Work Won't Love You Back

by Sarah Jaffe

  In the decades following welfare reform, labor in the paid workplace has been made cheaper because certain work remains unwaged and in the home. In Kathi Weeks’s words, neoliberalism’s “romance of the capitalist market” as the site of freedom “is coupled with a revived romance of the privatized family as the necessary locus of social reproduction and a haven in a heartless world.” The collapse of communism and the triumph of capitalist realism has led to diminished imaginings, too, of how domestic work could be done differently. Instead, in the age of the “two-earner family,” we hear a lot about “work-life balance,” but not enough about how, for everyone, “life” (code for “family”) often means “unpaid work.”60

  And only some people even get to consider such balance. Marriage is increasingly a track for the upper middle class, while the working class is now more likely to opt instead for less legally binding relationships. Conservative opponents of same-sex marriage rights have argued that allowing queer people to marry would destroy the institution of marriage. But, as gender and sexuality professor Laura Briggs and others have noted, it’s not gay marriage that has blasted open the family. Instead, it is economic inequality helping to splinter the family as we knew it. The birth rate itself has fallen since the 1970s: as Silvia Federici archly wrote, “the only true labor saving devices women have used in the ’70s have been contraceptives.” She also noted that the assault on abortion rights underway in much of the world has been an attempt to regulate the labor supply.61

  The children who are born are increasingly being born outside of the family. By the 2000s, in the United States, just 59 percent of children were born to married mothers, a steep drop compared to the late 1950s, when 95 percent of children were. (In this sense, it seems, welfare reform has failed.) For many working-class women, it is obvious that marriage is becoming too much work—in the words of one single mother who decided to leave her child’s father, “I can support myself. I always have. I can support myself and our kid. I just can’t support myself, the kid, and him.” Far from being the “bad mother” of the stereotype, she was making a decision to put her child’s welfare first.62

  But while the nuclear family might be mutating and falling apart, gendered assumptions around unpaid work—and who will do it—have not changed nearly enough. The pesky, persisting gender pay gap is explained in part by women’s continuing responsibility for doing unpaid care work. What sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild called the “second shift” remains in effect. Research in the United Kingdom in 2016 found that women still did nearly twice as much housework as men. US-based research showed that mothers working outside the home these days spend just as much time caring for children as mothers did in the 1970s, when their only job was in the home. Others have estimated that “the size of the paid labor force would double if all unpaid caregivers were paid for their work.” During the coronavirus lockdown, one survey found that nearly half of men with young children reported splitting domestic duties equally—but their wives disagreed. Only 2 percent of women agreed that men were responsible for most of the housework during lockdown. Globally, United Nations researchers estimated in 1999 that all unpaid reproductive labor, if paid, would cost $16 trillion, a third of the world’s total economic activity—$11 trillion of which would be women’s share.63

  For the working class, it’s the impossibility of paying for help that forces the squeeze. But the middle and upper classes also face the new ideological pressure of “attachment parenting”—something the writer Heather Abel described as a horror story. “Mama gives birth to Baby, and she must not put her down,” Abel wrote. “She cannot do sedentary work or even read for pleasure because Baby prefers movement—although Mama can, while Baby is strapped to her, perform housework.”64

  Such ideological pressure is jacked up to 11 on the far right, where a new generation of women calling themselves “tradwives” have become Internet celebrities. These women make the inherent fascist potential of the family explicit. They combine tips on child-rearing and husband-pleasing with white-supremacist rants; one woman issued what she called “the white baby challenge” to other wives, daring them to reproduce faster than nonwhite people. They are the curdled side of the unfinished feminist revolution: frustrated with limited career prospects and a shredded social safety net, they retreat to the home and blame feminism—and nonwhite people—for their plight. Today’s far right relies on the libidinal energy generated by this tension even as it pretends to simply defend what has been. But there is no turning back. The only option, as theorist Jordy Rosenberg wrote, is to ride “the supernova of the family’s destruction” through to something new.65

  Even as the old order crumbles, magazines and the Internet are loaded with articles about the ongoing quest for women to “have it all.” We rarely hear about men trying to “have it all,” because just asking the question seems ludicrous. Yet, with the opening up of the public gaze to queer families (at least, as long as they still fit comfortably into the nuclear model) and some flexibility on gender roles, we have new entries into the field of discussion: men writing about their attempts to parent better, queer couples on the impossibility of doing all the work even without strict gender divisions. There’s also new high-tech fixes for the problem, including egg freezing, which some companies are starting to offer to their valued employees. At bottom, though, so much of the conversation is individual: we must simply figure out a “balance” that works for us personally. Yet there’s another way to look at things. As Briggs wrote, these seemingly individual battles “are where neoliberalism lives in our daily lives.” The point of Wages for Housework is not for individual men to pay individual women, like the “wife bonuses” paid by wealthy husbands to their wives, described in Wednesday Martin’s Primates of Park Avenue. The point is to demand wages in order to break the system.66

