QOTD

[giandujakiss]

Katha Pollitt:

When performed by married women in their own homes, domestic labor is work—difficult, sacred, noble work. Ann says Mitt called it more important work than his own, which does make you wonder why he didn’t stay home with the boys himself. When performed for pay, however, this supremely important, difficult job becomes low-wage labor that almost anyone can do—teenagers, elderly women, even despised illegal immigrants. But here’s the real magic: when performed by low-income single mothers in their own homes, those same exact tasks—changing diapers, going to the playground and the store, making dinner, washing the dishes, giving a bath—are not only not work; they are idleness itself.

So there it is: the difference between a stay-home mother and a welfare mother is money and a wedding ring. Unlike any other kind of labor I can think of, domestic labor is productive or not, depending on who performs it. For a college-educated married woman, it is the most valuable thing she could possibly do, totally off the scale of human endeavor. What is curing malaria compared with raising a couple of Ivy Leaguers? For these women, being supported by a man is good—the one exception to our American creed of self-reliance. Taking paid work, after all, poses all sorts of risks to the kids. (Watch out, though, ladies: if you expect the father of your children to underwrite your homemaking after divorce, you go straight from saint to gold-digger.) But for a low-income single woman, forgoing a job to raise children is an evasion of responsibility, which is to marry and/or support herself. For her children, staying home sets a bad example, breeding the next generation of criminals and layabouts.

All of which goes to show that it is not really possible to disengage domestic work from its social, gendered context: the work is valuable if the woman is valuable, and what determines her value is whether a man has found her so and how much money he has. That is why discussions of domestic labor and its worth are inextricably bound up with ideas about class, race, respectability, morality and above all womanhood. You can talk all you want about equal parenting; nobody is raising his son from earliest childhood to see as the most important job in the world being a stay-home father dependent on a high-earning wife. Nobody says to men in college, “You can be a physicist, or you can be a homemaker—it’s your choice!”

Okay, it's a little more than a single quote, but I couldn't choose.

Comments

[ide_cyan]

Christine Delphy has written a lot on the subject. In English, there's the book Close to Home: A materialist analysis of women's oppression. (And I know Charlotte Perkins Gilman was writing about domestic work a century ago, too, though I'm not as familiar with her essays.)

Trying to find a passage from Close to Home that this article reminds me of...

The difference between the family mode of production and the
wage mode of capitalist production lies neither in the quantity of
benefits given for work nor in the difference between the value of
a wage and upkeep, but in the relations of production themselves.
The wage­labourer sells his labour power for a fixed wage which
depends on the service he provides. These services are also fixed:
defined in quantity (hours of work) and kind (qualifications).
The equivalents are deter­mined according to a fixed scale (that
is, by a price determined by the overall supply and demand on
the labour market in the capitalist system) ­ a scale which is not
subject to the will of either party. The employer and the employee
have no personal influence on the terms of their contract and the
individuals are interchangeable. The labour which is performed
has a universal value and it is this value which the employer buys
and over which the worker can bargain because it is possible for
him to take his labour power elsewhere. The fact that it is precise
services which are bought may enable the worker to increase his
earnings by improving his performance, either in quantity or in
kind.

The services which a married woman provides, on the contrary,
are not fixed. They depend on the will of the employer, her
husband. And these services are not paid according to a fixed
scale. Her keep does not depend on her work, but on the wealth
and goodwill of her husband. For the same work (for example, the
rearing of three children) the wife of a business executive receives
as much as ten times the benefits received by the wife of a manual
worker. On the other hand, for the same benefits, a wife may
furnish very different quantities and kinds of services, depending
on the needs of her husband. For example, the housework of the
wife of one bourgeois man may consist of running single­handedly
a large house, while another may be given several servants to free
her for the work of social display.

Since the benefits which wives receive have no relationship
to the services which they provide, it is impossible for married
women to improve their own standard of living by improving
their services. The only solution for them is to provide the same
services for a richer man. Thus the logical consequence of the
non­value of women's family labour is the hunt for a good
marriage. But even though a marriage with a man
from the capitalist class can raise a woman's standard of living,
it does not make her a member of that class. She herself does not
own the means of production. Therefore her standard of living
does not depend on her class relationship to the proletariat; but
on her serf relations of pro­duction with her husband. In the vast
majority of cases, wives of bourgeois men whose marriage ends
must earn their own living as wage­workers. They therefore
become in practice (with the additional handicaps of age and/or
lack of professional training) the proletarians that they essentially
were.

From chapter 4, "The main enemy", p. 70-71. (Emphasis mine.)

[giandujakiss]

You're right, that is similar - and Pollitt adds the twist of the fairly explicit judgments that society is making about the different values of such labor. It's like it's explicitly part of the Republican platform.