Making the Familiar Unfamiliar. Zygmunt Bauman
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in which I grew up was not a democracy. Until 1971, women – that is, half of the population – did not have the vote. The principle of equal pay for equal work is still not established, and women are under-represented in boardrooms. Are there not any number of good reasons for women to get rid of their dependencies?
Equal rights in these areas are important. But there are two movements within feminism that must be distinguished. One of them wants to make women indistinguishable from men. Women are meant to serve in the army and go to war, and they ask: why are we not allowed to shoot other people dead when men are permitted to do so? The other movement wants to make the world more feminine. The military, politics, everything that has been created, was created by men for men. A lot of what is wrong today is the result of that fact. Equal rights – of course. But should women simply pursue the values that have been created by men?
Is this not a decision that, in a democracy, must be left to women themselves?
Well, in any case, I do not expect that the world would be very much better if women functioned the same way that men did and do.
In the early years of your marriage you were a house-husband avant la lettre. You did the cooking and looked after two little children while your wife worked in an office. That was rather unusual in the Poland of those days, wasn’t it?
It wasn’t all that unusual, even though Poland was a conservative country. In that respect, the communists were revolutionary, because they considered men and women to be equal as workers. The novelty about communist Poland was that a large number of women worked in factories or offices. You needed two incomes at the time in order to provide for a family.
That led to a change in the position of women and thus to a change in relations between the sexes.
It was an interesting phenomenon. The women tried to understand themselves as economic agents. In the old Poland, the husband had been the sole provider, responsible for the whole family. In fact, however, women made an enormous contribution to the economy. Women took care of a lot of the work, but it did not count and was not translated into economic value. Just to give an example, when the first laundrette opened in Poland, making it possible to have someone else wash one’s dirty laundry, this saved people an enormous amount of time. I remember that my mother spent two days a week doing the washing, drying and ironing for the whole family. But women were reluctant to make use of the new service. Journalists wanted to know why. They told the women that having someone else do their laundry was much cheaper than them doing it themselves. ‘How come?’, the women exclaimed, presenting the journalists with a calculation showing that the overall cost of washing powder, soap and fuel for the stoves used for heating up the water was lower than that of having everything washed at the laundrette. But they had not included their labour in the calculation. The idea that their labour also had its price did not occur to them.
That was no different in the West.
It took several years before society got used to the fact that the household work done by women also had a price tag attached. But by the time people had become aware of this, there were soon only very few families with traditional housewives.
In her memoirs, Janina writes that you took care of everything when she fell ill with puerperal fever after the birth of your twin daughters. You got up at night when the babies, Lydia and Irena, were crying, gave them a bottle; you changed nappies, washed them in the morning and hung them up to dry in the backyard. You took Anna, your oldest daughter, to the nursery, fetched her again. You waited in the long queues in front of the shops when doing the errands. And you did all this while also fulfilling your duties as a lecturer, supervising your students, writing your own dissertation and attending political meetings. How did you manage to do that?
As was the norm in academic life back then, I was more or less able to dispose of my time as I chose. I went to the university when I had to, to give a seminar or a lecture. Apart from that, I was a free man. I could stay in my office or go home, go for walks, dance, do whatever I liked. Janina, by comparison, worked in an office. She reviewed screenplays; she was a translator and editor at the Polish state-run film company. There was a time clock there, and it was thus clear that I had to be there for the children and the housework whenever she was at the office or ill. That did not lead to any tension; it was taken for granted.
Janina and you grew up in different circumstances. She came from a wealthy family of physicians; in your family, money was always tight. And Janina was probably not prepared for being a housewife, for cooking, cleaning, doing all the work that in her parents’ home had been done by servants.
I grew up in the kitchen. Cooking was routine work for me. Janina cooked when it was necessary. She followed recipes, with a cookbook in front of her – terribly boring. That is why she did not like it. I observed my mother every day working miracles at the cooker, creating something out of nothing. We had little money, and she was able to produce a tasty meal even out of the worst raw ingredients. In this way, I naturally acquired the skill of cookery. It is not a talent, and neither was I taught it. I simply watched how it was done.
Janina said of you that you are the ‘Jewish mother’. You still love to cook today, even though you do not have to.
I love it because cooking is creative. I have come to realize that what you do in the kitchen resembles very much what you do at the computer when you write: you create something. It is creative work: interesting, not boring. What’s more, a good couple is not a combination of two identical people. A good couple is one where the partners complement each other. What one of them lacks, the other possesses. That was the case with Janina and me. She did not like cooking very much; I did – and thus we complemented each other.
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