Reproductive Labor

Definition and conceptual history

Reproductive labor is the labor needed to sustain and reproduce labor power, daily and across generations: the activity that keeps a worker going each day and raises the next generation. Domestic housework such as cleaning, cooking and child care is the paradigm case, and unpaid productive activities such as subsistence farming and water or fuel collection fall under it too. In Capital Marx defined labor power as "the aggregate of the mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being," and reproductive labor takes the maintenance and reproduction of that labor power as its object.

Marxist feminism uses the concept to explain what women contribute to the capitalist economy, usually unrecognized, through their role as child-bearers and providers of family care. Social reproduction is the adjacent term for the labor required to maintain life within households and communities, and it is distinguished from its general sense of the reproduction of social structures. Federici argues that Marx's account was hampered by its near-exclusive focus on commodity production and its blindness to women's unpaid reproductive work and the sexual division of labor in capitalist accumulation; he reduced the reproduction of labor power to the consumption of commodities purchasable with a wage. She also notes that the category of "social reproduction" itself was first conceptualized by bourgeois economics, notably François Quesnay (1694–1774) and the Enlightenment physiocrats, to describe how a social system reproduces itself, so it is not radical in itself, and that it cannot be adopted as a form of political identity.

Origins reach back before the term was codified. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), Engels held that once agricultural surplus was treated as men's property, the demand for male lineage and inheritance subjected women to monogamy and domestic servitude, and he wrote that "the first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male." Marx and Engels wrote in 1846 that "the first division of labour is that between man and woman for the propagation of children." Virginia Woolf's essay A Room of One's Own belongs to this lineage, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1898) held that women's oppression originated in their confinement to the private sphere and suggested that women's conditions would improve once their work was placed in the public sphere, recognized and valued.

Theorization and the Wages for Housework movement

The theorization of reproductive labor took shape with the 1970s Wages for Housework movement and continues today. Written in 1969 and published in the Houseworker's Handbook, Betsy Warrior's essay argued that the production and reproduction of the housework women perform is the foundation of all economic transactions and of survival, and Federici holds that women's refusal of housework in the 1960s and 1970s exposed the centrality of unpaid domestic labor.

The most influential effort in this current was the International Wages for Housework Campaign (IWFHC), launched in 1972. Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici, Brigitte Galtier and Selma James started it and first raised the demand for wages for housework; the campaign emerged from the larger current of Autonomist Marxist organizing in Italy. In 1974 groups calling themselves Salario al Lavoro Domestico (Wages for Housework) formed in several Italian cities, and in Padua Lotta Feminista, created by Dalla Costa and Federici, adopted the wages-for-housework concept. Federici argues that the "revolutionary" quality of the wages-for-housework theorists lay not in the field they examined but in what they discovered: that unpaid labor is extracted not only from the waged workday but from the workday of millions of unwaged house-workers; that the wage should be redefined as a creator of labor hierarchies and a means of naturalizing exploitative social relations and delegating power over unwaged workers; and that exposing the socio-economic function of the fictitious private sphere repoliticized the family, sexuality and procreation.

The organizing spread internationally. In 1975 Federici started the New York Wages for Housework Committee, opened an office in Brooklyn and published Wages Against Housework that same year; the New York group she built disbanded in 1977, and the Padua group led by Dalla Costa also left the IWFHC and soon dissolved, with Dalla Costa citing political repression in Italy in the late 1970s as the cause. Between 1974 and 1976 three autonomous organizations formed within the IWFHC: Wages Due Lesbians (now Queer Strike), the English Collective of Prostitutes, and Black Women for Wages for Housework, co-founded by Margaret Prescod and Wilmette Brown. In the 1980s and 1990s the IWFHC lobbied on unpaid labor at UN women's conferences on behalf of several countries and succeeded in passing resolutions recognizing women's unpaid care work; after 2000 it became better known as the Global Women's Strike, and in 2019 it joined a coalition demanding a European Green New Deal (GNDE) and included a "care income" policy recommendation.

Federici explains the emergence of the full-time housewife and the development of reproductive labor as a product of the transition from absolute to relative surplus value, that is, the late-nineteenth-century shift of accumulation from light to heavy industry; she holds that only in the late nineteenth century did housework emerge as a core motor of reproducing industrial labor power. At the turn of the twentieth century only 18 per cent of US women aged 15 and over reported non-agricultural employment income.

