Feminist Demands and the Problem of Domestic Labor

• In Event: Back to Work: New Theories of Work

Abstract

Political theorists have largely responded to contemporary debates about the future of work by debating the demand for a universal basic income. Feminist theorists by contrast have returned to a utopian politics of the demand - in particular, to the wages for housework campaigns of the 1970s, which underpin contemporary ideas about the refusal of work, as well as the explosion of ideas of emotional labor. This paper excavates a different set of ideas from that era of anxiety about work and technological change by exploring the political theory of the socialist feminist theorists of the early Women's Liberation Movement, from Juliet Mitchell to Angela Davis. In doing so, it charts a different and neglected debate about the socialization of housework and the uses of utopianism to political theory.

This paper will return to the 1960s -- to a moment in which proposals for guaranteed incomes and full employment stood alongside the novel political theories of the social wage, class and ‘post-industrial society’. First, the paper will begin by illuminating two rival radical visions of women’s work and two traditions of thinking about labor and production that both have their origins in New Left political theory. Second, it will focus on Mitchell’s influential account of women’s liberation as ‘the longest revolution’ to explore how her particular genre of normative and diagnostic theorizing not only provides a distinctive set of arguments for the socialization of housework and an undervalued account of women’s oppression, but a way of thinking about the relationship of theory and practice that can reorient contemporary debates about utopianism, realism and non-ideal theory. Third, it will show how these ideas were taken up and then left behind in the domestic labor and social reproduction debates of the 1970s, particularly - and strikingly - by Angela Davis. The paper will conclude by showing how these ideas can contribute to three pressing problems in political theory: the future of work; the uses of utopianism; and to discussions of privilege, identity and the dynamic of oppression at a moment when worries around ‘identity politics’ against the backdrop of right-authoritarian populism are resurgent.

Author

• Katrina Forrester, Harvard University