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Wages For Housework: The Strategy for Women'’s Liberation

Pat Sweeney

Many “feminist” writers have contributed to
the ideology of housework. Radical-feminists,
while recognizing the identification of house-
work with our female nature, have proposed
sharing this work with a man and leaving the
home for outside work. Socialist-feminists, de-
scribing housework as precapitalist, have pro-
claimed that our goal should be toward “indus-
trialization,” which would liberate our time for
more work—but in a factory, if not a collective
kitchen. Liberal feminists have defined our
problem as “lack of consciousness,” describing
women as dupes of Madison Avenue ad-men.
Finally, there are those feminists who, much to
capitalists’ rejoicing, have glorified our forced
labor in the home as the embodiment of the
best human potentials: our capacity to nurture
and care, our very capacity to love. One thing
they all agree on is that women should not be
paid for this work, because this presumably
would institutionalize us in the home, and
extend the control of the state to “the one area
of freedom we have in our lives.”

Contrary to these criticisms, the Wages for
Housework Committee’s perspective is based on

. the fact that housework is already controlled

and institutionalized (Mother’s Day is nothing
less than the celebration of this institutionaliza-
tion!) precisely because this work is unwaged.
Society is organized to force us into this job,
and the fact that we don’t receive a wage for the
work continuously undermines our power to
refuse it. '

That housework is unwaged means first of all
that it appears not as work, but as part of our
female nature. Thus, when we refuse part of this
work —as, for example, lesbian women do in
refusing to provide sexual services to men—we
are branded as perverts, as if we were breaking
some law of nature. We are divided into “good”
and “bad” women depending on whether or not
we do the housework and whether or not we do
it for free. In this society to be a good woman —
or just to be a woman—is to be a good servant
at everyone’s disposal 24 hours a day; it means
accepting that this work should not be paid
because it supposedly fulfills our nature, and
thus contains its own reward.

Housework is not just washing dishes, scrub-
bing floors, or raising babies. What we do at

home is produce and reproduce workers: every
day we create and restore the capacity of others
(and ourselves) to work, and to be exploited. It
is ironic that as houseworkers we are not in-
cluded in the nation’s labor force, for without
this work the workforce would not exist. The
lack of a wage obscures the indispensability of
our work to the functioning of this society.
Housework makes every other work possible.
No car could be produced, no coal could be
dug, no office could be run, if there were not
women at home servicing and reproducing
those who make the cars, those who dig the
coal, those who run the offices. This is the
sexual division of labor: workers make cars, and
women make the workers who make the cars.
And to make a worker is a much more time- and
energy-consuming job than to make a car! Not
only do we “reproduce” them physically—
cooking their dinners, doing the shopping
(shopping is work, not consumption as some
“feminists” would have us believe). We also
service workers emotionally —taking the brunt
of their tiredness and frustration day after day.
And we service workers sexually —the Saturday-
night screw keeps them going for yet another
week at the assembly line or desk.

It appears that we freely donate all this work
to our husbands and children out of our love for
them. In reality we are working for the same
bosses, who are getting two workers for the price
of one. Our lives are governed by the same work
schedule as those we serve. When we cook
dinner or when we “make love” is determined
by the factory time-clock. Not only the quan-
tity, but also the quality of workers we repro-
duce is controlled. If they don’t need many
workers, we are sterilized; if they need more
workers we are denied access to contraceptives
and are forced to resort to backstreet butchers
(the right to life is never claimed for women).
Likewise, if we are on welfare or we tend to
produce “troublemakers,” we are again steril-
ized.

In every case, our sexuality is continuously
under control to make sure that we use it pro-
ductively. Lesbianism and teenage sex are il-
legal, and rape in the family (or the battered
wife) is not a crime since readily available
sexual service is part of our job. It is the lack of