Heather Rawling, Socialist Party national committee
Are you looking forward to the festive season? Getting excited even? Maybe you are counting the days to having time off to spend with family and friends, sharing festive food and drink. Or perhaps the season of good cheer brings mixed feelings? Do you worry about falling further in debt in order to give the kids a good Christmas?
But never mind, if you are rich you can get a turkey dinner at the Ritz for £650 a head, or buy a £700 pack of crackers!
Or do you dream about escaping all the frenzied activity in the run-up to Christmas? Billionaires are off in their private jets and superyachts. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s yacht, Koru, is currently floating in the Caribbean Sea.
But for the 99% of us, it usually falls on women’s shoulders to organise and strive for the elusive perfect celebrations. We do extra cleaning of the home before the decorations go up, shopping, cooking, wrapping presents, getting all the laundry washed, dried and ironed before hosting family and friends. We often combine all this with jobs outside the home, with very little time off because women mostly work in the public sector, retail and hospitality. And whilst more men help in the home these days, capitalist culture places the responsibility on women. It is rarely a joint enterprise. According to a recent World Inequality report, women earn only 32% of what men earn per working hour if unpaid domestic labour is taken into account. And still only 61% when only counting paid labour. Really, not a lot has changed for women since Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin wrote over 100 years ago about “millions and millions of women … striving with a desperate daily effort to feed and clothe their families on a few coppers, economising in everything except their own labour.”
But in some households, women also fear violence from their partners in the season of ‘goodwill’. Rising numbers of women are experiencing domestic abuse at Christmas, with calls to helplines still higher than pre-pandemic levels.
But it doesn’t have to be like this. We don’t want equality with working-class men, their lot is not to be envied either. We want to free women and men from the weight of domesticity. A massive increase in spending on public services that could ease the burden of domestic chores and free, good-quality and democratically run community restaurants would give us a genuine choice of whether to cook for the family or to dine out with other families. And we call for free, high-quality childcare, not just for women to do paid work, but also to participate in a variety of activities of our own choosing.
