Daily Mail [UK], Feb. 26, 2011 [link]

Activists stormed more than 40 banks across Britain in protest over executive bonuses and public service cuts -  and turned them into a variety of ad hoc walk-in centres.

UK Uncut said demonstrators set up creches, laundries, school classrooms, libraries, homeless shelters, drama clubs, walk-in clinics, youth centres, job centres and leisure centres at branches of RBS, NatWest and Lloyds.

At 10am in Camden, north London, demonstrators invaded a NatWest and set up a creche where children played, practiced musical instruments while parents caught up.

 

Playcentre: In Camden, north London, demonstrators invaded a NatWest and set up a creche where children played, practiced musical instruments while parents caught up 

Meanwhile in nearby Islington 50 activists set up a laundry in an RBS branch in reaction to alleged council moves to cut services to the elderly, including a much-needed laundry service.

They set up washing lines, clothes horses, buckets for handwashing and a team of window cleaners on the outside. The protest was attended by over 15 pensioners and local Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn.

Banks were transformed into ‘hospitals’ in Liverpool and Redhill, a classroom in Cardiff, a leisure centre in Eastleigh, a job centre in Birmingham. Twenty people took tents and sleeping bags into NatWest in Brixton to create a homeless shelter.

Meanwhile in Islington 50 activists set up a laundry in an RBS branch in reaction to alleged council moves to cut services to the elderly, including a much-needed laundry service 

They set up washing lines, clothes horses, buckets for handwashing and a team of window cleaners on the outside 

Aisha Atkins, 32, said: ‘There are alternatives to the cuts, for example, making the banks pay for a crisis they created or by stopping tax-dodging by big business and the super rich.

‘But the Government is making a political choice to reduce the deficit by making ordinary people pay with job losses and savaged services.

‘We are transforming the banks into schools, leisure centres, laundry services and homeless shelters to show that it’s our society that’s too big to fail, not a broken banking system.’

An RBS spokeswoman said: ‘We fully respect the right to peaceful protest. Minimising disruption to our customers is our priority.’

If you want to take over or take a different direction, email caringlabor@gmail.com.

Evelyn Nakano Glenn

Review of Radical Political Economics Vol 17(3):86-108, 1985. [PDF]

INTRODUCTION

The failure of the feminist movement to address the concerns of Black, Hispanic and Asian-American women is currently engendering widespread discussion in white women’s organizations. Paralleling this discussion is a growing interest among racial ethnic women [1] in articulating aspects of their experiences that have been ignored in feminist analyses of women’s oppression (e.g. oral histories by Sterling 1979; Elessar, MacKenzie and Tixier y Vigil 1980; Kim 1983; and social and historical studies by Dill 1979; Mirande and Enriquez 1979; Davis 1981; Hooks 1981; Jones 1984). [2]

As an initial corrective, racial ethnic scholars have begun research on racial ethnic women in relation to employment, the family and the ethnic community, both historically and contemporarily (e.g. Acosta-Belen 1979; Mora and Del Castillo 1980; Melville 1980; Rodgers-Rose 1980; Tsuchida 1982). The most interesting of these studies describe the social world and day-to-day struggles of racial ethnic women, making visible what has up to now been invisible in the social sciences and humanities. These concrete data constitute the first step toward understanding the effects of race and gender oppression in the lives of racial ethnic women.

A necessary next step is the development of theoretical and conceptual frameworks for analyzing the interaction of race and gender stratification. Separate models exist for analyzing race, ethnic or gender stratification. Although the “double” (race, gender) and “triple” (race, gender, class) oppression of racial ethnic women are widely acknowledged, no satisfactory theory has been developed to analyze what happens when these systems of oppression intersect. A starting point for developing such a theory would appear to lie in those models which view race and gender stratification as part of a larger system of institutionalized inequality. During the 1970s two models which view race and gender divisions as embedded in and helping to maintain an overall system of class exploitation came to the fore: the patriarchy model developed by Marxist-feminists to explain the subordination of women (e.g., Weinbaum and Bridges 1979; Sokoloff 1980; Brown 1981; and Hartmann 1981 a) and the internal colonialism model developed by activists and scholars to explain the historic subordination of blacks, Hispanics, Asian-Americans and other people of color in the United States (e.g., Clark 1965; Carmichael and Hamilton 1967; Moore 1970; Barrera, Munoz and Ornelas 1972; and Blauner 1972).

At the center of the Marxist-feminist analysis is the concept of patriarchy, which may be defined as a hierarchical system of power which enables men as a class to have authority and power over women (Hartmann 1976; Sokoloff 1980). In this model the main mechanism by which control is achieved and maintained by men is the sexual division of labor, which places men in positions of authority over women and permits them to reap disproportionate benefits. Similarly, at the center of the internal colonialism model is a system of power relations by which subordinate minorities are kept politically and economically weak so they can be more easily exploited as workers. The main mechanism by which economic dependency is maintained is a colonial labor system, characterized by a segmented labor market, discriminatory barriers and separate wage scales. This system ensures that people of color are relegated to the worst jobs, i.e. insecure, low-paying, dangerous, dirty and dead-end.

Neither model explicitly recognizes the specific situation of racial ethnic women. The patriarchy model ignores differences among women based on race. When race is discussed, it is treated as a parallel system of stratification: an analogy is often made between “women” and “minorities,” an analogy that involves comparison of the subordinate status of white women and minority men. Minority women are left in limbo. Similarly, the internal colonialism model ignores gender by treating members of colonized minorities as undifferentiated with respect to gender. Analyses of racial ethnic labor have generally focused only on male workers. Yet, these studies also assume that the detrimental impacts of the labor system on men is synonymous with the impacts on the group as a whole, men and women alike.

Despite the focus on only one axis of stratification. the patriarchy and internal colonialism models have some important commonalities. Each focuses on explaining the persistence of inequality and sees gender/race stratification as dynamically related to the organization of the economy. Thus, each implies an historical perspective. one that traces changes in the relations between dominant and subordinate groups in relation to the development of capitalism. Each emphasizes institutional arrangements that ensure control by the dominant group over the labor of the subordinate group. There thus seems to be some common ground for developing a more integrated framework by combining insights from the two perspectives.

This paper is a preliminary effort to identify aspects of the two models that might contribute to an integrated framework. I will start by briefly reviewing the Marxist-feminist analysis of women’s subordination. I will then review racial ethnic women’s experience as members of colonized minorities in the United States. In light of this experience, I will examine the paid and unpaid work of Chinese, Mexican-American and black women from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, showing how they diverge from those presumed to be typical of white women. In the concluding section, suggestions are made for revision of Marxist-feminist theory to be more inclusive of the race-gender interaction.

MARXIST-FEMINIST ANALYSIS

The Marxist-feminist perspective views women’s subordination as a product of two interacting systems: patriarchy and capitalism. While generally adhering to the Marxist analysis of class exploitation, Marxist-feminists diverge by giving equal importance to patriarchy, which, they argue, existed prior to capitalism, though interacting with it as capitalism developed. According to this analysis, the main mechanism by which patriarchy was established and is maintained today is the sexual division of labor. The assignment of certain tasks (usually the more onerous and/or less valued) to women, and others (usually the more highly valued) to men, is considered more or less universal.

Under capitalism the sexual division of labor takes a particular form due to the separation of production of goods, and then services, from the household. As production was industrialized the household became increasingly privatized, and its functions reduced to consumption, which includes shopping and negotiating for services (Weinbaum and Bridges 1979) and biological and social reproduction, including child care, cleaning, preparing food and providing emotional support for the breadwinner. As capital took over production, thus households became increasingly dependent on the market for goods and, therefore, on wages to purchase goods and services needed for survival. During the nineteenth century – in part because men could be more intensively exploited as wage laborers, while women could benefit capital as full-time consumers and reproducers – a specialization developed, whereby women were assigned almost exclusive responsibility for household consumption and reproduction and men were allocated responsibility for publicly organized production. This division became prescribed in the mid-nineteenth century with the development of the cult of domesticity, which idealized the woman as the center of home and hearth (Welter 1966). This division of labor contributed to the subordination of women by making them economically dependent on a male wage earner. Simultaneously the domestic code controlled women’s behavior by threatening those who deviated from it with the loss of their feminine identity.

The ideal of separate spheres was, of course, unattainable for many women whose fathers or husbands were unable to earn a family wage and who therefore had to engage in income producing activities to support themselves and their families (Lerner 1969; Easton 1976). Yet the conception of women as consumers and reproducers affected them too, depressing their position in the labor market. Women were defined as secondary workers, a status maintained by a sexual division in the labor market, i.e. occupational segregation. Jobs allocated to women were typically at the bottom of the authority hierarchy, low in wages, dead-end and frequently insecure. The secondary position of women in the labor force meant that women had little leverage to shift the burden of household work onto husbands, so they continued to be responsible for the domestic sphere. Moreover, because of low wages and insecure jobs, even when employed, women remained dependent on the additional wages of the male earner (Hartmann 1976; Kessler-Harris 1982).

This analysis has much to offer: it permits us to view women’s subordination as part of a larger framework of economic exploitation. It also draws connections between women’s domestic work and their work in the labor force, and shows how subordination in one sphere reinforces subordination in the other. It is intended as a general analysis that encompasses all women. Yet, it is built on class- and race-bounded experiences. To what extent do the concepts developed in the Marxist-feminist model apply to the experience of racial ethnic women? To what extent does the private-public split and women’s association with the domestic sphere exist for racial ethnic women? To what extent has economic dependence on men been an important basis for racial ethnic women’s subordination? To what extent do struggles over allocation of household labor create gender conflict in racial ethnic households?

In order to begin addressing these questions we need to examine the impacts of race stratification on racial ethnic women’s work, both paid and unpaid. For this, I draw on both earlier and more recent research on the labor histories of . ‘colonized minorities.” Because histories of the various peoples in different regions of the country vary and because of the limited size and scope of this paper, I will limit my examination to three case studies for which there is comparable information from the mid-nineteenth century to the present: Mexican-Americans in the Southwest, Chinese in California and blacks in the South.

COLONIZED MINORITIES IN INDUSTRIALIZING AMERICA

The United States started out as a colonial economy which offered raw resources and land to European and American capitalists. In order to develop the economic infrastructure and extract resources, capitalists needed labor, which was always in short supply. The presence of racial ethnic groups in this country is tied to this demand for labor. Most were brought to this country for the express purpose of providing cheap and malleable labor (Cheng and Bonacich 1984).

Although European immigrants were also welcomed as a source of low-wage labor, they were incorporated into the urban economies of the north. Racial ethnics were recruited primarily to fill labor needs in economically backward regions: the West, Southwest and South (Blauner 1972). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Chinese men constituted from a quarter to a third of the work force (reclaiming agricultural lands, building railroads, and working in mines), and 90 percent of the domestic and laundry workers in California (Saxton 1971). During this same period, native Chicanos and Mexican immigrants (Mexicanos) were employed as miners, railroad hands and agricultural laborers in the western states (Barrera 1979). In the years following emancipation blacks were concentrated in agriculture, as well as in heavy labor in construction and domestic service in the South (Cheng and Bonacich 1984). All three groups helped build the agricultural and industrial base on which subsequent industrial development rested, but were excluded from the industrial jobs that resulted.

Racial ethnic labor was cheaper for infrastructure building in two senses: racial ethnics were paid less (including lower benefits) and provided a reserve army to be drawn in when the economy expanded or labor was needed for a short-term project, and pushed out when the economy contracted or the particular project ended. Their cheapness was ensured by institutional barriers that undercut their ability to compete in the labor market. The labor market itself was stratified into separate tiers for whites and racial ethnics. The better paying, more skilled, cleaner and secure jobs in highly capitalized industries were reserved for white workers, leaving the low paying, insecure, dangerous, seasonal and dead-end jobs in competitive industries for people of color. A dual wage system was also characteristic of the colonial labor system; wages for racial ethnics were always lower than for whites in comparable jobs (Barrera 1979). White workers benefitted because better jobs were reserved for them. The dual labor system also buffered them from the effects of periodic depressions, since racial ethnics took the brunt of layoffs and unemployment.

Further, racial ethnics were prevented from competing for better work and improved conditions by legal and administrative restrictions. Restrictions on their rights and freedoms began right at the time of entry or incorporation into the United States. While the exact form of entry for the three groups differed, in all cases an element of subordination was involved. The most striking instance of forced entry was that of blacks, who were captured, tom from their homelands, transported against their will and sold into slavery. This institution so structured their lives that even after emancipation former slaves were held in debt bondage by the southern sharecropping system (Painter 1976). Equally involuntary was the incorporation of Mexicans residing in territories taken over by United States military conquest. Anglo settlers invaded what is now California, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado. When the United States seized the land, native Mexicans living in those areas were reduced to agricultural peons or wage laborers (Barrera 1979). An intermediate case between forced and free entry was that of the Chinese. Their immigration was the result of the economic and political chaos engendered, at least in part, by western colonial intrusion into China (Lyman 1974). Many Chinese men entered the United States as contract laborers so they could support destitute kin in their villages. Under the credit ticket system they signed away seven years of labor in exchange for their passage (Ling 1912).

These unfree conditions of entry imposed special liabilities on racial ethnics. Blacks were not citizens and counted in the census as only three-fifths of a person. Mexicans were defined as second-class citizens, and Chinese were aliens, ineligible for citizenship. All three groups were placed in separate legal categories, denied basic rights and protections and barred from political participation. Thus, they could be coerced, intimidated and restricted to the least desirable jobs, where they were especially vulnerable to exploitation.

The process of incorporation and entry into the labor system in tum had profound effects on the culture and family systems of racial ethnics. Native languages, religion and other ways of life were constrained, destroyed or transformed and kin ties and family authority undermined. As Blauner (1972:66) notes:

The labor system through which people of color became Americans tended to destroy or weaken their cultures and communal ties. Regrouping and new institutional forms developed. but in situations with extremely limited possibilities.

We are most familiar with assaults on family ties of blacks under slavery due to sale of individuals regardless of kin ties, slave master control over marriage and reproduction, and the brutal conditions of life. Scholars and policy analysts in the past argued that slavery permanently weakened kin ties and undermined the conjugal household, thereby creating a legacy of family pathology (Frazier 1939; Moynihan 1965). More recently, revisionist historians have argued that slaves resisted assaults on family integrity and managed to maintain conjugal and kin ties to a greater extent than previously believed (Blassingame 1972;
Fogel and Engerman 1974; and Gutman 1976). Gutman (1975) found that a large proportion of slave marriages were of long-standing and many couples legalized their marriages when given the opportunity to do so after emancipation. Black families showed great strength in the face of assaults on kin networks, though their survival required great struggle and exacted great costs.

Less well-known are the assaults on the culture and family lives of Chicanos and Chinese-Americans. In both groups households were broken apart by the demand for male labor. Many Mexican-American men were employed in mining camps and on railroad gangs which required them to live apart from wives and children (Barrera 1979). This was also true for male migrant agricultural workers until the I 880s when the family labor system became the preferred mode (Camarillo 1979). In the case of the Chinese, only prime age males were recruited as workers, and wives and children had to be left behind (Coolidge 1909). The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 not only prohibited further entry of Chinese laborers, it also barred resident laborers from bringing in wives and children (Wu 1972; Lyman 1974). This policy was aimed at preventing the Chinese from settling permanently, once their labor was no longer needed.

Given these conditions, what was the work of racial ethnic women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?

RACIAL ETHNIC WOMEN’S WORK IN INDUSTRIALIZING AMERICA

The specific conditions of life experienced by the three groups of women differed. However, the women shared some common circumstances due to their similar positions in the colonial labor system and the similar difficulties the system created for their families. All three groups of women had to engage in constant struggle for both immediate survival and the long-term continuation of the family and community. Because men of their groups were generally unable to earn a family wage, women had to engage in subsistence and income producing activities both in and out of the household. In addition they had to work hard to keep their families together in the face of outside forces that threatened their integrity.

Chinese-American Women

Perhaps the least is known about Chinese-American women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This may be due to the fact that very few working class Chinese women actually resided in the United States then. For most of the period from 1860 to 1920 the ratio of men to women ranged from 13 to 20 males for every female. As late as 1930 there were only 9,742 females aged 10 or over in a population that included 53,650 males of the same age (Glenn 1983). It is estimated that over half of the men had left wives behind in China (Coolidge 1909). Although most of these wives never came to the United States, their lives must be considered as part of the experience of American racial ethnics, for they raised subsequent generations of sojourners who went to America, often with false papers. Little research has been done on what women did in their home villages or how they survived. The available evidence, based partly on some family history interviews I conducted and partly on other sources (Kingston 1977; Hirata 1979) suggests the following: the wife often resided with the husbands’ parents or other kin, who received remittances from the husband, acted on his behalf and oversaw the household. Wives took care of children, performed household work under the direction of the mother-in-law, and helped in subsistence farming. Her sexual chastity was carefully guarded, as was her overall behavior. She might never see her husband again or, if lucky, see him once or twice over the course of 20 or 30 years during his rare visits home.

In the late nineteenth century, aside from wives of merchants who were still allowed entry into the United States, the only notable group of Chinese women were prostitutes (Hirata 1979; Goldman 1981). The imbalanced sex ratio created a demand for sexual services. Except for a few years when some women were able to immigrate on their own as free entrepreneurs, Chinese prostitutes were either indentured servants or outright slaves controlled by Chinese tongs or business associations. They had been sold by their parents or kidnapped and involuntarily transported. The controllers of the trade reaped huge profits from buying and selling women and hiring out their services. Women who ran away were hunted down and returned to their captors, usually with the collusion of the police and courts. Unable to speak English and without allies, the women could not defend themselves.

Initially the Chinese were dispersed throughout the West in mining towns, railroad camps and agricultural fields. They were subjected to special penalties, such as a foreign miner’s tax in California that rendered it difficult for them to make a living. Finally, during the economic depression of the 1870s the Chinese were forcibly driven out of many areas (Nee and Nee 1972). They congregated in urban Chinatowns, so that by the 1880s the Chinese were a largely urban population. In place of households, the men formed clan and regional associations for mutual welfare and protection (Lyman 1977). By the early 1900s some Chinese men were able, with minimal capital, to establish laundries, restaurants and stores, thereby qualifying as merchants eligible to bring over wives (Lyman 1968). These small businesses were a form of self-exploitation; they were profitable only because all members of the family contributed their labor and worked long hours. Living quarters were often in back of the shop or adjacent to it, so that work and family life were completely integrated. Work in the family enterprise went on simultaneously with household maintenance and child care. First up and last to bed, women had even less leisure than the rest of the family. Long work hours in crowded and rundown conditions took its toll on the whole family. Chinatowns had abnormally high rates of tuberculosis and other diseases (Lee, Lim and Wong 1969).

It is unclear what proportion of women laboring in family laundries and shops were counted as gainfully employed in the census. They were undoubtedly severely undercounted. In any case some sizable proportion of women were employed as independent wage workers. As employees, Chinese women were concentrated in ethnic enterprises because of color bars in whiteowned businesses. Nearly half of all gainfully employed women in 1930 worked in jobs that were typical of Chinese enterprise. Out of a work force of 1559, garment operatives and seamstresses accounted for 11. 7 percent, sales and trade for 10.6 percent, laundry operatives for 7.3 percent, waitresses for 8.2 percent, and clerical workers for 11.2 percent. The only major form of employment outside the ethnic community was private household service, which accounted for 11.7 percent of Chinese women (U. S. Census 1933; for broad occupational distributions, see Table 1).

Mexican-American Women

The information on the work of Chicanas in the late nineteenth century IS also sparse. Barrera (1979) suggests that prior to the 1870s Chicano families followed the traditional division of labor, with women responsible for household work and child care. Thus, Mexican-American women worked largely in the home. Under the conditions of life among working class and agricultural families this work was extensive and arduous (Jensen 1981). In rural areas the household work included tending gardens and caring for domestic animals. Many Chicano men were employed in extracting industries which required them to live in work camps and company towns in unsettled territories. If a wife remained behind with the children in the home village, she had to engage in subsistence farming and raise children on her own, If she joined her husband in camp, she had to carry on domestic chores and child rearing under frontier conditions. forced to buy necessities in company stores that quickly used up meager wages. Even in the city the barrios often had no running water, and unsanitary conditions added to women’s burdens of nursing the sick (Garcia (980).

By the 1880s Mexican-American women were increasingly being brought into the labor force. In cities such as Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and El Paso, Chicanas were employed as servants, cooks and laundresses (Camarillo 1979; Garcia 1980). An economic depression in the 1880s forced more women to seek outside wage work, not only in private households, but also as washerwomen in commercial laundries, and as cooks, dishwashers. maids and waitresses in hotels and other public establishments. In this same period women entered the agricultural labor market. Prior to that time prime-age male workers were preferred for seasonal and migratory field work. In the 1880s whole families began to be used, a pattern that accelerated during World War I (Camarillo 1979:91). By the 1920s family labor was common throughout the
Southwest. Describing the situation in Colorado, Taylor (1929) noted that landowners felt that families, despite their lower productivity per unit. were preferable because they were a more stable work force that could be counted on to return year after year.

These trends are reflected in occupational patterns of Chicana women. Between 1880 and 1930, they tended to be employed in two main types of situations. A large part of the Chicana workforce, 20 percent officially, were employed as farm laborers (Barrera 1979). Many of these were employed as part of the piece rate system in which entire families worked and moved with the crops (Taylor 1937; Fisher 1953; McWilliams 1971). Under this system women had to bear and raise children, cook and keep house. while also working long hours in the field or packing house. Infants accompanied their parents to the fields, and children started working from an early age. Living conditIOns in migrant camps were extremely harsh. Adults rarely lived past 55 and infant and child mortality was high. Children had no regular schooling because of constant movement and the need for their labor. Schools were geared to fit agricultural schedules and provided minimal training (Taylor 1929). Once into the migrant pattern it was almost impossible for families or individuals to break out.

The second type of employment for Chicanas. primarily those in cities and towns. was in unskilled and semi-skilled “female” jobs. The distribution of jobs varied in different areas of the Southwest, but the most common occupations in all areas were service positions (household servants, waitresses. maids, cooks, and laundry operatives), which accounted for 44.3 percent of all employed Chicanas in 1930, and operatives in garment factories and food processing plants. which together employed 19.3 percent in 1930 (Table I). The latter industries also employed Anglo women, but Chicanas were given the worst jobs and the lowest pay. They were victims of both occupational stratification and a dual wage system. Their plight was revealed in testimony by employers before the Texas Industrial Welfare System in EI Paso in 1919. For example, F. B. Fletcher, a laundry owner representing the owners of the four largest laundries in EI Paso testified that almost all the unskilled labor was performed by Mexican women, while the skilled positions as markers, sorters. checkers, supervisors and office assistants went to Anglo women. Further, Mexican women were paid an average of $6.00 a week while Anglo women received $16.55. Fletcher argued that:

This difference indicates that in this industry, the minimum wage can be fairly fixed for Mexican female help and for the American entirely different and distinct (Garcia 1981:91)

Only by combining their wages with those of husbands and older children could Mexican-American women survive.

Whether engaged in subsistence farming, seasonal migratory labor, agricultural packing, laundry work, domestic service or garment manufacturing, Chicanas had to raise their children under colonized conditions. As part of the continued legal and illegal takeover of land by Anglos in Texas and Colorado from 1848 to 1900, the Chicanos became a conquered people (McLemore 1973, 1980). Defined and treated as inferior, their language and culture became badges of second class status. Through their daily reproductive activities and work women played a critical role not only in maintaining the family. but also in sustaining Mexican-American ways of life.

Black Women

Perhaps more than any other group of women, black women were from the start exempted from the myth of female disability. To be sure. they were exploited on the basis of their gender as breeders and raisers of slaves for plantation owners (Genovese 1974). Their gender also made them liable to a special form of oppression. sexual assault. Nevertheless. their gender did not spare them from hard physical labor in the field (Jones 1984). Hooks (1981) claims plantation owners often preferred women for the hardest field work because they were the more reliable workers. In addition black women did the heavy housework and child care for white women; in that role they were subject to abuse and even physical beatings at the hands of their mistresses. As Angela Davis (1971) notes. under conditions of plantation slavery, staying alive. raising children, and maintaining some semblance of community were forms of resistance.

After emancipation, life for rural blacks remained harsh under the sharecropping system; blacks found themselves held in debt bondage. Hooks (1981) suggests that landowners preferred sharecropping to hiring labor because black women were unwilling to be employed in the fields once slavery was abolished. With sharecropping women’s labor could be exploited intensively, since women had to work hard alongside the men in order to payoff the ever-mounting debt to the owner. One observer of black farmers noted that these women:

… do double duty. a man’s share in the field, and a woman’s part at home. they do any kind of field work, even ploughing. and at home the cooking, washing, milling and gardening (Lerner 1973).

Although there were some independent black farmers, it became increasingly difficult for them to make a living. Jim Crow laws deprived blacks of legal’ rights and protections, while national farm policies favored large landowners. Independent black farmers were increasingly impoverished and finally driven off the land (Painter 1976).

Aside from farming, the next largest group of black women were employed as laundresses and domestic servants. Black women constituted an exclusive servant caste in the South, since whites refused to enter a field associated with blacks from slave times (Katzman 1978). As servants, black women often worked a 14 to 16 hour day and were on-call round the clock (Brown 1938).
They were allowed little time off to carry out their own domestic responsibilities, despite the fact that the majority of black domestics had children of their own. A married domestic might see her children once every two weeks, while devoting night and day to the care of her mistress’s children. Her own children were left in the care of husband or older siblings (Katzman 1978). Low wages were endemic. They had to be supplemented by children taking in laundry or doing odd jobs. Many black women testified that they could only survive through the tradition of the service pan – the term for leftover food that was left at the disposal of the colored cook (Lerner 1973: 18).

Manufacturing and white collar jobs were closed to black women, though some of the dirtiest jobs in industry were offered to them. They were particularly conspicuous in southern tobacco factories and to some extent in cotton mills and flour manufacturing. In the cotton mills black women were employed as common laborers in the yards, as waste gatherers and as scrubbers of machinery. The actual manufacturing jobs were reserved for white women (Foner and Lewis 1981). Regarding black women in the tobacco industry, Emma Shields noted in a pamphlet she prepared for the Women’s Bureau in 1922:

Conditions of employment throughout the tobacco industry are deplorably wretched, and yet conditions for Negro women workers are very much worse than those for white women workers. .. Negro women are employed exclusively in the rehandling of tobacco, preparatory to its actual manufacture. Operations in the manufacture of cigars and cigarettes are performed exclusively by white women workers. Negro women workers are absolutely barred from any opportunity for employment in the manufacturing operations …. It is not unusual to find the white women workers occupying the new modern sanitary pans of the factory, and the Negro women workers in the old sections which management has decided to be beyond any hope of improvement (Quoted in Lerner 1969).

World War I saw increasing migration of blacks to the urban North and, simultaneously, the entrance of blacks into factory employment there. As late as 1910, 90.5 percent of all black women were farm laborers and servants, but between 1910 and 1920,48,000 black women entered factory work (Lerner 1969). Most were employed in steam laundries, the rest in unmechanized jobs in industry as sweepers, cleaners and ragpickers (Foner and Lewis 1981).

During the entire period from 1870 to 1930 black women, regardless of rural or urban residence, were notable for their high rates of labor force participation, particularly among married women. In 1900,26.0 percent of married black women were in the labor force compared to 3.8 percent of married white women (Pleck 1979). They thus had to contend with the double day long before this became an issue for a majority of white women. Moreover, although their wages were consistently lower than those of white women, their earnings constituted a larger share of total family income, due to the marginal and low wage employment of black men (Byington 1974). Finally, they had to perform their double duty in the face of poor and crowded living conditions, an educational system that provided inferior schooling for their children, uncertain income and other trials.

RACIAL ETHNIC WOMEN’S WORK IN THE CONTEMPORARY PERIOD

All three groups are predominately urban today, a process that began in the late nineteenth century for the Chinese, during World War I for blacks and after World War II for Chicanos. All have also experienced dramatic changes in occupational distributions since 1930.

Chinese Women Since World War II

The main change in circumstance is for Chinese women is that they were allowed entry to the United States in large numbers for the first time after World War II. Many separated wives were able to join their spouses under the provisions of the Walter-McCarran Act of 1953, and whole family units were able to enter after passage of the liberalized 1965 immigration law (Li 1977; U.S. Department of Justice 1977). Since World War II female immigrants outnumbered males, and the sex ratio of the Chinese population now approaches equality, with the remaining imbalance existing only in the older age categories (U.S Bureau of the Census 1973). Women who have rejoined spouses or arrived with husbands are adapting to the post-war urban economy by entering the paid labor force. Handicapped by language, by family responsibilities and gender and race discrimination in the skilled trades, both husbands and wives are employed in the secondary labor market – in low wage service and competitive manufacturing sectors. The most typical constellation among immigrant families is a husband employed as a restaurant worker, store helper or janitor and a wife employed as an operative in a small garment shop. The shops are located in, or close to, Chinatowns and are typically subcontracting firms run by Chinese. They often evade minimum wage laws by using an unofficial piece rate system (Nee and Nee 1972).

An examination of the occupational distribution of Chinese-American women reveals a bimodal pattern. In 1970 (Table 2) Chinese women were concentrated in clerical (31 .8 percent) and professional white collar work (19.4 percent), and in the operative category (22.5 percent). While the high proportion in white collar fields indicates considerable success by second, third and fourth generation women, generational mobility may be less than these figures suggest, since many professionals are actually recent immigrants of gentry origin rather than working class Chinese-Americans who have moved up. Working class Chinese women continue to be relegated to operative jobs in the garment trade. What Chinese women of all classes share is a higher than average rate of labor force participation (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1973).

Post-war economic changes have undercut family enterprises such as laundries and small stores, so that working class families today typically engage in dual wage earning. They encounter difficulties due to the long work hours of parents and crowded and run-down housing. Working mothers are responsible for not only the lion’s share of domestic chores, but often raise their children almost single-handedly. Husbands are frequently employed in the restaurant trade, which requires them to be at work from 11 in the morning until 10 in the evening or even midnight. Thus, they are rarely around while their children are awake. The women’s own work hours are often prolonged because they leave work during the day to cook meals or pick up children. They make up the time by returning to the shop for evening work or by taking materials home to sew at night (Ikels and Shang 1979). Their energy is entirely absorbed by paid employment and domestic responsibilities. The one ray of light is their hope for their children’s future.

Mexican-American Women

The Chicano population is still characterized by continued migration back and forth between Mexico and the United States. In 1970, 16 percent of the resident population in the United States was foreign-born (Massey 1982: 10). Not surprisingly, Chicanos remain concentrated in the Southwest, with 78 percent residing in California and Texas in 1979 (Pachon and Moore 1981). Contrary to their image as rural people, four out of five (79 percent) resided in metropolitan areas. In line with the urban shift has been a sharp reduction in the percentage of men and women engaged in agriculture. The proportion of women employed as farm workers fell from 21.2 percent in 1930 to 2.4 percent by 1979 (Tables 1 and 3). Due to the mechanization of agriculture which caused a sharp decline in the total number of farm workers, however. Chicana women constituted a higher proportion of women in agricultural labor in 1979 than they did in 1930. For those still involved in migrant labor. conditions remain harsh. with extensive exploitation of children, despite child labor laws (Taylor 1976).

The period from 1930 to the present saw a steady rise in the occupational status of Mexican-Americans. As with other racial ethnic groups the occupational dispersion of Chicanos is related to labor shortages during wars. especially World War II. In the post-war period, rising numbers of Chicanas found employment in clerical and sales jobs, though they still lagged behind white women, especially in sales. The lower rates in white collar jobs were matched by over-representation in blue collar and service occupations. Mexican American women were concentrated in operative jobs, principally in garment factories, laundries and food processing plants. which together accounted for 25.0 percent of their employment in 1979 (Table 3). These enterprises tended to be small competitive firms that paid minimum wages and were often seasonal. Another 23.4 percent of all employed Chicanas were in service jobs. including private household work.

