Work Won't Love You Back

by Sarah Jaffe

  This exploitation, the subordination of women’s work, was accomplished in part through violence but upheld through ideology. As the institution matured, the “family” shrank down to something like what we think of now as the nuclear family. By the time of ancient Greece, the household was central, and women’s place had been established as in the home.8

  That doesn’t mean that work and the family looked in Plato’s Athens the way they did in 1950s America. For one thing, Athenian prosperity was based in the labor done by slaves, not white men working union jobs. But the subordination of women and the diminishing of the value of their work was firmly established at the birth of the state as an institution, long before the advent of capitalism.9

  With capitalism, though, came a whole new set of practices for dividing and controlling household work. The division between “home” and “workplace” didn’t exist in feudal Europe in the way it began to exist under capitalism. In early medieval cities, women worked as doctors, butchers, teachers, retailers, and smiths. They had gained a degree of freedom. In precapitalist Europe, Silvia Federici wrote, “women’s subordination to men had been tempered by the fact that they had access to the commons and other communal assets.” Under capitalism, though, “women themselves became the commons, as their work was defined as a natural resource, laying outside the sphere of market relations.”10

  This rearranging of reproductive labor was ushered in with blood. Specifically, the bloodshed that birthed modern domestic relations came through witch-hunts. Women were deprived of rights they’d previously held, of access to wages, and allowed neither to gather in groups nor to live alone. The only safe place for a woman to be was attached to a man. Although women who refused to marry, women who owned a little property, and particularly midwives, healers, and other women who exercised some control over reproduction, and who may have carried out abortions, were especial targets of the witch-hunts, the terror worked precisely because nearly anyone could be accused. This terror helped create the thing we now think of as gender.11

  The witch-hunts not only served to force women off the common land being enclosed and back into the home. They also reminded entire populations what might happen if they refused to work. Eliminating popular belief in magic, Federici wrote, was central to the creation of the capitalist work ethic: magic was “an illicit form of power and an instrument to obtain what one wanted without work, that is, a refusal of work in action.” The discipline (and at times torture) of the body during the witch-hunts helped lay the ground for the discipline of the body by the boss during the workday, not only the discipline of the time-clock but also of sore muscles, tired joints, and worn-out minds that it now became a woman’s job to soothe.12

  Thus the dichotomy between “home” and “work” was created, and along with it so many other binary oppositions that continue to shape our assumptions about the world: “mind” and “body,” “technology” and “nature,” and, of course, “man” and “woman.” This, too, was the period when the concept of race as we know it began to take shape—along with the designation of certain races as natural slaves, and of societies penalizing nonreproductive forms of sex. At the end of this period of upheaval, women were not simply firmly ensconced in the home, unwaged and rightsless, but the history of violence that had created that situation was simply wiped away. “Women’s labor began to appear as a natural resource,” Federici wrote, “available to all, no less than the air we breathe or the water we drink.” Even women’s sexuality, she argued, had been transformed into work. Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel, in their book A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, referred to this period as the “Great Domestication.”13

  This, then, is the beginning of the double bind that mothers like Ray Malone are still trapped in: the work of parenting is not considered important enough to pay for, yet if you demonstrate that you have other priorities beyond the home, you’ll be castigated as a bad mother. The lines have always been permeable and shifting, but that has only made stigma harder to evade.

  Even with these divisions now firmly in place, capitalists were happy to send plenty of women and children to work in the mills and mines alongside or in place of the men—a preference for nimble little fingers could be expressed with no sense of shame, and these workers could be paid less than men. In the early days of wage labor, there was no pretense that such work was enjoyable: the choice was to do it or starve. When misery was known to be the condition of the wage worker, people would do nearly anything to avoid such labor, so bosses—and the state—had to ensure that people’s lives without waged work would be even more miserable than with it.14

  From this necessity arose the tradition of poor relief that still shapes social welfare policy today. The working classes rebelled frequently: Luddite machine-breaking, early forms of trade unionism, and riots roiled early capitalist England. And while nonproductive activities were met with harsh punishments—begging could be punished by “public whipping till the blood ran”—the authorities also acceded to pressure to create a sort of safety valve in the form of poor relief. But the English Poor Laws were designed to serve the bosses. Relief payments were low enough and punishing enough that any job at all was preferable to being on the dole; often one had to live and labor in a workhouse in exchange for the scraps of relief on offer. In this way, the work ethic was reinforced by the state under the guise of magnanimity, the idea that one should be grateful for a job inculcated. The Poor Laws live on today in Universal Credit’s punitive structures—the same punitive structures that Ray Malone faced.15

  The Poor Laws also enforced the idea of family responsibility—that relatives had a duty to and should be compelled to support their relations before public monies would be handed out. Later versions of relief were instituted specifically for people with disabilities and, importantly, for widows and mothers—for people excluded from the work relationship on account of ability or gender. The family ethic and the work ethic were thus shaped by the state in parallel.16

  Capitalism continued its march throughout the world, bringing with it the family, often at the tip of the sword. In the colonies and then the new United States, for example, Native people’s ways of living were reorganized, violently, by the colonizers into something they recognized as a family, with land formerly owned in common turned into inheritable private property. Even as the family was imposed from without, though, its existence was described as natural, inevitable, a way of living and working that benefited all.17

  TODAY’S LABOR-OF-LOVE MYTH REQUIRED NOT JUST THE GLOSSING OVER of the brutality of the family and the workplace, but the addition of a romantic sheen. Marriage, for its first few centuries, had little to do with love. As that changed, the ideal of marriage-for-love brought with it its own mystifications of work.

