reading reflection
13 The Approaching
Obsolescence of
Housework: A Working-Class
Perspective
The countless chores collectively known as “housework”—cooking, washing dishes, doing
laundry, making beds, sweeping, shopping, etc.—apparently consume some three to four
thousand hours of the average housewife’s year.1 As startling as this statistic may be, it does
not even account for the constant and unquantifiable attention mothers must give to their
children. Just as a woman’s maternal duties are always taken for granted, her never-ending
toil as a housewife rarely occasions expressions of appreciation within her family.
Housework, after all, is virtually invisible: “No one notices it until it isn’t done—we notice
the unmade bed, not the scrubbed and polished floor.”2 Invisible, repetitive, exhausting,
unproductive, uncreative—these are the adjectives which most perfectly capture the nature
of housework.
The new consciousness associated with the contemporary women’s movement has
encouraged increasing numbers of women to demand that their men provide some relief
from this drudgery. Already, more men have begun to assist their partners around the
house, some of them even devoting equal time to household chores. But how many of these
men have liberated themselves from the assumption that housework is “women’s work”?
How many of them would not characterize their housecleaning activities as “helping” their
women partners?
If it were at all possible simultaneously to liquidate the idea that housework is women’s
work and to redistribute it equally to men and women alike, would this constitute a
satisfactory solution? Freed from its exclusive affiliation with the female sex, would
housework thereby cease to be oppressive? While most women would joyously hail the
advent of the “househusband,” the desexualization of domestic labor would not really alter
the oppressive nature of the work itself. In the final analysis, neither women nor men
should waste precious hours of their lives on work that is neither stimulating, creative nor
productive.
One of the most closely guarded secrets of advanced capitalist societies involves the
possibility—the real possibility—of radically transforming the nature of housework. A
substantial portion of the housewife’s domestic tasks can actually be incorporated into the
industrial economy. In other words, housework need no longer be considered necessarily
and unalterably private in character. Teams of trained and well-paid workers, moving from
dwelling to dwelling, engineering technologically advanced cleaning machinery, could
swiftly and efficiently accomplish what the present-day housewife does so arduously and
primitively. Why the shroud of silence surrounding this potential of radically redefining the
nature of domestic labor? Because the capitalist economy is structurally hostile to the
industrialization of housework. Socialized housework implies large government subsidies in
order to guarantee accessibility to the working-class families whose need for such services is
most obvious. Since little in the way of profits would result, industrialized housework—like
all unprofitable enterprises—is anathema to the capitalist economy. Nonetheless, the rapid
expansion of the female labor force means that more and more women are finding it
increasingly difficult to excel as housewives according to the traditional standards. In other
words, the industrialization of housework, along with the socialization of housework, is
becoming an objective social need. Housework as individual women’s private responsibility
and as female labor performed under primitive technical conditions, may finally be
approaching historical obsolescence.
Although housework as we know it today may eventually become a bygone relic of
history, prevailing social attitudes continue to associate the eternal female condition with
images of brooms and dustpans, mops and pails, aprons and stoves, pots and pans. And it is
true that women’s work, from one historical era to another, has been associated in general
with the homestead. Yet female domestic labor has not always been what it is today, for like
all social phenomena, housework is a fluid product of human history. As economic systems
have arisen and faded away, the scope and quality of housework have undergone radical
transformations.
As Frederick Engels argued in his classic work on the Origin of the Family, Private Property
and the State,3 sexual inequality as we know it today did not exist before the advent of
private property. During early eras of human history the sexual division of labor within the
system of economic production was complementary as opposed to hierarchical. In societies
where men may have been responsible for hunting wild animals and women, in turn, for
gathering wild vegetables and fruits, both sexes performed economic tasks that were equally
essential to their community’s survival. Because the community, during those eras, was
essentially an extended family, women’s central role in domestic affairs meant that they
were accordingly valued and respected as productive members of the community.
The centrality of women’s domestic tasks in pre-capitalist cultures was dramatized by a
personal experience during a jeep trip I took in 1973 across the Masai Plains. On an isolated
dirt road in Tanzania, I noticed six Masai women enigmatically balancing an enormous
board on their heads. As my Tanzanian friends explained, these women were probably
transporting a house roof to a new village which they were in the process of constructing.
Among the Masai, as I learned, women are responsible for all domestic activities, thus also
for the construction of their nomadic people’s frequently relocated houses. Housework, as
far as Masai women are concerned, entails not only cooking, cleaning, child-rearing,
sewing, etc., but house-building as well. As important as their men’s cattle-raising duties
may be, the women’s “housework” is no less productive and no less essential than the
economic contributions of Masai men.
Within the pre-capitalist, nomadic economy of the Masai, women’s domestic labor is as
essential to the economy as the cattle-raising jobs performed by their men. As producers,
they enjoy a correspondingly important social status. In advanced capitalist societies, on the
other hand, the service-oriented domestic labor of housewives, who can seldom produce
tangible evidence of their work, diminishes the social status of women in general. When all
is said and done, the housewife, according to bourgeois ideology, is, quite simply, her
husband’s lifelong servant.
