1. Women’s Relationship with Labor
Feminist sweepstakes: From Fighting Back to Leaning In
8/1/2014
Nicolette Amber
Women find themselves in a unique position in relation to labor and the question
of their role in the workforce. The authors, Gross, Cox and Federici, McKay and
VanEvery, Meagher, and Bowman and Cole tackle the topic of women and labor in their
respective articles, and two major themes emerge. First, there appears to be a struggle
within the female demographic itself; as women with roles in formalized labor and
women outside this institutionalized system feel marginalized and degraded by each
other. This phenomenon is impacted by societal expectations and perceptions of valued
labor, largely influenced by wages. Second, as women unite under a feminist umbrella,
there materializes an argument against the social constructions of the modern industrial
era of family and citizenship that inherently oppress women and place them in a
subordinate position to men in the home and in the workplace (both of which are not
mutually exclusive).
On a basic level, each of these texts addresses the oppression of women as being
derived from the capitalist system of today’s western world. In Counter Planning from
the Kitchen, Cox and Federici posit that, “[the left] sees women’s oppression as their
exclusion from capitalist relations,” (1975: 2). Cox and Federici criticize this viewpoint,
because it suggests that the way to elevate the status of women is to simply have them
enter these relations; yet the authors point out that this strategy offers women not the
right to work, but “the right to work more, the right to be further exploited,” (Cox and
Federici 1975: 3). The idea that by entering the existing labor market, women become

2. further taken advantage of, stems from the argument that women’s work in the home
should retain value equal to that of waged employment. The authors point out that
“behind every factory, behind every school, behind every office or mine is the hidden
work of millions of women who have consumed their life, their labour power, in
producing the labour power that works in that factory, school, office, or mine,” (Cox and
Federici 1975: 5). Offering women a place in the institutionalized realm of labor does not
take away from the labor they must continue to perform to keep up the life of their
family, seen as laborers, or future laborers, from the capitalist viewpoint. Again, Cox and
Federici note, “Getting a second job has never released [women] from the first. Two jobs
have only meant for women even less time and energy to struggle against both,” (Cox
and Federici 1975: 5).
Due to this inequality in the labor market, in Gender, Family, and Income
Maintenance McKay and VanEvery argue that, “The welfare state relies on the provision
of care by families, but in its current form, is unable to recognize the main providers of
family care (usually women) as full citizens with respect to benefit entitlement,” (2000:
270). As such, they argue for the implementation of a Citizens Basic Income (CBI). A
CBI, they posit, would help remedy the inequities present in the labor market, where
women have historically struggled to gain a solid presence. Cox and Federici discuss the
idea of citizenship, as being best understood in the public sphere, where organized labor
also exists. Gender conceptions have framed the roles of men and women; men are
workers (labor, existing in the public realm, and so also citizens), and women are wives
(a relationship tied not to labor and the public, but to their husband; thus placing them at
a distance from citizenship and the rights that accompany this status). “The modern

3. liberal democracy, of which the twentieth century welfare state is one form, relies on a
model of family obligation in which the worker-citizen provides for the wife- mother and
her children. This arrangement is justified by an appeal to the natural complementarity of
"man" and "woman,” (McKay and VanEvery 2000: 274). This arrangement ultimately
has resulted in the economic dependence of women on men.
Cox and Federici take up a similar argument, stating that, “The family, in fact, is
essentially the institutionalization of [women’s] wageless labour,” (1975: 7). The authors
note that wage is expression of the power relation between capital and the working class
(1975: 4). However, they are quick to express that despite their proposition that wageless
working women in the home do produce capital, they do not want to engage with it but
would rather destroy it: “Ultimately when we say that we produce capital we are saying
that we can and want to destroy it, rather than engage in a losing battle to move from one
form and degree of exploitation to another,” (1975: 6).
Cox and Federici propose that the Left actually attacks any struggle that might
give women more power, saying, “[the left sees women] as primarily house workers, we
do not measure up to the ‘productive role’ they have assigned to the working class,”
(1975: 19). They quote Wally Secombe in the New Left Review as saying,
“Revolutionary transformation is only possible because the proletariat is engaged
directly in socialized labor and therefore bears as a class the perquisite of a
socialist mode of production. While the labor of housewives remains privatized,
they are unable to prefigure the new order nor spearhead the productive forces in
breaking the old.” (3) (Cox and Federici 1975: 19).

