“Kisi gurr banane wali se shadi karlo, mazdoori bhi nahi dena padega aur karz bhi nahi lena padega”, says Banerjee babu when Moti, the acclaimed “rasiya” of Sultanganj asks him for some debt. The above dialogue is from the 1973 movie, Saudagar which revolves around a man who sells the best jaggery in the market and his two wives who are eventually responsible for making it. The movie highlights the major part played by women that generates income apart from their daily household work and questions the stable notions of the ‘male breadwinner’. While Moti is proud of being the best jaggery seller, one eventually realizes that his role is too meagre compared to Majubee’s work of converting the date nectar into jaggery. This movie opens new lenses to analyze the notion of ‘work’. It shows that a woman must be able to work for her husband or the patriarch for nothing in return. Their labour has often been invisibilized largely because of being unpaid. If a woman generates any form of income apart from their husbands’ or fathers’, it is always considered supplementary even if it might be the larger share. If she is collaborating in some work with the men of her family, her work is considered mere help. Patriarchy and capitalism function closely to naturalize certain work attributed to women and subsequently devalue them.  

The understanding of ‘work’ revolves around the idea of a productive activity that could be marketed to generate a monetary return. Such a restrictive understanding fails to recognize the specific ways in which different social identities communicate with the notion of ‘work’ (Ferguson 2020). The core of the capitalist economic system is profit maximization and therefore it creates a hierarchal division of labour that intersects unequally with different social identities. It creates dichotomies like the public and the private, work and home, paid and unpaid. In doing so, it becomes easy for capitalism to value certain forms of work and devalue others. Who benefits from this unpaid nature of women’s work? Surely men, but also capitalism. Capitalism has often used the women workforce by bringing them into factories and throwing them out according to its requirement. Capitalism and patriarchy collaborate in determining that women’s work must be devalued and devalorized as it is not directly related to the market. Scholars have argued that women even if they are employed in paid work or not have a distinct relationship with the economic structure defined by their unequal status both within the family (the private sphere) and outside (the public and productive sphere) (Bhattacharya 2017).

It is erroneous to see the unpaid work that women perform as unrelated to the market or the economy. Several Marxist-Feminist scholars have pointed out that capitalism thrives on the unpaid labour performed by women (Vogel 2017). What happens in a capitalist mode of production? In the simplest sense, the industrialized economy functions to produce profit which will be accrued by those who own the means of production, i.e., the capitalists. This profit is drawn from the surplus labour of the workers for which they are not paid. The wage is certainly not sufficient enough to reproduce a worker to work another day. Further, in a capitalist mode of production, there is an army of reserved labour waiting to get the same exploitative work as capitalism has destroyed all earlier forms of production which were barriers to its development. If the wage is not sufficient to reproduce the worker, then there must be something that functions in such a way that ensures the workers turn up to the factories and other places of work. There is some factor that is pushing the process of production from behind. It is the social reproductive role of women, the housework, and the care work that enables these workers to go back to ‘productive’ work every single day. Social reproduction thus becomes the driving force of production (Bhattacharya 2017). However, capitalism does not pay for such work which is to be performed by women. It goes on to naturalize the role of women as housewives who must perform housework irrespective of whether they are engaged in some other form of waged work or not. Such a realization has led several scholars to argue for wages against housework. Housework has never been a private matter; it has always been part of the economic structure and the structure has benefitted from its unpaid nature (Federici 1974).

