A Woman's Work

A woman’s work is quiet work. She makes use of what surrounds her; she is aware of all of her potential resources though she is discriminating and uses only what she needs. Her work is often subtle, particularly to those who only look towards the end results of things and not the processes which compose them. Though subtle and often not culminating in any finite product, a woman’s work is not without its very real effects, though such effects are not always or only tangible. A woman’s work needs no form of external praise to be validated: to nurture, to create, to birth new possibilities and revitalize old ones — that is a value which nourishes itself. Yet it is for this lack of requirement for concrete validation that she often goes unnoticed, ignored; she is judged as passive and inactive though her work is so constant and ubiquitous as to be unseen. Her greatest actions lie in what others may pejoratively deem inaction. Thus her work is so easily erased, written over by the loud voices of others, extracted as unimportant and replaced with methods considered more effective and efficient in producing end results, which is ‘what such actions are undertaken for in the first place,’ they assert.

            A woman’s work is quiet but her voice is not. Though she may not always produce audible words, her mind is always speaking. Thinking is her domain, yet this too is linked with her doing. While it cannot be universally said, I am tempted to think that women live and think everyday what male philosophers ­­ responding to and building upon what their predecessors forgot in their search for wholeness ­­ claim to discover anew and for which they are remembered in history. Women, accustomed to having such ideas of wholeness, of the intrinsic relationship between immediate personal interactions and the whole, do not always write them down, nor even think to say them, holding them quietly to themselves, folding them into their actions, and giving them only subtly to others; they are however cautious to preach them, particularly in the written form, aware of the potential stagnating and dangerous influences of fluid ideas turned hard.

            Though her voice may be silenced, her activities mimicked by the machine, she can never be removed or replaced; for the breast which warms the body of an infant, a heart which sees the other so easily as oneself, and a mind and body which can create from old and from new without robbing from things elsewhere, that is a spirit who heals while doing, who acts while dwelling from the quietest of spaces.