Introduction
At the heart of the class struggle under capitalism is the fact that for capital, labour-power is merely an element of production and source of surplus value, whereas for workers, it is inseparable from themselves as living human beings. Struggles over wages, the duration and conditions of waged work, and control over it, have easily been recognised by Marxists as important aspects of class struggle. Yet the relations and conditions under which labour-power is produced, though equally important, have received far less attention, except from Marxist feminists and feminist Marxists. Given the centrality of labour-power to capitalism – since as the only commodity that can produce surplus value, and therefore profit, it is the sine qua non of accumulation – it is somewhat surprising that Marx nowhere describes its production. Engels did recognise the existence of domestic labour and the gendered relations within it, but did not take the analysis further. The domestic labour debate of the 1970s was an attempt to fill this gap, but it left many of the crucial issues unresolved.
One consequence of the under-theorisation of this particular arena of class struggle by Marxists is that it has been largely ceded to reactionary ideologies and politics. In Third World countries like India, it also results in extremely high rates of infant and maternal mortality, malnutrition, and disability or premature death resulting from preventable or curable diseases. This article attempts to take up this theoretical task, using examples from contemporary India. Recognition that the production of labour-power constitutes a crucial arena of class struggle would enable Marxists both to combat male domination within the working class more effectively, and to play a more effective role in revolutionising the social relations of production.
Marx and Engels on Domestic Labour
Under capitalism, according to Marx, labour is either productive – in the sense that it is exchanged with capital and produces surplus value – or unproductive, in the sense that it is exchanged with capitalists’ revenue or workers’ wages, and does not produce surplus value.[1] However, this definition of productive labour is relevant only from the standpoint of individual capital: labour is or is not productive according to whether it does or does not produce surplus value for the individual capitalist. A problem arises, however, when we look at production from the standpoint of total social capital, as Marx himself realised when he considered the capitalist production of articles of luxury consumption: ‘This sort of productive labour produces use-values and objectifies itself in products that are destined only for unproductive consumption. In their reality, as articles, they have no use-value for the process of reproduction,’ and hence, if there is ‘disproportionate diversion of productive labour into unreproductive articles, it follows that the means of subsistence or production will not be reproduced in the necessary quantities’.[2] The result will be a reduction in the rate of accumulation of capital as a whole.
In other words, what is productive labour from the standpoint of individual capital can be unreproductive labour from the standpoint of total social capital. In Volume II of Capital, Marx does refer to luxury production in the reproduction schemas for simple reproduction, but the schemas for reproduction on an expanded scale (i.e., capitalist accumulation) include only Department I producing means of production for capital, and Department II producing means of subsistence for wage-workers.[3] Implicitly, he makes a distinction between reproductive labour, embodied in products – including workers – that re-enter capitalist production, and unreproductive labour, embodied in products that do not. (We are here referring to social, not biological, reproduction, although biological reproduction, without which there would be no new workers to replace those who die, is a necessary element of social reproduction.)
Marx comes closest to describing the process of production of labour-power in the chapter on ‘The Sale and Purchase of Labour-power’: ‘Given the existence of the individual, the production of labour-power consists in his reproduction of himself or his maintenance. For his maintenance he requires a certain quantity of the means of subsistence. Therefore the labour-time necessary for the production of labour-power is the same as that necessary for the production of those means of subsistence… If the owner of labour-power works today, tomorrow he must again be able to repeat the same process in the same conditions as regards health and strength. His means of subsistence must therefore be sufficient to maintain him in his normal state as a working individual… The owner of labour-power is mortal. If then his appearance in the market is to be continuous, and the continuous transformation of money into capital assumes this, the seller of labour-power must perpetuate himself “in the way that every living individual perpetuates himself, by procreation”… Hence the sum of means of subsistence necessary for the production of labour-power must include the means necessary for the worker’s replacements, i.e. his children… The costs of education vary according to the degree of complexity of the labour-power required. These expenses (exceedingly small in the case of ordinary labour-power) form a part of the total value spent in producing it. The value of labour-power can be resolved into the value of a definite quantity of the means of subsistence.’[4]
Marx goes on to give examples of means of subsistence like food and fuel, which need to be replaced daily, while others like clothes and furniture can be purchased at longer intervals. But that is all. Unlike his detailed descriptions of the production of other commodities, here there is no description of a labour process, nor even a mention of instruments of production (such as a stove, pots and pans, broom, bucket and mop). Just raw materials – means of subsistence – and the finished product: labour-power. The implicit assumption is that all that is required to convert those means of subsistence into labour-power is a process of individual consumption. Yet the worker would not be maintained in his or her ‘normal state as a working individual’, nor be replaced when he or she could no longer work, unless somebody carried the raw materials and instruments of production home from the market or shops, cooked the food and washed up after the meal, dusted, swept, mopped floors and washed clothes, fed the baby, changed it, gave it a bath, and so on and so forth.
The home is therefore a site of individual consumption but also of production;[5] both are necessary for the production of labour-power, and Marx’s failure to identify and analyse the latter has been attributed to his ‘patriarchal position’ .[6] In fact, Marx’s confusion of production with individual consumption leads to bizarre contradictions in his work. For example, he writes of domestic labour that ‘The largest part of society, that is to say the working class, must incidentally perform this kind of labour for itself; but it is only able to perform it when it has laboured “productively”. It can only cook meat for itself when it has produced a wage with which to pay for the meat…’[7] If we generalise this proposition to all commodities, it would state that until a commodity has been sold, it cannot be produced. But commodities are usually sold only after they have been produced, and this is especially true of labour-power, which cannot be sold for the first time until many hundreds of hours of labour-time have been spent on its production, as Marx recognises elsewhere: ‘Its exchange value, like that of every other commodity, is determined before it goes into circulation, since it is sold as a capacity, a power, and a specific amount of labour-time was required to produce this capacity, this power.’[8]
Engels not only recognised the existence of domestic work and the gender division of labour within it, but even went so far as to observe that the reversal of gender roles during the industrial revolution, and the distress caused by it, was possible only ‘because the sexes have been placed in a false position from the beginning’.[9] He did not carry the analysis further, however, nor was there much progress on this front until the debate around domestic labour (i.e. housework and childcare) erupted in the 1970s.[10] Let us look at the issues taken up which throw light on the production of labour-power.
The Debate of the 1970s
Most participants in the debate agreed that domestic labour was socially useful and necessary: i.e. it was useful not just to other members of the household, but to society as a whole. It is clear that domestic labour transfers the value of the commodities bought with the wage to the end product, labour-power, but does it also create value?
