What is the work that keeps people alive? Who does it? Why is most of it unwaged? This theme covers feminist political economy, the history of the family, the wages for housework debate, care work, gender as a system, and the contested boundary between what counts as work and what does not. It develops the analysis of unpaid and reproductive labor opened in How Capitalism Works and Labor, Work, and Organizing.
How to use this theme
This folder organizes resources by lens. See the Pedagogy document for what the lenses do and why they are structured this way.
- Experiential: What is your experience with this? What does the room already know?
- Historical: How did this come to be?
- Theoretical: How do we understand and analyze it?
- Practical: What is happening on the ground and what are people doing about it?
- Liberatory: What would it mean to overcome or transform this?
A session does not need to use all five lenses. A study circle may move across them. Use what serves the room.
Anchor questions
These questions have proven useful for opening up this theme. They are starting points, not a script. Take the ones that fit the room and leave the rest.
- Who did the cooking, cleaning, and caring in the home you grew up in? Was it ever counted as work?
- What work do you do that keeps other people alive and able to work, that no one pays you for?
- What were you taught a man was, or a woman was? Where did those lessons come from?
- Who takes care of the children, the sick, and the old where you live? On what terms?
- Have you had to fight for control over your own body or your own household? Against whom?
- What would it take for care to be shared fairly? What stands in the way?
- What might a household, or a family, look like if it were built for freedom rather than property?
Recommended sequences
Suggested arcs for groups new to this theme. Adapt freely. Every session opens with a check-in and closes with reflection (see the pedagogy document). This theme is lived close to home; give the experiential work real time and hold the room with care.
Single-session entry point (2 hours). Start experiential: who did the unpaid work in the homes people grew up in, and what care they give now that no one pays for. Watch a short explainer together (UN Women’s three-minute What is the real value of unpaid work?). Read a few pages of Federici’s Wages Against Housework aloud. Close by returning to the opening question with what has shifted. See the single-session template.
Six-week study circle. Week 1 experiential and framing (the unpaid work in our own lives; what are we studying and why). Week 2 historical: how the household and the witch hunts were made, using Engels and Federici’s Caliban and the Witch. Weeks 3 to 4 theoretical: social reproduction and the Wages for Housework debate, reading Bhattacharya, Dalla Costa and James, and Federici. Week 5 practical: care work and organizing today, using the domestic-worker toolbox, Caregiving, and the reproductive justice framework. Week 6 liberatory: what to do with the household, staging the debate among wages for housework, socializing care, and family abolition. See the six-week template.
Weekend intensive. Compress the arc above into a Friday-evening-through-Sunday structure, with the historical and theoretical work on Saturday and the practical and liberatory work on Sunday. A screening of Caregiving or Care works well as a Saturday-evening anchor. See the weekend-intensive template.
Related themes
This theme connects closely to several others:
- How Capitalism Works introduces the primitive accumulation and reproductive labor that this theme develops through Federici and social reproduction theory.
- Labor, Work, and Organizing shares the social reproduction thread and the analysis of unwaged work as labor.
- Race and Racial Capitalism meets this theme in Black feminism, the Combahee River Collective, and reproductive justice.
- Imperialism and the Global System extends the analysis into global care chains and the migration of care work.
- Anarchism, Mutual Aid, and Prefiguration carries forward the communal-living and collective-care experiments the liberatory lens gathers.
- Socialism and National Liberation meets this theme in the women who fought and governed in the national-liberation revolutions, as in ¡Las Sandinistas!.
Status
First pass across all five lenses, and it may be a while before there is a second. If you have run a session on this theme, consider contributing back what you used and what you learned.