House/work
on Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf, Women, Race & Class by Angela Davis, Feminism, Interrupted by Lola Olufemi and Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez
A closer look at Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas and the book that I read—by cosmic coincidence—right after, Angela Davis’ Women, Race & Class. Two texts, fifty years apart. What follows here will not do justice the essence of these women. It will not capture the details of their lives or the circumstances that brought them their status and place in their respective societies. What I would like to attempt with the aid of these two texts is to demonstrate just how critical it is to decommission your readings from homogeneity. Should you be fortunate enough, and in possession of radical commitment, your hand that picks the spine could play a part in combating molecules of hegemony that pervades your personal psyche. Between Woolf and Davis, I hope you will see the inadequacies of a singular voice, the false promise of “universal oppression”, and the mighty generosity of time: the promise of progress, though achingly slow; and the guarantee of a future, sharp and light.
The case at hand: Housework. Woolf advocated for Wages for Housework—a movement that only came into prominence in 1972, 3 decades after Woolf’s death. This transnational movement demanded that “housework” and “domestic work” be recognised as real work, and, more importantly, exploited work. This invisible work, as Louise Toupin wrote in her historical account of the Wages for Housework movement, define women’s place in social organisation and the gendered division of labour. Keeping this work unpaid reproduces women’s place in the family, and by extension the society. This too, was the concern by which Woolf advocated wages for housework. Discussing how women might contribute to the cessation of war, Woolf proposed that they cannot—not as long as they are economically dependent on their husbands. It is only when they achieve economic independence could they wield any political power and offer to their society opinions and efforts that contradict their husbands’. She wrote:
"[Wages are] the most effective way in which we can ensure that the large and very honourable class of married women shall have a mind and a will of their own, with which, if his mind and will are good in her eyes, to support her husband, if bad to resist him, in any case to cease to be “his woman” and to be her self. You will agree, Sir, without any aspersion upon the lady who bears your name, that to depend upon her for your income would effect a most subtle and undesirable change in your psychology."
Woolf, it is important to note, was operating within the context of middle-class society, comprised of educated men who were seated officials—policymakers, paid stewards of the establishments-- and women whose profession were marriage and motherhood. To further her cause, then, she must appeal to the male audience:
"If your wife were paid for her work, the work of bearing and bringing up children, a real wage, a money wage, so that it became an attractive profession instead of being as it is now an unpaid profession, an unpensioned profession, and therefore a precarious and dishonoured profession, your own slavery would be lightened. No longer need you go to the office at nine-thirty and stay there till six. Work could be equally distributed. …If the State paid your wife a living wage for her work, … the opportunity of freedom would be yours; the most degrading of all servitudes, the intellectual servitude, would be ended; the half-man might become whole."
Of course, a reasonable woman Woolf was, she understood the impossibility of the state granting such a demand, for the funding of war would take greater precedence. She understood that having more professions opened for her remained the woman’s best chance in achieving economic independence—though Woolf was ever so cautious to advise that she refrained from “any profession hostile to freedom, such as the making or the improvement of the weapons of war.” This warning, I realised, bore a greater message: war, and the work women were expected to contribute for war, pushed the issue of housework further into the private realm, or, in other words, war played a major part in the invisibilisation of housework.
It is under this pretext that our current economic framework was built, Diane Coyle, professor of economics at Manchester University told Caroline Criado-Perez in her book Invisible Women. When World War II came along, “the main aim was to understand how much output could be produced and what consumption needed to be sacrificed to make sure there was enough available to support the war effort”. It was counted into ‘the economy’ all that were produced by governments and businesses, but the contribution of unpaid household work were left out: “It was decided,” said Coyle to Criado-Perez, “that this would be too big a task in terms of collecting the data”. Criado-Perez wrote that this omission has built perhaps the greatest gender data gap of all. An estimate, she wrote, suggest that unpaid house and care work could account to 50% of GDP in high-income countries, and 80% in low-income countries. Yet it remains invisible still, and its perceived non-contribution to the economy makes it “a costless resource to exploit”, as succinctly put by British economist Sue Himmelweit. When austerity measures hit the social sector—and they often do—the work and needs of the sector are shifted onto women (“because the work still needs to be done”, Criado-Perez wrote), increasing the volume of their unpaid work.
