Women's Unpaid Labour Research Articles

Confucian Familialism and the Crisis of Care

Abstract This paper critically examines Confucian proposals for social welfare espoused by contemporary Confucian moral and political theorists, who promote a familialist, residual welfare state in which welfare provision should be the family's primary responsibility and public assistance be a last resort only available to the poor without family support. By investigating the situation in South Korea, a country whose welfare system bears a striking resemblance to the Confucian ideal, I argue that the Confucian scheme is inherently flawed. It considers poverty to be a personal failure, idealizes the family as a single unity of common interest free from power hierarchies, and lacks knowledge about social reproduction. Their proposal in actuality humiliates and excludes disadvantaged and marginalized people from social protection, abdicates the state's responsibility for the well-being of citizens, and colludes with capitalism in free riding on women's unpaid labor.

From the Welfare State to the Carceral State: Whither Social Reproduction?

Historical, feminist scholarship demonstrates that the welfare state underwrote the work of social reproduction, enabling procreation, socialization, sexuality, nurturance, and family maintenance. Carried out by families and other public and private social institutions, social reproduction includes making food, clothing, and shelter available for immediate consumption; ensuring the health and productivity of the current and future labor force; providing for people too old, too young, or too sick to care for themselves; and socializing family members. Historically, social reproduction includes both women's unpaid labor in the home and low-paid labor in the market and converts the wages of paid workers into the means of subsistence for the entire household. The economic crisis of the mid-1970s marked the end of the “golden age” of capitalism, and yielded neoliberal politics that sought to undo the redistributive elements of the New Deal and the Great Society. It called for a smaller state, greater reliance on market forces, and reduced expenditure on family maintenance. This article, a reprint of a 2017 book chapter, explores the crisis in social reproduction in the United States that surfaced with the rise of neoliberalism and the “carceral state.”

The Role of Women in the Economic Contribution to the Household Economy: Employment Analysis Paid and Unpaid

This research offers a comprehensive examination of women's economic contributions to the household economy, encompassing both paid employment and unpaid labor. Through a multifaceted analysis, the study delves into the intricate landscape of women's roles, challenges, and the transformative potential of initiatives aimed at fostering gender equality. The findings reveal the expanding participation of women in various sectors of paid employment, highlighting its positive impact on economic empowerment, household income, and overall economic growth. Equally significant is the unveiling of women's unpaid labor—caregiving, emotional support, and household chores—often rendered invisible within traditional economic frameworks. The research underscores the urgency of recognizing and valuing these contributions to rectify historical oversight and more accurately depict women's impact on households and economies. However, persistent gender inequities, unequal distribution of household responsibilities, and resistance to change present challenges that require targeted policy interventions and cultural shifts. Through collective action, encompassing policy changes, cultural transformations, and inclusive attitudes, societies can leverage the diverse economic roles of women to pave the way for a more equitable and prosperous future

Women's voluntary work in the community: a question of recognition and rewards

ABSTRACT In South Korea, the state has played a minimal role in social provisioning, and as such, care provisions have been dependent on women's unpaid labour. Women's unpaid labour, especially in terms of voluntary activities, has played an important role in the sustenance of the community. However, women's voluntary work is often devalued as a free and readily available resource in public policy. Over the last few decades, a series of innovative policies on building community and promoting social economy have been implemented in South Korea to address problems of low economic growth, an ageing population, and polarisation of the society owing to neoliberal restructuring. While Korean women played pivotal roles in these innovative community-building projects, the sociopolitical connotations of their voluntary work, including appropriate public recognition and rewards, have rarely been discussed. This paper examines Korean women's role in the government-funded neighbourhood community-building project (Maeulmandeulgi) in South Korea. Reviewing public documents and survey data, this paper identifies existing gaps between policy discourses and practices, and examines their causes and fallouts, including rising discontent among community activists over these gaps. The paper also discusses the sociopolitical meaning of women's voluntary work for community building and the kind of changes that would be necessary to recognise and reward suitably women's voluntary work in the community.

