She’s reading the history wrong in terms of how we came to rely on women’s unpaid labour outside the home in schools, politics and charities — women’s domination of volunteer organizations a hundred years ago wasn’t an active choice on the part of many women or society as a whole but one forced upon many educated and ambitious women due to the systemic barriers against other work. Nineteenth century women couldn’t work as lawyers, but they could apply their skills to organizing their husband’s political campaign, household or affinity, for instance. And I suspect that we’re talking about a very small number of women with the leisure and social cachet to run these organizations — many working-class women were working for wages or taking in piece-work, married or not.

And, furthermore, if one goes back a century or two beforehand, one finds fewer and fewer women in any sort of voluntary leadership roles. Those were dominated by “men of the cloth” in many Western countries, whether Catholic priests or Protestant ministers, who, alongside other privileged men, kept the administration of much charitable aid and organization a male domain.

So, rather than thinking about “replacing women volunteers” (which usually gets people thinking things like “how can we stop women from doing what they’re doing now and go back to what they were doing then”) can we think about “what are the jobs that need to be done, and how can we ensure that”? And less about the end of sisterhood, too, while we’re at it!