ESSAY NO. 2 | The Women We Were Before We Became Useful

Photography by Cottonbro Studios

On invisible labor, girlhood, ambition, and what happens when a woman’s value becomes tangled with what she can provide.

There is a particular kind of freedom in watching a little girl love something before she learns to explain why it matters. She draws horses badly and hangs them on the refrigerator. She collects rocks that have no monetary value. She changes clothes four times because each outfit belongs to a different imaginary world. She sings before anyone tells her whether she has a good voice. She dances before she knows what her body looks like from across the room. She writes stories before anyone asks who would publish them. She makes things because making them delights her. She wants things because wanting them is enough. Then, somewhere between girlhood and womanhood, usefulness enters the room.

It rarely announces itself dramatically. No one necessarily sits a girl down and explains that much of adulthood will involve anticipating what other people need. Instead, usefulness is learned through thousands of small exchanges. Notice. Remember. Help. Be considerate. Don't make things harder. Be responsible. Be mature. Think of everyone else. These are not inherently bad lessons. A society without consideration for others would be unbearable. But the distribution of those expectations has never been entirely neutral.

By adulthood, usefulness can become so intertwined with femininity that it becomes difficult to tell where care ends and obligation begins. The useful woman remembers birthdays. She knows when the toilet paper is running low. She schedules appointments, buys gifts, checks whether everyone has eaten, knows which child needs a form signed, notices when someone's mood changes, remembers that the dog needs medication and somehow understands that "we need groceries" means she should already know what everyone intends to eat for the next seven days. She may also have a job.

We tend to recognize labor most easily when we can see someone doing it. Laundry is visible once it becomes a pile. Dinner becomes visible when it reaches the table. What is less visible is the thinking required before the task ever begins: noticing the laundry detergent is low, remembering the school uniform is needed tomorrow, deciding what meals can be made from what is already in the refrigerator, knowing which appointment needs scheduling and anticipating what will happen if nobody schedules it. Researchers increasingly describe this as cognitive household labor, or the mental load: the planning, anticipating, organizing, monitoring and remembering required to keep a household functioning.

A 2023 systematic review published in Sex Roles examined 31 peer-reviewed studies on this cognitive dimension of unpaid household and childcare work. Across much of the literature, women carried a larger share of the mental labor, particularly around childcare and parenting decisions. The review also found that this imbalance was associated with consequences including stress, lower relationship and life satisfaction, and career disadvantages for women. (PubMed Central (PMC))

This is important because the work is remarkably easy to miss. A partner may genuinely believe domestic responsibilities are evenly divided because both people physically perform household tasks. One cooks dinner. The other washes the dishes. One drives to the pediatrician. The other takes a child to soccer practice. Yet equality in execution does not necessarily mean equality in responsibility. Someone still had to notice the pediatric appointment was due, choose the doctor, make the appointment, remember the date, arrange the schedule, locate the insurance information, anticipate the forms and know what questions needed asking.

A recent study of 322 mothers of young children made that distinction directly by separating the planning of 30 household tasks from their execution. Mothers reported doing more domestic labor overall, but the inequality was particularly pronounced in the cognitive portion. Their disproportionate share of cognitive labor was associated with stress, depression, burnout, poorer overall mental health and relationship functioning. (PubMed Central (PMC))

This is where the idea of usefulness becomes more complicated than a complaint about housework. What happens when being the person who notices becomes part of a woman's identity?

There is a satisfaction in being needed. I don't think we should pretend otherwise. Knowing how to take care of people can be an expression of competence, intimacy and love. Remembering how someone takes their coffee is not oppression. Cooking for people you love can be joyful. Raising children, caring for relatives, maintaining friendships and creating a home can be among the richest parts of a life. The problem is not care itself. The problem is what happens when a woman's capacity to care becomes the primary evidence of her worth.

Then usefulness begins expanding.

It follows women into employment. A 2025 study described cognitive household labor as an "invisible third shift." Across seven weeks of data from 263 participants, women reported carrying a disproportionate share of cognitive labor at home, which was associated with greater emotional exhaustion and, in turn, lower career resilience and greater intentions to leave their jobs. Among parents, disproportionate childcare responsibility was especially consequential for mothers. (PubMed Central (PMC))

Another recent U.S. study of 2,133 partnered heterosexual parents found something even more revealing: women's employment and earnings reduced their share of physical household labor but did not similarly erase their cognitive burden. The researchers used the phrase "gendered cognitive stickiness" to describe the way responsibility for thinking about household needs can remain attached to women even as other aspects of couples' economic lives change. (Sage Journals)

In other words, a woman can leave the house, earn money, build a career and acquire professional authority without necessarily resigning from the invisible management position she holds at home.

This makes me wonder whether we have sufficiently considered what usefulness does to identity. If you spend decades becoming extraordinarily good at anticipating everyone else's needs, when exactly are you supposed to learn the shape of your own?

Perhaps that is why the question What do you want? can become unexpectedly difficult.

Not what does your family need. Not what makes financial sense. Not what would be responsible. Not what fits the schedule. Not what will inconvenience the fewest people. Not what can become a business. Not what will improve your health, strengthen your résumé or make you more productive.

What do you want?

