Since joining the Wages for Housework movement in the early ‘70s, Marxist scholar and activist Silvia Federici has called for more attention to be paid to the sheer scale of social reproduction, more colloquially known as domestic or care work, and how much of it remains unwaged or low-wage, gendered and super-exploitative.
But now, as the pandemic has thrown millions into unemployment, has affected women disproportionately, and laid bare just how much working people rely on myriad forms domestic care, others are, as this wide-ranging profile in the New York Times magazine suggests, rediscovering the socialist feminism of Federici and her contemporaries, such as Selma James, Angela Davis, and the Combahee River Collective.
Federici is perhaps best known for her 2004 book Caliban and the Witch, in which she argued that the transition from feudalism to capitalism required convincing European peasants, often through the most gruesome force, that social reproduction was the “natural” province of women, while waged work was for men. An arrangement that only became more exploitative as European powers began to colonize the Western hemisphere and increase their reliance of slavery.
Especially, but not only, in the US, such social arrangements persist up until the present. Even as ever more women are obligated to enter the workforce, they are still more likely to be responsible for social reproduction, be it having and raising children, maintaining a home, or caring for the elderly. This is in addition to women, especially Black and brown women, being employed in low-wage industries, many of which, like hospitality and domestic care, were the hardest hit by the pandemic.
As the profile notes, such a predicament might be ignored, as it has been for so long, except for the fact that the lockdowns have upended even the comfortable lives of “lean-in” professionals. Jolted into realizing how reliant they are on house-cleaners, domestic care workers, open schools, nurseries, and myriad other things designed to ease the burden of parents there is suddenly an awareness of how exploitative and lop-sided our current system is.
As Federici has noted, and learned from personal experience as a young activist in Parma, Italy, we can’t restrict our perspective to believing that the only thing that constitutes work in this world is that activity for which we’re paid wages. So much unseen, unheralded, and unwaged work, the entirety of social reproduction, is there, too, requiring someone to do it, and usually that’s a woman.
