## 1. Marxism, Work, and Human Nature



Marxism as a philosophy of human nature stresses the centrality of
work in the creation of human nature itself and human
self-understanding. Both the changing historical relations between
human work and nature, and the relations of humans to each other in
the production and distribution of goods to meet material needs
construct human nature differently in different historical periods:
nomadic humans are different than agrarian or industrial
humans. Marxism as a philosophy of history and social change
highlights the social relations of work in different economic modes of
production in its analysis of social inequalities and exploitation,
including relations of domination such as racism and sexism. (Marx
1844, 1950, 1906-9; Marx and Engels 1848, 1850; Engels
1942). Within capitalism, the system they most analyzed, the logic of
profit drives the bourgeois class into developing the productive
forces of land, labor and capital by expanding markets, turning land
into a commodity and forcing the working classes from feudal and
independent agrarian production into wage labor. Marx and Engels argue
that turning all labor into a commodity to be bought and sold not only
alienates workers by taking the power of production away from them, it
also collectivizes workers into factories and mass assembly
lines. This provides the opportunity for workers to unite against the
capitalists and to demand the collectivization of property, i.e.,
socialism, or communism.



According to Engels's famous analysis of women's situation
in the history of different economic modes production in *The
Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State* (1942),
women are originally equal to, if not more powerful than, men in
communal forms of production with matrilineal family organizations.
Women lose power when private property comes into existence as a mode
of production. Men's control of private property, and the
ability thereby to generate a surplus, changes the family form to a
patriarchal one where women, and often slaves,
 [1]
 become the property of the father and husband.



The rise of capitalism, in separating the family household from
commodity production, further solidifies this control of men over
women in the family when the latter become economic dependents of the
former in the male breadwinner-female housewife nuclear family form.
Importantly, capitalism also creates the possibility of women's
liberation from family-based patriarchy by creating possibilities for
women to work in wage labor and become economically independent of
husbands and fathers. Engels stresses, however, that because of the
problem of unpaid housework, a private task allocated to women in the
sexual division of labor of capitalism, full women's liberation
can only be achieved with the development of socialism and the
socialization of housework and childrearing in social services
provided by the state. For this reason, most contemporary Marxists
have argued that women's liberation requires feminists to join
the working class struggle against capitalism (Cliff 1984).


## 2. Marxist-Feminist Analyses



Many Marxist-feminists thinkers, prominent among them sociologists and
anthropologists, have done cross-cultural and historical studies of
earlier forms of kinship and economy and the role of the sexual or
gender division of labor in supporting or undermining women's
social power (cf. Reed 1973, Leacock 1972, Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974).
They have also attempted to assess the world economic development of
capitalism as a contradictory force for the liberation of women
(Federici 2004; Mies 1986; Saffioti 1978) and to argue that universal
women's liberation requires attention to the worse off: poor
women workers in poor post-colonial countries (Sen & Grown 1987).
Other feminist anthropologists have argued that other variables in
addition to women's role in production are key to understanding
women's social status and power (Sanday 1981; Leghorn and Parker
1981). Yet other feminist economic historians have done historical
studies of the ways that race, class and ethnicity have situated women
differently in relation to production, for example in the history of
the United States (Davis 1983; Amott and Matthaei 1991). Finally some
Marxist-feminists have argued that women's work in biological
and social reproduction is a necessary element of all modes of
production and one often ignored by Marxist economists (Benston 1969;
Hennessy 2003; Vogel 1995).


## 3. First Wave Feminist Analyses of Women and Work



Those feminist analyses which have highlighted the role of
women's work in the social construction of gender and the
perpetuation of male dominance have been termed liberal, radical,
Marxist, and socialist feminism by such influential categorizers as
Jaggar and Rothenberg [Struhl] (1978), Tong (2000), Barrett (1980),
Jaggar (1983) and Walby
 (1990)[2].
 However, the pigeonhole categories of liberal, radical, Marxist, or
socialist categories apply poorly to both to first wave women's
movement feminist predecessors and contemporary deconstructionist,
post-structuralist and post-colonialist perspectives.



A number of first wave feminists write about work and class as key
issues for women's liberation, such as socialist-feminist
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, heavily influenced by Darwinism and
19th century utopian modernism (Gilman 1898, 1910, 1979),
anarchist Emma Goldman (1969), and existentialist, radical feminist
and Marxist of sorts Simone de Beauvoir (1952). This is because the
debates that arose around the place of the women's movement in
class politics were different in the early and mid-twentieth century
than they were in the 1960s when many feminist theorists were trying
to define themselves independently of the left anti-Vietnam war and
civil rights movements of the time.



The debate about the economic and social function of housework and its
relation to women's oppression is an old one that has been a
feature of both the first and second wave women's movements in
the US, Britain and Europe. In both eras, the underlying issue is how
to handle the public/private split of capitalist societies in which
women's reproductive functions have either limited their work to
the home or created a "second shift" problem of unpaid
housework and childcare as well as waged work. In the first wave,
located as it was in the Victorian period where the dominant ideology
for middle and upper class women was purity, piety and domesticity
(also called the "cult of true womanhood"), the debate
centered on whether to keep housework in the private sphere yet make
it more scientific and efficient (Beecher 1841; Richards 1915 ), or
whether to "socialize" it by bringing it into the public
sphere, as socialist Charlotte Perkins Gilman advocated (1898).