Left with no resources in the public realm, women—many now have entered the workforce—turned to private household arrangements: negotiating task-sharing between partners, a strategy known as “family-job reconciliation”. But partners—when there is one—often fail to assume domestic responsibilities. In Canada, the 2010 General Social Survey revealed that women remain the primary caregivers for children, spending an average of 50 hours per week in the role. Recent OECD statistic show that women in India spend up to 352 minutes per day on domestic work, 577% more than men (52 minutes). Given these evidence, the demands of Wages for Housework—which include the right to work less, equal pay for all, the right to opt out of childbearing, and free community-controlled nurseries and childcare—do not only seem reasonable, they seem necessary. But the women’s movement in general have not been supportive of Wages for Housework; its outlook seen as backward. Louise Toupin wrote that Wages for Housework was seen
"… as a renunciation of the objective of socialization of domestic work (daycare centres, community services, and so on). In the labour field, the [women’s] movement preferred to invest its efforts in women’s access to the labour market, improvements to working conditions, the obtaining of parental leave, and the creation of community services to facilitate access to paid labour."
Not less important, the women’s movement felt that this would return women to the home and disrupt hard-fought task-sharing arrangements. Angela Davis had more severe objections, writing in her essay The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework that it is “invisible, repetitive, exhausting, unproductive, uncreative”, and “neither women nor men should waste precious hours of their lives on work that is neither stimulating, creative nor productive.” With the expansion of female labour, Davis wrote, industrialisation and socialisation of housework are objective social needs, though the capitalist state and society—reliant on the availability of exploitable bodies to perform housework and creation of labour-power—remains relentlessly hostile to the idea. Davis took the example of the South African society—as described by Hilda Bernstein in her book For Their Triumphs and For Their Tears: Women in Apartheid South Africa—where the architecture of Apartheid viewed Black men as “labour units” with productive functions valuable to the capitalist class, and their wives and children "superfluous appendages – non productive, the women being nothing more than adjuncts to the procreative capacity of the black male labour unit." Housework and child-rearing chores, Davis wrote, are no less than domestic slavery, and government paychecks for housewives would only legitimise their oppression.
Our paths, both pragmatic and radical, have led to dead ends. While radical feminists continue to struggle for the socialisation of housework and family care, women of means have turned to an expedient solution: hiring other women, often poor ones, to do the work. Women across third world nations have left their own land and families to care for those in wealthier countries; risking paltry wages, inhumane living conditions, and mental and physical abuse—all to be able to provide a better life for their families. ILO estimates that globally, there are 52,6 million women over the age of 15 whose primary occupation is domestic worker; representing 3,6% of all paid occupations. In Singapore, the number of Foreign Domestic Workers (FDW) have reached 255,800 last year, with every fifth household hiring a live-in domestic worker. Most come from neighbouring Southeast Asian countries—Indonesia, Philippines, Myanmar—and entered Singapore through agencies who demand from them six months wage’s worth of placement fees. Many receive as little as $600 per month (barely a living wage by Singapore standards, especially when most of the amounts are used to support their own families at home), and many cases of abuse have been reported and tried. Toupin wrote that some Wages for Housework theoreticians conceived of the recourse to female labour from poor countries as “a colonial solution to the ‘housework problem,’” and she herself called it “a relationship of direct exploitation between women”. Davis however, does not believe Wages for Housework is a viable solution. In fact, she argues, the experiences of domestic workers reveal the problematic nature of the strategy:
"Cleaning women, domestic workers, maids - these are the women who know better than anyone else what it means to receive wages for housework. ...And frequently, the demands of the job in a white woman’s home have forced the domestic worker to neglect her own home and even her own children. As paid housekeepers, they have been called upon to be surrogate wives and mothers in millions of white homes."
