TradeMarx |Unpaid Labour: The Work Women Do

In India, every day when men return from work, they come back to find dinner. When they wake up the morning after, their clothes are freshly pressed. If they make it in time for tea, they have it in spotless living rooms. Who does this work of making dinner, pressing clothes and cleaning the living room?

Almost universally, the answer is women. Women take part in what Marx called reproductive labor: the labor exerted in order for a worker to return to work the next day. And for this reproductive work, women make no money.

How did this division of labor come to be? Angela Davis has written extensively on housework and in her essay, “Women, Race and Class”, she outlines how the distinction of housework never existed until the capitalist period. Under primitive conditions and feudal relations, all work was housework. In the capitalist period, women have been left behind to do the housework and have for that reason become dependent on men. This is not to say that feudal and primitive modes of accumulation are better but rather to point out how economic activity has evolved over generations.

Angela Davis also argues that women should not ask for money as a solution to this problem for that will only make them domestic workers, chained to the household. Instead, she argues that for the complete liberation of women, a reorganization of society along marxist lines is needed. In other words, it is only when everyone is liberated from the yoke of capitalism that women can be liberated from housework.