Week 7
ASA2 A01
Nuoxin Xu
5.9.2020
For
this week, I read "Care Work: The Invisible Labor of Asian American
Women" by Wei Ming Dariotis and Grace J. Yoo. It was highlighted in New
Smithsonian Exhibit.
There
are signs in the restrooms across the United States, and employees are urged to
clean by themselves. Those signs shows: "Your mother doesn’t work
here." The new exhibition of the National Museum of American History
"All Work, No Pay: The History of Women's Invisible Work" claims that
this is an implicit expectation that women should take care of household as their
responsibility. The case shows that despite the increase in the payment of
labor, women still bear most of the responsibility for unpaid work at home.
The
exhibition explores the theme of unpaid work in three parts: " Separating
Home and Work", which determines the changing perspectives of early gender
roles and jobs in the United States; " Making Unpaid into Paid
Work", which compares the benefits of paid labor in 1890s with them from the 1940s to the 1940s; and the
"second shift" -- although women ’s rights improved from the 1960s to
the 1990s, the tacit expectations of domestic service continued.
"
There
is a historical relationship between unpaid work and the lower wages that women
often receive in the workplace," said Kathleen Franz, the chairman and
curator of the Ministry of Work and Industry. Based on the 2013 US Census,
women earn an average of 80 cents to a dollar of male.
Because
of features such as pockets for housework and apron, each period of "work
clothes" emphasizes not only the longevity of housework in the past three
centuries, but also the way women tailor their clothes to make work easier. In
the 1700s and early 1800s, short dresses were the clothing most women
possessed, highlighting how despite their complex dynamics and inequalities,
they assumed similar tasks between races and classes. These short dresses allow
for freedom of movement, and are usually equipped with a "pocket"
that can be tied to the pocket and used to carry small tools such as scissors
and thimble.
By
the 20th century, although new technologies such as electric irons are expected
to enable women to increase the efficiency as domestic helpers, they are of no
avail. Seeing the opportunity, entrepreneur Nell Donnelly Reed designed fashionable
clothing that made her a millionaire. Even during the Great Depression, her
factory employed thousands of women to make Nelly Don dresses. Finally, the
exhibition also shows the current version of modern home improvement: yoga pants.
Many
of the housework clothes are rarely seen outdoors, and therefore represent the
invisibility of female labor over time. "All Work, No Pay" draws on
the museum's wall of collection of home clothing, and many of them are not seen.
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