Unpaid Care Work : Are Women Getting A Raw Deal?

If you spend time cleaning, cooking, washing, and taking care of your family, do you deserve recognition? Why women believe their role as care-givers is pre-destined, and why this must stop.

I vividly remember an uncle of mine telling me how his wife does nothing, while he brings the bread to the house. He was implying that the daily chores had no value to add to his smooth-functioning existence. And this was a young, educated man, raised in a city.

A typical scenario in an Indian home includes at least one female member of the house doing the daily chores, breaking her back, and still being called a Housewife (which is considered equivalent to having no job). This scenario, is much worse in rural areas where the number of family members to take care of, and the number of household tasks multiply immensely.

The situation of rural women who are unable to open their mouths cannot be imagined. On one of the field trips to Bihar (one of the most backward states in India), I came across a family of 8 members with one woman in the productive, young age group taking care of all of the rest. Her daily chores included taking care of her 5 children, husband, his parents, and the animals of the house. With poverty on one hand, and her cooking, washing, bathing, care-taking cycle on the other, she was made to believe that this is the reason why she exists.

To me, this extreme burden with no appreciation or accountability on the part of society sounded brutal. Not only did it violate her body but  it had also created mental stress in her, giving rise to multiple health problems (without a care-giver for herself!). Worse still, she was  beaten up quite often by her husband. Needless to say, her productivity is challenged every day, like that of many other women. With little food to eat, little energy to carry out these chores, the children ended up being neglected many a time, leading to poorly developed adults later on.

To me, this extreme burden with no appreciation or accountability on the part of society sounded brutal.

What happens to the benefits the Government provides them with, like free food and health care,  or adult education ? She pointed out, “When I am at home, I am always busy doing different tasks. When do you expect me to go outside to the health care center to get myself examined? That is only done when the situation is out of hands. This is my role as a woman. I have to be the nurturer of the house and so, at the end, I don’t find time to think of myself.” One woman and multiple children often lead to ignorance with respect to education, health & sanitation, and even building civic values. Thereby, she might just bring up her daughter in the same way, with the same values: this is my fate!

It’s a vicious circle.

This is a common sight. For women like her don’t know what to do except take it as their fate. It is even more painful when nobody acknowledges the care activities, let alone provide them with right kind of resources to function smoothly. The rights of caregivers are symbiotically intertwined with rights of care receivers. For me, I think the Government providing funds and resources is one aspect but simply providing access of care givers (who are mostly women) to resources should not be an indicator of  their use of these resources too.

“This is my role as a woman. I have to be the nurturer of the house and so, at the end, I don’t find time to think of myself.”

What is required is that the society starts a) accepting unpaid care work as a form of work, b) helping to provide a support structure for the woman who is doing the back-breaking tasks and c) converting access to usage of services. While it is easier said than done, I think what we truly require along with Government efforts is a Behaviour Change Campaign.

Right now, rural women (urban too, atleast in India) face two kinds of problems with respect to their daily care chores:

a) They don’t know that its not their prescribed job but a gendered role that was given ages ago and has been going on as a tradition, and;

b) the people around, the care receivers, don’t understand the concept of how if these starting points don’t exist, their own productivity is hampered. Acceptance and acknowledgement by their peers is a crucial aspect of defining empowerment with respect to unpaid care work.

I have thought of this many a times. In fact, I have been a party to many debates where I have been the only one arguing, making people understand how its not a biological role for women, but a choice that they make, for which they need to be valued. Behaviour Change Campaigns are very crucial.

And so, when I think of how to raise this issue as a major “Human Rights” issue in the country, here is what I think could help at the community level: Media Advocacy, Using Edutainment Strategy (Education through Entertainment) via soap operas, Talk shows, positive reinforcements through movies, re-scripting the way we see women in homes, are a few steps. We still have a lot of communities who enjoy access to folk music, folk dance, nautanki (local theatre) and so, using these to reach the unreachable local women in order to make them aware is crucial. The process has to be smooth in order to avoid rebellion from the community and so, I have seen that local community media is the best way of taking the message forward. In this the immense pool of ICT Tools: Internet, SMS technology etc can help create huge momentum with the help of  Opinion Leaders. At the local level, the opinion leaders like Panchayats (Local governance bodies) with Women heads can be a crucial starting point to take the message forward. Training of community workers to see this aspect and then take it forward can be very helpful.

Behaviour Change Campaigns are very crucial.

In my personal experience, soap operas with educational messages work, and storytelling and reinforcing positive examples  among the community is vital. If people around her start valuing her presence, the process of her participating in decision making, education of children, her own growth and development, health facilities etc will smoothen up.

Policy advocacy is important, but that has to come along with a change in tradition and age-old customs and defined roles of women as care givers. I have seen how policies in India remain as paper documents that don’t percolate down to the most crucial level of the country, the household.

My heart waits to see a house in a village in India where the man helps a woman in the kitchen, where the grandparents do more than just sitting and sipping hukka (tobacco) and where a woman goes to a doctor when she doesn’t feel well. That my dear friends, would be the starting point of change.

What is needed for you to take note of this? Just a question:

Are you valuing the unpaid care work around you?

