The “Slavery of Housework”

Even in “enlightened” Austria, women’s work in the home and for families, whether paid or unpaid, is still poorly appreciated, especially financially. An examination of the facts demonstrates that, in 2017, Austrian women worked 22 hours a week at home, on average at least twice as much as men. Cooking took up most of the time, 4.2 hours a week, followed by dish washing (3.5 hours) and tidying up (3 hours). Between one hour and ninety minutes each are used for ironing, laundry, vacuuming and bed-making.

When unpaid work, such as housework, childcare, caring for the sick and elderly as well as voluntary work is taken into account, 9.7 billion hours are spent every year, two thirds of these are provided by women and one third by men. This in a small country like Austria with only 8 million inhabitants, so when scaled up globally, the enormous amounts of unpaid work can only be imagined!

This “slavery of housework” is reinforced by the current crisis of capitalism. It is mainly women who bear the burden of extra work caused by cutbacks in healthcare and social support services. As a result, many, especially older women, already live in poverty: their efforts doing housework and raising children are poorly rewarded with meagre pensions. Housewives are often dissatisfied with their lives, which makes them particularly prone to burn-out and depression.

In part this is due to the character of housework, which is monotonous and isolated, essentially aimed at maintaining order (cleanliness). The most ‘popular’ activity is not coincidentally also the most creative, namely cooking. Whilst clean laundry on the shelves is taken for granted, a ‘housewife’ gets most recognition for a good meal. It is therefore not surprising that women who are ‘just’ housewives often seek other fields in which they can ‘realize’ themselves, whether in home decoration or by taking up a creative ‘hobby’ and so on. It is also no wonder that phobias and compulsive disorders are often categorized as typical ‘housewife ailments’.

The ‘typical’ housewife is depicted as young

Historically, the work of women to sustain the family has covered various tasks. There was usually no separation between domestic work and the production of goods. All ordinary people — men and women produced items needed for survival, as well as goods produced for sale or exchange, especially food and clothing. As craft enterprises developed, the boundaries between different forms of work were more fluid than today. In this way housework and ‘gainful employment’ were conducted in the same place or nearby and the family represented a unit of production.

As industrialization gained pace, large parts of this work were outsourced from the household and bought in. Food and clothing were increasingly produced industrially and purchased as finished products. Housework tasks became completely separate, and conducted in a different place from those in which products are made. Although there are exceptions, and sometimes a trend in the other direction, both areas remain separate today.

Thus, the ‘modern’ image of the housewife living with a full-time working man and children, staying at home and running the household is relatively recent. Only a relatively small group of bourgeoisie women, many of whom outsource housework to servants, have really lived in this way. For a short time, in the exceptional period during the post WWII boom, women of the working class in the developed capitalist countries joined them. The US-American socialist Angela Davis, for example, argues that black women in the USA were never actually ‘just’ housewives, but have always performed slave or wage labour.

The tasks that this housewife is expected to complete — to keep a perfectly clean apartment, raise perfectly well-behaved children and so on are also relatively recent and artificially created. The demands for cleanliness, for example, are constantly increasing and despite new technical aids such as washing machines, dishwashers and vacuum cleaners, the number of hours needed to maintain the household are increasing, not falling. Studies also show that housework even increases, as household sizes decrease as each job has to be done separately in each small household.

Capital faces a dilemma due to industrialisation and the role of women’s work: whilst female labour is needed in the form of wage labour (i.e. as a worker or employee in a company), this is exactly what destroys the family in the form that capital needs it — as a tool to reproduce not only the workforce but also to stabilize the system. For this reason, capital also makes an effort to maintain the ideological image of women and the family. There are countless magazines, TV-serials and films which, despite all their modernity, in the end still show the father-mother-child(ren) family as the model necessary for happiness.

The debate begins

Since its beginning there was, and often still is, also a sexist climate in the workers’ movement, the living and working conditions of women have not been seen as important, or worse they were seen as competition to male labour or treated as unskilled and immature. The double and triple burden of women with work, household and family to look after was rarely discussed, and even continued in left-wing organisations. Stalinism, too, deliberately relied on the “bourgeois” image of women, of women as mothers and on a patriarchal family model that was used in the interests of the bureaucracy, which needed it as an instrument of social control.