Here those who say ‘yes’[11] are surely correct while those who say ‘no’[12] are wrong. Domestic labour is part of the production process of labour-power, a commodity that is sold on the (labour) market, and to say that it does not produce value would contradict the whole starting point of Marx’s theory of surplus value, according to which, ‘the value of each commodity is determined by…the labour-time socially necessary to produce it… Hence in determining the value of the yarn, or the labour-time required for its production, all the special processes carried on at various times and in different places which were necessary, first to produce the cotton and the wasted portion of the spindle, and then with the cotton and spindle to spin the yarn, may together be looked on as different and successive phases of the same labour process.’[13]
Whether the materials that go into the production of a commodity are produced as commodities or not makes no difference to the value of the final product, so long as their quality is comparable. In the case of labour-power, one male worker may eat his meals at restaurants, get his clothes and linen washed at a laundry, and pay for a cleaner to clean his flat, while another worker doing the same job at the same workplace and earning the same wage may have a wife who does the shopping, cooking, washing-up, washing and cleaning, but the value of their labour-power would be the same. To deny that the housewife’s labour in the latter situation creates value would entail arguing that the first worker’s labour-power has a much higher value than that of the second; an analogous contention would be that the piece of cloth woven by a handloom weaver whose wife spins the yarn at home has less value than an identical piece of cloth woven by one who buys the yarn on the market, which clearly cannot be the case. To the extent that domestic labour performs a function that is necessary for the production of labour-power, it produces value: ‘The value of labour-power is determined, as in the case of every other commodity, by the labour-time necessary for the production, and consequently also the reproduction, of this specific article.’[14] And this is reproductive labour in the sense that it makes an essential contribution to social reproduction.
Once we acknowledge that domestic labour contributes to the value of labour-power, the neat division of the working day into necessary and surplus labour performed in the workplace collapses. The equation becomes even more complex when the generational reproduction of labour-power and the contribution of state education and healthcare are brought into the picture. The rate of surplus value would then have to be calculated taking into account all the necessary labour (in the workplace as well as the home) done by members of the household that is the unit of production of labour-power, and all the payments made by the capitalist, not only by way of wages, but also in contributions to services such as state education and healthcare.
Does domestic labour produce surplus value? A housewife is not paid wages, but her labour is paid for out of her husband’s wage, so his employer pays her indirectly. If the amount paid for her labour is the same as or more than what her husband would have to pay to buy the services she performs on the market, then she would not be producing surplus value. (However, it is possible that her husband keeps for himself part of the amount paid by the employer for her labour, in which case, he would be exploiting her.) But if the amount paid for her labour by her husband’s employer is less than the value of the services she performs, that means the employer is keeping part of what he would otherwise have had to pay out as wages, and her labour is therefore contributing indirectly to his surplus value. The disparity is likely to be greatest where there are small children in the family, since the cost of waged childcare would tend to be considerably greater than the cost of the labour-power of their mother.
Thus although Dalla Costa and James[15] were wrong to think that domestic labour is always productive (i.e. always produces surplus value for the individual capitalist), it is true that when its duration is extended unduly, this labour allows extra surplus value to be appropriated by subsidising the production of labour-power. The Bolivian women’s leader and miner’s wife Domitila Barrios de Chungara made a precise calculation of this, comparing the work performed in the home with the cost of the same services bought on the market. ‘One day I got the idea of making a chart. We put as an example the price of washing clothes per dozen pieces and we figured out how many dozens of items we washed per month. Then the cook’s wage, the babysitter’s, the servant’s… Adding it all up, the wage needed to pay us for what we do in the home…was much higher than what the men earned in the mine for a month.’[16]
Thus if a miner’s wife died or stopped working, and the man was compelled to buy on the market the services that she formerly performed, his wage would not have been sufficient, showing that it was less than the value of labour-power; indeed, the shortfall would have been even greater, because Domitila, with help from her children, also made and sold small pies called salteñas to supplement the family income. Thus the women’s surplus labour allowed the mine owner to appropriate more surplus value than he would otherwise have been able to. But it is impossible to see this effect so long as the production of labour-power (and its value) is seen solely as the activity of waged workers. Only if it is seen as the collective product of the unit of production of labour-power – the working- class household – is it possible to calculate the real rate of surplus value.
What happens when there are two or more wage-earners in the family? We can examine this by looking at three different situations that are found in India. Situation A is one where a male worker in a formal sector enterprise is able to support his wife and, say, two school-going children. They might rent a two-bedroom flat with running water, use a gas stove, and eat fairly well. The woman is there when the children come home from school, and can spend time with them even while she does other chores. In effect, the man’s wage is sufficient to pay for the upkeep of another person (his wife) to do all this work.[17]
If it is a woman who is the formal sector employee, the continuity between her waged and unwaged work is clearer: she must do both, perhaps with some help from others at home, in order to support the family, since they cannot eat raw rice, wheat, dal or other food off dirty plates. The increase in time spent on domestic labour in order to compensate for lower wages is also more obvious. A study in Delhi showed that in response to a cut in real wages between 1994/95 and 1999/2000 resulting from inflation and restrictions in access to the Public Distribution System, the total time expended on waged work and domestic labour by women workers increased from 13-14 hours to 16-17 hours a day, as they spent more time shopping around for the cheapest goods, queuing up at the ration shop, and cleaning inferior rice.[18]
If the male breadwinner loses his job and has to take an informal job in a small enterprise which subcontracts work from his former company, earning just half of what he was earning before (situation B), his wife has two options. They could move to a basti (shanty-town) where she has to spend many more hours collecting water from the shared tap, cooking on a kerosene stove, queuing up at the ration shop, cleaning, preparing food and washing up, and so on. Their standard of living would be lower, but by spending much more time on housework – perhaps sixteen as opposed to ten hours per day – she could feed everyone on the lower wage and keep the children in school. Alternatively, she might find a job that pays half or less of her husband’s former wage. They can then stay in their flat and keep the gas stove, but everyone has to chip in and help with the housework even though she continues to do the bulk of it, working perhaps eighteen or more hours a day. In both cases, the rate of surplus value has gone up. If the technology in the small enterprise where the man now works is the same as in the large one (which is quite common), half of his former wage is being taken as additional surplus value. If his wife doesn’t get a job, this is partly compensated for by her increased domestic work; if she does, then her wage may compensate for the loss in his earnings, but she works even longer hours as well as creating surplus value for her own employer. The family wage is now split up between them.
Situation C is the most tragic: the man loses his job and cannot find another – at most can find casual work for a few days a month. His wife takes a job, but even their combined earnings cannot support the family, so the children are taken out of school and sent to work too. The family wage is now split up between four people, and the rate of surplus value is even higher. Their collective working hours, including necessary labour spent on household tasks, has also increased, since they are too poor to afford ready-cooked food or laundry and cleaning services. This sequence of events is not purely fictional, it is only too common: it occurred, for example, as a consequence of the closure of textile mills in Ahmedabad.[19] Millions of agricultural and migrant labour families have always been in situation C, as indeed most working-class families were in Marx’s time: ‘everywhere, except in the metallurgical industries, young persons (under 18), women and children form by far the most preponderant element in the factory personnel’;[20] even a steel and iron works ‘employs 500 boys under 18, and of these about a third, or 170, are under the age of 13’.[21] If we include other permutations – for example, where there are small children in the family, and a slightly older girl is kept at home to look after them while her parents go out to work – the bulk of the labour force in India belongs to situations B and C. In all these cases, except the rare one where a man’s wage is adequate to keep the family in relative comfort without anyone being subjected to overwork, domestic labour compensates for the fact that part of the value of labour-power is being kept by capital as additional surplus value.