  After all, there are so many ways that the system breaks us. It’s not just that, as Hochschild pointed out, continued struggles over housework—and who will do it—mean that “many [straight] women cannot afford the luxury of unambivalent love for their husbands,” that sex within the family is often just another type of labor. The presumption that unpaid care—for elders, for incapacitated spouses, and for children—will be provided by women in families is not only exhausting for women. In the United States, for example, health-care access—which necessitates health insurance—is still largely tied to the workplace, such that many people only have access to care through a spouse’s job. How does that affect one’s freedom to leave an unsatisfying or even abusive relationship? And what about those who do not have a partner at all?67

  In a society that presumes that intimacy, and sometimes life-sustaining care, will be provided by partners in a romantic couple or other family members—and where 84 percent of the measurable 21.5 billion hours of noninstitutional personal care still is—what happens to those without partners or families? “Caring means giving more than you get, or giving without hope of receiving,” wrote nurse Laura Anne Robertson. “But in order to receive this supposedly immeasurable care, you must first make yourself sufficiently loveable.” Such a need to be loved—not just emotionally, but in order to survive—is a powerful form of discipline. To ensure that everyone in a society is equitably cared for, we are going to need more than, in Robertson’s words, “love and guilt.”68

  Despite the turn toward gay marriage and “homonormativity,” queer relationships have also long pointed the way toward something more expansive than families. Experiments with collective households took on new meaning during the AIDS crisis, when people locked out of the traditional family (and health insurance), and often shunned by the families of their birth, banded together to nurse one another and organize together to demand a political response to the epidemic. They fought for relationships marked not by legal contracts and state approval but by free choice, love, and care.69

  People with disabilities have also turned the need for care and support into radical political demands, communities of
care, and a defense of the idea that there are things more important than one’s ability to hold a job. Unable to work in the ways that capitalism values, disability theorist Sunuara Taylor wrote, “disabled people have to find meaning in other aspects of their lives and this meaning is threatening to our culture’s value system.” Elders, too, are often devalued by a society that attaches worth to work and work alone: a story about declining life expectancy in 2017 was summed up by Bloomberg News as, “We’re dying younger. That could be really good news for our employers.” When care is framed simultaneously, by capitalist society, as both exchange and altruistic gift, when exchange under capitalism is always unequal anyway, how do we think of value and relationships otherwise?70

  During the coronavirus pandemic, Taylor’s words took on new meaning. Politicians and the wealthy began to be less subtle about their demands that the economy be reopened, even if some people had to die. Grandparents, said Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick of Texas, would be willing to die to save the economy for their grandchildren—certainly a perverse twist on the caring labor of the family. In the moment of the virus, staying home from work became itself an act of care and of social reproduction, a reminder that despite Patrick and his ilk, most of us do in fact recognize our intertwined lives and care for one another.71

  Philosopher Eva Kittay suggested the concept of “doulia” (a play on the title “doula,” used by caregivers who assist new parents during and after the birth of a child) as one that could replace exchange. She sees it as an understanding that interpersonal relationships will likely never be equal but can occur in a framework that sees care obligations as nested. In other words, we care for others understanding that we will one day be cared for, if not likely by the same person. But to have that understanding, we need to create structures to ensure that will be the case without relying on uncompensated work in the family. To do so, we must create a society that values and cares for those who need care and also for those who do the work.72

  To pull apart the notion of the family, then, is not to say that the labor done within the household (the cleaning and cooking as well as the caring) is without value—a topic I’ll address more in the next chapter. It is, rather, to claim the revolutionary potential of care, community, and relationships. It is to ask, as Selma James did, “What if [relationships] became the social priority which material production would serve?” Because women have been forced to do most of such work in society, they have also, Kittay noted, been the ones to lead political struggles to revalue it. In recent years, even as witch-hunts have returned in some places around the world, political struggles have led to wins: Wages for Housework proposals were revived by Mexico’s ruling MORENA party, for example, and pensions for homemakers were instituted in Venezuela.73

  Claiming the work done in the home as work is a way to begin to think beyond the double bind of “work-family balance,” perhaps to begin reclaiming the old demand of the shorter-hours movement for time “for what we will.” It is a way to begin envisioning a different society. After all, as Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore put it, “to ask for capitalism to pay for care is to call for an end to capitalism.”74

  IT WAS DURING A THEATER MEETING THAT RAY MALONE FIRST REALIZED she could turn her political gaze on her own life. A friend of hers had trained in Theater of the Oppressed techniques. This approach, developed by the Brazilian practitioner Augusto Boal, encourages dialogue between actors and audience with an aim of promoting political change. So Malone joined her friend and a group of theater-makers to discuss housing issues in London.

  She found herself telling the story of the nursery where she’d been told she’d be “rewarded” if she got a job. The people in the room began riffing on her story, playing with every angle. “This conversation that I’d kept to myself, that I was a little bit embarrassed about,” Malone said, suddenly became a way to get at deeply political issues of work and care.

