T

he Jakarta Post of Oct. 25, 2011 published an article titled “Do you follow your husband to the restroom?” written by Santi Dharmaputra.

The article is about a ‘trailing wife’ or ikut suami who — according to the writer — is a woman who is married to a man whose work forces them to move to other cities or countries such as diplomats, expatriates, military personnel or researchers.

She adds that “If an Indonesian woman is married to one of these men, and his work dictates that they must relocate, then whatever nationality the man holds, she will be regarded as a trailing wife”.

On some Indonesian women’s identity cards trailing wife is written next to “occupation” just like teacher, doctor or civil servant. The terms trailing wife and housewife are often used interchangeably, the former does not necessarily relate to the nature of a husband’s job.

Nonetheless as a profession, trailing wife has an inferior status compared to others as mirrored in the inappropriate response received by Santi Darmaputra, who was asked if she — as a trailing wife — followed her husband to the restroom.

According to the writer, the occupation is still taken for granted and not considered a real job, despite the fact that the duties of a trailing wife require a high commitment, huge responsibility and the juggling of multiple roles.

In my view, there is a fundamental problem which explains the underestimation of a trailing wife or housewives in general. The problem lies in how work is defined.

In today’s modern society only work that can be exchanged for cash is considered as work. Similar logic applies to the terms productive, skilled and active labor.

From this perspective, domestic work is excluded from the definition of work. It is unproductive, unskilled and not active labor.

Marilyn Waring (1987) in her book If women counted — a new feminist economics, states that “Cooking according to economists, is ‘active labor’ when cooked food is sold and ‘economically inactive labor’ when it is not”.

Housework is “productive” when performed by a paid domestic servant and “nonproductive” when no payment is involved. Those who care for children in an orphanage are “occupied”. Mothers who care for their children at home are “unoccupied”.

The list goes on and includes, among other things teaching one’s own children or nursing sick family members at home, which all are unproductive and unskilled. These are not the case if the same tasks are performed by paid teachers at schools or nurses at hospitals.

In fact, running a household requires active labor and skills and makes a woman — or whoever does it — occupied.

Certain family circumstances may bring greater challenges for a woman to navigate domestic life. For instance, families with children with special needs lead to greater pressure on the mothers as such children require special care at home. Poor families with limited incomes bring distress to a woman managing household financial matters.

Families who constantly move from one place to another face their own challenges as described by Santi Darmaputra. In such a family, a wife often has no choice other than to support her children in adapting to a new environment, something that she may actually need for herself.

In fact no society can function if it relies on paid work only. While such work provides cash to buy food, the latter needs to be prepared before it can be consumed. Paid work also brings in money to buy a house. However, to be a habitable place it needs to be cleaned every day, and so on and so forth.

Most of these unpaid tasks are performed by women, with or without help from their partners but based on the traditional economic definition these are not jobs.

Generally society tends to view domestic tasks more as a woman’s obligation, rather than important economic activities which should be shared fairly between men and women.

This proves that science is not neutral. More specifically, economic paradigms cannot free themselves from gender-biased norms which fail to acknowledge women’s contributions to society, through domestic work they perform at home. As a result, none of these tasks are accounted for in national statistics.

As for the trailing wife, I personally prefer other terms such as an “accompanying partner”. Regardless of the terms, it is more important to change the mind-set on how we define work and to have more appreciation for domestic work.

The writer is a lecturer at Parahyangan Catholic University’s School of Social and Political Sciences in Bandung.