A Day Without a Woman— the hidden economy of women’s unpaid labor and the power we haven’t fully weaponized yet

This essay is part of a bigger argument I’m developing in Return of the Matriarch, a book about the return of female authority in a world that has privatized women’s labor, narrowed women’s power, and treated the body, household, care, money, culture, and community as unrelated issues instead of parts of one system. I’m sharing a main argument here because I want this essay to stand on its own, not just preview the book. The book itself goes much deeper into the broader social, cultural, historical, and structural context behind these ideas.

A note before you start: this article is long on purpose. The first half is the essay itself; the second half is a completely free practical toolkit for building the kind of local infrastructure this argument depends on. If you’re here primarily for the action steps, scroll down to the toolkit. If you want the full argument, start at the beginning. And if you make it all the way through, scroll to the comments too—I’m using them as part of the conversation around what gets built next.

Women keep much of the economy running but have far less official economic power. We do most of the caregiving, a large share of housework, much of the planning and organizing that keeps families going, and a big part of the relationship work that lets workplaces, schools, and communities function as if life happens on its own.

Men hold more wealth, property, leadership roles, political power, and control over money… but those systems rely every day on work that women provide far more often.

We’re taught to see economic power as ownership, income, job titles, investments, laws, or control of assets. If someone owns a company, signs checks, controls accounts, sits at the head of the table, or is named on the deed, we assume that’s where power begins and ends.

While ownership matters—especially since women have often been denied it—it’s only one kind of power. Another kind appears when a system relies on something it can’t easily replace. If a household, workplace, or the economy can’t function without your work, your role is more important than whether your name is on the deed.

Someone still has to raise the workers, feed them, care for them when they are sick, keep their homes functioning, teach the children who become the next generation of workers, care for aging parents, manage appointments, purchase household necessities, organize schedules, preserve relationships, absorb emergencies, and handle the ordinary human maintenance that has to happen before anybody gets to play Monopoly.

Those tasks are not peripheral to an economy. They are among the conditions that allow an economy to exist at all, and women perform a disproportionate amount of them.

This is what I mean when I say women actually control more of the economy—and the world—than we realize. I’m not saying women have most of the official power, because we clearly don’t. That gap is the problem.

Women fill so many essential roles that our supposed lack of power makes less sense the more you look at what everything depends on. We have a lot of leverage, but it’s scattered across homes, jobs, relationships, and countless private acts of care, instead of being seen as collective power.

Every day around 16.4 billion hours of unpaid care work are carried out. This figure is based on time-use data from sixty-four countries; at the time the International Labor Organization carried out its major analysis of the care economy, it accounted for about two-thirds of the world’s working-age population.

16.4 billion hours is equivalent to approximately two billion people working eight-hour days for no pay. Women carry out more than three-quarters of these hours. When the ILO valued that work at the conservative rate of the hourly minimum wage, the total came to about $11 trillion per year in 2011 purchasing-power-parity dollars, or roughly 9 percent of global GDP in that study.

It is a very large number, and in fact this figure still falls short of the point I am trying to make since assigning a wage to an hour of care only gives an estimate of what that hour might be worth in a market economy. It fails to account for all the other things that hour enables.

If a woman looks after a child at home while another adult goes to work, her labor does not merely result in childcare, it also creates the conditions that make someone else’s paid work possible. Whenever she cooks dinner, looks after elderly relatives, looks after the household, gives a person a ride to an appointment, spends two hours arguing with a school about the services it provides, notices that a prescription is nearly empty, or has to rearrange the whole week because childcare has fallen through, the value of what she has done extends beyond the rest of the household.

It often reaches into workplaces and institutions that derive benefits without ever seeing the labor beneath them.

All offices, factories, hospitals, school days, construction sites, corporate meetings, warehouses, restaurants, government buildings, and trading desks rely on people turning up having eaten, worn suitable clothing, received an education, been transported, looked after, and been regulated so that they can carry out their duties.

Someone must have already taken care of the child, the older adult, the prescription, the meal, the laundry, the school form, the groceries, the birthday, the sick day, the emotional difficulties, the transportation issue, and the other thousand aspects of human life which never show up on a corporate balance sheet.

The balance sheet gives no information about whether the person looking at it had clean clothes, had slept the previous night altogether, or had someone available to pick up his child when the school nurse phoned. The labor is still there.

Once you realize this distinction, the way we measure economic production turns really fucking absurd.

When I pay someone to look after my child, that transaction counts as measurable economic activity; but when I look after my own child, a large part of that same kind of labor effectively vanishes from the standard measures.

A meal served in a restaurant is included in the economy as a transaction, while the hour someone spends cooking for their family is not recorded in the same way. Paid care for older adults is considered an economic service, but a daughter who cuts back on her paid work to look after a parent might, in fact, seem less economically productive even though the labor still took place and someone still benefited.

The work didn’t disappear just because money stopped changing hands; only our method of measuring it did. So what the actual fucking shit are we doing?

People don’t suddenly become fully grown at eighteen and then turn up at work ready to contribute value. Someone had to spend years looking after them, protecting them, transporting them, teaching them, regulating them, nursing them, socializing them, correcting them, comforting them, and keeping them alive before anyone was willing to call them human capital.

Adults still need food, housing, healthcare, sleep, relationships, clean clothes, administrative assistance, transportation, and sufficient rest to remain functional.

Older people need care.

People who are disabled need support—the sick need help.

Children need many years of continuous attention.

Societies need relationships, memory, trust, participation, conflict, the means to repair damage, and people who remember what happened the last time.

Someone still has to do all of that.

The labor-market data show the other side of the same arrangement. In 2023, an estimated 748 million people aged fifteen and over were not involved in the global labor force because of care responsibilities; about 708 million of these were women and 40 million were men. Of women aged between twenty-five and fifty-four who were outside the labor force, care responsibilities explained approximately two-thirds of the total.

This is not a small number of private lifestyle choices that happen by coincidence in hundreds of millions of unrelated households. Rather, it results from the structure of the labor market.

Economists have also worked out the figures in reverse. The McKinsey Global Institute once ran a scenario based on the full potential of greater gender equality in the labor market, in which such equality could add as much as $28 trillion to global annual GDP by 2025 compared to the baseline.

That was a hypothetical possibility, not a prediction. Still, the contradiction it reveals is almost comical: women already carry out labor amounting to trillions of dollars that the economy barely accounts for, while economists calculate how many more trillions women could produce if caregiving and inequality had not restricted their involvement in paid work.

We have produced both aspects of the problem and have ended up with women being seen as underperforming economically. Our unpaid work is constantly undervalued, while our contribution in paid work is limited in part because we carry out so much of the unpaid work. Then someone organizes a panel on female productivity.

The economic centrality we are considering does not correspond to proportional economic power.

Any system that is working must do more than produce; it also has to restore the conditions which enable continued production. Ecology fully realizes this. The soil cannot be taken out without being replenished; water must cycle, nutrients must return, organisms must reproduce, and the relationships between species must remain sufficiently intact so the ecosystem can keep functioning. A forest which is treated solely as a source of timber may generate a great deal of value for a period of time, but if you extract the timber without allowing it to regenerate, you end up with less forest.

No reasonable person would regard that as being efficient even though the amount of timber appeared to be excellent for a few years.

Human economies maintain roads, machines, fisheries, electrical grids, buildings, supply chains, and water systems. The only exception is people, who in some mysterious way are expected to work, reproduce, raise the next generation, look after the older ones, survive illness, keep their homes, take in crises, preserve relationships, and then go back to work on Monday morning, all thanks to an inexplicable kind of magic. We are that odd indeed, y’all.

Pregnancy and childbirth are the most direct kinds of human reproduction. Still, social reproduction—meaning the work needed to keep humans alive and to pass society on from one generation to the next—goes on well after a child has left the womb. Babies have to be fed, looked after, educated, socialized, comforted, transported, looked after when ill, and taught how to get on with other people.

Adults have to eat, recover, keep their homes, look after their relatives, and deal with everything connected to paid work. Older people need to be looked after too. Families must be maintained, and culture must be passed on.

Someone also has to know where the birth certificate is, whether the prescription is almost finished, what size shoe the child wears, why the school keeps sending that goddamn form back, when Grandma last had food, who needs a birthday present, what is going wrong in the refrigerator, and who is supposed to pick somebody up on Thursday.

Human beings need a tremendous amount of maintenance and care, and women have in the past supplied a greater share of it. It follows that we are not a neglected subgroup lying alongside the real economy calling for recognition. Rather, women make up a significant portion of civilization’s regenerative infrastructure.

Modern economies have dealt with this type of regenerative labor in much the same way that extractive systems handle any resource which they assume to be infinitely renewable—by taking as much as they can, replenishing as little as possible, paying as little as possible, and only suddenly becoming interested in the resource’s value when shortfalls begin.

It is then that women reach the limit of what they can comfortably cope with.

Society realizes it has a fertility crisis, a childcare crisis, an eldercare crisis, a loneliness epidemic, a family crisis, a workforce shortage, a burnout epidemic, or whatever other downstream problem has finally become large enough to bother the people who previously could ignore the conditions causing it.

The need for care is no less significant either. According to international labor estimates, about 2.3 billion people are expected to require care by 2030, compared with roughly 2.1 billion in 2015, as populations age while children still need ongoing care. The number of people employed in paid care is already very large, and about two-thirds of them are women. Women make up an even larger share of the paid domestic workforce worldwide.

Paid care is thus not a separate answer to the issue of unpaid female care; a large part of the market-based solution is also carried by women, often at low wages, without adequate labor protections, with migrant and low-income women especially present in the most unstable aspects of the work.

The situation is particularly hard to overlook because of motherhood.

A woman may spend many years carrying out the duties of creating, feeding, teaching, protecting, socializing, transporting, regulating, and keeping in order the future workers, customers, taxpayers, citizens, artists, teachers, doctors, mechanics, builders, and parents that society will rely on. Yet those same years might later show up on her resume as a gap.

Although the labor is essential while she is carrying it out, it later appears as proof of reduced economic productivity when we account for the cost to her.

Studies into what economists refer to as child penalties have shown a widespread trend in different countries: after children are born, the labor market results for men and women often differ greatly, with women suffering a disproportionate decline in both employment and income. The extent of this penalty varies greatly from one society to another, and this matters because it shows that biology alone cannot account for the situation.

