How did this come to be? What were the conditions, struggles, and contingencies that produced the current arrangement?
See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.
The full-time housewife, the private nuclear family, and the idea that care is a labor of love rather than work were all made, and made recently, alongside capitalism. This lens traces that making: the witch hunts and the disciplining of women’s bodies at capitalism’s birth, the separation of the home from production, the building of the family wage, and the state’s long effort to control reproduction. It develops the account of primitive accumulation begun in the capitalism theme.
Anchor questions
- The housewife was not always the norm. When and how was the modern household made?
- Why were so many women killed as witches at the dawn of capitalism? Whose power did they threaten?
- Where did the “family wage” come from, and who was left out of it?
- How has the state tried to control reproduction, and whose reproduction was encouraged or punished?
- Whose labor built the household economy, and why was it made invisible?
Materials
Free unless marked otherwise. “Free to borrow” means a free Internet Archive account and a renewable one-hour loan.
Books
- Friedrich Engels (1820 to 1895), The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). The foundational Marxist account of how the monogamous patriarchal family, the sexual division of labor, and women’s subordination emerged alongside private property and class society. Dated in its anthropology, still the starting point. Free: marxists.org
- Silvia Federici (b. 1942), Caliban and the Witch (2004). Reads the European witch hunts as central to primitive accumulation, showing how capitalism disciplined women’s bodies and reproductive labor to build the modern sexual division of labor. Shared with the capitalism theme. Free PDF: files.libcom.org
- Barbara Ehrenreich (1941 to 2022) and Deirdre English (b. 1943), Witches, Midwives, and Nurses (1973). A short, accessible history of how women healers were driven out by the rise of the male medical profession, connecting the witch trials to the later policing of women’s knowledge and bodies. A good first reading. Free: marxists.org
- Eli Zaretsky (b. 1940), Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life (1976). Traces how industrial capitalism split “personal life” and the family off from production, creating the private household as a distinct sphere that carries the weight of reproduction and emotional life. Free to borrow: archive.org
- Angela Y. Davis (b. 1944), Racism, Birth Control and Reproductive Rights (1981). Davis’s history of the birth control movement’s entanglement with eugenics, sterilization abuse, and population control, insisting that reproductive freedom for Black and poor women means the right to have children as well as the right not to. A bridge to Race and Racial Capitalism. This is a chapter of Women, Race and Class, not a standalone book, and the school does not otherwise list that book. Paywalled: penguinrandomhouse.com, and see the note on access for how to get it.
- Michel Foucault (1926 to 1984), The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (1976). Argues that modern power produced “sexuality” as an object of knowledge and control, reframing the family and the body as sites of regulation rather than simple repression. Denser, best with a companion. No borrowable copy exists. Paywalled: penguinrandomhouse.com, and see the note on access for how to get it.
Articles
- Wally Seccombe (b. 1942), The Housewife and Her Labour under Capitalism (1974). A key entry in the 1970s domestic labor debate, arguing that the housewife’s unpaid work reproduces labor power and has a material relation to capital. Useful for tracing how the family wage and the full-time housewife were built. Free: archive.org
Video
- “The Witch Trials and the Rise of Modernity and Capitalism” (ESOTERICA, 2020). Roughly 15 minutes, about 37,000 views, a niche pick. A clear walk through Federici’s thesis that the witch hunts helped construct the unpaid reproductive role of women. A visual companion to Caliban and the Witch. youtube.com/watch?v=pWwdx8Lo7So
- “The women who demanded wages for housework” (BBC World Service, Witness History, 2024). Roughly 4 minutes, about 9,900 views, a niche pick. A short oral-history piece on the 1970s Wages for Housework campaign. A quick opener before the theoretical readings. youtube.com/watch?v=devUpxx3EAA
Status
First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Contributions welcome, especially histories of the household and reproduction outside Europe and North America, and of gender beyond the man and woman binary.