Natural force of social labor, I think, here merely refers to work that is naturalized and non-commodified—the idea that a woman does the work of raising children because it’s “natural,” because she’s wired that way. The way most people would be deeply offended if you suggested that maybe mom deserves a paycheck just for being mom. It’s natural and naturally occurring, like rain watering crops.

—Kevin Floyd

Marxist feminists including Margaret Benston, Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and their contemporaries synthesized a critique of patriarchal oppression with a critical analysis of this oppression’s relationship to capital. However, despite their attempt to offer feminism a fuller critique of society under capital, the act of applying Marxist theory to feminist discourse is often greeted in Women’s Studies and “mainstream” feminism as a curiosity rather than a vital step in articulating the social arrangements that traditionally posited women as the “lesser” sex. Take, for example, the introduction to Women’s Studies textbook Women’s Voices, Feminist Visionswherein editors Susan Shaw and Janet Lee describe Marxist feminism as “a perspective that uses economic explanations from traditional Marxist theory to understand women’s oppression. For Marxist feminists, the socioeconomic inequities of the class system are the major issues.”1 One might infer from this short description that Marxist feminism places class struggle above the larger goal of equality for women. Yet this curtailed analysis misses Marxist feminism’s singular ability to account for the “bigger picture” of capitalist society. Indeed, in our present moment as we are bombarded by messages that we perhaps live in a “post-feminist” age, it becomes apparent that attempts to effect sex-based equity through established channels has failed—the wage gap persists and global labor trends such as Guy Standing’s notion of “feminized labor”2 indicate a crisis in labor relations based on historic and societal prejudice organized around women’s laboring capacity. Moreover, the category of labor historically seen as “house work” or “women’s work” is increasingly being shunted off to portions of the populace which society now views as “naturally” suited for menial tasks along lines of race, history of incarceration, or ableist prejudice. In other words, the need for the sort of tasks our mothers and grandmothers were shackled with has not been erased. Instead capital has found more insidious ways to hide the role of what the Endnotes collective terms “abject” tasks and the manner in which said forms of devalued and degraded labor directly tie into value creation. In a groundbreaking essay, “The Logic of Gender,” which likens the sex-gender binary to the use value-exchange value abstraction, the collective seeks to explicate why capital needs to “see” both sex and gender in terms of labor relations. Speaking in our present moment, the Endnotes collective underscores the need for a feminism which counters the evolving markers of which individuals are compelled by their presumed in-born “nature” to reproduce labor. The Endnotes collective observes:

Indeed, we can say that, if many of our mothers and grandmothers were caught in the sphere of IMM activities, the problem we face today is different. It is not that we will have to “go back to the kitchen”, if only because we cannot afford it. Our fate, rather, is having to deal with the abject.3

While “the abject” is a nuanced and elastic term couched in a critique of the assignment of the performance of specific reproductive tasks since the 1970s suffice it to say that for here “the abject” might be understood as the thankless and ceaseless tasks which were previously termed “women’s work.” The need for this work never disappears. Capital simply shifts the burden onto different shoulders as society evolves.

The consideration posed by “The Logic of Gender” exposes a very real challenge to modern feminism, if for no other reason than the concept of “the abject” and the proposed reframing of both sex and gender the essay goes on to advocate are ontologically difficult. When wrangling with a need for a more evolved Marxist feminist—or more precisely, Queer Marxist— stance, perhaps it is time we revisit and reappreciate the theoretical foundation laid by Marxist feminists in the 1970s. In reading their text with fresh eyes we might perhaps see that, in terms of capital’s special form of exploiting women beyond that of all laborers, it was never about reproductive organs but about the reproduction of labor. As a rereading of second-wave Marxist feminist theory demonstrates, these inaugural works dared to suggest that perhaps the reason why “women’s issues” and “labor issues” were considered distinctly separate problems was because capitalist society benefited from promoting that distinction. Beyond merely finding ways to apply Marxist theory to sex-related issues, Marxist feminism during the second-wave era articulated a dialectic approach which allows for a critique of society, “natural” arrangements, and capitalist exploitation of labor.