The genesis of the working-class family
Left to itself, capital’s ‘werewolf-like hunger for surplus value’[22] pushes down wages and extends the working day to such an extent that all members of the family, excluding only the smallest children, work long hours in wage labour simply in order to survive. If at any time it needs to retrench workers, it dismisses men rather than women and children. The family as a space apart from capital is destroyed. It is workers, through their struggles for higher wages, abolition of child labour and restriction of working hours, who win back time and space for the family. In this they are supported up to a point by the state, acting in the interests of the capitalist class as a whole. At an earlier stage, in both England and India, the state used legislation to force reluctant workers to labour long hours; but after capital extended these hours to such an extent that it ‘produces the premature exhaustion and death of this labour-power itself’[23] – in other words, when the supply of labour-power for capital was threatened – the state stepped in again to limit working hours and ensure that labour-power was not ‘maintained and developed only in a crippled state’; in such a situation, the price of labour-power (embodied in wages) falls below its value, since ‘the value of every commodity is determined by the labour-time required to provide it in its normal quality’.[24]
Thus both wages and working hours enter into the calculation of whether the price of labour-power is or is not below its minimum value. The worker sells his or her labour-power for a specified period of time, just as the rent for a flat is for a specified period of time. If a tenant can rent one flat for two weeks with a certain amount of money, but can rent another flat for three weeks with the same amount of money, the latter rent is only two-thirds of the former. Similarly, if one capitalist pays a certain wage for an eight-hour working day while another pays the same wage for a twelve-hour working day, the latter wage is only two-thirds of the former. If working hours are extended beyond a certain point, the price of labour-power falls below its value even if the wage is kept constant. This calculation cannot be accurate unless all the hours worked by all the members of the family in order to produce labour-power are taken into account.
Labour-power is not a purely physiological entity. ‘In contrast..with the case of other commodities, the determination of the value of labour-power contains a historical and moral element.’[25] Wages must enable the working class to live at an acceptable standard of living. Ensuring that the price of labour-power does not fall below its value, and setting this value at an acceptable level, are both products of working-class struggle. The ‘moral and historical’ element would differ from one society to another, but it seems reasonable to set the minimum value at a level where income covers basic requirements of food, water, clothing, shelter, health care and education; where the minimum age for employment complies with the International Labour Organisation norm of fifteen years; and where adults get at least eleven or twelve hours per working day for sleep and recreation, plus paid weekly days off, annual leave and holidays.
In the formal sector in India, workers have made progress in winning space and time for the family. By contrast with the situation in 1890, when women millworkers in India were getting up at 4.30 a.m. and working till late at night in order to complete their household duties as well as wage labour,[26] and children as young as seven years would be working in the factories, the Factories Act of 1948 (still in force) prohibits the employment of children under 14 in registered factories, and the statutory work week is 48 hours. When combined with travel to and from work and with domestic labour, even a 48-hour week means that women never get enough time for rest and recreation: women workers in Chennai reported getting up at 4.30-5.00 a.m., working for 16-18 hours, and being forced to miss meals in order to meet their work schedules.[27] However, some unions have negotiated a shorter work week. For workers in formal employment, there has been considerable advance in raising the standard of living and wresting family time away from wage labour.
The same cannot be said for informal women workers. At the beginning of the 21st century, malnutrition and ill health resulted in a maternal mortality rate of 540 per 100,000 live births, with around 136,000 women dying each year from pregnancy-related causes. Maternal malnutrition resulted in 30 per cent of infants with ‘low birth weight’, creating health risks that would last the rest of their lives. The infant mortality rate was 67 and under-five mortality rate 93; 47 per cent of under-five-year-olds were severely or moderately malnourished. This resulted in a large number of children dying or becoming disabled as a result of contracting preventable and curable diseases.[28] In other words, the exceedingly low wages, long working hours and unhealthy working conditions of the vast majority of women workers resulted in the production of labour power in a crippled state.
Unions have demanded equal wages for women for the same work, yet arguments for a ‘family wage’ also reveal an underlying assumption that many women will not, in fact, be employed, but will be dependent on male wage earners who will therefore have to be paid enough to support them. Two union officials in Bengal who were interviewed by the Royal Commission on Factory Labour (1931) argued for a wage that would be sufficient to support female dependants as well as children. ‘Although not formulated explicitly as a demand for a “family wage” based on a male-breadwinner/dependent wife conceptualization of the family, the complaints of the Bengali trade unionists over wage levels certainly involved the assumption that the typical worker was a married male with a range of non-employed dependants whom he had increasing difficulty maintaining.’[29] The Delhi Agreement of 1935 between the Ahmedabad millowners and the Textile Labour Association made this assumption explicit by specifying that married women workers whose husbands were employed in the mills would be dismissed.[30] The fact that no union has ever used the clause in the Equal Remuneration Act prohibiting the rampant discrimination against women in recruitment, promotions and training is eloquent testimony to the near-universal agreement that a woman has less right to a job (especially a well-paid one) than a man.
What has happened here? Are these developments a victory or defeat for women in particular? The working class as a whole? The answer to these questions, unsatisfactory though it may seem, is ‘both’. Comparing the employment and working conditions of nonunionised informal workers and their families with those of unionised formal workers and their families, no one could possibly deny that men, women and children in the latter category are vastly better off, in terms of living standards, rest and leisure, and access to health care and education. It would be hard to find a housewife married to a formal sector worker who would want to trade places with an informal woman worker in her hut, chawl or pavement shack; it is indisputable that ‘the retreat of certain family members from the labour force, in conjunction with an organized attempt to secure a “family wage”’,[31] has resulted in a very welcome rise in the standard of living. Like the woman miner who was glad she had left her job because she did not have to do domestic work after coming home exhausted from a day’s labour,[32] most women workers in India too are glad to escape from heavy labour and have more time to spend on home-making. It is less obvious but also true that compared with young women and men living on construction sites or in dormitories supplied by their employers, who are often nervous to be seen talking to ‘outsiders’ for fear of losing their jobs, workers who have homes that are outside the purview of their employers have greater freedom to discuss, organise and struggle collectively.[33] These are gains.
