Teach yourself Marxism: Women, housework and the system

1950s adverts championed household goods as liberation (Pic: SenseiAlan on flickr)

Most women in Britain now work outside the home. But they still do most of the childcare and housework.

Right wingers urge women to seek fulfilment in serving their husbands’ needs. But there is nothing natural about a woman with a duster.

Over 100 years ago, the Russian revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai argued, “Capitalism has placed on the shoulders of the woman a burden which crushes her—it has made her a wage worker without having lessened her cares as a housekeeper and mother.”

Kollontai and other leading Marxists were alert to the misery housework imposed on women. Lenin described how housework chains women to the kitchen and the nursery, and wastes their labour on “barbarously unproductive, petty, nerve‑racking, stultifying and crushing drudgery”.

Marxists did not just condemn the miseries of housework. They analysed the role women’s domestic labour played in the system and mapped out a strategy to liberate women from their mops and brooms.

Before the Industrial Revolution, homes were centres of production, and all family members contributed to the family economy.

Capitalist methods of production, however, involved the creation of mills and factories. Waged labour became separated from domestic labour and women who worked could no longer look after their families.

Many working class people fought for a “family wage” which meant men were paid more so women could stay at home and care for others. Women became dependent on men.

Women isolated at home found ways to organise collectively. But the idea of male breadwinners and female housewives justified low pay and job segregation and established women’s role as the homemakers.

One strategy for addressing this inequality was the wages for housework campaign which began in the early 1970s. Socialist feminists argued that housework was necessary for the creation of labour power and should be rewarded with a wage.

It is right to highlight all the unpaid work women do—but paying wages for housework is not a solution.

The rich already pay women wages to do their housework and care for their children. Paying men more money to give their partners would only entrench women’s dependency on male wage earners.

Theoretically, the state could pay wages for housework—but it is right wing politicians who want to use tax breaks to encourage women to have more babies. They are not interested in empowering women.

Caring for loved ones shapes our lives. It is also a vital part of the social reproduction of the system, which needs a healthy workforce now and a new generation of workers in the future. Capitalism could not function without this process.

But caring, cooking and cleaning does not create ­surplus value. A meal I make for my family has use value, but it does not have exchange value.

But if I buy in a meal cooked by someone else, it does have exchange value and it does create profits.

The endless search for new ways to make profits reshapes housework. Household goods, including washing machines, fridges and microwaves, led to a shift away from community facilities but did not give women more free time.

Marx argued that to help women “domestic work, such as sewing and mending, must be replaced by the purchase of ready-made articles”.

This has happened—but it has only freed women up to go to work to pay for things they don’t have time for because they work.

Women who work outside the home can organise to fight for equal pay and better conditions by hitting the bosses’ profits. Teachers and nurses have the collective power to shake up the system that needs childcare and health care.

Ultimately, we need to look to the possibility of making housework a social responsibility and creating collective alternatives to the privatised, nuclear family. In the meantime, dump the duster.