Perhaps the most illustrative points we need to be reminded of is that theoretically these works not only reapproriate Marx for feminist theory but are insightful enough to challenge societal norms that create the impression that sex-based labor prejudice and gender-specific stereotypes are “natural” and somehow beyond the machinations of the market. In continuing to question why reproductive tasks are still seen as either a “natural” service of a loving relative or else should “naturally” be held in disdain and assigned to the lowest strata of society, we can begin to appreciate a more fulsome subject for feminism that transcends sex-based essentializing and promotes a sense of reification which makes action and collectivism seem impossible. In other words, perhaps in our present moment feminism needs to expand to serve not just women, but those who capital uses as the “women of the world.”

In the 1965 released American Women: The Report of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women and Other Publications of the Commission, evidence of societal assumptions about women, housework, and childrearing permeate the document. Ironically, the report is meant to hasten a “pro-women” and liberal process, described by Committee Chairman Eleanor Roosevelt, wherein America saw “the remaining outmoded barriers to women’s aspirations disappear.”4 The committee report observes:

The present homemaking style can be attained and maintained only when another woman, or a man, replaces the homemaker who leaves her home to work. Wherever this is impossible, everyone suffers: the husband’s job capacity is threatened; the children’s health and psychological needs are less well met; and the woman working away from the home is under the pressure of continual worry about what may be happening in the home she left that morning.5

Even in this “progressive” report, which allows for women to work outside of the home, the assumption in the last line underscores that despite her form of employment a woman’s “natural” chief concern is for the care and keeping of her family. In the early 1970s, the works of the following theorists are remarkably able to step outside of the dominant world view and challenge a history, culture, and concept of “nature” predicated on patriarchal culture, revealing how capital historically benefits from women’s servitude in the home. Moreover, they use Marx’s theory to connect the seemingly separate sphere of the household to that of the market at a time when these physical separations appeared concrete. To do so, they focused on the crucial site of labor relations, and the properties of the unique commodity of labor power. I suggest that this emphasis on the vitality of not just labor, but unwaged and devalued reproduction of labor is a locus of continual fresh insight and must be ceaselessly evaluated. Just as a clean house begins to get dusty the very moment it has been dusted, so too must we start the theoretical chore of reconsider societal arrangements in terms of labor and reproduction of labor.

“Escaping” the Home and “Exploding” the Role of the Housewife

During second-wave feminism many activists shifted their focus from the first-wave goal of gaining political empowerment in the form of voting rights and began to link the stigma against women to women’s perceived inability to earn paychecks. It is during this era that the idea of wages for housework, and even pensions for housewives, was first suggested. These ideas were—and still are— often deemed laughably absurd. After all, how much should someone get paid for ironing or raising a child? And how in the world could employers be expected to pay for things that were done outside the office, in a place considered to be separate and private? Society perpetuated the assumption that women were simply better suited to caring for the young and caring for the home and that anything taking place within the home had nothing to do with the world of wages. In The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America, Dorothy Sue Cobble reflects on women’s relationship to waged labor: “The answer to the perennial question ‘Should women work outside the home?’ has changed dramatically over time” going on to observe how “the debate was never fully resolved in the sense that, even today, in the minds of some, women’s claims to wage work is secondary to that of men’s.”6 Cobble offers this commentary on the state of wage relations and sex not some decades past, but in 2004. This demonstrates that within the framework of societal norms and abstractions feminism is still confronted with gender stereotypes and sex-based disparities reflected in wage relations. While this persistent problem apparently confounds more liberal feminists, early Marxist feminists were able to deduce that capital required housework to be unpaid. Moreover, they articulate how dismissing “women’s work” is necessary to maintaining the status quo and to accumulation of surplus value, thus exposing capital’s need for women’s double exploitation.

