“Comparatively few people realise the long hours of monotonous unrelieved domestic drudgery needed to keep her home and surroundings clean and wholesome, to buy and prepare food, and to attend to the manifold wants of her husband and children in sickness and health.  Fewer still appreciate fully the effects on a woman’s health and mental outlook of the incessant struggle needed to stretch an inadequate income to its utmost limits, and of her restricted environment and the scanty opportunities for recreation or social intercourse during the small amount of leisure she is able to snatch from her daily toil.”

Dame Janet Campbell gave this description of the mother’s experience in 1933 in the Working Class Wives Health Survey in England (cited in Under the Radar). While this isn’t the exact situation of every mother in present-day America, there are alarming similarities

In the 1990s stateside, Leslie Lehr says,

“Since I worked at home, I also wrote for the PTA newsletter, volunteered in the girls’ classrooms, and chauffeured them across the city for playdates and ice-skating, softball and violin. This was all good and fun and worthwhile. I wanted my girls to enjoy everything I had missed when my own mother was working. Yet everything my mother complained about during the second wave of feminism was true. We needed childcare and parental leave to share the burden. I showed Drew financial charts of what my caregiving time would be worth in dollars, but it didn’t make any difference. Without money, I had no power. And none of his respect.”

Not all of us have partners as exacting as the first excerpt or as dismissive as the second, but certain parallels remain.

Even in 1933, women who had been bookkeepers and typists with solvent salaries before marriage and motherhood, whose husbands were suddenly jobless due to the unemployment crisis, faced not only “desperate poverty” but pressures to “make do, tend, and provide” for their family regardless that “their ‘mental and physical well-being’ was being ‘sacrificed.'”

For the last few years of my stay-at-home status, I’ve taken to referring to myself as a financial wizard. Fortunately, I have not been doing so amidst ‘desperate poverty’, but I have become super-creative at stretching a finite amount of money to cover as many infinite financial family needs as possible.

Women don’t get enough credit for the wizardry they perform – both in money-saving gymnastics and in the completion of costly services.

Disparity and dependency are the key words when it comes to finances and woman/motherhood.

And whether it’s the systems society has upheld for us (from capitalistic values of productivity to wage discrimination to gender expectations) or the overflow in our homes (rigid relationship roles or unintentional assignment of/ignorance of duties), women and mothers are significantly impacted by finances. (Beyond the obvious fact that kids are really expensive!)

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Money Talks: What does it say to you?

In your notebook, reflect on the following prompts about financial concerns:

• When you hear the word, money, what thoughts and feelings come to the front?
• Is it the same with finances or financial?
• How would you describe your financial status?
• Does money help you do anything? Does money keep you from doing anything?
• Does money influence how you mother? If so, how?
• Have you ever felt you had to be a financial wizard? When? How?
• Freewrite to explore the connection between money and productivity in your life. You might start by looking at each one individually. Then explore the interplay between the two.
• Revisit your description of your financial status. Based on your work on the previous prompt, would you change the description now?

Use the calculator in the related resources below to see how much your invisible labor is worth (besides the obvious value of priceless).