace injury.
So, he’d spent all those years living
off his wife’s income, watching Netflix while waiting for a payday that never
came. Willing to sit in a recliner all day, but not behind a desk, or even in a
hardware store. Some head of the household we have here.
Some of the younger generations may
find this hard to believe, but up until the late 70’s or early 80’s women needed
their husband’s permission to get a credit card. That’s right, in order to be an
effective ‘home economist’ women needed their husband’s permission to spend money.
This situation takes us back to my original point about men traditionally
seeing themselves as the head of the household, or the provider. With the concept
being taken so far as to them having the final sign-off on providing funds to
the home economist (refer to Post 6).
The role of a home economist,
even the situation of baby-boomer males just expecting things to happen around
them, is still lingering around with many females in modern Australia taking on
the role of paying bills and balancing books.
When my mum left my dad she
appeared to happily let off a few grenades as she left, by providing him with absolutely
no guidance or support as to how to deal with the finances for the business
they had both been running. This in turn left me with a call from my dad’s sister
pointing out that their dad, her husband, and her brother have no idea as to
how to stay on top of the bills. After ten years with my partner, this was the
first time I realised I’d taken on the traditional female role of being a home
economist. I’d known for a long time that, for all of his very strong points,
staying on top of finances was not one of them in my partner’s situation. I
just hadn’t realised that most, if not all, of the other significant males in my
life were in the same situation.
I had a workmate for a while that
was the daughter of a Sri Lankan General Practitioner. As the daughter of a GP in
Sri Lanka she had a very privileged life that included a nanny for her kids and
a chauffer to drive her around. However, once her marriage broke down she
emigrated to Australia and had to learn how to drive, work fulltime and finish
off raising her then teenage kids. The point to this Sri Lankan comparison is
that despite the social norms we’re subjected to, or perceive we’re subjected
to, self-sufficiency and self-determination is a choice, not a gender bias.
Now we have ‘stay at home dads’ rather
than ‘house husbands’ OR the gender neutral ‘home economist’ – did modern males
try to distant themselves from a term historically applied to ‘Oh my God! A
woman!’?
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