Benston, Dalla Costa, James, and the majority of second-wave feminism participants reasoned that if women could escape the confines of the home and enter the work force in massive numbers then this would rupture patriarchal culture and empower women. Marxist feminist also held out hope that this shift in labor relations could potentially rupture or “shake up” the market system entirely. Aside from not bringing about an end to the exploitation of all labor, in terms of ending women’s exploitation access to waged labor did not end sexually inequity. Historians Hymowitz and Weissman note, “the postwar consumer economy had come to rely on a workforce of women who did not think of themselves as workers and who were not taken seriously by their employers.”7 Thus, many women’s wages were viewed as contributing to but not sustaining a family. While it initially stood to reason that challenging this perception of women and the workplace would cause the societal perception of women as the lesser sex to fall away with time, by the 1970s it became apparent that beyond “escaping the home” second-wave feminism sought to “explode” the psychological effects of the figure of the housewife. Hymowitz and Weissman go on to observe this became necessary since “before working women could affect any change, they would have to confront the double exploitation they faced as both workers and women.”8 To that end, a simultaneous goal of second-wave feminism was to facilitate a dialogue between women, shedding light on experiences of oppression and isolation, thereby explicating the notion that there was nothing “natural” about the social arrangement that dictated an adult women toil ceaselessly in the service of her family in what was considered “non-work.”

“The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation”

In the introduction to her work Benston writes, “in arguing that the roots of secondary status of women are in fact economic, it can be shown that women as a group do indeed have a definite relation to the means of production and that this is different from that of men.”9 From the outset of her essay, Selma Benston moves to refute the idea that women exist outside the wage-economy in a realm separate from male labor. She does so by focusing on the non-work hidden behind the dynamic between capitalist and laborer. Marx uses “the means of production” as the single divisive distinction between capitalists and laborers: those who hold the means of production hire laborers, and those who do not possess them must sell their labor if they want to buy the commodities that make it possible to live. It is this arrangement that is the root of all capitalistic oppression of the worker. In stating that women have a “different” relationship to the “means of production” than men, Benston is making a critical suggestion about sex under capital. What she suggests is that while a male laborer is oppressed because of a market system that forces him to sell his labor in order to live, women are doubly exploited through this perceived erasure from the capitalist/laborer dynamic. While the laborer may be exploited in an observable fashion, dragging himself to work each day to earn his wages, women’s “work” is hidden from the equation. So while Marx’s original theory does not speak about women’s oppression specifically—an apparent omission that prompts many feminist to reject his theory entirely— Benston makes a feminist appropriation of Marx usable by moving on to explain how women’s exploitation is insidiously hidden under the social arrangements tied to labor relations through ideas of sexual stereotypes and cultural ideas of what is “normal.”

Benston points out that the social arrangements that make the “nuclear family” seem “normal” portrays the male worker as the only eligible laborer in the family. This creates the situation wherein his wages alone can buy the commodities necessary to maintain the family unit. For most families, the wife’s main relationship to the world of labor-exchange has historically been to perform the tasks necessary for reproduction of her husband’s labor—even if she did have a part-time job, her “real job” was to safeguard her husband’s labor power by performing housework. In most nuclear families it was assumed that after a “hard day’s work” a man should expect to return home to a hot meal and clean house. It was a given that his wife would ensure this all took place, as she was home at home “not working” all day. This societally promoted perception of the home and housework as totally separate from the world of work and wages deflects and dismisses the effort a housewife exerted in achieving these tasks as any sort of “work.” Indeed, economic analysis itself is predicated on this abstraction. Marilyn Waring notes that “economists usually use labor to mean only those activities that produce surplus value (that is, profit in the marketplace). Consequently, labor (work) that does not produce profits is not considering production.”10 She adds to this, “all the other reproductive work that women do is widely viewed as unproductive.”11 Benston exposes for us how the assessment and perpetuation of market relations are maintained through a deliberate erasure of the critical relationship between “women’s work” and production of value.

