Education and Work

This section looks at women and their relationship to power both inside and outside the home. What areas of control have gender demarcations? What pressures, both cultural and religious, are exerted on women in terms of dress, conduct, education, and work? What happens when the traditional male hierarchy is overturned, when a woman is successful at work, in business, or in politics — and in some cases even takes the highest political office in the land?

Finally, and fundamentally, this section will address the fact that all activity outside the domestic sphere for women is predicated on ensuring the absolute human right to education. Girls and women can accomplish very little in a public space without it, and denying them a basic education is the surest way to keep them at home, out of sight and earshot.

A Woman's Place Is in the Home — And What Happens When She Leaves It

Woman is made specifically to please man.

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762

Gentleness, docility, and a spaniel-like affection are ... consistently recommended as the cardinal virtues of the sex ... one writer has declared that it is masculine for a woman to be melancholy. She was created to be the toy of man, his rattle, and it must jingle in his ears whenever, dismissing reason, he chooses to be amused.

— Mary Wollstonecraft, 1792

131 Bellows for Dusting

When cleaning down, one of the handiest labour-savers is a pair of bellows. In cleaning the head and foot of a wire spring mattress, where the dust collects, a good pair of bellows blows out the dust and fluff in a minute. For the back of wardrobes that are too heavy to move stand at one end and blow the bellows behind along the skirting board, and you will find the dust out at the other end.

A pair of bellows and a passion for cleaning — this is a surreal picture of virtuous womanhood, conducting an ongoing war against the combined enemies of dust and dirt. Always on a high state of alert for these domestic battles fought on the home front: that is the traditional ideal of a good woman, a safe woman, whose primary role is as a housewife and mother. Modest, respectful, conforming in dress, speech, and behavior — a figurehead for her sex.

This tip about dusting is just one of over 30,000 entries submitted to The Good Housewife Competition run by the British Good Housekeeping Institute in the 1920s. Other entries ranged from the bizarre to the plainly unnecessary:

How to Sweeten Rancid Butter: Melt and skim the butter. Put into the fat a piece of toast ...

How to Clean Playing Cards: Place them on a newspaper, sprinkle with talcum powder and rub with a piece of clean, dry cheesecloth ...

How to Banish Cockroaches: If cockroaches and ants are troublesome in the house, sprinkle ground rice around their haunts. They eat greedily and it swells inside them and they die.

This obsessive devotion to housework can easily be ridiculed, but to what extent is it still part of an accepted female behavior today? How common is the traditional belief that a woman's place is in the home, that men are to be cooked for, cleaned for, and cared for, first by a mother, then by a wife; that women who do infringe on this code and go out to work have only themselves to blame if their doing so results in broken marriages, drug-addicted children, disintegration of families, and domestic violence? The socially conservative right-wing British newspaper the Daily Mail prints a steady flow of stories undermining women working outside the home:

Nearly nine in ten British women plan to quit their jobs to look after their children, a survey has found. The research flies in the face of the idea that women want to have it all by juggling a career and having children. As well as giving up work, the poll showed that women want large families. One in three said they would have four or more children if money weren't an issue. It provides a revealing insight into women's attitudes to work and relationships and their commitment to family lives. One in five who already have children thought that women who work while raising a family make worse mothers.

Women still do the majority of household tasks, despite participating more in the labor market than in the past. A recent 2007 survey in Britain found that the gendered "chores gap" — for unpaid domestic work at home — is worsening, with working women spending an average of 180 minutes a day on housework, compared to 101 minutes a day for men. The former Equal Opportunities Commission in Britain said that it believes this gap will never close, and that women will continue to spend in excess of 78 percent more time doing housework each day than men.

Outside the Home: Dress Codes

By staying confined within the home, in the domestic sphere, women are approved of by society at large and perceived to be safe and contained. When women venture outside, their appearance, throughout all cultures and all historical periods, has been a focus of mass observation and censure. For women in the public arena, the amount of flesh on display becomes charged with eroticism. In the West before the twentieth century, showing a few inches above the foot, perhaps an ankle or a glimpse of a calf as a woman moved around, getting in and out of carriages, was seen as highly sexually exciting. In the Indian Subcontinent today, the traditional sari exposes a woman's midriff and back, which isn't considered immodest. However, the sari shirt covers the underarm area, which is seen as erotic and risky to expose, as is showing the leg above the knee.

Different cultures have different dress codes for women — for instance orthodox Jewish women don't show their hair to anyone other than their husbands, and so usually wear a wig or a hat outside the home, and they dress modestly.

Hastings Banda was president of Malawi from 1961 to 1994, and part of his very authoritarian rule included restrictions on women's dress; women were barred from wearing trousers or skirts that ended above the knees. These strictures also applied to female tourists, and border guards stopped women from entering the country in trousers. Women had to wrap a towel around themselves to make an impromptu skirt at the border crossing into Malawi. Hastings...