The source of the bourgeois notion of woman as man’s eternal servant is itself a revealing
story. Within the relatively short history of the United States, the “housewife” as a finished
historical product is just a little more than a century old. Housework, during the colonial
era, was entirely different from the daily work routine of the housewife in the United States
today.
A woman’s work began at sunup and continued by firelight as long as she could hold her eyes
open. For two centuries, almost everything that the family used or ate was produced at home
under her direction. She spun and dyed the yarn that she wove into cloth and cut and hand-
stitched into garments. She grew much of the food her family ate, and preserved enough to last the
winter months. She made butter, cheese, bread, candles, and soap and knitted her family’s
stockings.4
In the agrarian economy of pre-industrial North America, a woman performing her
household chores was thus a spinner, weaver and seamstress as well as a baker, butter-
churner, candle-maker and soap-maker. And et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. As a matter of
fact,
… the pressures of home production left very little time for the tasks that we would recognize
today as housework. By all accounts, pre-industrial revolution women were sloppy housekeepers
by today’s standards. Instead of the daily cleaning or the weekly cleaning, there was the spring
cleaning. Meals were simple and repetitive; clothes were changed infrequently; and the household
wash was allowed to accumulate, and the washing done once a month, or in some households once
in three months. And, of course, since each wash required the carting and heating of many buckets
of water, higher standards of cleanliness were easily discouraged.5
Colonial women were not “house-cleaners” or “housekeepers” but rather full-fledged and
accomplished workers within the home-based economy. Not only did they manufacture
most of the products required by their families, they were also the guardians of their
families’ and their communities’ health.
It was [the colonial woman’s] responsibility to gather and dry wild herbs used … as medicines; she
also served as doctor, nurse, and midwife within her own family and in the community.6
Included in the United States Practical Receipt Book—a popular colonial recipe book—are
recipes for foods as well as for household chemicals and medicines. To cure ringworm, for
example, “obtain some blood-root … slice it in vinegar, and afterwards wash the place
affected with the liquid.”7
The economic importance of women’s domestic functions in colonial America was
complemented by their visible roles in economic activity outside the home. It was entirely
acceptable, for example, for a woman to become a tavern keeper.
Women also ran sawmills and gristmills, caned chairs and built furniture, operated
slaughterhouses, printed cotton and other cloth, made lace, and owned and ran dry-goods and
clothing stores. They worked in tobacco shops, drug shops (where they sold concoctions they made
themselves), and general stores that sold everything from pins to meat scales. Women ground
eyeglasses, made netting and rope, cut and stitched leather goods, made cards for wool carding,
and even were housepainters. Often they were the town undertakers …8
The postrevolutionary surge of industrialization resulted in a proliferation of factories in
the northeastern section of the new country. New England’s textile mills were the factory
system’s successful pioneers. Since spinning and weaving were traditional female domestic
occupations, women were the first workers recruited by the mill-owners to operate the new
power looms. Considering the subsequent exclusion of women from industrial production in
general, it is one of the great ironies of this country’s economic history that the first
industrial workers were women.
As industrialization advanced, shifting economic production from the home to the
factory, the importance of women’s domestic work suffered a systematic erosion. Women
were the losers in a double sense: as their traditional jobs were usurped by the burgeoning
factories, the entire economy moved away from the home, leaving many women largely
bereft of significant economic roles. By the middle of the nineteenth century the factory
provided textiles, candles and soap. Even butter, bread and other food products began to be
mass-produced.
By the end of the century, hardly anyone made their own starch or boiled their laundry in
a kettle. In the cities, women bought their bread and at least their underwear ready-made,
sent their children out to school and probaby some clothes out to be laundered, and were
debating the merits of canned foods … The flow of industry had passed on and had left idle
the loom in the attic and the soap kettle in the shed.”9
As industrial capitalism approached consolidation, the cleavage between the new
economic sphere and the old home economy became ever more rigorous. The physical
relocation of economic production caused by the spread of the factory system was
undoubtedly a drastic transformation. But even more radical was the generalized
revaluation of production necessitated by the new economic system. While home-
manufactured goods were valuable primarily because they fulfilled basic family needs, the
importance of factory-produced commodities resided overwhelmingly in their exchange
value—in their ability to fulfill employers’ demands for profit. This revaluation of economic
production revealed—beyond the physical separation of home and factory—a fundamental
structural separation between the domestic home economy and the profit-oriented economy
of capitalism. Since housework does not generate profit, domestic labor was naturally
defined as an inferior form of work as compared to capitalist wage labor.