Debates and distinctions

Whether reproductive labor should be seen as value-creating is a contested question, not a settled single position. Marxist anthropologists and economists such as George Caffentzis suggest that reproductive labor creates value in a manner similar to how productive labor creates value, by raising the value of labor power. Margaret Benston and Peggy Morton, among others, emphasize instead the distinction between productive and unproductive labor: productive labor yields goods and services with monetary value rewarded by a wage, while reproductive labor is tied to the private sphere and covers all work not aimed at a wage. Federici argues that value production is not a linear process and that the value-creating and non-value-creating spheres cannot be strictly separated by task or by whether a wage is paid, and criticizes denying the productivity of unpaid labor on the grounds that it assumes much of the world's population is irrelevant to capital accumulation. Mezzadri similarly points out that, given expanding informal labor relations, strictly separating value-creating from non-value-creating activity by task or wage payment is difficult and may be misleading, and Federici accepts this.

Unpaid labor today has also overlapped with the cult of motherhood and bans on abortion. In the Soviet Union, while Stalin in the 1930s called motherhood "a great and honorable duty given by nature" alongside such legislation, industry's demand for labor drew large numbers of women into the industrial workforce, and urban women took on a double burden of paid work and housework. Double burden means the workload of people who work for pay while also carrying substantial unpaid domestic labor; even in two-earner households women tend to spend considerably more time on housework and care and men more time on paid work, a pattern shaped largely by long-accepted traditional gender roles.

Reproductive labor is also divided into nurturant and non-nurturant reproductive labor. Nurturant reproductive labor includes child care, housework and positions in health care; non-nurturant reproductive labor includes food preparation and cleaning. Care work is divided separately into direct and indirect care. Direct care involves face-to-face interaction with the recipient, such as feeding, bathing, teaching, counselling and emotional support; indirect care covers activities that maintain the setting in which care happens, such as cooking, cleaning, laundry and scheduling. Scholars also distinguish active from passive care (supervision and being on call).

Another distinction concerns the dual meaning of care. Care refers both to concrete activities meeting another person's physical, emotional and developmental needs and to feelings of affection, concern and responsibility toward the care recipient; the distinction separates the labor performed from the emotional motives attached to it. Debra Satz, who treats reproductive labor as a special kind of labor encompassing pregnancy and childbirth and the raising and care of children, kin and community members, argues it should not be handled according to ordinary market norms. Pregnancy and childbirth depend on the capacity to bear children, but the expectation that women bear primary responsibility for reproductive labor is formed by social norms and power relations rather than biological necessity, and the reproductive-labor framework captures a wider range of activity than a nurturance framework.

Wages for housework has also drawn criticism. One argument holds that paying wages could reinforce and institutionalize particular gender roles around housework; critics hold that the goal should instead be liberation from housework, expanded opportunities in paid work and an equal distribution of unpaid labor. Supporters reply that entering the labor market alone does not challenge women's social role or achieve an equal distribution of unpaid care work, and that women who enter paid work still face a "double shift." Another criticism is that wages may commodify the intimate human relations of love and care and absorb them into capitalist relations.

Global division of labor and domestic workers

In feminist economics the concept fed a critique of the accounting systems that make women's unpaid work invisible in national accounts: Esther Boserup's Woman's Role in Economic Development (1970) was the first systematic review of the gender effects of structural change such as agricultural transition and industrialization, and Marilyn Waring's If Women Counted (1988) criticized the national accounts for excluding women's unpaid work and the value of nature, and is often rated a founding document of feminist economics.

Evelyn Nakano Glenn provided the insight that reproductive labor is divided along race and ethnicity, which she called the racial division of reproductive labor. In the northeastern United States, European immigrants from Germany and Ireland made up most domestic workers until the early twentieth century, but as the work's social status fell and conditions worsened it became racially stratified, with African American women in the South, Mexicans in the Southwest, and Japanese in northern California and Hawaii taking the roles. Domestic workers were paid low wages and treated as subordinates by the women who employed them, took the work for lack of other opportunities, and an ideology was produced that Black and Latina women were "made" to serve white families.