Yet the development of the male bread-winner/family wage norm was also a defeat for working class women, and thus for the working class as a whole. Some women, especially if they have no young children, prefer to have formal employment and to get help with housework rather than sit at home all day.[34] For large numbers of women-headed households, the acute shortage of formal employment for women means there is no alternative to poverty, and often the compulsion either to send children out to work or keep daughters at home to look after smaller children while the women themselves go out to work. The assumption that only men have dependants is not sustainable, nor is it true that all men have dependants: single young men living in their parental homes might need a ‘family wage’ even less than a woman whose husband is employed. Moreover, even when husband and wife are earning, there is no basis for the assumption that his wage pays for basic subsistence while hers is supplementary: indeed, most research shows that in such situations, women’s wages are spent entirely in ensuring family survival, while a variable portion of men’s wages is spent on alcohol, tobacco, gambling and other activities.[35]
So there is a negative element in the way that the demand for a ‘family wage’ has been posed, fought for, and won in formal employment. It is directly oppressive to women, and also disadvantageous to their dependants if they have any.[36] Gandhi’s justification of the expulsion of women from the Ahmedabad mills made the patriarchal assumptions behind this decision explicit: ‘It is not for our women to go out and work as men do. If we send them to the factories, who will look after our domestic and social affairs? If women go out to work, our social life will be ruined and moral standards will decline’.[37] This attitude undermines the working class struggle as a whole, by constituting women as secondary wage earners and therefore cheap labour. In formal employment, capitalists may have lost the battle to draw all members of the working-class family (except the very youngest) into the wage-labour force and compel them to produce surplus value; but they have very astutely used male dominance in the working class, which shaped the outcome of this struggle, to their own advantage, by constituting women as a reserve army of cheap labour.[38] In Bombay and Ahmedabad, women’s formal jobs in the textile mills were destroyed in the early twentieth century,[39] but when men’s jobs were in turn destroyed, women had to enter informal employment to ensure family survival. Their constitution as a cheap and flexible labour force with the collusion of male workers and unionists meant that in this latter situation, living standards for the whole family fell drastically.
Moreover, as discussions with women pharmaceutical workers in Bombay showed,[40] even well-paid formal women workers have great difficulty participating actively in the union, due to a combination of domestic labour commitments, objections from husbands, and prejudice in the workplace, thus posing obstacles to united struggles. How can all these problems be overcome?
Mechanisation, commercialisation, and state contributions to domestic labour
Moving towards a resolution of these issues requires us to take a closer look at the work that is performed in the home. It can further be divided into (1) work which results in a product that is distinct from a person (such as cooking a meal or washing clothes) and (2) work whose product is inseparable from a person (like childcare). The first kind of production can quite easily be mechanised or taken over by capitalism. Cleaning is a special case. There is not much scope for mass-production techniques here; it is labour-intensive work, made more onerous by the fact that its product is noticed only when the work is not done. The second kind is exemplified by caring work, where there can be no mechanisation, no substitution of dead for living labour: caring and nurturing work is by its nature labour-intensive. Although the majority of people needing care are children (since everyone begins life as a child), there are also adults who need it. Many people with disabilities and old people need part-time or full-time attendance, and an accident or stroke can at one blow convert even an able-bodied adult into one needing long-term care.[41]
One way in which the workload of domestic labour can be reduced is by mechanising tasks that were formerly performed manually, or by using labour-saving devices. This process has probably gone as far as it can go in the First World, but the same cannot be said for India. While refrigerators, which can cut down the frequency of shopping and cooking, are common among professionals and better-paid employees, and washing machines are somewhat less common, they are not an option for millions of working-class households in rural areas and urban slums, for the simple reason that they have no power supply. Women in these households spend hours each day collecting water. They sometimes also collect and prepare fuel for cooking on primitive stoves, the smoke from which causes respiratory problems in the ill-ventilated shacks they inhabit. Lack of sanitation further undermines the reproduction of labour-power by causing widespread illness and death from water-borne diseases. This is an area where the state urgently needs to contribute to the social reproduction of labour-power. Providing such households with subsidised housing, electricity, potable running water, sanitation, and stoves (including solar-powered ones) that do not require the collection of fuel would result in an enormous reduction in the time and effort spent on domestic labour as well as a reduction in avoidable sickness and death.
Another way of reducing domestic labour is by buying on the market products formerly made in the home. Again, the process has probably gone as far as it can in the First World, and possibly even too far, substituting not only ready-made for home-baked bread and frozen vegetables for fresh ones, but also fast foods of doubtful nutritional value for more nutritious cooked meals. In India, there has been some substitution of bread or ready-made chapatis for home-made ones, rice and pulses can be bought cleaned and packed, spices are commonly bought already processed, and people often buy flour rather than buying wheat and getting it milled. The use of packed and processed foods (ranging from ice-cream and frozen peas to yoghurt and pasteurised milk) is common among the families of professionals and better-paid employees, who also often eat their mid-day meal at a restaurant or indigenous fast-food stall if their workplace has no canteen of its own, and send their clothes and linen to be laundered, ironed or dry-cleaned. But there are three obstacles to the wider spread of such practices. One is the abject poverty of the largest section of the working class, which simply cannot afford to buy processed foods, much less get their clothes laundered. Another is the patriarchal assumption that it is the duty of women in the household to do this work. And the third is the availability of extremely cheap labour, which can be employed to do such tasks in the home.
The substitution of waged for unwaged domestic labour is universal among the rich, many of whom employ whole retinues of live-in domestic workers. Among professionals and better-paid white- and blue-collar workers, it is more selective, in the sense that domestic workers are employed for some tasks and not others, the most common tasks being cleaning, washing, and washing-up. The employment of child-minders to look after small children when both parents are working is also common. Such practices were common in the First World in Marx’s time, then disappeared from all but the richest households, but recently started spreading again with the influx of cheap migrant labour into these countries as well as parts of West Asia. One form is the cleaning firm, which sends its employees to clean the houses of customers. Another is the direct employment of domestic workers to work in the homes of their employers.
These practices do free women in more affluent households from the ‘double burden’ of domestic labour and paid work, but at a heavy cost to the reproduction of labour-power in the households of the workers who take up the burden. This is unregulated, informal labour, and suffers from low pay, long hours and lack of social security. In India, child labour is rampant in this sector. Women and girls who do such work, especially if they are live-in maids, are extremely vulnerable to verbal, physical and sexual abuse; such cases are reported from time to time, especially if they result in the death of the worker, but most are unreported, and serious crimes go unpunished. There are similar horror stories about migrant workers in First World countries, who are even more vulnerable because they may not speak the language of the country where they work or know anyone to whom they can turn for help, may be illegal immigrants or on visas that allow them to work only for a specified employer, and may have had their passports confiscated by employers.[42] In the case of live-in maids who are mothers, the money they send home often does not compensate for the neglect their own children suffer. If the worker is a child, she loses the time she needs for education, play and rest.
Domestic workers in India, especially those engaged in cleaning work, are unionising, and the ILO is working to strengthen the rights of migrant domestic workers. It is possible that these efforts will succeed in improving their employment conditions. But employing domestic workers, even if they come in only for an hour or two per day to do cleaning work, cannot be the solution to the problem of domestic labour. It is not accessible to most working class families, makes use of cheap labour, and tends to reinforce a social perception that cleaning work, which is socially necessary for hygiene and health, marks out a person as inferior. In most societies it is ill-paid work (if paid for at all), and in India has traditionally been consigned to Dalits, who were at one time – and still are in some places – treated as untouchable.[43] Paradoxically, regulating this sector of employment so that child labour is abolished, a living wage and social security contributions are paid, and paid leave is available, would make it unaffordable for the few working-class families that use it. Thus its role in the reproduction of labour-power – as opposed to the provision of services to the affluent – is minimal.
Socialist and radical feminist solutions
Yet childcare and help with the care of disabled and old people is essential if women are to be released from full-time domestic labour; sick people need specialised care and treatment, children need to be educated, and those who have no means of support need to be supported. One solution that emerged in countries with social-democratic and state-socialist regimes was the provision of these services by the state. Ideally, this would make it possible for workers performing these services to have decent employment conditions without making the services inaccessible to those who need them most, some of whom may be poorer than the workers. But the Indian state has been particularly recalcitrant in providing these services, even by comparison with much poorer Third World countries. Millions of children do not even get schooling, much less pre-school care; providing adequate socialised care and education for all children would require a substantial investment. Socialised care of adults is hardly available at all except for the rich; the appalling cruelty with which mentally ill patients are treated in many institutions, as well as the routine appearance of people with disabilities and old people begging on the streets, are testimony to the disastrous under-funding of this sector.[44]
A radical solution to the specific problem of childcare proposed by Lilina Zinoviev shortly after the Russian revolution was state-run child-rearing. ‘“Our task now is to oblige the mother to give her children to us – to the Soviet State.” The idea was taken up in Kollontai’s formulation: “Children are the State’s concern”. She added: “The social obligation of motherhood consists primarily in producing a healthy and fit-for-life child…Her second obligation is to feed the baby at her own breast”’.[45] A similar suggestion was that ‘it would..be desirable for the child to be left to his parents infinitely less than at present, and for his studies and his diversions to be carried on…under the direction of adults whose bonds with him would be impersonal and pure’.[46] A logical conclusion following from this approach is that women’s liberation requires the application of modern technology to the production of children in order to free women from the ‘social obligation’ to produce, breast-feed and care for them.[47]
However, the practical results of institutionalised care were not particularly positive. Small children left in full-time nurseries in Russia were found to be more backward than those looked after at home,[48] and as a woman lamented in a samizdat publication smuggled out of Russia in 1979, ‘Kindergartens and creches are a utopia, which in real life turn out to be anti-utopias. If we send healthy children to such establishments, we get back sick children. Women must constantly report sick in order to be at home with the child. Not with the healthy child, as the case was earlier, but with the sick child’.[49] Another problem, where day-and-night nurseries were tried out in Russia and China, was that women themselves wanted more contact with their children.[50]
It is hard to see how such proposals are an improvement on the more usual feminist demands for women to be able to control their own bodies, sexuality and fertility,[51] and for the development of technology which would enable them to do so safely, thus ensuring that women have babies only if and when they want them.[52] They also suggest that the cause of the oppression of women is their biological difference from men. Biological differences like sex and skin colour can certainly be made the pretext for oppression, but it is the social relations under which this occurs that are to blame, not the differences themselves. The biological difference in this case – the fact that women’s bodies are adapted to pregnancy, childbirth and breast-feeding[53] while men’s bodies are not – need not in all circumstances lead to the oppression of women. Whether it does or not depends on technological developments and social relations, which in turn determine whether or not women can control their own sexuality and fertility safely, whether or not childbearing is a physically safe and socially respected activity, and whether or not there is provision of facilities (like extended maternity leave and workplace creches) which provide social support for women who wish to combine breast-feeding with paid work.
As for other aspects of the gender division of labour, there is no evidence that they have any biological basis, in the sense that all the tasks can be performed either by men or by women, and competence depends not on gender but on inclination and acquired skills. However, given particular social relations, it may well make economic sense to relegate certain tasks to women other than those for which they are biologically adapted. In pre-capitalist agricultural societies where having a large number of children was an asset, where child mortality was high, and where women breast-fed each child for one year or more, they might spend twenty or more years of their lives in childbearing and breast-feeding, in which case it was more efficient for them to do other household tasks as well. But these relations are revolutionised by capitalism.[54] In India, having a large number of children is no longer an asset and may be a liability, with children constituting more mouths to feed, and child labour driving down wage rates and causing unemployment by competing with adult labour. Government family planning programmes make birth control relatively easily accessible and have succeeded in reducing the birth rate; child mortality, while still high, is rapidly being reduced; and a combination of these two developments means that women need not spend more than two or three years of their lives breast-feeding infants. On the other side, the interest of capitalism in women as wage-labourers provides them with an alternative that is often also necessary for the survival of the family. In other words, the material basis for the gender division of labour has changed drastically.
Since caring work involves a relationship between the carer and the person being cared for, it cannot completely be passed on to others without damaging the relationship, but this does not mean that it cannot be socialised at all. Indeed, at a slightly higher age – five or six years – children now routinely go to school, where they are looked after by people outside the family for several hours a day, and it can be argued that full-time care-giving constitutes a workload that is too heavy for one or even two people to carry alone. However, good quality socialised care requires a high ratio of care-givers to people being cared for, which makes it expensive.[55] This is probably why under capitalism it is not provided without a struggle by both feminists and the labour movement,[56] except as an expensive service to the privileged few who can afford it, or in circumstances where a shortage of labour-power makes it necessary for large numbers of women to be inducted into the labour force.
Although there is not much formal socialisation of caring work in India, a great deal of informal sharing of care does take place. The boundary between the family and the outside world is not as sharp in South Asian cultures as it has become in Western ones. To begin with, the term ‘family’ would usually refer to the extended family, even where, as in Bombay, there are many nuclear family households due to migration; and it is quite normal for people who are not kin to be called by family designations (brother, sister, aunt, uncle, mother, father, son, daughter, etc.). In traditional communities, these honorary relatives would tend to be from the same caste and religion, but in other settings they might simply be neighbours or friends who could, for example, be relied upon to look after children on an ad hoc basis. The extended family has advantages as well as disadvantages. In traditional families it means that young women – and men, for that matter – are more tightly controlled; young women have a heavier workload because they are catering to a larger number of people; and even if there are grandparents around to help with childcare, this comes at a price, in the sense that the children may then be imbued with traditional values such as rigid gender roles. On the other hand, the fluidity of boundaries means that the isolation of mothers with young children is less common. The small minority of alternative families that are not based on biological relationships and heterosexual marriage are more easily accepted in a metropolis like Bombay where traditional communities have partially broken down.
Solidarity instead of competition or domination and subordination
Socialising some caring work helps to reduce the huge burden now carried mainly by women within the family, but it does not by itself eliminate the gender division of labour. It is quite possible that carers in the socialised facilities are women, that the nurturing which continues to be done in the home is also done by women, and that women continue to be treated as cheap labour. Changing this would require challenging the gender division of labour both practically and ideologically, because it stunts both those involved in round-the-clock caring work, who never get a chance to exercise other skills and abilities, and those who do not engage in it at all, who never develop the skills and intelligence required for this work. Practical measures to counter it would include eliminating the gender division of labour in employment, working towards the equal sharing of domestic labour between men and women, provision of creches and nurseries for all children whose parents need childcare and sheltered accommodation or home care for adults who need it, shorter working hours, and regular part-time jobs – if possible with flexible working hours to suit the needs of the employees – for both men and women who have caring responsibilities.[57] It would also mean demanding that a much larger proportion of social labour time be allocated to this work, which in a capitalist society means state funding. But the ideological struggle in a sense has priority, because without winning that, the practical struggle will not be won, either in the home or outside. The fact that despite decades of feminism, and well over one-and-a-half centuries of the labour movement, caring and nurturing continue to be undervalued and seen as ‘women’s work’ even within the working class, needs to be explained.