In the US, the "public housekeeping" aspect of the
Progressive movement of the 1890s through early 1900s advocated that
women bring the positive values associated with motherhood into the
public sphere -- by obtaining the vote, cleaning out corruption
in politics, creating settlement houses to educate and support
immigrants, and forming the women's peace movement, etc. (cf.
Jane Addams 1914). Disagreements about whether to downplay or valorize
the distinctive function and skills in motherhood as work for which
women are naturally superior, or to see motherhood as restricting
women's chances for economic independence and equality with men
in the public sphere, were also evident in debates between Ellen Keys
(1909, 1914) and Gilman. Keys represented the difference side, that
women are superior humans because of mothering; while Gilman and
Goldman took the equality side of the debate, that is, that, women are
restricted, and made socially unequal to men, by unpaid housework and
 mothering[3].


## 4. Second Wave Feminist Analyses of Housework



In the second wave movement, theorists can be grouped by their theory
of how housework oppresses women. Typically, liberal feminists
critique housework because it is unpaid. This makes women dependent on
men and devalued, since their work is outside the meaningful sphere of
public economic production (Friedan 1963). Marxist feminist theorists
see this as part of the problem, but some go further to maintain that
housework is part of a household feudal mode of production of goods
for use that persists under capitalism and gives men feudal powers
over women's work (Benston 1969, Fox 1980). Other Marxist
feminists argue that women's housework is part of the social
reproduction of capitalism (Federici 1975, 2004; Malos 1975; Vogel
1995). That the necessary work of reproducing the working class is
unpaid allows more profits to capitalists. It is the sexual division
of labor in productive and reproductive work that makes woman unequal
to men and allows capitalists to exploit women's unpaid labor.
Some even make this analysis the basis for a demand for wages for
housework (Dalla Costa 1974; Federici 1975). More recently, Federici
has done an analysis of the transition to capitalism in Europe. She
argues that it was the emerging capitalist class need to control
working class reproduction, to eliminate working class women's
control over biological reproduction, and to assure their unpaid
reproductive work in the home by restricting abortions, that fueled
the campaign against witches during this period (Federici 2004).



One of the philosophical problems raised by the housework debate is
how to draw the line between work and play or leisure activity when
the activity is not paid: is a mother playing with her baby working or
engaged in play? If the former, then her hours in such activity may be
compared with those of her husband or partner to see if there is an
exploitation relation present, for example, if his total hours of
productive and reproductive work for the family are less than hers
(cf. Delphy 1984). But to the extent that childrearing counts as
leisure activity, as play, as activity held to be intrinsically
valuable (Ferguson 2004), no exploitation is involved. Perhaps
childrearing and other caring activity is both work and play, but only
that portion which is necessary for the psychological growth of the
child and the worker(s) counts as work. If so, who determines when
that line is crossed? Since non-market activity does not have a clear
criterion to distinguish work from non-work, nor necessary from
non-necessary social labor, an arbitrary element seems to creep in
that makes standards of fairness difficult to apply to gendered
household bargains between men and women dividing up waged and
non-waged work. (Barrett 1980).



One solution to this problem is simply to take all household activity
that could also be done by waged labor (nannies, domestic servants,
gardeners, chauffeurs, etc.) as work and to figure its comparable
worth by the waged labor necessary to replace it (Folbre 1982, 1983).
Another is to reject altogether the attempts to base women's
oppression on social relations of work, on the grounds that such
theories are overly generalizing and ignore the discrete meanings that
kinship activities have for women in different contexts (Nicholson
1991; Fraser and Nicholson 1991; Marchand 1995). Or, one can argue
that although the line between work and leisure changes historically,
those doing the activity should have the decisive say as to whether
their activity counts as work, i.e., labor necessary to promote human
welfare. The existence of second wave women's movements
critiques of the "second shift" of unpaid household
activity indicates that a growing number of women see most of it as
work, not play (cf. Hochschild 1989). Finally, one can argue that since
the human care involved in taking care of children and elders creates
a public good, it should clearly be characterized as work, and those
who are caretakers, primarily women, should be fairly compensated for
it by society or the state (Ferguson and Folbre 2000: Folbre 2000,
Ferguson 2004).


## 5. The Public/Private Split and Its Implications



Liberal, Marxist and radical feminists have all characterized women as
doubly alienated in capitalism because of the public/private split
that relegates their work as mothers and houseworkers to the home, and
psychologically denies them full personhood, citizenship and human
rights (Foreman 1974, Okin 1989, Pateman 1988, Goldman 1969). Noting
that women workers on average only have about 70% of the average
salary of men in the contemporary U.S., feminists have claimed this is
because women's work, tied stereotypically to housework and
hence thought unskilled is undervalued, whether it is cleaning or rote
service work, or nurturing work thought to be connected to natural
maternal motivations and aptitudes. Hence some feminists have
organized in campaigns for "comparable worth" to raise
women's wages to the same as men's wages involving
comparable skills (Brenner 2000; cf. also articles in Hansen and
Philipson eds. 1990).



