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in this session we're going to look at gender race and class we're going to look at how feminists and black feminists have sought to engage with questions of class and marxist theory the italian feminist theorist silvia federici was one of the key marxist feminists to try to engage with marx's class theory writing in the 1970s one of the main points that she made about marxism was that she said marx was unable to think about value producing work other than strictly commodity production and therefore because of his inability to see how value can be produced in places outside of the industrial workplace outside of the factory federici argued that marx was blind to the importance of women's unpaid reproductive labor in the home so why did marx persistently ignore women's reproductive labor federici gives several answers for this one she says is the conditions under which marx was writing he was writing about the working class in 19th century england and at this time the nuclear family as we know it today didn't exist in the same way so people often lived in crowded men working in the cities often lived in crowded dormitories or crowded rooms where they didn't necessarily have a domestic life to come home to at the end of the day of long hours working in a factory and really domestic work didn't emerge as an engine of reproduction until the late 19th century and so domestic life in the sense that we know it today didn't really exist in marx's time marx was unsure how to classify a form of labor that was not subject to monetary valuation most of marx's theories of value are based on industrial capitalism because this is a form of labor for which a wage is paid and for which value can be calculated another reason that federici gives is marx's technologistic concept of revolution for marx freedom comes through the machine and he divided up work into various kinds of hierarchical kinds of work whether it was peasant labor in the fields whether it was domestic labor in the home whether it was work in the factory and work in the factory was seen by marx to be the highest model of historical rationality so marx accepted this hierarchy of capitalist criteria for what constitutes work and waged industrial work was seen at the apex of models of work and finally for marx the wage industrial proletariat was seen as the privileged revolutionary subject he he privili privileged the sphere of of the factory of the industrial workplace and he privileged the the industrial proletariat as being the key to revolutionary action so even though this proletariat was as we've seen through through earlier weeks was a limited section of the world proletariat still for marx he prioritized this this wage proletariat over domestic workers and other workers the black feminist and marxist angela davis writing in her book women racing class in 1983 talked about the housewife the category as the of the housewife as being something that comes into existence under industrial capitalism davis argues that actually under pre-capitalist societies and colonial societies women's domestic labor in the home was very crucial economically and that often women had visible roles in economic tip activity outside the home as well so i was thinking for instance of my grandmother in india who had a recipe book and her recipe book included things like how to make household detergent and how to make household cleaning agents and how to recycle various objects because so much of what was produ what was consumed in the home was actually produced in the home they produced their own butter they produced their own yogurt most of the things they ate were actually also produced in the homes in the homes and so during this period during pre-capitalist colonial period women actually combine the kinds of roles that were seen as both unpaid domestic labor but also paid work and so there wasn't such a distinction between those two and and as such there was a higher value given to to this domestic work because the home was really also a site of economic activity what happens under industrial capitalism is that davis argues that we see a split between the physical between the domestic home economy and the profit oriented economy of capitalism and so tasks that were previously done in the home instead of churning butter in the home instead of making yogurt at the home you go and you you buy it at the store it is produced by workers in a factory and you go and you buy it and you bring it home and gradually this this what davis refers to is this fundamental physical and structural separation between these two spheres means that the domestic home economy becomes more and more undervalued it's still the site of significant unpaid domestic labor but it's not given the same value as it was under a pre-capitalist society [Music] so wages for housework is a campaign that came about in the 1970s where feminists began to say instead of housework being unpaid it should be paid and federici was one of the key proponents of this wages for housework campaign federici argued that the wage is quote the direct measure of our exploitation and therefore the direct expression of the power relation between capital and the working class so for federici this is why the wage has always been a key point of struggle between workers and capital because it is a way we can actually measure exploitation we can measure value and we can measure the degree to which capital is exploiting the worker as we've seen in earlier sessions marx argues that the wage hides the unpaid labor that goes into profit but measuring work by the wage also hides the extent to which family relations social relations have also become relations of production so women working in the home to cook to clean to carry out domestic labor to reproduce the workforce to reproduce children to ultimately enter into the workforce all of this labor that takes place is hidden and the fact that these relations are also relations of production are hidden so the exploitation of women has been effective because there was no way because it was hidden because the lack of a wage meant that it was not recognized as labor and so therefore women's labor in the home appears to just be a personal service outside of capital we do it because we love our children we do it because we love our husbands we do it because we feel that we want to cook a nice meal or we want to keep our homes tidy it's it's seen to be something in some ways optional in some ways done out of love or done out of a feeling of duty but not seen as actually integral to capitalist