Further, she noted that wages have not translated into welfare, nor have they bettered the social and economic value of housework. “As long as household workers stand in the shadow of the housewife,” she wrote, “they will continue to receive wages which are more closely related to a housewife’s paycheck. …The Wages for Housework movement assumes that if women were paid for being housewives, they would accordingly enjoy a higher social status. Quite a different story is told by the age-old struggles of the paid household worker, whose condition is more miserable than any other group of workers under capitalism.”
While Woolf once imagined wages for the woman’s liberation, Davis imagines the abolition of housework, seeking not only economic freedom but psychological liberation—and a total overhaul of the concept of the “housewife”. We must, she wrote, actively question the validity and direction of capitalism and take significant steps toward the socialisation of housework, which would require “an end to the profit-motive’s reign over the economy.” An ambitious vision—if not utopic. But I am reminded of Lola Olufemi’s words in her manifesto Feminism, Interrupted, where she asks that we imagine our radical feminist visions not as utopian, but “as something well within our reach”. She wrote in her call to action:
"Let us fight over a vision because our demands must spring from somewhere. This is the task handed down to us and we must approach it with the urgency it demands. We must rise to the challenge with a revolutionary and collective sense of determination; knowing that if we do not see this world someone else will."
Postscript
I had wanted to finish this essay on Olufemi’s words, but I would be remiss not to bring to your attention how this matter will be impacted by labour laws recently passed in Indonesia. The legislation is aimed to slash regulations and drive foreign investments—"a stimulus”, as the government calls it. The new laws will permit hourly wage, removes the three-year maximum duration of contracts and cuts severance benefits, amongst other clauses. The law passed while the government still sits on two bills: one to protect domestic workers, another to abolish sexual violence. Around 4.2 million domestic workers currently serve the nation, employed without insurance, protection, or clear delineation of tasks they are expected to perform, and paid, on average, 20 – 30% below the regional minimum, with some earning as little as 400.000 – 500.000 Rupiahs (SGD 40 – 50) per month. Clearly, the state’s interests lie only in coddling the oligarchy—exacerbating the vulnerable and exploited state of informal workers through exercises in precarity.
The law could also lead to women leaving the workforce, Commissioner Theresia Sri Endras Iswarini from the National Commission on Violence Against Women (Komnas Perempuan) told online platform HaiBunda. Women working the “double day”—those who straddle housework and care work along with formal work—are bound to suffer from stress, burnout, and psychological distress. When they fall sick, who’s to say they will not be seen as mere disruptions corporate productivity? Relaxed regulations and wage systems will make it easy for companies to dismiss those who work the “double day”, a population dominated by women.
There are also, of course, ideological objections to be had. The Wages for Housework movement, Davis wrote, suggests that housewives are “creators of the labour power” that propels capitalist production. Davis dismissed the idea that the housewife is “a secret worker inside the capitalist production process”, stating: "The employer is not concerned in the least about the way labour power is produced and sustained, he is only concerned about its availability and its ability to generate profit. In other words, the capitalist production process presupposes the existence of a body of exploitable workers."
The continuation and completion of housework performed unpaid by mothers and daughters, and under precarious conditions by domestic workers, are preconditions to social production. I have thought long and hard about why women must oppose this law. Its impact on female labour is severe, not to mention possible consequences it might have on maternity/paternity benefits and period leave. But in thinking of this law through the lens of housework, sifting through the words of Woolf and Davis, I have found that the principal reason we must oppose the law is this: Our position, our bodies, underpin capitalist production, and to question it, to resist it, is to move, slowly yet surely, towards its dismantlement. This vision might just be, as Olufemi has resolutely said, something well within our reach.