Many radical feminists maintain that women's work is part of a
separate patriarchal mode of reproduction that underlies all economic
systems of production and in which men exploit women's
reproductive labor (Delphy 1984; O'Brien 1981; Leghorn and
Parker 1981; Rich 1980; Mies 1986). Smith (1974), O'Brien
(1981), Hartsock (1983 a,b), Haraway (1985) and Harding (1986)
pioneered in combining this radical feminist assumption with a
perspectival Marxist theory of knowledge to argue that one's
relation to the work of production and reproduction gave each gender
and each social class a different way of knowing the social totality.
Women's work, they argued, ties them to nature and human needs
in a different way than men's work does, which creates the
possibility of a less alienated and more comprehensive understanding
of the workings of the social totality. Patricia Hill Collins argues
further that the racial division of labor, institutional racism and
different family structures put African American women in yet a
different epistemic relation to society than white and other women
(2000). Writing in a post-modernist re-articulation of this feminist
standpoint theory, Donna Haraway argues that the breakdown of the
nature/culture distinction because of scientific technology and its
alteration of the human body makes us into "cyborgs".
Hence our perspectives are so intersectional that they cannot be
unified simply by a common relation to work. What is required for a
feminist politics is not a situated identity politics, whether of
gender and/or race and/or class, but an affinity politics based on
alliances and coalitions that combine epistemic perspectives (Haraway
1985).



Like these radical feminists, some socialist-feminists have tried to
develop a "dual systems" theory (cf. Young 1981). This
involves theorizing a separate system of work relations that organizes
and directs human sexuality, nurturance, affection and biological
reproduction. Rather than seeing this as an unchanging universal base
for patriarchy, however, they have argued that this system, thought of
as the "sex/gender system" (Rubin 1975; Hartmann 1978,
1981a,b), or as "sex/affective production" (Ferguson 1989,
1991; Ferguson and Folbre 1981) has different historical modes, just
as Marx argued that economies do. Rubin argues that sex/gender systems
have been based in different kinship arrangements, most of which have
supported the exchange of women by men in marriage, and hence have
supported male domination and compulsory heterosexuality. She is
hopeful that since capitalism shifted the organization of the economy
from kinship to commodity production, the power of fathers and
husbands over daughters and wives, and the ability to enforce
heterosexuality, will continue to decline, and women's
increasing ability to be economically independent will lead to
women's liberation and equality with men.



With a different historical twist, Hartmann argues that a historical
bargain was cemented between capitalist and working class male
patriarchs to shore up patriarchal privileges that were being weakened
by the entrance of women into wage labor in the 19th
century by the creation of the "family wage" to allow men
sufficient wages to support a non-wage-earning wife and children at
home (1981a). While Ferguson and Folbre (1981) agree that there is no
inevitable fit between capitalism and patriarchy, they argue that
there are conflicts, and that the family wage bargain has broken down
at present. Indeed, both Ferguson and Smart (1984) argue that welfare
state capitalism and the persistent sexual division of wage labor in
which work coded as women's is paid less than men's with
less job security are ways that a "public patriarchy" has
replaced different systems of family patriarchy that were operating in
early and pre-capitalist societies. Walby (1990) has a similar
analysis, but to her the connection between forms of capitalism and
forms of patriarchy is more functional and less accidental than it
appears to Ferguson and Smart.



Walby argues that there are two different basic forms of patriarchy
which emerge in response to the tensions between capitalist economies
and patriarchal household economies: private and public patriarchy.
Private patriarchy as a form is marked by excluding women from
economic and political power while public patriarchy works by
segregating women. There is a semi-automatic re-adjustment of the dual
systems when the older private father patriarchy based on the
patriarchal family is broken down due to the pressures of early
industrial capitalism. The family wage and women's second class
citizenship that marked that initial re-adjustment are then
functionally replaced by a public form of patriarchy, the patriarchal
welfare state, where women enter the wage labor force permanently but
in segregated less well paid jobs. But Ferguson (1989,1991), Smart
(1984) and Folbre (1994) suggest that although the patriarchal control
of fathers and husbands over wife and children as economic assets has
been diminished in advanced capitalism, there is always a dialectical
and contradictory tension between patriarchy and capitalism in which
both advances and retreats for women's equality as citizens and
in work relations are constantly occurring in the new form of public
patriarchy. Thus, the new "marriage" of patriarchal
capitalism operates to relegate women to unpaid or lesser paid caring
labor, whether in the household or in wage labor, thus keeping women
by and large unequal to men. This is especially notable in the rise of
poor single-mother-headed families. However, as it forces more and
more women into wage labor, women are given opportunities for some
independence from men and the possibility to challenge male dominance
and sex segregation in all spheres of social life. Examples are the
rise of the first and second wave women's movements and
consequent gains in civil rights for women.



The work of feminist sociologist Dorothy Smith (1989) has been a
notable intervention into the public-private split by bringing into
view the institutions and power regimes that regulate the everyday
world, their gender subtext, and basis in a gendered division of
labor. Legal feminist critics expand on the biopolitics of the
patriarchal welfare state, which psychiatrizes as it threatens mothers
with the loss of child custody. This represents a new eugenics twist
on the enduring mistrust of working-class mothers and casting those
who are imprisoned as undeserving parent (Guggenheim 2007; Law 2012).
African American mothers bear the brunt of punitive and racist family
and criminal law (Roberts 2022; Thompson 2010; Solinger *et
al*. 2010).


## 6. Psychological Theories of Women and Work



The socialist-feminist idea that there are two interlocking systems
that structure gender and the economy, and thus are jointly
responsible for male domination, has been developed in a psychological
direction by the psychoanalytic school of feminist theorists.
Particularly relevant to the question of women and work are the
theories of Mitchell (1972, 1974), Kuhn and Wolpe (1978), Chodorow
(1978, 1979, 1982) and Ruddick (1989). Mothering, or, taking care of
babies and small children, as a type of work done overwhelmingly by
women, socializes women and men to have different identities,
personalities and skills. In her first work (1972), Mitchell argues
that women's different relations to productive work,
reproduction, socialization of children and sexuality in patriarchy
give her lesser economic and psychological power in relation to men.
In a Freudian vein, Mitchell later argues (1974) that women learn that
they are not full symbolic subjects because compulsory heterosexuality
and the incest taboo bar them from meeting either the desire of their
mother or any other woman. Chodorow, also reading Freud from a
feminist perspective, suggests that women's predominance in
mothering work is the basis for the learned gender distinction between
women and men. The sexual division of infant care gives boys, who must
learn their masculine identity by separating from their mother and the
feminine, a motive for deprecating, as well as dominating, women.
Ruddick from a more Aristotelian perspective suggests that it is the
skills and virtues required in the practice of mothering work which
not only socially construct feminine gender differently from
men's, but could ground an alternative vision for peace and
resolving human conflicts, if a peace movement were led by women.



Ferguson argues that the "sex/affective" work of mothering
and wifely nurturing is exploitative of women: women give more
nurturance and satisfaction (including sexual satisfaction) to men and
children than they receive, and do much more of the work of providing
these important human goods (cf. also Bartky 1990). The gendered
division of labor has both economic and psychological consequences,
since women's caring labor creates women less capable of or
motivated to separate from others, and hence less likely to protest
such gender exploitation (Ferguson 1989, 1991). Folbre argues by
contrast that it is only because women's bargaining power is
less than men's because of the power relations involved in the
gender division of labor and property that women acquiesce to such
inequalities (Folbre 1982). Ferguson argues that gendered exploitation
in a system of meeting human needs suggests that women can be seen as
a "sex class" (or gender class) which cuts across economic
class lines (1979, 1989, 1991). This line of thought is also developed
by Christine Delphy (1984), Monique Wittig (1980) and Luce Irigaray
(1975).



On the other side of the debate, Brenner (2000) argues that women are
not uniformly exploited by men across economic class lines: indeed,
for working class women their unpaid work as housewives serves the
working class as a whole, because the whole class benefits when its
daily and future reproduction needs are met by women's nurturing
and childcare work. They argue further that middle and upper class
women's economic privileges will inevitably lead them to betray
working class women in any cross-class alliance that is not explicitly
anti-capitalist. Hochschild (2000) and hooks (2000) point out that
career women tend to pay working class women to do the second shift
work in the home so they can avoid that extra work, and they have an
interest in keeping such wages, e.g., for house cleaning and nannies,
as low as possible to keep the surplus for themselves. Kollias (1981)
argues further that working class women are in a stronger political
position to work effectively for women's liberation than middle
class women, while McKenny (1981) argues that professional women have
to overcome myths of professionalism that keep them feeling superior
to working class women and hence unable to learn from or work with
them for social change.


## 7. Ethical Theories of Women's Caring Work



Several authors have explored the ethical implications of the sexual
division of labor in which it is primarily women who do caring labor.
Nancy Fraser (1997) and Susan Moller Okin (1989) formulate ethical
arguments to maintain that a just model of society would have to
re-structure work relations so that the unpaid and underpaid caring
labor now done primarily by women would be given a status equivalent
to (other) wage labor by various means. In her council socialist
vision, Ferguson (1989, 1991) argues that an ideal society would
require both women and men to do the hitherto private unpaid work of
caring or "sex/affective labor." For example, such work
would be shared by men, either in the family and/or provided by the
state where appropriate (as for elders and children's
childcare), and compensated fairly by family allowances (for those,
women or men, doing the major share of housework), and by higher pay
for caring wage work (such as daycare workers, nurses, and
teachers).



Carol Gilligan (1982) claims that women and girls tend to use a
different form of ethical reasoning -- she terms this the
"ethics of care" -- than men and boys who use an
ethics of justice. Some have argued that this different ethical
approach is due to women's caring sensibilities that have been
developed by the sexual division of labor (Ruddick 1989).
Interestingly, the debate between feminist theorists of justice, e.g.,
Fraser and Okin, and ethics of care feminists such as Gilligan and
Ruddick, is less about substance than a meta-ethical dispute as to
whether ethics should concern principles or judgments in particular
cases. All of these theorists seem to have ideal visions of society
which dovetail: all would support the elimination of the sexual
division of labor so that both men and women could become equally
sensitized to particular others through caring work.