An important ideological by-product of this radical economic transformation was the
birth of the “housewife.” Women began to be ideologically redefined as the guardians of a
devalued domestic life. As ideology, however, this redefinition of women’s place was boldly
contradicted by the vast numbers of immigrant women flooding the ranks of the working
class in the Northeast. These white immigrant women were wage earners first and only
secondarily housewives. And there were other women—millions of women—who toiled
away from home as the unwilling producers of the slave economy in the South. The reality
of women’s place in nineteenth-century U.S. society involved white women, whose days
were spent operating factory machines for wages that were a pittance, as surely as it
involved Black women, who labored under the coercion of slavery. The “housewife”
reflected a partial reality, for she was really a symbol of the economic prosperity enjoyed by
the emerging middle classes.
Although the “housewife” was rooted in the social conditions of the bourgeoisie and the
middle classes, nineteenth-century ideology established the housewife and the mother as
universal models of womanhood. Since popular propaganda represented the vocation of all
women as a function of their roles in the home, women compelled to work for wages came
to be treated as alien visitors within the masculine world of the public economy. Having
stepped outside their “natural” sphere, women were not to be treated as full-fledged wage
workers. The price they paid involved long hours, substandard working conditions and
grossly inadequate wages. Their exploitation was even more intense than the exploitation
suffered by their male counterparts. Needless to say, sexism emerged as a source of
outrageous super-profits for the capitalists.
The structural separation of the public economy of capitalism and the private economy of
the home has been continually reinforced by the obstinate primitiveness of household labor.
Despite the proliferation of gadgets for the home, domestic work has remained qualitatively
unaffected by the technological advances brought on by industrial capitalism. Housework
still consumes thousands of hours of the average housewife’s year. In 1903 Charlotte
Perkins Gilman proposed a definition of domestic labor which reflected the upheavals
which had changed the structure and content of housework in the United States:
… The phrase “domestic work” does not apply to a special kind of work, but to a certain grade of
work, a state of development through which all kinds pass. All industries were once “domestic,”
that is, were performed at home and in the interests of the family. All industries have since that
remote period risen to higher stages, except one or two which have never left their primal stage.10
“The home,” Gilman maintains, “has not developed in proportion to our other institutions.”
The home economy reveals
… the maintenance of primitive industries in a modern industrial community and the confinement
of women to these industries and their limited area of expression.11
Housework, Gilman insists, vitiates women’s humanity:
She is feminine, more than enough, as man is masculine, more than enough; but she is not human
as he is human. The house-life does not bring out our humanness, for all the distinctive lines of
human progress lie outside.12
The truth of Gilman’s statement is corroborated by the historical experience of Black
women in the United States. Throughout this country’s history, the majority of Black
women have worked outside their homes. During slavery, women toiled alongside their men
in the cotton and tobacco fields, and when industry moved into the South, they could be
seen in tobacco factories, sugar refineries and even in lumber mills and on crews pounding
steel for the railroads. In labor, slave women were the equals of their men. Because they
suffered a grueling sexual equality at work, they enjoyed a greater sexual equality at home
in the slave quarters than did their white sisters who were “housewifes.”
As a direct consequence of their outside work—as “free” women no less than as slaves—
housework has never been the central focus of Black women’s lives. They have largely
escaped the psychological damage industrial capitalism inflicted on white middle-class
housewives, whose alleged virtues were feminine weakness and wifely submissiveness.
Black women could hardly strive for weakness; they had to become strong, for their families
and their communities needed their strength to survive. Evidence of the accumulated
strengths Black women have forged through work, work and more work can be discovered
in the contributions of the many outstanding female leaders who have emerged within the
Black community. Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Ida Wells and Rosa Parks are not
exceptional Black women as much as they are epitomes of Black womanhood.
Black women, however, have paid a heavy price for the strengths they have acquired and
the relative independence they have enjoyed. While they have seldom been “just
housewives,” they have always done their housework. They have thus carried the double
burden of wage labor and housework—a double burden which always demands that
working women possess the persevering powers of Sisyphus. As W. E. B. DuBois observed in
1920:
… some few women are born free, and some amid insult and scarlet letters achieve freedom; but
our women in black had freedom thrust contemptuously upon them. With that freedom they are
buying an untrammeled independence and dear as is the price they pay for it, it will in the end be
worth every taunt and groan.13
Like their men, Black women have worked until they could work no more. Like their men,
they have assumed the responsibilities of family providers. The unorthodox feminine
qualities of assertiveness and self-reliance—for which Black women have been frequently
praised but more often rebuked—are reflections of their labor and their struggles outside
the home. But like their white sisters called “housewives,” they have cooked and cleaned
and have nurtured and reared untold numbers of children. But unlike the white housewives,
who learned to lean on their husbands for economic security, Black wives and mothers,
usually workers as well, have rarely been offered the time and energy to become experts at
domesticity. Like their white working-class sisters, who also carry the double burden of
working for a living and servicing husbands and children, Black women have needed relief
from this oppressive predicament for a long, long time.