One strand of the explanation can be identified in what has been described as ‘a great intellectual and cultural ambivalence within feminism,’ in that it ‘represented both the highest development of liberal individualism and also a critique of liberal individualism’.[58] The bourgeois ideology of competitive individualism penetrated not just bourgeois feminism but also radical and socialist feminism, leading to a devaluation of caring and nurturing because they constitute, inevitably, a handicap in the competitive struggle for recognition. But this has at least partly been a response to the attempt within working class movements to eliminate competition between women and men by reinforcing relationships of domination over women by men, and this constitutes the other strand of the explanation. Although Marx cannot be accused of advocating such domination, he did help to create the basis for it by ignoring and thereby devaluing the socially necessary caring work traditionally done by women, and assuming that a patriarchal family with the man as sole breadwinner was the model for the working class. The result was that when working-class struggle wrested from capital time and space for a family, that family was to a greater or lesser extent modelled on capitalist society, with its social division of labour and hierarchical, authoritarian relations.
Condoning oppressive and sometimes violent domestic relationships by attributing them to the pervasive ideological influence of capital or male domination, as some Marxists and feminists do,[59] simply perpetuates a situation where children grow up to believe that this is the only possible model of human relationships. But if it is possible to live in a capitalist society and struggle against it, it is equally possible and in fact easier to struggle against authoritarian relationships between men, women and children within the working class.[60] Indeed, without this struggle, the labour movement will continue to be subordinated to capital. Challenging the domination of capital requires the full involvement of working-class women and children, including those who are not directly exploited by capital, in the class struggle. As Domitila puts it, ‘the first battle to be won is to let the woman, the man, the children participate in the struggle of the working class, so that the home can become a stronghold that the enemy can’t overcome. Because if you have the enemy inside your own house, then it’s just one more weapon that our common enemy can use toward a dangerous end.’[61] Women have an advantage in this struggle, to the extent that they recognise ‘both human needs for nurturance, sharing and growth, and the potential for meeting those needs in a non-hierarchical, nonpatriarchal society’.[62] But it can only be won by the working class as a whole.
What are the elements of such a struggle, and how far can it progress under capitalism? The first requirement is an understanding and acceptance within the labour movement of the value of caring work and the skills and intelligence required for it, followed by the recognition that these need to be fostered in all human beings.[63] Caring for a person conforms to the Marxist ideal of work that is directly for the satisfaction of human need and not for profit; hence recognising its importance is crucial to the struggle against capitalist exploitation and oppression. While the demand for ‘wages for housework’ has the drawback that if met, it would eliminate even the limited autonomy enjoyed by working-class women and bring their domestic labour directly under the control of the state as employer,[64] the demand that the value produced by domestic labour be recognised – for example in statistics such as GDP, in settlements on divorce, and in allocating pensions to women – is an important one, helping to make this vast amount of labour visible. Counting the time spent in domestic labour as part of the working day is also important, especially in the case of women workers, who often do not get enough time to reproduce their own labour-power through rest and recreation.
The backwardness of the situation in India, where traditional hierarchies based on gender and age still predominate, could be an advantage if it allows the women’s liberation movement to avoid the dead end of liberal individualism, which is often confused with the development of individuality but is in fact as destructive of the full development of individuality as authoritarianism and patriarchy, which crush individuality in a more obvious way. Individuality can develop in a child only if (s)he is surrounded by the loving attention of other human beings; children completely deprived of this – wolf children, for example – fail to develop their human potentialities, while the development of children who are deprived of adequate interaction of this type is severely retarded. Yet providing this unstinted love and attention inevitably puts the giver at a disadvantage in a competitive market, and would therefore be ruled out in a purely market-driven economy.
This contradiction at the heart of bourgeois ideology – the fact that taken to its logical conclusion it threatens bourgeois society with extinction, and therefore the reproduction of competitive individualism depends on its opposite (the reproduction of self-sacrificing women) – is what leads to the right-wing insistence on the family as a separate realm from which the logic of capital is excluded.[65] However, from the standpoint of the socialist principle of solidarity, which posits an indissoluble link between the rights and well-being of each individual with those of others, such a contradiction does not exist; an ethic of care, in which the happiness and wellbeing of the person who is being cared for is essential to the happiness and well-being of the carer, is entirely compatible with it. Working for an ideal of nurturance and equal respect for human beings both inside and outside the family (whatever shape or form it may take) is thus an essential component of a labour movement built on the principle of solidarity.
The practical outcome of this understanding would be movement towards an equal sharing of nurturing between men and women and a struggle for conditions which would make that possible. Equally important is the struggle for the allocation of vastly more social labour time to this work than occurs currently, reversing the neo-liberal policy of cuts in spending on health care, education and welfare. For most trade unions in India, which have engaged in collective bargaining exclusively for their own members and have never had a solidaristic policy,[66] the idea of a social wage (including education and health care for all) as a trade union demand would be a new and important departure. Shortening working hours and increasing the number of part-time jobs with pro rata benefits would improve productivity and expand employment in addition to allowing more time for domestic labour. The Maternity Benefit Act and Factories Act, which require individual employers to pay maternity benefits and provide creches for the children of their women workers, are direct disincentives to their employing women, as well as being somewhat unfair, since the generational reproduction of labour-power is a service to the capitalist class as a whole rather than the individual capitalist. Funding parental leave and childcare from contributions made by all employers, workers and the government, as in the case of Employees’ State Insurance Scheme benefits, removes this anomaly.
The final goals of mutually affirmative relations within the household and adequate resources for the production of labour-power cannot be reached under capitalism, yet it is possible to make considerable progress in that direction even within capitalist society. Recognition that this constitutes a crucial arena of class struggle would enable Marxists to play a more positive and effective role in attaining that goal.
(This was published in Historical Materialism Volume 19 Issue 3, 2011, pp. 3-28.)
Notes
[1] ‘Since the immediate purpose and the authentic product of capitalist production is surplus value, labour is only productive, and an exponent of labour-power is only a productive worker, if it or he creates surplus value directly, i.e. the only productive labour is that which is directly consumed in the course of production for the valorization of capital…Every productive worker is a wage-labourer, but not every wage-labourer is a productive worker. Whenever labour is purchased to be consumed as a use-value, as a service…labour is not productive and the wage-labourer is no productive worker. His work is consumed for its use-value, not as creating exchange-value; it is consumed unproductively, not productively’ (Marx 1976, pp. 1038, 1041).
[2] Marx 1976, pp. 1045–46.
[3] Marx 1978, chapters 20 and 21.
[4] Marx 1976, pp. 274–76.
[5] In case this is doubted by anyone, one way of demonstrating the point would be to ask: is it possible for someone else to substitute for a person in this particular activity or not? If someone else eats all my meals for me, I would die of starvation within a month or two. On the other hand, if someone else cooks all my meals for me, I would not suffer at all, and might even enjoy them more than if I cooked them myself! Thus, in general, if it is possible to substitute one person for another in some activity, it is a process of production, while if that is not possible, it is a process of individual consumption.