Asha Bhandary (2020) proposes an integrative approach, enlargening the
Rawlsian distributive justice theory with liberal dependency care.
Taking into account Eva Feder Kittay's (2019, 1998) emphasis on
human dependency, Bhandary argues that Rawls's framework must be
expanded to include caring considerations as part of the basic
structure of society. To address feminist critiques, she adds that
boys must be taught the value of care work and voluntary participation
in it. Bhandary develops an arrow of care map to account for
distributive inequalities (race, class, etc.) within countries and
cross-culturally. In *Meaningful Work*, Andrea Veltman (2016)
also provides a liberal normative account of care, endorsing Paul
Gomberg's (2007) concept of contributive justice, where each
community and family member pulls together voluntarily using a system
of job rotation, rather than relying on state provisions of goods.



By contrast, the authors of the *Care Manifesto* (Chatzidakis
*et al*., 2020) build on political theorists who call for a
centering of care and a decentering of economics (Tronto 2013; 1993)
and a universal care giver model (Fraser, 2013) in democratic
societies. Caring work is not only important at the level of
interpersonal care but also at the macroscopic level of "theorising
caring infrastructures and the nature of an overarching politics of
care" grounded in "feminist, queer, anti-racist and eco-socialist
perspective" (Chatzidakis *et al*., p. 22). Such perspective
also critiques the exploitative nature of transnational care chains
where Global North upper class women exploit the labor of women and
girls from the Global South (Anderson, 2000). Reproductive labor has
also become transactional and exploitative in another sense: surrogacy
arrangements in the global biomarkets, where Indian women carry babies
and are contractually required to give up the newborn on terms dictated
by Global North couples, which may include selective abortion during
pregnancy (Saravanah, 2018). By centering care in the commons, these
theorists call attention to a politics of interdependence.


## 8. Modernist vs. Postmodernist Feminist Theory



Useful anthologies of the first stage of second wave socialist
feminist writings which include discussions of women, class and work
from psychological as well as sociological and economic perspectives
are Eisenstein (1979), Hansen and Philipson (1990), Hennessy and
Ingraham (1997), and Holmstrom (2002). Jaggar (1983) wrote perhaps the
first philosophy text explaining the categories of liberal, radical,
Marxist and socialist-feminist thought and defending a
socialist-feminist theory of male domination based on the notion of
women's alienated labor. Others such as Jaggar and Rothenberg
(1978), Tuana and Tong (1995) and Herrmann and Stewart (1993) include
classic socialist feminist analyses in their collections, inviting
comparisons of the authors to others grouped under the categories of
liberal, radical, psychoanalytic, Marxist, postmodern, postcolonial
and multicultural feminisms.



Various post-modern critiques of these earlier feminist schools of
thought such as post-colonialism as well as deconstruction and
post-structuralism challenge the over-generalizations and economic
reductionism of many of those constructing feminist theories that fall
under the early categories of liberal, radical, Marxist or socialist
feminism (cf. Grewal and Kaplan 1992; Kaplan *et al*. 1999;
Nicholson 1991; Fraser and Nicholson 1991; hooks 1984, 2000;
Anzaldua and Moraga 1981; Sandoval 2000). Others argue that
part of the problem is the master narratives of liberalism or Marxism,
the first of which sees all domination relations due to traditional
hierarchies and undermined by capitalism, thus ignoring the
independent effectivity of racism (Joseph 1981); and the second of
which ties all domination relations to the structure of contemporary
capitalism and ignores the non-capitalist economics contexts in which
many women work, even within so-called capitalist economies, such as
housework and voluntary community work (Gibson-Graham 1996).



In spite of the "pomo" critiques, there are some powerful
thinkers within this tendency who have not completely rejected a more
general starting point of analysis based on women, class and work. For
example, Spivak (1988), Mohanty (1997), Carby (1997), and Hennessy
(1993, 2000) are creating and re-articulating forms of Marxist and
socialist-feminism less susceptible to charges of over-generalization
and reductionism, and more compatible with close contextual analysis
of the power relations of gender and class as they relate to work.
They can be grouped loosely with a tendency called materialist
feminism that incorporates some of the methods of deconstruction and
post-structuralism (Hennessy 1993; Landry and MacLean 1993).


## 9. Race, Class, and Intersectional Feminist Analyses



Many in the contemporary feminist theory debate are interested in
developing concrete "intersectional" or "integrative
feminist" analyses of particular issues which try to give equal
weight to gender, race, class and sexuality in a global context
without defining themselves by the categories, such as liberal,
radical or materialist, of the earlier feminist debate categories (cf.
work by Davis 1983; Brewer 1995; Crenshaw 1997; Stanlie and James
1997; Anzaldua 1999; hooks 1984, 2000). Nonetheless strong
emphasis on issues of race and ethnicity can be found in their work on
women, class and work. For example, Brewer shows that white and
African-American working class women are divided by race in the
workforce, and that even changes in the occupational structure
historically tend to maintain this racial division of labor. Hooks
argues that women of color and some radical feminists were more
sensitive to class and race issues than those, primarily white,
feminists whom she labels "reformist feminists" (hooks
2000).



