6:00 A.M.
HALF AWAKE, AND HALF ASLEEP, I START A NEW TO-DO LIST, IN THE waiting room of the hospital.
This is what women do, to make things better. We make to-do lists.
But this to-do list—this to-do list isn’t for me, or the house, or the kids. This is a To-Do List for All Women.
For if every individual woman needs a to-do list in her life, just to get things done—then women as a whole must, too.
AS THERE ARE still not enough women in the rooms where the power is, we must be represented in another way.
We must be represented as a collective.
Oh, if I weren’t stuck in this hospital, on this chair, right now, waiting for breakfast, and was a brilliant organizer, and had years to spare, and had any kind of talent for this kind of thing in the first place, I would form a union. A union for women. The Women’s Union! Now I think of it, I want a Women’s Union so badly! I don’t want for women’s progression to still be down to either brilliant but disparate organizations, or thousands of individuals busily campaigning and tweeting—for both can be either ignored or suffer massive online backlashes, on their own, which cause so many to become more timid, or paranoid, or else give up communicating completely. In the twenty-first century, women’s problems are resolutely not to do with consciousness-raising, or coming up with ideas—for women have been talking about how they would change things for years, decades, centuries now. We have spilled our guts and come up with a million solutions—and yet, still, actual action and progress move so slowly.
What we need now is collective action—a general union we can join, whose sole purpose is to look at all the evidence and statistics on problems that affect our lives, jobs, safety, and sanity and campaign to make its members’ lives better.
I think the most wearying thing about becoming middle-aged, it’s that you are the only one who can fix things—there is no one you can complain to, or seek comfort from; for you are the grown-ups, now, and if you can’t fix it, it will remain broken. Deep down inside, I am a tired middle-aged woman who wishes there were powerful mother figures and matriarchs, who we could turn to—female tribal elders who we could appeal to when things are too difficult or unfair. Women who have been through the same shit as us and are determined that the next generation not go through the same joy-sapping, potential-wasting rigmarole. When I think about how we venerate Michelle Obama or Beyoncé—posting quotes and memes of them, and sighing with love for their wisdom, or calm, or reasonableness, or work ethic—it seems to come from this same deep need: to have champions of women, who speak out for us when we are too exhausted, or confused, or unmotivated to do it, for the millionth time, ourselves.
This is why the idea of being able to join a Women’s Union makes me want to shout out with joy: Guys, take my membership dues and represent the hell out of me! Make me, and so many others, feel like we’re not alone anymore! Finally install some Queen of Women, who is looking out for us all—who can take all these stories, ideas, and research we have done and run with it for all of us. For we alone cannot run with them—with the time and energy they deserve—as we’re too tired, too busy, and our pelvic floors are shot to shit.
A Women’s Union should be seen as an asset to any country that has one—for it would recognize that the problems women still face affect all of us, in one way or another—and usually economically. Financial inequality—disproportionately felt by women and people of color—is put at thirty-nine billion pounds a year in the UK, through its impact on health, well-being, and crime rates. Domestic violence—£66b. The gender pay gap—still running at 8.9 percent means women just aren’t spending as much as men. Man, we’d boost those High Street retail figures if we got equal pay. Women’s inequality disadvantages everyone—not just the female 52 percent we presume.
The argument against state involvement—legislation, increased funding to support services, prosecutions for companies breaking the 1970 Equal Pay Act is always that it is costly. But as we can see, we’re spending those billions anyway in bills that will never disappear and which don’t solve the problem: it merely patches up the survivors, using costly emergency services, and sends them back out again into the same old, bad world; or leaves them in the same bad position for decades to come.
Once we acknowledged how much money we’re wasting by ignoring women’s problems, who would not want to start saving those billions—by preventing what almost always starts as a small problem, from escalating up into a crisis? Perhaps it takes those who have mending kits—and a practical experience of how “a stitch in time really does save nine,” to put the saying into practice.
For everyone has one idea for how things could be better. Everyone has one solution to a problem: whether it be something relatively small—like mentoring children raised around domestic violence, so they don’t repeat the pattern—to a huge scheme, like building whole new family-friendly garden cities with carefully planned childcare centers and public transport, so that women can work like men.
Women have done enough confessing and consciousness-raising. We have improved our own lives as much as we can, in single campaigns. The only next stage, logically, is to do something together.
We would have professed aims. Care work would be top of the list. Paid or unpaid. Care work is disproportionately done by women—as a job, 82 percent in personal caring services are women, and 94 percent of those are in childcare. In unpaid care work, women carry 75 percent of the burden. It is seen as low-status and unskilled. It’s seen as, somehow, something women should just do out of duty, or privilege—women are born to care! Women have an excess of love, which they must vent, or else burst! Women need to care!—and in which payment is a secondary concern and slightly unseemly to complain about.
And, of course, it is both a duty and a privilege to care for the young, the sick, and elderly friends and family. To serve our loved ones. But it is also, surely, a duty and a privilege to be prime minister and serve your people. I can see no logical reason for paying someone handsomely for one duty and privilege, but not the other—save for that it has been, until now, just the way we do things.
Indeed, there is surely more reason to pay carers, and well, than politicians. Once you leave politics, you can secure a lifetime’s worth of well-paid consultancy jobs, book deals, and speaker’s fees—your years of assiduous duty have left you with a high social standing and greater earning power.