Although pregnancy and childbirth are biologically asymmetrical, a twenty-year earnings penalty reflects a social arrangement superimposed on this asymmetry. We accept the necessary, reproductive labor, privatize much of its cost, impose an economic penalty on the person who carries out this labor, and then call the resulting consequences her own personal financial problem.

That’s absolutely fucking stupid.

If we recognize that care is a form of infrastructure, then we must also stop pretending that care involves only the physical tasks that are obvious. Important as the visible activities are—such as cooking, cleaning, bathing the children, driving them, shopping, changing the sheets and taking someone to the doctor—the invisible work is what ensures that most of these visible tasks take place at the right time, in the right sequence, for the right person, with the appropriate supplies, before the situation turns into an emergency.

This is what I call The Motherload— it is at the same time bodily, cognitively, domestic, relationally, administratively, emotionally, economically, and culturally.

As sociologist Allison Daminger has pointed out, cognitive household labor involves predicting needs, spotting available options, making decisions, and then keeping an eye on what happens afterward. This approach helps explain why a household may appear fairly split in responsibilities, yet one individual still ends up running the operations. For instance, one partner might drive the child to the dentist.

Meanwhile, the other person had noticed that the child was overdue, found the dentist, checked the insurance, booked the appointment, entered it into the calendar, completed the forms, remembered that the school required a note, reminded everyone the night before, knew which sibling had to be picked up first, and later ensured that the follow-up appointment was arranged.

If we consider only the trip to the dentist, the division of labor seems a lot more equal than it really is.

Research increasingly finds this to be the case. Women tend to do more cognitive household work overall, with the greatest disparities in planning and supervision. A recent study carried out in the United States on more than two thousand heterosexual couples who were partners found that women’s employment and their earnings could lessen some of the physical household work they did without at the same time reducing their cognitive responsibilities.

The researchers called this continued obligation gendered cognitive stickiness: invisible responsibilities can stay attached to mothers even when the normal reasons for dividing up the physical labor—time and money—change.

That is why it comes as no surprise that so many women end up wanting to put their heads through drywall just by being told to ‘ask him for help’. Offering help is not the same as taking ownership of the matter.

If I have to become aware of the problem, decide what action is necessary, explain it, assign the task, remind you, answer your questions as you act, check that the task has been completed, and make any repairs that were overlooked. You have not actually removed the problem from my responsibility. You have only carried out one stage of a process that I still own.

That is also the reason why women may seem extraordinarily specific when talking about the load. A person who is not in a management position might hear something like ‘She’s upset because he bought the wrong cereal’ when in fact the cereal is just the four-hundredth small piece of evidence showing that she is still the only one who has the household’s map.

Perhaps the child has a sensory problem.

Perhaps the brand contains an allergen.

Perhaps they had three boxes already.

Perhaps she’s already explained it six times.

Perhaps he actually made a reasonable mistake as a beginner.

These are different situations, and viewing all of them as proof either that women are controlling or that men are incompetent fails to address the more interesting question: who owns the knowledge system and how does that ownership change?

The Motherload also involves caring for relationships and managing emotions. Who notices when a child is beginning to withdraw? Who is the one who recalls that a friend’s father died this week? Who is responsible for buying his mother’s birthday present? Who knows which sibling is at odds with which other sibling?

Who ensures that family traditions are maintained, remembers the teacher’s name, knows which neighbor can be trusted, keeps track of the social obligations that no one notices until they are missed, and picks up enough emotional information about the household to be able to predict when everyone is just one minor annoyance away from losing it?

These duties differ from one family to another and from one person to another; women are not magically born with this knowledge. Through repeatedly taking on responsibilities, one’s attention develops. Constant attention leads to expertise. Once expertise is gained, it can appear as a natural ability when people stop asking who carried out the repeated tasks.

I am also not aiming at swapping one silly gender story for another. It is not particularly true that women are neurologically destined to remember everyone’s shoe size, nor is it the case that men are biologically unable to find the ketchup in a refrigerator.

While reproductive bodies do produce real asymmetries, other asymmetries result from socialization, role expectations, exposure to threats, habit, and repeated practice. Girls are usually taught from an early age to notice other people’s needs, anticipate danger, help adults, and become useful in ways boys are not always taught to do.

Motherhood can reinforce these tendencies, since pregnancy, birth, feeding, sleep disruption, physical recovery, and the usual expectations placed on parents create countless opportunities to notice and respond.

The fact that these influences exist should not mean women were born with the duty of carrying the Motherload forever. Present-day specialization does not imply destiny.

The situation also has a temporal aspect which chore charts seldom manage to show. It is not just a matter of how many minutes a task lasts; it is about how much of a person’s day still allows for interruptions, how frequently attention is broken up, whether someone’s paid work can be rescheduled, whether their sleep can be sacrificed, whether their leisure time is seen as something that can be compromised, and whether someone continues to be mentally available after the task itself has finished.

Even if two parents each spend an hour on household duties, one of them will still have to notice what happens next. Time poverty isn’t simply having too little free time; it means living within a schedule in which your time is continually treated as the most available option for everyone else’s needs.

This difference helps explain how resentment can persist even when the arrangement of duties appears fair.

A person might, in fact, have two hours free while still being the one who packed the bag before going, answered three texts during the break, remembered to take the medicine on the way home, and reworked the dinner plan because the afternoon had changed. The body may have left the house while the responsibility of managing things had not.

The Motherload is not a metaphor for being busy; it is the situation that arises when one person’s attention carries a large part of the household’s continuity.

When you view the economy from this perspective, many problems traditionally seen as failures on the part of private households start to appear instead as costs passed on.

Since childcare has become unaffordable, a mother is forced to cut back on her paid working hours.

When eldercare becomes out of reach, a daughter starts taking on the responsibilities of making appointments, providing transportation, managing medication, preparing meals, dealing with paperwork, handling insurance, and carrying out any other tasks needed to keep someone safe.

If a school fails to meet a child’s needs, then a parent has to become familiar with a whole new set of bureaucratic procedures.

As food prices go up, someone has to spend extra time checking prices, driving to various stores, cooking from scratch, using what is left in the house, and somehow getting enough food with the same amount of money.

Healthcare becomes harder to manage, and as a result, someone takes on the role of family case manager.

Public services vanish, and families then take over the tasks that have been lost.

Employers require work schedules based on the false idea that employees have no caregiving duties, so someone at home has to reorganize their life for this fiction to continue.

When an institution stops carrying out a necessary task, the work doesn’t just disappear; instead, it falls to someone who will no longer let the consequences keep moving on. Within families, that person is most often a woman.

One reason institutions can fail for years without appearing nearly as dysfunctional as they really are is that women end up having to cover the gaps. A city may cut a service, a school may fail to provide something, an employer may keep setting unattainable expectations, the healthcare system may introduce yet another absurd administrative hurdle, and society as a whole can carry on because women adjust their lives to make up for the failure.

Their small spreadsheets and bro meetings still look incredibly successful since part of the true cost has been shifted to areas where it isn’t visible.

Economists use a term to describe this: externalization. When someone creates a cost, they arrange for part of it to be shifted to another party rather than taking it on themselves. For example, a company pollutes a river and the local community then bears the health consequences. If an employer does not offer family-friendly scheduling, the family has to take on the cost of scheduling. When a school fails to provide certain services, the parent has to step in and provide unpaid coordination. In a healthcare system that has become unmanageable, a daughter ends up losing half a day’s work just fighting with an insurance company.

The original balance sheet may be efficient simply because someone else has become the unpaid department into which the problems are transferred.

Gender violence also turns work outwards. It generates labor for the woman who is trying to stay alive, for the friend who is hiding documents, for the sister who provides a bedroom, for the person who is moving the belongings, for the relative who looks after the children in the aftermath, and for all those who help to rebuild what someone else has damaged.

When disability services fail, relatives end up acting as unpaid coordinators, advocates, drivers, researchers and caregivers.

If public transportation breaks down, families set up their own form of transportation.

When environmental damage makes food, water, health, or housing less secure, families have to do extra work to make up for it.

When queer people lose the support of family or institutions, other people have to create an alternative place for them to go to.

When schools fail children, parents take on the role of buffer between the child and the failure, mothers often bearing the majority of this burden.

For generations, women have taken on the external costs and have since been lauded for their resilience. I appreciate resilience in situations where life presents something truly unavoidable. But I lose some of my admiration for the term when it means an institution can keep failing because a woman has become extremely skilled at making up for it.

At times, resilience is more akin to a compliment than it is because, once everyone has silently agreed not to address what is continuously draining her, that is the language society ends up using.

Women act as a cushion for systems that would appear much more defective if we stopped making adjustments for them; this is where some of our power lies, and where the trap lies.

The points made about ‘family responsibility’ become rather unclear in this context. Families do indeed have responsibilities towards each other; no reasonable society could hand over love, obligation, or kinship to a bureaucracy. The problem arises when institutions take the fact that families exist as a justification for organizing themselves around unlimited private commitment.

For example, a healthcare system can require a family advocate without accounting for the unpaid hours of expertise such advocacy will demand. A school can rely on parental involvement without considering which parent has the flexible time off. An employer can commend family values while still running a system that assumes someone else is always available. ‘Family responsibility’ may refer to real reciprocity, or it can instead be a courteous way of saying that a private woman will take on whatever a public institution is unwilling to bear.

It would be wrong to take away responsibility from families as well.

What is needed is to cease mistaking responsibility for institutional abandonment. All sorts of institutions—such as a village, a household, a school, a place of work, and the public system—can meet part of the same human need. The difficulty arises when one level slowly withdraws and then expects the woman who is closest to the vulnerable person to make up for the shortfall indefinitely.

To speak of women as a single group also does not imply that they hold the same position within this system; we do not.

Factors such as race, class, caste, immigration status, citizenship, disability, sexuality, geography, household wealth, language, political rights, inherited assets, and access to institutions all affect how much of the burden reaches a woman and how much scope she has to refuse it.

Repeated findings from international data on the care economy show that women in low-income, migrant, racialized, and informal-work groups bear a particularly heavy share of unpaid or underpaid care. This is not merely a minor point of the argument; it tells us something about how costs are transmitted.

A woman who has some savings, reliable transport, flexible work, family nearby, legal knowledge, access to healthcare, and a home in her own name is not treated differently when she refuses to do something than a woman whose income supports several generations, who has an uncertain immigration status, whose disability already makes simple arrangements difficult, who lives in a community without reliable services, or who has much less accumulated wealth because previous generations had intentionally been kept from building up any wealth.

Two women can carry out the same act of refusal and yet suffer completely different consequences.