Mexican-American women have traditionally had among the lowest rates of labor force participation among racial ethnic women (Almquist and Wehrle-Einhorn 1978). However, in the 1970s Chicanas rapidly entered the labor market, so that by 1980 their rates were similar to that of whites. though lower than those for black and Asian-American women (Massey 1982). The lower rates may be related to two other circumstances which usually depress employment: education and family size. Chicanas have the lowest education levels of the three groups and also have the largest number of children. These factors in tum mean that when Chicanas are in the labor force, they are at a great disadvantage. In 1976 nearly one-third (31. 5 percent) of all employed Chicanas had 8 years of education or less; comparable figures for blacks was 14.1 percent and for whites 7.6 percent (U.S. Department of Labor 1977).

In short, though Mexican-American women have achieved greater employment parity with Anglo women, they continue to have lower educational levels and heavier family burdens. In addition, they encounter racial barriers to white collar employment.

Black Women

Black women have also experienced shifts In employment since World War II. The post war period saw a great decline in domestic service as a major category of women’s work. Because black women were so concentrated in it they have shown the most dramatic decline. Whereas in 1940, three out of five (59.5 percent) employed black females were in domestic service. By 1960 that proportion had dropped to a little over a third (36.2 percent), and by 1980 to one out of fourteen (7.4 percent) (U.S. Census 1943, 1973; Westcott 1982). Partially replacing service in private households has been service employment in public establishments, particularly in food service and health care, where the number of low level jobs has proliferated. These jobs accounted for 25.4 percent of black female employment in 1980, compared to 16.0 percent of white women (Westcott 1982).

U.S. Census data (Table 3) show that black women are over-represented in the operatives category, where 15.3 percent were employed in 1979, in contrast to 11.0 percent of whites. As in the past, there is a stratified labor market and a dual wage system. Baker and Levenson (1975a) examined the careers of black, Hispanic and white graduates of a New York City vocational high school, and found that black and Hispanic women were disproportionately tracked into lower paying operative jobs in the garment industry, while better paying jobs outside the garment industry were reserved for white graduates. Years later the difference in pay and mobility was even greater as black and Hispanic women were progressively disadvantaged (Baker and Levenson 1975b).

The last barrier to fall was white collar employment. A dramatic increase in professional-technical, clerical and sales employment took place after 1950. By 1979. the former accounted for 14.2 percent of black female employment, the latter two together for 32.1 percent. Differences remained, however, in that white collar employment accounted for over two-thirds of white women’s jobs, but less than half of black women’s employment. In addition, within white collar jobs. black women were concentrated in lower level jobs. For example. in 1980 black women constituted 10.8 percent of all clerical workers. but they made up over 15 percent of such lower level positions as file clerks. Mail handlers, key punchers and office machine operators, and less than 6 percent of more skilled positions as secretaries, bank tellers and bookkeepers (Glenn and Tolbert 1985). In effect, though black women have experienced desegregation at the level of broad occupations, they have been re-segregated at the finer level of detailed job categories.

Other measures also show continued disadvantage for black women. They have a 50 percent higher unemployment rate and somewhat lower earnings (U.S. Department of Labor 1977). The largest gap is in terms of median family income, due to discrimination against black men, Even with the mother in the labor force, the median family income for black families with children under 18 years old was $14,461 in 1975 compared to $17,588 for similar white families (U.S. Department of Labor 1977). Even though they could not raise family income to white levels by being employed, black women’s wages made a bigger difference to overall family income. The gap between blacks and whites was even greater if the mother was not employed: the median for black families without mothers in the labor force was $8,912 compared to $14.796 for whites (U.S. Department of Labor 1977). Regardless of income level, the economic fate of the black conjugal family rested on an economic partnership between men and women. Moreover, even among relatively affluent black families. the need to combat racism was a theme that infused daily life and absorbed the energy of parents in socializing their children (Willie 1981). Women’ s role as nurturers required them to combat the daily assaults on their children’s self-esteem and to be vigilant in protecting them from psychic injury.

IMPLICATIONS FOR FEMINIST ANALYSIS

The history of racial-ethnic women’s work in the United States reveals their oppression not just as women, but also as members of colonized minorities. As members of colonized minorities, their experiences differed fundamentally from those used to construct Marxist-feminist theory. Thus, concepts within that framework require reformulation if it is to generate analyses that are inclusive of racial ethnic women. I will briefly examine three concepts in Marxist-feminist theory that need to be redefined to take into account the interaction of race and gender. These are the separation between private and public spheres, the primacy of gender conflict as a feature of the family, and the gender-based assignment of reproductive labor.

The growing separation of public and private spheres with industrialization was central to early Marxist-feminist analyses of women’s oppression under capitalism. However, recent historical and comparative research has called into question the extent to which private and public constituted separate and bounded spheres for all classes and groups. Scholars note that in industrializing societies working class women engage in many income-earning activities, such as doing piece-work at home, taking in boarders, or trading on the informal market, which cannot be easily categorized as private or public (Jensen 1980). Moreover, industrial wage work and family life have been found to interact in complex ways, so that, for example, women’s family roles may include and overlap with their roles as workers (Harevan 1977). The examination of racial ethnic women’s work adds to the critiques growing out of this research.

The nature of the split, and the extent to which women are identified with the public sphere, seems to vary by class and ethnicity, and differences among groups in women’s relationship to public and private spheres needs to be examined. Like many other working class women, racial ethnic women were never out of public production. They were integrated into production in varying ways. Black women were involved in agriculture and waged domestic service from the time of slavery. Chinese-American women frequently engaged in unpaid labor in family enterprises, where there was little separation between public and private life. Mexican-American women were initially more confined to household based labor than the other groups, but this labor included a great deal of actual production, since men’s wages were insufficient to purchase the necessities of life. Thus, a definition of womanhood exclusively in terms of domesticity never applied to racial ethnic women, as it did not to many working class women.

Where racial ethnic women diverge from other working class women is that, as members of colonized minorities, their definition as laborers in production took precedence over their domestic roles. Whereas the wife-mother roles of white working class women were recognized and accorded respect by the larger society, the maternal and reproductive roles of racial ethnic women were ignored in favor of their roles as workers. The lack of consideration for their domestic functions is poignantly revealed in the testimony of black domestics cited earlier, who were expected to leave their children and home cares behind while devoting full-time to the care of the white employer’s home and children. Similarly, Chinese and Mexican-American women and children were treated as units of labor, capable of toiling long hours without regard to their need for private life. This is not to say that racial ethnic women themselves did not see themselves in terms of their family identities, but that they were not so defined by the larger society, which was interested in them only as workers.

Another area of divergence is in the scope of what is included in the so-called private sphere. For racial ethnic women the domestic encompasses a broad range of kin and community relations beyond the nuclear family. Under conditions of economic insecurity, scarce resources and cultural assault, the conjugal household was not self-sufficient. Racial and ethnic peoples have historically relied on a larger network of extended kin, including fictive relatives and clan associations, for goods and services. This means that women’s reproductive work in the “private” sphere included contributions to this larger circle, within which women took care of each others’ children, loaned each other goods, and helped nurse the sick. Beyond the kin network women’s work extended to the ethnic community, with much effort being expended in support of the church, political organizing and other activities on behalf of “the race” (La raza). Women are often the core of community organizations, and their involvement is often spurred by a desire to defend their children, their families and their ways of life (Ellesar et al 1980; Gilkes 1981; Yap 1983). In short, race, as organized within a colonial labor system, interacted with gender (patriarchy) and class (capitalism) to determine the structure of private and public spheres and women’s relationship to these spheres.

A second aspect of Marxist-feminist theory that requires reformulation in light of race is the concept of the family as a locus of gender conflict. The Marxist-feminist analysis of the family is a response to traditional approaches that treat the family as an entity with unitary interests; in particular, it challenges the functionalist view of the division of labor as complementary rather than exploitative. By focusing on inequality – the economic dependence of women and the inequitable division of labor – some Marxist-feminists see members of the family as divided in their interests, with conflict manifested in a struggle over resources and housework (e.g. Hartmann 1981 b; Thome 1982; for a contrasting view, see Humphries 1977). In this view the conjugal family oppresses women; the liberation of women requires freeing them from familial authority and prescribed roles.

Examination of racial ethnic women’s experiences draws attention to the other side of the coin – the family as a source of resistance to oppression from outside institutions. [3] The colonial labor system made it impossible for men of color to support their families with their labor alone and therefore ruled out economic dependence for women. The issue for racial ethnic women was not so much economic equality with husbands, but rather the adequacy of overall family income. Because racial ethnic men earned less, women’s wages comprised a larger share of total family income in dual wage-earner families. In the case of family enterprises, common among Asian-Americans, family income depended on the labor of men and women equally. Thus, in both dual wage earner and small business families, men and women were mutually dependent; dependence rarely ran in one direction.

As for the division of household labor, Marxist-feminist analysis sees it as benefiting men, who receive a greater share of services while contributing less labor. In the racial ethnic family, conflict over the division of labor is muted by the fact that institutions outside the family are hostile to it. The family is a bulwark against the atomizing effects of poverty and legal and political constraints. By transmitting folkways and language, socializing children into an alternative value system, and providing a base for self-identity and esteem, the family helps to maintain racial ethnic culture. Women do a great deal of the work of keeping the family together and teaching children survival skills. This work is experienced as a form of resistance to oppression rather than as a form of exploitation by men. In the colonial situation the common interest of family members in survival, the maintenance of family authority, and the continuation of cultural traditions are emphasized. This is not to say that there are no conflicts over the division of labor but struggles against outside forces take precedence over struggles within the family. Thus, the racial stratification system shapes the forms of intra-familial and extra-familial conflict. and determines the arenas in which struggle occurs.

A third concept in Marxist-feminist theory that would benefit from consideration of race oppression is the very useful notion of reproductive labor. Following an early brief formulation by Marx. Marxist-feminists identified two distinct forms of labor, production and reproduction (Sokoloff 1980). Reproduction refers to activities that recreate the labor force: the physical and emotional maintenance of current workers and the nurturing and socializing of future workers. In other words, people as well as things have to be produced. Although both men and women engage in production. women are still the ones who carry out most of the reproduction. In large part this is because much reproductive work remains at the household level, which is women’s domain. In considering the situation of racial ethnic women, it is useful to recognize the existence of a racial as well as a sexual division of reproductive labor. Historically, racial ethnic women have been assigned distinct responsibilities for reproductive labor.

In the early industrial period racial ethnic and immigrant women were employed as household servants, thereby performing reproductive labor for white native families. The labor of black and immigrant servants made possible the woman belle ideal for white middle class women. Even where white immigrant domestics were employed. the dirtiest and most arduous tasks. laundering and heavy cleaning – were often assigned to black servants. There was a three-way division of labor in the home, with white middle class women at the top of the hierarchy. followed by white immigrants. with racial ethnics at the bottom. In the late industrial period, as capital took over more areas of life, reproductive activities also were increasingly taken out of the household and turned into paid services which yielded profits (Braverman 1974). Today. such activities as caring for the elderly (old age homes) preparing food (restaurants and fast food stands) and providing emotional support (counselling services) have been brought into the cash nexus. As this has happened. women have been incorporated into the labor force to perform these tasks for wages. Within this female-typed public reproduction work, however, there is further stratification by race. Racial ethnic women perform the more menial, less desirable tasks. They prepare and serve food, clean rooms and change bed pans. while white women, employed as semi-professionals and white collar workers, perform the more skilled and administrative tasks. The stratification is visible in hospitals, where whites predominate among registered nurses, while the majority of health care aides and housekeeping staff are blacks and latinas. Just as white women in tobacco manufacturing benefitted by getting cleaner and more mechanized jobs by dint of the dirty preparation work done by black women, so white women professionals enjoy more desirable working conditions because racial ethnic women perform the less desirable service tasks. The better pay white women receive also allows them to purchase services and goods that ease their reproductive labor at home.

This point leads to a final consideration. It may be tempting to conclude that racial ethnic women differ from white women simply by the addition of a second axis of oppression. namely race. It would be a mistake though. not to recognize the dialectical relation between white and racial ethnic women. Race. gender and class interact in such a way that the histories of white and racial ethnic women are intertwined. Whether one considers the split between public and private spheres, conflict within the family and between the family and outside institutions or productive and reproductive labor, the situation of white women has depended on the situation of women of color. White women have gained advantages from the exploitation of racial ethnic women, and the definition of white womanhood has to a large extent been cast in opposition to the definition of racial ethnic women (Palmer 1983). Marxist-feminist theory and the internal colonialism model both recognize white men as the dominant exploiting group; however it is equally important to emphasize the involvement of white women in the exploitation of racial ethnic people and the ways in which racial ethnic men have benefitted from the even greater exploitation of racial ethnic women.

NOTES

1. The term racial ethnic designates groups that are simultaneously racial and ethnic minorities. It is used here to refer collectively to blacks, latinos and Asian-Americans, groups that share a legacy of labor exploitation and special forms of oppression described in the body of this paper. It is offered as an alternative to more commonly used designations, viz. minority groups, people of color and Third World minorities, each of which is problematic at some level.

2. Sokoloff (1980) points out that whereas earlier Marxist feminists viewed gender oppression as a by-product of capitalism. what she calls “later” Marxists feminists developed the concept of patriarchy as a separate system that pre-dated capitalism and that interacts with class exploitation under capitalism.

3. This general line of argument may also apply to white working class families. However. I would assert that there were crucial differences in the historical experiences of white working class and racial ethnic families. The family system of the white working class was not subject to institutional attacks (such as forced separation) directed against black, Chicano and Chinese families. Moreover white working class women were accorded some respect for their domestic roles.

REFERENCES

Acosta-Belen, Edna (ed.). 1979. The Puerto Rican Woman. New York: Praeger.

Almquist, Elizabeth M 1979. Minorities. Gender and Work. Lexington. MA: D.C. Heath.

Almquist, Elizabeth M. and Juanita L. Weherle-Einhorn. 1978. The Doubly Disadvantaged: Minority Women in the Labor Force. In, Women Working. Ann H. Stromberg and Shirley Harkess (eds.). pp. 63-88. Palo Alto, CA: Mayfield Publishing.

Baca-Zinn, Maxine. 1982. Review Essay: Mexican American Women in the Social Sciences. Signs 8:259–272.

Baker, Sally Hillsman and Bernard Levenson. 1975a. Job Opportunities of Black and White Working-Class Women. Social Problems 22:510-532.

__ . 1975b. Earnings Prospects of Black and White Working Class Women. Unpublished Paper.

Barrera. Mario. 1979. Race and Class in the Southwest. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Barrera. Mario. Carlos Munoz and Charles Ornelas. 1972. The Barrio as an Internal Colony. In Urban Affairs Annual Review 6. Harlan Hahn (ed.).

Blassingame. John. 1972. The Slave Community. New York: Oxford University Press.

Blauner, Robert. 1972. Racial Oppression in America. New York: Harper and Row.

Braverman, Harry 1974. Labor and Monopoly Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Brown, Carol. 1981. Mothers, Fathers and Children: From Private to Public Patriarchy. In Women and Revolution, A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism. Lydia Sargent (ed.). pp. 239-269. Boston: South End Press.

Brown, Jean Collier. 1938. The Negro Woman Worker. Women’s Bureau Bulletin 165. U.S. Department of Labor. Washington. D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Byington, Margaret. 1974. Homestead: The Households of a Milltown. Pittsburgh. PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Camarillo. Albert. 1979. Chicanos in a Changing Society. Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press.

Carmichael. Stokely and Charles V. Hamilton. 1967. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. New York: Vintage.

Cheng. Lucie and Edna Bonacich. 1984. Labor Immigration Under Capitalism: Asian Immigrant Workers in the United States Before World War II. Berkeley. CA: University of California Press.

Clark. Kenneth. 1965. Dark Ghetto. New York: Harper and Row.

Coolidge, Mary. 1909. Chinese Immigration. New York: Henry Holt.

Davis. Angela Y. 1971. Reflections on the Black Woman’s Place in the Community of Slaves. The Black Scholar 2:3-15.

___ . 1981. Women. Race and Class. New York: Random House.

Dill, Bonnie Thornton. 1979. The Dialectics of Black Womanhood. Signs 4:543-555.

Easton, Barbara. 1976. Industrialization and Femininity: A Case Study of Nineteenth-Century New England. Social Problems 23:389-40 I.

Elesser, Nan, Kyle MacKenzie and Yvonne Tixier y Vigil. 1980. Las Mujeres’ Conversationsfrom a Hispanic Community. Old Westbury, NY: The Feminist Press.

Fisher, Lloyd. 1953. The Harvest Labor Market in California. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Fogel, William and Stanley Engerman. 1974. Time on the Cross Boston: Little Brown.

Foner, Philip S. and Ronald L. Lewis. 1981. The Black Worker.’ A Documentary History From Colonial Times to the Present. Vol. VI, The Era of Post-War Prosperity and the Great Depression. 1920-1936. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Frazier, E. Franklin. 1939. The Negro Family in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Garcia, Mario T. 1980. The Chicana in American History: The Mexican Women of EI Paso, 1880-1920 – A Case Study. Pacific Historical Review 49:315-337.

___ . 1981. Desert Immigrants: The Mexicans of El Paso. 1880-1920. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Genovese. Eugene. 1974. Roll, Jordan, Roll. New York: Pantheon.

Gilkes, Cheryl. 1982. Successful Rebellious Professionals: The Black Woman’s Professional Identity and Community Commitment. Psychology of Women Quarterly 6:289-311.

Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. 1983. Split Household, Small Producer and Dual Wage Earner: An Analysis of Chinese American Family Strategies. Journal of Marriage and the Family 45:35-46.

Glenn, Evelyn Nakano and Charles M. Tolbert II. 1985. Technology and Emerging Patterns of Stratification for Women of Color: Race and Gender Segregation of Computer Occupations Revised version of a paper presented at the Women, Work and Technology Conference, University of Connecticut.

Goldman, Marion. 1981. Goldiggers and Silverminers. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Gutman. Herbert G. 1975. Persistent Myths About the Afro-American Family. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 6:181-210.

___ . 1976. The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom. New York: Pantheon.

Harevan, Tamara. 1977. Family Time and Industrial Time: Family and Work in a Planned Corporation Town, 1900-1924. In, Family and Kin in Urban Communities: 1900-1930. New York: New Viewpoints.

Hartmann, Heidi. 1976. Capitalism, Patriarchy and Job Segregation by Sex. Signs I: 137-169.

___ .. 1981 a. The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union. In, Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, Lydia Sargent (ed.). pp. 1-41. Boston: South End Press.

___ . 1981 b. The Family as a Locus for Gender. Class and Political Struggle: The Example of Housework. Signs 6(5):366-394.

Hirata. Lucie Cheng. 1979. Free, Indentured and Enslaved: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth Century America. Signs 5:3-29

Hooks, Bell 1981 Ain’t I a Woman. Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End Press.

Humphries. Jane. 1977. Class Struggle and the Persistence of the Working Class Family. Cambridge Journal of Economics 1:241-258.

Ikels. Charlotte and Julia Shang. 1979. The Chinese in Greater Boston. Interim Report to the National Institute of Aging.

Jensen, Joan M. 1980. Cloth, Butter and Boarders: Women’s Household Production for the Market. Review of Radical Political Economics 12(2): 14-24. ___ 1981. With These Hands. Women Working on the Land. Old Westbury. NY: Feminist Press

Jones, Jacqueline. 1984. Labor of Love. Labor of Sorrow: Black Women. Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present. New York: Basic Books.

Katzman, David. 1978. Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kessler-Harris. Alice. 1982. Out to Work. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kim, Elaine. 1983. With Silk WinKS. Asian American Women at Work. San Francisco: Asian Women United of California.

Kingston, Maxine Hong. 1977. The Woman Warrior. New York: Vintage.

Lee, L. P .. A. Lim and H. K. Wong. 1969. Report of the San Francisco Chinese Community Citizens’ Survey and Fact Finding Committee. (Abridged Edition). San Francisco: Chinese Community Citizens’ Survey and Fact Finding Committee.

Lerner, Gerda. 1969. The Lady and the Mill Girl: Changes in the Status of Women in the Age of Jackson. American Studies 10:5-14.

___ . 1973. Black Women in White America: A Documentary History. New York: Vintage.

Li, Peler S. 1977. Fictive Kinship, Conjugal Ties and Kinship Claim Among Chinese Immigrants in the United States. Journal of Comparative Family Studies 8(1):47-64.

Ling, Pyan. 1912. The Causes of Chinese Immigration. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 39:74-82.

Lyman. Stanford. 1968. Marriage and Family Among Chinese Immigrants to America. 1850- 1960. Phylon 29(4):321-330.

___ . 1974. Chinese Americans. New York: Random House.

___ . 1977. Strangers in the City: The Chinese in the Urban Frontier. In The Asian in North America. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC Clio Press.

Massey. Douglas S. 1982. The Demographic and Economic Position of Hispanics in the United States’ 1980. Report to the National Commission for Employment Policy. Philadelphia: Population Studies Center. University of Pennsylvania.

McLemore, Dale. 1973. The Origins of Mexican American Subordination in Texas. Social Science Quarterly 53:656-670.

___ . 1980. Racial and Ethnic Relations in America. Boston: Allyn Bacon.

McWilliams. Carey. 1971. Factories in the Field. Santa Barbara. CA: Peregrine Publishers.

Melville, Margarita B. (ed). 1980. Twice a Minority: Mexican American Women. SI. Louis: C. V Mosby.

Mirande, Alfredo and Evangelina Enriquez. 1979. La Chicana: The Mexican American Woman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mora, Magdelina and Adelaida R. Del Castillo (eds.). 1980. Mexican Women in the United States: Struggles Past and Present. Los Angeles: Chicano Studies Publications.

Moore. Joan W. 1970. Colonialism: The Case of Mexican Americans. Social Problems 17:463- 472

Moynihan, Daniel Patrick. 1965. The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. Prepared for the Office of Policy Planning and Research.

Nee, Victor and Brett deBary Nee. 1972. Long Time Californ’. New York: Pantheon Books.

Pachon. Harry P. and Joan W. Moore. 1981. Mexican Americans. Annals. American Academy of Political and Social Science 454:111-124.

Painter, Nell Irvin. 1976. Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas After the Reconstruction. New York: Norton.

Palmer, Phyllis Marynick. 1983. White Women/Black Women: The Dualism of Female Identity and Experience in the United States. Feminist Studies 9: 151-170.

Pleck, Elizabeth H. 1979 A Mother’s Wages: Income Earning Among Mamed Italian and Black Women, 1896-1911 In, A Heritage of Her Own’ Toward a New Social History of American Women. Nancy F Cott and Elizabeth H Pleck (eds) pp. 367-392.

Rodgers-Rose. La Frances (ed.). 1980. The Black Woman. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications

Saxton, Alexander. 1971 The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sokoloff. Natalie. 1980. Between Money and Love. New York: Praeger.

Sterling, Dorothy. 1979. Black Foremothers: Three Lives. Old Westbury, NY: The Feminist Press.

Taylor. Paul S. 1929. Mexican Labor in the United States: Valley of the South Platte Colorado. University of California Publications in Economics 6(2):95-235 ‘

___. 1937. Migratory Farm Labor in the United States. Monthly Labor Review (March): 537-549.

Taylor. Ronald. 1976. Sweatshops in the Sun. Boston: Beacon Press.

Thome. Barrie. 1982. Feminist Rethinking of the Family: An Overview. In Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions. Barrie Thome and Marilyn Yalom (eds.). pp. 1-24. New York: Longman.

Tsuchida, Nobuya (ed:). 1982. Asian and Pacific American Experiences: Women’s Perspectives. Minneapolis: Asian/Pacific American Learning Resource Center.

U.S. Bureau of the Census. 1933. Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930. Population, vol. 5: General Report on Occupations, Chapter 3, Color and Nativity of Gainful Workers.
Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office .

____ 1973 Census of the Population: 1970. Subject Reports, Final Report PC(2) IG. Japanese. Chinese, and Filipinos in the United States. Washington, D.C .. U.S. Government Printing Office.

____1933. F!fteenth Census of the United States: 1980. Population, Volume II: General Report. Statistics by Subject. Washington, D.C.: US. Government Printing Office.

U.S. Department of Justice. 1977 Immigration and Naturalization Service Annual Report. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice.

U.S. Department of Labor. 1977. U.S. Working Women: A Databook. Bureau of Labor Statistics . Bulletin 1977. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Weinbaum, Batya and Amy Bridges. 1979. The Other Side of the Paycheck: Monopoly Capital and the Structure of Consumption. In, Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, Zillah R. EisensteIn (ed.). New York: Monthly Review Press.

Welter, Barbara. 1966. The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860. American Quarterly (Summer): 15 1- 174.

Westcott, Diane Nilsen. 1982. Blacks in the 1970′s: Did They Scale the Job Ladder” Monthly Labor Review (June):29-32

Willie, Charles. 1981. A New Look at Black Families. Bayview, NY: General Hall.

Wu, C. 1972. “Chink”: A Documentary History of Anti-Chinese Prejudice in America. New York Meridian.

Yap, Stacey G .. Y. 1983. Gather Your Strength Sisters: The Careers of Chinese American Women Community Workers. Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Boston University.

The Fargate Speaker

Jan. 31, 2011 [link]

The Fargate Speaker talks to a local support worker about the problems in social care as a result of the recession and the proposed austerity measures.

I work as a support worker for a private company that provides social care for people in Sheffield for people with learning disabilities and mental health issues. The company I work operates across the city. According to government officials, cuts to public spending will not harm front line services, workers, or service users. The reality of the situation is that working conditions are getting worse, day services are closing down, and those paying for the support services are being excluded from any of the decisions relating to care they supposedly direct and influence.

The Sheffield city council budget has been slashed by 8.35% for next year, and this has amounted to a huge cut to front line care. What this has amounted to on the ground is a huge reduction in staffing levels, pushing local unemployment even higher. Those left in the job are left with the unenviable task of filling in the gaps, which means being over worked, and stressed. Many care workers, some with over 20 years experience, are finding it too stressful to carry on, and are walking away from the job, meaning that the most qualified staff in the company are leaving, while new employees, who often aren’t given a decent (and legally required) level of training before they are left to work with clients. This is dangerous to both clients, who often have serious health issues, and to workers, who are not given help to do the job safely (some clients have histories of challenging behaviour, violence etc)

Many of the people I work with have been sent into intense panic, fearing that their disability benefits will be cut and that they will be forced onto a work fare scheme in order to claim. This has led to increased difficulties at work, which again impacts upon the well being of clients and staff. For staff, we have been given an indefinite pay freeze (rates of pay are already extremely low – and the price of food, bills, rent etc has risen fairly sharply in recent months) and a loss of a chance of promotion and advancement within the company. The tactics of management have in recent weeks been an attempt to shift responsibility downwards. In essence, this means an unpaid promotion – increased work hours and responsibilities without extra pay. People are worried, and the constant upheavals in company policy leave staff and clients confused. Many people within the company care deeply about the people they support, and the fact that they are leaving is causing massive emotional stress on all sides.

The company I work for claims to be not-for-profit, this tends to give people the impression that the company operates with some kind of ethical policy. The reality is that instead of money being invested in desperately needed equipment for staff (such as computers that are less than a decade old) instead money has been spent on redecorating the offices of the executive managers and the reception area of the company (in order to make it ‘look more professional’ – the appearance of good care being more easily achieved than the practice of good care).

The company has also engaged in the bizarre tactic of employing agency staff to work as short term “bank workers” in order to plug the gaps created by the redundancies they have introduced. This means that for every worker the company gets from an agency they are paying for two (agencies charge ‘service rates’ which are roughly the same as the employees wages). Essentially this means that the company is firing experienced and dedicated workers to employ untrained and short term agency workers, while paying double the cost for the privilege. The reasons behind this plan seem fairly obvious. Agency workers are in a precarious position, and if they complain about being over worked, and under paid then they can be fired with no notice, whereas an employee cannot. The changes that management want to bring in over the next few months require a work force that does not feel secure, and able to resist the exploitation that is happening.

Marina Vishmidt

Reartikulacija, 2010. [link]

This is a sequence of reflections on affirmation and negation, on identification and severance: determinate negation as strategic affirmation, the identification of concrete universals and severance from a defunct relation. These lines will be explored with reference to the current situation of the waged and unwaged working class, most proximately in Britain, as “debt” becomes the ideological white noise and the practical horizon of all social and political imagination. Household indebtedness is confused with the state deficit in the spontaneous ideology of the Conservative austerity agenda, as what remains of the crisis-riddled economy is sacrificed to the “debt” – as poor people to loan sharks, so Britain to the bond investors. The nationalist narrative of “we’re all in this together” eliminates any space for discussion as to who might bear greater responsibility for the crisis, and who should be paying for it. The announced cuts make it all too clear – it’s the bloated public sector and welfare payments which are responsible, and those that have the least shall have even that taken away, as the Biblical parable goes. Yet a fatalistic consensus prevails for now, transfixed by a menace beyond dispute: the “debt.”

Debt has taken on an unprecedented social centrality, almost eclipsing the labour theory of value as both the principle of capital accumulation and the principle behind the structural role of labour in social relations organized through the value-form. The social logic of speculation is also at work [sic] in the premise of human and social capital which, as Jason Read argues, has reformulated every human activity as an investment in a future of potential access to greater social wealth. The notion of “human capital” also serves to eradicate any antagonism between those who own the means of production and those who only have their labour to sell, since both are understood to be investors seeking to maximize a return, which is only natural. [1]

Debt has of course also been the prime driver of accumulation for the past couple of decades, from deficit spending in the public sector contingent on a finance boom driven by the opulent trade in CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligations) and other fancifully quantified risk instruments, to the characteristic business of financialization – profiting from the hugely expanded consumption of credit products that its own effect of suppressing wages had created a demand for. In debt-financed accumulation, value was no longer at issue, but wealth; and as workers did not produce wealth, but were a liability on the balance sheet, the only way they could reimburse the wealth creators, the entrepreneurs, was by going into heavily commodified debt. And consumer debt, it need hardly be added, was the force that inflated the asset values that crashed so impressively two years ago, along with the demand it was able to sustain. It is in this scenario that we must look at what the shift from worker to debtor as the definitive social identity for most people today augurs for political re-composition in a time when unemployment and welfare cuts will leave them with marginal resources to either pay debts or meet more immediate needs. And, as has been plentifully evident around the world, austerity budgets trigger counter-attacks on the terrain of reproduction at once, as in Greece and Spain. This is because “social spending” is the first reduction demanded by the agencies of fiscal discipline, and public services become the stakes of survival when low-paid or nonexistent jobs become the norm, a condition exacerbated by cuts. In times of crisis, when the ratio of waged to unwaged starts to tilt negatively, reproduction becomes the political battleground, if only through sheer force of numbers of people who can’t get access to a wage, as well as the important category of the “working poor” who have to rely on benefits. The very existence of the “working poor” is the clearest demonstration, if required, that it is capital and not the indebted worker who is the parasite on the state, as the state allows employers to pay minuscule wages which it then agrees to supplement. The feasibility of targeting social services with the moralistic rhetoric of personal responsibility – like the received idea of a “dependency culture” – relies absolutely on a common sense which blacks out the systemic forces which are genuinely dependent, if not addicted to, the existence of a super-exploited, unemployed, illegalized and desperate “workforce.” It has to ignore the structural necessity of a low-waged and unwaged reserve army which enables capital (including state and semi-private entities) to suppress wages, since the state ultimately meets the costs of reproduction in fear of worse consequences. It is in this sense that all “welfare,” regardless of its levels of generosity or parsimony, regardless of whom it identifies as “deserving” or “scrounging,” is corporate welfare, since its function is ameliorative to the operations of the market, rather than redistributive. Needless to say, “welfare reform,” like austerity, fails on its own economistic terms. The factors of decreasing demand and the cost of policing welfare by outsourcing it to for-profit organizations that have an incentive to cut the welfare rolls ends up being far more expensive than the portion of state expenditure welfare comprised in the first place. But if private contractors are happy, and the tabloids are appeased, than markets are surely working overtime in the public interest.

