Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle

In fact, to demand wages for housework does not mean to say that if we are paid we will continue to do this work. It means precisely the opposite. To say that we want wages for housework is the first step toward refusing to do it, because the demand for a wage makes our work visible, which is the most indispensable condition to begin to struggle ag

For what differentiates the reproduction of human beings from the production of commodities is the holistic character of many of the tasks involved.

Not only do women across the world produce the workers that keep the global economy in motion. Starting in the early ’90s there has been a leap in female migration from the Global South to the North, where they provide an increasing percentage of the workforce employed in the service sector and domestic labor.

Compared with assembly-line work, “affective labor” may appear more creative, as workers must engage in a constant rearticulation or reinvention of their subjectivity, choose how much of their “selves” to give to the job, and mediate conflicting interests. But they must do so under the pressure of precarious labor conditions, an intense pace of wor

Why hasn’t the women’s movement posed the question of freeing the university, not simply in terms of what subjects should be studied, but also in terms of eliminating the financial cost of studying?

A typical example is the novel growth of the body industry—ranging from the health club to the massage parlor, with its multiple—sexual, therapeutic, emotional—services, and the industries that have been created around jogging (the popularity of jogging is by itself an indication of the new general awareness that you have to “take care of yourself”

Staples correctly points out that work is inexorably drawn to the home by the pull of unpaid domestic labor, in the sense that by organizing work on a home basis, employers can make it invisible, can undermine workers’ effort to unionize, and drive wages down to a minimum.

For our wagelessness and our dependence have kept men tied to their jobs, by ensuring that whenever they wanted to refuse their work they would be faced with the wife and children who depended on their wage.

Housework was transformed into a natural attribute, rather than being recognized as work, because it was destined to be unwaged. Capital had to convince us that it is a natural, unavoidable, and even fulfilling activity to make us accept working without a wage.