The Core Story: #womenswork

So, here we are in month 6 of the Covid-19 reset, on Labor Day 2020.

A female friend on facebook posted “Labor Day. [My son]woke me up at 4:45AM to remind me that there is no such thing as a day off.”

I read this comment as I listened to a story about #cottagecore, a term that was new to me.

…cottagecore has been the standout aesthetic of 2020 for the same reason that everything else happened in 2020. When the pandemic hit, idle homemaking became less escapism and more like an inescapable reality. Cottagecore under lockdown, then, became a way to spin the terror and drudgery into something adorable — and interest in it directly correlated to how bad it became outside. (source: Once Upon a Time, There Was Cottagecore)

As I kept listening, I realized it’s a repackaging of the old belief about how “women would be fulfilled from their housework, marriage, sexual lives, and children” rather than a life outside the house. The concept was originally brought forward by Betty Friedan in ‘The Feminine Mystique’.

Evienne Yanney, a 16-year-old in California, told Vox that, as a lesbian, she found solace in Instagram’s cottagecore feeds, because “many of us aren’t really accepted in the modern world, so the thought of running away to a cottage is really, I guess, kind of soothing.” (source: The Escapist…