This was countered by a growing self-confidence of women who had entered mass employment in the wake of the postwar upswing. The outcry of left-wing women politicized in the course of the 1968 movement, the civil rights movement in the USA or national liberation movements was therefore absolutely inevitable. This led to a debate about ‘housework’ and its social and economic significance as well as the resulting political consequences.

The debate began in 1972 with the publication by the Italian feminist Mariarosa Dalla Costa of the article “The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community”. This was followed by several articles by Wally Secombe, Jane Gardiner and others published from 1974 onwards in the theoretical magazine New Left Review. A third intervention was made by a group of development sociologists — the Bielefeld women.

The debate centred around the attempt to integrate the issue of housework into Marxist economic theory or to demonstrate, that because it is “unpaid, invisible and isolated”, it was a ‘blind spot’ in Marxism. It was argued that the subject is sidelined by Marx “in footnotes” or that he only spoke of reproduction, but not of “reproductive work”. The debate was strongly overshadowed by the experience of the Stalinist distortion of Marxism that degraded women’s issues to a ‘secondary or side contradiction’ in contrast to the ‘main’ contradiction of class. However, this approach has little to do with the work of Marx and Engels or that of the Bolsheviks immediately after the October Revolution 1917. Stalinism is therefore also jointly responsible for the separation of the women’s movement from the workers’ movement!

During the debate too, the issue of Marxist terminology was also raised, which it was claimed leads to a devaluation of the domestic work done by women.

Housework in the work of Marx and Engels

In the work of Marx and Engels, there is little explicitly said about housework, although the situation of women, both in the household and in paid employment is addressed in “The Situation of the Working Class in England”, “German Ideology” and of course in the “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State”, which covered changing family and living conditions.

The main economic work of Marx and Engels is mainly concerned with an analysis of capitalism and not with the simple production of goods. Housework is essentially dealt with here indirectly, within the framework of the question of the reproduction of labour. Since Marx and Engels could not complete their main work, “Capital”, it remains to be seen whether a more intensive examination of reproduction or domestic work was intended.

The critique of some feminists

In criticizing Marx and Engels, some feminists raise several issues around whether housework generates added value or is involved in value-added production and whether women are exploited as housewives. In answering these it is worth remembering some cornerstones of Marxist theory, which were developed to explain the workings of the capitalist system.

Marxism analyses work not simply as the expenditure of labour, but whether it is socially useful. By this it is meant whether it contributed to the growth of the wealth of society and, of course, the related question of how it is distributed. This contrasts to the simple production of goods which does not significantly increase overall wealth compared to capitalist production.

Useful work is defined as that which serves to produce use-values, the value of which is realized in exchange of the commodity produced. The ‘pleasant’ home that a housewife creates is not a use-value in this sense, and is therefore not ‘useful’ work as defined by Marx and Engels.

Productive work is defined as work that is integrated into the capitalist production process and creates added value. A large part of the working class is thus ‘unproductive’ in the Marxist sense, as for example all civil-servants, and even housewives since no additional, no added value is produced.

The value of a commodity is defined by the socially necessary working time that is accumulated in it. This is expressed in the abstracted labour, i.e. the amount of work necessary to produce it. This also applies to labour power itself, which is also a commodity. The value of this commodity, labour power, is expressed in the cost of its reproduction.

Thus the labour necessary for the production of the class of workers, including their children, consists of a physical element, in effect that which secures the physical survival of the labour force as well as a historical element that enshrines that expected standard won during previous class struggle. The term “reproduction” here indicates that no additional value is created during this process, the previous value is restored. This is in contrast to wage labor in a capitalist production relationship in which added value is produced.

There is a discussion about whether Marx includes the work of the housewife among the reproduction costs or treats it in the same way as purchased goods such as clothing, food etc. Marx notes in a footnote that the wages of a worker must be higher if more ‘housework’ has to be bought, for example, by employing more women. Reproduction costs also include maintaining the family, not just the direct labour force — although this is not always the case, it can also be cheaper to buy services from, for example, cheap foreign labour (au pair girls, cleaning women, domestic workers etc).

Secombe argues that the housewife’s work is necessary to maintain the commodity — labour power — and thus also creates value, even if it is not directly related to capital. Housework in this sense is unproductive, but value-creating work as is also that of cooks, cleaning and domestic workers.