No matter how obvious these contradictions seem to be, and how long they’ve been around, it is worth pointing out time and time again that the fight we have on our hands is not one against market rationality, to be countered with a more “social” set of principles for the economy. There is no rationality, only the looting and cannibalism which set the terms of capitalist accumulation for now. As the likes of David Harvey have exhaustively shown in their work, but which is no less obvious from reading the newspapers, “economic rationality” is a red herring for authoritarian managerial regimes of state power. Neoliberalism is a state project, with state-financed programs of engineering competitiveness across the entirety of social life. Because it is first and last an ideological project, objective circumstances or results have very little standing in it. Thus there’s no relevance to exposing its murderous or hypocritical inequities; it can only be drained of legitimacy ideologically. The argument is easier to make, paradoxically, because the objective conditions themselves have been shaped by the ideology to the point where, as some propose, “the class relationship” is coming to an end and communism is for the first time possible without a prior, “programmatic” affirmation of the working class. Work is no longer available objectively nor desirable subjectively as a political identity, although this lack of content does not prevent the ruling class from continuing to wield it as a disciplinary cudgel. [2] Although these ideas have been around since at least the 1970s, with the “Zerowork” strain of post-autonomist thinking, and all the variations of the “refusal of work” stance on the communist and anarchist ultra-left, their re-emergence now comes into the very different political landscape of three decades of neoliberal reaction, globalized capitalism and the destruction of organized labour, not to mention the de-industrialization of Europe, North and South America, the Middle East and Africa and the vast low-grade industrialization of parts of Asia and China. The “communist idea” now has to take into account that the refusal of work is not a political choice, but a prerogative exercised by a stage of capitalism that has much less need of surplus-value production since the discovery that debt is far more profitable.

In the vision of “austerity,” everyone is potentially a parasite on the nation’s solvent body, looking to compound the nation’s interest rate in the global markets. So why not behave like one? What is the outcome of a process, underway for at least two decades in the UK, whereby the majority of the population is positioned as the actual or virtual waste of the system? What could be the (anti-)political subjectivity of human capital turned toxic asset? When finance is universally agreed to be the source of all value, the machine of accumulation is rent, not productive investment. The generation of wealth boils down to trade in the “fictitious capital,” along with rent-seeking and capitalization/enclosure of existing [public] assets. As the only way workers can contribute to that valorization is through debt, debt stands as the point of de-legitimation of the current logic of capital. A refusal of debt must take the place of refusal of work in a situation when work is being refused by capital anyway.

Having said that, it is very ambiguous for now to what extent, if at all, such political implications have been drawn by the campaign groups, unions and grassroots party activists on the British left. It seems difficult to detect a real consideration of debt going on, besides the generic “we won’t pay for your crisis” standpoint; there is no disputing that someone does have to pay, and this by and large consists of making an economic case for one sector at the (implicit) expense of another. Nowhere is the stunted outlook of the mainstream British socialist left more conspicuous than in the “Right to Work” and “Green Jobs” campaigns that have been appearing on its fringes since the “crisis” hit. They seem to be missing something central about how capital operates nowadays (not to mention the simultaneously reactionary and idealist perspective of demanding “good jobs”): wealth is no longer created through productive investment, and workers don’t want jobs, they just want money. Why else would all the most visible instances of workplace militancy in the past couple of years, from factory occupations to “bossnappings” and threats to blow factories up, all center around better remuneration packages for job losses rather than the maintenance of jobs? Neither capital nor labour are interested in jobs: all anyone is interested in these days are assets. Capital has neither the inclination nor the resources to offer workers more exploitation right now, but there has to be recognition that exploitation remains the bedrock of the social contract, and it is achieved most efficiently without jobs in an economy premised on the capitalization of debt. Isn’t the “jobless recovery” appearing as the watchword in economic analysis today built on assumptions that consumption (or “consumer confidence”) can single-handedly drive a return to prosperity, that is, through another credit bubble? It is immaterial that the global economic crisis was triggered by the bursting of a systemic credit bubble; credit bubbles are the only conceivable avenue of a return to normality, much as disastrous neoliberal policies are only intensified in the aftermath of their resounding failure.

It seems evident, from this perspective, that we can only produce wealth (not value) for capital now through our debt repayments. In that case, shouldn’t debt be the pre-eminent focus of resistance and revolt, rather than petitioning imaginary benefactors for imaginary jobs? Further, it needs to be restated time and again that any demand for jobs dovetails all too harmoniously with the government propaganda against the “workshy” who will be forced off welfare if they don’t come to the independent realization that “work sets you free,” as the current Work and Pensions secretary has been quoted as saying. This no doubt inadvertent refrain of the National Socialist slogan throws light on the “obscene” agenda of the “we’re all in it together” mantra providing the rather flimsy legitimation of the announced cuts. On this point at least, there is no departure from earlier historical periods where worsening economic conditions were used to build up a nationalist consensus that paved the way for fascism.

If workers are now “human capital,” then the moment of negation of the social relations that have brought us here can start with affirmation: the affirmation of the sick and deteriorating nature of capital from the side of its “human” variant (what was once known as “variable capital”). As “human capital” is being maximized in or out of work, the terrain of reproduction (social services, health, housing) seems like the most direct arena in which this capital can become collectively dysfunctional, also a necessity in the era of intensified biopolitical surveillance and risk management which social services represent for “dependent” populations in the UK. [3] The docility of the service “user,” isolated, managed and humiliated in the absence of an employment allowing her to exist without recourse to state benefits, is what needs to be questioned by the users, as well as by the service workers, at the point of “delivery” and in solidarity. It must be recognized that social benefits are actually a “social wage,” and consist not of charity from the state, but of the value extracted from formerly and currently employed workers, as well as that funnelled from them in taxes and VAT. The position of supplication has to be transformed into a position of “insolence,” of justified and collective appropriation. After all, if there are no more workers, then surely oughtn’t “human capital” assert its own series of claims, as capital has asserted its claims for the past 40 years to the exclusion of all others?

The dialectic between affirmation and negation needs some clarification. Any practical critique entails both moments, though not a linearity or progressive vector between them. In any social movement, there needs to be an identification of a position (of exclusion, of injustice) in the contradiction, before the place of exclusion is negated by re-organizing the terms of justice or inclusion themselves on another basis. We can see this in the feminist and queer movements, where the structural role of the “woman” or “homosexual” must be accurately identified within the relations of capitalist patriarchy before gender and heteronormativity can be overturned. The same thing with the “classical” class struggle: the social affirmation of workers as a discrete class with interests incompatible with those of bosses and the organization this engenders is a precondition for the political imperative to negate wage-labour and capital. Mobilization around the “wrong” (Rancière) precedes, and persists through, the elimination of the conditions that produce that “wrong,” the conditions which orient the definitions of justice and at the same time, exclude certain kinds of people from making claims via those definitions (like the exclusion of women and many others from the scope of the French Revolution’s “Rights of Man” – which did not prevent the “Rights of Man” being seized by women, by Haitian slaves, as the programme of their fights for liberation.) Using another set of terms, we can look at the “void” or the “point of inconsistency” of the situation (Badiou) as that which is invisible from its point of view, but which is nonetheless primary for it; a moving contradiction. For Marx, it is the co-existence of perfect equality in the sale and exchange of labour power in capitalism with exploitation in production. This is glossed by the Malgré Tout Collective thus: “Structural injustice does not reflect a failure or a partial dysfunction of capitalism: on the one hand, it is perfectly consistent and it leaves no room for reproach; on the other hand, this injustice is what establishes or makes capitalism possible, it is its point of inconsistency, necessarily invisible to capitalism itself. Thus the free, just and rational rules of the market, the laws of supply and demand, have their origin in an injustice, an alienation and an absurdity that are unintelligible to the system, and which are, consequently, perfectly legal and consensual even in the eyes of a large number of workers and trade unionists. This is why the point is not so much that injustice sparks up rebellion, but rather that rebellion forces the inconsistency of the system: it’s in light of the revolutionary political project that the system reveals itself as unjust.” [4]

It may be that political action that is used to expose this point of inconsistency and to practically refute its terms may not even be recognizable as political action, because it is proposing a new set of identifications – not only of what constitutes injustice or a “wrong,” but of what it means to act politically, and the divisions it introduces are not the familiar ones, since it is no longer seeking to adjust concrete phenomena to an ideal structure, but to question the structure as such, and the subjectivities produced in it, which are at once singular and universal: “[the] position is not ‘negotiable,’ or cannot be answered from the normality of the situation, because it implies its destruction. In this way, political action ceases to be a partial claim, so as to become a singularity: something unforeseeable by the situation because it questions its very foundations. At this point it’s no longer a matter of a class, but of an unclassifiable or anomalous political subject. This subject does not exist outside the situation. It’s a subject that arises from, but is not linked to, the situation because the situation does not foresee it. At the same time, this singularity is universal from the very moment it introduces a rupture that concerns all the inhabitants of the situation (bourgeois, petit-bourgeois, intellectuals, artists, proletarians, etc.), who now have to decide whether or not to commit to the struggle that questions not only the situation they inhabit, but also what they in themselves are.” [5]

This subtractive moment (strikes, refusals to be monitored, refusals to enter into “workfare” programs, sharing information and resources between claimants rather than between claimants and the state, or even mass and organized “benefit fraud”) can become a constitutive moment in reclaiming the social legitimacy which seems to be the exclusive property of markets for now, provided it can move from a dismissible, “partial” activity to a “universal” one which re-organizes the majority perception of general interest – a perception that is more often than not, more often unconsciously than overtly, on the side of the markets rather than other people (or, rather, refuses the distinction between them). When the legitimacy of the state is grounded in its responsibility to markets – as the true generators of wealth – rather than to the public, who are deemed to just consume this wealth, it has to be workers who break down this apparent reality through their new primary role as indebted consumers, or sources of unproductive wealth accumulation, at the same time as through their role as unproductive workers, [6] waged or unwaged, commodity-producing or relationship-managing.

An itinerary of the politics of reproduction, leading up to a more precise exposition of what shape the “politics of debt” could assume, is the goal of this text. First, we will revisit the history of the politics of reproduction through the Welfare Rights Movement, Italian Autonomist feminism, the Wages for Housework campaign and “self-reduction” in 1970s Italy, the Claimants’ Unions of the 1980s and the Unemployed Workers unions and initiatives in present-day Britain. In Part Two, we will explore the thesis that the claim of unproductive labour to unproductive capital must be asserted as part of the decomposition of the wage-labour-capital relation discussed by the “communisation” current (Theorie Communiste and Endnotes), which entails the impossibility of asserting a work-based political identity (“only revindicative struggles”), either subjectively (no-one identifies with their jobs) or objectively (workers’ power is broken by law and by globalized re-structuring) and which, as we have already seen, needs to be asserted through the point of inconsistency of the situation – for the politics of debt, we can provisionally name it as “uncapitalized life,” just as “free human activity” came to name human praxis beyond wage labour when wage labour was decisive, both to relations of production and struggles for emancipation. The class relation Marx describes below may be in its historical eclipse:

“Capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous connected process, of a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage-labourer.” (Capital, vol. 1)

But the class relation between creditor and debtor flourishes in that vacuum, so long as capitalism in its core lineaments is still with us and so long as most of the populace has to survive within its laws and mediate this survival through the value-form. Again, Marx ensures it doesn’t escape us that, “When viewed, therefore, as a connected whole, and in the constant flux of its incessant renewal, every social process of production is at the same time a process of reproduction.” (p. 711) To the historical (and still current) figures of the housewife and the benefits claimant, we add the figure of the debtor, and try to trace a politics of debt on the ground of the politics of reproduction. What happens to the concept of the “social wage” after the wage?

Reproduction in the Home, Reproduction of the Home

To move chronologically, and to take a starting point which in some ways will appear arbitrary – certainly to historians of the working-class, community and women’s movements – the Welfare Rights Movement coming onto the scene in the 1960s in the United States stands as an interesting case, as it shared activists, demands and campaign tactics with the Civil Rights Movement and the second-wave feminist movement, as well as the more radical community-based and nationalist-influenced factions of the movement like the Black Panthers and the Young Lords. [7]  The Welfare Rights Movement was composed of the single mothers who were the main constituency of U.S. social services of the time. They were among the first, both in the Civil Rights and the women’s liberation movements, to position their struggle squarely on the terrain of social reproduction. They grounded what came to be known as “the personal is political” in the systemic inequities that organized their lives. They were also the first to name and analyze the structural contradiction that drove their demands on the state – the contribution of unpaid domestic labour to the efficiency of the capitalist economy – and were the first to associate their reproductive function with an economic position. They suggested that this reproductive labour be recognized and valued in the same way as paid labour in the workplace, and also turned this into a political practice, claiming a voice and a subject position from the sidelines of marginality and impoverishment: as women, as single mothers, as African-American in many cases, and as social welfare claimants. They claimed a “social wage” as against the patriarchal “family wage” paid to the male worker as the head of the family, the social responsibility of capital for the “externalities” of commodified but unwaged social being – looking after children and the elderly, for example. Dignity and autonomy from harassment, surveillance and corrupt bureaucracy were also emblematic to their struggle. As traced earlier in the dialectic of affirmation and negation, the Welfare Rights Movement affirmed a “wrong” in order to negate the social conditions and the social identifications – patriarchy, capitalism and racism – that made that wrong possible, indeed unquestionable, and rendered them its natural targets. Yet it can be argued that overall, like the mainstream of the Civil Rights and women’s movements (which came a bit later), the ultimate horizon of the movement for most of its members, in praxis and analysis, was that of improving their position within the current state of affairs rather than seriously challenging it, which would have had its tactical as well as its political reasons. The institutionalization of the movement in the National Welfare Rights Organization (1966–1972) lent it negotiating power at a higher level, but the reactionary social climate of the Nixon era, as well as internal splits (over expanding the movement to include the working poor vs. redefining welfare as a feminist issue) ended up destroying the organization. U.S. Government counter-insurgency activities no doubt also played a role, given the overlap of welfare rights activists with Black Panthers and other radical (as well as moderate – the CIA drew no such distinctions amongst its internally colonized) community action groups.

In the early 1970s, the currents of Marxist feminism in Italy associated with the Worker’s Power and Autonomia analyses started to put forward the idea that reproduction also constituted a “hidden abode,” as Marx spoke of production in its contrast with the sunlit equality of exchange. They proposed that since unpaid work conducted primarily by women in the home produces, the same as factory workers, the commodity of labour-power, which is then sold on the market for a wage, that they could as well form the “vanguard” of working-class organization and work refusal. Until that point, women at home were (indirectly) producing surplus value.

The desired consequences of this redefinition of women’s work was that unwaged workers would be acknowledged as subjects of working-class politics, and that “women’s issues” could be more broadly addressed as “class issues” and understood as antagonistic to capitalist interests in the same way as the issues of waged workers. Another reason was to actualize reproduction – childcare, health care, prostitution, power relations in the home and community – as a properly political site of contestation, rather than continuing to abide by the “revolutionary logic that established hierarchies of revolutionary subjects patterned on the hierarchies of the capitalist organization of work.” [8] Finally, some elements of this position, though not all, came to the conclusion that if housework produced a commodity, maybe even value, i.e., it fulfilled the minimal conditions of capitalist work in general, then it should be paid for by capital like any other work “directly,” “at its value,” rather than through the miserly margins of welfare payments or the “family wage.”

Alongside the number of conceptual, political and practical problems addressed by this analysis, there were a similar number of problems with the analysis itself. On the conceptual side, it could be claimed that no labour in capitalism is ever paid for “at its value,” or else surplus-value extraction would not be the first law of capitalist work. The second objection would follow from this, that for Marx, “being a productive worker is a misfortune,” and that the identification of domestic labour with productive work only made it politically meaningful in the “workerist” context, fixated as it was by the productive/unproductive labour distinction and which saw the factory worker as hegemonic, rather than providing a weapon against the relations of production in its own right. On the political side, as was swiftly pointed out, linking the emancipation of female houseworkers to the wage both reinforced the centrality of the state or “total social capital” to the reproduction of workers and families, and trapped women in the home rather than renegotiating gender roles and radically moving the structure of the family in a more collective and egalitarian direction. Additionally, it faced the paradox of the “transitional demand” that asks to reform capitalist relations in a way which would make them no longer capitalist; a paradox equally confronting the idea of the “basic income” today. Finally, the practical problem of evaluating housework in the same terms as waged work would revolve around problems of measure and withdrawal of labour: “[…] how exactly a wage could be calculated, given the lack of instruments for the measurement of the work day? How could housework ‘strike’ overcome the necessary aspects of community support for struggle in other sectors of the class composition?” [9]

Wages for Housework could further be discussed as a tension between the prescriptive and descriptive: how does a critical position on the production of value help us overcome value? Proceeding through the moments of affirmation and negation again, the affirmation would go something like: we, too, produce value and are productive workers, so the workers’ movement has to take us into account and expand their concept of value to include unpaid or “social” labour. The negation could then be, if we produce value, then value is so broad as to fall apart; it immediately becomes a political rather than a technical category. This was in fact the position of Silvia Federici, among others, who cautions against the literal interpretation of the Wages for Housework programme, placing emphasis rather on its strategic horizons and its critical character, what she terms “Wages against Housework.” Rather than the productivist agenda of raising all to the same baseline of exploitation, the contribution of the Italian Autonomist feminist perspective was to push for a generalization of the refusal of work by expanding the category of what constituted work, and to ensure that the “hidden realm” of reproduction would never again be forgotten in the analysis of and action against capitalist exploitation. As Federici has recently noted on the legacy of Wages for Housework for today’s anti-systemic movements:

“When we said that housework is actually work for capital, that although it is unpaid work it contributes to the accumulation of capital, we established something extremely important about the nature of capitalism as a system of production. We established that capitalism is built on an immense amount of unpaid labor, that it is not built exclusively or primarily on contractual relations; that the wage relation hides the unpaid, slave-like nature of so much of the work upon which capital accumulation is premised [...] In other words, by recognizing that what we call “reproductive labor” is a terrain of accumulation and therefore a terrain of exploitation, we were able to also see reproduction as a terrain of struggle [...].” [10]

Parenthetically, it should also be added that Italian Marxist feminism took on very disparate forms, although the one chronicled above has perhaps become the most renowned due to the originality and far-reaching impact of its analysis. There were also feminist elements of the armed factions that emerged in Italy towards the end of the 1970s, and their efforts did not transpire in the “hidden realm” alone – they targeted health clinics that refused to provide abortions to users of public healthcare for “reasons of conscience,” but were happy to do so for a steep fee, as well as sweatshops employing mainly young and immigrant women. [11] The emphasis on reproduction as a political battlefield most consistently developed by the feminists could also be seen to be key to the prevalence of both organized and informal campaigns of “self-reduction” and “proletarian shopping” in 1970s Italy; groups of tenants would take unilateral and concerted action to lower their rent or utilities, or pay lower prices or nothing for public transport or for groceries (although clearly the workers in these sectors had to be co-operative to some extent for these tactics to succeed).

The “social factory” of waged, unwaged and informal work did become increasingly central to Autonomist Marxism, as activists “followed the workers out of the factories,” who were leaving for reasons ranging from and between the broadly subjective (mass refusal) and broadly objective (mass unemployment). At the same time, there continued to be a caesura between feminism and class struggle, with divisions between socialist feminists, separatists, bourgeois and social democratic feminists and so forth complicating a situation where the subordination of women seemed so clearly to be attendant on capitalist class relations (and on religious customs) but seemed to flourish equally well in Left milieus among “comrades.” An articulation of the relations between patriarchy and capitalism (as well as the construction and exploitation of race) [12] where sexism and racism are seen as both divisions in a global working-class and as relatively autonomous, as phenomena which are both overdetermined and contingent, continues to be one of the most vexed fault lines in Marxian praxis; a thinking-through of the relations between them which is adequate to the present moment of capitalist decomposition, in all its unevenness, is a project of staggering complexity and no less staggering urgency, even with the resources supplied by thirty or more years of Marxist and materialist feminism and queer theory, not to mention historical and actual praxis.

However, the prescient appropriation by the Italian Autonomist feminists of the reproductive field for political action by its “native informants,” by those already defined by their lack of access to social visibility and economic power, can now be used to contextualize the organized struggles against welfare cutbacks that found a resurgence in Thatcher-era Britain and are making a gradual reappearance today. Reproduction as the social mediation of the value-form outside the workplace has clearly always been problematic, as the foregoing has illustrated. Yet it is in times when this particular mediation starts to eclipse the encounter with the value-form in the workplace for increasing numbers of people, i.e., in times of mass unemployment and capitalist restructuring, that the politicization of reproduction starts to have more general repercussions which are no longer limited to those temporarily falling into the category of the unwaged and who decide to organize for mutual aid and advice. From examination of the 1980s groups, the practical consequences of this can be quite disparate. The interstitial and low-level nature of some claimants’ groups can suddenly acquire a degree of visibility for which in some cases the participants are not prepared, or materially cannot sustain. In some cases also, the organization can shuttle between being a campaign group with radical demands and a “service provider,” and can finally end up subcontracted as a service provider for the state – something which is only going to escalate with the present UK government’s ideological commitment to expanding the role of the voluntary sector in what were formerly areas of state provision: ‘The Big Society’.

Such a dialectic between self-activity and support has so far not been able to translate into a broader mobilization which finds a commonality between the interests of the unemployed and the still-employed, even in the current destructive climate of the impending and gratuitous cuts. It has, in other words, not been able to redefine those sociological or factual categories as political ones. Yet such a commonality, in whatever terms it is set out, and whether it’s guided more by expediency than left communist analysis, is indispensable to the de-legitimation of the cuts and a defeat of the political project that is generating them.

The Islington Action Group of the Unwaged (1980–86) along with other claimants’ action groups and benefit workers’ strikes of the 1980s and 1990s, and going into the present with the national and local branches of the Unemployed Workers Union, the Brighton Unemployed Centre, the Edinburgh Claimants Union and the London and Edinburgh CAPs (Coalitions Against Poverty), the Hackney Solidarity Group, Save Our Council Housing and Save Our Nurseries, comprise the most visible historical and present-day actors of the struggle on the terrain of reproduction in the UK. To different degrees, the perspective is about encouraging resistance and collective activity among the ever-more demonized “benefits scroungers” who are uniquely aware of the effects of the state deficit being resolved on their backs but only have the means to confront them in a largely individualized and piecemeal fashion, i.e., from a situation of defeat. It is also sometimes about the principled “refusal of work” position, viewing benefits as a direct appropriation of socially produced wealth otherwise removed from its producers; and then, fundamentally, it is about occupying the “welfare state commons” and all the contradictions of that position. Like the struggles in the universities or the battles against social housing privatization, it is less about upholding the entrenched model of public services than it is about refusing to concede what little remains of non-commodified public goods (although that struggle would seem to be lost in terms of higher education in England, where fees up to £10,000 for a full degree and rocketing student debt is now the norm; universities are still free in Scotland). This reactive, rear-guard orientation, though it might seem to be less descriptive of the 1980s – which had a more recent memory of working-class organization – than of the contemporary groups, confirms that the situation of defeat is fundamental to all the listed formations. Although the political conjuncture demands generalization of struggles, three decades of working-class decomposition, union-hostile laws and public quiescence are preventing this from happening at the moment. But this is not to overdetermine the future, even the immediate future. And couldn’t decomposition find its own specific power? Could we say that the labour of the negative still applies even when it is a question of the negation of labour?

Note: Originally conceived in two instalments, the material referred to but not extensively discussed in this text will appear in an autonomous text for Reartikulacija in 2011.

Marina Vishmidt is a London-based writer who deals mainly with art, value, and the politics of work and abstraction, currently doing a PhD at Queen Mary, University of London.

1 Jason Read often writes on the anthropology of neoliberalism: “To quote Etienne Balibar, ‘The capitalist is defined as worker, as an “entrepreneur”; the worker, as the bearer of a capacity, of a human capital.’ (Balibar, 1994: 53). Once ‘capital’ and ‘investment’ have been redefined so broadly, the scope of the economic is drastically redefined. Any activity that increases the capacity to earn income, from learning a new computer program to getting one’s teeth whitened, is an investment in human capital. Economic rationality, the balancing costs and returns, risk and benefits, is removed from the specialized realm of the market, from the specific science of economics, to become tantamount to rationality altogether. Neoliberalism thus entails a particular version of ‘capitalism without capitalism,’ a particular way of dispensing with the antagonism of capitalism while maintaining private property and inequality.” ‘Reductions and Amplifications of the Political’, Unemployed Negativity blog post, 20 October 2009, http://unemployednegativity.blogspot.com/2009/10/reductionsamplifications-of-political.html

2 Compare Owen Hatherley’s enunciation of this point in his blog post ‘Work and Non-Work’: “Yet still, work goes on, as controlled, brutal and idiotic as it ever was. Thatcherism with a human face claims to have abolished the working class, but it perpetuates work to an ever more ludicrous extent, particularly when it wants to remind the ‘core voters’ of its roots in the movement of the toiling classes. British jobs for British workers. War on the workshy. Work more to earn more. Work trials for the disabled, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for those who don’t want to work. He who does not work, neither shall he eat. Today, the only response to this has to be – the party of the workers, whatever or wherever it is, must stand against work.” Then the more rigorous development through Marx’s categories in the Endnotes text, ‘Crisis in the Class Relation’: “[...] the proletariat increasingly becomes that which is produced by capital without producing capital. As the population that is simply superfluous to capitalist production, yet one which has no autonomous mode of reproduction, the surplus population is reproduced as a side-effect of capitalist production. Since its self-reproduction is not mediated through the exchange with capital of productive labour for the wage, it does not close the circuit with capital, and its existence thus appears as contingent or inessential relative to that of capital. […] As the wage form loses its centrality in mediating social reproduction, capitalist production itself appears increasingly superfluous to the proletariat: it is that which makes us proletarians, and then abandons us here. In such circumstances the horizon appears as one of communisation; of directly taking measures to halt the movement of the value form and reproduce ourselves without capital.” Endnotes, no. 2, pp. 17–19; also at http://endnotes.org.uk/articles/2

3 See ‘Battle of all Mothers (or: No Unauthorised Reproduction)’ by Madame Tlank, at http://www.metamute.org/en/The-Battle-of-all-Mothers

4 The Manifesto of the Malgré Tout Collective (written in 1995). Available many places on the web, including at http://www.gtrlabs.org/node/106

5 Ibid.

6 Neil Gray, ‘The Tyranny of Rent,’ Variant 37, print edition pp. 37–43 and online: http://www.variant.org.uk/37texts/13RentTyranny.html: “When McLay suggested, in 1990, that groups like Workers City pointed towards the future, he talked of the traditional image of the worker as producer of wealth becoming more problematic every day. Indeed, the manufacturing sector now accounts for only 6% of the Glasgow labour market, while low-paid services work now accounts for 88% of the workforce.” This figure comes from a 2009 report produced at the University of Glasgow, ‘Beyond Aspiration: Young People and decent work in the de-industrialised city’ http://www.variant.org.uk/events/Doc7Poverty/BeyondAspiration.pdf

7 Like their contemporaries the Black Panthers, the Puerto Rican Young Lords combined a nationalist and anti-racist agenda with ‘community work,’ which consisted of self-organized programmes in childcare, education and food distribution alongside direct action. See Jennifer 8. Lee, “The Young Lords’ Legacy of Puerto Rican Activism”, New York Times, City Room blog, Aug. 24, 2009 and Frank Edwards, ‘Young Lords 40^th Anniversary’ at http://www.areachicago.org/p/issues/6808/young-lords-40th-anniversary/; also http://www.nationalyounglords.com/ for the origins of the movement. For the Welfare Rights Movement, see Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States by Premilla Nadasen, Routledge, 2004 and Bread or Justice: Grassroots Organizing in the Welfare Rights Movement by Lawrence Neil Bailis, Lexington Books, 1974.

8 George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici, ‘Notes on the Edu–factory and Cognitive Capitalism,’ in The Commoner, issue 12, Summer 2007; in Edu-factory Collective, eds., Towards a Global Autonomous University: Cognitive Labor, the Production of Knowledge and Exodus from the Education Factory, Autonomedia, New York, 2009; and at http://www.commoner.org.uk/12federicicaffentz.pdf

9 Nicholas Thoburn, Deleuze, Marx and Politics, Routledge, London/New York, 2003, Chapter 5; or at http://libcom.org/library/deleuze-marx-politics-nicholas-thoburn-5

10 Silvia Federici, ‘Precarious Labour: a Feminist Viewpoint’, Variant 37 at http://www.variant.org.uk/37texts/Variant37.html#L9 or in the print edition pp 23–25.

11 See Vincenzo Ruggiero, ‘Sentenced to Normality: The Italian Political Refugees in Paris’, Crime, Law and Social Change, No. 19, 1993, pp. 33–50. Referenced in Pat Cunninghame, ‘Italian feminism, workerism and autonomy in the 1970s: The struggle against unpaid reproductive labour and violence’, p. 7, note 31; @mnis: Revue de Civilisation Contemporaine de l’Université de Bretagne Occidentale EUROPES / AMÉRIQUES http://www.univ-brest.fr/amnis/

12 It is relatively more straightforward to make the case that racism was both coterminous with and instrumental to the emergence of capitalism, via colonialism and slavery, than to make the same case for the subjugation of women, which seems historically much older and more widespread. In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici makes a trenchant, if not altogether successful argument, for the co-emergence of capitalism and the subjugation of women in the era of ‘primitive accumulation.’ Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation, Autonomedia, New York, 2004.

María Ruido

“Representation needs to be contextualized from several points. The representation of texts and images does not reflect the world as a mirror, mere translation of its sources, but is rather remodeled, coded in rhetorical terms. (…) Representation may be understood as a visible formal ‘articulation’ of social order “.

Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference, 1994

FIRST INTRODUCTION

WORK> NON WORK: REDEFINITIONS FROM FEMINISM

“What do you do? What is your occupation?” Although every day we all reply quite easily to this apparently simple question, if we stop and carefully think what is our interlocutor demanding, we conclude that, in fact, what he/she really wants to know is the job we have or the activity or activities we make for a living and does not expect us at all to enumerate the wide range of actions, relations and productions that we unfold throughout the day.

Defining work and its limits in abstract terms at the present time, where the times and locations of production became blurred and extended, is not an easy task. However, experiencing its consequences on our bodies seems to be less complicated, especially if we consider a definition of work that goes beyond the economistic view (whether neoclassical or Marxist) and, especially, if we understand our sustainment of a daily life and our daily incorporation of personalities and social actions as spaces and (re)productive efforts. Everything that tires, that occupies, that disciplines and stresses our body, but also everything that constructs it, that takes care of it, that gives it pleasure and maintains it, is work.

Thus, we could say that work, besides being a fundamental part of the socio-economic structure in which we set in, is an experience, although we all know that this liquid description has little to do with the traditional division of labour recognized by economics, sociology or anthropology until recently.

