Get rid of pointless dashes

lise_vogel_domestic_labour_revisited.md

@@ -4,39 +4,39 @@ _Written by Lise Vogel, 2000_
 
 From the late 1960s into the 1970s, socialist feminists sought to analyse women’s unpaid family-work within a framework of Marxist political economy.[^2] Such an analysis would provide a foundation, they thought, for understanding women’s differential positioning as mothers, family-members, and workers, and thereby for a materialist analysis of women’s subordination. At the time, interest in the bearing of Marxist theory on women’s liberation seemed perfectly normal – and not just to socialist feminists. Radical feminists also adopted and transformed what they understood to be Marxist concepts.[^3]
 
-From these efforts came a voluminous literature. Women’s liberationists studied Marxist texts, wrestled with Marxist concepts, and produced a range of origi-nal formulations combining, or at least intermingling, Marxism and feminism. Their enthusiasm for this work is hard today to recapture.[^4] It turned out, moreover, to be relatively brief. By the end of the 1970s, interest in domestic-labour theorising had dramatically declined. The shift away from the so-called domestic-labour debate was especially pronounced in the United States. In this paper I look again at the challenge of theorising the unwaged labour of housework, child-bearing, and child-rearing. I argue that much of the early domestic-labour literature followed an intellectual agenda that has not been well understood, reviewing my own work in this light. I then consider the reception of such endeavours by their audiences. Finally, I suggest that the early domestic-labour theorists’ unfinished project deserves further attention.
+From these efforts came a voluminous literature. Women’s liberationists studied Marxist texts, wrestled with Marxist concepts, and produced a range of original formulations combining, or at least intermingling, Marxism and feminism. Their enthusiasm for this work is hard today to recapture.[^4] It turned out, moreover, to be relatively brief. By the end of the 1970s, interest in domestic-labour theorising had dramatically declined. The shift away from the so-called domestic-labour debate was especially pronounced in the United States. In this paper I look again at the challenge of theorising the unwaged labour of housework, child-bearing, and child-rearing. I argue that much of the early domestic-labour literature followed an intellectual agenda that has not been well understood, reviewing my own work in this light. I then consider the reception of such endeavours by their audiences. Finally, I suggest that the early domestic-labour theorists’ unfinished project deserves further attention.
 
 ## Theories and theorising
 
-The notion that something called ‘domestic labour’ should be theorised emerged as part of a critique launched by North American women’s liberationists in the late 1960s and soon picked up elsewhere, notably in Britain. Although central in women’s experience, the unpaid work and responsibilities of family-life were rarely addressed in radical thought and socialist practice. Women’s liberation-ists, wanting to ground their own activism in more adequate theory, began to wonder about the theoretical status of the housework and child-care performed in family-households, usually by women. Over the next years, an enormous set of writings known collectively as the domestic-labour debate examined this puzzle.[^5]
+The notion that something called ‘domestic labour’ should be theorised emerged as part of a critique launched by North American women’s liberationists in the late 1960s and soon picked up elsewhere, notably in Britain. Although central in women’s experience, the unpaid work and responsibilities of family-life were rarely addressed in radical thought and socialist practice. Women’s liberationists, wanting to ground their own activism in more adequate theory, began to wonder about the theoretical status of the housework and child-care performed in family-households, usually by women. Over the next years, an enormous set of writings known collectively as the domestic-labour debate examined this puzzle.[^5]
 
-The domestic-labour literature identified family-households as sites of produc-tion. Reconceptualised as domestic labour, housework and child-care could then be analysed as labour-processes. From this beginning came a series of questions. If domestic labour is a labour-process, then what is its product? People? Commodities? Labour-power? Does the product have value? If so, how is that value determined? How and by what or whom is the product consumed? What are the circumstances, conditions, and constraints of domestic labour? What is domestic labour’s rela-tionship to the reproduction of labour-power? To overall social reproduction? To capitalist accumulation? Could a mode of reproduction of people be posited, comparable to but separate from the mode of production? Might answers to these questions explain the origins of women’s oppression?
+The domestic-labour literature identified family-households as sites of production. Reconceptualised as domestic labour, housework and child-care could then be analysed as labour-processes. From this beginning came a series of questions. If domestic labour is a labour-process, then what is its product? People? Commodities? Labour-power? Does the product have value? If so, how is that value determined? How and by what or whom is the product consumed? What are the circumstances, conditions, and constraints of domestic labour? What is domestic labour’s relationship to the reproduction of labour-power? To overall social reproduction? To capitalist accumulation? Could a mode of reproduction of people be posited, comparable to but separate from the mode of production? Might answers to these questions explain the origins of women’s oppression?
 
