The article discusses the correlation between sleep deprivation and gender roles, illustrating how women disproportionately bear the burden of nighttime caregiving and domestic responsibilities. It paints a vivid picture through the author's personal experiences as a new mother, highlighting the exhaustion that comes with constantly tending to a newborn, managing household tasks late at night, and the emotional toll of such responsibilities. Despite statistics showing a majority of night workers are male, it emphasizes that women's sleep is often compromised by unpaid, unrecognized, and undervalued labor, pointing out how this struggle is intricately linked to feminism.
Whether it's waking up every 45 minutes to feed a screaming baby, making shopping lists while roasting under the duvet in an insomniac hormonal flush, staying up past midnight to clean the house once your children are in bed, or setting the alarm for 4.45am so you can get your elderly mother to the toilet before she has an accident; the night shift of unpaid, unrecognised and uncelebrated domestic labour is still predominantly undertaken by women.
The fact that the boy couldn't yet roll over, was in his cot, and the door was closed, while my partner snored like a mechanical digger beside him, could not penetrate the exhausted fug of terror that had enveloped me after weeks, months of broken, fluttering, barely snatched rest.
Collection
[
|
...
]