As explained by several authors (Federici, 1999; Pérez Orozco y del Rio, 2002; Carrasco, 2004; Duran, 2006; Carrasco, 2006), the classical concept of work considers as such those productive activities governed by the laws of market and generally carried out in the extra-domestic space. If we consider that, since Modernity, Western capitalism completely split off the productive forms, underlining the division between public (productive) space and private (reproductive) space, this division of labour becomes also a sexual division, as well as an implicit regulation of spaces and times. This division of labour emphasizes and increases the value of the productive-accumulative public space versus the reproductive-life maintainer private space, and it settles the image of the man as the family provider in opposition to the woman, dependent and caregiver, supporting the dichotomous patriarchal capitalist order.

This socio-sexual division that devalued and condemned to invisibility, gratuity and non-work category a range of activities usually performed by women was and still is, not only false (women have worked and work in the domestic space providing items or services intended for the external consumption, thereby breaking the public versus private dichotomy), but it has also placed in the centre of the economic question the logic of accumulation instead of the logic of sustainability, the production of commodities instead of the care for human life, and without whose energy, power and consumption, any other activity would be useless and impossible (Orozco and Pérez del Río, 2002; Carrasco, 2004).

It is not a coincidence, then, that the distinction between work (paid employment, socially recognized), and non-work (unpaid, informal, socially illegitimate or unregulated) has an immediate correspondence in representation. Until a few decades ago, our imaginary of work was limited to the strictly economistic definition, and its main characters were, obviously, the homo economicus and its activities within the spaces of production, leaving obs-scenae (“out of the work scene”) and almost unrepresented all those tasks that women carried out within the domestic space or those other unregulated that, although they often imply an economic exchange, they enter a broad category of informal activities that have not acquired the consideration of work (for example, the sex work, the care for sick people, elderly and children, the maintenance of the affective networks, etc …).

Although it is not my intention to describe here an exhaustive history of the evolution of the concept work, I cannot cease to explain, as an introductory framework, several different “incorporations” of the term due to feminist critiques, as well as some fundamental paradigm shifts in its own conception, as, to a certain extent, these critical positions help to explain the emergence of some of the different images of work that we will find, especially from the 70s onwards. In some recent texts, authors such as María Ángeles Durán or Cristina Carrasco draw attention to the already long trajectory that these “expanded definitions” of work have, from the early enlightened feminism to the present days (Carrasco, 2006), as well as to the need of starting to consider in the state and supra-state economic studies the enormous weight of the so called “non-observed economies”, so that, in an effort to achieve a visibility increase (also fiscal, let’s not cheat ourselves), the opaque, submerged or informal activities become considered and valued by the macroeconomic indicators (Duran, 2006: 16-21). To really understand what it is and what work means it would be necessary, as some of these women explain, to redefine the  economic logic itself: not presenting care and benefit as separate and opposed terms, but  “affirming the primacy of human needs and sustainability” (Orozco y del Rio, 2002) over the abstract accumulation, de-hierarchizing spaces and the public/private dichotomy, and directing our gaze to the field of care and affection and their relations with power structures, also as a place of generation of economic flow (Precarias a la Deriva, 2006: 122-126).

For this “expanded economy” to result politically active, I think it would be essential also to transversally sexualize and ethnicize the production processes and their studies. I am referring not to simply apply the formula of addition, but to the need of developing an authentic deconstruction of economic history, its elaboration frameworks and processes, in a similar way as the one proposed since the 80s by Griselda Pollock and other scholars of representation for the art history after a period, during the 70s, of merely “parallel” feminist historiography (Pollock, 1994).

“Feminist economics is not an attempt to extend the existing methods and theories to include women, it does not consist, as stated by Sandra Harding, of the idea of “add women and stir” [Harding, 1996]. It is about something much more deeper: to seek a radical shift in economic analysis that will be able to transform the discipline and allow to build an economy that integrates and analyzes the reality of women and men, taking as a basic principle the satisfaction of human needs ” (Carrasco, 2006: 31).

“Does the feminist history of art must content itself with rediscovering female artists and reevaluating their contribution to art? Is it not rather an authentic feminist reinvention of the ‘art history’ discipline in order to reveal the structural sexism of its discourse based on the patriarchal order of sexual difference?. (…) Knowledge is a political issue, an issue of position, interests, perspectives and power. History of art, as a discourse and as an institution, maintains an order of the power invested by male desire. We must destroy this order in order to speak about women’s interests, and especially, in order to put in its place a discourse through which we will affirm our presence, our voice and, consequently, women’s desire” (Pollock, 1995: 63 and 90).

SECOND INTRODUCTION

TRANSNATIONAL BODIES OF THE NEW GLOBAL ORDER

In the hierarchical order of traditional work, sustained by the extradomestic prejudice and the  physical distance, the worker (either manual or affective) has been one of the examples of the otherness, of the excess and the excretion against the counterpoint of the central body, the bourgeois paradigm of introverted and self-contained body. The working body is, par excellence, the body of the sweat and the fatigue, exterior to the norm, but devoid of self-determination, governed by external time, and therefore opposed to the epitome of the modern body, which is presented as autonomous, controlled, perfectly limited and precise. If the bodies of men workers are excessive bodies, close to savage and rebel to social disciplines, the bodies of women workers represent the maximum degree of abjection and obscenity, because of their dual status as women and workers (even their triple status,  if besides women workers, they are ethnically signified, as in the case of immigrants) (Nead, 1998). In the visual hegemonic order continued by the patriarchal eye of industrial capital, these bodies are instituted, like the rest of the “other” bodies, as objects of study and observation. They will rarely take the scenic protagonism, and much less outside of the traditional production areas. Normally, these bodies of otherness act as “extras” or backdrops of the protagonist bodies in hegemonic narratives, those of (men and women) that, far from the physical production activities, allegedly have the control over their time and actions.

However, for several decades, although the classic imaginary still persists in the cinema and in the media, the working body has expanded and diversified. With the dissolution of the usual hierarchies of industrial capital and the imposition of a false reticularity that expands everything that is related to work to all spaces and times, we all have become “bodies of production” (Ruido, 2005). In this complex scenario of redefining work, we turn into privileged territories of (re)production and diversities, desires and sexualities appear now as fundamental economic variables, both in the division of labour as well as in the different forms of consumption.

The work sabotage expanded during the 70s operaismo (Virno, 2003), the exodus from the factory, the defection of the traditional class seems to have reversed, and it has become not only non-rejected, but capitalized and used by capitalism in a new phase dominated by the immaterial flow of information and sustained by the materiality and corporeality (mostly female) of the huge cross-border factories. From the concentrated and linear production of the Fordist factory, we have moved to the decentralized and reticular production of post-Fordism, where, thanks to the new technologies and its optimizing applications, as well as to the cheapening of transports, the location for assembly is chosen depending on the production costs, building a network of global corporate pressure, unimaginable in other moments in history. It no longer appears to be anything else outside the regime of global companies, holders of the authentic power, guides of the political agendas of governments (Federici, 1999, Sassen 2003).

As we noted above, the informal production becomes part of the normality of the offshoring and the subsistence within the regime of domestication and extreme flexibility scenario (that is why we can talk about a “feminization” of the economy)-see Haraway, 1995; Federici, 1999; Vega, 2000; TrabajoZero, 2001 – so that all the maintenance and worker’s safety costs rely upon him, without any commitment by the employer and, increasingly, neither by a state in crisis that pays, exclusively, for the final product, encouraging disloyal and wild competition. This informality and hyperflexibility extends to many sectors, including the one that produces and/ or transmits information, images or signs. Cultural producers and the so-called cognitariat (which does not correspond with the traditional intellectual class) maintain, under the cloak of vocation, highly irregular and precarized working conditions where the paralyzing romantic mythologies appear mixed with the most sophisticated technologies in an almost complete political disarticulation (Kuni, 1998; Lazzarato, 2001; Berardi, 2003; Ruido, 2004, Rowan and Ruido, in press).

Mobility is established as an effective control strategy in the metropolis of information. Cross-border bodies are part of the economic game (Sassen, 2003), while this same borders become impregnable walls when the capital does not find an immediate profitability (see the current situation of the southern border of Europe, displaced to Morocco because of the international interests). Our bodies, our affections, our time of relationship, everything seems to have entered the economic game: the personal, rather than political, is economic. The imposed precarity and fragility in the new division of labour structure our lives to a greater or lesser degree, and are some of the most obvious instruments of contemporary biopolitical regime. The bodies of postindustrial precariat (which coexists with the proletariat, not replacing it) return to the permeability and the extreme flexibility of domesticated production. They come out from the concentrated traditional production spaces to embrace a working regime without any separation between life time and working time.

Moreover, consumption becomes one of the new privileged forms of social relationship, the one that provides us presence and visibility in the framework of the economy of capital: the first product of the immaterial economy is not the information, but the social relationship and its raw material, the subjectivity (Lazzarato, 2000 and 2001; Precarias a la Deriva, 2005). The time of non-business, the leisure, becomes economic time when it appears as (re)productive time. The place and the moment of the personal construction is managed by professional staff, properly paid (from coaches and fitness instructors to psychologists and various therapists) that keeps us within the limits of physical and mental “normality”.

Care becomes a deferred activity, sometimes even a surrogated one -like in the case of surrogate mothers-, usually paid by women from the so-called first world to other women,- from the second or third world-, regenerating the already known hierarchical structures lady-servant which, in the long term, consolidate the impoverishment of the developed countries and the sexual division of labour. In the global economic exploitation, women of the developed countries assume, once again exclusively, the reproduction, deresponsibilizing men and the State for the sustainment of life, while women in developing countries seem to be condemned to producing workforce for transnational capital while providing, at the same time, energy and affection in a labour activity, the care, without defined limits or times, where emotional involvement and constant support are expected (Federici, 1999; Carrasco, 2004; Precarias a la Deriva, 2006).

Thus, together with the traditional and non-traditional working classes, an increasingly large new group appears, consisting of a transnational workforce, extremely fragile and susceptible to the deepest exploitation (Sassen, 2003), because of their aberrant status of “paperless”, people evicted from their most fundamental rights in the name of the preservation of a highly questionable definition of citizenship. On this respect, going in depth into the need of rethinking the symbolic and the economic value of care and the people who develop it, and connecting this with the need of revising the current relationship between employment and citizenship that prevails in our legislative framework, Precarias a la Deriva demand the “citizenship,” a right that politicizes and questions the relations of double subordination (between the caregiver and the subject of her work) that characterize our current concept of care.

“We define citizenship as the right to care and to be cared, so that the meaning of care does not imply subordination for women, nor for any other position of subject as caregiver/carereceiver.

If citizenship relies on the sexual contract as an heteronormative device, citizenship subverts this device through the proliferation of bodies, practices and desires for the production of other forms of life (…) Therefore, we strategically use the game of the language of rights, of citizenship rights: right to resources, spaces, times…. to give care and to receive care”(Precarias a la Deriva, 2006: 126) .

WOMEN AT WORK / WOMEN’S LABOUR:

HOUSEHOLD SPACES AND EXTRA-HOUSEHOLD SPACES

As pointed by José Enrique Monterde in the title of his book, the image of workers has been the “denied image” in the history of cinema (Monterde, 1997): an image that evidences hierarchies in the order of production, an uncomfortable vision for the modern imaginary, already framed by the same constraints on the construction of the gaze as other traditional forms of representation.

Work, however, sorrounds us, traverses us, shapes our reality, so it is no wonder that it is one of the thematic pillars, at least in the documentary record, nor it is no wonder that the first moving images that we preserve correspond precisely to workers leaving a factory in Lyon (La sortie des usines, 1895): these are disciplined bodies by the Lumière theirselves in their factory, at their service, controlled by their gaze from their position in the industrial process, and once again productive in the captured image.

The few preserved fragments of Lumière’s films contain scenes of the daily domestic and extra-domestic work, productive and reproductive, a voracious record only possible in an omnivorous eye which will soon begin to discern its privileged objects and accounts.

It is no wonder that, just as in the literature of the 19th and early 20th century, in the first cinematography it also prevails a general paternalistic and panoptic vision. It won’t be until some years later that other forms of gazing and other subjects of representation will appear. From this assumption, the cinema of the 20s and 30s faces the elaboration of discourses on its socio-economic reality with two fundamental types of narratives: the militant revolutionary narratives (which best examples we owe to the Soviet cinema, especially to Eisenstein and Pudovkin) or the overwhelming descriptions of the brutalization and the alienation in the industrial production chain, due to authors who were inserted in the order of the industrial capital. Both in Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1926) and Modern Times (Charles Chaplin, 1936) we can observe how the surprising intuition of their directors already points out the way in which the rhythm of the factory structures and organizes the life of the characters, although in one case there is a dramatic tone, almost apocalyptic, which becomes definitely threatening in its final part, while in the other case, there is a marked parodic and critical accent.

Cinema, which is a fundamental shaping technology of our time, was (and it still is) one of the most significant tools used by the main ideologies of the 20th century. Then, it is not surprising that, in opposition to the workers vision proposed by the cinema-spectacle of the early capitalism, an entertainment that intends to show the world without conflicts or with conflicts that have been allegedly resolved from the emotional exception, where antagonisms and social struggles are reduced to mere anecdotes, the cinema of real socialism stresses, through a categorical hypermasculine monumentalization, the success of the usual practices of the militancy and the protagonism of the triumphant working class. In both scenarios, however, the role of women seems to be similar: neither in the disciplinary victory of the corporation and the sacrifice of the (virgin) Mary in Metropolis, nor in the revolutionary conversion for the love of the son in The mother (V . Pudovkin, 1926) we find a real interest in the portrayal of women workers, but just a mere accompaniment of who is considered the protagonist of the labour scenario and its struggles, the worker (always a male). Women are, in both discourses, mere accomplices, figurants in the fundamental political struggles, the class struggles, with no claims or specificities of their own.

In this general prospect of vicariousness, some cases of an incipient (and always secondary)  feminist struggle should be subtracted, as we can see, for example, in Salt of the Earth (Herbert Biberman, 1954), where those women who are close to the protagonists, begin to have their own voice and, in the midst of a brutal strike, they mobilize to prevent the access of the strikebreakers to the mines. This demonstration of strength has an unforeseen price for the workers: the claim for gender equality interweaves with the demands for racial equality of the Latin-American miners (Sand, 2005: 192-195).

Portraying the postwar scenario after 1945, the neorealist films, both the Italian and others due to their state varieties, insist on the miserable consequences of war. Among the large number of women who appear in the scenario of almost all of them, it is unforgettable the humid and hypersexualized image of Silvana Mangano, the protagonist of Bitter Rice (Riso Amaro) (Giuseppe De Santis, 1949). The film, which narrates the vicissitudes of a group of women harvesters, reflects the poverty and difficulties in an area, the rural one, less visually exploited than the urban one, and it does it through the figure of some women who, in addition to their workforce, they also put their own bodies and their diverse profitabilities at stake in a highly sexualized labour scenario.

Although, in general, the interwar period and the years after World War II mean an entrenchment of the already mentioned positions and traditional strategies, fundamentally due to the Cold War order, the polychromed bodies of the 50s and the 60s begin to build more nuanced images of male and female workers. I am not referring only to the “women’s professions”, that begin to have an important (quantitatively speaking) and normalized place in the cinema and the  media, but also to films like They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (Sydney Pollack, 1969), that takes advantage of the commercial success and the accumulated memory capital of the successful film The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940) to continue the historicist fresque of the American Great Depression, pointing at the new ways of corporal exploitation (Sand, 2005: 217 -221). This new episode, reopens the memory of the previous film not only because Jane Fonda is the daughter of Henry Fonda, who is the protagonist in the John Ford’s film, that it clearly quotes, but it completes and redefines it by extending the crisis and the misery to the field of personal relationships and, especially, by displacing the production to the leisure scenario. Through a dance marathon where couples compete until they die of exhaustion, Sydney Pollack is already proposing, in a brutal way, the body itself as a territory of economic surplus value and not only as the main tool of the workforce.

The body as the scenario or the currency for economic exchange and the underlying sexual division of labour order is absolutely present in the work done by women and especially in those “women’s work”, both in the cinema and in the media.  As we already mentioned, if there is a doubly “denied image” in the representation of work, that is the one of women workers. If the productive activities and their conditions occupy a generally non-protagonist space, especially in fiction, the actions and forms of the reproduction of life in the household area remain practically invisible. Women’s non-works (except as a naturalizing affirmation or an anthropological print) are almost ignored by the cinematographic imagery until the 60s, especially those of difficult representation, such as the different immaterial forms of attention or affection and, of course, the socially stigmatized forms of work, such as sexual work.

Reproduction and its related tasks appear only in more or less condescending, moralistic or mystifying visions, and always to reify the sexual order (see, for example, the interested worship of motherhood and devotion of feminine care, very present in the cinema of diverse ideologies). Even the most vindicative or revolution celebratory films -in all its forms- reaffirm the sexual division of labour, praising the figure of the self-sacrificing and resigned female militant, or that of the heroic mother who reproduces and feeds men for the cause, not to talk, of course, about the image of traditional femininity (adapted to each time and space) where the cinema has been a powerful and fundamental rhetoric machine, an irreplaceable “gender technology” (de Lauretis, 2000). I believe there is no exaggeration in saying that, today, our bodies are literally constructed by the cinema and the media. As we mentioned above, providing evidence of the fact that one of our main tasks is to remodel and to build our body and subjectivity within the limits of consumption, it is no more than stressing the extensions of work, literally in-corporated here.

In the traditional overview of the productive representation, there are some jobs that are assimilated to femininity or almost always conjugated in feminine: as we already explained, those tasks related to care, reproduction, assistance or attention in any of its forms are usually interpreted by women. From nurses to teachers, going through secretaries or prostitutes,  women workers traverse the scene -not always in supporting roles-, but with very different endings. While in the genuine Las que tienen que servir (Jose M ª Forqué, 1967) or Como está el servicio (Mariano Ozores, 1968), the caregivers and sustainers of life are rural immigrants arriving at that moment to the large cities, harmless, emotionally generous, -although sometimes a bit clumsy- and apparently satisfied with the disrespect and the classism that is generally professed to them, in recent films, like the Brechtian The Ceremony (Claude Chabrol, 1995), the housekeeper (a restrained Sandrine Bonnaire), helped by a woman socially excluded because of a never proved murder accusation (a persuasive Isabelle Hupper), cruelly takes revenge on the family she works for, not only for their condescension, but for years of social injustice that had kept her, among other discriminations, in the illiteracy.

This fear of the rebellion of  the submissive caregiver (whether she is the housekeeper, the wife- mother or the babysitter) soars in the North American films of the 80s and the early 90s. Coeval to the crazed seducers who break marriages and sexually harass men that flood the United States’ filmography of those years, (distorted mirror of the women that, in those days, were beginning to get a scarce but feared professional recognition), The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (Curtis Hanson, 1991) represents the epitome of the masculinist mirages on the perversion of power: patriarchy’s fear of women using their motherhood to change the world (rather than to transmit their genes and their property).

If in the cinema and the television, the caregivers (sometimes) rebel, the secretaries and chief’s assistants seem to reaffirm, almost always, the corporate hierarchy and dominance, usually including among their regular services, the sexual and emotional ones. This is usually the common argument of many telenovelas and soap operas, which seems to be confirmed by films such as Working Girl (Mike Nichols, 1988), where the protagonists do not hesitate to use those women’s “weapons” to achieve a promotion in the business world, but where Melanie Griffith’s talent is subjected to her attraction to her competitor Harrison Ford. The most recent and successful example of the alienated secretaries -although it looks apparently rebel- is Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) by Sharon Maguire, where Renée Zellweger plays a woman in her thirties, obsessed with marriage and the biological clock: her character is the reverse (and the punishment) of the powerful harassers of the 80s that we mentioned before, the culmination of the symbolic murder of the premises of feminist liberation that had begun a while ago, especially on television and in the best seller literature, as it has already been pointed with well argumented  examples by Susan Faludi in her book Backlash in the beginning of the 90s (Faludi, 1993).

And what happened with those “winners” of the 80s in their role as bosses? Women who have reached some positions in the cooptative postindustrial labour hierarchy have achieved it at the expense of renounces or shortages that, of course, take their toll: they cannot escape from the dissatisfaction caused by the rejection of their mother and wife “instincts”, nor the unease generated by the priority dedication to their professional careers. Nobody seems to represent better this generational anxiety than the anorexic Calista Flockhart, who incorporates one of the most successful TV characters from the 90s, the neurotic and contradictory Ally McBeal, praised by the media like Bridget Jones, as a perfect icon of Post-Feminism.

But, among the feminine jobs par excellence, prostitution is the one that has been and still is the object of a large amount of formalizations. Whether appearing as the perverse woman, the cause of all evil, such as Lulu in Pandora’s Box (Georg Pabst, 1928), unforgettably played by Louise Brooks, or the innocent and trusting Irma la Douce (Billy Wilder, 1963), the prostitution in classic cinema has been the result of a “twisted” destination, of poverty or bad luck, and it has never included a reflection on the actual conditions of an activity that has not been and still isn’t considered as a work today. This activity, socially stigmatized like few others, has generated a great number of images and narrative profiles, but very few representations that situate it within the economic and social system and that deal with the authentic and complex relations of the sex workers with their immediate environment. The contempt and fear generated by the consciousness of the necessity of prostitution as part of the maintenance of the patriarchal order that emerges from Pandora’s Box (which recalls the story of Jack the Ripper in the background, who causes the death of  its protagonist) are complemented by the abolitionist and sentimental paternalism of Irma la Douce, where a well-meaning but clumsy Jack Lemon, in love with Shirley McClaine, pretends to solve her life by becoming her “only client” (a corrosive version of the marriage, which I am not sure up to which point Billy Wilder was conscious of).

Although the redemptorist vision, which has formally imposed, still persists with strength (see Princesas, by Fernando Leon de Aranoa, 2005, who insists on a typology of the whore expecting her conversion into “princess” without opening a real debate about sex work as a part of the service sector), it is true that the representation of prostitution undergoes a radical change under the perspective of some feminist directors since the 70s.

We should remember that in those moments some artists and filmmakers began to point out the bodies, mainly women’s bodies, as political battlefields and territories of social construction (see the works of Martha Rosler, Adrien Piper, Hannah Wilke… or during the 80s, those of Cindy Sherman or Barbara Kruger, to mention some well-known examples) (Broude and Garrard, 1994). At that time, the video, a new technology with less traditional burden than painting or sculpture, becomes a powerful tool for reflection and vindication of the performance of femininity as a labour of construction of subjectivity imbricated in the sustainment of the system. However, it will be in the cinema where the critical strategies against the traditional representation will acquire recognition (Selva and Solà, 2002).

Films like Jeanne Dielman (of the Belgian director Chantal Akerman, 1975), a detailed story of three days in the life of a discreet widow who practises prostitution in her own home, radically question the traditional terms of work and spaces of production and reproduction in parallel with the redefinition of work that feminisms were doing at that time, moreover, it does it by subtly using some complex formal strategies (such as the real time long sequence shots, the offscreen of the “prime action”, the re-framing of shots that fixes our attention on the small details that anticipate the dénouement and give the whole film a dramatically cold atmosphere…), which difficult its assimilation.

A decade later, it will be a North American director, Lizzie Borden, the one who will explore the working conditions of prostitutes in New York in Working Girls (1986). The protagonists are women who define the sexual services they carry out as a work, although they are aware of the social prejudice they are subjected to and their possibility of choice, something which is not shared by all the prostitutes, since, as explained by recent audiovisual works (especially documentaries), prostitution is one of the forms of corporal production more intensively subjected to slavery and trafficking networks, generating authentic global movements that, it is not by chance, follow, to a great extent, the transnational military movements.

As explained by Lourdes Portillo in Señorita extraviada (2001), where she explores the opacity and passivity that prevail in the investigation of Juarez murders, the new workers are, now, the assembled bodies of the hypersexualized factories of the dislocated non-places -from Mexico to Indonesia, going through Eastern Europe or India-, missing bodies without consequences, “off the screen” of the traditional gaze, unrepresentable, unnamed, as they were the Victorian London prostitutes murdered by the Jack the Ripper (Nathan, 2005; Ruido, in press). The bodies-merchandise trafficked in the global networks conjugate, as suggested by Ursula Biemann in her works Writing Desire (2000) and Remote sensing (2001), the sexual exploitation and the extreme violence (especially against women) with the interests and the circuits at the service of the large corporations (Sassen, 2003). Silvia Federici explains it very well in her text “Reproduction and Feminist Struggle in the New International Division of Labor“: the new international division of labour triply exploits women: it reaffirms them as objects of consumption and merchandises because of their condition of fetish-bodies; it exploits them as unique reproducers and responsibles for the sustainment of life (either directly or differly) and as second class workers (they are less paid, have less important positions, their productions are devalued…); and, finally, it exploits them because of their racial and ethnic condition, widening the differences between women from developed and underdeveloped or developing countries (Federici, 1999).

Neither the dislocation nor the consequences of applying the conditions of the new transnational division of labour are alien to our immediate context, in which we are witnessing the displacement of the southern border of the European Union. To give one recent example, the video documentary Frontera sur (2003) by the journalist Helena Maleno and the photographer Alex Muñoz, emphasizes the relationship between the migration conditions of North Africans and Sub-Saharans to the European Union and the multinational interests (especially the primary sector, turned into agro-industry in Almeria’s “sea of plastic”), showing the influence of the five major corporations of transgenic seeds in the recent political decisions of the governments-franchises. Although in the Spanish context the migration figures have become lately popular in a variety of contexts (especially in the video documentary and the television), their role, especially in the cinema, is less common. In this sense, it is interesting Icíar Bollaín’s perspective on immigrants in Flores de otro mundo (1999), a film that moves away from the exotization and hypersexualization, which is commonly found in these kinds of characters. The director narrates here the arrival of a group of Latin women to a village in the interior of the peninsula, a sort of “women’s caravan” that will end up establishing connections and stable relations with its inhabitants while generating significant changes in some native settlers, loaded with prejudices and reticences.

While almost all audiovisual documentary texts construct quite dramatic discourses on immigrant’s reality (Winston, 1995), fiction films have diverse nuances, ranging from mushy sweetening to victimization, going through films such as Las mujeres de verdad  tienen  curvas (Patricia Cardoso, 2003), where, without hiding the hyperflexible working conditions of textile maquilas -in this case, in the United States, although all workers are immigrants,- the story of a smart and determined Mexican teen who frees herself from the small family workshop (although probably not from labour precarity) when she obtains a scholarship to study at a prestigious university is narrated with humour.

LEAVING THE FACTORY

In 1995, one hundred years after those first Lumière’s images and in a clear reference to them, Harum Farocki elaborates a complex montage exercise, almost as a brief chronicle of the 20th century, that he also entitles Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik (Workers leaving the factory). What distinguishes the multiple exits from the factory that appear in this audiovisual essay from the ones that appear on the first Lumière’s film is that, unlike that one these abandonments will be definitive for many employees. Although the traditional working class does not disappear, and neither disappears the effort needed for the material production, but it will be transformed and dislocated, it is also true that productive forms that blur the agreed spatial and temporal limits will become extended and normalized, while information and communication (under very different forms of application and diffusion), now become the fundamental merchandises.

The coincidence, during the 70s, between some visual and narrative formulas as the ones already mentioned, the redefinition of the limits of work and the revision of the production model of the industrial capitalism, is not accidental. It will be precisely the capital, in its new informational or post-Fordist phase, the one that, with a different ordering and regulation of places and timetables, will render profitable some of the political strategies that were running since the ’70s (Virno, 2003), perversely transforming the absenteeism from the factory, which was, in those days, the spine of the class struggle, into endemic precarity; transforming  emotions and creativity into emotional looting and unlimited exploitation; redefining the claim for flexibility and diversity as domestication and irregularity; and, finally, distorting the dehierarchization into false reticualrity directed from the centrality of the metropolis (Villota, 1999; Precarias a la Deriva, 2004; Vara, 2006). Forced flexible personalities, emotional capitalization (Holmes, 2005): from the repetitive and monotonous chain work we have moved to the domestication of the imagination and the exploitation of the affective networks in a “feminization” of work that has little to do with the one drawn by the feminist agendas (Vega, 2000; TrabajoZero, 2001).

If in the classical cinema, the worker (and especially the woman worker) was “the denied image” of modernity, the excessive and abject body of the production scenario, in the informational capitalism, the work in the industrial factory becomes a sub-genre encoded in the representations of the production. Within this sub-genre, which some authors describe as “farewell to the proletariat” (Sand, 2004), some revivals of what we could call “new neo-realism” stand out, such as the French labour cinema, especially with the personal work of Robert Guédiguian and Eric Zonka, but particularly, because of its spatial vigour and continuity, the British cinema of the last decades. The bloated bodies of the brutal Thatcherist reconversion insist, through a slightly stereotypical forms -especially in Ken Loach and Mike Leigh films-, on the narrative of the working class conflicts that is far from being merely residual.

In many of these films underlies, veiled or explicitly, a critique to the subversion of the sexual division of labour, and a nostalgia, more or less obvious, for a world where the man provider had his own places and times (the pub, basically) forbidden to women and their influences. This fear of “contamination” and “feminization” of the homosocial spaces (and of the culture of power they represent) is present, in a very significant manner, in The Full Monty (1997) by Peter Cattaneo, where the order of the traditional gaze is inverted (Mulvey, 1988): the body object of the traditional scopic pleasure (women’s body), becomes the subject of the voyeuristic gaze on the bodies of men, forced to work as strippers to alleviate an unemployment situation for which they, indirectly, blame women. Once again, instead of a revision of the forms of masculinity and their place in the system of production, the film insists on the reafirmation of roles and on a soothing and victimist justification that, mixed with the tone of the costumbrist comedy, draws an (at least) immobile overview.

A closer example of this indirectly accusing victimization would also be Los lunes al sol (Fernando León de Aranoa, 2002), a film that still yearns for a classical labour universe: masculine, productive, dignifying, with the gaze placed on the full employment, and that releases, like in the previous case, a more or less controlled anger towards the women appearing in the film, the only ones who have a job in this overview of “feminization”-although it is a precarious, poorly paid and temporary job- but also the ones who have to put up with the violent assaults (physical and emotional) of the fear suffered by the male characters.

More complex and delicate is the perspective of the recent works by the French director Laurent Cantet, especially Ressources humaines (1999), where the sexual rearticulation of the work contract binds the experience of “disclassment” and uneasiness, not only of the “abandonment of class”, but also of rethinking the most immediate vital referents and their personal consequences. This film shows how work is more than just an economic activity, but also a powerful technology that constructs subjectivities and relationships.

On the other hand, in an apparently feminist tone and taking as a background the difficult relationships between mothers and daughters, the film Solas (1999) by Benito Zambrano, narrates the story of a cleaner (a character rarely common on the screens, and nearly always in a secondary way) who speaks clearly about her material conditions, as well as about the difficulties that they entail in her personal live. In this scenario, the protagonist and her mother, despite their will and strength, are still dominated by the omnipresence of an abusive father-husband, who is now sick, and the final resolution of the conflict still has a certain tinge of “appeal for the patriarchal order”: the protagonist accepts her maternity under the tutelage of a mature man (the paternal neighbour, symbolically “castrated” because of his age), who indirectly recovers the control over the situation by taking the fruit of the biological conception of another man (who is expelled from the scene) in a sort of “corporal dislocation” or surrogate paternity that allows the continuation of his heritage.

We could already observe that in the distance that separates two precise documentaries by Barbara Kopple: while Harlan County (1976) relates the success of a strike and the specific strategies of the political practices of the traditional working class, American Dream (1991) exposes, not without anxiety and nostalgia, the inefficiency of these tools in the midst of a constantly changing political and labour scenario, where the capitalist system of production has mutated and strengthened. In this landscape without outsides, the unions have become  institutions of consensus that merely perpetuate themselves, the classic images of work appear as alien and useless, and the very concept of representation becomes a tautology. The acid criticism, the parody, and sometimes the poetic resistance are some of the tools used in certain audiovisual proposals. A recent example might be the delicate staging by Marta de Gonzalo y Publio Pérez Prieto W: la force du biotravail (2001), a videoperformance showing a couple of “winners” (according to the current social standards) isolated and lost in their sheltered domestic universe, talking about an undefined immaterial work that conforms these lives completely besieged by insecurity and uncertainty.

