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lise_vogel_domestic_labour_revisited.md

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 # Domestic Labour Revisited [^1]
 
+_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.