4. They go on to note that since internationally the majority of women work first as house
keepers, this amounts to writing off women from the revolutionary process; actually
accepting their exploitation. In the end, the left has capitalist aims that do not offer
equality for women.
“Capital needs us in the factories as cheap labour, to replace other workers who
are too expensive, but they also need us at home to keep potential trouble makers
off the streets. The seeming difference between the Trotskyist line- housework is
barbarism i.e. all women to the factories--and the libertarian line- housework is
socialism i.e. no work should be paid -is only a difference in tactics within an
overall capitalist strategy,” (Cox and Federici 1975: 21).
McKay and VanEvery use the concept of women being marginalized citizens
because their work in the home is not institutionalized in the public sector to introduce
the idea of “sexual citizenship.” They say, “Despite recognition at the level of discourse
of women's "vital unpaid service" to the nation, this service is still treated as if it were but
a personal one to her husband. A new model of citizenship needs to explicitly recognize
the importance of the "sexual contract,"” (McKay and VanEvery 2000: 277). This
involves a reanalyzing the nature of the relationship between the family and citizenship,
which has strong implications for the construction of gender, (2000: 277). In this way,
women could achieve equal value as men in terms of their contributions to the public
sector; a key aspect of citizenship and what could amount to the end of the exploitive
nature of women’s work today.
The second theme found among these articles is the tension within the

5. demographic of women due to the different relationships many hold with labor,
institutionalized or in the home. A question faced by many women is whether or not they
should seek employment at all. As more and more women are entering the workforce, a
chasm is developing between the perceptions of women who choose to stay home and
those who choose to seek employment in the labor market. The New York Times
published an article by Jane Gross titled, “Women and their Work: How Life Inundates
Art.” In the article Gross sits in on a book club meeting of eight women who had recently
read literature on working mothers. Some of the women in the club work full time, 9 to 5
jobs; others work part time or from home; and a few who do not seek employment.
The women who do not work spoke of feeling marginalized and judged by
professional women; “Ms. Wilde feels the opprobrium of professional women when she
meets them at parties with her husband, a lawyer. ''I can see their eyes glaze over,'' she
said. ''It's like they feel we're slackers. They say things like, 'What do you do all day?' I
feel dismissed, and I resent that,” (Gross 1998: 3). In contrast, the working mothers also
noted feeling judged, “They are angered by a television commercial for AT&T cellular
service in which a small child says that she wishes she were ''an important client'' so her
mother would spend time with her. They quake at recent court decisions giving custody
to fathers because divorced mothers had demanding jobs,” (1998: 5).
The working women conversed about their differing experiences with employers.
Some had great experiences in terms of flexibility, while a few others claimed that
inflexible bosses had led them to either work from home or start up their own businesses,
(Gross 1998: 7). All women had more unified perspectives in relation to their experiences
with their spouses. “All but one said that while their husbands expressed willingness to

6. help with the children and the house, the men rarely lifted a finger unless they were
specifically asked and given detailed instructions about the task at hand,” (Gross 1998:
7). Ultimately, the women unified under the feeling that they were expected to do it all:
“''If you listen to what everybody wants from us,'' Ms. Factor said, ''you come away
thinking that you should be a successful professional who is home with your family,''”
(Gross 1998: 8).
Apart from this unity, one of the key factors contributing to the tension felt among
women over work is apparent in the ethical question of hiring other women as
housekeepers. In Is It Wrong To Pay For Housework, Meagher introduces the discussion
by stating, “To evaluate paid housework is to explore an aspect of the contemporary
meaning and validity of the feminist maxim, “The personal is political,”” (Meagher 2002:
53). It appears that the exit of a worker from the market, and the entrance of this worker
into the private domain of the home is what sparks the controversy. The domestic worker
is neither a member of the family, nor a member of the public sphere where they would
enjoy the benefits involved with socialized labor. In Do Working Mothers Oppress Other
Women? Bowman and Cole address the heart of the conflict among women in relation to
the question of housework. “By paying other women to clean their houses and care for
their children, women in paid employment are held responsible for the emergence of a
whole new class of oppressed domestic workers,” (2009: 158). The issue at stake here is
whether or not women who have managed to advance in the workforce and obtain gainful
employment outside the home are exploiting the women they hire to perform the tasks
they feel to be too menial. Is this relationship actually detrimental to the feminist
movement? Meagher uses an analysis of the Swedish “maid debate” to posit that, “Rather