For Black women today and for all their working-class sisters, the notion that the burden
of housework and child care can be shifted from their shoulders to the society contains one
of the radical secrets of women’s liberation. Child care should be socialized, meal
preparation should be socialized, housework should be industrialized—and all these
services should be readily accessible to working-class people.
The shortage, if not absence, of public discussion about the feasibility of transforming
housework into a social possibility bears witness to the blinding powers of bourgeois
ideology. It is not even the case that women’s domestic role has received no attention at all.
On the contrary, the contemporary women’s movement has represented housework as an
essential ingredient of women’s oppression. There is even a movement in a number of
capitalist countries, whose main concern is the plight of the housewife. Having reached the
conclusion that housework is degrading and oppressive primarily because it is unpaid labor,
this movement has raised the demand for wages. A weekly government paycheck, its
activists argue, is the key to improving the housewife’s status and the social position of
women in general.
The Wages for Housework Movement originated in Italy, where its first public
demonstration took place in March, 1974. Addressing the crowd assembled in the city of
Mestre, one of the speakers proclaimed:
Half the world’s population is unpaid—this is the biggest class contradiction of all! And this is our
struggle for wages for housework. It is the strategic demand; at this moment it is the most
revolutionary demand for the whole working class. If we win, the class wins, if we lose, the class
loses.14
According to this movement’s strategy, wages contain the key to the emancipation of
housewives, and the demand itself is represented as the central focus of the campaign for
women’s liberation in general. Moreover, the housewife’s struggle for wages is projected as
the pivotal issue of the entire working-class movement.
The theoretical origins of the Wages for Housework Movement can be found in an essay
by Mariarosa Dalla Costa entitled “Women and the Subversion of the Community.”15 In this
paper, Dalla Costa argues for a redefinition of housework based on her thesis that the
private character of household services is actually an illusion. The housewife, she insists,
only appears to be ministering to the private needs of her husband and children, for the real
beneficiaries of her services are her husband’s present employer and the future employers of
her children.
(The woman) has been isolated in the home, forced to carry out work that is considered unskilled,
the work of giving birth to, raising, disciplining, and servicing the worker for production. Her role
in the cycle of production remained invisible because only the product of her labor, the laborer,
was visible.16
The demand that housewives be paid is based on the assumption that they produce a
commodity as important and as valuable as the commodities their husbands produce on the
job. Adopting Dalla Costa’s logic, the Wages for Housework Movement defines housewives
as creators of the labor-power sold by their family members as commodities on the
capitalist market.
Dalla Costa was not the first theorist to propose such an analysis of women’s oppression.
Both Mary Inman’s In Woman’s Defense (1940)17 and Margaret Benston’s “The Political
Economy of Women’s Liberation” (1969)18 define housework in such a way as to establish
women as a special class of workers exploited by capitalism called “housewives.” That
women’s procreative, child-rearing and housekeeping roles make it possible for their family
members to work—to exchange their labor-power for wages—can hardly be denied. But
does it automatically follow that women in general, regardless of their class and race, can
be fundamentally defined by their domestic functions? Does it automatically follow that the
housewife is actually a secret worker inside the capitalist production process?
If the industrial revolution resulted in the structural separation of the home economy
from the public economy, then housework cannot be defined as an integral component of
capitalist production. It is, rather, related to production as a precondition. The employer is
not concerned in the least about the way labor-power is produced and sustained, he is only
concerned about its availability and its ability to generate profit. In other words, the
capitalist production process presupposes the existence of a body of exploitable workers.
The replenishment of (workers’) labor-power is not a part of the process of social production but a
prerequisite to it. It occurs outside of the labor process. Its function is the maintenance of human
existence which is the ultimate purpose of production in all societies.19
In South African society, where racism has led economic exploitation to its most brutal
limits, the capitalist economy betrays its structural separation from domestic life in a
characteristically violent fashion. The social architects of Apartheid have simply determined
that Black labor yields higher profits when domestic life is all but entirely discarded. Black
men are viewed as labor units whose productive potential renders them valuable to the
capitalist class. But their wives and children
… are superfluous appendages—non-productive, the women being nothing more than adjuncts to
the procreative capacity of the black male labor unit.20
This characterization of African women as “superfluous appendages” is hardly a metaphor.
In accordance with South African law, unemployed Black women are banned from the
white areas (87 percent of the country!), even, in most cases, from the cities where their
husbands live and work.
Black domestic life in South Africa’s industrial centers is viewed by Apartheid supporters
as superfluous and unprofitable. But it is also seen as a threat.
Government officiais recognize the homemaking role of the women and fear their presence in the
cities will lead to the establishment of a stable black population.21
The consolidation of African families in the industrialized cities is perceived as a menace
because domestic life might become a base for a heightened level of resistance to Apartheid.