The neoliberal capitalist economy has created precarious work situations for everyone. The clear distinction between a woman’s economic and reproductive and hence paid and unpaid labour no longer exists the way it has mostly been understood. There are spaces in between these extremes which shows that while women work in gainful economic activities, they are not even paid for them. While housework and care are one form of unpaid labour, another form of unpaid labour exists where women work, such as in areas like subsistence agriculture, cattle rearing, small family business, etc (N. 2020). The line between these two forms of unpaid labour has often been invisibilized. In the neo-liberal economy, this is starkly evident. The neat divide between the formal and informal sectors does not exist anymore. Furthermore, there is a sharp decline in any form of availability of work. Such a situation has prompted a very significant population to depend on self-employment. Occupations like running food stalls, sweet shops, general stores, etc., all function because of the unpaid work that women put in behind the back. One can easily observe small food stalls on every street. Once you interrogate the preparation and production, you realize it is the wife who has already done half of the work at home. The amount of work that women do daily is obscured as love, respect, and duty. Their work has always remained in the shadows and has been invisibilized from understanding the economic structure more accurately. Such work is also not accounted for data collection, like the census. While the endless hours of a woman’s toiling labour generate income, it is always considered as the man’s income as he has actively engaged in the exchange of the product in the market. He gets all the recognition, pride, and money while the woman who has worked in producing the commodity gets none.

Here, the interplay of the economic structures with the existing notions of Brahmanical patriarchy coupled with modern notions of domesticity comes into the foreground. It is considered to be the function of a ‘good’ wife/daughter/mother/sister to work for the patriarch out of love and respect. The ideologies of a housewife and the male breadwinner function in a way to ensure that generating income remains characteristic of the ‘man’.  These structures of the capitalist economy and patriarchy continuously reinforce each other to the detriment of the already oppressed. The work that women perform is devalued, also because the specific work is considered to be something that does not require a skill. It is assumed that it is the characteristic of women to be able to perform such works. The unpaid labour that goes into housework and petty family businesses are the sites of emotional and affective relationships. It becomes extremely difficult to negotiate prospects of love and exploitative labour as work often falls outside the domain of time and money.

While a huge population of women is engaged in either or both forms of unpaid labour, it is also extremely privatized (Mies 1981). Every woman is working in the patriarch’s home, but that work is not recognized as a collective work performed by a particular social group. Hence, it has led to severe problems in the unionization of women working in these concealed spheres. The lack of collectivization of their interests on the issue of unpaid labour hampers the development of any form of resistance. The unpaid work of women is significant for the maintenance of the economic system. The constant efforts to make visible the shadowed work that women perform and the contestations around it, enable us to argue for not just recognition but also wages. The demand for wages is not just a monetary return but a challenge to the economic structure as it forces the capital to restructure social relations that have always depended on various forms of exploitation and in this case systematic sexist oppression. The restructuring of social relations contains a revolutionary capacity as it challenges the natural attributes given to women and their unpaid work status. It recognizes women as ‘workers’ and becomes favourable to the unity of the working class. As bell hooks has argued “feminism is a movement to end sexist oppression”, making visible the various areas of women’s work like housework, care work, affective and emotional work, etc., must therefore become a very significant part of the feminist movement (hooks 1984).

References:

Bhattacharya, Tithi. 2017. Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. London: Pluto Press.

Federici, Silvia. 1974. “Wages Against Housework.” 74-87.

Ferguson, Susan. 2020. Women and Work: Feminism, Labour, and Social Reproduction. Pluto Press.

hooks, bell. 1984. “Feminism: A Movement to End Sexist Oppression .” In Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre, by bell hooks, 2-32. Boston: south end press.

Mies, Maria. 1981. “The Dynamics of Sexual Division of Labor and Capital Accumulation: Women Lace Workers of Narsapur.” Economic and Political Weekly 487-500.

N., Neetha. 2020. “Exploring Paid and Unpaid Work Dichotomy: A Care-Employment Perspective.” In Labouring Women: Issues and Challenges in Contemporary India, by Avinash Kumar, and Yamini Mishra Praveen Jha, 127-153. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan.

Vogel, Lise. 2017. “Foreword.” In Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, by Tithi Bhattacharya. London: Pluto Press.

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Jyoti Kumari is an MA student at the Centre for Political Studies (CPS), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). Tahseen Fatima is an MA student at the Centre for Political Studies (CPS), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU).

*A version of this article was earlier published in Feminism in India and can be found here.