Riane Eisler Quotes

GDP excludes care work and other unpaid work, most of which falls to women and girls in rich and in poor countries alike.

Women are often paid far less than men, while they also perform most of the world's unpaid care work.

I am not prepared to accept the economics of a housewife.

Woman has been the great unpaid laborer of the world.

Our economies are built on the backs of all this unpaid labor that women do.

Just as there is a wage gap between men and women in the workplace, there is a 'leisure gap' between them at home. Most women work one shift in the office or factory and a 'second shift' at home.

Sometimes our definitions fall short. Take, for example, the way we view income and labor. It simply doesn't cover enough of the work that women, and in particular poor women, are doing - especially in their own households and the vast 'informal' economy in which most of the world's poorest people work.

As long as working women also have to do the work of child and family care at home, they will have two jobs instead of one. Perhaps more important, children will grow up thinking that only women can be loving and nurturing, and men cannot.

No laborer in the world is expected to work for room, board, and love -- except the housewife.

The great majority of married women must be regarded as occupied on work which is vital though unpaid, without which the husbands could not do their paid work and without which the nation could not continue.

I will not accept anybody’s claim that they are striving for equal rights for women when they refuse to agree to a radical redistribution of work—both gainful employment and unpaid work [in the home].

When women are expected to bear the burden of unpaid work, everyone loses.

Across society, the lion's share of caring responsibility - whether for children or elderly relatives - still falls on women.

Can we really expect adequate funding for programs to clean up our environment and care for people's basic needs as long as the socially essential work of caretaking and cleaning is relegated to women for little or no pay?

The historical weight of gender inequality has tended to concentrate women in lower-paid jobs with fewer benefits, at the same time made them primarily responsible for care giving.

When I hear that there are 5,000,000 working women in this country, I always take occasion to say that there are 18,000,000 but only 5,000,000 receive their wages.

For both Adam Smith and Karl Marx the essential work of caring for people, starting in early childhood, was "just women's work" - and in their minds not even classified as "productive work."

Most women work one shift at the office or factory and a 'second shift' at home.

Unless the concepts of work and play and reward for work change absolutely, women must continue to provide cheap labor, and even more, free labor exacted of right by an employer possessed of a contract for life, made out in his favor.

The lowest stage of humanity is experienced when the individual must labour for a small pittance of wages from others.

A woman's work, from the time she gets up to the time she goes to bed, is as hard as a day at war, worse than a man's working day. ... To men, women's work was like the rain-bringing clouds, or the rain itself. The task involved was carried out every day as regularly as sleep. So men were happy - men in the Middle Ages, men at the time of the Revolution, and men in 1986: everything in the garden was lovely.

We need a Nuremberg to put on trial the economic order that they have imposed on us, that every three years kills more men, women and children by hunger and preventable or curable diseases than the death toll in six years of the second world war.

No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far, at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.

The caretaking has to be done. "Somebody's got to be the mommy." Individually, we underestimate this need, and as a society we make inadequate provision for it. Women take up the slack, making the need invisible as we step in to fill it.

Women represent 70 percent of the 1.3 billion people in our world who live in absolute poverty. Consequently, as Joan Holmes, president of the Hunger Project, points out, any realistic efforts to change patterns of chronic hunger and poverty require changing traditions of discrimination against women.