This is undoubtedly the reason why large numbers of women holding residence permits for
white areas are assigned to live in sex-segregated hostels. Married as well as single women
end up living in these projects. In such hostels, family life is rigorously prohibited—
husbands and wives are unable to visit one another and neither mother nor father can
receive visits from their children.22
This intense assault on Black women in South Africa has already taken its toll, for only
28.2 percent are currently opting for marriage.23 For reasons of economic expediency and
political security, Apartheid is eroding—with the apparent goal of destroying—the very
fabric of Black domestic life. South African capitalism thus blatantly demonstrates the
extent to which the capitalist economy is utterly dependent on domestic labor.
The deliberate dissolution of family life in South Africa could not have been undertaken
by the government if it were truly the case that the services performed by women in the
home are an essential constituent of wage labor under capitalism. That domestic life can be
dispensed with by the South African version of capitalism is a consequence of the separation
of the private home economy and the public production process which characterizes
capitalist society in general. It seems futile to argue that on the basis of capitalism’s internal
logic, women ought to be paid wages for housework.
Assuming that the theory underlying the demand for wages is hopelessly flawed, might it
not be nonetheless politically desirable to insist that housewives be paid. Couldn’t one
invoke a moral imperative for women’s right to be paid for the hours they devote to
housework? The idea of a paycheck for housewives would probably sound quite attractive
to many women. But the attraction would probably be short-lived. For how many of those
women would actually be willing to reconcile themselves to deadening, never-ending
household tasks, all for the sake of a wage? Would a wage alter the fact, as Lenin said, that
… petty housework crushes, strangles, stultifies and degrades (the woman), chains her to the
kitchen and to the nursery, and wastes her labor on barbarously unproductive, petty, nerve-
racking, stultifying and crushing drudgery.24
It would seem that government paychecks for housewives would further legitimize this
domestic slavery.
Is it not an implicit critique of the Wages for Housework Movement that women on
welfare have rarely demanded compensation for keeping house. Not “wages for housework”
but rather “a guaranteed annual income for all” is the slogan articulating the immediate
alternative they have most frequently proposed to the dehumanizing welfare system. What
they want in the long run, however, is jobs and affordable public child care. The guaranteed
annual income functions, therefore, as unemployment insurance pending the creation of
more jobs with adequate wages along with a subsidized system of child care.
The experiences of yet another group of women reveal the problematic nature of the
“wages for housework” strategy. Cleaning women, domestic workers, maids—these are the
women who know better than anyone else what it means to receive wages for housework.
Their tragic predicament is brilliantly captured in the film by Ousmane Sembene entitled La
Noire de …25 The main character is a young Senegalese woman who, after a search for
work, becomes a governess for a French family living in Dakar. When the family returns to
France, she enthusiastically accompanies them. Once in France, however, she discovers she
is responsible not only for the children, but for cooking, cleaning, washing and all the other
household chores. It is not long before her initial enthusiasm gives way to depression—a
depression so profound that she refuses the pay offered her by her employers. Wages cannot
compensate for her slavelike situation. Lacking the means to return to Senegal, she is so
overwhelmed by her despair that she chooses suicide over an indefinite destiny of cooking,
sweeping, dusting, scrubbing …
In the United States, women of color—and especially Black women—have been receiving
wages for housework for untold decades. In 1910, when over half of all Black females were
working outside their homes, one-third of them were employed as paid domestic workers.
By 1920 over one-half were domestic servants, and in 1930 the proportion had risen to
three out of five.26 One of the consequences of the enormous female employment shifts
during World War II was a much-welcomed decline in the number of Black domestic
workers. Yet in 1960 one-third of all Black women holding jobs were still confined to their
traditional occupations.27 It was not until clerical jobs became more accessible to Black
women that the proportion of Black women domestics headed in a definitely downward
direction Today the figure hovers around 13 percent.28
The enervating domestic obligations of women in general provide flagrant evidence of the
power of sexism. Because of the added intrusion of racism, vast numbers of Black women
have had to do their own housekeeping and other women’s home chores as well. And
frequently, the demands of the job in a white woman’s home have forced the domestic
worker to neglect her own home and even her own children. As paid housekeepers, they
have been called upon to be surrogate wives and mothers in millions of white homes.
During their more than fifty years of organizing efforts, domestic workers have tried to
redefine their work by rejecting the role of the surrogate housewife. The housewife’s chores
are unending and . Household workers have demanded in the first place a clear
delineation of the jobs they are expected to perform. The name itself of one of the
houseworkers’ major unions today—Household Technicians of America—emphasizes their
refusal to function as surrogate housewives whose job is “just housework.” As long as
household workers stand in the shadow of the housewife, they will continue to receive
wages which are more closely related to a housewife’s “allowance” than to a worker’s
paycheck. According to the National Committee on Household Employment, the average,
full-time household technician earned only $2,732 in 1976, two-thirds of them earning
under $2,000.29 Although household workers had been extended the protection of the
minimum wage law several years previously, in 1976 an astounding 40 percent still
received grossly substandard wages. The Wages for Housework Movement assumes that if
women were paid for being housewives, they would accordingly enjoy a higher social
status. Quite a different story is told by the age-old struggles of the paid household worker,
whose condition is more miserable than any other group of workers under capitalism.
