Capitalism and Patriarchy are Kicking My Butt: A Feminist Political Economy Analysis of Women’s Freedom and Domestic Labour
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.065 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".