Women's Freedom and Domestic Labour: A Feminist Political Economy Analysis


Tara McWhinney, Carleton University

Domestic labour, defined as the unpaid work done in households to support the daily and generational reproduction of household members, is ubiquitous, necessary, and continual for working-class families. For those in heteronormative nuclear households that depend upon wages, it is most often women who perform much of this work, and do it unpaid (Guppy et al., 2019; Houle et al., 2017), in addition to their typically under-valued paid work, the so-called “double” or “second shift” (Hochschild, 2012). Domestic labour was a hot topic of early 1960s to 1980s socialist feminist scholarship (Barrett, 1980; Benston, 1969/2019; Briskin, 1980; Dalla Costa and James, 1975; Morton, 1970/1980, Seccombe, 1980), and since these domestic labour debates several feminist political economists have conducted interviews with women in Canada about their domestic labour conditions (Bezanson, 2006; B. Fox, 2001, 2006; Luxton, 1980, 1981, 1983, 2006b; Luxton and Corman, 2007, 2001/2007; Neysmith et al., 2012), but this empirical research seemed to drop off in the last decade. This research project seeks to reanimate this topic by exploring women’s often-invisible domestic labour and its conditions in 2020. My research asks, what freedom do working-class women in Ontario have in organizing and supporting of their domestic labour, given a context of austerity politics? Can they imagine radically new ways of organizing and supporting this labour? I take up the case of working-class women with children in Ontarios increasingly conservative policy climate as an apt and timely case study. However, this research does not begin and end with an examination of the conditions of domestic labour within households. In my analysis I consider the relationship between the organization of women’s domestic labour and the conditions of other forms of social reproduction and productive labour across state, market, and community relations. I argue that feminist political economists need to consider the ways in which domestic labour is distinct from, and conditioned by, other forms of social reproduction. I do so for two reasons. First, domestic labour makes up a significant portion of social reproduction labour, and women’s emancipation is hampered by the inequitable divisions of labour that assign domestic labour to women, especially for those with children. Second, domestic labour conditions have become more challenging. The intensification of austerity and neoliberal policy approaches have downloaded more of the responsibility for social reproduction onto households (Bezanson and Luxton 2006; Braedley and Luxton, 2010). To advocate for women’s emancipation, the problem of domestic labour and the experiences of women performing domestic labour need to be directly addressed in theory, research and advocacy efforts. One hundred and twenty-four women participated in a participatory online mapping survey, with 25 respondents further engaging in an online discussion forum and 11 respondents participating in focus groups. These three overlapping methods aimed to bring women together to discuss housework and childcare within households and to debate ways to improve these unpaid labour conditions. The data analysis shows that domestic labour continues to be a central aspect of women’s oppression under capitalism. The findings demonstrate how in 2020, even before the pandemic shutdowns, gendered divisions of domestic labour persisted, as most women who participated in this study were the main providers of housework within their households. These findings are consistent with time-use domestic labour research showing that women take on a larger share of housework labours than men. But what the time-use survey research has not captured, and which women in this study made clear, is that that women often experience domestic labour as a burden and a time issue. Further, many women who participated either cannot imagine changing these oppressive conditions or focus on changes to household and gender relations that miss or ignore the wider political economy that shapes unpaid labours. However, when prompted to consider a wider lens, women in the focus groups discussed inequities and discrimination in the labour force and the need for social policy change. Although their political claims did not move beyond existing policy discourse, this research suggests that domestic labour can potentially be a unifying topic for diverse working-class women, and a promising basis for political action.

This paper will be presented at the following session: