It’s Not “The Mental Load” That Sucks, It’s “Shadow Work”

Illichpilling the Gender Discourse, part 1

There’s been another flurry of Gender Discourse in recent days, mostly turning on the evergreen topic of “the mental load”. That is, in the sense it’s commonly used, a supposedly disproportionately heavy psychological burden imposed on women, by domestic organisational duties without which a household cannot run smoothly, and which somehow never seem to be evenly distributed between husband and wife. I’m not going to rehash the debate, or claim the phenomenon is made up; instead in what follows I’ll offer an alternative term, drawn from one of the twentieth century’s most uncategorisable maverick thinkers: Ivan Illich.

I want to do this because “mental load” points in the right direction, in suggesting something burdensome (“load”) but also intangible (“mental”). But “mental load” also makes the phenomenon a property of minds, and thus always at risk of being individualised and dismissed or subjected to another round of marketisation. The Illichian term I want to offer as alternative comes from his most controversial work - Gender - and denotes the same sense of hidden labour: “shadow work”. But instead of pointing inwards at individual psychologies, it gestures at the quality of this work as something both real and that has also been thinned, occluded, even perhaps deliberately obscured.

Illich was a writer, rogue scholar, activist, and Catholic priest, though he later withdrew from active ministry, and wrote numerous influential books including Gender in 1982. The book set out, as Illich puts it, “to examine the economic apartheid and subordination of women”, in the context of an industrial modernity - and attendent conceptual framework - that Illich saw as “both genderless and sexist”. That is, it’s difficult to describe what he wants to describe, because the language no longer easily allows it.

This is because modernity re-ordered nearly everything about men and women - a change that, he argued, was a foundational precondition for industrial society, modern economics, and modern working patterns.. But this didn’t just give us new technologies but a new consciousness, down to the granular level of how men and women interact. And it created the belief in a putative, genderless ‘human’ which we now treat as default, and whose unattainability gives rise to those obdurate dissatisfactions that, in turn produce tropes such as “the mental load”.

For, Illich argued, modern market society and the hypothetical genderless “human” that is its default subject, structurally disadvantages women. It does so, paradoxically, by replacing the gendered, dualistic nature of those innumerable locally and culturally specific premodern, pre-industrial societies with a flat and presumptively “unisex” society supposedly more equal but in practice, he argued, actually more sexist.

I’ll argue that at the level of everyday experience one of the byproducts of this predicament is the cluster of experiences now widely referred to as “the mental load”. I’ll suggest, with Illich, that this arises not from women’s psychology, men’s moral turpitude, or even “patriarchy”. Rather, it inheres in the way we’ve opted to organise and technologise our social order.

This needs to be argued carefully, so to avoid the risk of being overlong I’ll publish the essay in two parts. In this, the first, I’ll introduce Gender, and make the case for “shadow work” over “the mental load” as a more fruitful framing for that residue of difference that refuses to be deleted from our common life. In the second I’ll think about the practical experience of living with “shadow work”, and explore what this framing has to offer to aid us in transforming that experience. My hope is that we can go further than just changing the way we think about the work that happens in homes, to - perhaps - changing the quality of that work, in the hope not of obliterating it but restoring it from shadow to something fuller and more life-giving.

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