I WAS A weird kid who faithfully read the syndicated “Hints from Heloise” newspaper column and the household tips in my mom’s many women’s magazines. I loved how a mundane problem in everyday life could be cheerfully solved with vinegar and “elbow grease” or the strategic deployment of a couple of rubber bands.
This was before Martha Stewart famously built an empire providing perfection-oriented household advice, such as mopping tips that note “sparkling floors begin with the correct tools.” In contrast, the advice in my childhood was humbler, with a how-to/can-do spirit that acknowledged that making a home clean and safe, and keeping a family fed, clothed, and nurtured on a budget is difficult and time-consuming.
When I was young, this was still sometimes called “women’s work.” Religious conservatives and organizations such as Focus on the Family added a faith twist—a woman’s role in the home was sacred duty (based on Jesus’ lost parable of the submissive helpmate?). The term “women’s work” is less common now, but studies show that in households where both a male and female partner are employed outside the home full time, the woman is still more likely to do more of the domestic work.
The sexism that undervalues work performed by women shapes policy and economic forces. Given patriarchy (and white supremacy), when domestic labor is contracted out to house cleaners, nannies, and home health care aides—who are also usually women, often Black and immigrant women—it is often poorly compensated and offers few protections or benefits.
The pandemic has upended much of home and work life. The demands of managing online school, care for babies and toddlers, and working full time from home crushed any remaining semblance of “work-life balance” for many, especially women. And it left many working-class people facing difficult choices between COVID-19 risks at work and feeding their families. All of this is worsened in the U.S. by the lack of holistic public support for child care, long-term care services, and paid leave. The American Rescue Plan COVID relief package, which incentivized businesses to offer paid leave, expanded services to older adults and people with disabilities, and infused billions into the child care sector, offers a model for permanent policies to lift up families and our society as a whole.
Putting a holy glow on home life is not completely wrong: Households are where many of us experience God incarnate at work at the granular level. Ideally, home is where all of us—women, men, and nonbinary people, children and elders—learn and practice love and justice, mutual care and sacrifice in the nitty-gritty of daily life. Housing, food, rest, and healing aren’t supposed to be merely commodities for Christians. They can be sacramental. But the big issues at the intersection of home and work—how things like low wages, child care needs, lack of sick leave, and market forces affect our domestic lives—are where we seek communal wholeness, not privatized blessing. Those challenges are too big for life hacks or individual solutions. Fixing our fundamentally misguided economic structure will take more than a rubber band and a “can-do” spirit.
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