Over 50 percent of all U.S. women work for a living today, and they constitute 41 percent
of the country’s labor force. Yet countless numbers of women are currently unable to find
decent jobs. Like racism, sexism is one of the great justifications for high female
unemployment rates. Many women are “just housewives” because in reality they are
unemployed workers. Cannot, therefore, the “just housewife” role be most effectively
challenged by demanding jobs for women on a level of equality with men and by pressing
for the social services (child care, for example) and job benefits (maternity leaves, etc.)
which will allow more women to work outside the home?
The Wages for Housework Movement discourages women from seeking outside jobs,
arguing that “slavery to an assembly line is not liberation from slavery to the kitchen
sink.”30 The campaign’s spokeswomen insist, nonetheless, that they don’t advocate the
continued imprisonment of women within the isolated environment of their homes. They
claim that while they refuse to work on the capitalist market per se, they do not wish to
assign to women the permanent responsibility for housework. As a U.S. representative of
this movement says:
… we are not interested in making our work more efficient or more productive for capital. We are
interested in reducing our work, and ultimately refusing it altogether. But as long as we work in
the home for nothing, no one really cares how long or how hard we work. For capital only
introduces advanced technology to cut the costs of production after wage gains by the working
class. Only if we make our work cost (i.e., only if we make it uneconomical) will capital “discover”
the technology to reduce it. At present, we often have to go out for a second shift of work to afford
the dishwasher that should cut down our housework.31
Once women have achieved the right to be paid for their work, they can raise demands for
higher wages, thus compelling the capitalists to undertake the industrialization of
housework. Is this a concrete strategy for women’s liberation or is it an unrealizable dream?
How are women supposed to conduct the initial struggle for wages? Dalla Costa
advocates the housewives’ strike:
We must reject the home, because we want to unite with other women, to struggle against all
situations which presume that women will stay at home … To abandon the home is already a form
of struggle, since the social services we perform there would then cease to be carried out in those
conditions.32
But if women are to leave the home, where are they to go? How will they unite with other
women? Will they really leave their homes motivated by no other desire than to protest
their housework? Is it not much more realistic to call upon women to “leave home” in
search of outside jobs—or at least to participate in a massive campaign for decent jobs for
women? Granted, work under the conditions of capitalism is brutalizing work. Granted, it is
uncreative and alienating. Yet with all this, the fact remains that on the job, women can
unite with their sisters—and indeed with their brothers—in order to challenge the
capitalists at the point of production. As workers, as militant activists in the labor
movement, women can generate the real power to fight the mainstay and beneficiary of
sexism which is the monopoly capitalist system.
If the wages-for-housework strategy does little in the way of providing a long-range
solution to the problem of women’s oppression, neither does it substantively address the
profound discontent of contemporary housewives. Recent sociological studies have revealed
that housewives today are more frustrated by their lives than ever before. When Ann Oakley
conducted interviews for her book The Sociology of Housework,33 she discovered that even
the housewives who initially seemed unbothered by their housework eventually expressed a
very deep dissatisfaction. These comments came from a woman who held an outside factory
job:
(Do you like housework?) I don’t mind it … I suppose I don’t mind housework because I’m not at it
all day. I go to work and I’m only on housework half a day. If I did it all day I wouldn’t like it—
woman’s work is never done, she’s on the go all the time—even before you go to bed, you’ve still
got something to do—emptying ashtrays, wash a few cups up. You’re still working. It’s the same
thing every day; you can’t sort of say you’re not going to do it, because you’ve got to do it—like
preparing a meal: it’s got to be done because if you don’t do it, the children wouldn’t eat … I
suppose you get used to it, you just do it automatically.… I’m happier at work than I am at home.
(What would you say are the worst things about being a housewife?) I suppose you get days when
you feel you get up and you’ve got to do the same old things—you get bored, you’re stuck in the
same routine. I think if you ask any housewife, if they’re honest, they’ll turn around and say they
feel like a drudge half the time—everybody thinks when they get up in the morning “Oh no, I’ve
got the same old things to do today, till I go to bed tonight.” It’s doing the same things—
boredom.34
Would wages diminish this boredom? This woman would certainly say no. A full-time
housewife told Oakley about the compulsive nature of housework:
The worst thing is I suppose that you’ve got to do the work because you are at home. Even though
I’ve got the option of not doing it, I don’t really feel I could not do it because I feel I ought to do
it.35
In all likelihood, receiving wages for doing this work would aggravate this woman’s
obsession.
Oakley reached the conclusion that housework—particularly when it is a full-time job—so
thoroughly invades the female personality that the housewife becomes indistinguishable
from her job.