Once you finish caring, however—once your sick are well, your children grown, or your elderly dead—you have a lower social standing and lower earning power. All your work is not seen as a benefit on your CV. A Women’s Union would run ad campaigns showing how unpaid care work should be seen as equally valid on a CV as “normal” employment. Perhaps, even greater: After all, what takes more guile, forward-planning, patience, and people skills than wrangling twins or someone with dementia? It’s definitely harder work than chairing a sales conference in Staines.
Arguments fretting over the cost of paying carers for their work—with either benefits or tax credits—fail to see the bigger picture: They need to be reminded that any state money given to citizens doesn’t disappear. People don’t set fire to it, chuckling, “Thanks, Nanny State!” It immediately boosts the country’s economy in payments to utility companies and purchases of food, holidays, shoes. It goes into making houses more livable, morale-raising treats, helping your children, having free time. It goes into quality of life. It gives people happiness, and dignity.
And, most importantly, it acknowledges your effort and worth. It says, “We know people like you exist, and we have chosen to not let you struggle on your own anymore.”
And as for paid care work—well, if there’s one thing the global pandemic has shown us, it’s that the people who do these jobs do something so necessary, and so vital to the functioning of society, that we eulogize them, and applaud them, and are moved to tears by their dedication, even when their lives are at risk. If this is not the time to discuss how minimum wage is simply, morally, incorrect, then when is? When will “the things women do”—and care work is overwhelmingly a female occupation—be commensurately rewarded for how tough and essential they are?
THE WOMEN’S UNION would become the place that scrutinized all new plans and legislations for their effect on women, then it would issue statements and inform its members, accordingly. It would be aligned to no party—it would simply be an impartial, expert eye constantly monitoring whether women’s lives and needs were being taken into account when decisions were being made. It would be both a powerful campaigning body and representative of a massive voting block of women. It would give women—in their thousands or millions—a voice dedicated to them.
And it would protect women’s voices when they first speak out: For it could compile reports on the hostility and threats of violence meted out to women on social media, suggest technical and safeguarding solutions, and—if social media companies still did not improve—the Union could act. It could suggest to all its members that they strike: that on days of action they could post, on their accounts, a statement from the Union—explaining why social media is a hostile environment for women, and how tech companies have still not acted—and then go offline for twenty-four, forty-eight, seventy-two hours. It could remove half of the free content social media companies rely on in a heartbeat.
And if social media still did not improve—if these platforms still continued to host rape and death threats—then, in my dream, the Women’s Union would do what I secretly hoped that e.g., the Kardashian sisters would have done years ago: work with alternative tech companies to finally build social media platforms that were safe for women. That didn’t allow for bots or trolls and made everyone traceable, if they broke the rules. We would take our unpaid labor—our attention economy, 52 percent of the audience— elsewhere, that took our safety, and voices, and amusing cat memes seriously.
And the thing I would love most about a union would be that, just as industrial unions worked to recognize those who worked in shipyards, mines, and factories, the Womens’ Unions would work to recognize those who work in homes. For millions of women, so much of the work we do is in the home—ours and other people’s. That is our workplace. It is where we put in the same hours others put in at the office, in a factory, in a school. Often, after we come home from an office, factory, or school. In homes across the country, we contribute just as much to the economy as those who commute. We prop up the economy—we allow all these other sectors to survive, with our unpaid work. But the home does not have a union.
A Women’s Union would have, at its core, a simple but vital aim: to reward those still female things of “love” and “care” in the same way we reward all the other, similar things like “loyalty,” “teamwork,” “innovation,” and “entrepreneurship.” It would show the true value of women—both to the world and to women themselves. Sometimes I think it is the latter that would, in the end, be the most valuable—for whilst popular culture has been successful in writing songs and telling stories about how great it is to be a young, hot, dollar-savvy lady adventurer, there is still nothing about being an older, stoic, domestic hero quietly mending and remending the world every day. We have not yet found a way to value and honor these qualities. These kinds of women who are doing these kinds of things still put themselves down: “I’m just a boring mom”; “I’m just doing the right thing”; “If I don’t do it, who will?” The foster moms, the hospital cleaners, the mentors, the volunteers, the community leaders, the outreach workers, the social workers, the ones who tend to the dying. A few dozen will be honored at The Pride of Britain awards, or Hello’s “Mom of the Year,” or on breakfast TV, when someone writes in and gets Michael Bublé to sing a song to them. But that’s not enough. That’s not enough to show our daughters, when they wonder what will become of them if they spend their later years trying, simply, to be good, useful people. That’s not enough to keep making women endure.
If we really want to stop our young girls fearing becoming full-grown women, we have to be able to look them in the eye and say, “It’s hard work, but life does get better”—and mean it. We have to be truthful when we say, “There is both respect and worth in the work of women.” We have to be able to say, “You will never feel like it’s just down to you, on your own, to make the world better. You will be walking with millions.”
We need to be able to say, “Women are cared for, as they care for others”—and then point to an organization that is actually doing it.
So yes—this is my dream, sitting here in this hospital, at dawn, half awake and half asleep, trying to imagine how things could be better. Trying to imagine how I can still say what I always say, “Be kind, and don’t give up, and things will be okay, in the end. The world is progressing”—and mean it.
I don’t dream of big houses, or millions, or jewels. I dream of a Women’s Union.
I hold My Girl’s hand, as she sleeps. Right now, that’s the best, and only, thing I can do.