  That was one of the launch points for what became Fallout Club—“Fallout from the nuclear family,” Malone laughed. Fallout Club was a way to create space for single parents—mostly single mothers—to gather and find ways to discuss and politicize their situation. “Where do we go with these feelings? Where is there a place for our anger to be heard about these situations? There is a lot that we should be angry about,” Malone said.

  There had been, she said, a “bit of an explosion” recently in groups for adults to talk about mothering, parenting, and being in the arts. Many of those groups felt like therapy—there were lots of tears, lots of sharing, akin to the consciousness-raising groups of the 1960s and 1970s. “We would often talk about the fact that we had specific barriers to accessing art workshops, yoga workshops. I said, ‘Let’s start a group for single mothers and low-income parents. I think there is something, specifically, that needs addressing here politically.’”

  It was the theater that helped Malone open up, and so in her Fallout Club workshops there is always something creative to do. Crafting, she noted, has long been considered women’s work, but it is also a way to focus and yet to be reflective. Lots of political meetings, she said, are noisy places full of argument, but what if they could be something else? The question, she said, was, “How do people realize the systems of their oppression? How do you get people to talk about the situation they are in and realize what underpins it?”

  Embroidery artist Milou Stella became her collaborator on Fallout Club, and Malone began her own art project about the experience of Universal Credit. As Nola grew older, Malone was expected to spend more time at the job center, attempting to prove she was working hard enough not to lose her benefits. “As soon as your child is one year old they want to see your CV,” she said. “If you don’t have a job when your child is three years old, they could be threatening you with sanctions and taking your money away. It is a very punitive environment and a very difficult thing to have a toddler [there with you]. It is demeaning. It is really badly set up for actually getting a job.” She began to notice other parents there with children in tow—highlighting, once again, the tensions between child care and paid work. Here were parents trying to soothe their children in this punitive space. She began doing embroidered renditions of photos she took of parents in the job center.75

  Her daughter has picked up on the implications of the job center as well. Malone recalled showing Nola the photo she was working from. “I said to my daughter, who is four, ‘Do you know what it’s of?’ She said, ‘It’s a woman and she is poor.’ I said, ‘How do you know she is poor?’ She said, ‘Because she is worried. Look at her face.’”

  The embroidery project and the art workshops, she said, are ways of getting people to feel comfortable and open up. “If I said,… ‘Are you on benefits?’ or, ‘Are you affected by the housing benefit cap?’ people would be like, ‘Whoa! I don’t want to tell you that. That is really nosy.’” But when she leads with her own story, she said, people understand it differently, and if they can work together on creative projects about their experience, then they can have a discussion about it.

  Malone has also started to think about solutions. She’s drawn to the idea of universal basic income—the opposite of the Orwellian-named Universal Credit, which is laden with catch-22s, traps, and sanctions and rooted in the old punitive Poor Laws. Basic income, as the mothers of the welfare rights movement argued, would provide a floor for everyone, allowing single parents to take time with their children, or artists to cobble together a living doing creative work. For one workshop, Malone bought a child’s playhouse to use as a prop and called it the Basic Income House. “We created loads of tiles for the house and we get people to embroider onto the tiles. We have a discussion about ‘What do mothers need to survive and what do mothers need to thrive?’” They also do a presentation on the history of basic income, the United Kingdom’s child benefit, and the importance of money that is paid to the mother, not to the family. “Child benefit actually allowed women to escape domestic violence situations because they had a bit of
money that was paid to them,” she noted. “But it hasn’t continued at the rate of inflation. It is 80 quid a month [£80, equivalent to about US$100]. What can you do with 80 quid a month?”

  At the end of the workshop, they asked attendees, “If you had an extra £1,000 [about US$1,200] a month, what would you do with the money?” The group was diverse: wealthier people said they’d spend their money on their grandchildren or give it to charities. To others, that amount would be life-changing. “Some people were like, ‘I would escape my housing situation.’ A disabled person was like, ‘I can’t chop food properly. I would bring somebody in to chop food.’ You realize loads of people’s basic needs are not being met.” She planned to take the Basic Income House on the road to different communities, and to talk to people, particularly mothers, about their needs. “You feel punished for having a child by yourself as a single woman. Motherhood is throwing a lot of women into poverty. Or, a lot of women just make the decision, ‘I can’t afford to have a child.’”

  Living in London, Malone felt the inequality acutely. “You always hear that people have got to work, they can’t be given something for nothing. But something like 60 percent of wealth in this country is inherited wealth,” she pointed out. That means a lot of people are, in fact, living on money they didn’t work to earn. And Malone was working quite hard, but it was at a job that was deemed worthy of only £80 a month: raising a child.76

  When she met Barb Jacobson, who had come out of Wages for Housework to coordinate the UK basic income network, Jacobson asked her if she wanted to help run a London group. Malone agreed, and at the group’s first meeting, people raised questions that she had long been asking. The expectation of constant work, she said, created a “culture of just surviving without giving ourselves the breathing room to ask, ‘What would the lives that we really wanted be like? If we could be as creative as we wanted to be? If we could spend more time with our children?’”