For some adults, especially women who have spent years caring for others, the question can feel almost embarrassingly indulgent. We have become so accustomed to defending our choices through usefulness that pleasure alone begins to sound like insufficient evidence.

This reaches beyond domestic labor. Contemporary culture has developed an extraordinary ability to convert almost every private pleasure into a potential productivity system. If you bake beautifully, someone suggests selling cakes. If you make jewelry, open a shop. If you exercise, track your progress. If you read, set an annual goal. If you travel, create content. If you paint, build a portfolio. If you garden, calculate the grocery savings. If you rest, explain that rest makes you more effective later.

Even leisure must occasionally arrive carrying paperwork proving that it contributes to something.

Women are particularly vulnerable to this because the expectation of usefulness did not begin with the internet. The internet merely industrialized it.

Historical changes in gender roles have certainly altered how women spend their time. Long-term U.S. time-use research shows substantial convergence between men's and women's lives compared with earlier decades. Yet gender differences have persisted in unpaid work, including during time that might otherwise function as leisure; women have remained more likely to perform chores when unpaid labor needs doing. (PubMed Central (PMC)) The modern woman may therefore possess opportunities her grandmother could scarcely imagine while still carrying an older expectation: if something needs doing, she should probably notice.

And perhaps that is why I keep returning to the girl before all of this.

Not because childhood was necessarily innocent. Not because every girl was carefree. Certainly not because adulthood is some unfortunate condition from which women need rescuing. I return to her because she represents a period when desire could sometimes exist without an argument.

She liked yellow.

That was the entire explanation.

She wanted to dance.

She wanted to draw.

She wanted to spend the afternoon reading.

Nobody had yet taught her to convert those desires into outcomes.

There is something worth recovering there.

Not irresponsibility. Not selfishness. Not an abandonment of the people we love. Rather, the recognition that a woman can contribute enormously to the lives around her without reducing herself to a contribution.

I want women to have things they are terrible at and continue doing anyway. I want paintings that never sell, gardens that produce nothing edible, poems nobody publishes, clothes that aren't flattering, books read slowly, walks that don't count toward a fitness goal and hobbies that remain stubbornly resistant to monetization. I want friendships in which nobody is networking. I want naps that are not described as recovery. I want pleasure without a business model.

Most of all, I want us to reconsider the word useless.

We use it as one of the harshest possible descriptions of a person. To be useless is to have failed at contribution. Yet some of the most important experiences of being human are wonderfully useless by that definition. Looking at the moon does not accomplish anything. Neither does listening to someone laugh until you begin laughing too. A child collecting shells along the shore is not improving quarterly output. Falling in love is notoriously inefficient. Art itself often refuses to justify its existence except by insisting that human beings needed to make it.

Perhaps a life should contain things that do not have to earn their place in it.

The woman beneath all those responsibilities does not need to become another item on the household list. She does not need another self-improvement program designed to help her "reconnect with herself" efficiently. She may simply need enough room to remember what interests her when nobody is asking anything from her.

Who were you before being needed became one of the ways you understood love?

What did you make before you wondered whether anyone would buy it?

What did you wear before you learned which parts of your body were supposed to be hidden?

What did you want before you became skilled at calculating what everyone else wanted first?

Maybe some of those answers are gone. People change. Girlhood is not a museum we can simply walk back into.

But I suspect traces remain.

The woman we were before we became useful was never useless.

She simply had not yet learned to confuse her value with what she could do for everyone else.

EDITOR’S NOTE

This essay is part of a five-part editorial series from Bruja Magazine examining the quieter tensions of modern life: our obsession with self-improvement, the expectations placed upon women, the complexity of identity, the lives we imagine but never live, and our cultural desire for closure. Across five essays, the series draws from psychological research, cultural observation, and personal reflection to consider what happens when we stop searching for simple answers to complicated human experiences. This is Essay No. [2] of 5.

Sources & Further Reading

Reich-Stiebert, Natalia, Laura Froehlich, and Jan-Bennet Voltmer. “Gendered Mental Labor: A Systematic Literature Review on the Cognitive Dimension of Unpaid Work Within the Household and Childcare.” Sex Roles, 2023. The review examined 31 peer-reviewed studies and found that women generally performed a greater share of household mental labor, with consequences for stress, relationships and careers. (PubMed)

Aviv, E., et al. “Cognitive Household Labor: Gender Disparities and Consequences for Maternal Mental Health and Wellbeing.” Archives of Women’s Mental Health, 2024. The study examined planning and execution across 30 household tasks among 322 mothers of young children. (Springer)

Krstić, Anja, et al. “Taking on the Invisible Third Shift: The Unequal Division of Cognitive Labor and Women’s Work Outcomes.” Psychology of Women Quarterly, 2025. The research linked disproportionate cognitive household labor among women with emotional exhaustion and poorer work-related outcomes. (PubMed)

Catalano Weeks, Ana, Helen Kowalewska, and Leah Ruppanner. “Take a Load Off? Not for Mothers: Gender, Cognitive Labor, and the Limits of Time and Money.” 2025. The study of 2,133 U.S. parents examines the persistence of women's cognitive household burden even as employment and economic resources change. (Sage Journals)