This Woman's Work
I walked into the dorm restroom, and someone was playing a song I later knew to be “This Woman’s Work” while they were in the shower. From the first sparse chords of the piano to the start of Kate Bush’s voice, I was enthralled.
It’s a love story into which I only fell deeper when I looked up the lyrics and learned an interesting fact about the song—though sung by a woman, ”This Woman’s Work” is told from a male perspective. Kate wrote it around a scene from the John Hughes film She’s Having A Baby, matching the lyrics and chord progressions to the beats of the cinematography. When the song plays in the movie, a young man is in a hospital waiting room having just learned that there are complications in his wife’s pregnancy. As Kate sings I know you’ve got a lot of strength left, scenes flash through the man’s head. In their new house, a room with a fireplace and blinds pulled down but light still coming in, her watching him fold newspaper onto the ground and smiling, head tilted. I should be crying but I just can’t let it show, and he throws the newspaper into the fireplace before crossing the distance to her. The ladder tips and the paint bucket falls over, spilling white all over the floor: oh, make it go away. She stops her painting, turns to him to say something inaudible.
Then, in another scene, they are running in the rain, fluid movement to the front door. By the door, red roses. Search for the keys and reaching for each other when they can’t find that sharp ring of metal. Give them back to me. Walking and kissing and walking, heads back in laughter, arms around each other. Back inside and flicking paint onto each other. In present time, the young man looks up at the hospital lights. A tear falls down his cheek and the tear becomes a single drop of blood hitting the ground. They’re in the bedroom now, kissing. Their shadows on the wall follow their movement.
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The song has also been used in an episode of the more recent TV series The Handmaid’s Tale. “This Woman’s Work” appears in very different tones in these two pieces of art—one centered around the fear of one’s lover giving birth and the complications that come with this, and the other a scene from a series about the loss of women’s autonomy and the punishment they are threatened with for protecting one of their own.
In The Handmaid’s Tale, Kate vocalizes the beginning of the song while women are pushed forward by men in black robes, in line to be hanged after declining to stone fellow Handmaid Janine in defiance. As the piano starts, we see the women’s backs, hear their fearful breaths. We glimpse their faces, some with wide eyes looking straight ahead, some with eyes closed. I’ll stand outside this woman’s work, this woman’s work: the camera pans down to linked hands and up bodies, reminding us of the unshakeable claim their country holds over them. The women shiver, shake their heads, hold hands.
Oh, darling, make it go away, and the man pulls the lever. The music stops.
The women are still alive.
For a second, there is no music, just heavy breaths while we see each woman find her way back to herself. Then, the music’s final lyrics—just make it go away—before it dissipates, and the scene ends in breath. The attempted execution has been a scare tactic, a ploy, and their feet touch the platform at the same time.
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My sophomore year of high school, I read The Handmaid’s Tale for the first time. Even years later, I still remember its passages as I walk through daily life: Offred talking about her loneliness, feeling like she embodies the word hollow, reminded of the idea of reinvention after being shown an old magazine, desiring a distinct identity.
More than this, Atwood’s novel has also been brought into our modern day world with the battle for reproductive rights. Women are dressing as Handmaids at town halls and statehouses, spilling onto the streets to protest the stripping of their right to safe and legal abortion, to reliable access to tampons and sanitary napkins, for transgender women to use the correct bathroom, and more. The red-cloaked image, drawn from Atwood’s novel, gives these women power; it is not self-contained but rather morphs, much like “This Woman’s Work”, to fit the context in which it is needed. The television adaptation too brings the subject matter into the current political and cultural landscape.
Though the song in The Handmaid’s Tale is played far out of its original context, I find the melody doing a similar job as in She’s Having a Baby, pulling us into the inner landscape of a character’s emotions. How powerful is it that a female voice is calling to the bravery of these women, yet onscreen we see only what the men are seeing? In She’s Having a Baby, that male perspective shows us what it is to be a forced bystander to a loved one in pain. He, and the viewers, cannot enter the women’s pain fully because we aren’t experiencing it with them. We stand outside this woman’s work. But that work is real, the song reminds us, whether or not we can see it. And for the first time in too long, it cannot be silenced.