Gardiner focuses on the very strong dependence of the woman on her husband, but also explains that although domestic work in itself does not create value, it makes a substantial contribution to the creation of added value because it lowers reproduction costs.

Coulson, Magas and Wainwright argue that domestic work does not produce commodities, but use-values that are directly consumed, i.e. no value is produced (in other words they say that the housewife produces goods such as food for immediate consumption, but not commodities).

The whole debate is confused in that the terms such as value, added value, use value and exchange value are often used loosely and that a strong moral element resonates through the debate reflecting the idea “if the work of housewives is so strenuous, how can it then not create value?”

Marxism shows that labour power, a commodity, is purchased for a specific period of time, but that only the sum of money necessary for its reproduction is paid as a wage, which includes both the physical and historical elements. The difference between the wage paid and the value realized when the product produced by the labour is sold is the added value. In this way labour is the only commodity that creates additional value. Housework, on the other hand, essentially restores things to their previous state; it reproduces the commodity labour, but does not create any additional value in itself.

In the capitalist system, Marxists therefore explain that the rate of exploitation depends on the ratio of unpaid overtime to paid work, that is the cost of reproduction. In this sense, there is no exploitation in domestic work.

This does not mean that Marxists deny that women also live in exploitative circumstances in the household and in the family — on the contrary, they demand and fight for the liberation of women from this situation.

The “Bielefeld women”, Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, Maria Mies and Claudia von Werlhof find Marx’s vocabulary unsuitable and therefore define new terms, while at the same time also focusing on domestic and reproductive work, instead of on wage labour as Marx did. They justify this by, among other things, pointing out that wage labour is not the most common form of work worldwide. This is true, but it does not change the fact that capitalist wage labor is still the most important, because it is the only form that creates value.

They created new concepts including that ‘female subsistence production is the creation and preservation of life’ and that ‘housewifery is the devaluation of female gainful employment by depicting it as easy or even leisure activity’. In doing so they did not provide clear and unchangeable definitions but explained that their concepts ‘develop as part of our lives and with our struggles and with our thinking about them”. These concepts are contrasted to what they call the orthodox ‘eternally true’, view which they define as masculine. Not only is this unclear, it is even a sexist argument.

Although these have been questionable and even contradictory analyses, they have provided some important and valid findings for practical work and our understanding of the situation of housewives:

• The amount of time housewives need for their work is largely irrelevant (except during upswings when they are needed as labour). Technical progress in this area is therefore low or does not compensate for increased demand. Even with the most modern technical aids, the housewife’s working day never ends. Capital is also not keen to see the widespread automation of housework, because this would be accompanied, at least partly, by increased socialization, overcoming the boundaries of the small family unit. This is because automation of processes such as cleaning, washing and cooking does not pay off for individual households, but only in larger units. The small family is also a sales market — if each family has its own vacuum cleaner robot, many more will be sold!
• The fact that housework is defamed and devalued as ‘easy’ and ‘unskilled’ creates the situation in which employees in these areas, who are mostly women, can be fobbed off with starvation wages. Women’s work is often devalued as ‘extra income’, which therefore does not have to be paid properly and consolidates role models. For example, development aid for women is presented as providing microcredits for ‘extra income’.
• Domestic work assists in the stabilisation of the system not only because women work cheaply and without criticism, but also because in times of crisis they help to keep workers fit despite lower wages or unemployment. If the man’s wage is no longer sufficient, then the housewife eases the situation by buying less and making more at home. She also acts as a ‘safety valve’ to ease male anger about his job and even sometimes to push him to work to feed the family, maybe even as a strikebreaker! Finally, she educates children to become future workers, who will function as cogs in the system.

What does this mean in practice?

The main political conclusions which have been drawn from the debate concern:

What needs to be changed?

If domestic work is understood as a mode of production on its own, not determined by capitalism, then women are understood to be, so to say, a class, which must organize itself independently and also against men. For the Bielefeld women, for example, housework is a central feature of capitalism alongside wage labour. This leads to another goal — the abolition of wage labour and capitalism is no longer the main aim of the struggle.

Who is the revolutionary subject?

Dalla Costa concludes that “all women are housewives, regardless of whether they also perform wage labour” and thus belong to the working class.

Others argue that domestic work cannot be understood within the concept of labour value, that is why it stands, so to say outside capitalism, and that women’s oppression therefore also has “relative autonomy from the central axis of capitalist production”. This leads to the necessity of the independent organization of women.

