Work Won't Love You Back

by Sarah Jaffe

  The suburban home, supposed to be the pinnacle of achievement for the new middle class, often felt more like a trap and a prison than anything else. Women were isolated in the home, which was also their workplace, constantly alone, surrounded by reminders of the work that was always left to do. This realization began to leak into the mainstream consciousness in the 1960s. The stay-at-home housewife had only been a widespread phenomenon for about a decade, but she was already over it.35

  Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique was a meteoric best-seller when it dropped in 1963. Friedan detailed the “problem that has no name” of women trapped in the home doing housework and sparked a feminist rebellion. Her concerns, though, seemed to be for educated women consigned to do work she thought beneath them and more suited to “feeble-minded girls.” For those educated women, getting a job would be a form of liberation.36

  Yet careers outside the home, the solution Friedan offered to the problem of housework’s tedium, did not actually improve the lives of all women. While well-off women could hire help to do the work in the house while they went off to decently paid jobs, many working-class women had never been or had only recently become able to choose to stay home. The jobs that were on offer for them should they leave the house were often low-paid versions of what they were doing at home—preparing food and serving it, cleaning, or caring. Some women certainly entered the paid labor force as an alternative to housework, but the very idea that women were doing so to amuse themselves, rather than out of necessity, helped employers justify paying women less. Meanwhile, many more of those who took paid work did so out of real need.37

  The new labor-of-love myth was bolstered by the idea that leaving the home to go to a job constituted empowerment. Even as the old story—that housework, and particularly mothering, was inherently satisfying—hung on, the new myth, of work-as-liberation, grew up around it. The clash between these two narratives fueled clashes between women.

  The class divisions between women became fault lines for other clashes, particularly over abortion and so-called welfare reform. Abortion, which had been key to the witch-hunts and hovered in the background ever since, became an explosive political issue in the 1960s and 1970s. As women fought back against the position of homemaker, they demanded the power to choose to parent or not. The feminist writer and activist Shulamith Firestone, in The Dialectic of Sex, argued that eliminating “sexual classes” meant “the seizure of control of reproduction: not only the full restoration to women of ownership of their own bodies, but also their (temporary) seizure of control of human fertility.”38

  But even before Firestone’s literary bomb landed, women were arguing that control over their fertility was essential to their ability to control their destinies. Abortion, wrote sociologist Kristin Luker, was a “symbolic linchpin” for an entire set of assumptions about women’s roles and women’s work. On one side of the debate were people who presumed that women should be seen not as potential mothers but as individual humans, capable of independent decisions and lives; on the other were women and men who thought that women’s primary role was in the home. Some of the latter, particularly the women, feared that abortion rights would not only upend those roles but devalue women’s role in reproduction. But that ground was already shifting, and it wasn’t abortion that ended the brief idyll of the working-class family. It was ending because of changes in the global economy.39

  Against a backdrop of shifting material conditions, the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision was a momentous shift, and for some it was too much. After Roe, a new group of activists—most of them women in nuclear families who did not work outside the home—joined the antiabortion cause. Fearing that by devaluing the fetus, the Court had also devalued women, these women plunged into activism. Their options in the job market were limited, but their work in the home, guarding “tenderness, morality, caring, emotionality, and self-sacrifice,” at least received lip service. “As I see it, we were on a pedestal, why should we go down to being equal?” one woman asked. They feared, Luker wrote, motherhood demoted from a sacred calling to just another job.40

  Feminists bristled when conservatives accused them of being out to destroy the family, insisting that they just wanted to give people choices. Yet destabilizing the reproductive role, making motherhood optional, and marriage something one could change one’s mind about, did in fact put the family on shaky ground. Radicals like Firestone considered that all to the good, but mainstream feminism was more likely to focus on women “having it all”—the job and the family. That is perhaps why many mainstream feminists failed to join the fight of another group of women who were challenging traditional roles: the welfare rights activists, whose struggle centered, as historian Premilla Nadasen wrote, on “the work ethic, faith in the market economy, compassion for the less fortunate, models of motherhood, mores about sexuality and reproductive rights.”41

  The welfare rights movement was a relatively small group of women with very little social power, yet they collectively managed nevertheless to win some control for themselves over their lives. They rejected both the family ethic and the work ethic to demand the right to parent as they saw fit, refusing the discipline of the Poor Law tradition that was baked into the roots of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the program commonly called “welfare” in the United States.42

  The National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) was founded in 1966 as a coordinating body for local groups, some of which had already been in existence for years. Those groups used direct action, often sitting in in welfare offices, and agitating for an end to discriminatory policies. They combined this strategy with political organizing and a legal effort challenging the surveillance policies associated with AFDC. Though Black women were never a majority of the women on AFDC, they led the welfare rights movement; their presence on the welfare rolls had provoked handwringing from politicians—often the same ones who argued that white women belonged at home with their children. Welfare rights organizers, as Nadasen wrote, “adopted political positions based on a material understanding of the hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality and the way in which these realities were intertwined and inseparable for all people.”43

