some nonfiction for a change
In response to the outrage I feel at what’s happening with reproductive rights in the US these days, some feminist/anticapitalist thoughts from the archive:
Are Wages for Housework Enough?
A Response to Federici from 2023
Stella Jorgensen
5/08/2023
Capitalism may not promise to value workers. It may be rooted in processes of exploitation and may be entirely unconcerned with issues of sustainability, social justice or human rights. But capitalism does promise one thing. It’s an idea that has become the basis for the great American dream; that is that everyone has an equal shot at playing the capitalist game. Capitalism claims to be only a bystander to issues of gender– after all, women are not prohibited from joining the labor force! Capitalism will happily exploit and extract from them under a system of waged labor just as it does men. However, this American dream ideology fails to account for the society and context in which it plays out. By overlooking the traditionally gendered nature of unwaged labor, capitalism’s bystander position, while arguably maintaining the potential for equality within the paid labor force, ultimately upholds gross gender inequity.
This paper will examine the work of Silvia Federici through her involvement in the “Wages for Housework” campaign of the 1970s and understand how the ideals of this campaign can be adapted to address modern gender inequity. It will discuss Federici’s analysis of how capitalism has historically supported patriarchal inequality, and point out ways in which it continues to do so despite advances in women’s rights and the feminist movement. Finally, it will advocate for a deconstruction and reconstruction of gender norms to support not just equality in the workplace but gender equity across both public and private spheres.
The Wages for Housework movement was born of the 1970s women's movements, and attempted to address the gross amount of unpaid domestic labor women were and are expected to perform. As women began joining the traditionally male-dominated workforce, they found that while men returned home to rest and eat, women often returned home to a “second shift;” cooking, cleaning, child-rearing, and caring for their husband's mental, physical, and sexual needs. Silvia Federici claimed that it is this unpaid labor that enables the male worker to succeed under a capitalist system, and this unpaid labor is a necessity for the function of capitalism. In her book “Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle” she writes “In the same way as God created Eve to give pleasure to Adam, so did capital create the housewife to service the male worker physically, emotionally, and sexually, to raise his children, mend his socks, and patch up his ego when it is crushed by the work and the social relations (which are relations of loneliness) that capital has reserved for him.”
As capitalism has become a global phenomenon, it has been marketed by neoliberals as “the great equalizer.” The assumption being made is that it will provide waged jobs and training to women outside the home, giving them greater autonomy and independence. While capitalist production, particularly as it has moved into the “Third World” has indeed provided greater opportunities for women to work outside the home, it fails to account not only for their second shift at home but also for the discrimination they are likely to face in the workplace and to provide them with subsistence wages or adequate job protection in case of pregnancy and childbirth. If a woman can overcome gender discrimination in the workplace as many more are now able to do, rather than increasing self-advocacy and autonomy, in the modern era capitalism forces women to choose between parenting and motherhood or the same success in their careers as their male counterparts.
This is not to say that mothers are not able to rise to the top of their fields, they can and many do, both on their own or with the help of a partner willing to contribute to child care and domestic labor. However, while some women are able to share domestic labor, pregnancy and birth (quite literally labor) at the minimum cannot be shared and this additional physical and emotional labor presents an obstacle to traditional capitalist success that men will never face, creating an undeniable gender imbalance.
Federici claims that the “Wages for Housework” campaign is not limited to the idea that domestic labor should be paid. Rather it is about raising appreciation for the unpaid labor women perform so that they can not only be compensated with wages but also with adequate adaptations in the workplace to fit their needs. She writes “We are housemaids, prostitutes, nurses, shrinks; this is the essence of the “heroic” spouse who is celebrated on “Mother’s Day.” We say: stop celebrating our exploitation, our supposed heroism. From now on we want money for each moment of it, so that we can refuse some of it and eventually all of it.”