Digital Piecework

In 1975 women in Iceland went on strike, bringing the entire nation to a standstill. For one full day, referred to now as "the long Friday," 90 percent of women didn't show up to their jobs, and refused to cook, clean, or look after children and the elderly. Men scrambled—overwhelming restaurants with food orders and working longer and harder than usual in attempt to do both care work and their paid work. The point of the strike was to draw attention to what socialist feminists had been arguing for decades: economies are built upon women's unpaid labor. Their action showed how capitalism has a propensity to make invisible the labor of people with little political power—both by refusing to recognize it as work and by refusing to pay for it.

"She Was My Kind of Scientist"

In the late 1960s, the North American women's liberation movement was reaching a highpoint of activity, its militancy complemented by a flourishing literature. This was the environment into which Margaret Benston's 1969 Monthly Review essay, "The Political Economy of Women's Liberation," struck like a lightning bolt. At the time, many in the movement were describing women's situation in terms of sociological roles, functions, and structures—reproduction, socialization, psychology, sexuality, and the like. In contrast, Benston proposed an analysis in Marxist terms of women's unpaid labor in the family household. In this way, she definitively shifted the framework for discussion of women's oppression onto the terrain of Marxist political economy.

Reconceptualising play: Balancing childcare, extra‐curricular activities and free play in contemporary childhoods

This paper rethinks geographical approaches to children's play in the Global North. One narrowly conceived strand of past research considered the erosion of outdoor free play, but overlooked children's views of alternative play environments (e.g., out‐of‐school activities). A separate thread examined the feminisation of employment and growth in childcare, but investigations into children's play in care‐based environments are rare, and explorations of their ability to balance different play landscapes are lacking. This paper builds on insights from both lines of research, and challenges their deficiencies, to map out a more broadly conceived geography of play. Drawing on rigorous quantitative and qualitative research with middle‐ and working‐class parents and children, the paper examines the socially differentiated reconciliation of neighbourhood, extra‐curricular and care‐based play in contemporary British childhoods. The analysis highlights stark class differences in the balance between these play environments. Middle‐class children's elective engagement in extra‐curricular activities results in reduced outdoor free play, but they have little control over the total time they play in care environments. Working‐class children have greater experience of playing out, but are underscheduled as they have less than desired access to play in structured activities and wraparound care. In conclusion, the paper argues that geographers must: (1) move beyond the romanticisation of free play and recognise children's right to participate in a diversity of playful spaces; (2) embrace an intergenerational approach which recognises that play is not a matter for children alone – adults can facilitate as well as limit play, but reliance on women's unpaid labour makes play a feminist issue; and (3) uncover play's role in social reproduction as wider inequalities emerge in, and are reproduced through, children's landscapes of play in times of austerity, whether as here in terms of class, or along other axes of social differentiation or location.

Women's Unpaid Labour in Neo-Liberal India

This paper explores trends in women's unpaid labour across the national employment surveys of 1993-1994, 1999-2000 and 2004. It argues that unpaid labour by women in production constitutes an important element in understanding how restricted employment opportunities have affected women across the period of neo4iberal reforms in India. It shows how employment trends and patterns in recent times appear to have thrown up many socially regressive trends in the sphere of women's work.

The Politics of Food: Gender, Family, Community and Collective Feeding in South Wales in the General Strike and Miners' Lockout of 1926

