Society is learning to share the housework, but is it yet learning to let women rest?
It was a routine job application, one of those ordinary, forgettable tasks where you move quickly from one blank space to another, answering questions almost automatically. Name, address, educational background. Then: Father's occupation. I typed "Retired" without thinking twice. Next, Mother's occupation. I typed "Housewife" and then I paused.
Not because the answer felt wrong; it felt completely normal. That was the problem. In that moment of automatic response, a quiet question surfaced in my mind: will there ever come a day when I can write "Retired" for my mother too? Not housewife, not homemaker, not caregiver, but simply retired, the way we imagine a person who has worked long and hard and finally earned the right to rest.
The progress we have made and the gap that remains
To be fair, society has come a long way. There is a genuine and growing movement in households, schools, and public conversation to normalise domestic work as real work, regardless of who does it. More men today cook, clean, and take parental leave than ever before. Gender-equal parenting is increasingly celebrated. The idea that housework belongs to women by nature is, slowly, being challenged.
And yet, for all this progress, we seem to have barely touched one question: what happens at the end of a life spent doing domestic work? When people finish their official careers, society has a word for it: retirement. A status, a ceremony sometimes, a clear before and after. But when a woman who has spent forty years running a household reaches that same stage of life, we do not have an equivalent word. The language simply does not exist. The category is not there. We have spent energy debating who should do the housework. We have not spent nearly enough asking: who gets to stop, and when?
Retirement is not simply the act of stopping work. It is recognition. It says: you worked, your contribution was real, and now you have earned rest. It gives labour a timeline, a beginning, a middle, and an end. For housewives, however, who cooked every meal, raised children, cared for elderly relatives, and kept the household running through every big and small crisis, no such category exists.
Retirement is recognition
Retirement is not simply the act of stopping work. It is recognition. It says: you worked, your contribution was real, and now you have earned rest. It gives labour a timeline, a beginning, a middle, and an end.
For jobholders, that word makes perfect sense. They held a formal job, drew a salary, and finished one day. The world had a category ready for them. For housewives, however, who cooked every meal, raised children, cared for elderly relatives, and kept the household running through every big and small crisis, no such category exists. On a form, she is still a "housewife". Not a former housewife, not a retired homemaker. Just a housewife, as though the decades of work are still ongoing, as though she is still in the middle of a shift with no end. The absence of a word reflects the absence of recognition in society itself.
The social norms behind the silence
If attitudes about housework are changing, why does this gap remain? The answer lies in the social norms that shape how we think about care, norms that run deeper than any single policy or public debate. In most societies, domestic and care work have long been framed not as labour but as love, as something women give naturally, endlessly, without needing acknowledgement or rest. A mother who cooks is not seen as performing a job; she is seen as being a mother. And because love, by social convention, does not retire, neither does she.
This framing is so deeply embedded that it survives even when our stated values change. A family may fully believe that housework should be shared equally and still expect the mother to keep going long after everyone else has slowed down. An ageing woman who steps back from caregiving may even feel guilty for doing so, because the norm says care is not a job with fixed hours; it is an identity without an end date.
Efforts to ascribe a monetary value to women’s unpaid care and household work have been a topic of global discussion over the last few decades. VISUAL: ALIZA RAHMAN
This is the crucial distinction. The conversation about gender equality in domestic work has largely focused on entry, on who starts doing the work. The conversation about exit, about who gets to stop, when, and with what recognition, has barely begun.
A gap with real consequences
The failure to recognise domestic labour as work has concrete consequences for women’s lives. Because unpaid care work sits outside the formal economy, it generates no pension, no savings, and no financial security for old age. A woman who has spent her prime years managing a household instead of accumulating a salary arrives at the end of her working life with no institutional safety net of her own. As a 2025 OECD report on gender gaps in paid and unpaid work notes, the disproportionate burden of unpaid care on women directly limits their lifetime earnings and retirement security.
The feminist scholar Silvia Federici argued decades ago that unpaid domestic labour is not marginal to the economy; it is what makes the formal economy possible. Without someone cooking, cleaning, and raising the next generation, the paid workforce could not function. Yet the system built to reward labour was designed around paid employment, leaving an entire category of essential work without recognition or reward. In Bangladesh, where women shoulder a particularly large share of unpaid care work within the family and the community, this gap is especially visible and especially consequential.
The failure to recognise domestic labour as work has concrete consequences for women’s lives. Because unpaid care work sits outside the formal economy, it generates no pension, no savings, and no financial security for old age. A woman who has spent her prime years managing a household instead of accumulating a salary arrives at the end of her working life with no institutional safety net of her own. As a 2025 OECD report on gender gaps in paid and unpaid work notes, the disproportionate burden of unpaid care on women directly limits their lifetime earnings and retirement security.
Equal work, unequal rest
Encouraging men and women to share domestic responsibilities equally is important and right. But it is only half the conversation. The other half, the part we have not yet fully had, is about rest, recognition, and the right to finish. If we genuinely believe that domestic work is real work, then we must also believe that the people who do it deserve to retire from it. That means changing not just household habits but the deeper social norms that define care as a permanent, unconditional obligation, one that women are expected to carry without interruption until they are no longer physically able.
It means asking: What would it mean for a society to say, formally or informally, that a woman who has raised a family and kept a household has done her part and now deserves to rest?
The pause that started it all
The moment when the automatic answer gave way to an uncomfortable question becomes clear in hindsight. Mother worked every day, without a salary, without a title that changed over time, and without a date circled on a calendar when she would be done. She is still working. And when I try to imagine writing "Retired" beside her name, I find that the word does not fit, because her work is still ongoing. Nothing in our social vocabulary was built to give rest to her. We are learning slowly to share the work. Now we need to learn to let women rest from it, and to give that rest the same dignity and recognition we extend to everyone else.
References
Jobeda Akter Rini is a recent graduate of South Asian University, New Delhi, where she completed a master’s degree in Sociology.
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