-The burgeoning domestic-labour literature seemed initially to confirm, even legitimate, socialist feminists’ double commitment to women’s liberation and socialism. Before long, however, a range of problems surfaced. Concepts and categories that had initially seemed self-evident lost their stability. For example, the notion of reproduction of labour-power became surprisingly elastic, stretch-ing from biological procreation to any kind of work that contributed to people’s daily maintenance – whether it be paid or unpaid, in private households, in the market, or in the workplace. Likewise, the meaning of the category domestic labour fluctuated. Did it refer simply to housework? Or did it include child-bearing and child-care as well? Circular arguments were common. For example, domestic labour was frequently identified with women’s work and conversely, thereby assuming the sexual division of labour women’s liberationists wished to explain. In addition, the debate’s almost exclusive concern with unpaid house-hold-labour discounted the importance of women’s paid labour, whether as domestic servants or wage-workers. And its focus on the economic seemed to overlook pressing political, ideological, psychological, and sexual issues.
+The burgeoning domestic-labour literature seemed initially to confirm, even legitimate, socialist feminists’ double commitment to women’s liberation and socialism. Before long, however, a range of problems surfaced. Concepts and categories that had initially seemed self-evident lost their stability. For example, the notion of reproduction of labour-power became surprisingly elastic, stretching from biological procreation to any kind of work that contributed to people’s daily maintenance – whether it be paid or unpaid, in private households, in the market, or in the workplace. Likewise, the meaning of the category domestic labour fluctuated. Did it refer simply to housework? Or did it include child-bearing and child-care as well? Circular arguments were common. For example, domestic labour was frequently identified with women’s work and conversely, thereby assuming the sexual division of labour women’s liberationists wished to explain. In addition, the debate’s almost exclusive concern with unpaid house-hold-labour discounted the importance of women’s paid labour, whether as domestic servants or wage-workers. And its focus on the economic seemed to overlook pressing political, ideological, psychological, and sexual issues.
 
-Women’s liberationists also found the abstractness of the domestic-labour literature frustrating. The debate developed in ways that were not only hard to follow but also far from activist-concerns. Concepts appeared to interact among themselves without connection to the empirical world. Not only was the discus-sion abstract, it seemed ahistorical as well. Perhaps most damaging, much of the domestic-labour literature adopted a functionalist explanatory framework. A social system’s need for domestic labour, for example, was taken to imply that that need was invariably satisfied. Where in the debate, many wondered, was human agency? Meanwhile, feminist agendas were bursting with other matters, both theoretical and practical. By the early 1980s, most socialist feminists had decided to move ‘beyond the domestic labor debate’. They left behind the ambigu-ity, conceptual fuzziness, circularity, and loose ends of an unfinished project.[^6]
+Women’s liberationists also found the abstractness of the domestic-labour literature frustrating. The debate developed in ways that were not only hard to follow but also far from activist-concerns. Concepts appeared to interact among themselves without connection to the empirical world. Not only was the discussion abstract, it seemed ahistorical as well. Perhaps most damaging, much of the domestic-labour literature adopted a functionalist explanatory framework. A social system’s need for domestic labour, for example, was taken to imply that that need was invariably satisfied. Where in the debate, many wondered, was human agency? Meanwhile, feminist agendas were bursting with other matters, both theoretical and practical. By the early 1980s, most socialist feminists had decided to move ‘beyond the domestic labor debate’. They left behind the ambiguity, conceptual fuzziness, circularity, and loose ends of an unfinished project.[^6]
 
-The shift away from the effort to theorise domestic labour within a framework of Marxist political economy seemed to make sense. Many women’s liberation-ists assumed theory to be directly pertinent to day-to-day activities and thought a given theory had determinate political and strategic implications. Conversely, they looked to empirical accounts of history and current circumstances as a way to constitute the appropriate basis for theory.[^7] Rejecting the abstractions of the early domestic-labour literature, they sought a conceptual apparatus that could be used to organise and interpret the data of women’s lives.
+The shift away from the effort to theorise domestic labour within a framework of Marxist political economy seemed to make sense. Many women’s liberationists assumed theory to be directly pertinent to day-to-day activities and thought a given theory had determinate political and strategic implications. Conversely, they looked to empirical accounts of history and current circumstances as a way to constitute the appropriate basis for theory.[^7] Rejecting the abstractions of the early domestic-labour literature, they sought a conceptual apparatus that could be used to organise and interpret the data of women’s lives.
 
 This approach reflected a particular epistemological orientation, one that put theory into a kind of one-to-one relationship with the empirical. Theory was assumed to be isomorphic with what was understood to be reality. As such, it could produce empirical generalisations, statements of regularity, and models. Explanation and prediction would then depend on extrapolation from these presumably accurate representations. In this view, familiar from the social- scientific literature, theory is a broad-ranging intellectual activity, grounded in the empirical and capable of supplying descriptions, explanations, and predictions – and thereby able as well to guide policy or strategy.
 
