DOMESTIC LABOR, work necessary to maintain a household or private home. Disproportionately performed by women, this work falls under the umbrella of “invisible work”—a term coined by sociologist Arlene Kaplan Daniels to describe labor that is unacknowledged and therefore unregulated. Domestic labor includes but is not limited to cleaning, laundry, meal planning, grocery shopping, cooking, reproductive labor, parenting, carpooling, managing the family calendar, coordinating extracurricular activities and doctors’ appointments, as well as the conception and planning of these tasks, which require mental and emotional labor.
The devaluation of domestic labor is indivisible from the subordination of women in the ongoing process of capitalist accumulation, in which women are both the maintenance workers and producers of labor power. As Silvia Federici writes in Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, “Women’s unpaid labor in the home has been the pillar upon which the exploitation of the waged workers, ‘wage slavery,’ has been built, and the secret of its productivity.” In the transition from feudalism to capitalism, centers of production were reorganized from the home, where artisanal and agricultural production thrived, to the factory. Housework and child-rearing were no less necessary for capitalist profit in this process—as women quite literally raised and nourished the next generation to enter the workforce—but the conditions of this labor were transformed into a “natural resource” or “personal service.” This exclusion of women from waged work allowed for the exploitation and appropriation of women’s labor by the state and capitalists, contributing to further divisions in the social and labor relations between men and women.
The fight for recognition and payment for all domestic labor was a project central to the second-wave feminist movement. The International Wages for Housework Campaign (IWFHC), which was launched at the third National Women’s Liberation Conference in Manchester, England, in 1972, was a grassroots networking campaign that connected organizations dedicated to the fair remuneration of female labor. Participants included Women Against Rape, a UK-based group that linked the incidence of domestic violence and sexual assault to women’s financial dependence on men; WinVisible, a campaign for women with both visible and invisible disabilities that advocated for increased accessibility and resources for disabled individuals; Wages Due Lesbians; and the English Collective of Prostitutes and the US PROStitutes Collective. A New York Wages for Housework Committee poster proclaimed in 1975:
The crime against us internationally, from which all other crimes against us flow, is our life sentence of housework at home and outside, servicing men, children, and other women, in order to produce and reproduce the working class. For this work we are never paid a wage.
This crime of work and wagelessness brands us for life as the weaker sex and delivers us powerless to employers, government planners and legislators, doctors, the police, prisons and mental institutions as well as the individual men for a lifetime of servitude and imprisonment.
Our campaign wages for housework is our demand for power to refuse the social and sexual onslaught on our minds, our bodies, and our relations— in a word, our demand for power to refuse this destiny of work which we carry in every country, wherever we find ourselves.
Despite the continued social and economic relevance of unpaid housework in the twenty-first century, the issue has been largely circumvented by women’s large-scale participation in the workforce, which has obscured the fact that they still perform the lion’s share of domestic labor in addition to their professional duties. Feminist scholar Angela McRobbie emphasizes the importance of working mothers’ incomes as the privatization of the public sector and divestment from social-safety networks have resulted in increased financial stress for families. “Female labour power,” she writes, “is far too important to the post-industrial economy for anyone to be an advocate of long-term stayat-home wives and mothers.”
Because paid domestic labor is undervalued and often unregulated it remains underpaid, and it is disproportionately performed by women of color, “many of whom are migrants or members of disadvantaged communities,” according to the introductory text of the 2011 Convention on Domestic Workers, “and particularly vulnerable to discrimination in respect of conditions of employment and work, and to other abuses of human rights.” The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that there are 75.6 million domestic workers worldwide, 76.2 percent of whom are women, and that 81 percent of them are informally employed, meaning they have no formal proof of employment and few if any workplace protections. It is estimated that domestic workers earn just fifty-six percent of the average wage of other workers, even as they experience some of the most difficult and strenuous working conditions.