Simone de Beauvoir
Nothing Left to Show
Work that ends where it began goes unseen, not because it is small but because it leaves no trace
The Second Sex (1949), Book II, 'The Married Woman'; English quotations from H. M. Parshley's 1953 translation
You finish and nothing has changed. Beauvoir asked why the heaviest work at home counts for the least.
What actually happened?
In The Second Sex Beauvoir writes about washing up, dusting and making beds. "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." Then comes the line that matters more: "The housewife wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present." The better the job is done, the less there is to see: a tidy house is one where nothing seems to have happened.
Holding off the bad, not making the good
She separates work that produces something from work that only stops things getting worse. The first can be pointed at when it is done. The second leaves behind only the absence of mess, and an absence does not show.
A meal is eaten in twenty minutes; a kitchen put back to normal looks as if nobody touched it.
Nobody notices until it stops
A clean house draws no comment; a dirty one does. So what gets seen is always the thing not done, and the person doing the work learns that her best result is silence.
Nobody thanks you for clean shirts, but everyone knows when the last pair of socks has gone.
The difficulty is that it never ends
Her complaint is less that any one task is hard than that none is ever finished. A job has a hand-in date and a project has a launch. This kind of work has neither, so there is no day on which you can say it is done.
On Friday evening you can say the week's work is finished; on Sunday night the kitchen needs doing again.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: You do these jobs every day and, said aloud, they sound like complaining about small things.
Ask first: Which of these jobs leave something I can point to, and which only keep things from getting worse? List the second kind and count the hours a week.
Where it goes wrong: Using it to say housework is beneath anyone, or that it is not real work. Her point is that it is easy to overlook because it leaves no trace, not that it does not matter.
Lines to keep
Nothing left to show is not the same as nothing done.
What gets seen is always the thing that was not done.
Same situation, other people are asking
Everything I do at home counts as nothing.I'm on my feet all day and I'm told I don't work.It always ends up being me.Every machine is in the house and the work is still all mine.The work at home doesn't count · all 5 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.