  Black women had long been expected to work, first as slaves and then as low-wage workers. The welfare panic exposed the tension between these two beliefs: that women’s “natural” place was home taking care of children, and that Black people were getting away with something if they stayed home to parent. Pushing Black women—and by extension other women—off of welfare meant pushing them into taking a job, any job, no matter how low paid. This was, as sociologists Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward wrote, another way of coercing labor.44

  The welfare rights groups, though, argued that welfare mothers were already working—that what they did in the home was important work deserving of support, and that they shouldn’t have to be married to get it. “If the government was smart it would start calling AFDC ‘Day and Night Care,’ create a new agency, pay us a decent wage for the service work we are doing now,” one organizer said, “and say that the welfare crisis has been solved, because welfare mothers have been put to work.” For a while, they succeeded—in the 1960s, AFDC rolls increased 107 percent as organizing brought more people to claim the benefits to which they were legally entitled. “NWRO buttons are well known at the welfare department,” said another organizer. “Our members find that when they go down to the department with buttons on, they receive prompter and better service.”45

  The welfare rights organizers posed a sweeping challenge to American ideas about work and who did it, and about the family and who was in charge of it. Mothers for Adequate Welfare (MAW), according to one reporter, believed that marriage, with its “fixed rules and obligations,” was a “means for domination more than a means for expressing love.” MAW favored “responsibility toward other persons, and freedom to whatever extent that responsibility allows,” instead of the traditional family. Johnnie Tillmon,
director of the NWRO, wrote, in an article for Ms. magazine, “Welfare is like a super-sexist marriage. You trade in a man for the man. But you can’t divorce him if he treats you bad. He can divorce you, of course, cut you off anytime he wants. But in that case, he keeps the kids, not you. The man runs everything. In ordinary marriage, sex is supposed to be for your husband. On A.F.D.C., you’re not supposed to have any sex at all. You give up control of your own body.”46

  The women of the NWRO argued for a guaranteed minimum income rather than jobs programs, challenging the idea that one must go to a job in order to make a living. Milwaukee WRO organizer Loretta Domencich, of Native descent, noted that guaranteed income was similar to the way things had been done before colonization: “The dignity of the individual says that no matter what a person’s capabilities are, whether he is the leader or whether he is a person who is crippled or elderly or can’t do anything, he still has a place in the tribe.” And under the administration of Richard Nixon, the NWRO nearly got its wish—Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan, which, while lower than the NWRO’s demand of $5,500 a year for a family of four (over $35,000 in today’s dollars), would have given a basic income to more than ten million people.47

  That the welfare rights movement came within a fingertip of seeing a law that would have guaranteed income for anyone regardless of marital status or employment enacted by a conservative president should remind us that it is possible to imagine work and the family differently. But in the 1970s, the pendulum swung the other way. The profitability crisis, the beginnings of outsourcing, and inflation meant that everyone was suddenly competing for a piece of a shrunken pie. Instead of guaranteed income and rights, we got the “welfare queen” stereotype. Women were considered immoral if they had abortions, but also if they had children outside of the prescribed social conditions, and they were demonized for getting state support. Seeming to underscore the long history of such demonization, Ronald Reagan told a story about the need to cut benefits premised on “a young lady… who on the basis of being a student is getting food stamps, and she’s studying to be a witch.”48

  Turning presumably Black women on welfare into a hate object—claiming that they undermined both the family, by daring to be single mothers, and the work ethic, by not taking a waged job—created a wedge that was slowly driven in to dismantle the entire welfare state and usher in the neoliberal moment. The left, having embraced the idea that going to work was liberation, had little with which to counter this turn.49

  But one group of feminists, inspired by the NWRO and the Italian Marxist operaismo (workerism) movement of the 1970s, put forward a different analysis, one that challenged popular ideologies of both work and the family. While the Wages for Housework Campaign, as a demand and a political perspective, didn’t spread as far as its founders would have liked, its organizers continue to struggle and to inspire others to this day.50

  Wages for Housework picked up the idea from operaismo that capitalist production has subsumed every social relation, collapsing the distinction between “society” and “workplace” and turning all of those relations into relations of production. To the organizers of Wages for Housework, the “social factory” began in the home, and the work done in the home was necessary for the functioning of capitalism because it reproduced workers for capital. They argued, therefore, that this work was worthy of pay. Selma James, one of the founding theorists of the movement, wrote, “To the degree that we organize a struggle for wages for the work we do in the home, we demand that work in the home be considered as work which like all work in capitalist society is forced work, which we do not for love but because, like every other worker, we and our children would starve if we stopped.”51