-This is not the only way to think about theory, however. Much of the early domestic-labour literature implicitly adopted a different perspective, rooted in certain readings of Marxist theory current in the 1960s and 70s. Associated most famously with the French philosopher Louis Althusser, this alternative perspec-tive accords theory an epistemological specificity and a limited scope. Theory, in this view, is a powerful but highly abstract enterprise and sharply different from history.[^8] As Althusser put it, speaking of Marx’s Capital:
+This is not the only way to think about theory, however. Much of the early domestic-labour literature implicitly adopted a different perspective, rooted in certain readings of Marxist theory current in the 1960s and 70s. Associated most famously with the French philosopher Louis Althusser, this alternative perspective accords theory an epistemological specificity and a limited scope. Theory, in this view, is a powerful but highly abstract enterprise and sharply different from history.[^8] As Althusser put it, speaking of Marx’s Capital:
 
-> Despite appearances, Marx does not analyze any ‘concrete society’, not even England, which he mentions constantly in Volume One, but the capitalist mode of production and nothing else. This object is an abstract one: which means that it is terribly real and that it never exists in the pure state, since it only exists in capitalist societies. Simply speaking: in order to be able to analyse these concrete capitalist societies (England, France, Russia, etc.), it is essential to know that they are dominated by that terribly concrete real-ity, the capitalist mode of production, which is ‘invisible’ (to the naked eye). ‘Invisible’, i.e. abstract.[^9]
+> Despite appearances, Marx does not analyze any ‘concrete society’, not even England, which he mentions constantly in Volume One, but the capitalist mode of production and nothing else. This object is an abstract one: which means that it is terribly real and that it never exists in the pure state, since it only exists in capitalist societies. Simply speaking: in order to be able to analyse these concrete capitalist societies (England, France, Russia, etc.), it is essential to know that they are dominated by that terribly concrete reality, the capitalist mode of production, which is ‘invisible’ (to the naked eye). ‘Invisible’, i.e. abstract.[^9]
 
-From this perspective, theory is necessarily abstract as well as severely con-strained in its implications. It can point to key elements and tendencies but it cannot provide richly textured accounts of social life. Even less does it directly explain events, suggest strategies, or evaluate the prospects for political action. These are matters for a qualitatively distinct kind of inquiry – one that examines the specifics of particular historical conjunctures in existing social formations.
+From this perspective, theory is necessarily abstract as well as severely constrained in its implications. It can point to key elements and tendencies but it cannot provide richly textured accounts of social life. Even less does it directly explain events, suggest strategies, or evaluate the prospects for political action. These are matters for a qualitatively distinct kind of inquiry – one that examines the specifics of particular historical conjunctures in existing social formations.
 
 To put it another way, this alternative approach conceptualises theory as a sort of lens. By itself, the lens tells us little about the specifics of a particular society at a particular moment. It is only by using the lens that observers can evaluate such specifics and strategise for the future. Compared to theorising – producing the lens – these tasks of empirical investigation and political analysis constitute intellectual work of a different and, I would argue, more challenging sort.
 
 ## A different starting point
 
-I turn now to my own work on domestic labour. My purpose in so doing is to offer an example of women’s liberationist theorising within the intention-ally abstract framework just described. From this perspective, the domestic-labour debate was a theoretical, rather than historical or sociological project. Its outcome would be expected to take the form of sets of abstract concepts and identifications of possible mechanisms and tendencies. These could not, by themselves, really ‘explain’ anything concrete – neither the rich, idiosyncratic, and constructed character of experience nor the specific nature and direction of popular mobilisation or social transformation. Even less could they suggest political strategies. Such questions would be matters for empirical investigation and political analysis by the actors involved.
+I turn now to my own work on domestic labour. My purpose in so doing is to offer an example of women’s liberationist theorising within the intentionally abstract framework just described. From this perspective, the domestic-labour debate was a theoretical, rather than historical or sociological project. Its outcome would be expected to take the form of sets of abstract concepts and identifications of possible mechanisms and tendencies. These could not, by themselves, really ‘explain’ anything concrete – neither the rich, idiosyncratic, and constructed character of experience nor the specific nature and direction of popular mobilisation or social transformation. Even less could they suggest political strategies. Such questions would be matters for empirical investigation and political analysis by the actors involved.
 