This article features the General Strike and Miners’ Lockout in South Wales in 1926. It examines the Lockout from the perspective of social and gender history, focusing on communal eating which was a central feature of community survival and resistance. It documents the extensive network of soup kitchens for miners, which was established across the South Wales coal field during the seven months of the Lockout. In addition school feeding and the involvement of both central and local authorities is analysed. The article highlights the opportunities that arose from the Lockout, particularly through communal eating, for a reduction in gender segregation and a challenge to male dominance. It concludes that overall, women in these mining communities were concerned to maintain class solidarity with their men rather than to make advances for women. Maintaining the masculine identity of the militant miner, which necessarily incorporated male bonding and women's subordination, was regarded as an essential feature of the class struggle. The General Strike, and the epic struggle of the miners which followed, have long been regarded as seminal events in the history of the twentieth-century labour movement. It is remembered as perhaps the greatest episode in working class solidarity in British history. Historians writing from a left wing perspective have also been drawn to the leap in class consciousness which occurred in some local areas, transforming the Strike/Lockout from a struggle to defend wages and living standards to the exercise of real workers’ power.1 The vast specialist historiography on this topic, much of which emanates from the 1970s and earlier, focuses very much on the politics of industrial conflict as played out at both national and local levels.2 This emphasis on traditional ‘labour history’ left women either invisible or on the margins of the conflict, although attempts were made from a ‘women's history approach’ by Sarah Boston and Shiela Lewenhak to include women in the General Strike in their more general narratives.3 Despite the advent of ‘gender history’ from the late 1980s there have been no major studies of the social and gender impact of the 1926 dispute, although recently both Ian Haywood and Maroula Joannou have addressed gender aspects of the General Strike through the literature of the period.4 Ellen Wilkinson's novel Clash is perhaps unique in that it develops a socialist–feminist perspective through her heroine, labour activist Joan Craig, who is committed to preserving her independence within marriage.5 Virtually all the studies of this topic focus heavily on the nine days of the General Strike with little consideration of the seven-month Lockout which followed the collapse of the General Strike on 12 May 1926. The only specialist work on the Lockout is Gerard Noel's forgotten text The Great Lockout of 1926 (1976).6 This impressionistic account attempts to bring in some social aspects of the dispute, although even here women make only a fleeting appearance and there is no serious attempt to examine the position of women in the coalfield communities. It is hoped that this article will begin the process of establishing a gendered approach to the General Strike and Miners’ Lockout. Research on this question necessitates a detailed local case study methodology rather than a broad national survey. This article concentrates on Britain's largest (by number of miners) and most militant coalfield, South Wales, which also, unlike most other coalfields, possessed a distinctive separate identity from the surrounding area. Chris Williams has acknowledged that gender history in Wales is still at an early stage.7 In a recent article Paul O’Leary argues that whilst major advances have been made to map out the experiences of women in modern Welsh history, the overall emphasis on community cohesion (rather than social divisions such as gender and ethnicity) has inhibited the development of an integrated approach, often leaving women's history as an ‘add on’ to the dominant narratives.8 The historicization of men in Wales, on the other hand, has scarcely been recognized. O’Leary goes on to make the case for the centrality of gender for research in Welsh history.9 This involves collapsing the public/private divide, being attentive to family dynamics, acknowledging the pivotal role of women's unpaid labour to the local economy, and recognizing both femininity and masculinity as essential components of any historical enquiry. Using this approach, this article will analyse in depth one aspect of the dispute which was central to community survival: food and communal eating.

Connecting Time and Space: The Significance of Transformations in Women's Work in the City

AbstractGrowing numbers of women with children living in western cities are entering the labour market, raising new questions about changes in the allocation of the tasks of social reproduction between household members and others and about the effects of the increasing time women now spend in the workplace. As Manuel Castells noted over 25 years ago, women's unpaid labour has long been essential, not only in the domestic arena, but also in patching together facilities separated in space. The spatial layout of cities, with its specialized and segregated land‐uses, only works, he argued, if women's unpaid labour is available to connect urban locations. But many women now spend many more hours in the labour market, replacing their former domestic labour with a range of commodified goods and services as well as by help from a range of related or unrelated others, sometimes but not always remunerated and/or by state‐provided or supported services. This article examines the consequences of the growth of women's employment in Britain and the concomitant decline of the old breadwinner family, the growth of workfare policies that assume all individuals are available for waged work and the rise of commodified caring. The arguments are illustrated by empirical examples from interviews undertaken with middle‐class mothers in waged work in London and Manchester in the UK.

