Sleep is a feminist issue. Or should I say, lack of sleep is a feminist issue. During a particularly thickly cut bout of tiredness, when my son was a newborn, I became so convinced that my tiny, milk-stained baby had rolled out of my arms and somehow, unfathomably out of the room, into the night outside that I started crawling along the floor of our hallway, in the dark, sobbing. The fact that the boy couldn’t yet roll over, was in his cot, and the door was closed, while my partner snored like a mechanical digger beside him, could not penetrate the exhausted fug of terror that had enveloped me after weeks, months of broken, fluttering, barely snatched rest.
Whether it’s waking up every 45 minutes to feed a screaming baby, making shopping lists while roasting under the duvet in an insomniac hormonal flush, staying up past midnight to clean the house once your children are in bed, or setting the alarm for 4.45am so you can get your elderly mother to the toilet before she has an accident; the night shift of unpaid, unrecognised and uncelebrated domestic labour is still predominantly undertaken by women. While the Office for National Statistics found that in 2022, almost 4.9 million (56%) night-time workers were male and almost 3.9 million (44%) were female, this does not by any means mean that women are getting more sleep. I very much doubt that it was a breastfeeding woman who smugly declared Friday 14 March as World Sleep Day.