7. than blaming women who hire housecleaners, progressives should focus instead on
elevating the status of this labor. Securing adequate pay and employment rights for those
who perform this work would be an important material move in this process of cultural
revaluation,” (Meagher 2002: 159).
Bowman and Cole note that most arguments opposing the hiring of house workers
actually reinforce preconceived gendered notions about the domestic realm, and thus
sustain market inequalities. However, what makes the issue so complex is that,
“On one level, hiring a housecleaner is problematic since it uses the market (i.e.,
economic class) to displace inequality from the male-female axis to the
householder-housekeeper axis. The conflict of interest built into this class
relationship is aggravated by the fact that both employer and employee are
women,” (Bowman and Cole 2009: 165).
The fact that a woman managing other women has become controversial points more
gendered constructions of relationships. One does not argue about the ethics of a man
hiring another man to come into his yard and trim his hedges. Bowman and Cole state
that, “it is no doubt verifiable that it is mostly women who manage household workers,
but this is a product of the same gendered division of domestic labor that feminists have
long fought. It seems paradoxical, at the very least, for feminists to make the women who
end up in this gendered role their principal target,” (2009: 172). They go on to argue that
the solution to the issue is to elevate the value of housework itself, and cite a Bang
interviewee as stating, “The only way that housework can be valued more highly is for
men to do it also” (Bang 1995, 27). Furthermore, it is important to consider this issue

8. from the perspective of the domestic worker herself. Meagher found that,
“Some domestic workers are engaged in a collective “struggle for recognition”
that aims to raise their status and that of their work by changing its social
meaning and organization. It seems patronizing and ahistorical not to respect and
support these projects, which potentially have more far-reaching positive
ramifications than refusing to buy the services these workers offer,” (Meagher
2002: 59).
Bowman and Cole raise a similar argument, “Housework needs to be deprivatized and
subjected to the same division of labor and commodification as so many other formerly
domestic tasks,” (2009: 179).
It seems then, that a formalization of housework would be the suitable ideal to
eradicate the idea that women who hire housecleaners are contributing to the oppression
of other women workers. However, Meagher also notes that formalization may not be
enough of a long-term solution. She concludes by stating, “Improved opportunities in the
labor market for women from subordinated racial-ethnic minorities, and redress of gender
inequality in both paid and unpaid work are necessary,” (Meagher 2002: 63).
It is these two themes, the tension within the demographic of women over the
question, “to work, or not to work,” and feminist opposition to the social constructs of
family and citizenship, that largely make up the discussion of women and their
relationship with labor.

9. Works Cited
Bowman, John R. and Alyson M. Cole. (2009). “Do Working Mothers Oppress
Other Women? The “Maid Debate” and the Welfare State Politics of Gender Equality.”
Signs, 35(1). 157-184.
Cox, Nicole and Silvia Federici. (1975). “Counter-Planning from the Kitchen.”
Wages for Housework: A Perspective On Capital and the Left. New York Wages for
Housework Committee and Falling Wall Press. 1-23.
Gross, J. (1998, August 23). Women and Their Work: How Life Inundates Art.
The New York Times.
McKay, Ailsa and Jo VanEvery. (2000). “Gender Family and Income
Maintenance: A Feminist Case for Citizens Basic Income.” Social Politics, Oxford
University Press. 266-284.
Meagher, Gabrielle. (2002). “Is It Wrong to Pay for Housework?” Hypatia. 17(2),
52-66.