Penelopes and the left-behind

Penelope waits twenty years, weaving by day and unpicking by night — her waiting is the story's condition, and her fidelity its moral. Under Southern Africa's migrant-labour system, women waited decades for men sent to the mines; in China, the 'left-behind women' of the interior hold households together while labour migrates to the coastal cities.

Two regimes, one distribution: mobility to some, waiting to others, and the waiting gendered. Literature has always known this figure. The question is what she knows — what the long-practised waiting of women contains besides patience: management, endurance, authorship, refusal.