Presupposed in the general theoretical debates concerning the
relations between gender, social and economic class, and work are
usually definitions of each of these categories that some thinkers
would argue are problematic. For example, Tokarczyk and Fay have an
excellent anthology on working class women in the academy (1993) in
which various contributors discuss the ambiguous positions in which
they find themselves by coming from poor family backgrounds and
becoming academics. One problem is whether they are still members of
the working class in so doing, and if not, whether they are betraying
their families of origin by a rise to middle class status. Another is,
whether they have the same status in the academy, as workers, thinkers
and women, as those men or women whose families of origin were middle
class or above. Rita Mae Brown wrote an early article on this, arguing
that education and academic status did not automatically change a
working class woman's identity, which is based not just on
one's relation to production, but one's behavior, basic
assumptions about life, and experiences in childhood (Brown 1974).
Joanna Kadi (1999) describes herself as cultural worker who tackles
elitism in the white academy, including in women's studies
courses. Tokarczyk and Fay acknowledge that the definition of
"class" is vague in the U.S. Rather than provide a
standard philosophical definition in terms of necessary and sufficient
conditions for membership in the working class, they provide a cluster
of characteristics and examples of jobs, such as physically demanding,
repetitive and dangerous jobs, jobs that lack autonomy and are
generally paid badly. Examples of working class jobs they give are
cleaning women, waitresses, lumberjacks, janitors and police officers.
They then define their term "working class women
academics" to include women whose parents had jobs such as these
and are in the first generation in their family to attend college
(Tokarczyk and Fay, 5). They challenge those that would argue that
family origin can be overcome by the present position one has in the
social division of labor: simply performing a professional job and
earning a salary does not eradicate the class identity formed in
one's "family class" (cf. Ferguson 1979).



More recent work in socio-legal studies also has begun to question the
limits of intersectional analysis (Grabham *et al*. 2009). It
acknowledges the importance of intersectionality, a term coined by law
professor Kimberle Crenshaw (1989) to shed light on epistemic
injustice done to Black women in anti-discrimination law. Yet, despite
its merit for overcoming the dual system's theoretical impasse,
Joanna Conaghan also critiques the essentializing tendencies of
intersectional analysis which succeeds mainly dealing with race and
gender oppression at an individual level, but it has little to offer
to remedy structural injustice. Furthermore, because such method is
identity-focused it will not get at the dimension of class which has
been traditionally thought in relational not locational terms (2008,
29-30).



To theorize the problematic relation of women to social class,
Ferguson (1979, 1989, 1991) argues that there are at least three
different variables -- an individual's work, family of
origin, and present household economic unit -- which relate an
individual to a specific socio-economic class. For example, a woman
may work on two levels: as a day care worker (working class), but also
as a member of a household where she does the housework and
mothering/child care, while her husband is a wealthy contractor (petit
bourgeois, small capitalist class). If in addition her family of
origin is professional middle class (because, say, her parents were
college educated academics), the woman may be seen and see herself as
either working class or middle class, depending on whether she and
others emphasize her present relations of wage work (her individual
economic class, which in this case is working class), her household
income (middle class) or her family of origin (middle class).



Sylvia Walby deals with this ambiguity of economic class as applying
to women as unpaid houseworkers by claiming against Delphy (1984) that
the relevant economic sex classes are those who are housewives vs.
those who are husbands benefiting from such work, not those of
*all* women and men, whether or not they do or receive
housework services (Walby 1990). Ferguson, however, sides with Delphy
in putting all women into "sex class", since all women,
since trained into the gender roles of patriarchal wife and
motherhood, are potentially those whose unpaid housework can be so
exploited. But seeing herself as a member of a fourth class category,
"sex class," and hence, in a patriarchal capitalist
system, seeing herself exploited as a woman worker in her wage work
and unpaid second shift housework,
 [4]
 is thus not a given but an achieved social identity. Such an identity
is usually formed through political organizing and coalitions with
other women at her place of employment, in her home and her community.
In this sense the concept of sex class is exactly analogous to the
concept of a feminist epistemological standpoint: not a given identity
or perspective, but one that is achievable under the right
conditions.



Realizing the importance of this disjuncture between economic class
and sex class for women, Maxine Molyneux (1984) argues in a often
cited article that there are no "women's interests"
in the abstract that can unify women in political struggle. Instead,
she theorizes that women have both "practical gender
interests" and "strategic gender interests."
Practical gender interests are those that women develop because of the
sexual division of labor, which makes them responsible for the
nurturant work of sustaining the physical and psychological well-being
of children, partners and relatives through caring labor. Such
practical gender interests, because they tie a woman's
conception of her own interests as a woman to those of her family,
support women's popular movements for food, water, child and
health care, even defense against state violence, which ally them with
the economic class interests of their family. Strategic gender
interests, on the contrary, may ally women across otherwise divided
economic class interests, since they are those, like rights against
physical male violence and reproductive rights, which women have as a
sex class to eliminate male domination.



Molyneux used her distinctions between practical and strategic gender
interests to distinguish between the popular women's movement in
Nicaragua based on demands for economic justice for workers and
farmers against the owning classes, demands such as education, health
and maternity care, clean water, food and housing, and the feminist
movement which emphasized the fight for legal abortion, fathers'
obligation to pay child support to single mothers, and rights against
rape and domestic violence. She and others have used this distinction
between practical and strategic gender interests to characterize the
tension between popular women's movements and feminist movements
in Latin America (Molyneux 2001; Alvarez 1998; Foweraker 1998).



