We have nearly a hundred years of history to rebuild.

I'll tell you why I'm going on strike. Because for too long I've given my labour free of charge and been told I should.  Not only that, but my mother did and my grandmother before  her. Now my daughter's working in a bar and earning the minimum wage. I have to make a stand, to set an example.  

When my grandmother came here from Poland in 1911 she had nothing but a husband.  Pretty soon she had nothing but an absent husband and three children. Of these, two were sons. The daughter was my mother. My Booba worked on a market stall to earn enough to keep the family alive. The two sons grew up to be gamblers and my mother (who else but a woman?) followed in my Booba's footsteps and worked on the market stall to help my Booba.

When I was 17 my uncle died of cancer from smoking. My mother never got over his death. It meant more to her than we did. Her focus had always been on her brothers in spite of having her own family. Her mother was more like a sister than a mother. That's the dynamic of a fatherless family.  I know that, because my daughter's family is also fatherless.

Try as I may, I can't seem to strike that motherly pose with her. It's easy to work out why.  You see whatever happens we're sisters in the end because of our political position.

Luckily for Norma, there was only a father in our lives for a short time.  At every time when there was one, it was a negative experience.  It was a period when we had to make allowances and retreat to a feminine, passive role in order not to cause chaos.  When the father figure left it was a period of calm and regeneration. 

My father's family was sparse too. My paternal grandma became a widow in much the same way as my maternal one. Her husband went to Europe for the First World War and never returned. Nana was a poet and embroiderer.  She wrote poems in Yiddish.  She couldn't survive without a husband and remarried to a man who didn't love her.  My father was excluded from his stepfather's family. This meant his mother could only see us on rare occasions and gave us little gifts secretly.  My father is convinced his mother would have lived many more years if her second husband had looked after her as he should have.  She died of bronchitis.

Now my mother is dead.  She nursed my father in her last years and ended finally in a mental health unit from which after two weeks she demanded to be discharged only to die at home a few hours later. She died with a large bruise on her forehead. She deserved better.  We all do.  The hospitals we rely on aren't worthy of the women who work in them and end up in them.  They are organised by men in Management and men in Government.

The play groups and nurseries my daughter attended were staffed by women.  We understood each other. The social work institutions I worked in were staffed by women who support each other. The clients who receive our services appreciate it and show their support. The Afghan boy who lost his whole family came to see me to today just to say hello. I had to welcome him secretly as the Director of my agency frowns on welcoming old clients. We're required to deal with clients in short sharp bursts and then move on as if they never existed. That's the nature of the work. Of course the funders would frown on it too. They are, of course, men. Pity.

What's severely lacking in Refugee work is sufficient interpreters and counsellors who speak ethnic languages. This is because the staff are underpaid and unresourced.  Why?  Because they're in the caring professions of course, which as we all know, is dominated by women.  And what they do doesn’t matter does it?

So I'm going on strike - will you join me?  We have nearly a hundred years of history to rebuild. Ruth Appleton

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