Capitalism and Patriarchy are Kicking My Butt: A Feminist Political Economy Analysis of Women’s Freedom and Domestic Labour

In the context of contemporary austerity politics, what freedom do women have to organize and support domestic labour? In post-welfare states, austerity regimes have shifted social welfare provision, undermining equity and increasingly responsibilizing individuals and households. Since the 1970s women have entered the labour force in unprecedented numbers, yet inequitable gendered divisions of paid and unpaid labour persist. Domestic labour was a hot topic of early 1960s to 1980s socialist feminist scholarship, but this inquiry has been somewhat sidelined within feminist political economy literature and research since the late 2000s. This research project seeks to reanimate this topic by exploring women’s often-invisible domestic labour and its conditions. It takes up the case of working-class women with children in Ontario's increasingly conservative policy climate as an apt and timely case study. I employ a feminist materialist approach to examine the relationship between the organization of women’s domestic labour in the household and the organization of other forms of social reproduction and productive labour across state, market, and community relations. I use a freedom-centered feminist politics conception of freedom as a collective process of political claims making towards a more equitable world. One hundred and twenty-four women participated in a participatory online mapping survey, with twenty-five respondents further engaging in an online discussion forum and eleven respondents participating in focus groups. These three overlapping methods aimed to bring women together to discuss and debate ways to improve domestic labour conditions. The data analysis shows that domestic labour continues to be a central aspect of women’s oppression under capitalism, and that many women either cannot imagine changing these oppressive conditions or focus on changes to household and gender relations that miss or ignore the wider political economy that shapes unpaid labours. However, when prompted to consider a wider lens, women discussed inequities and discrimination in the labour force and the need for better pay equity legislation and affordable childcare. Although their political claims did not move beyond existing policy discourse, this research suggests that domestic labour can potentially be a unifying topic for diverse working-class women, and a promising basis for political action.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.