The housewife, in an important sense, is her job: separation between subjective and objective
elements in the situation is therefore intrinsically more difficult.36
The psychological consequence is frequently a tragically stunted personality haunted by
feelings of inferiority. Psychological liberation can hardly be achieved simply by paying the
housewife a wage.
Other sociological studies have confirmed the acute disillusionment suffered by
contemporary housewives. When Myra Ferree37 interviewed over a hundred women in a
working community near Boston, “almost twice as many housewives as employed wives
said they were dissatisfied with their lives.” Needless to say, most of the working women
did not have inherently fulfilling jobs: they were waitresses, factory workers, typists,
supermarket and department store clerks, etc. Yet their ability to leave the isolation of their
homes, “getting out and seeing other people,” was as important to them as their earnings.
Would the housewives who felt they were “going crazy staying at home” welcome the idea
of being paid for driving themselves crazy? One woman complained that “staying at home
all day is like being in jail”—would wages tear down the walls of her jail? The only realistic
escape path from this jail is the search for work outside the home.
Each one of the more than 50 percent of all U.S. women who work today is a powerful
argument for the alleviation of the burden of housework. As a matter of fact, enterprising
capitalists have already begun to exploit women’s new historical need to emancipate
themselves from their roles as housewives. Endless profit-making fast-food chains like
McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken bear witness to the fact that more women at work
means fewer daily meals prepared at home. However unsavory and unnutritious the food,
however exploitative of their workers, these fast-food operations call attention to the
approaching obsolescence of the housewife. What is needed, of course, are new social
institutions to assume a good portion of the housewife’s old duties. This is the challenge
emanating from the swelling ranks of women in the working class. The demand for
universal and subsidized child care is a direct consequence of the rising number of working
mothers. And as more women organize around the demand for more jobs—for jobs on the
basis of full equality with men—serious questions will increasingly be raised about the
future viability of women’s housewife duties. It may well be true that “slavery to an
assembly line” is not in itself “liberation from the kitchen sink,” but the assembly line is
doubtlessly the most powerful incentive for women to press for the elimination of their age-
old domestic slavery.
The abolition of housework as the private responsibility of individual women is clearly a
strategic goal of women’s liberation. But the socialization of housework—including meal
preparation and child care—presupposes an end to the profit-motive’s reign over the
economy. The only significant steps toward ending domestic slavery have in fact been taken
in the existing socialist countries. Working women, therefore, have a special and vital
interest in the struggle for socialism. Moreover, under capitalism, campaigns for jobs on an
equal basis with men, combined with movements for institutions such as subsidized public
child care, contain an explosive revolutionary potential. This strategy calls into question the
validity of monopoly capitalism and must ultimately point in the direction of socialism.
T
The Gallant Charge of the Fifty Fourth Massachusetts (Colored) Regiment, on the Rebel works at Fort Wagner, Morris Island near Charleston, July 18th 1863, and
Death of Colonel Robert G. Shaw, Currier and Ives (Keith Lance/Getty Images)
It is remarkable, and it continues
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���� are two things that I believe to be true. First, that America has a long history of brutal and
shameful mistreatment of racial minorities — with black Americans its chief victims. And second, that
America is a great nation, and that American citizens (and citizens of the world) should be grateful for
its founding. Perhaps no nation has done more good for more people than the United States. It was and is a
beacon of liberty and prosperity in a world long awash in tyranny and poverty.
In much of our modern political discourse, it seems to be taken as a given that the existence of one truth has to
negate the other. A nation simply can’t be great and also inflict such immense pain and suffering on so many
millions of black and brown citizens.
NR MAGAZINE JULY 27, 2020, ISSUE
America’s Racial Progress
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By July 9, 2020 11:48 AM
DAVID FRENCH
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And so the public debate warps and twists. Speak about the greatness of the nation, and critics immediately
accuse you of minimizing the undeniably hideous sin of white supremacy. Emphasize white supremacy, and
opponents will accuse you of minimizing the immense sacrifices of black and white soldiers in the Union Army,
the undeniable progress in civil rights since Jim Crow, and the obvious fact that black and brown citizens from
across the globe flock to our shores in search of the American dream.
Let’s dodge that back-and-forth and go back and ask two more-fundamental questions. What is the nature of
man? And what does that nature imply for the history of nations and cultures? Absent truthful answers to those
questions, it’s not possible to accurately analyze a nation’s worth. And the answers are grim.
Human beings, to quote no lesser authority than Jesus Christ, are evil. As G. K. Chesterton observed, original
sin is the “only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.” It doesn’t take a historian to know that a
survey of human civilization over the ages leads us to conclude that social justice has been hard to find. Indeed,
there isn’t even a straight line between, say, Athenian democracy and American liberty, or the Magna Carta and
the American Constitution. Instead, there were times when three steps forward were followed by nine steps
back.
