Invisible Labor Quotes

I feel like I am doing a lot, but if someone asks me what exactly I have accomplished, I don't know... putting my son to sleep, feeding him, taking care of things in the house amount to a lot of work. But, yes, I haven't arrested 14 criminals in one day or saved the world or anything of that sort!

There's no praise or acknowledgment paid to women who raise the babies.

We are all fed from hundreds and thousands of hands. Often we do not know whose they are nor how they work. Only a few of us ever visualize the hands that grope in the coal mines or push levers in the mills or handle axes in the lumber camp.

We must ensure that while eliminating child labor in the export industry, we are also eliminating their labour from the informal sector, which is more invisible to public scrutiny - and thus leaves the children more open to abuse and exploitation.

The best servant does his work unseen.

And just as a little thread of gold, running through a fabric, brightens the whole garment, so women's work at home, while only the doing of little things, like the golden gleam of sunlight runs through and brightens all the fabric of civilization.

Let's face it, 80 percent of the work I do my kids can't see.

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.

A lot of people don't know what I do. In the industry they take credit for work because to some degree it makes them feel worthy or greater. I am not a ghostwriter 'cause it is on the CD covers who wrote and did what but people don't care about anything they can't see. The work gets unnoticed and the credibility goes untouched.

I would invite all Latin people to do nothing for about two weeks so you can see who really, really is running the economy I am here to give voice to the invisible.

I've worked extremely hard. There's always that part that people don't see, the things you do behind the scenes.

Across the curve of the earth, there are women getting up before dawn, in the blackness before the point of light, in the twilight before sunrise; there are women rising earlier than men and children to break the ice, to start the stove, to put up the pap, the coffee, the rice, to iron the pants, to braid the hair, to pull the day's water up from the well, to boil water for tea, to wash the children for school, to pull the vegetables and start the walk to market, to run to catch the bus for the work that is paid. I don't know when most women sleep.

...well, if women's work was never done, why trouble about how much of it wasn't being accomplished at any given moment?

[My dad] didn't do much apart from the traditional winning of bread. He didn't take me to get my hair cut or my teeth cleaned; he didn't make the appointments. He didn't shop for my clothes. He didn't make my breakfast, lunch, or dinner. My mom did all of those things, and nobody ever told her when she did them that it made her a good mother.

No one knows how hard one works.

It's invisible, what women do. It's not rewarded as much.

There is lots of my work that takes place behind closed doors that is not ever seen.

I think that's something people need to convey because you see all these celebrity moms out there, and the perception is they can do it all, but they have sooo much help. And it's kind of an unfair image to project for many women, because it is really hard, and if you have help, you should indicate you have help.

Have you seen a duck gliding smoothly on water? Does it ever look like it is paddling furiously underneath the surface? I don't have to show that I am working very hard.

Such is of the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.

I've always believed it's important to make the invisible visible. And valuing that which has been taken for granted is something that I've always instinctually known is the key to the kind of society I want to live in and raise my children in.

I scarcely remember any writer who has ever ventured to say that the half of the work of the world is actually accomplished by women; and very few husbands who would be otherwise than greatly startled and amazed, if not indignant, if not derisive, at the suggestion of such an idea as that the work of their wives was equal to their own.

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

We are surrounded every day by people who do thankless but important work.

One is not idle because one is absorbed. There is both visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil, to think is to do. The crossed arms work, the clasped hands act. The eyes upturned to Heaven are an act of creation.