Especially interesting because of its collective elaboration and being a result of a militant research process consisting of polls, walks and plural reflections, would be the video and the book Precarias a la Deriva (2004). This work in progress, not only speaks in feminine of the precarity and the new forms of work (breaking, also, the dichotomy between material and immaterial work, between extra-domestic work spaces and domestic work spaces), but it also emphasizes the logic of care and placing in the centre of the analysis the sustainment of life and affection. In their study, Precarias a la Deriva gives a voice to different women who lead or intervene in each of the “derivas”, sexualizing the Baudelairian flâneur and introducing in the randomed situationist circuit the trajectories of the daily tasks, embodying the production process in a profound redefinition of labour that goes further beyond than the proposals of the feminism of the 70s.

Within the new division of labour, marked by the power of the image and information, and by its distribution, the cultural production (from design to code diffusion, going through the figures generated by the art institution, etc…) it has, however, an ambiguous place within the production system. While many of its products are simply denied or made invisible,- and of course, unpaid-(for example, the work developed by video game testers, by the free software generators or the contributions of participants in chats and news groups, just to mention some examples), though they are largely capitalized by some companies and economic groups, the frequent representations of cultural workers (both men and women) in the cinema and mass media still go on the idea that the cultural production is a rewarding and light non-work, a sort of vocational “reward” where money is not important. The social value that these images could signify becomes simply a fetishist “overexposure” that, in practice, makes them invisible, since it is clear that it has not been useful to establish a clear consideration of  their activities as a work nor to improve their material conditions (which often include doing them for free) (Ruido, 2004, Rowan and Ruido, 2007). A good example of this reifying “overexposure”, as we already mentioned in our text “In the mood for work” (Rowan and Ruido, 2007), would be Carrie Bradshaw, the protagonist of the successful TV series Sex and the City, turned into an authentic social phenomenon that influences fashion and set trends. Carrie’s life goes by among trendy restaurants and luxury shops thanks to an activity, writing, that it is presented as simple and pleasant, where she uses her own life and that of her friends as a regular material. Her life time and her working time are not only overlapped, but this confusion also involves the continuos and normalized looting of her affective networks.

I do not want to close this brief review on the images of women at work without suggesting the potential effectiveness of the representation as a contribution to the social valorisation of some activities that, in our postindustrial scenario, are still not generally defined as work.

Bridging the enormous gap confered by their diverse social meanings, their various remunerations and their different situations within the economic system, which are quite incomparable, it seems to exist certain intersections between cultural production, sex work and care and attention work, which share, not only the difficulties of being recognised as work, but also the mystification in their representations. If we agree, like other authors, that the production of images shares similar frameworks as the ones of the socio-economic system of production (Benjamín, 2001; Steyerl, 2005), the possibility of designing and disseminating politically active and valorising representations would then require a previous reflection:  images would not generate recognition by themselves, but they will reflect the already existing social and/or economic values that would need to be previously changed, so that their representations would be transformed and they will be able to transform.

“As the director Hito Steyerl explains in a recent text that reactualizes the classic by Walter Benjamin “The Author as Producer” (1934), the image construction system is closely linked to the production system and to the economic regime in which they are inserted (…) If in the traditional capitalist scheme the struggle of cultural workers was based, as explained by Benjamin, on positioning theirselves in the production relations (as for example, in the manner of Bertolt Brecht, showing the agreement of representation), the new production system requires a permanent negotiation with the production conditions that are in continuous transit, a constant sign of the representational “offscreen” since, precisely when we register this process, we are acting in a vicarious way and giving rise to a “new cultural object” (Rowan and Ruido, 2007).

Bibliographic and webographic documentation

Benjamin, Walter, “El autor como productor”, Arte después de la Modernidad, Wallis, Brian (ed.), Madrid, Akal, 2001 (1º ed. 1934).

Broude, N. y Garrard, M. (eds.), The power of feminist  art, Nueva York,  Harry N. Abrams Inc. Publishers, 1994.

Carrasco, Cristina,  “Tiempo de trabajo, tiempo de vida: ¿reorganización o conciliación?”, 2004. www.ciudaddemujeres.com/articulos/Economia/ReorganizacionConciliacion.htm

Carrasco, Cristina, “La economía feminista: una apuesta por otra economía”, Estudios sobre género y economía, Vara, Mª Jesús (ed.), Madrid, Akal, 2006.

De Lauretis, Teresa, “Tecnologías del género”, Diferencias, Teresa de Lauretis, Madrid, Horas y Horas, 2000.

Durán, Mª Ángeles, “El mercado de las palabras”, Estudios sobre género y economía, Vara, Mª Jesús (ed.), Madrid, Akal, 2006.

Faludi, Susan, Reacción, Barcelona, Anagrama, 1993.

Farocki, Harum, Crítica de la mirada, Buenos Aires, V Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente, 2003.

Federici, Silvia, “Reproduction and Feminist Struggle in the New International Division of Labor”, Women, Development and the Labor of Reproduction, Maria Rosa Dalla Costa y Giovanna Dalla Costa, Giovanna (eds.), Trenton, New Jersey, Africa World Press, 1999.

Gubern, R., Monterde, J. E. Pérez Perucha, J, Rimbau, E. y Torreiro, C., Historia del cine español, Cátedra, Madrid, 2000.

Haraway, Donna J., “Manifiesto para cyborg”, Ciencia,  cyborgs  y mujeres. La reinvención de la naturaleza, Madrid, Cátedra, 1995.

Harding, Sandra, Ciencia y feminismo, Madrid, Morata, 1996.

Holmes, Brian, “A personalidade flexíbel: para unha nova crítica cultural” , Corpos de producción. Miradas críticas e relatos feministas en torno ós suxeitos sexuados nos espacios públicos, Uqui Permui y María Ruido (eds.), Santiago de Compostela, 2005. www.nettime.org

Kuni, Verena, “Some Thoughts On The New Economy of Networking. Cyberfeminist Perspectives on ‘Immaterial Labour’. ‘Invisible Work’ and other Means to Make Carreer as Cultural Part Time Worker under Net_Conditions”, Future is femail, VVAA, Hamburgo, Old Boys Network, 1998.

Lazzarato, Mauricio, “El ciclo de la producción inmaterial”. ContraPoder, 4/5 (trabajo<no trabajo: perspectivas, conflictos, posibilidades), Madrid, 2001.

Lazzarato, Mauricio, “Del biopoder a la biopolítica”, Multitudes, 1. París, 2000. http://www.multitudes.samizdat.net

Monterde; José Enrique, La imagen negada: Representaciones de la clase trabajadora en el cine, Valencia, Filmoteca de la Generalitat Valenciana, 1997.

Mulvey, Laura, Placer visual y cine narrativo, Valencia, Episteme, 1988.

Nathan, Debbie, “Trabajo, sexo y peligro en Ciudad Juárez”, Cárcel de amor: relatos culturales sobre la violencia de género, Sichel, Berta y Villaplana, Virginia (eds.), Madrid, MNCARS, 2005.

Nead, Linda, El desnudo femenino. Arte, obscenidad  y sexualidad, Madrid, Tecnos, 1998.

Pérez Orozco, Amaia y  Río, Sira del,  “La economía desde el feminismo: Trabajo y cuidados”, 2002: http://www.sindominio.net/karakola/textos/trabajocuidado.htm

Pollock, Griselda,  Vision and Difference, Nueva York, Routledge, 1994.

Pollock, Griselda, “Histoire et politique: l´histoire de l´art peut-elle survivre au féminisme?” Espaces de l’art. Féminisme, art et histoire de l’art, Ferrer, Mathilde y Michaud, Yves (eds.), París, École Supérieure des Beaux- Arts, 1995.

Precarias a la Deriva, A la deriva (por los circuitos de la precariedad femenina), Madrid, Traficantes de Sueños, 2004.

Precarias a la Deriva, “Precarización de la existencia y huelga de cuidados”, Estudios sobre género y economía, Vara, Mª Jesús (ed.), Madrid, Akal, 2006.

Rowan, Jaron y Ruido, María, “In the mood for work”, Producta 50, YProductions (ed.), Barcelona, CSAM/Generalitat de Catalunya, 2007

Ruido, María, “Mamá, quiero ser artista!”, Precarias a la Deriva, A la deriva (por los circuitos de al precariedad femenina), Madrid, Traficantes de Sueños, 2004. Disponible en  <http://www.sindominio.net/karakola/precarias/mamaquieroser.htm>

Ruido, María, “La representación de la violencia/ la violencia de la representación: De Jack el Destripador a Ciudad Juárez, pasando por la pantalla de la tv”, Actas del Congreso MUJERES JÓVENES, ¿NUEVOS FEMINISMOS?, Castellón, Fundación Isonomía- Universitat Jaume I, (en prensa).

Ruido, María, “Algunhas notas sobre corpos, olladas, palabras e accións en tempos de (ins)urxencia e precariedade” , Corpos de producción. Miradas críticas e relatos feministas en torno ós suxeitos sexuados nos espacios públicos, Uqui Permui y María Ruido (eds.), Santiago de Compostela, 2005.

Sand, Shlomo, El siglo XX  en  pantalla, Barcelona, Crítica, 2005.

Sassen, Saskia, Contrageografías de la globalización. Género y ciudadanía en los circuitos transfronterizos, Madrid, Traficantes de Sueños, 2003.

Selva, Marta y Solà, Anna (comp.), Diez años de la Muestra Internacional de Filmes de Mujeres  de Barcelona, Barcelona, Paidós, 2002.

Steyerl, Hito, “La articulación de la protesta”, Brumaria, nº 5,  Madrid, 2005.

TrabajoZero, “Sobre la feminización del trabajo…”, ContraPoder, nº 4/5 (trabajo<no trabajo: perspectivas, conflictos, posibilidades), Madrid, 2001.

Vara, Mª Jesús, “Empleo femenino en las cadenas de producción global”, Estudios sobre género y economía, Vara, Mª Jesús (ed.), Madrid, Akal, 2006.

Vega, Cristina, “´Domesticación´ del trabajo: trabajos, afectos y vida cotidiana”, 2000. http://www.sindominio.net/karakola/domesticacion.htm

Villota, Paloma, Globalización y género, Madrid, Síntesis, 1999.

Virno, Paolo, “Virtuosismo y revolución: notas sobre el concepto de acción política”, Virtuosismo y revolución. La acción política en la era del desencanto, Virno, Paolo, Madrid, Traficantes de Sueños, 2003.

Winston, Brian, Claiming the Real. The Documentary  Film Revisited, Londres, B.F.I., 1995.

Audiovisual documentation

A la deriva (por los circuitos de la precariedad femenina), Precarias  a la Deriva, España, 2004.

Ally  McBeal, EE. UU.,(serie de tv de los años 90).

American Dream, Barbara Kopple, EEUU, 1991.

Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik (Trabajadores saliendo de la fábrica), Harum Farocki, Alemania, 1995.

Armas de mujer, Mike Nichols, EE.UU., 1988.

Arroz amargo, Giuseppe de Santis, Italia, 1949.

Como está el servicio, Mariano Ozores, España, 1968.

Danzad, danzad malditos, Sydney Pollack, EE.UU., 1969.

El diario de Britdget  Jones, Sharon Maguire, EE.UU., Reino Unido, Francia, 2001.

Flores de otro mundo, Icíar Bollaín, España, 1999.

Frontera Sur , Helena Maleno y Alex Muñoz, España, 2003.

Harlan County, Barbara Kopple, EEUU, 1976.

Irma la Dulce, Billy Wilder, EE.UU.,1963.

Jeanne Dielman, Chantal Akerman, Bélgica, 1975.

La Ceremonia, Claude Chabrol, Francia, 1995.

La caja de Pandora, Georg Pabst, Alemania, 1928.

Los lunes al sol, Fernando León de Aranoa, España, 2002.

La madre, Vsievolod Pudovkin, Rusia, 1926.

La mano que mece la cuna, Curtis Hanson, EE.UU., 1991.

Las mujeres de verdad  tienen  curvas, Patricia Cardoso, EE.UU., 2003.

Las que tienen que servir, José Mª Forqué, España, 1967.

La sal de la tierra, Herbert Biberman, EE.UU., 1954.

La sortie des  usines, Hermanos Lumière, Francia, 1895.

Las uvas de la ira, John Ford, EE.UU., 1940.

Metrópolis,  Fritz Lang, Alemania, 1926.

Princesas, Fernando León de Aranoa, España, 2005.

Recursos humanos, Laurent Cantet, Francia, 1999.

Remote sensing,  Ursula Biemann, Suiza, 2001.

Señorita  extraviada , Lourdes Portillo, EE.UU., 2001.

Sex and the City, EE. UU., (serie de tv de los años 90)

Solas, Benito Zambrano, España, 1999.

The Full  Monty, Peter Cattaneo, Reino Unido, 1997.

Tiempos modernos, Charles Chaplin, EE.UU., 1936.

W: la force  du biotravail ,  Publio Pérez Prieto y Marta de Gonzalo, España, 2001.

Working girls, Lizzie Borden, EE.UU., 1986.

Writing desire, Ursula Biemann, Suiza, 2000.

Madame Tlank

mute vol. 2 no. 9, 2008. [PDF]

Well Jeff, … the fact is that you have the luxury of knowing that you will never ever ever ever EVER be faced with the government bossing you around like a child, simply because you have a parasite living in your body.

– The Law Fairy, Feministing.com

By now people have forgotten what history has proven: that ‘raising’ a child is tantamount to retarding his development. The best way to raise a child is to LAY OFF.

– Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, 1970

In what follows I wish to consider the effects of recent UK health and social policies on women and their children who are labelled ‘at risk’.[1]

The ‘difficult’ (i.e. poor) parts of the population have often served as the playground for experiments in socio-biological control by the state and its affiliates. Historically, these experiments have affected women differently from men, whether because of the role ascribed to them, (e.g., their exploitation in wartime industries, or the use of rape as a strategy of warfare) or because of their physical make-up (as in the testing and developing of modern methods of contraception on women in occupied territories, in prison or on social benefits).

State intervention tends to concentrate on those women who cannot afford invisibility, i.e. those who cannot buy their way out of dependence on state administered medical and social ‘services’.[2] Women are often more visible than men to government agencies because of their physical capacity to reproduce. Professional medical involvement is required for, amongst other things, contraception, prescriptions, abortions, sterilisations, antenatal check-ups, giving birth, postnatal treatment, hysterectomies, and menopausal issues, smears and breast-cancer checks, etc. Thus most women’s physical reproductive capacity remains under medical control throughout their lives.[3]

In most countries with a semblance of a social-democratic welfare system, many women register with some form of state agency if they are about to have or have had children, in order to get at least some financial support in the form of child benefits. In the UK 94 percent of lone parents claim benefits; most lone parents are women.[4] Once registered with the state as a ‘claimant’ for survival purposes, many mothers are obliged to sign up for training or ‘support’ programmes (i.e. social experiments) of one kind or another, as proof of their willingness to ‘integrate’ into ‘economic activity’ and to make sure their children do likewise, miserable dependency notwithstanding. Those who refuse risk losing financial support. ‘Social integration’ services in the UK target ‘hard-to-reach’ families, requiring that those who would prefer to remain as invisible as possible be identified and made available to state and private institutions. Arm’s length private charity initiatives ‘help’ mothers back to work, while youth teams monitor their children to make sure they don’t offend, and blame the mother if the kids turn delinquent anyway.

Under recent UK policies – the new GP’s contract (2004), the Children Act (2004), Every Child Matters (2004), the gradual privatisation of the NHS and social services – frontline services have been cut while a general patient/‘client’ database is built up. The cuts, which limit the availability of services, effectively force patients to assent to the data-sharing, lest (already scarce) treatment be withheld.[5] The claimant’s claim is turned against her ever more directly, making her responsible for conditions imposed by economic factors and by the institutions themselves, which attempt to ‘cure’ the problem by ‘educating’ her to change her behaviour so she no longer fits the ‘claimant’ profile. The criteria used for such profiling are often discretionary, with ever-changing parameters used to measure each ‘case’ as if it were self-contained. Such an approach systematically refuses to acknowledge the socially structural, institutional reasons for the deterioration of lives within the non-asset owning, working and claimant class (henceforth ‘dependent class’).[6]

Mechanisms of this kind exist to varying degrees, always complicated and qualified by local factors, in most of the ‘developed’ world. As the examples already mentioned suggest, the process is at an advanced stage in the UK, where medical and social ‘services’ have undergone continuous transformation under the Labour governments since 1997. Here the rhetorical signposts along the way are ‘risk’, ‘responsibility/empowerment’ and ‘prevention’. In practice, the key elements are computerised control and data collection, along with funds poured into training the poor to ‘help themselves’. In what follows I will use a few examples from UK institutions to consider the effects of these policies on the women and children directly concerned, with particular attention given to encroachments upon the ‘unofficial’, independent and increasingly illegalised reproduction strategies of the dependent class. The result will not be an exhaustive or systematic survey, but an exposure of the perverse logic running through the cases described which seems to be taking hold ever more widely as capital attempts to transfer the cost of reproducing labour power downwards onto labourers.[7]

Women and the NHS

Let’s start by looking at some of the things that directly affect women’s control over their own bodies.

Women seeking treatment in relation to reproductive health are subject to the laws of whichever state they so happen to be in at the time. Of course the treatment they receive depends on the financial situation and organisational structure of the given health system. If a woman wants to have an abortion in the UK she discovers that, as in most ‘advanced democracies’, abortion has never been fully legalised. The 1967 abortion law granted exceptions, giving the power of decision making not to the women affected but to doctors. Two doctors’ signatures are required for an abortion on the NHS. According to a GP I spoke to, ‘there are still a lot of GPs around who think it’s not right that terminations should be available through the NHS.’[8] There are also far too few abortion facilities available, meaning that a lot of women get referred to Marie Stopes or another private provider, with the operation paid for by the NHS. The waiting time for an NHS operation is often critical and, therefore, those who are able to do so often raise money for a private operation (about £350 – £750, depending on how many weeks into the pregnancy you are). The laws governing sterilisation are shocking: if you want to be sterilised before the age of 30 your doctor has to give his consent, with the rate of refusal much higher than for abortions. The operation does not constitute a health risk, so the doctors decide according to what they think a woman should do with her body, which in many cases is simply: reproduce!

With fertility treatment on the NHS, it is ultimately also the doctor who decides. IVF is only slowly picking up state funding (although it has proved to be very lucrative for the private sector), and is currently only available on a highly restricted basis. There are long waiting lists with set age limits, and the doctor’s subjective judgment decides who may not receive treatment. Usually those excluded in this way are the ‘overweight’, smokers and people who already have children living with them.

Pregnant women are severely affected by a tendency to view the mother’s and child’s health as conjoined. Although it is of course desirable for a woman to know about the relation between her body and the foetus living inside it, the problem is the way such knowledge is imposed and in whose interest. Most women trust what they learn from other women who have had kids; but in relation to a health system embodied in the authority of the (usually male) doctor, the pregnant woman can make few autonomous choices. There are various health check-ups which, though not compulsory, are ‘strongly encouraged’ (foetal scans for example, which can identify disabilities, yet are not without potential harm to the unborn child), a barrage of moralistic lifestyle prescriptions and health advice that can be confusing and contradictory, such as how much wine you may drink, which side to sleep on, which medicines to take or not to take, etc.

Meanwhile, birth services in London hospitals seem to be among the worst in Europe. Post-natal services in particular lack facilities and staff (no check-ups after having given birth, mothers sent home right away, no space for the baby to lie next to the mother, etc.). Birth is one of the most critical and dangerous moments in the mother’s life, and a check-up afterwards seems an obvious necessity. On the other hand, an increasing obsession with risk (and fear of litigation) has led to many practitioners performing caesarians as a matter of routine, just to make sure everything remains in the doctor’s control. Many women do not want a caesarian (they will be incapacitated for longer, it might present complications in the event of any subsequent births, etc.), yet unwanted caesarians are often performed.

Speaking of risk and preventive measures, hysterectomies are among the most commonly performed operations in the western world, very often without any real need for the removal of the organ, on the pretext that some future risk might be slumbering inside it.[9] As is finally coming to be recognised, many conditions that lead to the removal of the uterus can often be treated by other, less drastic means.

Such dismissal of an organ that is part of one’s body and continues to perform certain functions considered ‘useless’ once the woman can no longer reproduce goes hand in hand with the prevailing attitude towards menopausal symptoms, which could be summed up as: ‘We don’t give a shit because you can’t reproduce any more’. There is no funding plan for menopausal treatments, and the new contract for GPs, which introduced bonus pay for the ‘successful management of disease’, actively undermines any interest in dealing with such possibly lengthy and complicated cases.[10] (Meanwhile, private clinics specialising in menopausal symptoms are flourishing.)

NHS and SS

The aim is to achieve effective monitoring of under achievement by specific groups. The matter is technical, and to enable the proper monitoring and evaluation to take place such detail is necessary.

– Stephen Byers, MP[11]

Two tendencies can be seen as central to recent UK health and social services policy. One is partial privatisation on an ‘insurance’ model, in which the state sheds direct responsibility for provision of treatment it continues to pay for, causing overall spending on the NHS to increase drastically even as services atrophy. The second, closely related tendency is expansion of information-sharing across the two departments, which already overlap to a great extent.[12] Witness the current attempt to co-ordinate medical practice and ‘welfare-to-work’ contractors in the attack on Incapacity Benefit. Databases already exist within the NHS (patient registration, drug prescriptions and SUS [Secondary Uses Service – a summary of all secondary care episodes such as terminations, pregnancy and HIV tests]) as well as within the social services (through claims for Child Benefit, Income Support, Incapacity Benefit, Housing Allowance, Working Tax Credits, etc.).[13] One department can easily obtain the other’s data if a concern is expressed: for instance social services may check the health record of a truant child and a hospital can check a patient’s registration with social services (henceforth SS).

Of course perceptions of health and illness are social, they constantly change and are also subject to government targets. Green Papers, White Papers and ‘vision outlines’ alert professionals to the newest problems to be ‘solved’. Thus hyperactivity in children and stress in adults are now things to watch out for; compare this with the emphasis on lower back pain ten years ago. The latter is purely physical, whereas the former imply that the patients might be able to do something about their condition, like eat 5-a-day and think good thoughts or take anti-depressants at least. What back pain and stress have in common, of course, is their successive status as the most popular ‘excuse’ for absenteeism from work.

Women and men who drink, smoke, or are ‘too fat’ or ‘too skinny’ are currently the main target of health action plans. For pregnant women belonging to these ‘risk groups’ means facing much greater scrutiny by the health services and the social services than other women. That is, a pregnant woman’s body is placed under surveillance because behaviour that is otherwise legal and (still) seen as a ‘personal lifestyle choice’ somehow changes status when she becomes pregnant. European liberals are shocked to hear of the ‘fetal rights’ campaigns and legislation in the US, but practice here is not so far off. For instance, when the welfare of a foetus is apparently endangered by conditions in a pregnant woman which are regarded as self-inflicted, a report must be filed by health practitioners and be made available to social services. Women in this ‘risk group’ who are seeking to conceive may be refused IVF treatment. Pregnant women who come to police notice (e.g. for reasons relating to the consumption or sale of drugs, domestic violence incidents, mental health issues etc.) might end up with a police record relating to the welfare of their unborn child. The relevant system, MERLIN CTN, is operated by the Metropolitan Police and records every instance of a child ‘Coming to Notice’ (CTN). ‘Fetal rights’ ahoy![14]

The NHS and SS also work closely together on the ‘problem’ of teenage pregnancies and reducing their occurrence remains a high government priority. The discourse runs something like this: ‘A single mum on benefits forever! Scientific research shows they are more likely to be depressed! She will have no chances in later life!’, etc. If the teenage girls manage to have and keep their babies they’ll have to deal with imposed further training (in motherhood, in getting work) and SS supervision of the child(ren).[15] Such ‘support’ is officially voluntary but you’ll end up on the ‘cause for concern’ list if you don’t participate. Who would not be depressed to find that what state support really means is the social services policing and maintaining the poverty that state benefit levels force you into. And as for ‘no chances in later life’, a couple of statistical studies recently quoted in The Guardian found that the ‘chances in life’ for girls having grown up on the same estate, whether with or without kids, are the same.[16] A glowing example of political discourse on the issue:

We need to educate and instill young girls with [sic] the self esteem to resist the pressures which are clearly placed on them at such young ages, and equip them with the confidence to say no.[17]

Well, maybe they want to say no to the supermarket cashier job and yes to bringing up a child? Telling girls they’re not competent to raise children is of course a great way of giving them ‘self-esteem’.

Teenage mums are in fact the most embattled by current schemes. Social services get involved during pregnancy[18] and the government wants to establish strong links between (the data held by) Teenage Pregnancy Units, Children’s Centres, schools, colleges, Connexions and job centres.[19] With the help of this kind of teamwork, young mothers get checked up on from all sides and ushered back into work ASAP. This way it can be ensured that their ‘at risk’ children are brought up with as little ‘disturbing’ influence as possible.

At Risk

The only children who have the slightest chance of escaping from this supervised nightmare – but less and less so – are the children of the ghettos and the working class where the medieval conception of open community – living on the street – still lingers.

– Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex

We cannot believe that a police force is justified in sharing information without consent about a nine-month-old baby on the grounds that it might grow up to be a villain. Measures that may be justified in the face of specific and identified threats lose their justification when they become statistically-based measures against subpopulations.

– ‘Children’s Databases’ report20

Procedures of this kind are legitimised by the government’s most recent definitions of what it means to be ‘at risk’, with a new emphasis on preventing this terrible condition from spreading. The policing and containment of a large chunk of the population is what it boils down (or up?) to, with agendas such as Every Child Matters (ECM) and cross-departmental special task forces driving social inclusion home for those who remain ‘hard-to-reach’. Reading through the relevant publications, the suspicion grows that this is only the beginning of a much larger attack on the remaining elements of independence within dependent class life.[21]

‘Risk’ has proved a useful category in transferring responsibility downwards from institutions onto the individuals they deal with: if you know you’re at risk then you must do something about it, otherwise you are willfully causing trouble. This logic can be seen at work in the NHS approach to cutting the potential cost of future illness, which once again means targeting the obese, smokers, and the ‘unfit’. GPs have an obligation to hassle whoever they think falls into these categories, and to spell out to them that all they lack is ‘will-power’. (Quite whose ‘will’ is ‘empowered’ by obedience to such top-down orders is another question.)

But this approach blossoms in public propaganda on social services, whether published by the Home Office (and the Social Exclusion Taskforce as its subsidiary), the Department of Work and Pensions or the Department for Children, Schools and Families. The latter has published a list of risk factors to help councils (specifically their Teenage Pregnancy Strategic Management Groups) identify girls who are ‘at high risk of teenage pregnancy’! Among the factors listed are: early onset of sexual activity, conduct disorder, alcohol and substance misuse, being the daughter of a teenage mother, disengagement from school, ethnicity (!), etc. Any subjective intention on the part of the mother is institutionally disregarded, unless it also counts as a ‘pregnancy risk factor’. Of course, keeping an eye on all teenage girls who fit the categories and ‘preventing’ them from becoming pregnant is going to be quite a handful (of data).

Perhaps the most effective definition of ‘at risk’ from the agencies’ point of view – because it is the vaguest, and it targets ‘vulnerable’ children in a way that automatically implicates their families – is the one set out in the Every Child Matters (ECM) agenda. ECM is part of the Children Act (2004) and has the ultimate aim of collecting the data of all children in the country on a single database covering social services, education, crime and health. (Apparently ECM also aims to reduce teenage pregnancies, substance misuse, crime and anti-social behaviour. It’s not just surveillance, you know, there’s some policing in it too!). Of course, data held will also relate to the children’s families and friends:

[I]f a child caused concern by failing to make progress towards state targets, detailed information would be gathered. That would include ‘subjective’ judgment such as ‘Is the parent providing a positive role model?’ as well as sensitive information such as parents’ mental health.[22]

The justification for such crass procedures is ‘prevention’. Preventing children from being neglected and abused, preventing them from turning into criminals. Thus a child’s data will be made available cross-departmentally, with the child and his/her family being made subject to regular checks by various agencies if she/he fits the following categories:

Low income and parental unemployment, homelessness, poor parenting, poor schooling, postnatal depression among mothers [!] and low birth weight [in this way mothers are implicated immediately], substance misuse, individual characteristics such as intelligence [!!], and community factors, such as living in a disadvantaged neighbourhood.[23]

The conditions presented here as ‘causes’ for being at risk are clearly inseparable from the ongoing economic and governmental attack on the dependent class. Homelessness, poor schooling, low income and unemployment are not ‘pre-given’ conditions inherent in certain individuals, they are among the concrete achievements of ‘supply-side’ policy and financial asset-oriented accumulation over almost 30 years.[24] Basically, you ask for housing and you get nothing, but you are registered as homeless, which categorises you as ‘at risk’ and thus liable to be checked up on according to agency whim, simply because you were foolish enough to ask for something in the first place.[25]

Once any of the risk-of-risk factors listed above is ascribed to a child (on the basis of existing files on the parent/s, rather than direct observation of the kid), he/she is presumed to be in danger of ‘abuse, neglect, offending and social exclusion’.[26] (Note the failure to differentiate between things the child might undergo and acts s/he could commit. The logical promiscuity is no accident: the whole drive to hold claimants ‘responsible’ for their ‘exclusion’ from income is founded on this willful confusion of categories.) The threat of these undesirable ‘outcomes’ legitimises interference with the whole family by the cross-departmental state taskforce. Intervention is not a response to the family’s non-professional perception of its own needs: it is strictly preventative. In most cases this means action to prevent family members breaching the boundaries of legal and ‘socially acceptable’ behaviour, even as these semi-codified bounds narrow to the point that life within them becomes impossible in practice.

ECM has vastly expanded the field of targets for prevention, with the formulation of The Five Outcomes designated as necessary for all children. Failure to ‘achieve’ them means automatic ‘at risk’ status for the child and the family, and further increases the pressure on the council to intervene. The extremely vague phrasing of The Five Outcomes leaves ample room for discretionary interpretation – on the professional side only, of course: ‘Being healthy; Staying safe; Enjoying and achieving; Making a positive contribution; Achieving economic well-being.’ These pieties only become concrete, impossible-to-obey instructions[27] in sub-headings such as: ‘live in households free from low income’ (well it’s not like anyone’s doing anything about low income per se… must be the low-incomed’s fault then?!); ‘Parents, carers and families promote healthy choices’ (well, people have different ways of eating. If there are no bloody shops, then yes, the newsagent will be your nutrition centre – try finding any amenities ’round ungentrified areas of the East End such as Homerton or Canning Town); ‘Safe from crime and anti-social behaviour in and out of school’ (with more than 3,000 new criminal offences created under New Labour, ‘safe from crime’ is hardly an option); ‘Attend and enjoy school’ (As Shulamith Firestone put it: ‘The child is forced to go to [school]: the test is that he would never go of his own accord.’)

The way The Five Outcomes are to be achieved is, unsurprisingly, by ‘engaging’ with the children and their families, rather than actually changing any of the material causes to do with housing or schools etc.. The non-negotiable premise is that the causes of ‘non-achievement’ are located within those who insist on remaining ‘hard to reach’. The Social Exclusion Task Force (SETF, as in Sod ’Em Total Fuckwits) encourages: ‘personalisation, rights and responsibilities’, as in: ‘it is your personal problem, you have the right to identify with it and you are responsible for getting out of the at-risk group’.