Gender power under female leadership: a local women’s association in Japan

In this article I examine the major activities of one of Japan's local women's associations (fujinkai),1 the Yosugi Women's Association (YWA),2 to demonstrate how women exercise power by utilizing gender roles in voluntary community activities.3 Since women's unpaid labor in structured organizations in the public sphere has been a topic of study over the last decade,4 exploring how the concept of gender has enhanced the significance of women in unpaid community activities is timely. Voluntary work has been underestimated in labor history, women's history, and feminist theories, and is in need of a proper theoretical framework. In addition, I observed characteristics of women in this local voluntary association and show that the patterns of members' behavior challenge longstanding stereotypes.

Feminising the Economy: Metaphors, strategies, politics

Within contemporary feminism, common approaches to feminising the economy involve adding a sphere or sector or attributing a monetary value to women's unpaid labour. Each of these approaches is interested in creating an accurate representation of the real or 'whole' economy. But these representations are in the same lineage as mainstream economic conceptions; the economy remains a bounded entity that can be known by enumerating its parts. The 'adding on' and 'counting in' strategies employed by feminists complete the picture of what is needed to produce social well-being but do not necessarily help us think differently about how goods and services are or might be produced. In this article, the authors ask how feminist economic theory might contribute to envisioning or enacting alternative economies. They find answers to this question through reading feminist interventions for glimmers of a deconstructive project that opens 'the economy' to difference. Pursuing these glimmers, they attempt to insert the possibility of non-capitalist forms of economy, including economies of generosity, non-profit businesses, worker collectives and alternative capitalist enterprises impelled by a social or environmental ethic. In place of the view of the economy as a whole comprised of a pre-established number of parts or sectors, it can begin to be seen as a discursive construct that can be reconstructed to contribute to social transformation.

The Functions of Class at the Present Time: Including Taste, or Sex and Class as Culture

Gagnier provides an analytic account of current uses of gender, sex and sexuality, and of class as objective condition, role, identity, subjectivity, performance, product of cultural formation, pain and pleasure. She concludes that we shall do better today to take from the history of political economy a focus on the division of labour, the kinds of work people do, including women's unpaid labour at home, and the ways that work structures identity and subjectivity, than on more abstract class identity (e.g. wage-labourers and capitalists), and to see that both local and global divisions of labour or work patterns are along race and gender lines as much as along class lines. The introduction of consumption models of taste and status draws together both class and gender, for consumption and leisure, the realm for most wage-labourers of pleasure, is as significant in the formation of identity and subjectivity as work, production or pain. We should account for people's pleasures and desires as well as their pain and place in narrowly conceived 'productive' relations. Class is no less significant than it always was, but future work should disaggregate the concept along these lines, mindful of gender salience in the division of labour and the reproduction of class. And it should include critical analysis of the realms of taste, pleasure, consumption, leisure and status.

Patriotic Toil: Northern Women and the American Civil War

During the Civil War, the United States Sanitary Commission attempted to replace female charity networks and traditions of voluntarism with a centralized organization to ensure that women's support for the war effort served an elite, liberal vision of nationhood. After years of debate over women's place in the democracy and status as citizens, soldier relief work offered women an occasion to demonstrate their patriotism and their rights to inclusion in the body politic. Exploring the economic and ideological conflicts that surrounded women's unpaid labor on behalf of the Union army, Jeanie Attie reveals the impact of the Civil War on the gender structure of nineteenth-century America. She illuminates how the war became a testing ground for the gendering of political rights and the ideological separation of men's and women's domains of work and influence.

Women's Work in a Rural Community: Dungog and the Upper Williams Valley, 1880-1900

This article analyses the position of women in the economy of a rural community in the second half of the nineteenth century. The town of Dungog and its surrounding region in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales were being settled by Europeans in these decades. The article explores the relationship between family needs and aspirations, the economic constraints and opportunities available to women in this community. It concludes that while more economic opportunities such as teaching and nursing were opening for single women, most women's work remained part of the family enterprise. In addition, women's unpaid labour was vital in the creation ofDungog's quality infrastructure such as schools, churches and hospitals.

