Women Want Credit Where Credit Is Due : ‘Time Off’ Rally Seeks International Recognition for Paid, Unpaid Work

“Time off for women: Oct. 24th,” the flyer being distributed by the International Wages for Housework Campaign says. It invites women to a rally and celebration honoring women on the 1st Street steps of Los Angeles City Hall at noon Thursday, urging them to “take whatever time off you can from housework, mothering, office work, nursing, factory work, sex work, farming, school work, teaching . . . and call the press and your local Congress person to tell them why.”

Margaret Prescod, an organizer and spokeswoman for the campaign, is happy to tell why.

The day’s activities are being organized, she said, in Los Angeles and dozens of other cities in at least 18 countries to strengthen women’s demands by focusing attention on their contributions to society and by making all the paid and unpaid work they do more visible.

Women also will be pressuring their governments to implement the decision passed in July in Nairobi at the world conference marking the end of the Decade for Women to include women’s paid and unpaid work in their gross national products.

Not coincidentally, Thursday is the 40th anniversary of the United Nations. It also marks the end of the U.N. Decade for Women, 1975-1985. And it marks the 10th anniversary of “Women’s Day Off” in Iceland that, after two years of planning, resulted in a one-day general strike by women.

What is going on here?

It all started at the Nairobi women’s conference, Prescod said. She described “Time Off for Women” one recent morning, joined by two members of the day’s planning committee, Blanche Spindel of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and Cynthia Anderson-Barker of the Steelworkers Welfare Action.

Prescod and the Wages for Housework Campaign were very much in evidence at the Nairobi conference, attracting women from around the world to their cause, running out of printed information before they could even put it on a display table.

Lobbying Campaign

Not only were they spreading the word among women, they were lobbying government delegations to the U.N. conference to support their demands that all women’s unpaid work in the home, in reproduction, in domestic food production and in marketing and voluntary activities be measured, quantified and reflected in national accounts and gross national products.

With such International Labor Organization statistics as the fact that women do two-thirds of the world’s work and receive one-tenth of the income, and that they produce at least half the food in the Third World for no wage, it was clear that this was an idea whose time had come.

The final document of the conference, the “Forward Looking Strategies,” contains the language Wages for Housework was lobbying for and directs nations to take appropriate steps and start counting.

“Before Nairobi,” Prescod said, “we knew we wanted to do something on the 24th, U.N. Day, maybe hold a forum. At Nairobi, we met the Iceland delegation . . . . We began thinking, ‘Why not commemorate that with time off for women?’ Once the word got out, women from all over wanted to do it. We announced it. The press immediately called it a strike. We don’t. We call it a timeout. It’s hard for women to go on a strike--there are so many jobs we do.”

Once back home in Los Angeles, the campaign got busy. The planning committee has drawn women from such diverse organizations as the American Friends Service Committee, the International Migrant Women Workers, the National Organization for Women and the Feminist Women’s Health Centers.

“Our organization has always worked for the full emancipation of women,” Spindel said of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’s endorsement. “In fact, we found just recently that in 1919 a resolution was passed at our international meeting urging that women’s work be counted.”

As for the Steelworkers Welfare Action, a group that started with a large food bank that serves families, Cynthia Anderson-Barker said, “Traditionally labor has not linked up with women’s issues, but they are really coming on board . . . . We lobbied against ‘workfare’ on behalf of women and children. (Nevertheless, it passed in California.) The link has come with Wages for Housework. Welfare is really the closest thing to wages for housework that we have, but it’s seen as charity.”

The Los Angeles committee enlisted the support of some key women at City Hall, namely Deputy Mayor Grace Davis, City Council President Pat Russell and Councilwoman Joy Picus. Davis obtained the City Hall steps for the rally. Russell and Picus helped draft a resolution that is being presented to the City Council by Russell and Mayor Tom Bradley, acknowledging “Oct. 24, 1985, as a day of recognition of both the waged and unwaged contributions of the women of Los Angeles to the city’s economic and spiritual well-being.”

The rally will be something of a “speakout,” Prescod said, with women from various walks of life getting up and saying just “what their work is . . . There are a lot of emerging issues about peace, welfare, comparable worth, deportation, the serial killings of prostitutes. That’s what we want the day to be: recognizing the importance of these issues, not just a strike of housewives for wages.”

Awards and Certificates

Refugee women, middle-class women, welfare mothers, trade union women, professional women--”This is an opportunity to say, ‘This is who we are and what are concerns are. It’s really an expression of the women’s movement. This is who the women’s movement really is. It’s not an isolated thing,” Prescod said.

Consciousness raising, networking, action. They will speak out. There will be awards and certificates of recognition and flowers. The Crenshaw High School Marching Band and Choral Ensemble will play. Clowns, mimes and baby sitters will take care of children on the City Hall lawn. And later, discussion groups will gather on the lawn to tackle some of the issues raised, much as women did so successfully on the campus of the University of Nairobi in July.

And they will know, Prescod said, that they are part of an international observance. A rally in Trinidad; a gathering in Nigeria. In Vancouver, British Columbia, she said, there will be an all-day child care center available, with the community invited for lunch and a speakout. In Great Britain, 24 cities will be observing the day, some with motorcades and a women’s steel band in an open truck in one city. In one section of London, booths will be set up like a fair, many of them for children, including a hair-braiding one. And, she said with a laugh, word had arrived from a group of women in Barcelona, Spain, that they had decided to go all the way: They would go on strike.

In the United States, Prescod said, the theme will be peace at the Wichita, Kan., observance; there will be a demonstration supporting women striking at a Hormel plant in Minnesota, and a kickoff celebration for the organization of a Wages for Housework chapter in Coconut Creek, Fla.

And the women who are calling for time off? Will they practice what they preach?

“I’m so work-oriented,” Anderson-Barker said, indicating that for her going to the rally would be time out. As it would for Spindel.

At City Hall, Russell, Picus and Davis described themselves as more interested in honoring women’s work and supporting the recognition of it than taking time off. Russell saw no such break in the day for her, and sounded not at all concerned. The best Picus could come up with, after initially dismissing such a notion as pure fancy, was an extra half hour in the morning with the paper. Davis had no plans, she said, but when asked to think about it, let out a plaintive, “My God, just to get away from the telephone and maybe go somewhere for a drink with a friend. I think I’ll write that down in my book for three o’clock!”

Prescod, the mother of a 3-year-old daughter and wife of a labor organizer, had her plans at the ready:

“I want some time for me. Obviously, I’ll be working, but I’m sure I won’t deal with the housework. I won’t cook breakfast or dress my daughter or braid her hair or take her to child care,” she said, indicating that her husband would do those chores. “It may even mean that I can watch ‘Good Morning America’ rather than something like ‘Sesame Street.’ That would be a luxury.”