Housework

Housework, or labor performed within the intimate space of the home, includes cooking, cleaning, and caring for the physical structure and its residents. Historically a responsibility thrust upon women and specifically mothers, housework remains an unpaid, unrecognized form of labor, and yet ironically, housework creates and maintains the necessary environment for an advanced capitalist economy to keep thriving through its reproduction of daily basic functions—food for eating, beds for sleeping, clothes for working, and a home for shelter. Often deemed “women's work,” housework responsibilities demonstrate the gender division of labor in the home as well as slow-to-change expectations and constraints placed on women, based on their gender and/or their status as mothers.

Stemming back to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, housework was theorized as reproductive labor, a concept describing the work that is required to sustain the productive labor force—to keep a family functioning, productive, and participatory in the capitalist market. The concept extends to offer a class analysis through families raising the next group of healthy, capable, productive workers to join the proletariat, or working class, and help bolster the bourgeoisie, or wealthy employer class.

Reproductive labor can also extend to include cleaning, cooking, and care labor performed outside the home in the formal marketplace—not just housework. Yet, housework has historically been devalued because of its specific position inside the home, where it remains mostly invisible, unseen, and unpaid, versus work performed in a social factory setting or busy retail environment. This invisibility of housework has contributed to its long standing lack of acknowledgment and recognition, especially in capitalist societies. Additionally, janitorial work, housekeeping, and other forms of low-wage service work that mimic the crucial elements that constitute housework, yet are performed within institutional settings, are still devalued with low wages and little respect or recognition.

In addition to the gendered nature of housework, there is also a strong racialized component. The Institute for Women's Policy Research found that in 2002, one-third of all service sector employees performing domestic labor in private households were Latinas. Similarly, Asian American women were highly clustered in high-tech contract assembly work, domestic work, and garment work. These examples of workforces offer low wages, less prestige, and less room for advancement. They also speak to the nature of structural gender and racial discrimination, which represents a widespread problem manifest in various [Page 384]public- and private-sector workplaces, such as universities, hospitals, factories, and traditional office settings, in addition to domestic work in the home. This trend continues to create gendered and racialized workforces—high numbers of jobs that are occupied disproportionately by women, such as those paid to perform housework.