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Authors: Laurie Penny
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feminism, women still do the lion’s share of caring, cooking and cleaning duties, for free. Nowadays, we are also encouraged to do ‘real’ work – i.e., work traditionally done by men, outside the home – on top of these domestic duties, albeit for less pay and fewer rewards. In 2003, British women still performed an average of nineteen hours’ worth of housework per week, compared with only five hours for men, whose share of the domestic burden has remained essentially unchanged since the early 1980s. 17 Whilst unemployment and retirement decreased the number of hours spent by men on domestic work, they increased women’s hours.
Women’s work-relationship to their bodies mirrors our work-relationship to our homes: we labour at great personal cost to gild our cages, our increasing resentment tempered by fear of the social consequences of refusal. This fear is engendered in us by patriarchal capitalism, which would have everything to lose were women to once refuse to perform for free all the boringdomestic work vital to support alienated industrial labour. We tidy away the messy reality of our bodies just as we tidy away the grim reality of domestic toil, because have been schooled to fear losing our womanhood, losing our identity, if we refuse to shape up and clean house, no matter what our other engagements of paid work and social interaction may be. Modern women are told that we can have it all, which in practice means that we must and should do it all – with a smile, and for free.
There was once a dedicated movement, tied in to Marxist feminism, to change the labour conditions of working women across the world. This movement petered out in the 1980s, despite the fact that the labour dispute on the domestic front was never close to being won. Instead, men and women have retreated into a grim stalemate, and many find themselves standing on a picket line that extends across every home, from the sink to the washing machine to the kids’ bedrooms. Before we set up homes together, we may not be aware that this picket line exists, but the strategic socio-sexual marginalisation of women’s bodies makes it seem somehow natural and right that all the dirty, messy work of the home should be performed by women for low pay or no pay. Women are seen as animalistic, manipulable, and born to be low-paid workers; because we see ourselves in that way too, we capitulate – we abandon our resistance in effect, we scab.
Domestic drudgery is a capitalist construction
Whilst researching this chapter I interviewed Western women of all ages and classes who were balancing domestic labour with paid, ‘real’ work, and my overwhelming impression was one of defeatism and paralysis. Women, whether or not they identify as feminists, feel guilt about the state of our homes in the same way that we feel guilt about the state of our bodies – we feel ashamed of being seen to have somehow lost control, to be insufficiently worthy of our womanhood as socially interpreted. “Not being able to keep one’s house clean still suggests complete breakdown,” says Lucy, 38, a full-time mother. “Every time a stranger comes to my door I worry that they are glancing past me at the grubby porch, and sofa covered in dog-fur and thinking, ‘that woman has lost control of her life.’ I feel like if my elderly neighbour looks in, she’ll think I’m a failure as a woman.” The feminization of domestic labour makes makes it seem at once trivial and an essential part of female identity. Housework and childcare are not real work, because women do them – and because they are done by women, whose bodies are marginalised to the point of unreality, they are not real work.
In fact, domestic labour is not at all trivial. Without the work that women do for free, every western economy would collapse within days. In the United States, the money that women should in theory be owed for their unpaid caring and domestic work runs to some six
Women’s work-relationship to their bodies mirrors our work-relationship to our homes: we labour at great personal cost to gild our cages, our increasing resentment tempered by fear of the social consequences of refusal. This fear is engendered in us by patriarchal capitalism, which would have everything to lose were women to once refuse to perform for free all the boringdomestic work vital to support alienated industrial labour. We tidy away the messy reality of our bodies just as we tidy away the grim reality of domestic toil, because have been schooled to fear losing our womanhood, losing our identity, if we refuse to shape up and clean house, no matter what our other engagements of paid work and social interaction may be. Modern women are told that we can have it all, which in practice means that we must and should do it all – with a smile, and for free.
There was once a dedicated movement, tied in to Marxist feminism, to change the labour conditions of working women across the world. This movement petered out in the 1980s, despite the fact that the labour dispute on the domestic front was never close to being won. Instead, men and women have retreated into a grim stalemate, and many find themselves standing on a picket line that extends across every home, from the sink to the washing machine to the kids’ bedrooms. Before we set up homes together, we may not be aware that this picket line exists, but the strategic socio-sexual marginalisation of women’s bodies makes it seem somehow natural and right that all the dirty, messy work of the home should be performed by women for low pay or no pay. Women are seen as animalistic, manipulable, and born to be low-paid workers; because we see ourselves in that way too, we capitulate – we abandon our resistance in effect, we scab.
Domestic drudgery is a capitalist construction
Whilst researching this chapter I interviewed Western women of all ages and classes who were balancing domestic labour with paid, ‘real’ work, and my overwhelming impression was one of defeatism and paralysis. Women, whether or not they identify as feminists, feel guilt about the state of our homes in the same way that we feel guilt about the state of our bodies – we feel ashamed of being seen to have somehow lost control, to be insufficiently worthy of our womanhood as socially interpreted. “Not being able to keep one’s house clean still suggests complete breakdown,” says Lucy, 38, a full-time mother. “Every time a stranger comes to my door I worry that they are glancing past me at the grubby porch, and sofa covered in dog-fur and thinking, ‘that woman has lost control of her life.’ I feel like if my elderly neighbour looks in, she’ll think I’m a failure as a woman.” The feminization of domestic labour makes makes it seem at once trivial and an essential part of female identity. Housework and childcare are not real work, because women do them – and because they are done by women, whose bodies are marginalised to the point of unreality, they are not real work.
In fact, domestic labour is not at all trivial. Without the work that women do for free, every western economy would collapse within days. In the United States, the money that women should in theory be owed for their unpaid caring and domestic work runs to some six
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