The Invisible Hand on Her Back:

How capitalism and patriarchy hold each other up

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There’s an image that keeps coming back to me.

It’s my mother, standing at the sink in a quiet kitchen, sleeves rolled up, wrist-deep in suds. She’s not coming home from work — this is her work. The floors are clean, the children fed, the fridge full, and the bills paid — thanks to her planning, her labor, and her invisible juggling act.

She was a full-time homemaker. And somehow, everyone looked past that word as if it meant she had no job at all.

But the truth is she worked every waking moment. She never got paid. And she rarely got credit.

This isn’t a personal memory — it’s a window into something much larger and more structural. Millions of women hold up the world in a system where they remain unseen. That system has a name.

It’s not capitalism. It’s not patriarchy. It’s both. Together.

Capitalism needs her to work. Patriarchy needs her to disappear.

We often talk about capitalism as a system driven by markets and wages. Beneath that machinery lies a hidden economy. It’s the unpaid, feminized labor that keeps households and societies running. Cooking, caregiving, budgeting, managing emotions, smoothing conflict. All of it is…