As with the NHS, so with SS. In the former, illness-risk and its management are personalised, even though accounting norms for staying healthy are rigid – ‘your 5-a-day’, pedometer quotas, etc. – and conflicting ideas about who is at risk of what keep proliferating. Likewise, in social services, responsibility is devolved downward from the institution to the individual, and the point of intervention has moved as far ‘into’ the subject as possible. The ubiquitous language of ‘choice’ and ‘empowerment’ (as in ‘you can choose which hospital you want to be operated in, a super-bugged non-waiting list one or a non-super-bugged endless waiting-list one’, or, ‘you can choose between welfare-to-work options: go freelance or work on a two week contract’) is the punchline to the bad institutional joke of imposing coercive ‘solutions’ on claimants while retrospectively blaming them for the problem.

In effect, anyone who is financially dependent on the state has to pay for it by being obliged to open up their lives to scrutiny and ‘intervention’.[28] This interference is notoriously random (and increasingly so as the number of ‘services’ involved multiplies) as well as being disruptive, destructive and threatening. As some dissident social workers put it,

[W]orker-client relationships are increasingly characterised by control and supervision rather than care … Too often today social workers are doing little more than supervising the deterioration of people’s lives.[29]

Might this not be precisely the point? Because if you don’t know who’s dealing with which aspect of your life where basic elements of survival are at stake, you end up depending on an unknowable structure that encompasses you from all sides, with no way of knowing how to ‘disappear’ from its radar or at least to ditch the ‘at risk’ tag. Parameters change non-stop so you have to remain constantly alert. If you mistake them you will be held responsible.[30] If you try to evade them, welcome to overcrowded prisons, mental hospitals, foster homes and so on.

This tendency goes hand in hand with the financing and organisational structure of the social services themselves (as is increasingly the case within the NHS): many functions are outsourced to private companies (even care homes and foster homes have been sold off to private equity outfits), and what remains in state control is increasingly staffed by temporary, underpaid workers:

[O]ur work is shaped by managerialism, by the fragmentation of services, by financial restrictions and lack of resources, by increased bureaucracy and workloads, by the domination of care-management approaches with their associated performance indicators and by the increased use of the private sector.[31]

Under pressure to reach set government targets, which often lead to disjointed and conflicting procedures in relation to a ‘client’, a great deal of social workers’ time is now devoted to reporting potential risk-situations (adding to the database). Often they lack the funding to do anything else. Yet overall spending on SS management and IT has increased, even as frontline services are recklessly cut.

A GP who was worried about the well-being of two mothers in separate incidents says:

quite often in borderline situations, you can’t get social services support. There is only something like Children in Need; you get risk categorisations.[32]

And with it stigmatisation. There is no way out of the child protection register other than ceasing to be a ‘child’.[33]

What Involvement Looks Like

The mother who wants to kill her child for what she has had to sacrifice for it (a common desire) learns to love that same child only when she understands that it is as helpless, as oppressed as she is, and by the same oppressor: then her hate is directed outwards, and ‘motherlove’ is born.

– Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex

The National Service Framework for Children, Young People and Maternity Services (NSF) throws women and their children into one pot for the provision of health and social services.[34] It is of course much cheaper to target kids’ health through mothers’ health, but it implies the presumption that what is beneficial to women’s health is automatically good for children’s health and vice versa. The issue of breastfeeding is a good example: many women suffer pain when breastfeeding their children but are ‘strongly encouraged to continue doing so’ by the relevant health departments. They might also simply not want to be the exclusive feeder of the baby for months on end.

The ‘Action Plan’ for the Social Exclusion Taskforce (SETF, as in, See ’Em TransFormed) had at its heart ten pilot projects engaged in testing intensive health-led parenting support given to first-time mothers from pregnancy up until the baby’s second birthday. Apparently it was a success (i.e. it hit targets, the babies’ neurones presumably grew rapidly) although no response from the targeted mothers has been made publicly available.[35] The programme clearly presupposes the ‘at risk’ mother to be nothing but a birthing and feeding machine, attached to her child as its unwaged carer and at the convenience of state observation. A GP I interviewed was less blunt but regarded this programme as useless because it kept mothers away from community services and isolated them, together with their assigned health workers, for more than two years. To prevent subsequent independent child-rearing by the ‘at-risk’ mothers, the ‘Government bid to reshape childhood’ (The Guardian headline, 8 December, 2007) ‘aims to bring children under state education control from age 2 and get parents involved through “parent support workers”.’

The drive to institutionalise the upbringing of dependent class children, coupled with control of their parents, was also evident in the test phase of the Sure Start project. The scheme was intended to help women from ‘disadvantaged backgrounds’ back into work, while also supervising and training them in proper British motherhood (how to interact with babies ‘to make their brains grow’, how to talk to them and play with them, what to feed them – with breastfeeding, of course, top of the agenda).[36] Unemployed single mothers were specifically targeted. Nursery (the oddly medicalising British name for ‘kindergarten’, the oddly German-Romantic term used elsewhere in the anglophone world), health centre and job centre were to be combined under one Sure Start roof. Participation in supervised mother-child playing sessions was strongly encouraged.

Central government money for the initial phase of the project has now run out and it has been handed over to councils to manage and pay for themselves. The nurseries are now called ‘Children’s Centres’. But whether Sure Start nursery or Children’s Centre, if you want to send your child there you have to sign a paper agreeing to the involvement of social work teams if there seems to be any cause for concern about your child. Thus, in order to be able to use the service at all, one has to give one’s consent to information sharing with social services. Official guidance states that ‘data and information on the most excluded families should be collected and more emphasis be placed on outreach and home visits to support these families.’[37] No wonder, then, that (aside from their unaffordability for those not in work) the services have not been popular among the ‘hard-to-reach’ target group who have good reason to be worried about Sure Start workers watching them and their children, with a direct line to social services should anything seem ‘out of order’. Home visitors and outreach workers attempt to push their way into people’s homes without seemingly realising that keeping your door closed keeps the state out; something that is especially desirable for anyone in any way dependent on state services and aware of the level of surveillance that comes with it. (‘We will track down benefit thieves’ [formerly ‘cheats’, now upgraded] – the posters are all over town!).

Even during the Sure Start test phase,

some surmised that the registration of families by their local Sure Start was simply about gathering information, especially as no services seemed to follow [...]. Participants described encounters with welfare professionals who had information about them from other agencies, for example Sure Start staff revealing information which could only have been sourced from the Social Services department or community nurses. Other participants expressed fear about confidentiality being broken and not having any power to do anything about it [...]. Although none of the participants described being referred to social services by Sure Start, several Sure Start workers admitted doing so.[38]

Now that Sure Start has to get by on what little funding it receives from local authorities, management concerns (or simply trying to keep your job, a pressing issue for many of the workers in former Sure Start centres) have fully taken over.[39] With the high cost of nursery fees (around £200 per week in London), the focus on poor families has largely subsided. You can only get this fee reduced through Working Tax Credit, meaning you’d have to be in work to begin with. One probably unplanned effect of all this has been that middle-class parents who can get by on part-time work or who work from home happily take advantage of the ‘training courses in child care’, the resident psychologists and the health professionals still offered at Children’s Centres. At the same time things have changed for the worse for poor families in Sure Start areas. The perceived improvement in the standard of childcare provision has contributed to the influx of middle-class families as inner-city neighbourhoods are gentrified, making it harder for poorer families to maintain the way they organised their daily lives. Checks are made to prevent childminders working ‘illegally’, behaviour clauses are written into ‘social’ housing contracts, and ‘child protection’ activity by social services is out of all proportion to the actual number of cases ‘uncovered’. (The latter development may have something to do with the fact that councils fund the Children’s Centres according to the number of kids on the protection register.) Overall, funding has been cut for necessary services (including ‘traditional’ nurseries), while surveillance of working class behaviour outside work has constantly increased.

If ‘risk of social exclusion’ continues to be discovered everywhere in the UK, it is largely because the dependent class goes on finding ways to organise life that elude the discipline of the state and its ‘arm’s length’ agencies. These survival strategies are wide-ranging and include: babysitting without Home Office vetting, fare dodging, ‘sick note culture’, squatting, council flat sublets, tricks to thwart bailiffs and debt collectors, various kinds of ‘grey market’ trafficking, and the sharing of knowledge (or secrecy) to beat the benefits, tax and immigration systems. In response, methods of ‘intervention’ refined over years in countless Green and White Papers set ever-more intrusive ‘task forces’ on communities, families, lives and bodies, ‘helping them to be socially included’, so that both task force professionals and ‘clients’ will ‘achieve the targets’.

The very real threat of services being taken away ensures that it becomes the dependent’s personal responsibility to remain within the (ever-changing) boundary drawn by the accountancy of risk, effectively forcing her into her own continuous risk-management operation to minimise the dangers of benefits withdrawal or the confiscation of children. Find yourself labeled ‘hard-to-reach’ and a lot of agencies will start getting involved with you, seeing as they also get in trouble if they don’t. This pressure is there to make survival conditional on responding to labour, consumer and credit market needs.

What ‘Caring’ Feels Like

What we ought to be protesting, rather than that children are being exploited just like adults, is that adults can be so exploited.

– Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex

Women now make up the largest part of the workforce worldwide. Most of this work is low-paid and insecure; traditionally women have been kept out of organised workers’ struggles and have been used as an industrial reserve army to keep wages down (just as immigrants have). This strategy still very much holds true: women are still paid less than men and, more importantly, now occupy whole industries (small part assembly factory work, cleaning, care work, etc.) because the pay is so low only women will accept it. Work that might earn them more, such as prostitution, remains illegal, meaning that prostitutes need keepers (police bribers) who get the biggest chunk of their income. In general, women often work in unstable conditions with, if any, only temporary contracts – they might get pregnant after all. Currently there are more female than male migrants worldwide, yet women’s immigration status is far more precarious. Almost everywhere in the world they are still classified as untrained dependents, that is, they are seen to be following their families. Thus, women migrants often work illegally, which means they are completely exposed and vulnerable to their employer’s whim. Also, in the UK (as elsewhere) a lot of women are employed in so-called ‘care work’, meaning health and social policy affect them both at work and at home. Under constantly changing regulatory regimes, they must frequently renew qualifications in order to work ‘legally’, conform to departmental guidelines regardless of what experience tells them, and above all (unless privately employed) ‘achieve the targets’.

Women are under scrutiny both as workers and as (potential) mothers. ‘Parenting’ as unpaid ‘care work’ is increasingly subject to the same measures, targets and supervision devised in the professional sector. In their double-loser role (either dependent on boss and their husband, or on boss and the state, or on all of them), low-income and unemployed mothers, along with their children (whose loser status is assured by their absolute economic dependence), are uniquely exposed to the way capital shapes our lives.

Recent state moves to ensure women’s active participation in adjusting themselves and their lives to capital’s needs are no more than a pioneering experiment in what is shaping up to be a full frontal assault on the dependent class. The disjointed forms of health and social services intervention I have tried to identify seem to be regarded by policy makers as the ‘cheap route’ to one of the main aims of ‘supply-side’ social policy everywhere: maintaining and extending stratification and competition between and within classes. Thus, while neighbours are encouraged to inform on one another and families and individuals who are singled out for ‘help’ take on personal responsibility for their deteriorating circumstances, transformation of the essential, underlying conditions is experienced in contradictory ways by various class sub-groups, with some people even able to imagine that certain initiatives make them better-off.[40] Cut-throat individual labour-market competition, transfer to the market of formerly subsidised housing, asymmetrical attacks on benefits and partial or full criminalisation of previously legal activities will no doubt look like ‘opportunity’ to some of those affected, even as they dilute the income and undermine the freedom of their class in general.[41] The common interest of people vulnerable to market blackmail and state coercion is obscured by personalised state action to foster individual economic ‘competitiveness’. This inevitably diminishes the prospects of any counter-attack, not only against the material deterioration of lives, against data collection, surveillance and control, but against being turned into a pool of miserably dependent bodies, available whenever and however capital might need it.

Footnotes

[1] This text was mainly researched during 2007 – by now various changes may have been introduced

[2] That such services never are class-neutral is perfectly exemplified by UK legal practice regarding ‘anti-social behaviour’: among the most commonly-threatened sanctions is the loss of your council house, i.e. enforcement applies to the council-housed income bracket only.

[3] This of course was not always the case (cf. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 2004). Several noteworthy attempts to reclaim control of their reproductive capacity were made by women’s groups in the US during the 1960s and ’70s. Most famously Jane (officially known as the Abortion Counseling Service of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union), which performed numerous illegal abortions between 1969-1973. The Black Panthers’ social and health care programmes also eventually included family planning, after the women in the party had overturned the prevailing anti-abortion stance. Until then, abortion was seen as the white man’s attempted genocide of the black people. The pro-life case had been argued on the grounds that African-American women were not only widely used as guinea pigs in contraceptive research, but had, throughout their history as (waged or unwaged) slaves, often been prevented from having the kids they might have wanted, either because they did not want to carry them into slavery or grinding poverty made it absolutely impossible (cf. Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race and Class, 1983). The ‘new’ Black Panther Party is now in charge of some family planning clinics.

[4] And how much harder it is if the father is the claimant! Two male single parent friends report that agencies regularly demand to know ‘where is the mother?’, and sometimes threaten to take the child away if the father really goes ahead with, say, an application to be housed.

[5] Because it is becoming increasingly difficult to get real support from health or social services, those who need it only have two options, which both lead to the same result: they can either overstate their case, which will initially lead to a risk report being filed, containing data which will be widely shared, or they’ll be made to wait for ages, then visited by a health and/or social worker, who will take their details and signature consenting to the data being shared. Otherwise no help will be offered. If it’s urgent you won’t refuse. An example on the data sharing policy of social services in the UK can be found here: http://linkme2.net/ec

[6] ‘Dependent class’ as in dependent for survival on selling labour-power to others, and/or on state-administered supplements, whether in the form of benefits or ‘services’. All those, in other words, who are not able to live off the asset price bubbles blown in the Brown/Bush ‘ownership society’.

[7] ‘Reproduction’ as used here refers to sexual reproduction, but is NOT limited to its biological component. By extension, the term also includes all the activity by which individuals and social groups attempt to maintain their physical and socially subjective existence. From the point of view of capital this is restricted to reproducing the ability, along with the need, to sell labour (regardless of whether a corresponding demand for it exists at a given moment). The cost of ‘reproduction’ in this latter sense is theoretically covered by the wage (and its various state supplements), but historically and now, perhaps more than ever, this payment falls short of the minimum necessary leaving the burden of reproduction to fall on dependent workers in general and women in particular.

[8] During my research I interviewed several professionals working in the health- and social services. Their reasons for wishing to remain anonymous are obvious. I also spoke to some women using the services but, presumably for related reasons, I was unable to speak to those women who are most exposed to institutional action. Thus a lot of my material comes from a broad sweep of officially endorsed and dissident UK-published sources.

[9] Cf. Mariarosa dalla Costa, Gynocide: Hysterectomy, Capitalist Patriarchy, and the Medical Abuse of Women, New York: Autonomedia, 2007.

[10] Thus, self-help prevails. I overheard a Jamaican woman in the launderette sharing her treatment method: ‘I just eat ice-cream and pray to Jesus.’

[11] Quoted in ‘Children’s Databases – Safety and Privacy: A Report for the Information Commissioner’, Foundation for Information Policy Research, http://www.fipr.org/childrens_databases.pdf

[12] Cf. Damian Abbott, ‘The Spine’, Mute Vol 2 #7, http://www.metamute.org/en/The-Spine

[13] The government departments comprising the social services in the UK are the Department for Work and Pensions, the Inland Revenue, the Department of Health, the Department of Home and Community, and the Department for Children, Schools and Families. It is important to note, however, that these ministerial allocations change frequently and many of the departmental responsibilities are newfangled, while the tendencies discussed are longer-term.

[14] In the US, the vilification of pregnant women presumed to be living unhealthily has developed yet further: under a fetal protection banner, women can be tested for drugs and, if positive, prosecuted for ‘delivery of drugs to a minor’ or ‘child endangerment’, http://linkme2.net/ed

Many pro-lifers would like to see their moral indignation at pregnant women who drink or smoke turned into a statute. This of course would in effect see women being criminalised for being pregnant (seeing as, when not pregnant, they may smoke and drink with impunity). Incidentally, such additional punishment based on one’s status already exists in the UK when it comes to criminal offences committed by foreigners: nominally the same penalties apply to everyone, yet foreigners are additionally subject to deportation when they get out of prison.

[15] Current tabloid story-telling has it that children are snatched from their mothers by social services because they have to meet government targets for adoption; seeing as no-one seems to want to adopt kids who have already lived in foster care, newly born babies are a safe bet. See: Sue Reid, ‘How social services are paid bonuses to snatch babies for adoption’, The Daily Mail, 31 January 2008, http://linkme2.net/ee

[16] ‘It isn’t babies that blight young lives’, Madeleine Bunting, The Guardian, 27 May, 2005, http://linkme2.net/ef

[17] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4720813.stm

[18] Thus, according to a GP I spoke to, a teenager who was trying to conceal her pregnancy from her parents was contacted by social services at home. The hospital had passed her information on, ignoring the fact that her files had ‘do not contact at home’ written all over them.

[19] Connexions is a ‘service’ targeted at 13-19 year-olds who are ‘at risk of social exclusion’, it aims to encourage participation in education, and deal with personal problems that might present ‘barriers to learning’. The model is of an information-sharing multi-agency team; Connexions introduced a ‘smart-card’ for 16-19 year olds, which was scrapped this February, because the kids were too smart to let themselves be card-traced in return for shop discounts (take-up was 3.7 percent).

[20] ‘Children’s Databases – Safety and Privacy: A Report for the Information Commissioner’, op. cit..

[21] See, for example, the research published on the Every Child Matters site, http://www.everychildmatters.gov.uk/publications and on the Social Exclusion Task Force site, http://linkme2.net/eg

[22] Stuart Waiton, ‘The Enemy Within’, TES, 26 September, 2003, http://linkme2.net/eh

In order to collect the relevant personal details, the government’s vision is to be able to browse through a vast array of public services data such as personal medical information (with a diagnosis of hyperactivity being considered a risk), school results, social workers’ case files and information from police and youth-justice systems. Access to the resulting database would be granted to education, early years and childcare services, Connexions, health, social care, Youth Offending Teams, police, probation, prisons, and secure training centres. Some agencies are currently actively collecting data. Connexions, for example, seeks out data from the National Pupil Database and other services to ‘identify vulnerable young people’ (their powers for requesting data extend across educational records, welfare claims, revocation of benefits and attendance at ‘Jobcentre Plus’). The Connexions Customer (!) Information System is the intended database, covering all young people over 13 in the area and their parents, siblings and friends. The assessment document used by Connexions includes information on the parenting skills of parents and on substance abuse amongst the family and friends of the child. Of course no consent is sought in relation to this information. (And, obviously, the data can’t be cross-checked by those it refers to, even for something as ‘basic’ as truth value.)

Other databases involved in the policing of young people ‘at risk of offending’ are Reducing Youth Offending Generic National Solution (RYOGENS), Asset and Onset. All three of these include information on the family and possibly also friends of each risk-subject. Very often, the family has no idea that this data exists since it has been obtained from the child, who may not even know that they have given consent to the collection of family data, or that the data is used to identify whether or not they are ‘at risk’ and to track them over time. Included in the data will be causes for concern such as ‘negative home influence on education’, ‘dangerous behaviour’, ‘social isolation’, ‘non-constructive spare time’, ‘living in high-crime area’, ‘financial and/or housing difficulties’, ‘parenting difficulties’, ‘family and/or peers involved in anti-social behaviour’, etc.

Data is also collected by local spies, so-called YIP (youth inclusion and support programmes) workers. They should ‘assume the role of an identifying agency by collating information about these young people [not yet on their databases] from local contacts, residents, tenancy associations, community groups, street wardens etc.…’ That is, they encourage residents to inform on one another and/or on one another’s children, a project already well underway with ASBOs. Information held on Child Benefit or any other social security system may be passed on to ‘any civil servant or other person’ involved with the provision of protective services. Collected data can be passed around quite freely between the different databases as long as the recipient of the data is somehow involved with child services.

[23] ‘Children’s Databases – Safety and Privacy: A Report for the Information Commissioner’, op. cit..

[24] ‘Supply-side economics is a school of macroeconomic thought that argues that economic growth can be most effectively created using incentives for people to produce (supply) goods and services, such as adjusting income tax and capital gains tax rates. This can be contrasted with Keynesian economics (or ‘demand side economics’), which argues that growth can be most effectively managed by controlling total demand for goods and services, typically by adjusting the level of government spending. Supply-side economics is often conflated with trickle-down economics, now a derogatory term given to right-leaning economists’ views. The term supply-side economics was coined by journalist Jude Wanniski in 1975, and popularised the ideas of economists Robert Mundell and Arthur Laffer.’ A neutrality-disputed gloss from Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply-side_economics

[25] It is an understatement to say that these categories hardly constitute ‘objective’ states: ‘intelligence and community factors’! ‘Poor parenting’! ‘Individual characteristics’! Here as elsewhere in social legislation, the criterion of ‘objectivity’ seems to be that real institutional intervention follows whenever a flimsy concept is invoked.

[26] My personal favourite! ‘At risk of social exclusion’ – as if definitions of this kind didn’t create the risk! In any case it is clear that the child concerned (or, more commonly, its mother) will be held responsible for being ‘hard-to-reach’.

[27] A negative thinker reading a draft of this text wondered whether the dialectic of ’68 utopian radicalism is fully played out when the state demands the impossible of the workers, rather than the other way around.

[28] ‘One of the illustrative examples [of a non-communicative child attending a playgroup] is particularly objectionable. It suggests that the playgroup leader should seek consent to share her concerns with health practitioners and she should indicate in any letter she wrote “that her concerns would increase if this is refused”’, ‘Children’s Databases – Safety and Privacy: A Report for the Information Commissioner’, op. cit.

[29] Chris Jones, Iain Ferguson, et al., ‘Social Work and Social Justice: A Manifesto for a New Engaged Practice’, http://www.liv.ac.uk/ssp/Social-Work-Manifesto.html

[30] This idea is confirmed by a friend who was constantly harassed by a nurse after having visited the hospital with her daughter. She had no idea how to make it stop. Another friend commented on giving birth: ‘on the one hand you’re treated like a birthing machine, on the other hand you are completely held responsible for what happens even though you can’t possibly know the parameters.’

[31] ‘Social Work and Social Justice: A Manifesto for a New Engaged Practice’, op. cit.

[32] A UK child sponsorship charity.

[33] However even this may not be enough: the ContactPoint database, containing regularly updated details of every child born in the UK, promises to converge smoothly with the national ID system, so that no-one would be cut loose from observation even on becoming a nominally independent adult.

[34] There are 21 ‘standards’ in relation to children’s and young people’s well-being, and 203 ‘key actions’ for achieving them. The multi-agency taskforce (PCTs, LEAs and ‘other partners’) responsible for implementing the management programme educates mothers as to how they have to live and how to feed and educate their children.

[35] A wild guess: they might have preferred someone to help them with the cleaning, shopping and nappy changing, rather than someone standing around giving them health advice.

[36] ‘Looks and smiles help the brain to grow. Baby looks at mother; sees dilated pupils (evidence that sympathetic nervous system aroused and happy); own nervous system is aroused – heart rate increases. Lead [sic] to a biochemical response – pleasure neuropeptides (betaendorphin and dopamine) released into brain and helps neurons grow. Negative looks trigger a different biochemical response (cortisol) stops these hormones and related growth.’ From ‘Health-led Parenting Project: Family Nurse Partnership’ – a powerpoint presentation given at primary care trusts nation wide, http://linkme2.net/ei

[37] Mark Gould, ‘Unsure Future’, The Guardian, 24 May 2006, http://linkme2.net/ej

[38] Krysia Canvin, Chris Jones, et al, ‘Can I risk using public services? Perceived consequences of seeking help and health care among households living in poverty: qualitative study’, 2007, http://linkme2.net/ek

[39] From an interview with a Children’s Centre manager: ‘If we don’t meet the figures, no-one can bail us out, we’ll be made redundant.’

[40] ‘… neighbours had referred some participants to social services, and family social workers confirmed that referrals from neighbours were quite common. Participants understood that this aspect of their social and physical location was intensifying and inescapable.’ In, ‘Can I risk using public services?’, op. cit..

[41] ‘Asymmetrical’ in the sense that single adult claimants have been significantly impoverished in real-terms in the UK since 1997, while cumulative family eligibility, if all conditions are fulfilled, has at least kept pace with inflation. Only at first glance could this seem to run contrary to the argument of the article. In fact what has happened is perfectly in keeping with the other trends described: monetary payments have been allowed to rise where accompanied by intensified observation and intervention. What is actively disincentivised is claiming anything while eluding observation and ‘support’: hence single adults, particularly long-term incapacity claimants who only have to sign on once every few months, have to be hounded out of their quasi-hard-to-reach condition.

Madame Tlank’s profile as a suspect non-breeder can be found here: http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk

Louie Traikovski

Journal of Australian Studies, No. 78, 2003 [PDF]

The topic of housewives’ wages has received almost no Australian historical consideration. Dorothy Campbell’s fleeting reference is an extremely rare exception. [1] This article provides a much-needed historical examination of a neglected topic. Such examination shows that progressive and conservative arguments were mounted on both sides of the debate over housewives’ wages in Australia in the 1920s. Both sides of the debate are also found to have sometimes pursued contradictory aims. Furthermore, this article contests sociologist Ann Oakley’s claim that support for housewives’ wages always has conservative ends. [2]

The closest a housewife’s wage came to being awarded in 1920s Australia was in 1921, when the matter was debated in the Western Australian parliament. [3] This debate continued throughout the decade in the press, where arguments over financial remuneration for a housewife’s domestic labour focused on the value of woman’s domestic work and woman’s place in marriage. The press both reflected and shaped the debate. It fulfilled the former role by reporting statements by key public figures on the issue. It fulfilled the latter role through publishing the opinion of staff columnists and citizen letter writers on the topic.

Oakley has argued that when the various tasks that comprise housework are isolated, housework is revealed as multiskilled, and the commercial value of these tasks becomes clear. [4] This strategy was apparent in a 1924 rationale for wages for housework that estimated the financial value of individual aspects of housework: based upon average weekly wages for a cook, laundress, assistant hired man, seamstress and nurse, a domestic science expert figured a housewife who performed the jobs of all of these workers deserved £455 per year. [5] Australian Woman’s Mirror journalist ‘Una Tached’ contended that the housewife was grossly underpaid by the allowance her husband provided. She complained, ‘in 1924 … the washlady earns 12/- a day, … the housemaid 30/- a week and … the cook £2 a week … while in 1903 this angel (wife) did it all for “ten bob and keep”’. [6]

This recognition of the financial value of female domestic labour was accompanied by an awareness of unpaid housework as what Oakley terms ‘labour exploitation’. [7] Denial of monetary payment for housework meant a wife was a ‘household slave’ for her husband in the mind of American industrial analyst Maud Thompson. [8] Like-minded Sydney Morning Herald writer ‘M J W’ contemptuously labelled husbands who took advantage of the non-salaried domestic labour of their wives as ‘parasites’. [9]

Housework was deemed to be of financial worth because of what historians Sally Alexander and Anna Davin see as a perception of housewives as workers. [10] Some maintained that the location of their workplace should not deny housewives the classification of workers and, accordingly, the benefits due to workers. ‘Paragot’ wrote in an Adam and Eve article that, ‘the mere fact of her working in the home instead of going out into the world surely does not debar her from the right to a small weekly sum’. [11] Similarly, Maud Thompson stated that women involved in ‘home production’ should be paid as producers. [12] Defining housewives as labourers was revolutionary. As historian Eileen Boris states, it rejected the prevailing definition of work as existing only within the public sphere. [13] Such justification of housewives’ wages disputes Oakley’s contention that support of housewives wages invariably promoted conservatism. [14]

Housewives were said to deserve wages not only because they were workers but because they were superior workers to men. Unlike many men, a housewife’s energy was claimed to be always directed toward the good of the family. Maud Thompson described housework as ‘productive in character and absolutely essential to the existence of the family’. She believed this work was more deserving of a salary than ‘that non-productive class of labor [sic] upon which so much of man’s labor [sic] is expended, such as advertising, gambling, and lawsuits’. [15] Australian Woman’s Mirror journalist Gwen Spencer likewise favoured payment for housework over men’s work where money was often frittered away on ‘drink, hobbies, racing or investments which may quite possibly turn out a failure’. [16] Her colleague May MacFarlane proposed that housewives’ salaries would act to safeguard family finances against such wasteful, hedonistic pursuits by their husbands. [17] Thompson, Spencer and MacFarlane displayed an awareness that the role of family financial provider was often badly performed by husbands.

Wages for housework were sought upon the analysis that women’s work enabled men to undertake waged work. Maud Thompson described a wife as ‘a necessary part of a wage-earning machine’. [18] Part of a husband’s wage had been earned by his wife, asserted Leader writer C W Taber, for her ‘work in the household …made it possible for her husband to earn the income he enjoys’. This is why Taber described marriage as a ‘business partnership’. [19] Fellow Leader writer Helen Normanton reasoned this way too. She believed the explanation that, ‘many a man can earn a high salary and can sustain heavy mental and moral loads of business anxiety is largely due to the fact that he has in the background a silent partner whose name does not appear upon his business stationery’. Awife allowed her husband to reserve ‘his whole energy … for his public or professional career … by subtracting from his life all the worry of domestic management’. Normanton contended therefore that a wife warranted payment for her housework because she was an economic ‘helpmate’ to her husband. [20]

Housewives’ wages were further desired as a strategy to improve the status of married women. Wives lacking an income were said to be kept in a degrading, dependent state. Sun writer Nina Murdoch complained that wageless wives suffered ‘the humiliating necessity of asking for money whenever they wanted postage stamps … tram fares [or] new stockings’. [21] Kindred spirit Leader woman’s columnist ‘Nance’ grieved for ‘wives who are made to feel debased by begging for pocket money’. [22] Conversely, as Maud Thompson contended in her Labor Call article, a housewife with a salary had a ‘dignified economic position’. [23] Her dignity stemmed from the destruction of her husband’s total economic power. No longer would a housewife suffer from the demeaning accusation that she was ‘kept’ by her husband if she was salaried, asserted Australian Woman’s Mirror writer May MacFarlane. [24] Dependence was to be Louie Traikovski 11 replaced by equality as the foundation of marriage for the housewife who received an income. Gloria Sims explained in her Everylady’s Journal article that a wife’s income for domestic labour would ‘promote a feeling of fifty fifty … between husband and wife’. [25]

Such progressive thought featured in other support for housewives’ wages. The salaried housewife was seen as an individual who possessed the democratic right of freedom of choice. Labor Call journalist Mabel Brown claimed the absence of housewives’ wages meant that married women who required money could only pursue work outside their homes. A wage for housework, contended Brown, would give these married women the choice to work inside or outside their homes. [26]

Reflecting a more conservative stance, housewives’ wages were advocated for producing better housewives. These wages were claimed to force lazy wives to do housework. Australian Woman’s Mirror writer Gwen Spencer argued that wages for housework would ‘have the effect of shaming certain married shirkers into doing their fair share of home-making, by emphasizing the fact that they are cheating if they wear a man’s ring and take what they can get from him while doing as little as they possibly can in return’. [27] Clearly, husbands’ interests were served here as they would obtain a clean, well-ordered home to live in.

