DOMESTIC LABOR REVISITED LISE VOGEL INDEX I. THEORIES AND THEORIZING...................................................................................................................... 2 II. A DIFFERENT STARTING POINT ................................................................................................................ 4 III. CAPITALISM AND DOMESTIC LABOR....................................................................................................... 6 IV. AUDIENCES AND PARADIGMS ................................................................................................................. 9 V. DOMESTIC LABOR IN THE 21ST CENTURY ...........................................................................................11 VI. REFERENCES........................................................................................................................................... 12 DOMESTIC LABOR REVISITED. 1 1. From the late 1960s into the 1970s, socialist critique launched by North American women's feminists sought to analyze women's unpaid liberationists in the late 1960s and soon picked family work within a framework of Marxist up elsewhere, notably in Britain. Although political economy.i Such an analysis would central in women's experience, the unpaid work provide a foundation, they thought, for and responsibilities of family life were rarely understanding women's differential posit!ioning addressed in radical thought and socialist as mothers, family members, and workers, and practice. Women's liberationists, wanting to thereby for a materialist analysis of women's ground their own activism in more adequate subordination. At the time, interest in the theory, began to wonder about the theoretical bearing of Marxist theory on women's status of the housework and childcare liberation seemed perfectly normal— and not performed in family households, usually by just to socialist feminists. Radical feminists also women. Over the next years, an enormous set adopted and transformed what they understood of writings known collectively as the domestic to be Marxist concepts (e.g., Firestone, 1970; labor debate examined this puzzle.iii Millett, 1970). 5. The domestic labor literature identified 2. From these efforts came a voluminous family households as sites of production. literature. Women's liberationists studied Reconceptualized as domestic labor, housework Marxist texts, wrestled with Marxist concepts, and childcare could then be analyzed as labor and produced a range of original formulations processes. From this beginning came a series of combining, or at least intermingling, Marxism questions. If domestic labor is a labor process, and feminism. Their enthusiasm for this work is then what is its product? people? commodities? hard today to recapture.ii It turned out, labor power? Does the product have value? If moreover, to be relatively brief. By the end of so, how is that value determined? How and by the 1970s, interest in domestic labor theorizing what or whom is the product consumed? What had dramatically declined. The shift away from are the circumstances, conditions, and the so— called domestic labor debate was constraints of domestic labor? What is domestic especially pronounced in the United States. labor's relationship to the reproduction of labor 3. In this paper I look again at the challenge of power? to overall social reproduction? to theorizing the unwaged labor of housework, capitalist accumulation? Could a mode of childbearing, and childrearing. I argue that reproduction of people be posited, comparable much of the early domestic labor literature to but separate from the mode of production? followed an intellectual agenda that has not Could answers to these questions explain the been well understood, reviewing my own work origins of women's oppression? in this light. I then consider the reception of 6. The burgeoning domestic labor literature such endeavors by their audiences. Finally, I seemed initially to confirm, even legitimate, suggest that the early domestic labor theorists' socialist feminists' double commitment to unfinished project deserves further attention. women's liberation and socialism. Before long, however, a range of problems surfaced. I. THEORIES AND THEORIZING Concepts and categories that had initially seemed self— evident lost their stability. For 4. The notion that something called “ domestic example, the notion of reproduction of labor labor” should be theorized emerged as part of a power became surprisingly elastic, stretching DOMESTIC LABOR REVISITED. 2 from biological procreation to any kind of work directly pertinent to day— to— day activities that contributed to people's daily and thought a given theory had determinate maintenance— whether it be paid or unpaid, in political and strategic implications. Conversely, private households, in the market, or in the they looked to empirical accounts of history workplace. Likewise, the meaning of the and current circumstances as a way to constitute category domestic labor fluctuated. Did it refer the appropriate basis for theory.iv Rejecting the simply to housework? Or did it include abstractions of the early domestic labor childbearing and child care as well? Circular literature, they sought a conceptual apparatus arguments were common. For example, that could be used to organize and interpret the domestic labor was frequently identified with data of women's lives. women's work and conversely, thereby 10. This approach reflected a particular assuming the sexual division of labor women's epistemological orientation, one that put theory liberationists wished to explain. In addition, the into a kind of one— to— one relationship with debate's almost exc!lusive concern with unpaid the empirical. Theory was assumed to be household labor discounted the importance of isomorphic with what was understood to be women's paid labor, whether as domestic reality. As such, it could produce empirical servants or wage workers. And its focus on the generalizations, statements of regularity, and economic seemed to overlook pressing models. Explanation and prediction would then political, ideological, psychological, and sexual depend on extrapolation from these presumably issues. accurate representations. In this view, familiar 7. Women's liberationists also found the from the social— scientific literature, theory is abstractness of the domestic labor literature a broad— ranging intellectual activity, frustrating. The debate developed in ways that grounded in the empirical and capable of were not only hard to follow but also far from supplying descriptions, explanations, and activist concerns. Concepts appeared to interact predictions— and thereby able as well to guide among themselves without connection to the policy or strategy. empirical world. Not only was the discussion 11. This is not the only way to think about abstract, it seemed ahistorical as well. Perhaps theory, however. Much of the early domestic most damaging, much of the domestic labor labor literature implicitly adopted a different literature adopted a functionalist explanatory perspective, rooted in certain readings of framework. A social system's need for domestic Marxist theory current in the 1960s and '70s. labor, for example, was taken to imply that Associated most famously with the French need was invariably satisfied. Where in the philosopher Louis Althusser, this alternative debate, many wondered, was human agency? perspective accords theory an epistemological 8. Meanwhile, feminist agendas were bursting specificity and a limited scope. Theory, in this with other matters, both theoretical and view, is a powerful but highly abstract practical. By the early 1980s, most socialist enterprise and sharply different from history feminists had decided to move “beyond the (see, among others, Althusser, 1971; Hindess domestic labor debate.”They left behind the and Hirst, 1975; Willer and Willer, 1973; as ambiguity, conceptual fuzziness, circularity, well as Marx, [1857]/1973). As Althusser put it, and loose ends of an unfinished project speaking of Marx's Capital: (Molyneux, 1979). 12. Despite appearances, Marx does not analyze 9. The shift away from the effort to theorize any “ concrete society,” not even England, domestic labor within a framework of Marxist which he mentions constantly in Volume One, political economy seemed to make sense. Many but the capitalist mode of production and women's liberationists assumed theory to be nothing else. This object is an abstract one: DOMESTIC LABOR REVISITED. 3 which means that it is terribly real and that it concrete— neither the rich, idiosyncratic, and never exists in the pure state, since it only exists constructed character of experience nor the in capitalist societies. Simply speaking: in order specific nature and direction of popular to be able to analyse these concrete capitalist mobilization or social transformation. Even less societies (England, France, Russia, etc.), it is could they suggest political strategies. Such essential to know that they are dominated by questions would be matters for empirical that terribly concrete reality, the capitalist mode investigation and political analysis by the actors of production, which is “invisible” (to the involved. naked eye). “Invisible,” i.e., abstract. 16. The challenge, then, was to discover or (Althusser, 1971, 77.). create categories to theorize women's unpaid 13. From this perspective, theory is necessarily family work as a material process. Women's abstract as well as severely constrained