Women as Infrastructure
Historically women have been repressed to stay within the private sphere, ‘behind-the-scenes’ so to speak, as the public sphere was initially intended only to be accessible to men. This was true well into the twentieth century, but as women today in the twenty-first century continue to strive for equity and equality, the quest for accessibility is an on-going project. Part of the historic inaccessibility to the public sphere was due to the lack of occupations and opportunities available to women, as women were mostly relegated to the role of caregiver. Caregiver could be taken literally, to denote mother and/or house-wife, but for working-class women caregiver could also denote domestic-mimicking occupations such as housekeepers, cleaners, child-care workers, servers, etc. (i.e. domestic labor). I will emphasis that this essay is not to be considered an ethnographic sweep of all women , and I go don’t want to come across as deliberately leaving out vast amounts of the fem