-The challenge, then, was to discover or create categories to theorise wom-en’s unpaid family-work as a material process. Women’s liberationists, myself included, examined the classic texts of Marx, Engels, Bebel, and others, discover-ing only a precarious theoretical legacy at best. This finding led, in my case, to a lengthy critical reading of Marx. In this reading I followed what I understood to be Althusser’s advice:
+The challenge, then, was to discover or create categories to theorise women’s unpaid family-work as a material process. Women’s liberationists, myself included, examined the classic texts of Marx, Engels, Bebel, and others, discovering only a precarious theoretical legacy at best. This finding led, in my case, to a lengthy critical reading of Marx. In this reading I followed what I understood to be Althusser’s advice:
 
-> Do not look to Capital either for a book of ‘concrete’ history or for a book of ‘empirical’ political economy, in the sense in which historians and economists understand these terms. Instead, find in it a book of theory analysing the capi-talist mode of production. History (concrete history) and economics (empirical economics) have other objects.[^10]
+> Do not look to Capital either for a book of ‘concrete’ history or for a book of ‘empirical’ political economy, in the sense in which historians and economists understand these terms. Instead, find in it a book of theory analysing the capitalist mode of production. History (concrete history) and economics (empirical economics) have other objects.[^10]
 
-Using this approach to theory, I hoped to be able to contribute to the construc-tion of a more satisfactory theoretical lens with which to analyse women’s sub-ordination.
+Using this approach to theory, I hoped to be able to contribute to the construction of a more satisfactory theoretical lens with which to analyse women’s subordination.
 
 As my conceptual point of departure I considered two notions basic to Marx’s work: labour-power and the reproduction of labour-power. For Marx, labour-power is a capacity borne by a human being and distinguishable from the bodily and social existence of its bearer. Labour-power’s potential is realised when its bearer makes something useful – a use-value – which may or may not be exchanged. The bearers of labour-power are, however, mortal and suffer wear and tear; every individual eventually dies. Some process that meets the ongoing personal needs of the bearers of labour-power is therefore a condition of social reproduction, as is some process that replaces them over time. These processes of daily maintenance and long-run replacement are conflated in the term reproduction of labour-power.
 
@@ -116,8 +116,8 @@ female-dependent nuclear-family norm. Most households contribute increasing amou
 
 At the turn of the twenty-first century, heavy burdens fall on women, alongside undeniably empowering changes. These burdens include, among others, the double day, absent husbands, isolation from kin, and single motherhood without adequate social support. In short, women’s experience still points to the question of theorising domestic labour and its role in capitalist social reproduction.
 
-[^1]: This paper first appeared in Vogel 2000. It originated as a presentation at the July 1994 meetings of the Conference of Socialist Economists in Leeds, England. My thanks to Filio Diamante for inviting me and to my co-panelists and audience for lively discus-sion. In preparing this text for publication, I benefited from the very helpful comments of Christine Di Stefano and a number of anonymous reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my colleague James Dickinson, whose detailed obser-vations and probing questions were, as always, invaluable.
-[^2]: It is not possible to separate a socialist from a Marxist feminism as they were prac-ticed in the 1970s; I therefore use the term socialist feminism inclusively. In this paper, I generally follow contemporary American usages of terms. From the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, the term women’s liberation was current, intended to demarcate the younger and presumably more radical branches of the women’s movement from the so-called bour-geois feminism of the National Organization for Women. Within the women’s liberation movement, socialist feminists formed a distinctive tendency. By the late 1970s, the term women’s liberation was being replaced by the term feminism. That feminism was now a broader term than it had been earlier perhaps reflected the declining importance of distinguishing branches within the women’s movement.
+[^1]: This paper first appeared in Vogel 2000. It originated as a presentation at the July 1994 meetings of the Conference of Socialist Economists in Leeds, England. My thanks to Filio Diamante for inviting me and to my co-panelists and audience for lively discussion. In preparing this text for publication, I benefited from the very helpful comments of Christine Di Stefano and a number of anonymous reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my colleague James Dickinson, whose detailed observations and probing questions were, as always, invaluable.
+[^2]: It is not possible to separate a socialist from a Marxist feminism as they were practiced in the 1970s; I therefore use the term socialist feminism inclusively. In this paper, I generally follow contemporary American usages of terms. From the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, the term women’s liberation was current, intended to demarcate the younger and presumably more radical branches of the women’s movement from the so-called bour-geois feminism of the National Organization for Women. Within the women’s liberation movement, socialist feminists formed a distinctive tendency. By the late 1970s, the term women’s liberation was being replaced by the term feminism. That feminism was now a broader term than it had been earlier perhaps reflected the declining importance of distinguishing branches within the women’s movement.
 [^3]: For example, Firestone 1970 and Millett 1970.
 [^4]: For descriptions of the excitement with which feminists confronted Marxist theory in the 1960s and 70s, see Echols 1989; Vogel 1998; and the personal accounts in Duplessis and Snitow (eds.) 1998.
 [^5]: For fine (and very short) overviews of the domestic-labour debate, see Himmelweit 1983a and 1983c. For a survey of the literature, see Vogel 1986. See also the essays in Sargent (ed.) 1981, and in Hansen and Philipson 1990.