The history of paid care makes the existing hierarchy particularly evident in the United States. Following slavery, discriminatory labor markets meant that Black women had much fewer occupational options than white women, and domestic service was one of the main forms of employment available to them.

The legal framework mirrored this hierarchy: the Social Security Act of 1935 first excluded domestic workers, and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 originally did not extend federal minimum-wage and overtime protections to domestic service.

These exclusions were significant since Black women were disproportionately represented in the kind of work that was left outside the new protections. Wealthier families could hire someone to take on household duties while the women who provided that relief worked in one of the most unprotected areas of the labor market.

The burden within the household did not vanish; instead, race and class shaped which woman had to bear it and under what conditions.

The same system now operates between countries. The International Labor Organization believes that tens of millions of people around the world are engaged in domestic work, the majority of them being women and a large number of them being migrants, with informal employment remaining extremely widespread.

Migration by women means that they can leave their children, elderly relatives, partners and communities in one country to look after children, older adults, provide domestic work or offer health care in another country, so that the care arrangements of one household may depend on another household having to reorganize care over a distance, through relatives and by means of money sent back.

Such transnational care networks do not mean that paid care is necessarily exploitative; on the contrary, they show that if we are to talk seriously about care we must ask who is receiving the time, who is losing it, who has legal protection, who can leave a poor employer, and whose own dependents are being looked after. In contrast, she looks after somebody else’s family.

If the way we respond to female overload is just for wealthy women to shift their exhaustion onto poorer women, then we have not fixed the problem; we have once again transferred the burden downwards and called it empowerment.

It should be included in the economic discussion since racial hierarchy has on several occasions determined which women were able to pass on care and which women were expected to take it up themselves. Enslaved Black women were made to do reproductive, domestic, agricultural, and caring work within systems of ownership that took away their control over their own bodies and their families.

Even after emancipation, discriminatory hiring practices continued to send a large number of Black women into domestic and service jobs. Nevertheless, Black domestic workers did get together and organize: Nannie Helen Burroughs set up institutions that focused on improved training, negotiation, and economic opportunities; Dorothy Bolden organized domestic workers in Atlanta; other women also resisted the degrading day-labor markets and the conditions in households which treated their work as private service rather than as labor entitled to rights.

The work had always been economically essential, and carrying it out in private homes made it easier to ignore the people doing it.

Whenever immigration status, caste, race, colonial history, or poverty results in a group of women whose care can be obtained at a low cost and thus relieves pressure on other people’s households, similar situations arise.

A genuine politics of female labor must not rejoice in the professional emancipation of one group of women while at the same time failing to consider who is doing the washing, looking after the children, attending to the elderly, and taking on the effects of migration, low wages, lost time, or family separation that make that emancipation possible.

Paid care should exist, and people who want or need it should be able to buy it. The criterion to judge this should be whether care workers are given adequate pay, protection, time, status, and bargaining power so that one woman’s freedom does not rest on another woman having to become the next invisible shock absorber.

A genuine women’s movement must therefore take account of who can afford to take part and who cannot and why. If a movement is based on the idea that the woman in the best position to say no should lead, it will end up reinforcing hierarchy even as it praises itself for displaying solidarity.

Patriarchy does not apply female exploitation equally, and neither can resistance share its costs equally. It would be unreasonable to ask the women with the least room to say no to bear the greatest share of the costs incurred by everyone else to make a point.

The system keeps going because everyone expects women to fill the gap. Women may complain, become mentally exhausted, cry in the toilets, make jokes about the mental load, fantasize about leaving, say that they need a village, tell everybody that they are worn out, buy yet another planner, download another calendar, start yet another shared list, and keep announcing for the fiftieth time that something has to change.

As long as dinner still turns up, Grandma still makes it to the doctor, the child still gets collected, the appointment still gets arranged, the groceries still arrive, the employee still turns up, and the institution continues to appear a lot more efficient than it really is, none of these statements necessarily lead to any changes around them.

It is exceptionally admirable for women to take the necessary actions when someone we care about is on the other side of a failure. This trait is beautiful, deeply human, and one reason families and communities can survive awful situations.

At the same time, it can be used terribly. A system can get an incredible amount from people if it knows that they will never voluntarily let the consequences reach the ones they love. Once everyone realizes you will eventually catch the object as a child stands below it, they will keep dropping things.

It is in this context that the idea of responsibility becomes so distorted that women are made to take responsibility for situations whose effects they have already suffered. Better manage your time, choose a better husband, earn more money, ask more clearly, set better boundaries, control your nervous system, pick a better employer, save more, delegate duties, stop doing everything yourself, and build a village.

While some of this advice may be useful in an individual’s personal life, it becomes absolutely bizarre when millions of women are getting self-improvement advice about structural conditions they did not personally create.

A person’s responsibility results from their role, actions, relationships, duties, or agreements. Accountability arises when such responsibility is coupled with relationship, consequence, and the need for repair. Self-accountability refers to the ability to recognize one’s responsibilities and act on them without needing another adult to chase, remind, threaten, or manage one.

None of those actions are equivalent to punishment, and a consequence is not automatically a punishment just because someone dislikes going through it.

If a capable adult doesn’t learn how his own household functions because a woman has looked after it for him for ten years, then the confusion he experiences when she ceases to look after it isn’t a punishment that she has imposed on him; it is a consequence which had earlier been avoided.

In the case of an employee who stops without making a noise about carrying out two extra jobs which she was neither hired for nor paid for and as a result the workplace starts to go wrong, it is not true that she has sabotaged the company; the company had already been relying on unacknowledged labor, and she had stopped hiding that fact.

Where a school has to rely on a large amount of unseen parental administration to operate, making that responsibility visible is not an attack on education.

If a mature man fails to keep his own appointment because some other adult has stopped reminding him, no one has committed violence in causing the missed appointment; it simply happened that Tuesday.

To someone who has long been shielded from the results of their own actions, the idea of accountability may seem like a form of punishment. Women have become so used to taking on those consequences that we may seem harsh when we stop.

However, there is a moral difference involved, since not every consequence should be allowed to drop wherever gravity leads it. Children should not be held responsible for adults’ mistakes. Disabled people should not be deprived of the care they need so that some political argument might be made. An older adult who truly relies on another human being should not be treated as collateral damage. Animals should not be used as teaching tools.

A person in a vulnerable position should not be put at risk so that a senior executive finally becomes aware of a staffing issue.

The aim is to learn how to tell the difference between protecting vulnerable people and protecting capable adults and powerful institutions from the consequences of their own failures, since those two things are not at all the same.

We do not need to become cruel; we need to be much more specific about who exactly is the object of our care, whose responsibilities we have taken on, and what remains unchanged as a result of our ongoing interference.

Millions of women feel that they have a personal personality defect due to structural overload. A woman will buy a new planner because she believes she is disorganized. Another thinks that she has married the wrong man. A third considers that she is not succeeding as a mother. Another believes that she needs to earn more money.

Yet another supposes that everyone else has already worked out how to be an adult and therefore concludes something must be wrong with her. Some women tell themselves they should be more grateful since someone somewhere has it worse, and that is an incredibly effective way to ensure that no one ever asks why so many women are drowning at the same time.

Women who live in different governments, in various religions, in different family systems, in different economies, in different racial and class groups, and under different cultural expectations all continue to describe similar cases of overload; at that point we must stop diagnosing each woman separately and begin to examine the environment. It is not the case that millions of women have, at the same time, lost the ability to manage their time; rather, too few people carry out an excessive amount of necessary work.

Research into the cognitive aspects of household labor provides one quantifiable element of that environment. It shows that the invisible element of planning and supervising domestic duties can be more unequally distributed than the physical tasks themselves, and that a greater cognitive load is linked to stress, burnout, worse mental health, and strain in relationships among mothers.

It does not follow that every tired woman is tired for the same reason or that all households operate in the same way; what it does mean is that the invisible structure which women continually refer to is not merely imaginary simply because it is hard to photograph.

I am in a position to say this having devoted a large part of my professional career to teaching various aspects of care, regulation, health, movement, and fortitude. Breathing exercises are useful; somatic work can be useful; therapy can be useful, too. Meditation, sleep, movement, nourishment, organization, and support for the nervous system are all useful.

However, they turn into convenient nonsense when an institution keeps on causing harm and then asks the individual who is suffering to regulate herself more effectively to be able to tolerate it. It may be possible to survive long enough to bring about change by breathing through something, but being made to breathe through structural failure indefinitely is not liberation.

At times resilience amounts to getting women back to work so quickly that no one has to wonder why so many of us continually push ourselves to the limit.

When the hidden workload becomes visible, the political issue is altered. The question then ceases to be whether women deserve praise for all they do. Although recognition is pleasant, it doesn’t redistribute time, money, ownership, risk, or decision-making power.

The harder question is why social systems that rely so heavily on women’s labor grant women so little control over the conditions in which that labor takes place.

By using the term control, I mean something more extensive than the kind of control economists generally have in mind when they talk about formal economic control. Formal control is mainly found in ownership, law, investment, management, and political institutions, where men still have great advantages.

The kind of power I have in mind is that which arises out of dependency, since anything that a system cannot function without holds a support role whether or not anyone formally acknowledges it.

Women earn money while also carrying out unpaid labor. They look after the home, bring up the next generation of workers, look after people who are too young, old, ill or disabled to take part fully in paid work, influence the way the household spends its money, keep up the social networks and make the arrangements which enable other people to keep turning up for their jobs as if these arrangements had occurred by magic.

The various forms of power involved in paid work, unpaid care, household management, consumer behavior, reproduction and community organization are not the same. They do not have to be. Together, they place women at many crossroads through which ordinary human life continues.

Women seldom have the opportunity to experience such leverage together since it is spread out over millions of private situations—such as kitchens, workplaces, schools, grocery stores, hospitals, nursing homes, farms, factories, churches, mosques, temples, apartment buildings, suburban neighborhoods, the lines at schools when picking up children, family text chains, and group chats.

When looked at individually, the situation seems like exhaustion; but when considered as a group, it starts to feel like part of the infrastructure.

I keep coming back to the image of the lioness in my other writings for precisely this reason. Everyone talks about the lion because the lion has the mane, the crown, the symbolism, and the entire fucking brand. Yet it is lionesses who carry out most of the hunting, who cooperate a great deal, who bring up the cubs, who defend the territory, and who make a substantial contribution to the pride’s survival.

For a remarkably long time, women have been trained to admire the roar while carrying out the work.