A similar distinction between different types of women's
interests was developed further as a critique of interest group
paradigms of politics by Anna Jonasdottir (1988, 1994).
Jonasdottir argues that women have a common formal
interest in votes for women, women's political caucuses, gender
parity demands, and other mechanisms which allow women a way to
develop a collective political voice, even though their content
interests, that is, their specific needs and priorities, may vary by
race and economic class, among others. Her distinctions, and those of
Molyneux, have been changed slightly -- practical vs. strategic
gender needs, rather than interests -- to compare and contrast
different paradigms of economic development by World Bank feminist
theorist Carolyn Moser (1993). Most recently the
Jonasdottir distinctions have been used by Mohanty
(1997) to defend and maintain, in spite of postmodernists'
emphasis on intersectional differences, that commonalities in
women's gendered work can create a cross-class base for
demanding a collective political voice for women: a transnational
feminism which creates a demand for women's political
representation, developing the platform of women's human rights
as women and as workers. Nonetheless, the tension between
women's economic class-based interests or needs and their
visionary/strategic gender interests or needs is still always present,
and must therefore always be negotiated concretely by popular
movements for social justice involving women's issues.



Another approach to the problematic nature of socio-economic class as
it relates to women are empirical studies which show how class
distinctions are still important for women in their daily lives as a
way to compare and contrast themselves with other women and men, even
if they do not use the concepts of "working class,"
"professional class" or "capitalist class".
Many have pointed out that the concept of class itself is mystified in
the U.S. context, but that nonetheless class distinctions still
operate because of different structural economic constraints, which
act on some differently from others. The Ehrenreichs (1979), in a
classic article, argue that this mystification is due to the emergence
of a professional-managerial class that has some interests in common
with the capitalist class and some with the working class. Whatever
its causes, there are empirical studies which show that class
distinctions still operate between women, albeit in an indirect way.
Barbara Ehrenreich (2001), by adopting the material life conditions of
a poor woman, did an empirical study of the lives of women working for
minimum wages and found their issues to be quite different from and
ignored by middle and upper-class women. Diane Reay (2004) does an
empirical study of women from manual labor family backgrounds and
their relation to the schooling of their children, and discovers that
they use a discourse that acknowledges class differences of
educational access and career possibilities, even though it does not
specifically define these by class per se. Similarly, Julie Bettie
(2000) does an impressive discourse analysis of the way that Latina
high school students create their own class distinctions through
concepts such as "chicas," "cholas" and
"trash" to refer to themselves and their peers. These
categories pick out girls as having middle class, working class or
poor aspirations by performance indicators such as dress, speech,
territorial hang-outs and school achievement, while never mentioning
"class" by name. Women's experiences of growing up
working class are presented in the anthology edited by Tea (2003).



Drawing on a socialist feminist framework, Margaret McLaren (2019)
offers an ethnographic study of cross-border feminist solidarity. She
focuses on SEWA, the largest women's union in the world with
over 700,000 members and its own cooperative bank. This Indian
organization of self-employed women has ties with a sister
organization in South Africa and builds global grassroots trading
networks in addition to fostering cross-cultural dialogues and
peace-building. Utilizing traditional gendered expectations, married
women leave the home to work in women-only groups where the artisans
organize beyond the workplace for public health, sewage treatment and
other social justice issues such as violence prevention. Such
cooperatives which also forge ties with Global North consumers
showcase the possibilities for transnational feminist organizing in
the face of neoliberalist finance and resource extraction. 


## 10. Anarchist Perspectives on Work and its Other



So far, it has been assumed that work is an intrinsic good.



What if waged or unwaged work itself were to be considered problematic
or oppressive? Autonomous Marxists contest that liberal or socialist
feminist perspectives have unnecessarily mystified work and have
operated with a moralism. Autonomists are associated with the
Operaismo, post-Operaismo and Autonomia movements, the Midnight Notes
Collective, Zerowork, Lotta Feminista, and the Wages for Housework
movement (Weeks 2011, 241). Whether one ought to be paid for housework
or reproductive labor or seek equal employment opportunities,
feminists have not sufficiently opposed the sanctification of work.
Championing the refusal of work means to abandon a narrow focus on the
critique of the extraction of surplus value or of the process of
deskilling. Furthermore, it is imperative to interrogate how work
dominates our lives (Weeks 2011, 13). Kathi Weeks charges that a
productivist bias is common to feminist and Marxist analysis. The
credo of autonomists then is liberation *from* work, in
contradistinction to Marxist humanists such as Erich Fromm's
advocacy for liberation *of* work.



The Wages for Housework campaign demanded purposefully the impossible.
These feminists did not only ask for compensation for unpaid domestic
labor, but also postulated the end of such work (Federici 1975).
Post-work also means post-domestic care, something that gets lost in
some of the ethic of care analysis, which inadvertently fosters a
romantic attachment to endowing meaning to such work. Furthermore,
post-work also appeals to carving out space for "queer
time" and queer resistant agency (Halberstam 2005, Lehr 1999),
an appeal to unscripted life. A wholesale critique of housework is not
easily understood; even Arlie Hochschild's (1997) own analysis
of her ethnographic studies of diverse family practices comes to the
conclusion that authentic housework should be sanctified and set apart
from mere alienating factory production (Weeks 2011,
157-59).



