Waring Reaction

“One when women’s unwaged work is acknowledged and valued will women’s demands and needs be valued” (Waring xxvii)

- Ruth Todasco, International Women’s Count Network

Waring is quite clearly a believer that feminism and capitalism cannot coexist, simply by nature of how little the world (as it is now) respects and values what women produce. However, as she points out, measurement of value in terms of production makes so little sense it is almost as if it has been created with the intention of leaving out women. Based on contribution, women, most certainly, should be given very high consideration because they directly create the entire population of people who, in turn, produce materials that play into the economy. At the same time, however, she makes the point that there is something intrinsically problematic with assigning economic value to family, because it defines people as products and removes their humanity, replacing it with numerical value. 

Although Waring speaks primarily from her experience in New Zealand, many of her statements are meant to be inclusive of the entire world. Waring makes the argument, by looking at destruction of the environment that happens as a result of what is considered “useful” production, that what should truly be valued is that which creates and restores, not that which destroys. By that logic, women would be the most valuable creators, because they quite literally produce life. Waring also makes the point that if this ideology were really internalized around the world, we would have very different notions of war and peace, simply because more value would be placed (economically, which seems so often to be what starts wars in the first place) on creation and nurturing. I find this to be a fairly universal way of looking at economy, one that doesn’t depend just on Waring’s own New Zealand economy.

 

 “Time is the one thing we all have [. . .] Our economics is about how we use our time” (Waring xxxix).

Here, it seems like Waring is attempting to speak universally of women around the world. Yet her wording implies that women have agency over how they use their time (which feels strikingly similar to the very untrue cliché about how anyone can achieve their dreams if they just set their mind to it). Do all women really have the agency Waring seems to be suggesting? It seems like, although all women do technically operate on the same amount of time as men, some have far less time available to actually accomplish anything men would value—particularly because Waring points out that the UN does not recognize things produced within the home and consumed there as part of an economy. And what of the communities where a woman is almost entirely confined to the house?