Is housework productive?

More importantly, should we care?

First, a quick note: what follows will make a lot more sense if you’ve read last week’s post!

'We demand wages for housework'

I left you last week with a cliffhanger: the Wages for Housework (WFH) movement that sprang up in the early 70s in the US, Europe, and the Caribbean had fallen apart by the end of the decade. What went wrong?

I should offer some caveats here. While that first incarnation of the WFH campaign may have dissolved, its descendants live on. As one reader commented, the Global Women’s Strike is actively organizing for a “Care Income” under the leadership of Selma James, a WFH foremother. The WFH legacy is also apparent in calls for a Universal Basic Income and other programs offering unconditional cash transfers to low-income families.

And yet, three of the five WFH leaders profiled by Emily Callaci in her new history of the movement left the campaign decades ago. Several of the most active WFH “chapters” dissolved in the late 1970s. And while the idea that care work is valuable has resurged in public discourse over the last few years, the idea that we should offer payment for familial care labor has never truly gone mainstream. (I’m happy to be proven wrong on this last point – feel free to drop some counter-evidence in the comments!)

Callaci’s analysis suggests WFH 1.0 fell apart for a host of pragmatic, interpersonal, and ideological reasons:

Pragmatic:

Activism is really hard work. Organizer burnout is a major threat to any social movement, and particularly so when progress seems slow. As Mariarosa Dalla Costa, one of the movement’s founders, reflected years later, “After so many struggles and so much time spent organizing, we couldn’t detect even the outline of a transformation of our society.” Many of the original organizers simply got tired of fighting.

Relatedly, it is much easier to be a radical activist when you don’t have major caregiving demands! And the WFH constituency, as you might imagine, included a fair number of current or aspiring caregivers. As Callaci drily puts it, some activists “wanted to have children and found that the demands of motherhood were incompatible with the demands of political militancy.”¹

Finally, activism doesn’t pay well (or, typically, at all). Alas, fighting back against the capitalist machine doesn’t release you from its clutches. Many who started in the movement as young students later left it because they needed to make some money.

Interpersonal:

Competing visions and clashes over leadership drove a wedge among the primary WFH organizers. Exactly what went wrong is somewhat unclear. Callaci points to two competing accounts: one camp says the movement split along racial lines, another that the conflict stemmed from frustration over some members’ domineering leadership style. Both seem plausible, and indeed it’s likely the “true” culprit was a bit of both.

Source

These pragmatic and interpersonal factors are important, but a bit generic. Point to any social movement, and I bet you’ll find burnout, infighting, and the like.

So I want to linger today on the final, ideological category of reasons-things-fell-apart. This is where things get sticky – but helpfully so. I see two core tensions, both with ongoing significance for those of us who care about housework in 2025:

First, how do you counter the devaluation of “women’s work” without also tethering women to it?

In theory, WFH is a gender-neutral benefit: anyone, of any gender, who performs domestic labor would be eligible for payment. In practice, women would be the major beneficiaries of such a program. And if you were to start receiving a payment for your housework, would you be effectively acquiescing to it as “your job”? In the 1970s (and arguably still in the 2020s), when much of the energy of mainstream feminism was aimed at getting women equality in paid (market) work, WFH was countercultural: ‘I don’t want to be paid for my housework, I want to do less of it!’

Dalla Costa herself once advocated for “smash[ing] the entire role of housewife” rather than simply making it a paid position:

“We must discover forms of struggle which immediately break the whole structure of domestic work, rejecting it absolutely, rejecting our role as housewives and the home as the ghetto of our existence….”

The line between valuing housework and glorifying it can be fuzzy. For example, one could argue that Tradwives and their ilk value housework extremely highly. While no one would confuse Silvia Federici with Hannah Neeleman, both challenge the paid work > domestic work hierarchy.² The Tradwives’ project, to the extent they have one, is to show that domesticity is an art, that maintaining a family isn’t drudgery but high calling, that the home isn’t “the ghetto of our existence” but a sanctuary.

My take is that the worthy project of getting housework appropriately valued has to be paired with the equally worthy project of disentangling gender from household roles - much easier said than done.

Source

Second, speaking of valuation, how do you assert housework’s value without capitulating to capitalist premises?

A reader summarized this tension perfectly in their comment on last week’s post:

“I think this is really funny in that, while ostensibly a movement to ameliorate the effects of capitalism, it further entrenches the logic of the markets and capitalism in an entirely social sphere.”

Callaci admits to the same hesitation:

“Perhaps the part that makes me most uneasy is the centrality of productivity…Wages for Housework reveals how women’s work creates economic value in a capitalist system, and, in that sense, they make a brilliant case for wealth redistribution on capitalism’s own terms. But should we accept those terms? Do we have to be deemed ‘productive’ to claim a share of the collective wealth?”

I, too, wrestle with this. I’m all for greater recognition—and valuation—of domestic labor. The social and reproductive labor women perform is literally keeping all of us alive! That would be true under any economic system, but the fact that within the capitalist framework that labor is deemed “unproductive” is particularly insulting.

But how do you counter housework’s devaluation? Most activists who have taken on this project, WFH included, have sought to translate its impact into terms even the most hardened of capitalists will understand: dollars. ‘Look, here is how much money women are saving humanity by doing housework for free!’ (Estimates vary, but Callaci cites $9 trillion.)

Yet this translation into monetary terms feels uncomfortably like conceding defeat. As the same, wise commenter (hi, Apoorva!) put it, we’ve seen “the collapse of all sources of value in society into economic/financial value in the last few decades, all over the world. I don’t think that has entirely been good for us.”

Me neither. One of the arguments I make in What’s On Her Mind is that efforts—by activists and scholars alike—to translate unpaid work into terms that policymakers, business leaders, and others in power will appreciate have costs. Apoorva describes it as collapse; I write about it as flattening. It’s taking this thing we call housework, or care work, or household labor, and reducing it to a unidimensional “productive” entity. Something is inevitably lost along the way.

I sympathize with the desire to have one’s contributions valued in the currency the rest of the world recognizes. (Again: $$$) Yet another commenter (y’all had great insights last week!) who’s currently working as an “unpaid mother/laborer” suggested that wages would be helpful for her material well-being, but also for her confidence. Absolutely!

I’ll admit I don’t know how best to square this circle. In the book, I suggest we resist our reductionist tendencies and instead allow multiple forms of value to coexist. Unfortunately, that means hanging out in the gray areas many of us (it me) find unsettling.³

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What did I miss? Do you see a way to change the way care and housework are valued that doesn’t entail acceptance of capitalism’s terms? Or perhaps you are less worried about that dilemma than I am? As always, I’m eager to hear your take in the comments.

P.S. Check out TDD reader Elaine Luther’s incredible quilts inspired by the WFH movement! (Scroll down toward the end of the blog post.)

1. This one resonates for me. Though political militancy isn’t on my agenda, I had grand plans for civic engagement this year. I’ve made very little headway, mostly because parenthood has left me feeling always tired and frequently pressed for time.

2. Ironically, though, the “successful” Tradwives manage to turn their housework into paid work through sponsorships, product lines, and the like.

3. Elissa Strauss is someone who I think writes thoughtfully about the both/and of it all, e.g. in this post from earlier in the summer:

THE ESSAY What Both the Left and the Right Get Wrong about Pronatalism