Women as Servants
A Feminist Manifesto
You will notice that there is no text here yet. This is because as a woman, I do not have the time to talk about women’s rights: I must work. I must do thousands of hours of unrewarded, unnoticed, physical labour. De facto, I do not have the right to talk about women’s rights!
This is the reality of a woman writer in Europe in the 20th and 21st centuries. What you read in the newspapers about gender equality every day is fantasy.
Meanwhile, you might enjoy my Aesthetic Manifesto: Art as Life.
P.S.: Feminist women can be feminine.
Photograph: Christina Egan © 2015.
Here is finally the first part of an essay, The Tea Turned Cold in the Cup, about female domestic labour, to be continued soon.
I have also written a poem, I peel potatoes round and round, about household chores; maybe someone could turn it in to a chanson or a rocksong or a rap!
You may be interested in my hints at the role of women in the 17th to 19th centuries, in the Third Reich and the GDR and Federal Republic.
Home-made Christmas cakes. Photograph: Christina Egan © 2012.
The Tea Turned Cold in the Cup,
or, Why Women’s Work is No Work
I.
When I was a teenager, my parents agreed that I was academically gifted, but had no practical talent whatsoever (by contrast to my brother); this was despite the fact that I had been capable of cooking and baking and taking over the household to the same exacting standards, whenever the need arose, from the age of twelve.
This must mean that domestic work is no practical work and no skilled work either.
II.
When a woman cooks a nourishing meal from scratch for her family and afterwards wipes the table and counters, scrubs the sink, rinses and washes all the crockery and cutlery, all the spoons and utensils, and the casserole or baking-tray, will she say: “Well, washing up is as much work again as cooking”?
No, she will say: “I do it by hand. It’s only four plates.” And she will say it with a shrug of her shoulders and a throwaway tone.
Christina Egan by Christina Egan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Christina Egan 