Husbands were also said to benefit through payment of housewives’ wages by gaining a constantly cheerful spouse. Such wages were deemed to put a permanent smile on a housewife’s face. ‘I really believe that half the housewives who mar their home by looking as if they had a perpetual grievance would be blithe and gay if their husbands had the inspiration to pay them regularly’, maintained Sun writer Nina Murdoch. [28] Similarly, Leader women’s columnist ‘Nance’ believed that an occasional cheque given to a housewife for her domestic efforts would make her ‘a much happier wife’. [29] These proponents of wages for housewives supported the prevalent notion that the job of a wife was to brighten her home for her husband.

Defence of existing sex roles was again apparent in opposition to wages for housewives for causing wives to reject their subservient domestic role. Monetary payment was deemed to transform her from an obedient and selfless wife and mother into a disobedient and selfish individual. A Bulletin cartoonist made this point with an illustration of a disgruntled husband holding a row of uncooked sausages on his fork and glaring at his wife as she lay on a couch reading and explaining to him that she would not cook his dinner as, ‘My ten hours were up’. [30] Likewise, a Table Talk writer imagined a husband’s ‘chops … being burnt to a cinder’ as a pay dispute took precedence over cooking for his salaried wife. [31] The same criticism of the waged housewife was provided in verse by a Herald poet:

Father:-

I say! Come quick Maria!
Here’s little baby Ted
He’s fallen in the fire
And burned his pretty head.

Mother:-

I cannot help it, Father.
It’s after union time
Besides, I would much rather
Read Marx’s work sublime.

Father:-

This chop’s a little underdone
I’d rather have some steak.
It really is but little fun
My teeth on it to break.

Mother:-

The board’s determination
is ninepence for a chop.
‘Twould cause you aggravation
If I my work should stop.

The price of steak’s a shilling
Still, if you chose to pay,
To cook I’d be unwilling -
Because I’m off today. [32]

A waged housewife was presented as obsessed with her rights as a worker to the detriment of her responsibilities as a housekeeper.

Traditional familial roles further figured in the denial of payment of wages to housewives so that husbands could be portrayed as exemplary family breadwinners. A Journal writer observed that many a husband rejected such wages because ‘my wife has everything she wants’. [33] This comment indicated a husband’s success at providing for his spouse rendered wages for her unnecessary.

Keeping husbands as breadwinners necessarily entailed keeping wives as their dependants. Monetary remuneration for a wife’s performance of domestic duties was dismissed as marriage and money were proclaimed to be mutually exclusive for a woman. An Age writer chastised the wage-seeking housewife as being in ‘a much less congenial branch’ of business than a single woman. [34] Employing the same logic, a letter-writer to the Weekly Times contended that the woman who chose ‘marriage as a salaried position’ made a bad choice. This person asked, surprised, ‘why marry? Other occupations offer better pay and less worry’. [35] Denial of payment to housewives was justified on the basis that they forfeited any right to an income when they chose marriage and its associated economic dependence upon a man.

A related argument against wages for housewives focused upon the wealthy housewife’s disassociation from commerce. Historian Gerda Lemer states that a lady’s identity was once dependent upon her not receiving pay for work. [36] It is therefore obvious that only a financially comfortable housewife, such as one cited in an Australian Woman’s Mirror article, could afford to object to wages for housewives as ‘horribly commercial’. [37]

Accordingly, monetary payment was rejected in favour of what sociologists Silvia Federici, Belinda Probert, Wendy Edmond and Suzie Fleming term ‘emotional payment’ for housework. [38] A great grandmother quoted in a Weekly Times article contended that, ‘The love and affection of my husband and children were ample payment’ for her housework. [39] Mrs A C Guthrie thought similarly. In an address to a branch of the Mother’s Union of the Church of England, she approvingly quoted John Ruskin who wrote, ‘In a man’s house his wife is his slave — in his heart she is Queen’. Guthrie maintained, ‘It is the position in his heart that a woman values’. [40] Another emotion that substituted for money as payment for a housewife’s labour was pride. A Freeman’s Journal writer maintained that a salary was not necessary for a housewife, as ‘She gets her reward in the knowledge that …civilization has moved to a …higher plane as the result of her labors [sic]’. [41] These critics depicted emotional payment as honourable and the ultimate form of payment for housework.

Another argument maintained that wives’ work at home should not be salaried because it was unskilled. Maud Thompson elucidated upon this in her Labor Call article. She explained that in an era of job specialisation, housework was generally perceived as ‘unskilled because [it was] so diversified’ and thus financially devalued. [42] Conversely, public sphere work usually conducted by males, which consisted of ‘endless effort in one direction’, was termed skilled. [43] Such valuation of a man’s public work over a woman’s private work was brilliantly captured by a Smith’s Weekly cartoonist: a housewife who praises her husband’s ability to focus all day long on the solitary task of book-keeping for his firm is depicted, whilst she fails to acknowledge her ability to simultaneously combine cooking, knitting, babysitting, reading and thinking. [44] Deeming the monoskilled to be skilled and the multiskilled to be unskilled displays what historian Chilla Bulbeck sees as masculinist logic in skill definition. [45]

Wages for wives’ housework were also opposed as non-egalitarian. The status of wives was said to be lowered if they were remunerated as employees for their housework. This criticism was expressed by Herald letter-writer ‘Sympathy’, who complained, ‘I took my wife as a partner, not an employee’. [46] Mrs J K Wallace, president of the Women’s Organizing Committee of the Australian Labor Party, agreed. She disagreed with Western Australian parliamentarian Edith Cowan’s campaign for wages for wives’ domestic work as she maintained it contravened ‘equality of the sexes’ by forming a hierarchy with one spouse ‘an employer and the other … an employee’. [47] This theme of inequality was also raised by an Age writer. This person asserted the word ‘wages’ implied obedience as the payer of wages possessed authority and thus superiority over the payee. [48] A housewife who earned wages shared the same low status as her domestic servants, believed Table Talk writer and Weekly Times women’s columnist Marjorie Pryor. [49] The concept of marriage as a relationship between equals was perceived to be threatened by paying housewives for their work.

Protagonists and antagonists in the debate over housewives’ wages were in conflict about the definition of woman’s domestic labour as work. They differed on whether housework was skilled and whether housewives were workers. Common ground was found amongst these two groups regarding women’s place in marriage. Both favoured subservient, dedicated housewives and, paradoxically, sought high status for married women.

Notes

1 D Campbell, ‘The Status of Women in New South Wales and Victoria 1925–8’, unpublished BA Hons thesis, University of New South Wales, 1974, p 104.
2 A Oakley, Housewife, Allen Lane, London, 1974, p 224.
3 Western Australian Parliamentary Debates, vol 65 (1921–1922), p 1,730.
4 A Oakley, The Sociology of Housework, Martin Robertson, Bath, 1974, p 48.
5 Everylady’s Journal, 6 October 1924, p 48.
6 Australian Woman’s Mirror, 23 December 1924, p 17.
7 Oakley, Housewife, p 91.
8 Labor Call, 12 August 1920, p 1.
9 Sydney Morning Herald, 29 May 1922, p 4.
10 S Alexander and A Davin, ‘Feminist History’, History Workshop, no 1 Spring 1976, p 5.
11 Adam and Eve, 1 February 1927, p 31.
12 Labor Call, 5 August, 1920, p 1.
13 E Boris, ‘The Home as a Workplace: Deconstructing Dichotomies’, International Review of Social History, vol 39, December 1994, p 416.
14 Oakley, Housewife, p 224.
15 Labor Call, 5 August, 1920, p 1.
16 Australian Woman’s Mirror, 3 February 1925, p 24.
17 ibid., 18 December 1928, p 10.
18 Labor Call, 5 August, 1920, p 1.
19 Leader, 24 January 1920, p 43.
20 ibid., 19 March 1921, p 43.
21 Sun, 29 May 1926, p 7.
22 Leader, 29 May, 1920, p 35.
23 Labor Call, 5 August, 1920, p 1.
24 Australian Woman’s Mirror, 18 December 1928, p 54.
25 Everylady’s Journal, 2 January 1928, p 37.
26 Labor Call, 28 February, 1924, p 4.
27 Australian Woman’s Mirror, 3 February 1925, p 24.
28 Sun, 29 May 1926, p 7.
29 Leader, 29 May, 1920, p 35.
30 Bulletin, 1 December, 1921, p 10.
31 Table Talk, 24 November 1921, p 8.
32 Herald, 12 April 1922, p 4.
33 Freeman’s Journal, 25 February 1926, p 3.
34 Age, 22 July 1924, p 6.
35 Weekly Times, 5 May 1928, p 64.
36 G. Lerner, The Majority Finds its Past: Placing Women in History, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1981, p 132.
37 Australian Woman’s Mirror, 3 February 1925, p 24.
38 Federici, op. cit., p.260; B Probert, Working Life: Arguments about Work in Australian Society, McPhee Gribble, Melbourne, 1989, p.84; Edmond and Fleming, op. cit., p 5.
39 Weekly Times, 5 May 1928, p 64.
40 Church of England Messenger, 18 June, 1925, p 298.
41 Freeman’s Journal, 25 February 1926, p 3 cited in Campbell, op. cit., p 104.
42 Labor Call, 5 August, 1920, p 1.
43 Argus, 3 April 1920, p 10.
44 Smiths Weekly, 16 July 1921, p 13.
45 C Bulbeck, ‘Manning the Machines: Women in the Furniture Industry, 1920–1960’, Labour History, no 51, November 1986, p 25.
46 Herald, 19 April 1924, p 6.
47 Argus, 19 November 1921, p 20.
48 Age, 22 July 1924, p 6.
49 Table Talk, 24 November 1921, p 8; Weekly Times, 5 May 1928, p 64.

Why is it important to achieve a society that values caring and caring relationships? The answer might appear obvious: It seems inherent in the definition of a good society that those who cannot care for themselves are cared for; that those who can care for themselves can trust that, should they become dependent, they will be cared for; and that people will be supported in their efforts to care for those they care about. But even more is at stake. Currently we are caught in a nasty circle. To the extent that caring is devalued, invisible, underpaid, and penalized, it is relegated to those who lack economic, political, and social power and status. And to the extent that those who engage in caring are drawn disproportionately from among disadvantaged groups (women, people of color, and immigrants), their activity-that of caring-is further degraded. In short, the devaluing of caring contributes to the marginalization, exploitation, and dependency of care givers. Conversely, valuing and recognizing caring would raise the status and rewards of those who engage in it and also increase the incentives for other groups to engage in caring. Thus, a society that values care and caring relationships would be not only nicer and kinder, but also more egalitarian and just.

In addressing the question of how to create a society in which caring is valued, I first give a brief account of the contemporary “crisis” in care which stems from its being defined as a privatized, feminized, and therefore devalued domain. In the next section I review recent feminist attempts to rethink the concept of care in ways that open it up to critical analysis. I then define some desirable goals for a society that values care. In the final section I outline four major directions for change in social citizenship rights, family responsibility, organization of paid care, and employment policies and practices.

The Contemporary Problem of Care

A spate of popular books and articles in the last decade has sounded an alarm about a new “crisis in care,” a crisis occasioned by the exodus of women from the home into the work force. The need for care of children, the elderly, and the chronically ill and disabled has not diminished, and may have grown because of increased longevity and medical advances that keep people with serious injuries or illnesses alive. Yet traditional caretakers-stay-at-home wives and mothers-are now less available to provide care on a full-time basis.

Dual-worker families-and more concretely, employed women-are said to be increasingly overburdened and strained by the need to meet both earning and care responsibilities. At the same time, most families don’t have the economic means to purchase care, and state services are grossly inadequate. As Mona Harrington (1999: 17) says in a recent popular treatment, “we have patchwork systems, but we have come nowhere near replacing the hours or quality of care that the at home women of previous generations provided for the country.” The question of how care is to get done without substantial numbers of nonemployed women to do it has become the subject of research and policy initiatives. For example, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has funded several university research centers on work and family life, including one at my campus devoted to “Cultures of Care.”

The “crisis in care” is just one impetus for recent critical examinations of the concept and organization of care in modem political democracies. Feminist theorists and researchers for some time have been examining care in its gendered dimensions. Their work makes it clear that the current crisis is a product of a privatized and gendered caring regime in which families, rather than the larger society, are responsible for caring and in which women (and other subordinate groups) are assigned primary responsibility for care giving. The relegation of care to the private sphere and to women has had two further corollaries: the devaluation of caring work and caring relationships, and the exclusion of both from the arena of equality and rights. As feminist critics of liberal political philosophy have explained, the very concept of citizenship (Le., full membership in the community, including reciprocal rights and responsibilities) has been premised on two conceptual dichotomies. First has been a split between the public and private, with the private realm of concrete relations of care defined not only as separate from, but also in opposition to citizenship. The private realm encompasses emotion, particularity, subjectivity, and the meeting of bodily needs, while the public arena of citizenship is ruled by thought, universality, objectivity, and the ability to act on abstract principles. Those relegated to the private sphere and associated with its valueswomen, servants, and children-were long excluded from full citizenship. Second has been a dichotomy between independence and dependence, with the ideal citizen defined as an autonomous individual who can make choices freely in the market and in the political realm. Within the liberal polity, citizenship supposedly created a realm of equality in which independent individuals had identical rights and responsibilities, regardless of differences in economic standing and other attributes. Those deemed dependent, whether categorically (as in the case of women, slaves, and children) or by reason of condition (as in the case of mental or physical disability) lacked standing and therefore were defined as outside the realm of equality (Okin 1979; Pateman 1988). [1] The fiction of liberal philosophy that independent and autonomous actors exist also obscures the actual interdependence among people and the need for care that even “independent” people have.

Historically, then, in the United States caring work within the family has not been recognized as a public societal contribution comparable to paid employment. As Judith Shklar (1991) has pointed out, earning has always been seen as a responsibility of citizenship because it is the basis for independence. In this view, earners fulfill citizenship responsibilities and therefore deserve certain entitlements, such as old age pensions, unemployment insurance, and health and safety protection. In contrast, unpaid family caregivers perform strictly private responsibilities and do not fulfill broader citizenship responsibilities. Hence, they are not accorded entitlements comparable to those of wage earners.

Moreover, the dominant family model assumes that support for dependents and care givers comes from the male breadwinner. Historically, the United States has provided little support for care giving, compared to other Western nations where paid parental leave, family allowances, child care services, housing subsidies, and health care coverage have been common (Fraser and Gordon 1993). During the World War I era, Progressive reformers pushed though maternalist programs, such as the Mothers’ Pension program, to allow widowed women to keep their children rather than sending them to orphanages. But pensions were so low that single mothers were forced to work as well as care for their children. The Mothers’ Pension was quickly phased out. New Deal-era social welfare policies institutionalized a two-tier system based on a male breadwinner-female caregiver model. The upper tier consisted of safety net entitlements for male breadwinners, which provided relatively generous, non-meanstested benefits such as unemployment insurance, social security retirement, and disability payments. Dependents of male breadwinners, including female caregivers, received indirect benefits through their relationship to a male earner, via provisions such as social security survivor benefits. The lower tier for women without connections to male breadwinners provided relatively ungenerous, means-tested “welfare” as in the original Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) and in the later Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). These benefits were considered a response to the neediness of children, not as an entitlement for mothers’ caring labor (Nelson 1990; Gordon 1994; Abramovitz 1996). These programs were not only gendered, they were also raced. Black single mothers in the South and Mexican single mothers in the Southwest were routinely denied relief on the grounds that they were “employable.” Thus, these women were not seen as “dependent” caregivers in the same way that white women were (Mink 1994).

Yet despite the prevailing ideology of the family as the realm of care, the growing need for care has generated a demand for paid care giving as an alternative or supplement to unpaid family care. Some of the demand has been met by institutions and services administered by the state and nonprofit organizations. The greatest growth, however, has been in institutions and services organized by for-profit corporate entities formed to take advantage of payments available through (industry-backed) government medical insurance. Overall, then, there has been a shift of some portion of caring to publicly organized settings, whether administered by state, nonprofit, or for-profit entities.

In these settings, the actual work of caring is done by “strangers”-paid workers, sometimes supplemented by unpaid volunteer workers. When caring is done as paid work, it not only remains gendered, it also becomes conspicuously racialized. In institutional settings such as hospitals, nursing homes, and group homes, nursing aides and other workers who actually do the day-to-day work of caring are overwhelmingly women of color, many of them recent immigrants. Home care workers also are drawn disproportionately from the ranks of women of color (Glenn 1992).

When care work is done by people who are accorded little status and respect in the society by reason of race, class, or immigrant status, it further reinforces the view of caring as low-skilled “dirty” work. This dual devaluation-of care work and care workers-rationalizes the low wages and lack of benefits that characterize care work. From her analysis of national wage data, Paula England (1992: 182) concluded that “being in a job requiring nurturing carries a net wage penalty of between $.24/hour and $1. 70/hour.” Taking into account such factors as workers’ education, service jobs involving care giving paid less than comparable jobs not involving care giving. Thus child care workers earned less than manicurists; nursing aides and orderlies earned less than janitors; and psychiatric aides earned less than elevator operators. One ironic result is that those who care for others usually have to give up caring for their own dependents, yet cannot afford to pay anyone to care for them. Caring work is considered lowskilled and largely physical in nature, despite the importance of emotional and psychological aspects of caring.

Care in institutional settings is compromised by a combination of factors: pressures to cut costs, government regulations, medicalization, and bureaucratization (Foner 1994). Deborah Stone (1999) notes that cost-containment pressures affect both private for-profit care and public nonprofit and taxpayer-supported facilities. Efforts to reduce or control costs have resulted in inadequate training and chronic understaffing. Government regulations, reflected in institutional procedures, also require caregivers to spend time on extensive paper work. As workers are stretched thin, they experience stress and frustration, leading to burnout and high turnover. Bureaucratic structures and regulations, which are designed to both keep down costs and protect care receivers, nonetheless often restrict the caring activities of caregivers. For example, because of Medicare regulations, health care institutions try to limit staff to performing strictly medical and medical-related tasks such as changing dressings, and not getting involved in social and emotional caregiving. [2] All of these pressures directly affect the care relationship. Caregivers complain about the lack of time and autonomy to respond to individual needs. Care receivers may be subject to controls that maintain “order” under conditions of understaffing (e.g., through use of sedation or physical restraints). Care receivers may not receive the kind of individualized and time-consuming care that would allow them maximum dignity and autonomy.

Rethinking Care

To develop alternatives to the present situation, we need to rethink the concept of care. Because care is so closely associated with womanhood, feminist philosophers and social theorists have subjected care to close analysis. My reading of several theorists of care, including Joan Tronto (1993), Diemut Bubeck (1995), Emily Abel and Margaret Nelson (1990), and Sara Ruddick (1998), suggests the usefulness of defining care as a practice that encompasses an ethic (caring about) and an activity (caring for). “Caring about” engages both thought and feeling, including awareness and attentiveness, concern about and feelings of responsibility for meeting another’s needs. “Caring for” refers to the varied activities of providing for the needs or well-being of another person. [3] These activities include physical care (e.g., bathing, feeding), emotional care (e.g., reassuring, sympathetic listening), and direct services (e.g., driving a person to the doctor, running errands). The definition is not free of ambiguity, but it does establish some boundaries. For example, defining caring in terms of direct meeting of needs differentiates caring from other activities that may foster survival. Thus, economic provision would not be included, even though it may help support care giving. Men are often said to be “taking care of their family” when they earn and bring money into the household. Despite the use of the term care in this phrase, bread winning would not be considered “caring.” In fact, economic support has historically been seen as men’s contribution in lieu of actual care giving; simultaneously, care giving has been viewed as women’s responsibility, an exchange for being supported by the primary breadwinner.

Within this definition of care as a practice, three features are important. First, this definition recognizes that everyone needs care, not just those we consider incapable of caring for themselves. Often only children, the elderly, the disabled, or the chronically ill are seen as requiring care, while the need for care and receiving of care by so-called independent adults is suppressed or denied. As Sara Ruddick (1998: 11) notes, “most recipients of care are only partially ‘dependent’ and often becoming less so; most of their ‘needs,’ even those clearly physical, cannot be separated from more elusive emotional requirements for respect, affection, and cheer.” At the same time, even those we see as fully independent-that is, able to care for themselves in terms of “activities of daily living”may for reasons of time or energy or temporary condition need care to maintain their physical, psychological, and emotional well-being. They may turn to a family member, friends, a servant, or a service provider for hot meals, physical touch, or a sympathetic ear. The difference is that “independent adults” may preserve their sense of independence if they have sufficient resources, economic or social, to “command” care from others, rather than being beholden to relatives or charity.

A second aspect of defining care as practice is that care is seen as creating a relationship; as Ruddick (1998: 14) puts it, “[caring] work is constituted in and through the relationship of those who give and receive care.” The relationship is one of interdependence. Generally we think of the caregiver as having the power in the relationship; but the care receiver, even if subordinate or dependent, also has agency/power in the relationship. Focusing on relationships brings into relief the influence of the recipients of care on caring work. T ronto (1993) notes that for the work of care to be successful, its recipients have to respond appropriately — e.g., a screaming child betokens failure. In some situations where the care receiver employs the caregiver or has social authority (e.g., due to the norm of respect toward elders), the care receiver may have more power than the caregiver.

Third, the definition of care as practice recognizes that caring can be organized in a myriad of ways. The paradigmatic care relationship is the mother-child dyad, which often serves as the template for thinking about caring. In this model, caring (mothering) is viewed as natural and instinctive-women’s natural vocation. However, this idealized model is deceptive in that it ignores the actual diversity in the ways mothering/caring is actually carried out within and across cultures. Caring can take place in the household or in publicly organized institutions, and can be carried out individually or collectively and as paid or unpaid labor. Much caring takes place in the family, usually as the unpaid work of women, but it is also done as paid work (e.g., by babysitters, home health aides, and the like). It also takes place in the community as unpaid volunteer work, as in the case of church or charitable organizations that run day care or senior activity centers. It also takes place in institutions organized by the state, corporations, or individuals as commodified services using paid caregivers.

Care can also be “fragmented,” divided among several caregivers and between “private” and “public” settings. Thus, a parent may take ultimate responsibility for ensuring that a child has care after school but delegate the actual work of care giving to a babysitter, a relative, a 88 Symposium paid home care worker, and/or an after-school program. Barrie Thome (1999) found in her study of childhoods in an urban multicultural community that parents often have to patch together several of these arrangements.

What Should Our Goals Be?

To achieve a society in which caring is valued in all spheres of social life, all of the elements- the work of care giving and the people involved {care receivers and caregivers)-would have to be recognized and valued. Hence, a society in which caring is valued would be one in which:

• Caring is recognized as “real work” and as a social contribution on a par with other activities that are valued, such as working, military service, or community service, regardless of whether caring takes place in the family or elsewhere or as paid or unpaid labor.

• Those who need care (including children, the elderly, disabled, and chronically ill) are recognized as full members of the society and accorded corresponding rights, social standing, and the voice of citizens. This would mean that care receivers are empowered to have influence over the type of care, the setting, and the caregivers, and that they have access to sufficient material resources to obtain adequate care.

• Those who do caring work are accorded social recognition and entitlements for their efforts similar to those who contribute through paid employment or military service. These entitlements include working conditions and supports that enable them to do their work well and an appropriate level of economic return, whether in wages or social entitlements. For each of these ideals to be achieved, additional specific conditions would have to be fulfilled; these conditions are also desirable for reasons of equity and social justice.

• Caring is legitimated as a collective (public) responsibility rather purely a family or private responsibility.

• Access to care is relatively equally distributed and not dependent on economic or social status. Ultimately, the ideal would be a society in which there is an adequate amount and quality of care for all who need it-i.e., care that is individualized, culturally appropriate, and responsive to the preferences of those who are cared for.

• The responsibility and actual work of caring is shared equitably so that the burden of care does not fall disproportionately, as it now does, on disadvantaged groups-women, racialized minorities, and immigrants.

Some Directions for Change

Rethinking social citizenship: One important step is to redefine social citizenship to make care central to the rights and entitlements of citizens. This would involve a radical reversal of the present situation, in which care is defined as a private responsibility and therefore outside the realm of citizenship. Making care central to citizenship would entail three elements: establishing a right to care as a core right of citizens; establishing care giving as a public social responsibility; and according caregivers recognition for carrying out a public social responsibility. These three elements are interrelated. If citizens have a right to care, then there is a corresponding responsibility on the part of the community to ensure that those who need care get it. Further, if care giving is a public social responsibility, then those who do care giving fulfill an obligation of citizenship and thus are entitled to societal benefits comparable to those accorded for those fulfilling the obligation to earn-for example, social security, seniority, and retirement benefits.

Additionally, a constraint that is specific to caring (in contrast to earning) and that needs to be addressed is what Kittay (1995) has called the “secondary dependence” of the caregiver. By taking on the care of a dependent and foregoing earning, unpaid caregivers become dependent on a third party-a breadwinner or the statefor resources to sustain both those they care for (primary dependents) and themselves (secondary dependents). Historically, U.S. welfare policy has been premised on the assumption that support for care giving belonged to the male breadwinner, and that the state should assume responsibility for support of caring only in the absence of a male breadwinner. Sometimes, as in the case of black single mothers, the lack of a male breadwinner was not seen as adequate grounds for the state to step in. Instead, black single mothers were deemed to be “employable mothers” who should support themselves and their dependents. In a step backward from recognizing caregivers’ need for support, the U.S. Congress passed the Personal Responsibility Act in 1996, which abolished AFDC, devolved welfare back to individual states, and restricted the amount of lifetime benefits; most states have mandated stringent “workfare” to get single mothers off welfare.

In contrast to the U.S. welfare system, European welfare states have all provided some forms of family allowance for citizens with children. Most countries have supported caregivers with child allowances, and some even give small pensions to those who engage in unpaid care work. In conservative welfare regimes, such as France and Germany, the rationale for maternal allowances typically has been framed in terms of child welfare and promoting natalism, to ensure the size and well-being of the future population, rather than in terms of the value of caring and social citizenship rights and responsibilities in caring. Nonetheless, the allowances have been designed as universal entitlements not tied to income or means testing, unlike U.S. welfare programs. In more progressive social democratic welfare regimes support for care giving is extensive, including allowances, subsidies, and direct services, such as child care and home aides (Pederson 1993; Sainsbury 1996).

Transforming citizenship in the United States to make care central to rights and entitlements would require us to challenge the linked ideologies of individual independence and family responsibility that I have described above. The United States for the most part has not even recognized mothering/parenting as a contribution to the national welfare, nor has it assumed a larger societal responsibility for supporting caregivers. As with previous historic changes in the boundaries and meanings of citizenship, it would require concerted struggle. Political citizenship, in the form of suffrage, was gradually extended to include previously excluded groups: nonpropertied white men in the early nineteenth century, black men after the Civil War, and, finally, women in 1920. The democratization of the vote was achieved only after concerted struggles by each of the groups in the course of over 100 years. Social citizenship rights of the welfare state, including social security, unemployment relief, minimum wage, and job creation were responses to the political mobilization of millions of Americans displaced by the Great Depression. [4] In the second half of the twentieth century, the second civil rights movement and second-wave feminism impelled legal, political, and social changes that dramatically expanded employment, education, and legal rights for racial minorities and women.

An important recent example of expanding citizenship is the success of the disability rights movement in establishing federal laws and policies that require schools and universities, employers, and public programs to provide facilities and activities that enable differently-abled citizens to work, study, travel, and otherwise participate in the social and cultural life of the society. The latter movement comes closest to addressing the issues central to caring and social citizenship. It addresses the rights of citizens who have physical and mental conditions that limit their physical and economic independence to receive services and accommodations that allow them to achieve social and political independence. [5] There is thus a precedent for claiming the right to care as essential for meaningful citizenship.

Rethinking the family as the primary site of care: The previous discussion about state policies on social citizenship and care has assumed that most care takes place within the family and is carried out as part of unpaid labor of family members. However, if we take seriously the notion that caring is a public social responsibility, we also need to examine critically the conception of the family as the institution of first resort for caring. Indeed, one can argue that keeping the family as the “natural” unit for caring relationships helps anchor the gender division of caring labor. Seeing family and women’s caring as “natural” disguises the material relationships of dependence that undergird the arrangement. But as those who care for others know, love is not enough: Care requires material resources. We need therefore to consider “defamilializing” care in order to relieve women of disproportionate responsibility for care giving and also to free both care receivers and caregivers from economic dependence on a male breadwinner.

Utopian societies in the past, ranging from communes to the Kibbutz movement, have attempted to transform care, especially infant and child care, into a public or communal responsibility by collectivizing child care. Theoretically, communal arrangements in which child care is treated as a form of “public” labor equal to other forms of labor free those who engage in caring from dependence on a breadwinner and also free children from dependence on (and therefore subordination to) biological parents. In practice, collectivized care has not eliminated the gendered division of caring labor, since it was still women who were the principal caregivers in publicly organized child care. Moreover, collectivized care generally has arisen in homogeneous religious and socialist communities where members shared fundamental cultural and political values. Completely collectivized care would be unlikely and perhaps undesirable in large-scale multicultural societies in which people maintain divergent cultural and political values. Family remains the main institutional nexus for anchoring distinctive cultural and social identities.

Thus, for both practical and ideological reasons it seems likely that families (broadly defined) will continue to value caring, and that family members will feel responsible for caring for children and, to a lesser extent, elderly and disabled members and will choose to do so. This does not mean that the family should be defined in the traditional way as the conjugal heterosexual household or that it should be the first resort for care in all cases. The states’ and employers’ care policies currently recognize dependency and caring relationships in rather traditional terms of parents and children (whether biologicalor adoptive) and spouses (defined through legal marriage). However, there are many other types of family relations that generate relationships of care, including cohabiting couples, gay and lesbian couples, extended kin such as grandparents and siblings, and sometimes “fictive kin” who participate in mutual support. As Carol Stack and Linda Burton (1994) point out in relation to their study of African-American families, men, women, and children may be “kinscripted” to care for the children of siblings, grandparents, grandchildren, aunts, and uncles when there is no one else able to do so. To the extent that caring in the “family” is valued, the notion of “family” must be extended to encompass diverse kin relations, including “voluntary” or “fictive” relationships.

Regarding the knotty question of the primacy of family vs. the larger community in care giving: In a survey conducted in England by Janet Finch (1996), respondents affirmed the importance of kin ties; they indicated that “rallying around in times of crisis” was what defined a functional family. The actual degree of responsibility that respondents felt in particular situations and toward particular relatives varied, however, depending on prior relationship and current circumstances. (I would also add that in a diverse society, there is considerable cultural difference in degree of obligation and in who is included in the net of obligation.) In general,
Finch’s respondents emphasized that relatives should not expect or take for granted assistance from other family members. Another British researcher, Jenny Morris, found that, in tum, people requiring care often prefer not to rely on family. Many of the disabled adult women Morris interviewed said they preferred paid helpers or helpers provided by social service to help from family members, because it allowed them more independence (cited in Cancian and Oliker 2000: 99).

Finch (1996: 207) argues that the moral reasoning of people in her survey suggests the principle that people should have the right not to have to rely on their families for help: “To point in another way, the family should not be seen as the option of first resort for giving assistance to its adult members, either financial or practical.”

Finch is careful to say that her point is not to deprecate generosity, care, and support within families, but only to see these as “optional, voluntary, freely given” (1996: 207).

Taken together, the findings from Finch’s and Morris’s studies support the case that the community, as represented by the state, has primary responsibility for care of its citizens, and that citizens in tum have the right to nonfamily care. Public policy would thus be that all persons are entitled to publicly organized care or to allowances or vouchers to pay for care, regardless of whether or not family members are available to provide it.

