Dead Homemaker Gets Paid
It is high time that the invisible is made visible, observed Justice Sanjay Karol in a Supreme Court judgment on Thursday. The case concerns the death of a homemaker in a road accident in 2001. In enhancing the compensation from ₹8.4L to nearly ₹63L, the court described homemakers as nothing less than “nation-builders”. What it sought to make visible is how after a woman cooks, cleans, cares for children and the elderly, manages households, and enables everyone else’s productivity, her labour still continues to be treated as “non-work”.
Basically, the legal system acknowledges the economic value of a wife’s labour only because she’s no longer alive to perform it. The compensation will benefit surviving family members, including the husband. But what about recognising and compensating women for their domestic labour while they are alive? Why does the law discover the economic worth of a homemaker only after tragedy strikes?
These questions are hardly new. More than a century ago, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, the first woman ordained as a Protestant minister in US, wrote that a wife “owes service and labour to her husband as much and as absolutely as the slave does to his master”. Married women’s labour continues to be treated as an extension of their husband’s rights.
Legal scholar Robin West has found that intimate labour occupies a peculiar position in modern economies. Wherever care, affection and domestic responsibility are involved, compensation mysteriously disappears. The result is economic impoverishment for those who perform that labour, overwhelmingly women.
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Views expressed above are the author’s own.