  Central to these demands was the idea that refusing housework—striking from it, the same way workers in a factory would strike—was a way that house-workers would have power. Women leaving the home for the workplace were refusing housework, but for too many women, going to a waged job was anything but liberating—it often meant still more low-paid drudgery similar in form to what they still had waiting for them at home when they returned after a long workday. Demanding a wage for the work was a way to point out that housework was work, and that work was a thing they would like to do less of. It was a way to say, “We are not that work.”52

  Additionally, it was a way for them to refuse the identity that had been forced upon them, the very way that gender had been constructed. The assumption that housework, and reproductive work, came naturally to women and satisfied some deep inner feminine need, they argued, shaped the experiences of all women, even those who were wealthy enough to hire others (usually also women) to do their housework.53

  The women of the Wages for Housework Campaign took from the women of the welfare rights movement the understanding that neither the workplace nor the family was a site of freedom. They wanted, instead, time for themselves, freedom to discover what love and sexuality might look like outside of relations of power and labor. Queer women in the movement noted that the stigma on lesbianism served to enforce the patriarchal family and the work done in it. Women who worked in child care and hospitals noted that the devaluing of work in the home led to a devaluing of their work outside of it. Violence against women, they argued, was a form of work discipline, a boss keeping his subordinates in line. Wages for Housework was a perspective that could be applied to all political struggles—it added an angle that was missing in most analyses of capitalism and gender.54

  Though many people laughed (and continue to laugh) at the idea of wages for housework, it is inarguably true that housework, in many instances, is in fact paid. As economist Nancy Folbre wrote, echoing those welfare rights organizers, “if two single mothers, each with two children under the age of five, exchanged babysitting services, swapping children for eight hours a day, five days a week, and paying one another the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, they could both take full advantage of [the Earned Income Tax Credit], receiving a total of more than $10,000 for providing essentially the same services they would provide for their own children.” The women of Wages for Housework noted that the state pays foster parents, and that courts had granted damages to men whose wives had been injured to pay for “lack of services.”55

  The new discourse of the labor of love was being knitted together as wages were dropping and factories were closing, moving, and automating. Those in the Wages for Housework movement were some of the first to see what was happening in the 1970s. The shifts in the economy became visible in New York and other cities, where a fiscal crisis laid the groundwork for later austerity politics. Wages for Housework proponents warned, Cassandra-like, that feminists were going into the workplace just as the bottom was falling out of it. Women were expected to pick up the slack by taking up paid work while not reducing the amount of work they did in the home. The new social conservatives, hand in hand with the ascendant neoliberals, aimed to reinforce the traditional nuclear family at the same time that policies were being put in place to wring more work out of everyone, reinstituting the Protestant work ethic by law if not by choice.56

  The end result of all this was “welfare reform,” a multi-decade process that culminated in President Bill Clinton’s Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, a law that in its very text does the double duty of upholding the work and family ethics. Welfare reform was a reminder of the ruthless cruelty that disguises itself in pretty words about love, care, and concern, and it was a project that spanned the political spectrum. Neoliberals like Clinton and social conservatives like Reagan alike mobilized racist beliefs about Black women’s unwillingness to work (thick with irony in a country built by the enslaved labor of Black people) and exploited newly working women’s resentment of those who didn’t have to do the double shift. They pitted women against one another and turned everyone against a program that should have been an option for anyone who needed it—as activist Johnnie Tillmon had written, “Welfare’s like a traffic accident. It can hap
pen to anybody, but especially it happens to women.”57

  Welfare reform was begun by conservative governors in states like Wisconsin and California but it was finally implemented nationally by a Democratic president. Clinton had become president in a three-way split election by promising a “third way” for American politics—a third way that involved turning his back on the movements of the 1960s that he had credited with awakening his political consciousness, and embracing both “free markets” and “personal responsibility.” Clinton’s program did away with AFDC in favor of a series of block grants to states, which had wide discretion in how to use the funds. Many of them instituted work requirements and put a lifetime cap on benefits. The 1996 law also included money for “marriage promotion” programs and funds for states that could lower the number of “illegitimate” births without increasing the abortion rate. It diverted money into funds to track down biological fathers and extract child support funds from them, whether the mother wished to have anything to do with the father or not. The preamble of the law included the line, “Marriage is the foundation of a successful society.” It was, in political scientist Melinda Cooper’s words, “a state-enforced system of private family responsibility,” built on the old Poor Law tradition but expanding its punitive nature.58

  Despite all the politicians’ professions that they wanted to help women, the new law surveilled and punished Black women in disproportionate numbers. (All of this happened alongside the growth of mass incarceration, itself a bipartisan project of the 1980s and 1990s.) The flood of new, desperate workers into the low-wage labor market—often, once again, into jobs mirroring the work they were expected to do in the home—helped to hold wages down for all while improving profits for those at the top.59