[6] Weinbaum 1978, p. 43.
[7] Marx 1963, p. 161.
[8] Marx 1976, p. 1066.
[9] Engels 1975, p. 439.
[10] Malos 1982.
[11] Dalla Costa and James 1972; Seccombe 1973 and 1975.
[12] Benston 1969; Coulson et al. 1975; Gardiner et al. 1982; Himmelweit and Mohun 1977.
[13] Marx 1976, pp. 293–4.
[14] Marx 1976, p. 274.
[15] Dalla Costa and James 1972.
[16] Barrios de Chungara with Viezzer 1978, p. 35.
[17] cf. Seccombe 1973.
[18] Chhachhi 2005, pp. 247–49.
[19] Breman 2004, pp. 203–209.
[20] Marx 1976, p. 577.
[21] Marx 1976, p. 371.
[22] Marx 1976, p. 353.
[23] Marx 1976, p. 376.
[24] Marx 1976, p. 277, emphasis added.
[25] Marx 1976, p. 275.
[26] Savara 1986, p. 38.
[27] Swaminathan 2002, pp. 9–10.
[28] UNICEF 2004, Tables 1, 2, 5 and 8; Krishnakumar 2004; Pelletier et al. 1995.
[29] Standing 1991, p. 149.
[30] Chhachhi 1983, pp. 41–42.
[31] Humphries 1980, p. 157.
[32] Pinchbeck 1930, p. 269.
[33] cf. Humphries 1980, pp. 159–63.
[34] cf. Chhachhi and Pittin 1996, p. 110.
[35] cf. Elson 1995, pp. 183–84; Kottegoda 2004, pp. 137–55.
[36] Hartmann 1981, pp. 20–21; Barrett and MacIntosh 1980; Barrett 1980, pp. 26–27.
[37] Patel 1988, p. 380, cit. Breman 2004, p. 112.
[38] Beechey 1977, 1978.
[39] Kumar 1983, p. 110; Westwood 1991, pp. 292–95.
[40] Hensman 1996.
[41] Marx’s analysis allows for means of subsistence for such people, but not for the care that is equally important to their well-being.
[42] Heyzer et al. 1992; Young 2000; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003.
[43] Menon 2005.
[44] For more details see Hensman 2011, pp. 190–203, 246–250, 262–275.
[45] Broyelle 1977, p. 71.
[46] de Beauvoir 1997, p. 539.
[47] Firestone 1970.
[48] Rowbotham 1974, p. 168.
[49] Malachevskaya 1979; cf. McAuley 1981, pp. 198–99.
[50] Rowbotham 1974, p. 196; Dunayevskaya 1996, pp. 73–4.
[51] Weinbaum 1978, pp. 29–30.
[52] A woman’s right to control her own fertility is also partially a protection of a child’s right to be wanted, loved and adequately cared for by at least one parent. This is absolutely essential, given the huge amount of time and effort that is involved in this work – indeed, preferably two or more adults should make this commitment before the child is brought into the world. Advocates of socialised childcare often forget that this presupposes a much larger number of people who love children and wish to spend time on childcare than do so at present.
[53] Breastfeeding can be substituted by bottle-feeding, either of expressed breast-milk or infant formula, but in India and other Third World countries this can lead to high rates of infant mortality where conditions are not hygienic or the milk powder is diluted too much, hence it is recommended that babies should be breast-fed for at least six months. But this does not mean that the mother has to be solely responsible for childcare during this period, since there is still a great deal that others can do for the baby.
[54] Ferguson and Folbre 1981, pp.321–23.
[55] This applies to schoolchildren too, since teachers are responsible for pastoral care as well as education. Therefore even a ratio of one teacher for twenty-five to thirty children – forget about the usual Indian ratio of one teacher for fifty to seventy children! – is not enough.
[56] Zaretsky 1982, pp. 215–17.
[57] cf. Molyneux 1979, p. 27.
[58] Gordon 1982, p. 45.
[59] see Chodorow and Contratto 1982, pp. 68–69.
[60] However grim the situation is, it is not inevitable that men or women turn the anger generated by their own oppression against victims who are weaker and more vulnerable than themselves (women and children in the case of men, children in the case of women, or minority communities). This form of resistance to oppression – i.e. the refusal to become an oppressor oneself – is available even to the most powerless.
[61] Barrios de Chungara with Viezzer 1978, p. 36.
[62] Hartmann 1981, p. 33.
[63][63] Ruddick 1982.
[64] Freeman 1982.
[65] Thorne 1982, p. 19.
[66] There are a few exceptions, like the Chhattisgarh Mines Mazdoor Sangh, which is also unusual in the role women have played (see Hensman 2002).
References
Barrett, Michele 1980, Women’s Oppression Today – Problems in Marxist Feminist Analysis, London: Verso.
Barrett, Michele and Mary McIntosh 1980, ‘The “Family Wage”: Some Problems for Socialists and Feminists,’ Capital and Class, 11: 51–72.
Barrios De Chungara, Domitila, with Moema Viezzer 1978, Let Me Speak: Testimony of Domitila, A Woman of the Bolivian Mines, New York: Monthly Review Press.
Beechey, Veronica 1977, ‘Some Notes on Female Wage Labour in the Capitalist Mode of Production,’ Capital and Class, 3: 45–66.
Beechey, Veronica 1978, ‘Women and Production: A Critical Analysis of Some Sociological Theories of Women’s Work,’ in Feminism and Materialism, edited by Annette Kuhn and AnnMarie Wolpe, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Benston, Margaret 1969, ‘The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation,’ Monthly Review, 24, 4: 13-27.
Breman, Jan 2004, The Making and Unmaking of an Industrial Working Class: Sliding Down the Labour Hierarchy in Ahmedabad, India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Broyelle, Claudie 1977, Women’s Liberation in China, Sussex: Harvester Press.
Chhachhi, Amrita 1983, ‘The Case of India,’ in Of Common Cloth: Women in the Global Textile Industry, edited by Wendy Chapkis and Cynthia Enloe, Amsterdam: Transnational Institute.
Chhachhi, Amrita 2005, Eroding Citizenship: Gender and Labour in Contemporary India, Academisch Proefschrift, Universiteit van Amsterdam.
Chhachhi, Amrita and Renée Pittin 1996, ‘Multiple Identities, Multiple Strategies,’ in Confronting State, Capital and Patriarchy – Women Organizing in the Process of Industrialization, edited by Amrita Chhachhi and Renée Pittin, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, and New York: St Martin’s Press.
Chodorow, Nancy and Susan Contratto 1982, ‘The Fantasy of the Perfect Mother,’ in Rethinking the Family – Some Feminist Questions, edited by Barrie Thorne with Marilyn Yalom, New York and London: Longman.
Coulson, Margaret, Branka Magas and Hilary Wainwright 1975, ‘The Housewife and Her Labour Under Capitalism – A Critique,’ New Left Review, 89: 59–71.
Dalla Costa, Mariarosa and Selma James 1972, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, Bristol: Falling Wall Press.
De Beauvoir, Simone 1997, The Second Sex, (tr. H.M.Parshley), London: Random House.