  If marriage was done out of love, after all, then the labors subsumed into it must also be done for love. Marriage and housework alike, in this way, become things that women, in particular, are expected to find fulfilling and self-actualizing. Centuries’ worth of popular entertainment, from the novels of Jane Austen to the Oscar-winning 2019 film Marriage Story, take love and marriage as their narrative material, and mommy blogs and lifestyle Instagrammers, as journalist Kelli María Korducki wrote, still uphold signifiers of romance that date back to the post-Enlightenment era. These signifiers were popularized through the new women’s magazines and novels depicting women’s separate sphere as a space of pleasure, not of work.18

  The family as romantic escape from the burdens of work was a bourgeois ideal that trickled downward; like most such gifts, it was anything but. The middle classes were able to marry for love rather than simply for money; the white middle-class housewife could hire help to do the hard physical labor of housework, thus devoting herself to the romanticized emotional work. But working-class women still had to do it all.19

  There is also real love in a family, which is precisely what makes it and its surrounding ideologies so sticky. As Angela Davis observed in Women
and Capitalism, the family fulfills very real human needs, needs “which cease to demand at least minimal fulfillment only when human beings have long since ceased to be human. In capitalist society, the woman has the special mission of being both reservoir and receptacle for a whole range of human emotions otherwise banished from society.”20

  The emotional support, care, sexual expression, and real love that exist within families are not figments of our imagination, nor false consciousness, yet they are also shaped by a regime that exists to produce profits rather than human fulfillment. As bell hooks wrote, it has been the job of the wife “to produce this love by herself in the factory of the home and offer it to the man when he returned.” The family absorbs the violent anger that a male worker cannot safely vent at his boss; at other times, it teaches real emotional connection that, as theorist and organizer Selma James noted, is the same skill that is necessary to build movements for change.21

  Sexuality is valorized by capitalist society primarily within marriage, where it is presumably producing children who will grow up to be new workers. At the same time, the weight placed on the family under capitalism ensures that heterosexual love is incredibly difficult to maintain—that even as more expectations are placed on it, as the couple’s relationships with other people outside of their marriage thin and fade, marriage threatens to collapse on itself. The pressure, James wrote, makes marriage such a hostile environment that “what’s astonishing is that men and women even talk to each other, let alone live together and even love each other.”22

  Marriage is an institution constantly shifting, absorbing the critiques thrown at it and the needs placed on it by societies, embedded in a set of historical power relations. It has proved incredibly difficult to strip away the old “separate spheres” ideology holding that the home is women’s domain, the workplace that of men. But this idealized way of living has never been universal.23

  If the nuclear family—and society, which, as Engels wrote, “is a mass composed of… individual families as its molecules”—is a recent development, it was even more recently that the working classes were able to live this way, with a man working outside the home and a woman, unwaged, within it. This shift meant that even more people were subject to the pressures of which Ray Malone spoke—of being held to an ideal of feminine perfection, often with little support.24

  Up until and into the twentieth century, working-class women worked in factories and mills; they took in laundry and did piecework while cooking, cleaning, and caring for children. The term “housewife” used to connote this sort of woman, who was both earning cash income and oriented toward the home; the term “homemaker” arose around 1890 to denote a wife who “was fully immersed in domestic activities.” This new definition came along with new expectations—that the home not only be a place to eat and sleep but a place that was the opposite of work, where the homemaker saw to every comfort for her husband and children. Whether her comfort was seen to was a question she wasn’t supposed to ask. In this way, changes in the structures of work produced changes in our understanding of gender, of what it meant to be a woman.25

  While at first, homemakers were for the well-off, eventually even wage laborers could aspire to have a full-time wife. Labor movements began to demand the so-called “family wage”: a pay rate high enough that a male worker could support his wife and children. It was first implemented in Australia in 1896, with a law allowing the setting of minimum wage rates with the assumption that men needed a wage that allowed them to be the breadwinner for a family. Protective legislation, too, banning child labor and limiting women’s working hours, began to be enacted around this time, giving workers some of their demands cloaked in the idea that women were too weak for the workplace—a surprise to the millworkers of Manchester or Lowell—and that their place was in the home.26