A post-work ethic entails a playful commitment to leisure and
unstructured activities such as day-dreaming. Joseph Trullinger (2016)
extends Kathi Weeks' analysis by drawing on Marcuse's
concept of great refusal and playful labor defying commodity fetishism
and productivism. By ignoring the liberatory power of play, Weeks
insufficiently engages the meaning of work and the asceticism of the
work ethic (Trullinger 2016, 469). Still, the danger of play morphing
into (unpaid) labor is real, as evinced by social media corporate
giant FaceBook exploiting play-labor for capitalist gains (Fuchs 2016)
and a corporate feminism may ask us to "lean in" (Sandberg
2013) rather than "lean out."


## 11. Punitive Perspectives on Work and Non-Work



While it is reasonable to champion daydreams and play as intrinsic
goods, idle time itself is often not felt as a good or luxury, but
instead a psychic imposition. This is why one speaks of "doing
time," when one is sentenced to a prison term or worse, to death
row (Moses 2007). Imprisonment is anathema to Indigenous,
socio-centric peoples in the Global South, and imprisonment is closely
connected to the disciplinary apparatus of western colonization of the
Americas and Africa (Nagel 2007). The birth of the western modern
prison focused on self-discipline, known as the "separate
system" of Philadelphia, PA, leading to enforced isolation and
separate celling. Day-dreaming in a solitary cell becomes positively
dangerous and suicides and mental illness increase exponentially
(Casella *et al*. 2016). Idle time is thus countered by another
prison regime, the Auburn, NY, factory system, also known as the
"silent system," where prisoners worked in a factory, but
they were forbidden to talk with each other. Under the notorious
Southern U.S. convict lease system, representing the shift "from
the prison of slavery to the slavery of prisons" (Davis 1998),
Black female and male prisoners were toiling in chain gangs, a
visceral legacy of chattel slavery. Slavery or indentured servitude is
codified in the U.S. Constitution, turning the nation-state into a
penal democracy (James, 2007). 



Another haunting reminder of chattel slavery is the neoliberal welfare
state's intrusion in the family, charging parents with poor work
ethic and neglect of their children. In the US, poor children of
color, especially Black, Latine, and American Indians living on
reservations, are at higher risk of being taken away from their kin
and carers and turned over to the family regulation system (Goldberg
2015). The world over, parents who are socially displaced such as
Romanian immigrants in Norway, are under greater scrutiny by state
actors, e.g., child protective services. In the U.S., social
workers' own white middle class (protestant) work ideology is
enforced paradoxically on working-class mothers: these stigmatized
women are summoned to comply with social programming, a penal version
of the cult of domesticity and are thus effectively forced out of a
paid job, made dependent on the good will of the social worker and
family court judge, who may grant access to child-supervised visits.
Parents charged with child abuse and/or neglect are thus unable to
pursue education or a job, often creating an intergenerational cycle
of the violence of poverty (Nagel 2018). In ideological terms, this is
coded as welfare dependency and racialized as a controlling image,
thus stereotyping young Black mothers (Fraser and Gordon 1994; Hill
Collins 2000). In response, the National Welfare Rights Organization
was created to destigmatize welfare by postulating it as a human right
(Toney 2000) and by also demanding a basic income, as alternative to
punitive welfare (Weeks 2011, 138). The proposal for universal basic
income has gained traction in recent years (Chatzidakis *et
al.* 2020). Migrant workers, worker-mothers who serve as domestic
workers are also at risk (of deportation and/or imprisonment) for
facing frivolous neglect charges or simply for lacking proper visa
status. Gendered moral economies operate across national, racial and
geographic borders in enforcing a domestic and domesticating
patriarchal ideology and determining who is a good victim and deserves
to be rescued (Keogh 2015; Nagel 2013; Gutierrez
Rodriguez 2010; Grewal and Kaplan 1992; Kaplan *et al*.
1999).



Stigmatized work such as erotic labor or sex work has divided
feminists into two camps: those who support sex workers' rights
to organize and seek labor law protection and carceral feminists who
advocate "rescuing" women trafficked into sex work
(Bernstein 2007; Nagel 2015). Some sex worker rights approaches focus
on eschewing the moralizing rallying cry of choice versus coercion and
seek to destigmatize such labor and offer a postcolonial critique of
prohibitionist ideology (Kempadoo and Doezema 1995). Others also focus
on the lived experiences and agencies of such workers and
contextualize their lives within structural constraints of the
feminization of poverty (Dewey 2010; Zheng 2009). Paradoxically, by
focusing narrowly on income-generating activities, Dewey (2010)
contents that such advocates actually reinscribe stigmatization. And
some sex workers' rights organizations such as COYOTE
("Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics") also inadvertently
endorse a traditional work-ethic ideology by appealing to a moralizing
discourse of respectability (Weeks 2011, pp. 67-68).


## 12. Concluding Remarks



Theoretical and empirical debates about the relation of women to class
and work, and the implications of these relations for theories of male
domination and women's oppression as well as for other systems
of social domination, continue to be important sources of theories and
investigations of gender identities, roles and powers in the field of
women and gender studies, as well as in history, sociology,
anthropology and economics. They also have important implications for
epistemology, metaphysics and political theory in the discipline of
philosophy, and consequently other disciplines in humanities and the
social sciences.