Rethinking Paid Care

As noted in the introduction, the sheer demand for care, the inability of families to provide all care, and economic incentives to commodify care have brought about significant shift of caring to paid caregivers. This is especially the case for those needing physically demanding, round-the-clock care, such as children or adults with severe mental and physical disabilities, and elderly with dementia or Alzheimer’s. Much of the latter care takes place in institutional settings, nursing homes, hospitals, and residential facilities, where the intensive face-to-face caring is done by nursing aides and other nonprofessional workers under the supervision and authority of administrators and medical and nursing professionals.

Thus, any scheme to create a society in which caring is valued in all spheres must address the growing commodification and defamilization of care. We need to think about the changes that occur when caring is made into a public rather than private function, when “strangers” rather than family members provide care, when care giving is paid rather than unpaid, and most importantly when caring is regulated and controlled by bureaucratic rules and hierarchy.

Transferring caring from private household into publicly organized settings inserts “third parties” into the caring relationship. Both caregivers and care receivers are hemmed in by rules and regulations about time spent and kinds of care that are covered (e.g., shopping). Foner (1994) and others have argued that the “iron cage” of bureaucracy that constrains people in organizations creates fundamental dilemmas for care workers who are caught between conflicting ideals. Whereas bureaucracies operate according to principles of standardization, impersonal rules, and efficiency, care relationships encourage individual treatment, personal ties, and patience.

Bureaucratic rules and control were instituted because of publicity about widespread abuse and neglect of patients. Having done an ethnographic study of a nursing home in New York, Foner (1994) agrees that bureaucratic rules and oversight are necessary to protect elderly patients, and that nursing aides, who do the actual physical care, feeding, cleaning, bathing, and so on, cannot be allowed to act autonomously. However, the rules and the way they are administered emphasize “efficiency” in getting physical care tasks done, meeting time deadlines, and maintaining records. Yet, as Tim Diamond (1988: 48) found in his ethnography of a nursing home, emotional care is essential to the nursing aide’s job: “holding someone trying to gasp for breath” or talking to residents to “help them hold on to memories of their past.” Diamond observed that these kinds of emotional support were not listed in the aides’ job descriptions, nor were the aides rewarded for these activities. In the nursing home she studied, Foner found that Ana, a nursing aide who regularly took time to talk to patients, and comfort or reassure them while bathing them or changing them, was constantly reprimanded for being inefficient, while Ms. James, an aide who never spoke to patients and handled them roughly to get them through their routines, was praised by supervisors as a model aide.

Deborah Stone (2000) found that home care workers also faced a conflict between bureaucratic rules and principles and their own ethic of care. Thus, they often stretched or evaded rules and supervisors to provide personal care, or spent off-work time or money to provide extra services.

The various ethnographic studies reveal that many care workers do provide quality emotional care, but they do so “around the fringes” so that their skills and effort are unrecognized or they do so in direct defiance of the rules. These studies point to the existence of “oppositional cultures” in which workers cooperate to provide the kind of care that the bureaucratic structure does not recognize or disallows. One case study of a psychiatric hospital (Lundgren et al. 1990) found the quality of care was excellent because psychiatric technicians who did the daily care carved out areas of autonomy in which they could act in accordance with an ethos of care. Because the psychiatric technicians had opportunities to interact freely when residents were in classes, they developed camaraderie. Workers supported one another to go beyond the policies they considered unreasonable or against the interests of the residents. They developed customs, such as “time out” to leave the unit when they were about to lose control. These kinds of practices that workers themselves develop could be incorporated into organizational practices. Encouraging a team approach in which workers model and support each other for sensitive caring would be one such salutary practice. Procedures could also be reformed to build in more opportunity and recognition for aides who show kindness and go out of their way for patients. Organizations could offer more regular training in sensitivity and emotional aspects of care, include emotional caring work in job descriptions and worker evaluations, and provide a reward system for caregivers who go beyond the call of duty to help patients.

At the professional level, the bureaucratic and chart-keeping imperatives of caring institutions could be harnessed to build in accountability for the social and emotional well-being of care receivers. Foner (1994) notes that one reform that has been adopted in many institutions is the psychosocial model of care, which pays attention to the emotional and social as well as the physical aspects of caring. The psychosocial model involves a case management approach that includes both health and social service needs of care receivers. Cancian and Oliker (2000) describe a “Clinical Practice Model” of nursing that Bonnie Wesorick has developed and introduced in several hospitals. This model challenges the medical model by emphasizing “holistic caring.” It does so by such methods as keeping a record on each patient that includes personal histories, religious orientation, family situation, and individual concerns. Importantly, it calls for writing a plan of care that documents the patient’s needs, concerns, and problems and an individualized approach to reach desired outcomes.

Encouraging caregivers to focus on social and emotional aspects of care may be salutary in some respects. Yet there is an inherent pitfall to empowering caregivers: It may exacerbate the already unequal relationship between caregivers and care receivers. Caregivers may feel that they understand the needs of care receivers and that they are acting in their best interests. However, care receivers might have different values and priorities. To the extent that care receivers depend emotionally and physically on their caregivers, they may feel they have no choice but to defer to the caregiver’s judgment.

Thus, an additional concern should be to ensure that care receivers are given voice and influence over their care. In the case of mentally competent adults requiring home care assistance, for example, it would be preferable for them to be given grants or vouchers to hire their own caregivers rather than being assigned a helper by a social service agency. Several of the 50 disabled women interviewed by Jenny Morris in England said they especially valued helpers they hired and paid for themselves rather than those sent by government social services, because they had greater control. One woman said that only when she started employing her own helper did she feel she could pay attention to her own appearance. She had her paid helper assist her with clothing and makeup, which she felt justified in doing because “They need to be patient and I’m paying for that patience so I feel OK about expecting it” (quoted in Cancian and Oliker 2000: 99). One group already has direct access to government funds for paid care. The Department of Veterans’ Affairs has a program for Universal Aid and Attendance Allowance that gives direct unrestricted cash payments to 220,000 veterans to pay for homeworkers or attendants (Cancian and Oliker 2000: 155). The right of veterans to state supported paid care is acknowledged because of their “service to the country.” What is needed is a more universal approach that extends entitlements to nonfamilial paid care to all citizens.

In short, both paid caregivers and receivers of paid care need to be empowered. Sometimes, when the interests of caregivers and care receivers intersect, it makes sense for them to organize together. For example, when social service agency budgets are cut and home care and other services are reduced, caregivers may be forced to serve more clients less well and clients don’t get the care they need. During the 1980s and ’90s, coalitions of home health care workers, care receivers, and community leaders have formed to improve wages and benefits for care workers. Since services are paid from Medicaid or other public funds, care receivers will support wage increases for care workers, especially if it means that their caregivers will continue rather than leaving for higher-paying jobs in other fields (Cobble 1996; SEIU 1999).

Rethinking Employment Practices

Changes in employment practices are also needed to make it possible for people to integrate work and care and so that care giving is not penalized. A small proportion of citizens currently benefit from private-sector initiatives by corporations that recognize the caring responsibilities of their employees. Some of these corporate employers provide child care and unpaid leaves to care for children or elderly relatives. Model programs include those by CitiBank, Stride Rite, and Campbell’s Soups, which provide child care on or near their premises. Bristol Myers-Squibb has a family leave policy for employees that covers care for elderly relatives (Cancian and Oliker 2000: 75, 155).

The passage of the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act marked a first step in developing a national policy that supports combining work and care. The act recognizes care responsibilities for those engaged in paid work and accepts public responsibility so that dependents can receive adequate care. As in many European countries, the stated goal of the legislation was the development of children and promotion of the family unit rather than recognition of care giving as a social responsibility. The preamble to the Act recognizes job security and parenting as important for citizens’ well-being and acknowledges the role of the state in supporting both. However, coverage is extremely limited. By mandating only unpaid leave, the government accommodates care rather than fully supporting it, since few parents can afford to use the unpaid leave. Moreover, by exempting employers with fewer than 50 employees, the law leaves an estimated half of the workforce uncovered-56 percent of women and 48 percent of men, according to Spalter-Roth and Hartmann (1990). Ultimately, when employer interests are at stake, employer needs are allowed to trump care needs. Finally, the Act recognizes dependency only within traditional conjugal family relationships- spouse, children, and parents (Kittay 1995). It thereby “refamilizes” care by excluding other types of voluntary relations of dependency and care.

Besides parental and care-giving leave and child care, employment policy must consider the sheer number of hours needed for care. A national survey of a representative sample of 1509 English-speaking households found an average of 17.9 hours of care giving per week per household, while several other specialized surveys found a much higher number of unpaid caregiver hours in households with persons having specific medical conditions or disabilities (Arno et al. 1999). At the same time, work hours of employed Americans have become the longest of those in all industrialized nations, according to a 1997 United Nations survey. The survey found that u.s. workers averaged 40 percent more hours than Norwegians and 25 percent more than the French (calculated from figures in the San Francisco Chronicle, September 6, 1999).

In combination with lack of state support for nonemployed caregivers, long work hours increase the strain on U.S. workers who have care responsibilities. Comparisons of worker productivity suggest that the longer hours of U.S. workers have not produced comparable increases in productivity. Thus reduction of work hours can be justified on economic as well as social welfare grounds. The 40-hour week was the goal of labor movements starting after the Civil War, but it was only when organized labor acquired sufficient political power in the 1930s that it became the standard. It involved the recognition of workers’ rights for a life apart from the job. It is now time to recognize the reality of workers’ multiple responsibilities for earning and caring by reducing work hours through a combination of reducing the standard for “full-time work” and increasing vacation and leave time.

Closing Thoughts

I have focused on specific ideological and structural constructions of caring. But ideas about and structures of caring are tied to other ideologies and structures that they support and are supported by. Achieving the kinds of changes needed to create a society that values caring will require transforming the ways we think about ourselves, our relationships with others, the family, civil society, the state, and the political economy. Ultimately, the transformation of caring must be linked to major changes in political-economic structures and relationships. Perhaps most fundamentally, the liberal concept of “society” as made up of discrete, independent, and freely choosing individuals will have to be discarded in favor of notions of interdependence among not wholly autonomous members of a society.

Notes

1. Kittay (1995) has extended the critique to argue that dependence and relations of dependence are simply not accommodated in liberal theories of justice, which are premised on a model of autonomous individuals who can make choices in their own best interests.

2. Thus, visiting nurses or health care coordinators may be allowed to make a single home visit to give discharged patients instructions on medical selfcare, but not to take longer to provide social and emotional support to help them adjust to their new limitations.

3. For the purposes of this essay, I am deliberately limiting the meaning of care to that of caring for people, even though for other purposes, one might conceptualize care as encompassing caring for objects, animals, and the environment. For example, political theorist Joan Tronto (1993: 103) defines caring as “a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.” At the same time, I am adopting a somewhat broader definition than one that restricts caring only to meeting the needs of those who cannot care for themselves-e.g., Diemut Bubeck’s (1995: 129) definition of “caring for” as “the meeting of the needs of one person by another person where faceto- face interaction between carer and cared for is a crucial element of the overall activity and where the need is of such a nature that it cannot possibly be met by the person in need herself.”

4. Similarly, veterans’ benefits, the G.I. Bill, hospitalization, and other social welfare benefits came about partly because of veterans’ political organizing efforts.

5. There has been a recent movement to franchise citizens with mental illness.

References

Abel, Emily and Margaret Nelson, eds. 1990. Circles of Care. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Abramovitz, Mimi. 1996. Under Attack: Fighting Back. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Arno, Peter S., Carol Levine, and Margaret M. Memmott. 1999. “The Economic Value of Informal Caregiving.” Health Affairs 18(2): 182-87.

Bubeck, Diemut Elisabet. 1995. Care, Gender, and Justice. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Cancian, Francesca M. and Stacey]. Oliker. 2000. Caring and Gender. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.

Cobble, Dorothy Sue. 1996. “The Prospects for Unionization in a Service Economy.” Pp. 333-58 in Working in a Service Economy, edited by Cameron MacDonald and Carmen Siriani. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Diamond, Timothy. 1988. “Social Policy and Everyday Life in Nursing Homes: A Critical Ethnography.” Pp. 39-55 in The Worth of Women’s Work: A Qualitative Synthesis, edited by Anne Statham, Eleanor M. Miller, and Hans O. Mauksch. Albany: State University of New York Press.

England, Paula. 1992. Comparable Worth: Theories and Evidence. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter.

Finch, Janet. 1996. “Family Rights and Responsibilities.” Pp. 193-208 in Citizenship Today: The Contemporary Relevance of T. H. Marshall, edited by Martin Bulmer and Anthony M. Rees. London: UCL Press.

Foner, Nancy. 1994. The Caregiving Dilemma: Work in the American Nursing Home. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Fraser, Nancy and Linda Gordon. 1993. “Contract versus Charity: Why Is There No Social Citizenship in the United States?” Socialist Review 212(3): 45-68.

Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. 1992. “From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor.” Signs 18: 1-43.

Gordon, Linda. 1994. Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare 1890-1935. New York: Free Press.

Harrington, Mona. 1999. Care and Equality: Inventing a New Family Politics. New York: Knopf.

Kittay, Eva Feder. 1995. “Taking Dependence Seriously: The Family and Medical Leave Act Considered in Light of the Social Organization of Dependency Work and Gender Equality.” Hypatia 10: 8-29.

Lundgren, Rebecka Inga and Carole H. Browner. 1990. “Caring for the Institutionalized Mentally Retarded: Work Culture and Work-Based Social Supports.” Pp. 150-172 in Circles of Care, edited by Emily Abel and Margaret Nelson. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Mink, Gwendolyn. 1994. The Wages of Motherhood. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Nelson, Barbara. 1990. “The Origins of the Two-Channel Welfare State: Workmen’s Compensation and Mothers’ Aid.” Pp. 123-51 in Women, The State and Welfare, edited by Linda Gordon. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Okin, Susan. 1979. Women in Western Political Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Pateman, Carole. 1988. The Sexual Contract. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Pedersen, Susan. 1993. Family, Dependence, and the Origins of The Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914-1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ruddick, Sara. 1998. “Care as Labor and Relationship.” Pp. 3-25 in Norms and Values: Essays on the Work of Virginia Held, edited by Joram G. Haber and Mark S. Halfon. Lanham, MD: Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield.

Sainsbury, Diane. 1996. Gender, Equality and Welfare States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. San Francisco Chronicle. 1999. “UN Says Americans Are the Hardest Workers.” September 6, p. 3.

Service Employees’ International Union (SEIU). 1999. “Drive to Improve L.A. Homecare Takes Big Step Forward.” Press Release.

Shklar, Judith. 1991. American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Spalter-Roth, Roberta M. and Heidi I. Hartmann. 1990. Unnecessary Losses: Cost to Americans of the Lack of Family and Medical Leave. Washington, DC: Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

Stack, Carol and Linda Burton. 1994. “Kinscripts: Reflections on Family, Generation, and Culture.” Pp. 33-44 in Mothering: Ideology, Experience and Agency, edited by Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, and Linda Forcey. New York: Routledge.

Stone, Deborah. 1999. “Care and Trembling.” The American Prospect 43 (March-April): 61-67.

—. 2000. “Care as We Give It, Work as We Know It.” In Care Work: Gender, Labor and the Welfare State, edited by Madonna Harrington-Meyer. New York: Routledge.

Thome, Barrie. 1999. “Pick-Up Time at Oakdale Elementary School: Work and Family from the Vantage Points of Children.” Working Paper No. 2. Center for Working Families, University of California, Berkeley.

Tronto, Joan. 1993. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge.

Sheila Fitzpatrick

From Chapter Six, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s, 1999. [PDF]

“Wives” were an almost unrecognized entity in the first decade and a half after the revolution. An emancipated woman did not define herself by her status vis-à-vis her husband but by her work and activity outside the home. Educated revolutionary women despised housework and tended to consider the upbringing of children as a community rather than family responsibility. For a woman to concern herself primarily with home and family was “bourgeois.”

Although housewives had the vote, they often seemed to be treated as second-class citizens. “Sometimes I thought that we housewives were not even considered human,” one woman complained. Another wrote:

In all my documents it says: housewife. It has been ten years since I graduated from high school and got married, and here I am still putting it down as my meaningful “occupation.” During the elections to the soviets I, a healthy young woman, was sitting together with the old people and retired invalids. I suppose that’s fair. I am “unorganized population.” [62]

In addition to resenting the inferior classification as “housewife,” the wives of high-powered industrial managers were often bored, especially when their husbands were posted at new plants in the middle of nowhere with no amenities. In a little volume of personal stories put out by some of the wives (mainly from southern steel plants), they wrote with feeling of the emptiness of life before the wives’ movement, when the only events were visiting the hairdresser and going to parties with the same guests and nothing to talk about. Time hung heavy on the wives’ hands, and they often quarreled with their husbands because of the latters’ involvement in their work. Wives from a prerevolutionary intelligentsia background—as many of the engineers’ wives still were—suffered particularly from the loneliness and lack of culture around them, all the more if their husbands developed close relationships with the Communists with whom they worked. One of them recalled her chagrin at finding that, while her husband had a common language with the Communist managers, she had none:

The more time [my husband] spent at the factory, the more he participated in construction, the larger was the distance between us. He made new acquaintances. They were not just engineers—industrial administrators and party workers began to frequent our house. . . . Ever since childhood, I had been taught to entertain guests. . . . I remember the time when I was an expert at this art. But it turned out that it was not enough to be able to make conversation; one had to know what to talk about. . . . Once, as I was trying to carry on a conversation [with a Communist], I looked at my husband and stopped short. His eyes were full of anxiety and terrible pity. [63]

For wives like this one, seeking an occupation and a way of connecting with the new Soviet society, the emergence of the wives’ volunteer movement was a godsend. The movement, known by the name of its journal, Obshchestvennitsa, which means woman activist, originated in heavy industry under the patronage of Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Minister of Heavy Industry, and went national in May 1936, when a “conference of wives of managers and engineers in heavy industry” was held in the Kremlin. Stalin, Ordzhonikidze, Voroshilov, and other leaders attended the conference and graciously accepted gifts and effusive tributes from the delegates. Wives of army officers and railroad managers were soon organizing in a similar manner. [64]

One of the problems of organizing housewives in the past had always been the lack of a good basic unit of association on which to build. “Street committees,” mobilizing women on the basis of residence, had not been a success. The great discovery of the wives’ movement was that wives, like everyone else in Soviet society, could be organized through the workplace—in this case, the husband’s workplace. Not only the husband’s workplace but also his work status was crucial to the movement’s internal structure: in any local branch of the movement in industry, it was usually the enterprise director’s wife who took the lead.

It was the wives’ task to make society in general and their husband’s workplace in particular more “cultured.” According to one account, the whole movement started when Ordzhonikidze was touring the Urals and noticed a square that the wife of a local industrial manager, Klavdia Surovtseva, had planted with flowers and bushes. Wives were encouraged to furnish workers’ dormitories and barracks, organize kindergartens, nurseries, and camps and sanatoria for children, set up literacy schools, libraries, and public baths, supervise factory cafeterias, plant trees, and in general do their best to improve the quality of life at their husbands’ plants. Their work was generally unpaid, and the (generally unstated) premise on the financing of their projects was that it would be done by a domestic version of blat, that is, getting the director-husbands of the wives to release funds from the enterprise budget. [65]

The wives also did their best to improve their own quality of life, which at distant provincial construction sites, railroad depots, and military bases was often extremely dismal. In Magnitogorsk, the local wives (headed by Maria Zaveniagin, the director’s wife) set up a “cultured” cafe in the local theater and acted as patronesses of the arts. At the “Red Profintern” plant, wives set up a fashion atelier. At Krivorog, wives set up a dressmaking shop where a worker could have a dress made for 7 or 8 rubles, and then added a more fashionable atelier for elite women where a dress might cost from 40 to 100 rubles. [66]

A good deal of what the wives did was reminiscent of the charitable activities of upper-class women under the old regime. Some of them, indeed, had been involved in philanthropy before the revolution. Of course the analogy was firmly denied by spokeswomen for the movement, even though the Old Bolshevik Nadezhda Krupskaia (Lenin’s widow) came close to making it explicit at the founding conference. “We do not have charity. We have social activism,” asserted the movement’s journal defensively. [67]

But the high-society, “charity ball” aspect of philanthropy in “bourgeois” society was certainly not absent from the Soviet version. The Magnitogorsk wives organized masked balls that were by invitation only, with “undesirable elements” excluded. Moreover, both local and national branches of the movement cultivated close relations with local political leaders, whom they often addressed in gushing and adulatory tones. The choice of tasteful gifts for political patrons like Lazar Kaganovich, Minister for Transport, was a major concern of the wives, as Galina Shtange’s diary attests. In Leningrad, seamstresses at the “Rabotnitsa” factory complained to the local party committee that the local managers’ wives were only interested in getting themselves honors and publicity and had wasted the workers’ time and the state’s money by having workers embroider a picture of comrade Stalin at a cavalry parade as a gift to him. All the workers were indignant at being exploited for the glory of the “wives,” the letter claimed. [68]

As this letter implies, the wives’ movement had a distinct class base: it was explicitly a form of organization for elite wives, not ordinary working women. The wives’ upper-class manners could grate on Communist managers and workers. Even within the movement, it was sometimes admitted that the wives’ relationship with their husband’s workforce left something to be desired, since they “still behave in an arrogant manner . . . and speak in the tone of a boss.” The addition of wives of Stakhanovite workers to the roster of volunteers did not significantly change either the movement’s actual upper-class character or popular recognition of it. [69]

Nevertheless, the wives’ movement really did provide an important Soviet socialization experience for many of its members. The wife, quoted above, whose husband had felt “anxiety and terrible pity” for her earlier efforts to entertain Communist visitors now had something to talk about with them and found new common interests with her husband. She and the other volunteers were also inducted into specifically Soviet rituals that their lack of contact with a Soviet workplace had previously denied them. The diary of Galina Shtange, wife of a railroad engineer, chronicles her growing acquaintance with the world of meetings, conferences, publicity photos, and even business trips to other cities, and makes it clear that these rituals were a source of particular enjoyment, satisfaction, and self-respect. Meetings and other formal gatherings of the wives (like those of Komsomols, Young Pioneers, and other voluntary associations) were conducted strictly according to Soviet conventions for “real” business meetings. As Galina Shtange reported her official visit as representative of the wives’ movement:

The room . . . had been decorated with flowers and slogans. In the middle of the room stood a large table, covered with a red tablecloth. The whole Wives’ Council, plus stenographers, was already there waiting for us. . . . They seated me at the center of the table, and we had our picture taken. . . . Then the activists from each brigade reported on their work. [70]

One of the major themes of the wives’ movement was the obligation of wives to make a comfortable and well-ordered home life for their husbands. “Becoming volunteers, these women did not cease to be wives and mothers,” said one delegate at a conference of Red Army wives, and this motif was repeatedly emphasized, particularly in the early phases of the movement. The ideal was represented by someone like the wife of Professor Iakunin, a member of the Moscow regional council of scientists’ wives, who did not let her new volunteer duties interfere with her basic vocation as a support to her husband:

Neither the important and serious business, nor the bulging briefcase, nor the endless telephone calls, give Professor Iakunin any reason to complain about lack of attention to the home from his wife. In her room there is exemplary order and warm, feminine comfort. As before she and she alone manages all the housework; as before, arriving home, her husband meets a welcoming, attentive wife. [71]

But it was not so easy to combine these things in real life. “N. V.”—wife of an engineer in Magnitogorsk—started a lively discussion when she wrote in to Obshchestvennitsa to ask how she could reconcile her husband’s strong desire that she remain at home, look after their child, and, above all, look after him as his “secretary, adviser, nanny, and confidante,” and her own feeling that she was wasting her education and being left out of all the exciting things happening in the country. [72]

Readers reacted in various ways. Some were sharply critical of the husband. One critic was reminded of “the country nobleman who will not go to sleep unless a serf scratches his heels” and recommended that N. V. liberate herself as soon as possible from a suffocating, exploitative marriage. Another thought the husband would cope better than N. V. feared if she became active outside the home, citing the example of her own husband, who had learned to shop, cook, and clean now that she worked, without cost to their relationship (“If there has been a change, it has been for the better.We have become closer.We have more in common.”) If N. V. did decide to liberate herself, readers were divided as to whether she should go out to work or just become an activist in the wives’ movement. [73]

The tentative and sometimes disapproving approach of the wives’ movement to women’s paid employment was one of its most curious features. After all, this was a decade in which millions of women were entering the workforce and being encouraged to do so. The regime was doing its best to increase the number of women in higher education and the professions and, with less success, to promote women to administrative positions. Women in the Soviet Union were brought up to think they should have careers: as a Harvard Project respondent reported, “at meetings and lectures they constantly told us that women must be fully equal with men, that women can be flyers and naval engineers and anything that men can be.” [74]

In “backward” groups, like peasants and Central Asians, the regime was still urging women to stand up for their rights against oppressive husbands and fathers; “wifely duty” was not a theme commonly discussed in Soviet propaganda (outside the wives’ movement) in this context. Indeed, even Obshchestvennitsa recognized that in the lower classes men were likely to retain attitudes so unenlightened that the issue of women’s emancipation still had priority, reporting with respectful sympathy on the hard lives of workingclass women who had had to contend with abusive, bullying husbands. All this underlines the elite nature of the wives’ movement and suggests that the movement’s characteristic themes and attitudes came at least as much from the elite wives themselves as from the regime.

By 1939, in any case, the earlier homemaking emphasis of the wives’ movement was giving way to a focus on women learning to do men’s work and entering the workforce. This was both an internal development within the movement and a response to the imminence of war and the likelihood that men would soon be conscripted. The journal Obshchestvennitsa gave readers many accounts of daring, path-breaking women, high achievers in formerly “male” professions and activities, like the ship’s captain Anna Shchetinina, Polina Osipenko’s team of female aviators, and the dauntless female automobile drivers who participated in the long-distance race Moscow-Aral Sea-Little Kara-Kum-Moscow. Toughening the body on skis, bicycles, and long hikes was particularly favored in the military branch of the wives’ movement. But the women volunteers of the Kuznetsk metallurgical plant were not far behind: under the theme “Ready for anti-chemical [warfare] defence,” eleven women activists set off for a hike wearing gasmasks. [75]

Women learned to shoot, drive a truck, and fly planes in the wives’ movement. They studied in courses to become “chauffeurs, communications operators, stenographers, accountants.” Early on, this was usually represented as a means of making the wives fit partners for their husbands, but it soon became an end in itself, closely linked with preparation for war. Even in 1936, sixty engineers’ wives in Gorky learnt to drive “so that at a crucial moment for the native land they can militantly take the wheel.” In 1937, Kaganovich told the transport wives (in Galina Shtange’s diary rendition) “how we need to be aware of the international situation and be ready at any moment to take the places of our husbands, brothers and sons if they go off to war.” By 1939, getting ready to take the men’s places in time of war had become one of the central motifs of the volunteer movement, with exhortations directed to mothers as well as wives of prospective soldiers. [76]

By 1938, Obshchestvennitsa was writing almost as if a stint as a volunteer was a preparatory stage for wives bound for further education or promotion to administrative work—a kind of elite wives’ equivalent of the “workers’ faculties” that used to prepare worker promotees for university entrance. Wives’ councils sought support for various kinds of training courses that would give the women specialized skills and thus enable them to move into paid employment. Under the heading “A battle plan for women volunteers,” Obshchestvennitsa editorially deplored both the reluctance of industrial managers to appoint women volunteers to responsible administrative positions and the fact that the leaders of the movement themselves had “limited the range of activities and [had] not prepared the activists for permanent positions in the economy. . . . It is important to understand that a woman who has spent, say, two years as a volunteer, receives training roughly equivalent to one year of political education, and that the experience of volunteer work will be of great help when she gets a permanent position.” [77]

When promotion of women occurred in real life, there were likely to be conflicts with husbands and the concept of wifely duty fostered by Obshchestvennitsa in its early phase. In the case of Klavdia Surovtseva, the original volunteer gardener noticed by Ordzhonikidze back in 1934–35, this meant getting rid of the husband. Their married life had suffered from her public success with the gardening project (“like many people, he lost his perspective from close up”), and he had been unhappy when she went to Moscow for the 1936 meeting in the Kremlin. At that meeting, Klavdia had taken the pledge to study (following a Stakhanovite rather than volunteer model: in 1936, nobody was stressing study for activist wives), promising “that she would study, would become an engineer. That would be her expression of gratitude to the country for the high award—the order of the Labor Red Banner.” In a “Where are they now?” article in 1939, Obschestvennitsa revealed that Klavdia was indeed studying in Moscow at the Stalin Industrial Academy. Moreover, she had a new husband, also studying, with whom her relations were on a much more equal basis than her old one: “My husband has taught me how to organize my studies. He is a good friend and a sensitive comrade. We are at the same level. . . .” Showing her college transcript to the reporter, Klavdia said happily, “This is my passport to a new life.” [78]

There was a gulf between the elite women of the wives’ movement and ordinary working women, or even the wives of ordinary workers, and it was not only social but also ideological. For elite wives, duty to husband and family and the task of homemaking were seen as paramount, particularly in the early stage of the movement. Yet these ideals could hardly be applied without qualification to lower-class women who (it was acknowledged) still had to defend themselves against abuse and oppression by unenlightened husbands and fathers. Moreover, such ideals were at least potentially in conflict with an economic goal dear to the regime’s heart—that of expanding the labor force by drawing in large numbers of urban women who had not previously worked for wages.

Of course the regime’s message about the importance of family responsibilities was not limited to or even mainly directed toward elite wives. As the law against abortion made clear, it was the responsibility of women of all social classes to bear children, whether or not they worked or had adequate housing for their families; and it was the responsibility of their husbands to support them in this endeavor. As far as lower-class women were concerned, however, it was the duty to family, not the duty to husbands, that was usually emphasized. Lower-class husbands were too often delinquent in their own performance of family duties to be a suitable object for too much wifely duty—with the interesting exception of Stakhanovite workers who evidently deserved the same level of support as elite husbands. [79]

At all levels of the society, though most notably at its lower levels, women took the brunt of the manifold problems of everyday life in the Soviet Union— feeding and clothing the family, furnishing and organizing its dwelling space, achieving a modus vivendi with neighbors in communal apartments, and so on. In some cases, the woman who performed these tasks was not the wife and mother of the family, especially if she was educated and worked outside the home, but the grandmother or domestic servant; it should be noted that for all Obshchestvennitsa‘s efforts, emancipated Soviet women of the younger generation did not take at all kindly to housework. Still, women were increasingly accepting the role of the family’s specialists on consumption and taste as well as the upbringing of children. This meant knowing how to get goods, both legally and by blat, and how to judge their quality.

A voice noticeably muted, if not silent, in the 1930s was that of educated women with a profession, a job, and an ideology of women’s emancipation who did not define themselves as wives. Such women had been visible and vocal in the 1920s, often in connection with the Communist Party’s Women’s Department (closed down in 1930); Stalin’s young wife, Nadezhda Allilueva, was one of them until her suicide at the end of 1932. They were a minority, to be sure—only about 10 percent of senior administrative jobs were held by women, who constituted about 15 percent of party membership—but then they had also been a minority in the 1920s. Their much lower profile in the 1930s is often attributed to a withdrawal of regime support for the women’s cause; yet, if the cause is defined in terms of support for women’s entry into higher education, the professions, and responsible administrative jobs, support was not withdrawn, at least at the rhetorical level, though it obviously was not one of the regime’s top priorities. It seems at least as likely that the muting of this group had practical causes, notably the great difficulties and hardships of everyday life that fell with particular force on working women with dependents. After marriage, or more precisely after the birth of a child, women who worked usually had no time to be activists, regardless of ideology. For this reason, the percentage of Komsomol members who were women (34 percent in 1935) was more than double that of Communists. [80]