Wages Against Housework

“In the same way as god created Eve to give pleasure to Adam, so did capital create the housewife to service the male worker physically, emotionally and sexually” (p. 78)

Housework is not considered on equal footing as “real work” since housewives are not paid a wage, they aren't even granted the capitalist validation of being recognized as a worker. Furthermore, this unwaged housework has not only been imposed on women but has been transformed into a natural attribute of what it means to be a woman. Demanding wages for housework is a revolutionary demand not because it will destroy capital but because it forces capital to acknowledge this invisible labour and to restructure social relations in better terms for women. It is a refusal of housework as the expression of women's nature, a refusal of the female role that capital has invented (pp. 80-81).

Some women have second jobs that are actually paid, they become nurses, maids, teachers, secretaries... functions that not only increase their exploitation but that simply reproduces their role at home (“housewife condition”) in different forms. This is problematic for many reasons, one of which being the impossibility to distinguish between where work begins and ends and where their desires begin (pp. 83-84).

But won't the struggle for wages make housework even more expected and entrenched? On the contrary, women are already expected to accomplish so much precisely because they are not being paid for their work, because it is assumed to be a “woman's thing” that they enjoy doing. But once housework and care are recognised as labour, something that can be refused and that isn't intrinsic to the state of being a woman; that is when the position of man becomes undermined.