Revaluing the household economy

Abstract The household economy remains associated with women and the market economy with men and, as feminists have so clearly demonstrated, because of the different social salience of these two economies, this has significant implications for women's citizenship. Rendering the household economy invisible was a process which is traced from the middle of the nineteenth century. Also examined is a trend over recent years to reverse this process. Greater recognition is being afforded to the household economy at the international and national levels in social policy and even within standard economics. Nonetheless empirical evidence about how women and men spend their time still shows very different patterns, despite women's increasing absorption into the market economy. The Australian data makes clear that the old patterns die hard. This once again invites raising the implications of the exploitation of women's unpaid labour by men. Given that increasing men's domestic contribution has proved so difficult to achieve a possible structural approach is canvassed.

Home and work: housework, wages, and the ideology of labor in the early republic

Over the course of a two hundred year period, women's domestic labor gradually lost its footing as a recognized aspect of economic life in America. The image of the colonial goodwife, valued for her contribution to household prosperity, had been replaced by the image of a and a non-producer. This book is a history of housework in the United States prior to the Civil War. More particularly, it is a history of women's unpaid domestic labor in the context of the emergence of an industrialized society in the northern United States. Boydston argues that just as a capitalist economic order had first to teach that wages were the measure of a man's worth, it had at the same time, implicitly or explicitly, to teach that those who did not draw wages were dependent and not essential to the real economy. Developing a striking account of the gender and labor systems that characterized industrializing America, Boydston explains how this effected the devaluation of women's unpaid labor.

The locus of reproduction: women's labour in the Zambian Copperbelt, 1927–1953

An important advance in the study of southern African labour history in the last decade has been the recognition that capital has historically sought to relieve itself of the costs of social reproduction. The argument suggests that South African mining capital, in order to reduce the cost of wages paid to its African employees thus increasing the level of surplus value it could extract sought to localise social reproduction in the rural areas. By encouraging a system of migrant labour, companies avoided responsibility both for the maintenance of workers' families at the mine during their period of employment and for the maintenance of the workers themselves at the end of their working lives. I This paper, primarily a study of the causes, structure, and implications of women's involvement in the Zambian (Northern Rhodesian) copper mining industry, questions both the conceptual and spatial dimensions accorded social reproduction in this paradigm. Social reproduction, it suggests, involves not only the generational reproduction of the working class as a whole, but also the daily reproduction of labour power, that is, the daily maintenance of the worker. The Northern Rhodesian mining companies saw it in their interest to localise this second aspect of women's reproductive labour not in the rural areas, as the standard paradigm would predict, but under company domain and on company property. Women's unpaid labour, performed in the mining compounds, reproduced labour power on a daily basis and increased its productivity in the long term more effectively and cheaply than could the companies directly. Thus, contrary to Wolpe's South African model, the ability of capital in Northern Rhodesia to extract greater surplus value depended on its success in relocating women's reproductive labour to the urban areas. Moreover, although this calculation was initially based on a short-term assessment of the potential reduction of wage costs, some elements of management came to suspect by the second

Women and health care: a comparison of theories.

There are three distinct approaches to the analysis of women's position in society, and thus of women's relation to the health care system. Liberal feminists seek equal opportunity "within the system," deman equal opportunity and employment for women in health care, and are critical of the patronizing attitudes of physicians. Radical feminists reject "the system" as one based on the oppression of women and seek to build alternative structures to better fill their needs. They see the division between man and woman as the primary contradiction in society and patriarchy as its fundamental institution. They have initiated self-help groups and women's clinics to extend the base of health care controlled by women in their own interests. Marxist-feminists see the particular oppression of women as generated by contradications within the development of capitalism. Women's unpaid labor at home and underpaid labor in the work force both serve the interests of the owners of capital. The health care system serves these same interests; it maintains and perpetuates the social class structure while becoming increasingly alienated from the health needs of the majority of the population.