relations of production the international wages for housework campaign was founded in 1972 in italy and inspired by this international campaign and the civil rights movement poor black women in the u.s who were organized as welfare mothers they were the ones who actually led the first wages for house housework campaign in 1975 and this campaign demanded that women housewives and all of those who engaged in tasks of reproduction should be compensated for that work the wages for housework campaign talked about the economic values of reproductive labor so instead of seeing welfare as something that people should ask the state to receive and will get it if they are deserving of it what this campaign said was welfare is actually a woman's right welfare should be given to all women for who carry out domestic work in the home it should be given to them as their right and so what these black women who were receiving aid for dependent children did was they criticized the stigma that was attached to public assistance they said that child care was only recognized as work when it was done by a child care center when it was done by a nanny or a domestic worker when somebody else was doing it that's when it would be paid but when you are looking after your own children you are not paid and often when you receive state payments for that through welfare you're stigmatized as being somehow unable to look after your own family these are some of the posts this is a poster from the wages for housework campaign strike while the iron is hot and this is a scene from the aid for dependent children campaign so what the wages for housework campaign helped to do was to re-center feminist focus on child care to establish that child care should be seen as a collective responsibility it should be supported by the state and should not just be the individual responsibility of women so the campaign helped to place this issue on the national agenda in the united states in italy and across the globe the argument that was being made by these feminists was if corporations and the state benefited from women's roles in maintaining and reproducing the workforce for capitalism then capitalism and those corporations in the state they should take financial responsibility for that labor [Music] davis considers race and gender together in her analysis and one of the things she's really concerned about is how the concept of the housewife actually comes out of the social conditions of the bourgeoisie in the middle classes so not only is it related to industrial capitalism but it's also more related to the conditions of white middle class women she says for black women housework has never been just the focus of their lives black women have always carried the double burden of housework at home and wage labor outside the home often black women neglected domestic workers had to neglect their own home and family to look after the children of white women to to clean their homes to carry out long hours of domestic labor in their home unable to do their own domestic work or carrying a very heavy burden of doing their own work as well so what are some of the critiques of the wages for housework movement one of the critiques is that domestic life can actually be dispensed with by capitalism and one example of this could be apartheid south africa so that the services provided for women don't necessarily have to be an essential constituent of wage labor under capitalism we can have capitalism without having the domestic sphere at all another critique of the the wages for housework movement is that household workers already received paltry wages for housework so giving women a wage for doing housework doesn't necessarily mean that the domestic sphere is going to become more highly valued another argument is that rather than what uh one of the wages for housework uh feminist uh maria de la costa talked about having a housewife's housewife strike others argued that women need to demand jobs they need to enter that workforce and they need to challenge capitalists at the point of production and then finally it has been argued that the psychological drudgery of housework won't be solved by paying a wage so what are some other solutions to the reproductive question well davis argues that domestic work and care work should be socialized that is it should be provided for by the government instead of women doing this domestic work or care work and being paid for it she says we should be demanding universal and subsidized child care this might include the socialization of meal preparation and housework like took place in china and the ussr in the 20th century after their communist revolutions so we can see here for example a factory child care unit in one of the factories in china after the chinese communist revolution where all the children of the factory after the women gave birth they would go back to work in the factory and their children would come to be cared for in one of these child care centers that were run by the the government and the children would stay here they'd receive their meals they would be looked after all day while their parents worked in the factory and these are a few examples from of of child care centers in the the soviet union after the communist revolution in the soviet union children and and um in this is this is an example of an agricultural child care cooperative where the women going out to work in the fields would send their children off to a cooperative the children would be looked after and then they would come and pick up their children at the end of the day [Music] so while uh feminists in the 1970s and 80s pushed for domestic work to be either paid for by the government or to be subsidized and for the government to socialize uh child care and domestic work what actually happened federici says instead of that was we had a shift to what she calls a new international division of labor that rather than resolving the housework question the way that feminists had suggested what we saw instead was a colonial solution to the housework question so that women across the world were often forced to leave their homes to migrate from poor economies in the global south to global north and wealthier countries in order to carry out reproductive work in the houses of middle class and wealthy women and so that women across the world were integrated into the world economy as producers of workers for both local and industrialized countries and federici sees this as a failure of the feminist movement of the 1970s to make the state recognize reproductive work as work and to take financial responsibility for it