Martyrdom Isn’t a Good Business Model

Matricide isn't just the killing of a mother - it's the consistent slow erasure of the feminine, the life giving, the nurturing the caretaking. And nowhere is it more apparent than in the business of care.

Women's work is a billion-dollar industry but the money never lands in the caregivers’ hands because the world is real comfy extracting our empathy while telling us we should be grateful for the opportunity to “serve.”

Hospice nurses break their backs trying to keep up with the death care charts and graphs while holding impossible amounts of grief. Death workers too, hold impossible grief like it's their job - because it is - but you wouldn't know it by looking at their rates.

That is matricide. The slow killing of the caretakers, the breaking of women under the weight of care. And what's crazy making is that women perpetuate this erasure of the feminine by reinforcing the belief that their labor is a “gift” and should be given freely rather than deeply compensated.

Mutual aid and sliding scale models, while well-intentioned, can sometimes function as covert people pleasing behaviors that keep women's work undervalued and drive forward a culture of scarcity and exploitation… and yet women are still upholding a system that exploits them.

Here are some things to add to your checklist, women who offer care work:

·     Stop accepting exploitation as “Just the way it is.”

·     Set boundaries like your life depends on it.

·     Charge what you're worth.  

·     Reject the martyr narrative.

·     Support each other.

·     Only offer sliding scale if it feels exactly true for you and don't do it out of a “should.”

I've got a few under my wing in thee Nine Keys death midwifery apprenticeship who have come to the course to be held while they rest - while I keep *putting them back to bed* - guess what they have in common - they are women from the end-of-life care industry.

It's heartbreaking to me that in 2025 we're still exploiting women by abusing their empathy and nurturing. And it's infuriating to me that celebrity death workers and celebrity hospice nurses don't use their platforms to address this issue. And it's infuriating to me that when I get on Facebook (which I rarely do) that I see a whole host of elder death doulas just singing how happy they are to do their work for free as if that's fair the other women workers.

Let's get the words “goddess” and “Great Mother” out of our mouths if we are going to double down on “women's work is freely given” by shaming another woman for raising her rates.