Federici continues to critique the globalization of capitalism, arguing that rather than promoting independence and autonomy, it has tasked women from the Global South with producing labor for the Global North. She notes that remittances are the second highest category of international monetary transfers behind oil sales, pointing to a massive movement of labor following capital to the global north largely leaving women behind to birth and raise the labor power. Her book further critiques the globalization of capitalism by pointing out that as middle-class women in countries such as the United States join the workforce, the care work they leave behind is not delegated to or shared with their partners. Rather it is transferred to women from the Global South who take up jobs as nannies and house cleaners. She writes “Taken as a whole these phenomena show that far from being a means of female emancipation, the NIDL (New International Division of Labor) is the vehicle of a political project that intensifies the exploitation of women and brings back forms of coerced labor that we would have thought extinct with the demise of the colonial empires.” In a study on gendered migration written up by Nicola Phillips and Patricia R. Pessar of Yale University, this assumption is reiterated. It concludes that “Throughout the Americas and beyond the demand for foreign domestic servants has been spurred by an escalation in native-born female employment and the shortage of nationals available for domestic service alongside the undercutting of social welfare policies favorable to women and children.”
This point brings me to a critique of the Wages for Housework movement. Noting that the women replacing middle-class housewives are paid (if minimally), they are actually receiving wages for housework. Yet little has changed regarding the fact that it remains women doing this domestic labor. The necessity of housework and the role of the housewife is evident in the fact that middle-class Westerners seem desperate to hire help largely from Latin America and Southeast Asia. In this sense, Federici’s ideal of a societal emphasis on the value of housework through wages has at least in part come to pass, but with the roles of housekeeper, homemaker, and sex worker still predominantly filled by women, it is clear that the emancipation of women from these roles has yet to occur.
Silvia Federici’s involvement in the Wages for Housework campaign took place through the 1970s, and her book “Revolution at Point Zero” collects work from 1970 through 2016. The issues of which she writes remain unfortunately relevant, but a great deal has changed both within the women’s movement and the world since the beginning of this collection. As of 2022, 77% of prime-age women (18-54) are participants in the labor force, indicating massive improvement since the 1970s. However, upon further breakdown of this participation, women continue to make up a vast majority of caretakers and educators. In 2019, 88.9% of registered nurses were women, as were 80.5% of elementary and middle school educators. Not coincidentally, these jobs are frequently underpaid, demonstrated by the 4.5 million strike days that occurred in 2022, the largest industries impacted being educational services and healthcare and social assistance.
Furthermore, the proliferation of the internet has created a new platform for the exploitation of women’s emotional labor. In her paper “Emotion Work: Considering Gender in Digital Labor,” Jacquelyn Arcy explains that “The digital sphere adds a new dimension to the long-standing assumption that women have a natural expertise in expressing and managing emotions.” She points out that in engaging with digital platforms, actions as small as liking and sharing content generate value for social media companies like Facebook. It may seem that like the capitalist demand for labor, social media giants are unbiased in the exploitation of their users. However once again in considering the context of how these platforms are used, the gender bias becomes evident. As Arcy points out, “Facebook mirrors the offline social world, in which women plan the get-togethers, send the birthday and holiday greetings, transmit the family gossip, and just generally stay present in everyone else’s lives.” As women are expected to fulfill the roles of family organizer, event planner, and caretaker in real life, so they do online, demonstrating an extension of women’s unpaid emotional labor and time to the digital realm.
While still undervalued, it is clear through the demand for domestic and service workers to replace women moving into the workforce that paying wages for housework does not significantly alter the gender imbalance. Furthermore, the vastly female nature of labor in service and care industries demonstrates that moving into the waged workforce does not liberate women from societal expectations of fulfilling “women’s work.” What is needed then, is not only an appreciation and wage for housework, but a deconstructing of gender norms to emancipate women from their historical roles as housewives. Nancy Fraser outlines the pros and cons of several models aimed at promoting female liberation in her paper “After the Family Wage: Gender Equity and the Welfare State.” She considers the downsides of a welfare state, a solution often championed to provide women with necessary support within domestic roles, explaining that this solution does little to dismantle the gender norms of the nuclear family. So long as welfare policy remains centered around supporting a traditionally nuclear family structure, little progress is made in emancipating women from the expectation of fulfilling their mother and caretaker role. Fraser also importantly notes that in the modern era, the traditional family structure is increasingly uncommon, particularly among lower-income populations and those who may most need support from the state.
