PORQUE HOJE É SÁBADO (Because today is Saturday) it’s a verse from a poem by the Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes. Saturday should be a day dedicated to extraordinary things, but in several houses, and for many women, it’s mainly the cleaning day.
This film builds on the theme of the imbalance of the division of house-hold tasks, which fall predominantly on women, in the context of a traditional family (mother, father and children) by focusing on the precarious sharing of duties and the way in which this overload compromises their freedom and creativity.
A study conducted by the Francisco Manuel dos Santos Foundation, entitled “Women in Portugal, Today”, concluded that Portuguese women feel always, or roughly always, tired. The reason for this exhaustion may be due to the fact that they still are the major responsible for the unpaid housework, even though both spouses work professionally. The disparity aggravates when younger children are a part of the household.
Although men have begun to accept their part of the household chores, it will still take 5 to 6 generations for a balanced distribution to be reached. And beyond the simple execution of household chores, there is ongoing management work, and it is generally up to women to plan these tasks and organize the family agenda.
This is called the “mental burden”, and it translates into the passive behaviour of the man, who expects the woman to constantly tell him what needs to be done and when: to pay attention to the last bottle of milk in the refrigerator, organize laundry, to plan the meals, make sure the children have their vaccinations up to date, serve them healthy food, insist with them so they eat it, and also call a plumber when needed.
This type of work, routinely and apparently invisible, is often unappreciated. At the same time, it also contributes to an effective overload in women’s lives, leading to potent, and common, mental disorders such as anxiety, depression, insomnia and low self-esteem.
Taking on this management is sometimes so strenuous that many times the woman chooses to take care of all the tasks herself, gives up “asking for help”, and develops automatic behaviors such as picking up clothes from the floor, picking crumbs and lowering the volume of the television. This attitude allows for the companion to dismiss responsibilities with a simple: “You did not tell me what to do.”
The overload of household work in professionally active women has another perverse effect: these women give up on having time for themselves. The breaks between chores are only for resting, to “disconnect” for a few moments. They don’t have time to transcend the day-to-day routine, to work on body and soul, to find feelings beyond those of the others that they have prioritized: the kids, the husband, and keeping up appearances. These women are missing a space of freedom and creativity.
Virginia Woolf said that a woman, in order to be free to write, needed to have financial independence and a room for herself.
Today I think that a “mental room” would suffice, a space of refuge from housework, from the mental overload. This work, categorized by Simone Beauvoir as Sisyphean:
“Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. The housewife wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present. Eating, sleeping, cleaning – the years no longer rise up towards heaven, they lie spread out ahead, grey and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won.”
Nowadays, women have already overcome many of the obstacles that diminish them in relation to men. However, attitudes towards the kind of work that is appropriate for men and women, the devaluation of unpaid work, such as housework, and the issues surrounding raising children are still hostage to traditionalist and conservative paradigms.
The roles that women play, daughter, wife, mother, are linked to a set of informal, though empirical and invisible, behavioural definitions that are transmitted from generation to generation, impose themselves in family responsibilities, and invoke feelings of guilt or inadequacy associated with, for example, cleaning the house, feeding or raising children, which men generally do not seem to feel as intensely affected by.
Subjected to the eternal repetition of her days, the woman, unconsciously, loses the pleasure of living.
We are what they allow us to be, and what we allow ourselves to be.
And only by adjusting this condition to the condition of man can the woman find a space closer to her creative freedom.
