Solo mothers: holidays, the first expense crossed off the budget

According to Le Figaro, which publishes a report today, 1 November, single mothers find themselves weighing the shopping basket against a weekend away from home. With budgets tightening, the paper writes, holidays become a "variable d'ajustement" (a adjustment variable, the item you trim to make the sums work). Some go without so their children can leave; others rely on relatives or charities to get away for a few days. The detail of the figures and situations is not repeated here: we only have the article's summary.

Everything that follows is our reading, not that of Le Figaro.

We talk about "holidays" as a leisure extra, a supplement, the dessert of the budget. Look instead at the kitchen. A single mother does everything: the wages, the meals, the homework, the doctor's appointments, the laundry, and the end-of-month accounts. When the budget cracks, the first thing cut is whatever does not look like an emergency. Yet rest is part of reproductive labour: catching your breath is what lets you keep going for the rest of the year. Denying it means making the one carrying the whole machine pay for it.

The concepts of social reproduction help here. Capitalism depends on work that produces people rather than commodities: caring, feeding, nursing, raising. This work is largely unpaid or badly paid, and above all carried out by women. When public services retreat or prices rise faster than wages, this work does not vanish: it is passed back onto households. And in a household with only one adult, there is no one else to hand it to.

The double day, which Kollontai described more than a century ago, has not aged a bit: a wage earner whose worries as a mother and household manager have not been lightened. For solo mothers the load is heavier still, because there is neither a second wage nor a second adult to take over. Going without so the children can leave is an act of love, certainly. It is also a quiet way of filling the gap that neither wages nor the collective fills.

The reliance on relatives and charities deserves respect: it is real solidarity. But it must be said plainly: it is not a right, it is makeshift coping. A right to holidays would depend neither on the generosity of an aunt nor on a charity application.

What the report does not say, going by its summary: how many families are affected, and what the authorities intend to do. These questions remain open. Ours is simpler: who pays, today, so that the system holds? The usual answer: those who never have the time to tell the story.