Dunayevskaya, Raya 1996, ‘On the Family, Love Relationships and the New Society,’ (excerpts from a radio interview by Katherine Davenport on 8 March 1984), in Dialectics of Women’s Liberation, edited by Raya Dunayevskaya and Olga Domanski, Nagpur: Spartacus Publications.
Ehrenreich, Barbara and Arlie Russel Hochschild (eds) 2003, Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy, London: Granta Books.
Elson, Diane 1995, ‘Male bias in macro-economics: the case of structural adjustment,’ in Male Bias in the Development Process, edited by Diane Elson, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Engels, Frederick 1975, ‘The Condition of the Working-Class in England,’ in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works Volume 4, 1844-45, Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Ferguson, Ann and Nancy Folbre 1981, ‘The Unhappy Marriage of Patriarchy and Capitalism,’ in Women and Revolution – A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, edited by Lydia Sargent, London: Pluto Press.
Firestone, Shulamith 1970, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, New York: Bantam Books.
Freeman, Caroline 1982 [1980], ‘When is a Wage not a Wage?’ in The Politics of Housework (3rd edition), edited by Ellen Malos, London: Allison and Busby.
Gardiner, Jean, Susan Himmelweit and Maureen Mackintosh 1982 [1980], ‘Women’s Domestic Labour,’ in The Politics of Housework, (3rd edition), edited by Ellen Malos, London: Allison and Busby.
Gordon, Linda 1982, ‘Why Nineteenth-Century Feminists Did Not Support “Birth Control” and Twentieth-Century Feminists Do: Feminism, Reproduction, and the Family,’ in Rethinking the Family – Some Feminist Questions, edited by Barrie Thorne with Marilyn Yalom, New York and London: Longman.
Hartmann, Heidi 1981, ‘The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union,’ in Women and Revolution – A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, edited by Lydia Sargent, London: Pluto Press.
Hensman, Rohini 1996, ‘Urban Working-class Women: The Need for Autonomy,’ in Confronting State, Capital and Patriarchy – Women Organizing in the Process of Industrialization, edited by Amrita Chhachhi and Renée Pittin, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, and New York: St Martin’s Press.
Hensman, Rohini 2002, ‘Trade Unions and Women’s Autonomy: Organisational Strategies of Women Workers in India,’ in Gender, Diversity and Trade Unions: International Perspectives, Gender, Diversity and Trade Unions: International Perspectives, edited by Fiona Colgan and Sue Ledwith, London and New York: Routledge.
Hensman, Rohini 2011, Workers, Unions, and Global Capitalism: Lessons from India, New York: Columbia University Press.
Heyzer, Noeleen, Geertje Lycklama à Nijeholt and Nedra Weerakoon (eds), The Trade in Domestic Workers: Causes, Mechanisms and Consequences of International Migration, Kuala Lumpur: Asian and Pacific Development Centre, and London: Zed Books.
Himmelweit, Susan and Simon Mohun 1977, ‘Domestic Labour and Capitalism’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 1: 15–31
Humphries, Jane 1980, ‘Class Struggle and the Persistence of the Working-Class Family,’ in The Economics of Women and Work, edited by Alice H.Amsden, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. (reproduced from Cambridge Journal of Economics, 1: 241–58, September 1977).
Kottegoda, Sepali 2004, Negotiating Household Politics – Women’s Strategies in Urban Sri Lanka, Colombo: Social Scientists’ Association.
Krishnakumar, Asha 2004, ‘Unsafe Motherhood,’ Frontline, 21, 16
www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2116/stories/20040813002709600.htm
Kumar, Radha 1983, ‘Family and Factory: Women in the Bombay Cotton Textile Industry, 1919-1939,’ Indian Economic and Social History Review, 20, 1: 81-110.
Malachevskaya, N. 1979, ‘The Mother – Family,’ (tr. from the German by Saral Kumar Sarkar), The Almanac, Leningrad (published in March 1980 in the German feminist monthly Courage.)
Malos, Ellen (ed.) 1982 [1980], The Politics of Housework, (3rd edition), London: Allison and Busby.
Marx, Karl 1963, Theories of Surplus Value, Part I, Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Marx, Karl 1976, Capital Volume 1, (tr. Ben Fowkes), Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
McAuley, Alastair 1981, Women’s Work and Wages in the Soviet Union, London: Allen & Unwin.
Menon, Sindhu 2005, ‘Safai Karamcharis: Reinvented Untouchables in Modern India,’ Labour File, 3, 6: 5–12.
Molyneux, Maxine 1979, ‘Beyond the Domestic Labour Debate,’ New Left Review, 116: 3–27.
Patel, B.B. 1988, Workers of Closed Textile Mills: Patterns and Problems of their Absorption in a Metropolitan Labour Market, Ahmedabad: Oxford and IBH Publishing Co.
Pelletier D.L, E.A.Frongillo Jr., D.G.Schroeder and J.P.Habicht 1995, ‘The Effects of Malnutrition on Child Mortality in Developing Countries,’ Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 73, 4: 443–48.
Pinchbeck, Ivy 1930, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution 1750-1850, London: Routledge.
Rowbotham, Sheila 1974, Women, Resistance and Revolution, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Ruddick, Sara 1982, ‘Maternal Thinking,’ in Rethinking the Family – Some Feminist Questions, edited by Barrie Thorne with Marilyn Yalom, New York and London: Longman.
Savara, Mira 1986, Changing Trends in Women’s Employment, Bombay: Himalaya Publishing House.
Seccombe, Wally 1973, ‘The Housewife and Her Labour Under Capitalism,’ New Left Review, 83: 3–24.
Seccombe, Wally 1975, ‘Domestic Labour: Reply to Critics,’ New Left Review, 94: 85–96
Standing, Hilary 1991, Dependence and Autonomy: Women’s Employment and the Family in Calcutta, London: Routledge.
Swaminathan, Padmini 2002, Labour-Intensive Industries But Units Without “Workers”: Where Will ILO’s Dialogue Begin?’ Working Paper No.168, Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai.
Thorne, Barrie 1982, ‘Feminist Rethinking of the Family: An Overview,’ in Rethinking the Family – Some Feminist Questions, Rethinking the Family – Some Feminist Questions, edited by
Barrie Thorne with Marilyn Yalom, New York and London: Longman.
UNICEF 2004, The State of the World’s Children, www.unicef.org/sowc04_contents.html
Weinbaum, Batya 1978, The Curious Courtship of Women’s Liberation and Socialism, Boston: South End Press.
Westwood, Sallie 1991, ‘Gender and the Politics of Production in India,’ in Women, Development and Survival in the Third World, edited by Haleh Afshar, London and New York: Longman.
Young, Brigitte 2000, ‘The “Mistress” and the “Maid” in the Globalized Economy,’ in Working Classes Global Realities: Socialist Register 2001, edited by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, London: The Merlin Press.
Zaretsky, Eli 1982, ‘The Place of the Family in the Origins of the Welfare State,’ in Rethinking the Family – Some Feminist Questions, edited by Barrie Thorne with Marilyn Yalom, New York and London: Longman.