The Invisible Woman and Other Naturally Occurring Phenomena: Runner-up, VUW Feminist Law Society Competition

Pluto Rennie

Nobody notices when the tea towel is replaced. They notice when it isn’t: when it becomes damp, vaguely smelly, and functionally useless. But when a clean one appears, the flat carries on as normal. Nobody asks how it got there. The tea towel has simply, almost magically, replaced itself. 

Of course it hasn’t. Somebody noticed it needed changing, knew where the clean ones were, put the dirty one through the wash, and returned another to the kitchen. It is a very small job. That is exactly what makes it so easy to ignore. 

A lot of care work is like this. When it is neglected, its absence is obvious. When it is done well, the labour disappears. 

We tend to describe care as a personality trait rather than a skill. Some people are just thoughtful. Some are naturally organised, maternal, good with children, or good at remembering birthdays. More often than not, those people are women. Apparently, they emerged from the womb knowing when the sheets needed changing and carrying Panadol for everyone else. 

This myth is useful. If care comes naturally to women, it does not need to be taught, shared, respected, or properly paid. It can remain something women simply do because they are better at it. Strangely, people tend to become “naturally good” at precisely the work everyone else would prefer not to do. 

You can see this after a night out. Someone makes sure everybody has a way home, watches the drinks, finds the missing jacket, looks after the friend who drank too much, and stays awake until the last “home safe” reaches the group chat. If everybody gets home safely, it looks as though nothing happened. It was simply a good night. The work becomes visible only when something goes wrong. 

Then there are hobbies. A woman enjoys knitting, so knitting quietly becomes how she produces Christmas presents. She likes baking, so somebody volunteers her to make the cake. She owns a camera, so she becomes the unofficial photographer. What began as leisure is redirected towards other people. Even women’s pleasure is expected to become useful. 

An unmade bed can carry the same expectations. Domestic order is treated not simply as a preference, but as evidence that a woman is coping, responsible, and respectable. A man with a messy bedroom is untidy. A woman with one is somehow failing. She is judged not only by the life she lives, but by how effectively she maintains its background. 

None of these tasks is enormous on its own. Replacing a tea towel takes seconds. Sending a text takes seconds. Taking a photograph takes seconds. This is partly why domestic inequality is so difficult to challenge. Any individual task seems too petty to argue about. Together, though, they form the infrastructure of everyday life. They consume attention, and attention is finite.

I see the same narrative in paid care work. Caring for children is often described as though it consists of keeping them alive and being vaguely nice to them. In reality, it demands constant observation and judgement. When working with autistic children, for example, you learn to recognize when apparent misbehaviour is sensory overload, anxiety, or an attempt to communicate. You think about transitions, routines, demands, safety, and how to offer support without taking away autonomy. 

The knowledge does not become less skilled because it is used in somebody’s home rather than an office. Yet care workers are underpaid for the same reason unpaid carers are overlooked: their expertise has been recast as feminine instinct. We pay people poorly for work we pretend they were born wanting to perform. 

Good care can also make its own difficulty invisible. When a child feels safe and regulated, an outsider may assume they were easy to care for. They do not see the planning and adaptation that prevented distress in the first place. The absence of crisis is mistaken for absence of work. 

This is a feminist issue because women remain disproportionately responsible for producing that absence: no empty fridge, no missed birthday, no stranded friend, no overflowing laundry basket, no child left without comfort. Their labour is measured by all the things that never happened, while everybody else gets to experience the result as ordinary life. 

Recognizing care work must mean more than thanking women for everything they do. Gratitude is pleasant, but it does not redistribute time, responsibility, or money. Praise can become another way of keeping the arrangement intact: she is amazing, so we may as well let her continue doing it. 

Ordinary life does not organise, document, comfort, and clean up after itself. If everything appears to be running effortlessly, that is not proof that no work was required. 

It probably means somebody replaced the tea towel.