The American republic was thus founded against the backdrop of millennia of conquest, oppression, slavery,
monarchy, and tyranny — all of it an expression of humanity’s dark nature. That doesn’t mean there weren’t
pockets of virtue or periodic prophetic condemnations of wickedness, but the presence of evil in human affairs
has been persistent and often overpowering.
Noting that the evils of slavery and conquest have been pervasive doesn’t make them less evil. It does, however,
help us to explain our appreciation for the American founding and the trajectory of the American nation.
That founding and that trajectory were hardly inevitable. Indeed, the introduction of slavery to our shores in
1619 showed that there was nothing particularly special about our new civilization. It was more of the dreary
human same. The signing of the Declaration of Independence and the ratification of the Constitution (and the
Bill of Rights) were, by contrast, remarkable. They marked the beginning of something new.
It’s important to emphasize the word “beginning.” I’ve been struggling to think of the right analogy to describe
the role of the American founding in world history. Let’s try a term from counterinsurgency warfare: “the ink
blot.”
In counterinsurgency warfare, the strategist looks at a nation or countryside in chaos — one that’s descending
into a state of nature — and attempts to establish an island of safety and security. The purpose is for that island
of safety and security to spread across the map the way an ink blot spreads across the paper.
The American founding declared universal principles: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” But then its constitution and laws granted only a particularized and
narrow defense of those rights.
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Even the Bill of Rights, sweeping in its language, was extraordinarily limited in its scope. It originally
restrained only the actions of a small and relatively weak central government. The ink blot of liberty was tiny.
The only people who could confidently assert those universal rights were a small class of white male property
owners clustered on the Eastern Seaboard of the new United States.
Everyone else, to a greater or lesser extent, lived still within the ordinary state of nature, with slaves, as always,
the most vulnerable of all. But the combination of a universal declaration of liberty — and the obvious joy and
prosperity of its exercise — created an unbearable tension within the new nation. There was a tension between
our founding ideals and our founding reality.
Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner, understood this tension. These words, adapted from his writings, are
engraved on Panel Three of the Jefferson Memorial:
God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a
conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I re�ect that God is
just, that His justice cannot sleep forever. Commerce between master and slave is despotism. Nothing is more
certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.
It is absolutely true that too many of those Americans who enjoyed the blessings of liberty did not ponder the
question Frederick Douglass posed: “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” Too many, once they cashed in
their own “promissory note” of freedom, did not concern themselves with those who were still owed a debt of
liberty. But in every generation, there were Americans — white and black, slave and free — who sought to close
the gap between promise and reality.
And make no mistake, in the face of often violent resistance, the American promise is prevailing. The ink blot of
liberty is spreading, blotting out the default human background of oppression and misery. Critically, that ink
blot has jumped our borders. The mightiest military power in the history of the world has used its strength to
defeat the world’s worst tyrannies, secure the existence of liberal democracies from Japan to Germany, and
then maintained a long and prosperous peace.
But it’s a mistake to think that our chief task is to point backwards, to look at the immense gap between slavery
and freedom, between Jim Crow and civil rights, and believe that our work has been done. One does not undo
the consequences of 345 years of legalized oppression in a mere 56 years of contentious change. Instead, our
task is to continue the struggle to match American principles with American reality. It’s to spread the ink blot
— to continue the American counterinsurgency against the chaos of history.
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In July of every year, I think of two seminal infantry charges. The first occurred on July 2, 1863, when Colonel
Joshua Chamberlain led the 20th Maine Infantry Regiment on a desperate counterattack against Confederate
troops on Little Round Top on perhaps the most fateful day in American history — day two of the Battle of
Gettysburg.
The second charge happened just 16 days later, when the 54th Massachusetts Infantry launched its own
desperate attack against the walls of Fort Wagner in South Carolina. The 54th was a black regiment, and its
charge was a direct and physical manifestation that America’s black citizens were rising up to seize their
inheritance.
The lesson of those two historic moments has been repeated time and again throughout American history. It
took white Americans and black Americans to end slavery — and not through a revolt against the Founding but
rather through a defense of the Founding. It took white Americans and black Americans to end Jim Crow.
Again, not through a revolt against the Founding but rather through a defense of the Founding. Through
appeals to America’s founding promise, every marginalized American community has muscled its way into
more-complete membership in the American family.
It’s right to celebrate a nation that has — over time — combined courageous people with righteous principles to
secure a “more perfect union.” Light the fireworks. Defend the monuments to the imperfect (though
indispensable) people who in their turn and their time advanced human liberty and dignity.
It’s most important, however, that we run the race in our turn, that we look forward so that future generations
can look back and say of us that we didn’t simply secure and maintain the gains of the past — we made our own
payments on that promissory note of freedom. We continued to close the gap between American principles and
American reality. We have far to go, but the courageous history of this great nation should give us confidence
that the best part of the American story is yet to be told.
This article appears as “On Racial Progress” in the July 27, 2020, print edition of N������� R�����.
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