Rather than merely accepting that it is “natural” for a woman to perform domestic tasks, Benston questions why historically women have been discouraged from working outside of the home and why “housework” or “women’s work” is dismissed as non-work. Benston directs these questions back to the exploitation of laborer by the capitalist. Much feminist theory did not see the point of discussing the oppression of “labor” given that it was presumed this group referred exclusively to men. Yet, in order to understand why capital needs women to be relegated to the role of housewife, Benston realized that the exploitative nature of labor-exchange must be emphasized. She cites the work of Ernest Mandel to remind her readers of the oppression of male laborers to which women’s oppression is tied:

The proletarian condition is, in a nutshell, the lack of access to the means of production or means of subsistence which, in a society of generalized commodity production, forces the proletarian to sell his labor power. In exchange for this labor power he receives a wage which then enables him to acquire the means of consumption necessary for satisfying his own needs and those of his family.12

This passage establishes a system where the male laborer must continually sell his labor if the family wishes to survive. Though Mandel glosses over the notion of “means of consumption,” Benston uses Marxism to serve a feminist agenda by consider the “means of consumptions” in reference to the activities that reproduce labor power. Here, Benston notes that Mandel offers no critical account of how, when, and where the “means of consumption” becomes labor power but also how he fails to appreciate how these tasks are an instance of labor. In questioning the processing of the “means of consumption” that result in the production of labor power, Benston synthesizes the theoretical project of Marxism and feminism, describing the exploitation of labor and the double exploitation of women: One cannot simply purchase a slab of raw beef, eat it, and be sufficiently nourished to go back to work in the morning. Effort must be exerted, and time must be spent to transform wage-purchased commodities— “the means of consumption”— before they can be consumed and then turned into a fresh supply of labor. Yet the capitalist has been able to buy labor without paying for the work required to reproduce labor because these tasks are perceived as “non work.” In scrutinizing this gap in the reading of Marxist theory, Benston identifies the hidden location of where women enter into the equation of labor relations, value creation, and the perpetuation of capitalism itself. Commodities are not naturally and magically transmuted into labor power. This process takes work. Yet capital needs to dismiss the efforts of processing the means of consumption in order to produce fresh labor power as non-value producing so that it does not have to acknowledge these efforts by paying for them.

In revolutionary fashion, Benston builds from Marx’s basic description of the male worker’s exploitation to expose women’s vital relationship to waged labor, noting how the necessity of “women’s work” is deliberately erased from the value creation process. By erasing the significance of “women’s work” and hiding it away in the home she accounts for the “double exploitation” experienced by women. Benston articulates the need for feminist theory capable of drawing on Marxism to expose the position of women within capital:

We lack a corresponding structural definition of women. What is needed first is not a complete examination of the symptoms of the secondary status of women, but instead a statement of the material conditions in capitalist (and other) societies which define the group “women.”13

Here, Benston helps us understand that “women” as a category owes its definition and the subsequent oppression of women to their deliberate and perpetual exclusion from direct market relations. Women are not hidden away to toil within their homes by accident. Capital needs to hide and dismiss the “work of the housewife” in order to earn a larger profit and perpetuate exploitative labor-relations. An important aspect of the previous quote is also that Benston presents her readers with an ontological-shaking point to contemplate: “Women” and all that we perceive to be the “natural” and “normal” characteristics and roles of that group are directly related to and manipulated by capital. There is nothing natural or even biological to suggest that women are the “lesser sex.” Rather, women have been the sex whose relationship to value-creating and capital has been historically hidden and societally justified. Having addressed this abstraction, Benston moves to further account for how women, as a group, relate to all commodity production through their relationship with the commodity of labor.

Again, citing Mandel, Benston describes the dividing of commodity production into two camps—labor and tasks which have an exchange value, earn a wage, and are therefore socially productive and a second group:

The second group of products in capitalist society which are not commodities but remain simple use-value consists of all things produced in the home. Despite the fact that considerable human labor goes into this type of household production, it still remains a production of use-values and not of commodities. Every time a soup is made or button sewn on a garment, it constitutes production, but is not production for the market.14