The natural world includes almost all the possible forms of sex, reproduction, hierarchy, cooperation, competition, mating, caregiving, and social organization, but human beings always mix up visibility with importance.

The most noticeable organism is not necessarily the one that holds an ecosystem together.

The person who is standing at the podium is not necessarily the one in charge of the community.

The person who signs the paycheques is not necessarily the one who makes the workforce possible.

The person whose name is on an asset is not necessarily the only person whose involvement keeps that asset valuable.

We realize that systems are made up of relationships just as much as they are of the visible organisms. An ecosystem is in good condition even if the relationships beneath it are already breaking down. If you remove enough pollinators, decomposers, fungi, microorganisms, seed dispersers, keystone species, reproductive relationships, and various forms of care, the visible landscape will eventually change as well.

For centuries, we have looked at the trees while neglecting the mycelium.

Women have traditionally acted like social mycelium, linking people, transferring resources, passing on information, mending relationships, providing for those in need, spotting when things are going wrong, and keeping in place the conditions necessary for everyone else to go on living.

Throughout history, society has wanted women to carry out these roles in a quiet, generous, private way and without attracting much notice of the huge amount of human life that has been held together because of them. It is remarkable, really, the timeline that has developed.

Women do not need to agree on political issues if we are to acknowledge all of this. A conservative mother and a progressive mother may disagree on questions such as government, religion, education, abortion, marriage, family structure, and almost every other topic that cable news has prepared them to argue about. Yet, they will still know exactly what occurs when childcare breaks down on a Tuesday morning.

Whether a woman wishes to stay at home with her children or wants to work full-time is normally portrayed as placing her on opposite sides of a cultural debate, even though both of them are facing the same fundamental economic reality—that care is essential, time-consuming, expensive, unevenly supported, and full of uncertainties which have to be borne by someone.

The woman who stays at home is told she is not working because she doesn’t get a paycheck, while the woman who works outside the home is expected to act as if her caregiving duties never happen. In both cases, care is not respected; in the first instance, it is dismissed because it is unpaid, and in the second, it is regarded as an inconvenience that should somehow vanish before the employee comes.

A woman can strongly believe in traditional marriage and still believe that mothers ought to have economic security. A religious woman can place great importance on the family and realize that a woman should be able to leave a violent home without ending up homeless. A politically conservative woman can acknowledge that women do an unreasonable amount of unpaid work.

On the other hand, a politically progressive woman can admit that passing another piece of legislation doesn’t create the kinds of relationships, trust, neighborhood knowledge, and local human infrastructure that people in fact need. The material reality is there whether or not we all use the same fucking vocabulary to describe it.

Women have been split into various political groups that usually have very little connection with the ordinary material conditions of our lives. We are led to discuss which sort of woman is properly carrying out womanhood while the actual workload remains in the middle of the room, unchanged.

The stay-at-home mother is labelled as dependent, the working mother is described as selfish, the childfree woman is said to be incomplete, the single mother is blamed for carrying out alone what two people were supposedly meant to be doing together, the grandmother ends up with free childcare, the eldest daughter takes on the role of family administrator, and the wife is the one expected to know everything about everybody else’s life before being accused of nagging when she asks another adult to get involved.

Different political positions continue to result in remarkably similar fucking workloads.

It doesn’t follow that motherhood determines what it means to be a woman, nor does it mean that women who have no children belong to some inferior category of women. They don’t. Women who have no children work, look after others, create, organize, support their family members, teach, heal, keep up friendships, build communities, and take part in the same political economy.

Reproduction is important since all societies depend on it, not because every woman is required to have children.

Care matters because humans need it, not because every woman is obliged to provide it.

Any future that is based on matrilineal principles and deserves to be built must be able to recognize the reality of female bodies and reproductive labor without reducing female authority to motherhood.

There is an obvious question that arises if women are in so many load-bearing positions: why have we not made better use of that advantage?

The reason has almost nothing to do with weakness and much more to do with risk. Being indispensable is not equivalent to being free; a person can be essential to a system without being able to negotiate with it.

A woman who is living with domestic violence cannot surely state the next morning that she is stopping doing household work.

A woman whose partner controls the money might not have enough economic independence to refuse without risk.

If a single mother missed one shift, it could mean she wouldn’t be able to buy groceries.

A caregiver cannot just leave someone who is physically dependent on her.

A woman without secure immigration status may face risks that do not affect a neighbor who is a citizen.

A disabled woman may have a different range of practical limitations.

A woman in a rural area may in theory have a legal right to leave but, in reality, will have no shelter, no attorney, no hospital, no public transportation, and no safe housing within a reasonable distance.

The distinction lies between dependency power and bargaining power. Even if the system relies on your labor, your ability to bargain stays mostly theoretical if everyone knows that you cannot safely stop providing it. A resource has little negotiating power if those who use it know it will still be available, no matter how badly they treat the person who produces it.

It is also at this point that a discussion about a women’s strike becomes serious or foolish. A serious campaign can’t start with someone announcing a date on Instagram and then asking all women to show their loyalty by taking the same risk.

Any action organized in that way would reinforce the hierarchy it aims to overcome. The women who have the least money, the least security, the fewest resources, and the greatest responsibility for caregiving would bear the highest personal cost, allowing women with more security to take part in a striking public display. That is completely nonsense.

Some sisters have money tied over their heads, women who would leave here tonight if there were a safe place for them to go, mothers who can’t afford to miss a single shift, grandmothers who have to support entire families on their fixed incomes, undocumented women, disabled women, women looking after disabled children, women who are isolated in rural areas, women who have no reliable means of transportation, and women who have never had a bank account with money that is solely under their control.

If collective power does not involve including those women from the very start, then we have completely missed the point.

The suggestion that women could show their social and economic importance by stopping work is not merely theoretical. On October 24, 1975, the vast majority of Icelandic women took part in what was later called Women’s Day Off by withdrawing from paid work and from much of the domestic work and childcare that had normally been expected of them. Schools, businesses, service establishments, and industries that relied on women’s labor suffered disruption.

Men began taking their children to work and had to face responsibilities that had previously been easy to ignore while women handled them in silence. The country did not vanish for twenty-four hours, and thus dependency became obvious.

The next year, Iceland introduced equal-rights legislation, and five years later, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir became the world’s first woman elected president in a democratic election. It would be absurd to say that one particular event was the sole cause of those developments or eliminated gender inequality; Icelandic women, on the contrary, kept on organizing since inequality had not gone away.

This is why the example is more valuable than a less striking one. A striking action may reveal an underlying structure, change how the public understands an issue, show the potential for effect, and modify people’s beliefs about what is politically feasible; it cannot replace the more gradual work that comes after.

Polish women showed another kind of collective pressure on Black Monday in 2016, when large-scale protests and strikes were held against a proposal which would have introduced a near-total ban on abortion. As a result, the lawmakers voted to reject the plan.

In 2018, Spain expanded the action by organizing a feminist strike that specifically involved employment, care, education, and consumption, rather than considering only formal paid work as the area in which women have influence. Millions took part.

This fact matters. Although women are workers, they also act as buyers, manage households, make decisions, look after people, organize events, volunteer, carry out administrative tasks, and are the ones who notice that the shoes no longer fit, that the refrigerator is empty, that a prescription needs refilling, that a birthday is next week, and that someone really does need to book an appointment with the dentist.

Paid labor, unpaid care, household administration, and consumer behavior are not the same kind of power; they are connected points of leverage within the same economic system. What concerns me is what happens when women stop seeing these different aspects as separate parts of their private lives.

By saying “A Day Without a Woman,” I am not referring to women suddenly dropping all their responsibilities on Tuesday because someone has produced a Canva graphic and picked a hashtag. What I have in mind is a carefully planned withdrawal so the demonstration itself mirrors the kind of world we claim to want to build.

While a typical strike focuses on paid production, a wider women’s withdrawal could reveal the infrastructure underlying paid production by temporarily eliminating forms of labor which usually remain unseen since women carry out this kind of work before anyone else has to notice.

Once it has been prepared, a well-organized twenty-four-hour withdrawal might involve paid work when this is both safe and strategically advantageous, discretionary buying, carrying out household duties for non-disabled adults, offering voluntary labor, unnecessary scheduling, giving reminders, smoothing things over, and all the other quiet kinds of labor that normally stop dysfunction from showing itself.

Care for those who need it will still be provided. Children, people with disabilities, frail older adults, the sick, animals, and anyone else who is genuinely dependent on another person should not be turned into collateral damage so that adults with more power can learn a political lesson.

The ethical boundary is not between giving care and not giving care; it is between protecting vulnerability and indefinitely exempting capable adults or organizations from responsibilities that belong to them.

Anything that can safely be left undone may well be left that way.

A capable adult can find his own keys, book his own appointment, remember the birthday, choose what is to be eaten for dinner, find the school form, buy any item that has run out, and look after his household all without having to call a woman every twenty minutes.

Employers can see what takes place when the woman who remembers everything fails to turn up.

Schools can face up to the fact that a large amount of unpaid parental labor has been quietly supporting them.

Businesses can watch what occurs when women deliberately cut back on their spending.

And households can at last realize the difference between a home which looks after itself and one in which the work needed for maintenance has become invisible.

It must remain uncompleted long enough to be seen. That is not a form of punishment; it is a temporary halt to consequence-management for people and organizations who can take responsibility for themselves.

When a capable husband finds out that he does not know the school timetable because his wife has looked after it for six years, the confusion he feels is not something she has caused him; it is merely information. If an employer finds out that three outside jobs had been going on within one woman’s paid position, the disruption is not an act of revenge; it is information. And if a volunteer organization finds that a woman had been putting in twelve hours of unpaid administrative work each week, the disorder caused is not evidence that she was selfish for stopping; it shows that the organization had relied on unseen labor.

Taking the figure of $11 trillion for unpaid care as just an example, if you spread that annual amount over the course of a year, you end up with tens of billions of dollars worth of unpaid care each day before anyone even tries to work out the disruption in the paid sector or any changes in consumer spending.

This is not a prediction of the cost of a single global women’s strike; the actual calculation would have to make assumptions regarding participation, substitution, labor markets, timing, geography, and exactly which kind of work ceased to take place. It does, however, help us grasp the magnitude of the value embedded in the kind of work we so often talk about as if women were merely being kind and carrying half the world on their shoulders for no reason at all.

