Domestic Labor Revisited

From the late 1960s into the 1970s, socialist feminists sought to theorize “domestic labor” - the unwaged labor of housework, childbearing and childrearing - within a framework of Marxist political economy. Such an analysis would provide a foundation, they thought, for a materialist analysis of women's subordination. Socialist feminists studied Marxist concepts, and pro-duced a range of original formulations combining Marxism and feminism. Much of this literature, including the author's own work, followed an intellectual agenda that has not been well understood. A powerful but generally unacknowledged difference of theoretical paradigm thus undermined feminist discussions of domestic labor. Meanwhile, Marxist theorists generally ignored the domestic labor literature, assuming it to be irrelevant to issues of class exploitation. The early domestic labor theorists' unfinished project is, however, important and deserves further attention.