This article was originally published at womens web by the author. 

How Community Radio Is Giving Rural Women The Voice They Never Had

Women’s access to and participation in the media has always remained a big question, especially in rural areas. But community radio is empowering rural women, as broadcasters and as listeners.

As I walked down the narrow road in a village in the Butwal region of Nepal, I looked around and all I could see were mud houses and women trying to finish one or the other tasks. It was not a new sight for me. It is a common sight in every nook and corner of India. And there I was, standing in the middle of the kuchcha road trying to ask women their experiences with Radio Mukti, a Community Radio station for women by women.

I recalled the day I was in a village in Orchha in the Bundelkhand region, same situation, same huts, different women, similar circumstances. This is a story made up of two stories; two levels where I found women participating in community radio (a local radio station, low power, medium reach, run mostly by a NGO or educational institute) in different capacities, struggling to find a space with limited prospects and unlimited challenges to face.

Picture this: a young girl aged 22 years struggles to move out of her comfort zone in order to create a space for herself in this big world. She describes her movement from being the rebel of the community to the idol many want to follow as one uphill task she undertook. It took her years but she loves what the movement brought to her. As a community broadcaster, she knew what the issues of the people around her were.

She was well aware of the struggles that were being faced at the local level. The community radio, she describes, “…came up as a ray of hope, for I wanted to do something and this was just the right platform.” When she came to work at the station, the community people taunted her for moving out of her house and going to work with men. The fact that she had no mother and she had the responsibility of brothers and sisters on her made her life tougher.

When she came to work at the station, the community people taunted her for moving out of her house and going to work with men.

She describes her daily routine thus: “I get up, cook for everyone, clean the house and then get out to work at the station. Earlier, no one valued what I was doing but when they heard my voice on the radio and saw me solving community problems, they started valuing my work. At home, I am the one bringing bread and outside, I am now recognized and respected. I struggled initially with technology and fieldwork but my passion made me persistent. The struggle in the past four years has been hard, but worth it. I feel confident and there is nothing that I am scared of now.”

As a community broadcaster, the Community Radio not only shaped her personality but her connection to the community people brought those grassroots issues to the table.

She is not just a story. She represents the story of many women I have met working in similar capacities at various radio stations, in India and in Nepal. The fact that women from different communities and villages are being represented in the media, their issues brought out, speaks for itself.  The names are varied, but the stories of women working in community radio have been similar.

The second story is a story of women at the listener level. My field visits tell me similar stories. I meet women in villages and slowly gather them for a discussion. In one of the visits in Gujarat, I can see how difficult it is for women to multi-task at home, in the farms, trying to accomplish any task left to their disposal. For me the challenge with women’s participation in media has always been ownership and access in homes to the technologies and access to mediums outside to take a stand and be a leader.

Women have always been the deprived gender. Even in the field of Media, the access and participation of women has been extremely limited. In the area of Community Radio, the issues of reach and ownership with respect to women have been challenged as it operates in the vicinity and movement is not a big question. While policies promote involvement of women in Community Radio, the reality is that it’s not as simple as it looks. Breaking the patriarchal shackles and stepping out of the mental walls is a task, which needs a lot of support and encouragement from a social perspective.

Breaking the patriarchal shackles and stepping out of the mental walls is a task, which needs a lot of support and encouragement from a social perspective.

Acting as a major information channel for women, a Community Radio station exists in their vicinity, is an immediate source of information, knowledge and at many instances hastens behavior change. It is interesting how every station that I have visited in India and Nepal includes at least one such woman broadcaster who has broken the shackles of the house, kept aside her challenges of literacy, has fought against all the barriers and has come out as a role model for women in the community.

She is the one who has moved beyond the unmarked yet known boundaries of the community territories, where she was once not even allowed to step out of the house. It’s an amazing sight – how technology has done what a lot of policies failed to do: include women.

With both men and women being keenly involved, I have always seen that the involvement of women has been beyond music and farming. They are the ones concerned about not just their children and the health of the house but are equally bothered about the rates of the vegetables they have grown, how to take care of animals, old age, health as well as issues of knowing their rights.

As a woman listener from one of the stations I visited remarked, “For us, the station is like the local activist who is not only giving us information and making us aware, but is also acting as a problem solver. Any issue we have, we call them and they give us information.. Sometimes, if we can’t go to the station, they come down and record our opinions and broadcast them…it’s empowering just listening to ourselves on the radio.”

For many who can’t read or write, or even understand any other language, the fact that the programmes a CR airs are made in their native language, by women like them, on issues that belong to them makes the station the sole source of information. One of the women from a station in rural Nepal once told me, “We don’t know what our rights are. Before the station came we did whatever was told to us, now we are trying to fight against wrong, we want to stand for ourselves and our children.” A community radio need not be all women, yet it reaches more women as they are the ones with access issues, to any form of technology, to any form of information.

Quoting Arundhati Roy, “There is no such thing as ‘voiceless’. There are only the ones deliberately silenced or preferably unheard”. I am a strong believer that through Community Radio as a medium of the masses in real, the idea of making the unheard come out and voice out their opinions is slowly coming to reality, especially for women.

This article was originally published at women' web by the author.