Civilization doesn’t need to end by the time dinner is served. Anyone can break a system, and women have already spent a large part of human history coping with the consequences of system failures. We locate the children, find Grandma, get the medication, stretch the food, work out where everyone is sleeping, arrange transportation, contact relatives, make lists, clean up, and then rebuild the whole thing. So why should women be left with even more mess to clean up?

A Day Without a Woman should be seen as a form of controlled exposure. During the twenty-four-hour period in question, the machine is not permitted to feign independence. The demonstration shows just how much of the apparently routine operation had already been paid for by women’s unpaid labor, their foreseen attention, and their readiness to take on the consequences before they became obvious.

Destruction would not have taught us much; we obtain evidence through exposure.

We can all imagine the scene from all the movies where the villagers eventually break and flee after being attacked by the evil-doers wielding fire and pitchforks. Think about what it is that they have which we do not. Hint: it’s not the damned pitchforks.

They have a real village to walk with. (and okay the pitchforks too)

We must have the necessary infrastructure in place beneath us if we are to withdraw infrastructure from everyone else. This kind of infrastructure can involve emergency funds to cover lost wages, food networks, childcare exchanges, transportation facilities, access to legal advice, resources for cases of domestic violence, temporary housing, community kitchens, the sharing of skills, support from the neighbourhood, assistance for the disabled, backup care for the elderly, professional connections, and a sufficient amount of local knowledge so that women already know what resources are available before they find themselves in a crisis.

You don’t need to wait for a huge organization to appear from heaven to do all this. Instead, you can start by working out who has a car, who can look after the children, who has room in the freezer, who has a spare room, who knows the shelters, who understands family law, who can fix things, who owns tools, who knows how to stretch food, who can cook for twenty people, who speaks another language, who can go with someone to the hospital, who can lend money, who understands forms, who knows about the local government, who has access through professional networks, and who knows some useful person.

These things may seem trivial simply because modern societies have conditioned us to think of infrastructure as physical buildings, large institutions, non-profit organizations, government schemes, or technological platforms. What actually counts as infrastructure is simply what enables a system to carry on when one of its parts fails.

A true village therefore has only a small connection with matters of beauty. It isn’t about twelve mothers wearing linen as their children play barefoot in some photogenic backyard.

A village is based on functional redundancy: if one woman falls ill, the household won’t collapse; if one mother needs help, her children won’t have to suffer as a result. One caregiver can take a break. A family can lose their income without immediately being evicted from their home. A woman can leave a violent home without having to sleep in her car. Saying no does not automatically put the safety of all the people you love at risk.

In this way, individual vulnerability becomes collective leverage. When a woman refuses something, she has very little power to negotiate if that refusal puts her food, housing, transportation, children, healthcare, immigration security, or personal safety at risk. But if you give her a place to go, the whole situation is different. The village provides not only emotional support but also redistributes the power to say no.

That is also the reason why the village is already victorious even if a national strike never takes place; a woman who has an emergency fund, reliable childcare, access to a ride-sharing service, local legal knowledge, a network of people who will look after her after she has given birth, a place where she can safely sleep, professional connections, competent adults nearby, and five individuals who will truly answer the phone at midnight is already in a more material position than she was earlier.

Infrastructure is not ammunition kept for a future protest; it is a embodiment of the world we are allegedly trying to build.

A durable power also has to shift sideways before everyone starts looking upwards. Women need relationships at the block, in the neighborhood, at school, at the workplace, in the religious community, at the city level, and at the county level since that is where ordinary life really takes place. Childcare fails at a local level. Housing disappears at a local level. Food is distributed at a local level. Shelters either exist or fail at a local level. People need transportation locally. School boards make their decisions locally. When somebody needs help at midnight, the president is probably not going to turn up.

We devote an extraordinary amount of energy to looking at national institutions while failing to appreciate the influence that exists in the places where we really live; local power is in no way insignificant when ordinary life is local.

Women must start building this, since no one is going to build it for us. It doesn’t follow that women should be expected to carry out all the labor needed to build the alternative as well. I don’t want to avoid an economy which relies on women overworking by setting up a women’s movement that itself relies on women overworking. That would be an amazingly stupid way of reproducing the very system we were attempting to change.

Men act as husbands, fathers, brothers, sons, friends, neighbours, co-workers, employers, union members, teachers, attorneys, contractors, nurses, doctors, mechanics, cooks, organizers, business owners, individuals who have trucks, those who have tools, people who have spare rooms, people who have storage space, people who have money, people who possess institutional knowledge, and people who know other useful individuals.

Those who already grasp the political argument do so, and some are engaged in labor organizing, civil liberties, decentralization, local food systems, mutual aid, anti-war activities, community resilience, environmental work, religious service, union activities, or other anti-establishment initiatives. To assume that all men are helpless husbands who merely need a grocery list is not only incorrect but also a poor strategy.

Anyone who claims to be against concentrated power should be particularly interested in this issue. If you are worried about corporate control, monopoly situations, authoritarian governments, surveillance, wage exploitation, weak supply chains, institutional corruption, industrial food systems, or the ever more strange extent to which ordinary people depend on massive systems that they have no means of influencing, then it should be clear that care infrastructure is not a minor feminist concern.

People cannot truly stop cooperating with systems they cannot survive without materially.

When an employer is abusive, and the prospect of missing two paychecks could jeopardize your housing, it is hard to resist. When childcare decides whether half the adults present can attend the meeting, it is difficult to challenge the institution. When you want to leave a hazardous home but have no place to sleep, it is difficult to do so. When no one knows the farmer, the mechanic, the nurse, the teacher, the lawyer, the carpenter, the cook, the elder, the organizer, or the neighbor who lives ten houses away, it is hard to build resilient local economies.

It is difficult to decentralize power while every ordinary human need still has to go through a central institution. It is extraordinarily difficult to establish an anti-establishment movement while assuming that women will continue to provide the unpaid reproductive, domestic, emotional, administrative, and caring infrastructure beneath the revolution.

If the political theory you advance depends on women remaining economically vulnerable, socially isolated, burdened with unpaid care, and always available to suffer out every consequence. At the same time, the men deal with the establishment, then you have not really produced an alternative to the established order—instead you have copied its labor model within the home.

If you value resilient communities, then go ahead and help to build such communities.

If you support decentralization, take steps to develop local capacity.

If you believe in labor power, you must recognize that unpaid labor is still labor even though your wife carried out that labor.

If you think that families are important, make sure that your family doesn’t end up structurally relying on one tired woman who has to remember all the details.

If you believe in freedom, you should realize one of the most fundamental truths about freedom—that a person who cannot safely say no is not really free.

Men do not need to feel guilty, to be defensive, to act in a performative way, or to become the latest self-appointed advocates for women. Neither do they need to waste time sitting outside the project waiting for a woman to draw up a color-coded volunteer schedule. Just listen before taking over; don’t make yourself the central figure.

The word ‘matriarch’ is almost as badly misunderstood as ‘responsibility’ is. If I speak of a matriarchal or matrifocal reorganization, I am not suggesting female supremacy, permanent female management, or a household in which a wife is finally given the executive position for the work she has already been doing for free.

It would be absolutely ridiculous for any tired married woman to be dragging herself through the Motherload simply because her secret wish is to become the official chief operating officer of all the people she loves. That would be the most outrageous scam imaginable. .. and quite frankly, none of us wanna do that shit anymore.

The hidden load has to become visible so that it can be redistributed, not formally assigned to women forever. Female authority is important because women need to have authority over their own bodies, their time, their money, their work, their safety, their relationships, their reproductive lives and the systems which depend on us; female centrality is important because institutions based on human life cannot treat the people who do most of the reproductive and caring work as being on the periphery.

Neither idea requires men to become subordinates or women to continue being managers.

We are not beginning from a position of neutrality either. In most homes, the woman has already acquired more practical knowledge from having more experience: she is familiar with the school systems, the doctors, allergies, relatives, schedules, food habits, clothing sizes, daily routines, the unseen deadlines, and the effects of missing things.

It would be absurd to pretend that this expertise does not exist to achieve immediate equality; it would be just as absurd to regard it as evidence that she should remain the permanent owner of the system.

Women will therefore have to take the lead in various aspects of the transition by naming the invisible work, identifying who currently owns it, clarifying what true safety demands, transferring the knowledge, ceasing to intercept the manageable consequences, and setting boundaries long enough for new competence to emerge.

To take the lead in a transition is not the same as being in charge of the result. The change is likely to be unpleasant at times. Men will find themselves in situations where they have to start from scratch in areas which society has allowed them to delegate, and women will have to see capable adults carry out tasks less efficiently than people who have done them a thousand times.

Someone might pack the wrong snack, misinterpret a routine, take twice as long, forget a form, prepare a meal that nobody really likes, realize upon arriving at a place that he should have brought something, or organize the pantry in a way that’s like a fucking psychopath.

Women will at times have to tell the difference between ‘this is actually unsafe’ and ‘this is not the way I would do it’, while men will have to distinguish between ‘I am learning’ and ‘she will eventually save me if I wait long enough’. Women can’t hand over responsibility simply because men promise to do it exactly as women would, since that ensures that women will always remain in control; men can’t be given unlimited leniency for repeated negligence since everyone has agreed to regard it as a learning curve.

Ownership involves anticipation, execution, monitoring, and repair. If you set up a manageable problem when you are learning, then you are taking part in solving it. That is the way in which competence is developed.

I place less importance on a mathematical 50/50 than on equitable sharing of responsibilities and full ownership. Pregnancy can’t be divided up. Birth can’t be divided up. Breastfeeding, when it takes place, also can’t be divided up.

People’s bodies, employment situations, disability status, income levels, skills, and different stages of life are all different. A pregnant woman and her partner don’t have to do the same amount of physical work to show that they support equality. A relationship can be unequal in the tasks shared and yet fair in the pressure shared, and it can appear equal in tasks while still being extremely unequal in ownership.

If he does half of what she assigns but she still has to anticipate, make decisions, keep an eye on things, and make repairs, the chore chart might show fifty-fifty while the Motherload stays hers. The right question is whether the total pressure is distributed in a way that accounts for real capacity and whether one adult is still left responsible for managing the other adult’s participation.

There is also an embodied learning issue which ordinary internet discussions about gender tend to reduce to statements concerning ‘wiring’. The longer a person has been expecting problems, the quicker they become at spotting them; the more often a person is punished by life for forgetting, the more alert they become; and a default responder learns to keep some of her attention on hand in case something goes wrong.