The dramatic increase in awareness of the gender spectrum that has arisen in the 21st century provides an ample atmosphere to explore policy that supports not only women but any member of any marginalized gender group in working and raising families. It is clear that the minimum wage in most places is insufficient to adequately support a family. In raising the next generation of labor, some further form of support must be imagined. The likeliest candidate to extend this support would be the state both to ensure the most equitable distribution of resources and because of its existing structures to secure funds that could be utilized and redistributed to better support its citizens. Here there is an important distinction to be made between receiving support from the state and transferring the responsibility of domestic work to the state; one would allow greater autonomy and independence for parents and families, the other risks state control over the family structure and would be criticized from left to right across the political spectrum.
Fraser argues that existing welfare structures ultimately aim to allow women to be “more like men” within the workforce, only further perpetuating barriers to gender equity. She argues that instead, welfare policy should support men in becoming more like women. This does not imply the feminization of all men, however, it opens the door to policy solutions such as mandatory paternity leave in addition to maternity leave, requiring men to take on a greater portion of domestic responsibilities. Given the fluidity of the gender spectrum, I argue that the goal should not be to support men in taking on women’s roles but to recognize firstly the ungendered nature of most care work and mandate structures such as paid parental leave and childcare in close proximity to the workplace to encourage participation in care work across the gender spectrum. The emptying of cities following the COVID pandemic has created an opportunity for residential restructuring that could allow for a bridge between the traditional metropolitan/suburban gap that divides the home and the workplace. This would lessen the isolation of caregivers, allowing them greater access to the workplace, and would heighten the impetus for those at work to be more frequently present in the home. Secondly, welfare policy must continue to recognize the biologically gendered nature of pregnancy and childbirth and must provide assurance that absence from the workplace due to these conditions will be paid rather than penalized.
The fight for female liberation is a fight as old as time yet since Federici’s first writings over 50 years ago, progress has but crept along and recent restrictions to women’s healthcare have presented a devastating and significant setback. The growing awareness of the gender spectrum and LGBTQ issues present a societal atmosphere ripe for a restructuring of mentality around gender norms. The COVID pandemic forced a dramatic reconsideration of the value of essential workers and the importance of domestic work around the world and created new political and economic realities well positioned to support structural shifts. We are now presented with the opportunity to take advantage of these conditions and tackle the capitalist systems that have plagued houseworkers for generations. Federici’s words from 50 years ago still ring true, she wrote: “Capitalism is the utopian project of modern patriarchy.” Change is undeniably overdue.
Citations
Arcy, J. (2016). Emotion work: Considering gender in digital labor. Feminist Media Studies, 16(2), 365–368. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2016.1138609
Cudd, A. E. (2015). Is Capitalism Good for Women? Journal of Business Ethics, 127(4), 761–770. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-014-2185-9
Fact Sheet: The State of Women in the Labor Market in 2023. (2023, February 6). Center for American Progress. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/fact-sheet-the-state-of-women-in-the-labor-market-in-2023/
Federici, S. (2020). Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. PM Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6201177
FRASER, N. (1994). After The Family Wage: Gender Equity and the Welfare State. Political Theory, 22(4), 591–618. https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591794022004003
Full article: Emotion work: Considering gender in digital labor. (n.d.). Retrieved April 26, 2023, from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14680777.2016.1138609
Phillips, N. (2011). 9 Migration and Development in Latin America and the Caribbean. In N. Phillips (Ed.), Migration in the Global Political Economy (pp. 167–190). Lynne Rienner Publishers. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781626370050-009
U.S. labor strikes up 52% in 2022 as worker activism rises. (n.d.). Cornell Chronicle. Retrieved April 27, 2023, from https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2023/02/us-labor-strikes-52-2022-worker-activism-rises
von Werlhof, C. (2007). No Critique of Capitalism Without a Critique of Patriarchy! Why the Left Is No Alternative. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 18(1), 13–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/10455750601164600
Women in the labor force: A databook : BLS Reports: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (n.d.). Retrieved April 27, 2023, from https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/womens-databook/2020/home.htm