The number of domestic workers fell at first in the late twentieth century with modernization, development and the growth of other jobs, but Saskia Sassen-Koob explained that as economies shifted to services, low-wage jobs in advanced countries created demand for migrant women. The term "international division of reproductive labor" was coined by Rhacel Parreñas in Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration and Domestic Work, writing on Filipino migrant domestic workers. It refers to the transfer of labor between the wealthier women who delegate housework to migrants and the lower class left behind to care for the migrants' children, with migrant women maintaining a hierarchy over their own families and the women who remain. Parreñas argues the division arises from globalization and capitalism: elements such as privatization and the feminization of labor promoted its rise, reproductive labor is commodified and demanded internationally, and sending countries lose valuable labor power while receiving countries use it to grow their economies. She emphasizes the role of US colonialism and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in turning countries such as the Philippines into exporters of migrant labor. The concept has been extended to other regions: studies of Guatemala and Mexico found a more local transfer, rather than a global one, between women who join the workforce and the female relatives who care for their children, and in Singapore a "new international division of reproductive labor" arose through outsourcing and the use of low-skilled labor.

Based on surveys and censuses in 232 countries and territories, the International Labour Organization (ILO) estimated 67.1 million domestic workers in 2015, and noted that because this work is often hidden and unregistered the true figure may be as high as 100 million. The ILO reports that 83 per cent of domestic workers are women and many are migrant workers. In the United States domestic workers are generally excluded from many legal protections other workers enjoy, including the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), and from holidays, paid sick leave and paid overtime, while only 13 per cent have employers who provide health insurance. According to a National Domestic Workers' Alliance report, about a quarter of nannies, care workers and home health workers earn less than their state minimum wage and about 48 per cent earn less than what is required to support a family. The same organization led the passage of domestic workers' bills of rights in New York, Hawaii, California and Illinois. The domestic work industry is globally dominated by women; in the child care industry men are only about 3 to 6 per cent of all workers, and the jobs men hold skew toward administrative roles such as child care centre directors.

Assessment and relations

Despite the efforts of the small women's groups that began in Italy, the Wages for Housework campaign achieved international mobilization. As Heidi Hartmann (1981) acknowledges, these campaigns ultimately failed, yet they produced an important discourse on the value of housework and its relation to the economy. Hartmann criticizes traditional Marxist-feminist campaigns such as the wages-for-housework movement for asking about "women's relation to the economic system" rather than "women's relation to men," and considers the tradition to have ignored the importance of women's oppression as women. Clara Zetkin and Alexandra Kollontai opposed forms of feminism that strengthened class position, and Kollontai questioned in 1909 why women workers should ally with bourgeois feminists, pointing to the ways women's "free labor" was used under capitalism. Nancy Folbre (1994) proposed that the feminist movement focus on women's subordinate position in both the reproductive (private) and workplace (public) spheres, and in a 2013 interview Federici urged the feminist movement to consider that many women are forced into both productive and reproductive labor and thus a "double workday," argued that women's liberation is impossible until they are freed from the burden of unwaged labor, and proposed institutional changes such as closing the wage gap and implementing workplace child-care programmes.

Reproductive labor is distinguished from and intertwined with social reproduction, care work, the international division of reproductive labor and the double burden. Social reproduction is the adjacent concept naming the whole of the labor needed to maintain life within households and communities; care work names care activities performed for pay or unpaid together with their emotional motives; and the international division of reproductive labor names the structure in which that care is transferred across borders. Double burden describes the condition in which women carry paid work and unpaid care at once. Women perform a disproportionate share of unpaid care work, and this unequal distribution is linked to the "care penalty" of lower lifetime earnings and is sometimes described as a "care deficit" amid demographic change and shifts in work and family life. Because Marxist feminism rests on historical materialism, it is close to socialist feminism and, further, to materialist feminism, and it treats capitalism and patriarchy as mutually reinforcing systems, holding that capitalism depends heavily on women's unpaid housework. Reproductive labor is performed unpaid in households and also for pay through market institutions such as schools, hospitals and childcare facilities, and paid and unpaid care are substitutable and complementary, with households moving between market-based services and unpaid labor according to institutional and economic conditions. Care is sometimes conceptualized as a relational process in four phases: caring about, taking care of, care giving and care receiving.