Over time, these patterns can become so automatic that they seem innate, particularly when they are built on the demands of reproduction, disrupted sleep, exposure to threats, social expectations, and thousands of repetitions. This does not mean they constitute immutable female biology; it means experience can train one’s attention so deeply that any attempt to redistribute responsibilities must go beyond simply reallocating tasks on paper.

A woman who has for many years had to deal with the consequences might still carry on with her monitoring even after some other adult has taken responsibility. In contrast, a man who has long been made aware of the situation may at first fail to anticipate it, since anticipation was never expected of him.

In both cases, people have to put up with the uncomfortable phase in which the previous pattern is no longer working completely, but the new one has not yet become automatic. Trust develops through evidence — that is, another adult notices, takes action, follows through and makes repairs so frequently that it ceases to be necessary to remain constantly on guard.

Likewise, competence changes in the same way, through a level of responsibility which is genuine enough for feedback to reach the person responsible. Asking women to ‘let go’ when no actual changes take place shifts responsibility onto whoever is beneath the surface; on the other hand, expecting men to become competent without ever experiencing manageable consequences deprives them of the very kind of experience that competence demands.

The fact that the middle stage represents no moral failure should be noted, since it occurs when a system which had depended on the overdevelopment of one person and the underdevelopment of another is reorganized in real time.

The aim is to achieve mature interdependence, which means having many competent adults who can look after ordinary life; children who more than one dependable caregiver surrounds surrounds; older people being supported through wider networks; women no longer being required to be indispensable to be regarded as valuable; and men taking part in the maintenance of human life as full adults, rather than merely acting as occasional helpers.

A fully grown woman ought not to have to be indispensable to be valued, and a mature man should not need a woman to remain indispensable and to function.

The fieldwork that comes next is deliberately left free. If the point is that women need material infrastructure before it becomes safe to refuse or before collective power becomes usable, then I’d be a stupid bitch to keep this behind a paywall.

You should use it, adapt it to your own situation, and build on what is already available to you.

The argument only proves its value when it affects what people can actually do; a protest checklist for next Tuesday, a script to shout at a senator, or a graphic retweeted by people who know about zero neighbors will not generate any bargaining power. Instead, relationships, local knowledge, an economic buffer, care redundancy, and repeated practice can.

If collective withdrawal is ever to be more than just a dramatic show, the infrastructure which makes refusal survivable had better exist before the date arrives.

Speak to one hundred real people who are around you. Visit the playground, the library, the laundromat, the gym, the park, the grocery store, the church, the mosque, the temple, the community center, the area where children are picked up from school, the coffee shop, the farmers’ market, the break room at your place of work, or any other place where people still occupy the physical surroundings. Talk to your neighbors even if you have lived next to them for three years and all you know about them is the make and model of their car.

Don’t start by saying, ‘Would you like to join my international women’s strike?’ Never say that to someone who is folding underwear in a laundromat. Just have a normal fucking conversation.

You’re aiming to get a proper understanding of the human environment – that is, to find out who is isolated, who is connected, who has children, who looks after an elder, who is disabled, who has the means to do things, who needs assistance, who knows all the other people, who owns something useful, who has some odd skills, who has time and who has absolutely no time, and where the same problems keep reoccurring.

Have conversations mainly with women since the question at the heart of the matter is women’s material conditions, but don’t pass over useful men as if they were ornamental shrubs.

Look for the father who really parents, the retired man with a truck, the union organizer, the attorney married to one of your friends, the mechanic everyone trusts. The neighbor knows all the people on the street, the teacher who understands the district, the man who can construct a wheelchair ramp, the one who already spends his weekends assisting with people’s moves, and the anti-establishment friend who has been talking about local resilience for ten years and is now going to find out whether he actually means it.

Find out what is difficult right now. Find out what keeps on failing. Find out what people are already doing for one another. Find out what they are capable of doing. Find out what they wish did exist. Find out whom else you should get to meet. Before coming up with your own branded solution, look into the informal systems that already exist.

The first hundred conversations aren’t about acquiring members; they are about carrying out field research.

Most community projects end up making one of two errors: they view everyone as in need, or they see everyone as a volunteer. In reality, most people are both. A mother who desperately needs childcare on Tuesday may be able to cook three extra dinners on Friday. The older woman who can’t drive at night may know all the local organizations and exactly who to contact if any problems arise. A woman with very little money might be a good translator, gardener, bookkeeper, sewist, nurse, teacher, baker, organizer, caregiver, or the person who can somehow get six children to calm the fuck down in thirty seconds.

• For care: childcare, picking up children from school, accompanying elderly people, providing meals, offering support for people with disabilities, helping after childbirth, looking after pets, and giving relief to caregivers.

• For transportation: reliable vehicles, car seats, larger cars, mobility-accessible options, moving equipment, and emergency trips.

• For space: spare rooms, garages, kitchens, freezers, storage areas, meeting rooms, backyards, offices outside normal business hours, and religious buildings.

• For knowledge of various systems: lawyers, nurses, teachers, social workers, accountants, therapists, mechanics, contractors, translators, organizers, public employees, union members, grant writers, business owners, and the unusual individuals who can handle government forms without wanting to throw the computer into the road.

• For food, technology, communication, political relationships, knowledge of the labor market, local history, and practical repairs.

Don’t just ask what people can offer. Instead, find out what they can reliably be said to own. Ownership is not the same as availability. Someone who states that ‘I can sometimes drive somebody’ is useful. But someone who says ‘I will keep the list of emergency transport arrangements and see that there are always two backups’ is said to own a system.

Communities become durable when responsibility is assigned to specific individuals without becoming all concentrated in one indispensable woman.

Also, PLEASE DO NOT create a giant creepy database of everybody’s private life. Collect only what people knowingly share, keep sensitive information private, and separate general resource information from anything that could endanger somebody if exposed.

You are building enough collective memory that every emergency does not begin with twenty people asking, ‘Does anybody know somebody who can help?’ You are not building a surveillance system.

Don’t just rush to put five hundred strangers into a single group chat; believe me. Such large groups are very good at generating 723629348972 notifications regarding absolutely fucking nothing. At the same time, the person who actually needs help gets lost in a thirty-seven-message debate over where everyone should order matching shirts.

Start by forming smaller circles, since a small number of families living on the same block have a more direct effect on each other’s daily lives than do two hundred people spread across a whole county.

Parents at one school can set up a childcare backup system.

Women living in one apartment complex can establish a pantry shelf and an emergency ride service.

People who work together in one hospital, warehouse, school, office, restaurant, or gym are aware of the overlapping problems that people outside the group might not be aware of.

Religious communities usually already have kitchens, meeting spaces, elders, transportation arrangements, and regular routines that can be used to provide material support.

There is a reason why some groups should be women-only since women need opportunities to talk about matters such as safety, money, relationships, their bodies, violence, or political strategy without having to work out the impact of men being present. In other cases, the group does not need to be women-only. A neighborhood resilience network could include any trustworthy person from the neighborhood who is willing to take on such a role.

The issue isn’t whether men are permitted to enter the village; the question is whether the village has sufficient boundaries to protect female safety and authority in situations where those factors matter.

Join the small circles together horizontally when they are working. Don’t rebuild the same damn pyramid that you’re complaining about.

Without considering money, any serious discussion about women refusing requests cannot take place. Women’s economic dependence is one of the primary reasons why they are unable to say no; for one woman missing a day’s work might be merely symbolic, while for another it could make the difference between being able to pay the rent and not being able to do so.

For some women leaving a partner may be emotionally difficult, but for others it would be impossible from a financial point of view. Begin to earn money before an emergency arises.

When ten people each pay ten dollars a month, they produce something which had not existed before; a bigger network could do a great deal more. You should decide in advance what the fund is to be used for, so that when a crisis arises the rules won’t have to be determined then—such as missed wages, groceries, medication, transportation, temporary housing, prevention of utility shutoffs, emergency repairs, identity documents, legal advice, deposits, or the immediate expenses associated with leaving an unsafe home.

If the network becomes large enough, then the fund should have both a rapid-response element and longer-term grants.

Do not establish safeguards that would turn the fund into another organization in which a woman had to publicly demonstrate that she was suffering adequately to persuade a committee that she deserved assistance. It is important to respect privacy. Transparent management is important too. Humiliation does not enhance financial accountability.

A man need not control the fund to make a material contribution.

For instance, a man who holds the view that women should be able to leave abusive homes can donate money to the infrastructure that enables them to do so. A man who thinks workers should have bargaining power can help set up the means for wage replacement. A man who believes that concentrated institutions exert too much power over ordinary people can help ordinary people build up a sufficient buffer so that they can say no. But a husband who makes public donations to women’s causes while his wife has no independent access to the family’s money has missed the fucking point.

Individuals concerned about providing food for their children are not free to take part in labor strikes, political opposition, fleeing violence, or most other activities.

Since food is a form of infrastructure, it is necessary to find out where inexpensive and free food is available in your area—such as food pantries, mutual-aid fridges, religious organizations, school food schemes, rescue groups, community gardens, discounted produce, local farms, and businesses that regularly have surplus that can be used.

Set up your own reserves. For example, share pantry shelves, prepare meals in bulk through group purchases, arrange meal trains, take turns at cooking, establish community gardens, and practice food preservation.

Make a list of the people who can cook for twenty, a list of those who can deliver the meals, and a list of any dietary and allergy concerns that are relevant to your immediate circle—without the need to create excessive medical records for everyone.

You need to gain experience feeding people before a strike takes place; if your network can’t arrange a dinner for three families, it isn’t ready to support hundreds of people during a disruption.

Men are capable of cooking. I realize that this fact might undermine Western civilization. That said, they can grow food, go shopping for it, store it, preserve it, deliver it, wash the dishes, organize a meal train, look after the pantry, or learn how to feed the children that they themselves have helped to bring about, without having to text a woman to find out where the pasta is.

Since men eat roughly every goddamn day, I am at ease in saying that they are suitable for the food infrastructure section.

Any women’s strike that fails to account for care has completely misinterpreted the whole argument. It’s not true that children become political collateral just because their mothers go on strike. Disabled people still require help. Older people still need their medication and their meals. Animals still need food and water.

Our task is to draw the line between essential dependent care and the huge amount of unnecessary compensatory work that women carry out for non-disabled adults and for failing systems. Protecting the vulnerable is necessary; protecting every capable person from inconvenience is not.