  The family-wage ideal spread rapidly. While labor liked it as a way to raise pay, it also served to bolster gender roles within the family. Becoming a “provider” was a way for working-class men to take pride and power in the home that they didn’t have on the assembly line; it allowed them to define their manliness against those who did not bring home a decent wage. And, particularly in the United States, that also meant, for white men, defining their masculinity against workers of color. Black workers in the United States first labored as slaves, their marriages and reproduction directly appropriated by the slaveholder. When they were emancipated, a new set of laws encouraged former slaves into “traditional” families. As historian Tera Hunter has noted, under the conditions of slavery, where blood kin or spouses could be sold off at any moment on the slaveholder’s whim, African Americans “transformed the strict definition of kinship,” understanding the family in a more expansive way. But institutions like the Freedmen’s Bureau aimed to condition Black workers into the patriarchal family even as it was unlikely that Black men would be paid anything like a family-sustaining wage.27

  It was in the wake of the New Deal and World War II, as labor laws finally put in place some protections for the right of workers to unionize, that the family wage—and with it, the white working-class family—became institutions. This was what was known as the Fordist compromise. Henry Ford himself was deeply invested in implementing his idea of the correct family. In order to get the “family” wage, employees had to qualify—and Ford had an entire department of investigators, called the Sociological Department, who would interrogate workers on the job and show up at their homes to ensure that wives were working hard too. “Full-time domesticity on the part of the wife was required,” sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin wrote. “Anything less would run afoul of the investigators.”28

  The American New Deal order that made possible the family-wage ideal explicitly excluded certain workers—agricultural and domestic workers were left out of the protections of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). This meant that most Black men and women were left out of the family wage system. The Fordist family wage not only served to normalize gender and the nuclear family; it also defined race and class by who was in and who was out of the public-private partnership that was the US welfare state.29

  This period gave us the thing we think of as the “traditional” family: the suburban two-point-five-kid picket-fence white nuclear household, the June Cleaver mom at home making dinner in high heels and waiting for her husband to come home from his eight-hour day in his five-day workweek. Yet this period was not traditional in the slightest: it was a historical exception, created by a compromise between capital and labor that was never stable, but overseen by a state that saw stabilizing business as its prime goal. And it was nothing to romanticize—the jobs that paid a family wage were alienated and boring. Women alone had no access to the higher wages paid to men; domestic violence was considered a man’s prerogative. Indeed, as many have pointed out, for men, violence in the home was a way both to demonstrate masculinity in a world where they had little control and to discipline the labor of their wives. The labor contract, like the marriage contract, presumed a legal equality between parties that hid immense actual inequalities of power between boss and worker, husband and wife. Masculinity and femininity themselves were shaped by these experiences of power and powerlessness.30

  There has always been a tension hidden within this ideology: whether women were needed at home because their work in the home was indispensable, or whether women should stay home because they were simply too pure, too good, or too weak for the world of wage labor. Women were encouraged, in the twentieth century, to improve their domestic skills—learning from women’s magazines or through the new home economics courses in schools. Even the question of whether women should be paid for housework was on the table in one way or another—feminists struggled for mother’s pensions and pay, for family aid, and for what in 1946 became the Family Allowance in the United Kingdom. Yet they were still reminded in a thousand ways that this work wasn’t “real” work, not like what men did.31

  It was in
the attempts at building a socialist society, though, that the real challenges to the family came about. Utopian socialists argued for raising children communally rather than in nuclear families, and this idea, as anthropologist Kristen Ghodsee has observed, influenced those who took power in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. In the early USSR, Alexandra Kollontai was made people’s commissar for social welfare; the only woman in the cabinet, she took special interest in policies that would give women equal rights. She argued that “maternity was to be appraised as a social function and therefore protected and provided for by the state.” Domestic work would be socialized through public nurseries, kindergartens, laundries, and cafeterias; abortion was legalized in 1920. Rather than assuming that women’s work would be subsidized by men’s wages, the socialist state would provide services to all, freeing women from economic dependence on men.32

  But socialist men weren’t always comfortable with changes to the family structure; they, too, had been raised to believe that it was natural for women to work in the home. Kollontai struggled with her comrades to implement her ideas; in 1936 many of her successes were overturned as Stalin reinstated support for the patriarchal family. Still, state socialist and social democratic governments in Eastern and Western Europe outpaced the United States in terms of family policies, allowing for maternity leave and other supportive measures and even officially encouraging men to take on more of the housework.33

  In most of the capitalist world, child-rearing was presumed to be a private responsibility, to be taken on in a couple or, if not, done at one’s own risk. Even as women argued for the value of their work in the home, they came up against the myth of the labor of love. Their work, which they had studied for, and at which they labored for longer hours than their husbands did at their paid jobs, was supposed to be the most fulfilling thing a woman could do. But this work, supposedly freely provided out of love, was in fact coerced at all levels, from the state down to the individual, and plenty of women continued to point out that they didn’t love the work, not at all.34