For the Bielefeld women, housewives and domestic workers become the ‘revolutionary subject’, in contrast to the working class for socialists. They also argue that women have generally a more positive approach to life than men due to their fertility, which is a biological explanation. As a result, the focus is on the independent organization of women and not on the common class struggle.

For housewives, work and home are not separated, which leads to frustration and isolation and can also have a negative effect on class consciousness, since there is no shared experience, no recognition of the equality of problems. The fact that there is no ‘payment’ for one’s own performance also has a negative effect on self-confidence.

Housewives are not at the forefront of the revolutionary movement precisely because they are isolated and not part of collective production, which also affects their consciousness. A similar question arose in Russia in 1917 regarding who would be the revolutionary subject: could not the peasants, who were more numerous than the working class, be the revolutionary subject, i.e. the driver of the revolution? They could not, because they were isolated on their land, they lacked the collective experience of their own fighting power, that the working class has and that is decisive for the development of class consciousness as well. This analysis does not mean, however, that housewives cannot also be an important part of the anti-capitalist struggle! The numerous independent mobilizations of women within the framework of larger class struggles show this.

It should also not be overlooked that the majority of working class women are by no means ‘only’ housewives, but also wage earners.

The demand for a housewife’s wage or an unconditional basic income must also be considered in terms of awareness. As socialists, we focus on the demand for the right to a full-time job, as this means active integration into the working class and has a positive effect on self-confidence and class consciousness.

In contrast, Dalla Costa and her “Lotta Feminista” groups in Italy led a movement for the state to pay a wage to housewives with the aim of making domestic work more expensive. As with the unconditional basic income, this creates the danger that domestic work will remain the task of women, keeping it cheap and thus socially under-valued, instead of minimizing and socializing it. The role models are not changed by paying for domestic work.

What forms of struggle?

Dalla Costa calls for a “women’s struggle, within the family”, for the refusal to do housework — ‘housewife’s strike’. The idea is that capitalism is also affected as the reproduction of labour no longer functions. However, the immediate addressee of this struggle, is one’s own family, husband and children. This form of struggle places the responsibility on the individual.

From the world of work, we know that strikes are easier in large companies than in small ones. It helps to prepare the fight together, to have colleagues who strengthen one’s back and also a trade union. But all this is missing in a ‘housewife strike’. All the pressure exerted on fighting women must be dealt with by each housewife alone. The collective actions that make the working class strong is missing.

The need to confront the domestic and working conditions of women is a central task for socialists. There will be no successful struggle against capitalism without women. The debate about housework, however, is strongly influenced by the negative experiences of Stalinist sexism and moral evaluations. Psychological instead of materialistic explanations dominate the ideas of most authors.

The debate has focused on the situation of housewives and thus brought important insights. However, the explanations and solutions offered do not help, as they are based on the continuation of the division of the working class along gender lines. Ultimately, they represent the other side of the coin of reformist or bourgeois sexism that has divided the working class. But this division represents a weakening — a weakening of the working class as a whole and ultimately also of the women of the working class because the division helps to stabilize the existing capitalist system.

In order to free women from their role as ‘house slaves’ (Lenin), the socialization of domestic and educational work is needed. As socialists, we therefore fight for comprehensive social solutions for the various forms of housework to give women, as well as men, the opportunity to free themselves from it and to get more involved in professional, social and political life. This includes:

• Free comprehensive and high quality childcare for every child with opening hours adapted to work-times.
• The right to properly paid full-time jobs.
• Free, comprehensive and high-quality care — inpatient, outpatient and in housing projects — to relieve families of the burden of caring for sick and elderly family members and to enable elderly people in need of care to live in dignity and self-determination.
• Establishment of inexpensive social facilities of good quality: canteens and restaurants, but also community laundry facilities and public infrastructure companies that take care of cleaning etc. and where qualified personnel work with decent pay.

Even within the framework of capitalism, real improvements can be achieved here, even if they are limited, not accessible to all women and may even be reversed. But achieving the possibility, without coercion, of the complete socialization of domestic work and the necessary technical developments, financial means and social changes will only be possible with the abolition of private ownership of means of production. Only a society that places the needs of all above profits can bring an end to domestic slave labour.