Find reliable individuals who are willing to take part in childcare exchanges, picking up children from school, providing companionship for the elderly, delivering meals, offering support after giving birth, looking after people with disabilities, providing transportation, and covering periods when a caregiver is unable to look after the person in need.

Care should be based on qualifications, consent, trust, safety, accessibility, and the real needs of the individual receiving care. Not everyone willing is suitable for every kind of task. Having redundant arrangements does not mean compromising safety standards just because someone has volunteered.

Men play a major role in this section. Fathers aren’t merely backup childcare; they are parents. Adult sons also have aging parents of their own. Husbands occupy houses. Brothers can offer transportation. Male friends can bring food. Men can learn about disability support. They can be made aware of the school, the pediatrician, the allergies, the routines, the medication schedule, the clothing sizes, the emotional patterns, and where the extra damn socks are kept.

The idea behind A Day Without a Woman should not be that women have to put in forty-eight hours of double work so that men can manage during the twenty-four hours when women are said to be withdrawn.

If a capable man finds that he is unable to cope without a woman’s emergency binder, the solution is not to have an improved binder the following year; it is instead the consequence that reveals the gap, and then he comes to understand the system.

Every women’s network should know what happens if somebody says, ‘I need to leave tonight.’

Learn the domestic-violence resources in your area. Know which shelters accept children, whether they accommodate pets, what identification they require, whether somebody can reach them without a car, whether the local shelter routinely fills, where legal aid exists, who can accompany somebody to court, and where important documents or emergency belongings can be stored safely.

You shouldn’t wait until a woman is in the middle of trying to leave during one of the worst nights of her life to start searching the internet; a woman in crisis doesn’t need twelve people sending her links they found twenty minutes ago. What she needs is someone who already understands the available options.

It may become apparent that the official resources are not sufficient. That’s a good thing; what’s good is that you realize this.

The gap shows you exactly what kinds of services to set up: a fund for hotels, temporary care for pets, secure storage for documents, emergency transportation that crosses county lines, a legal clinic, language support, disability-accessible shelter options, a list of locksmiths, storage space, or reliable individuals who can move your belongings quickly.

Reputable men can be of some use in certain ways, for example by transporting animals, moving furniture, giving legal or logistical advice, changing locks when it is both lawful and appropriate, providing secure storage, accompanying a person when another adult’s presence would increase safety, or looking after another man so that the woman does not have to.

The key term here is “reputable”. It does not follow that the right political approach will make anyone safe.

Social media is useful for reaching people, but it should not be relied on as the only means of communication. Algorithms shift, accounts vanish, platforms crash, posts get buried, and people delete apps. Moreover, not everyone uses the same platform, and the individual who needs help most might not be online at all.

Set up overlapping communication systems such as group texts, email lists, phone trees, printed resource sheets, contact cards, neighborhood boards, physical meeting places, or a combination of these.

Make sure you know who is responsible for checking on the elderly, who can contact households without smartphones, what languages are commonly spoken in the area, and what accessibility requirements people have.

Use union networks, religious networks, workplace channels, civic organizations, local businesses, and any available technical skills, without giving up control just because someone has access.

A working network should not rely on one woman having all the information on her phone. If she falls ill, moves house, burns out or switches off her phone since everyone has driven her completely mad, the system should still function.

Intentionally carry out little tasks before trying to do anything big. Arrange a childcare appointment for one mother.

Provide food for a family following a birth or a death. Assist someone with a move. Raise money for a utility bill. Arrange transportation when a car breaks down. Help an older neighbor with their garden. Organize a clothing exchange. Get groceries for several households. Help a person to finish the paperwork which she has been avoiding for three months because the form seems to have been designed personally by Satan.

Now focus on what really took place.

• Did one woman end up carrying out all the tasks?

• Did people volunteer eagerly only to fail to turn up when it was their time to do so? Did communication break down completely?

• Did no one know where the money had gone?

• Did anyone who was receiving assistance feel ashamed?

• Did a man offer to help and in that way end up creating an extra managerial position for three women?

• Did everyone spend four hours discussing the logo and only fifteen minutes talking about who was actually responsible for bringing dinner?

Sort out those issues at once; you’re not just assisting someone, you’re putting the infrastructure to the test.

Don’t limit yourself to building community with people whose political views agree with yours. If the point being made is that women from all political backgrounds have common material interests, then you have to act as if that is the case.

You needn’t give up your own beliefs, accept racism or prejudice, treat threats as no more than differences of opinion, or develop close relationships with unsafe people.

What you do need to do is learn to tell the difference between someone threatening another person’s humanity and the fact that the woman next to you holds a different view on taxes, schooling, religion, guns, capitalism, marriage, or whatever cable news argument everyone has been told to discuss this week.

Begin with the physical world. Does she have childcare? Does she have some people she could contact? Could she miss a day at work? Does she have money that is solely under her control? Could she leave her house tonight if she had to? Who would assist her if her car broke down tomorrow? Who looks after her mother? Does she know her neighbors? Can she safely deal with formal institutions? Does disability affect the way in which participation takes place? Does she have the necessary documentation? Is her home fifty miles from the nearest meaningful resource?

(psst.. white people: the fact that you are acting across lines of difference also involves not viewing Black, Indigenous, Latina, immigrant, migrant, or other marginalized women as decorative elements in your inclusive movement -or- coming up with a competing system that they may already have established in your area.

First, learn about the existing infrastructure, since many communities have for generations developed survival systems because formal institutions were never reliable. You should never walk into a community that already exists and declare that you have come up with mutual aid, for God’s sake. Instead, find out what is already working, where resources are lacking, what local leadership is already in place, and whether support is being sought before you take on someone else’s work and then claim to be its founder.

In homes, instead of just dividing up tasks, people should start looking at the systems involved. Choose a particular area: school, food, healthcare, children’s clothing, home maintenance, eldercare, finances, extracurricular activities, family travel, household supplies, or social obligations.

When someone owns an area, that person forecasts what might happen, plans, makes decisions, carries out actions, keeps an eye on things, and deals with problems—all without needing another adult to act as an unseen supervisor.

Take schools as an example. Just because a parent has responsibility for the school doesn’t mean that Dad will drive on Tuesday simply because Mom has put ‘drive to school’ on his calendar.

Ownership means knowing the calendar, reading the emails, keeping track of forms and supplies, responding to teachers, attending events, meeting deadlines, arranging transportation, noting absences, addressing problems, and following up. It does not mean that one parent can never ask the other for help; since the relationship is based on interdependence, making a request is necessary.

The request must come from a parent who is in charge of their own area, not from a manager delegating parts of her responsibilities.

The learning phase should be expected to be flawed. You should agree on safety and on outcomes that are genuinely nonnegotiable, then allow as much autonomy in method as possible.

Keep a record of whether the number of reminders decreases, whether anticipation develops, whether the person becomes aware of problems before being informed, and whether repairs take place after mistakes.

Simply repeating negligence does not count as learning; it is just repeated negligence. A different technique is not automatically negligence. Everyone involved must become more precise.

If you are a man and you are reading this, begin with the part of the world that you currently occupy.

• If your female partner disappears for twenty-four hours, can you deal with the situation without having to keep calling her?

• Do you know the children’s schedules, their medications, the names of their teachers, their allergies, the school’s requirements, and the various routines?

• Do you know what food is in the house, when the bills are due, what your parents require, and what appointments are coming up?

• Are you capable of looking after your own healthcare, remembering the birthdays of others, buying gifts, planning meals, keeping up with your friendships, getting in touch with your own relatives, and managing the household duties without some other adult having to remind you?

If so, start there, then move on to the outside world.

What do you already have that could enable people to become less reliant on institutions which they cannot control—such as professional knowledge, money, transportation, space, tools, food, political access, union knowledge, a trade, legal expertise, organizing skills, competence in childcare, technology, a business, a large kitchen, a truck, connections, time, or physical capacity? Use these without asking women to take on the role of project managers for your usefulness.

One of the most valuable things men can do is close the gap between what other men claim to believe and how they behave when women are not around. It is important to question a colleague before a woman has to.

Men should strive to make it normal for fathers to be competent. They should campaign for leave, reasonable working hours, childcare, workplace safety, strict enforcement of harassment policies, and fair pay systems in workplaces dominated by men.

You should ask why the meeting assumes someone else is responsible for looking after everyone’s children, and encourage other men to get involved in their own families, while also explaining things to the man who would otherwise go home and have his wife tell him.

You do not become the leader of the women’s movement by doing that. You become accountable for the part of the world you already occupy.

Before anyone makes a public commitment to withdrawing labor, draw up a risk map that is simple enough to prevent someone from experiencing a preventable crisis.

• Who might lose their wages?

• Who might lose their job?

• Who is covered by a union or by employment law and who is not?

• Who is undocumented or part of a mixed-status household?

• Who shares a bank account with someone who is in a vulnerable position?

• Who relies on medication that cannot be stopped?

• Who looks after a disabled person?

• Who has a child with special needs?

• Who lives a long distance from transportation?

• Who might be subjected to violence at home if their partner sees taking part as an act of defiance?

Don’t view this as a reversal of a purity test in which women with the most obstacles end up as passive recipients of everyone else’s strategies. Instead, ask yourself what kind of participation would be possible if the network actually dealt with the barrier.

For example, she might not be able to miss work but could choose to forgo some of her discretionary spending. Or she might be unable to leave her home but could still help with organizing food. Perhaps she can’t take part in a public way but could supply information. Or the network could pay enough to replace her wages so she can take part later on.

The purpose of the audit is to transform abstract ideas of inclusion into actual design.

Each answer must result in a build list; for example, if ten women state that lost wages are the problem, then you have a funding target. If transportation is the problem, you will need drivers and accessible vehicles. If employer retaliation is the problem, then you need knowledge of labor law and workplace organizing. If childcare is the problem, the care network is not ready. If domestic violence is the problem, political participation comes after safety.

The risk map is not simply paperwork linked to the movement; it is one of the clearest indicators of whether the village actually exists.

A protest that makes no demands will result only in symbolism, widespread media attention, and a straightforward way to return to the status quo. Before deciding on a date, each participating network should clarify what it hopes to achieve from the institutions it intends to press.

For example, a group in the workplace might want a reliable schedule, paid family leave, pay transparency, a childcare subsidy, or the informal expectation that women take on office housework to be abolished.

A school community might want sufficient staffing for special education, realistic expectations of volunteer involvement, transportation services, or communication arrangements that do not presume that one parent will be permanently available.

A city might require shelter beds, public transit, maternal healthcare, access to food, disability services, or funding for childcare.

The demands had to be specific so it would be possible to tell whether they had been successful. Although ‘respect women’ may be morally right, it is not practically useful.

Suggestions such as ‘publish the salary bands’, ‘fund two extra school social workers’, ‘set up a paid family leave policy’, ‘extend the bus service to the shelter corridor’, or ‘establish a county childcare emergency fund’ give people something concrete that they can discuss, measure, and return to later.

Different communities will need different things because their material circumstances differ.

Household needs must also be taken into account. A woman might find that the most politically significant demand in her own life does not address Congress; it could be full shared control of school administration, independent access to funds, a guaranteed block of working time, an equal sleep schedule, or an agreement that her husband will look after his own parents rather than having his responsibility towards them become hers.

In this view, large-scale politics and private life are not seen as opposing areas. The point is that the system perpetuates itself through both.

Don’t start with a big test of your system, especially not one with cameras watching. Instead, try several smaller practice runs. For example:

• Can one group manage if three women take a day off from nonessential housework?

• Can the men in those homes handle things on their own without calling the women for help?

• Can the group cover for someone who misses a shift?

• Can childcare be arranged without one woman spending two days on it?

• Can meals be organized?

• Can a woman leave an unsafe home and get to safety before midnight?

• And if the group leader is offline, does information still get through?

When you keep records, don’t treat people as content. Instead, focus on practical notes: where the system failed, where things were repeated, which roles had no backup, what information only one person knew, which resources were promised but not delivered, how much money was actually needed, and which tasks went well once someone took responsibility.

Practicing like this should make your system stronger.

This idea works at home too. Letting one adult fully manage an area for a while will reveal more about fairness than months of arguments. Only when there is enough space in the system can you see where real knowledge, dependence, and responsibility are.

This isn’t meant to trick anyone; it’s a way to diagnose the situation. Let someone take full ownership so the hidden issues can come to light.

Don’t get caught up in the data until your network is running. Figure out which types of women’s work can safely pause and which can’t. Women in healthcare, emergency response, caregiving, insecure jobs, undocumented status, with disabilities, medical needs, or in abusive situations all face different risks. Their ability to join in will depend on things like paid leave, savings, flexible jobs, or household security. Not everyone can participate in the same way.

One woman might stop her paid job. Another might stop doing nonessential housework. Someone else could skip optional shopping. Another could cancel her volunteer work. Someone might stop reminding capable adults about things they already know. Another could donate to a wage-replacement fund so someone else can join in. Someone might take care of the kids. Another could handle meals. Someone else might offer to drive. Another might need to keep working because losing her job would be too risky, but she could stop doing unpaid extra work. And finally, someone might not be able to step back from anything but still be a full part of the movement.

Ask women what would stop them from joining in: lost wages, childcare, transport, employer backlash, food, housing, a partner, immigration status, disability, healthcare, caregiving, or safety. Then work backward from each barrier. For example, if income is lost, you need money.

Childcare needs care networks. Transport needs drivers. Avoiding violence requires escape options. Legal risks need legal help. Language needs translation. Disability needs accessible setups. Medical needs require ongoing care. Each barrier shows what the movement still needs to build.

Readiness isn’t about how many women can show off their resources. It’s about how many have gained enough real power to make choices they couldn’t before.

The day itself isn’t what matters.

If millions of women stopped working for a day, people would take photos, journalists would write stories, politicians would comment, and then women would quietly return to the same conditions the next morning. That would prove a point, but it wouldn’t change anything. So what’s the point?

Before the chosen day, communities should already be discussing the changes they want. Demands will differ because women’s situations aren’t the same everywhere. Housing varies by city. Childcare systems differ by country and state. Workplace protections also change.

For example, one community might need better transportation. In contrast, another needs maternal healthcare, clean water, legal help, language support, disability services, paid leave, safer schedules, protection from violence, or a school system that doesn’t rely on mothers for unpaid admin work.

The day gives us evidence—use it afterward.

• What caused things to stop?

• What failed?

• What barely worked?

• What depended on just one woman?

• What could be shared when another adult stepped up?

• Which women couldn’t join in, and why?

• Which employers retaliated?

• Which institutions relied on hidden unpaid work?

• Which men took initiative without being told?

• Which men waited for help?

• What parts of the community worked?

• What failed when tested?

Afterward, negotiate things like sharing household work, workplace rules, pay, schedules, leave, childcare, housing, healthcare, eldercare, safety, local resources, political voice, and how institutions are set up. The real demands should come from the people living these situations, not from a chart made months ago.

The real risk isn’t collapse—it’s a credible withdrawal.

We’re not saying, ‘Give women what we want, or we’ll destroy everything.’ The point is that institutions, employers, families, and adults have always assumed women’s work is guaranteed, that women will fill any gap. Organizing challenges that idea by building a strong base for women, so their participation isn’t taken for granted. Negotiations change when the other side knows your ‘no’ is real.

That’s why we plan the community setup before picking a date. We’re not assuming civilization will fall apart. We’re just tired of being the reason an unfair system never has to change.

Don’t ask me what the date is until then.

Go and talk to one hundred people—talk to your neighbours, to the women at the playground, to the grandmother who is sitting all by herself at the library, to the woman who runs the little shop you pass every week, to the mother at drop-off whose political views you most likely don’t agree with, to the woman who is doing the washing beside you, to the women at your gym, to the women at church, to the women who would never go into your church, to the women who have lived in the neighbourhood for forty years, and to those who moved here last month.

Also talk to the fathers who actually have children, to the men who already know something about labor or local government, to the friend who has a truck, to the neighbor that everyone calls when there’s a problem, and to the men who can listen to women describing a problem without at once responding to it.

Learn the people’s names, their needs, their skills, and how they relate to one another, and identify any gaps.

After that, do something practical with all the information you’ve gathered. Introduce two people who should know each other. Begin one childcare exchange. Set up one emergency fund. Fill one pantry. Make one ride list. Find out what domestic-violence resources are available in your county. Discover which shelter accepts pets. Get five people into a group chat so that they will actually reply if someone calls at midnight. Move one household domain entirely rather than adding three more chores to your husband’s list. Practice letting a capable man deal with a manageable problem without taking it back later because you could have done it faster.

Also get used to accepting help from others, because the community won’t function if everyone is determined to show off their self-sufficiency.

We already do so much—raising kids, caring for families, organizing communities, helping the sick, supporting elders, passing on culture, running households, picking up where institutions fail, and making up for what’s been lost. Most of us do this alone, which turns shared responsibility into personal exhaustion.

I don’t want women to get better at coping with a system that expects us to cover for everyone else forever. I don’t want us to be called essential just because no one has built a system that works without us overdoing it. I don’t want matriarchy to mean women finally get official control over the same impossible workload.

I want enough support for women so that saying no isn’t risky, enough backup so leaving isn’t like falling, enough connections. Hence, no one has to carry everything alone, and enough capable men doing their part so rebuilding the world doesn’t become another unpaid job for women.

It isn’t just beneficial for women; a householder with several capable adults is more resilient.

Children have more than one person who knows about their lives.

Older people receive a wider range of care.

Men gain the advantages of practical adulthood, deeper relationships, fatherhood, competence, and a sense of belonging, rather than a peculiar form of authority that relies on someone else quietly maintaining the conditions of their existence.

Societies gain in terms of local capacity.

Workers acquire greater bargaining power. Institutions get more accurate feedback since women are no longer having to make up for their mistakes constantly.

Everyone benefits from a society that understands what is really necessary to keep human beings alive and one that builds on that understanding.

Once we decide on the date, the movement should be there. It is simple to pick a date, but the work involved in building up sufficient power so that the date will have some significance is the difficult part.

Get the hell out there and speak to one hundred people. Set up the damn village. Only then can we plan the damn day.

Before you move on to whatever you need to do next, take a moment to look at your own life. Try not to overthink it, make excuses, or feel like you have to change anything right now.

1. Why do you keep doing work that no one else seems to notice, just because you’re so good at it?

2. Which parts of your home, family, workplace, or community depend on you to spot problems before anyone else even notices them?

3. Which responsibilities are truly shared, and which only become shared after you notice them, assign them, explain them, remind someone, follow up, and fix what was missed?

4. What are you carrying that should really be someone else’s responsibility?

5. What would be the first thing people would notice if you stopped stepping in for just one day?

6. What could safely be left undone, and what would actually put a child, elder, disabled person, animal, or other dependent at risk?

7. Have you ever confused caring with obligation, or love with always being available?

8. What would truly make it safer for you to say no?

9. Would things like more money, your own access to money, childcare, transportation, housing, legal help, food, healthcare, a job, an extra caregiver, a spare room, a trustworthy neighbor, or five people who would pick up the phone make a difference?

10. Who could you call at midnight without feeling like you have to apologize? Who could call you in the same way?

11. What useful knowledge, skills, resources, relationships, space, equipment, access, or abilities do you have that could help someone else’s community?

12. What support do you already have around you that you never thought of as part of the infrastructure, just because it doesn’t have a nonprofit logo, a grant application, a membership portal, or a strategic plan?

13. Is there an area where a capable adult could take full responsibility, instead of just helping with one task? The whole thing, not just a single chore.

14. What would they need to do to truly take it on—anticipate, remember, decide, act, review, and fix things—before it could really be theirs?

15. Why are you holding onto something that’s actually unsafe to keep? Are you keeping it just because it’s hard to watch someone else learn?

16. If there were a Day Without Women tomorrow, would you join in? If not, why? What does your answer say about the support systems you have—or don’t have? Your vicinity would be unable to take part, and what would have to occur before it became possible for them to refuse as well?

17. What do you honestly hope a Day Without a Woman would reveal in your home, workplace, school, community, or local government? What would you want to change after that?

18. Who is one person you’ll talk to after reading this? What’s one small piece of support you could help build before the end of the month?

If you’ve read this far, don’t just tell me if you agree. Tell me what you see from where you are. What are women carrying? What keeps getting put on us? What support is already there, what’s missing, what would make it safer to say no, and what would you actually help create?

This essay is part of Return of the Matriarch: The Motherload, the book I am currently developing from this larger body of work. The book will go further into reproductive embodiment, matrescence, invisible and emotional labor, economic dependence, partnership under load, the isolated household, authority, restoration, and the material structures women need to live without being consumed by the work of sustaining everyone else.

If you want to follow that work as it develops, subscribe to Fieldkeeper Codex. Paid subscriptions help fund the research and the practical work underneath it.