Benston thus exposes how there is no such thing as a mother’s “natural” job, nor any form of housework that is inherently valueless. These abstractions are perpetuated by capitalist society because the converse is true. Just as trees or minerals are just “naturally” scattered about for capitalists to seize upon, the duties of wife and mother are portrayed as things that women “naturally” do. Analogously, if capitalists benefit from either mother nature or mother’s little labors, it is only because they are clever enough to seize upon the usefulness of something that “naturally” occurs. In this way, capital perpetuates the notion that valorizing women’s work is just as silly—and logistically impossible— as remunerating mother nature for the rain which waters crops. Benston dispels this abstraction, laying-out how “things produced in the home” are not some naturally occurring phenomenon, but activities deliberately excluded from having a direct exchange-value, perceived as not being produced for the market merely because they are performed in the domestic sphere. Yet if the laborer is meant to return to the market or public sphere with a fresh supply of labor at the start of the next work day, then these tasks should have an exchange value, regardless of where they are performed, or why someone feels compelled to do them, for they tie directly into the male laborer’s ability to exchange labor for wages. No reproductive effort or activity is intrinsically value-less any more than a purely “natural” occurrence. Thus, Benston shows how society draws on the idea of both “natural” gender roles and home/market distinctions to delineate between commodities, or activities that are produced directly for the market and those which are not, allowing labor reproduction to occur without chipping in to surplus value.

Taking a bold step toward breaking with the traditions of the past, Benston and her contemporaries ask: Why is it that a mature and physically capable female finds herself fated for a life of “non-work” at the service of her husband or male head of household? Once more challenging our perception of “natural” roles beyond the influence of capitalistic society, Benston states that “this assignment of household work as the function of a special category ‘women’ means that this group does stand in a different relation to production than the group ‘men.’”15 She allows us to define women, then, “as that group of people who are responsible for production of simple use-values in those activities associated with the home and family.”16 In this way, we can understand women as a group who are perhaps not significantly different in their laboring capabilities than their male counterparts, but who have an historically “different” relation to production. Rather than being marked as a category because of biology, “women” emerges as a group of people whose laboring abilities are constantly channeled to activities that must occur within the home but are excluded from exchange-value production and the market. Thus, Benston concludes: “The material basis for the inferior status of women is to be found in just this definition of women. In a society in which money determines value, women are a group who work outside the money economy. Their work is valueless, is therefore not even real work.”17 This establishes women’s work as a sort of production—the “work” that is necessary to but occurs “outside of the money economy”—that must be portrayed as non-value producing. And it is this relation to the market wherein women historically were chained to the sort of work that must have its ties to the market hidden that serves as the site of women’s inferior status. Benston emphasizes that this arrangement is no mere accident: For capital to produce surplus value and in order for the laborer to be able to sell labor power to capitalists, it is necessary for this group— here understood as “women”— to exist perpetually laboring outside of the money economy. It is under this social arrangement that the commodity labor power has been reproduced in such a fashion as to allow for the creation of surplus value. In other words, women are not simply exploited in the same fashion as the average laborer. Instead, she is doubly exploited: first through her reliance to the exploited wages of her husband and then again in her status as “non-worker” outside of the monied economy despite the vital role her non-work plays in the exchange of labor and value creation process.

Women and the “Reserve Labor Army”

Benston shows us that capitalist accumulation relies upon a group of individuals needing to perform forms of labor that are considered to be “non-work” as well as capital’s need to maintain a reserve army of labor. Explicating the idea of women comprising a “reserve” of laborers, she writes, “when labor is scarce (early industrialization, the two world wars, etc.) then women form an important part of the labor force. When there is less demand for labor (as now under neocapitalism) women become a surplus labor force.”18 Benston goes on to note how women as a labor force are easily pushed in and out of the factory, since “the pervading ideology ensures that no one, man or woman, takes women’s participation in the labor force very seriously. Women’s real work, we are taught, is in the home; this holds whether or not they are married, single, or the heads of households.”19 Prior to the 1970s, it was largely assumed that it was women who comprised this labor reserve, thus Benston makes clear for future Marxist feminists that capital needs to restrict a portion of the labor pool from selling their labor openly and equally.

Women have historically occupied the role of supporting their husband’s waged labor, allowing society to draw on women in times of need while perpetuating the belief that a woman’s “real job” consisted of activities that took place within the home. This creates a perception that while the woman is at home she is “not working” and if she does hold a job she is merely “pitching in”—working to produce war materials for the men who are at war, or else supplementing her husband’s family-sustaining wages to provide a “better life.” It is this very supposition that laid the framework for theorists from Guy Standings onward to discuss the concept of feminized labor and the resulting effects on labor relations we are presently experiencing. Moreover, the intrinsic need for a labor reserve that can be pushed in and out of employment shows that structurally capital still needs some group of people to be marked out for this group. We, as feminists, can no longer assume that it is biological sex alone that indicates which laborers “participation in the labor force” should be “taken seriously:” we need to thoroughly interrogate which groups of society are assumed to be naturally deficient or lesser laborers in our present moment.

Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James’ “The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community”

As the title of their 1972 essay suggests, the idea that a woman’s collective held the potential for political action –systemic rupture even— was increasingly embraced by feminist theory as the decade progressed. Similar to Benston, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James focus on the commodity of labor power, its role in wage relations, and how feminism can challenge this dynamic. A next step from the groundwork laid by Benston, Dalla Costa and James continue to emphasize the mystified representation of the production and reproduction of labor power and how it is portrayed and perpetuated as “women’s work.” In the introduction, James writes, “capital’s special way of robbing labor is paying the worker a wage that is enough to live on (more or less)” going on to describe how, “he buys with the wages the right to use the only “thing” the worker has to sell, his ability or her ability to work.”20 From this basic Marxist formulation, she explains, “The specific social relation, which is capital, then, is the wage relation. And this wage relation can exist only when the ability to work becomes a saleable commodity, Marx calls this labor power. This is a strange commodity for it is not a thing.”21 James underscores the application of this theory to her purpose:

The ability to labor resides only in a human being whose life is consumed in the process of producing. First it must be nine months in the womb, must be fed, clothed and trained; then when it works its bed must be made, its floors swept, its lunchbox prepared. . . . This is how labor power is produced and reproduced when it is daily consumed in the factory or at the office. To describe its [labor power’s] basic production and reproduction is to describe women’s work.22

Dalla Costa and James build from Marx’s basic formulation of the value creation process: a laborer must sell their labor, the only “thing” they actually possess, if they wish to live and work another day. The wage is meant to sustain the laborer in exchange for their time working for the capitalist, yet there is a blank spot in this arrangement since labor itself must be produced. Dalla Costa and James articulate that the act of producing and reproducing labor power has traditionally been the role of “women,” thus exposing society’s role in portraying reproductive activities as naturally being “women’s work.” While Benston focuses on the domestic sphere, or the home, “The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community” is especially concerned with the way in which society perpetuated the figure of the “housewife.” Rather than concerning themselves with the physical space that serves to hide the work of women, they emphasize the societal stereotypes that keep women subservient and within the home. They write: “We place foremost in these pages the housewife as the central figure in this female role. We assume that all women are housewives and even those who work outside the home continue to be housewives” (21). Yet we cannot assume in our present moment that all women are housewives, nor that a family is comprised of two heterosexual married adults. Likewise, we cannot assert that all “abject” tasks are performed by women in the decades since second-wave feminism. Yet the exploitation and debasement associated with these tasks is still perpetuated by society and this theory lays the source of these conceptions bare—capital’s inability to pay for and refusal to validate the reproduction of labor is why we throw around terms such as “menial” or “unskilled labor.” Yet during the recent global pandemic we have seen stark evidence that reproductive tasks are vital to the perpetuation of capital as those cleaning nursing homes were temporarily lauded as “heroes.”

Returning to the text, in the following passage Dalla Costa and James illustrate the historic relationship of the family to the market and how this relationship plays a critical role in how we understand the figure of the “housewife:”

With the advent of capitalism, the socialization of production was organized with the factoryas its center. Those who worked in the new productive center, the factory, received a wage. Those who were excluded did not. Women, children and the aged lost the relative power that derived from the family’s dependence on their labor.23

Because of pervasive cultural norms men became the wage laborer within the family, the individual tasked with bearing the brunt of financial responsibility for the others: “It has put on the man’s shoulders the burden of financial responsibility for women, children, the old, the ill, in a word all those who do not receive wages.”24 What becomes clear is that familial arrangements serve to perpetuate stereotypes surrounding “the housewife” by assigning relationships to waged labor along the lines of sex. Not as a result of biology or “nature,” but because of “pervasive cultural norms” capital can draw on customs, history, and notions of the family to portray women as the supplement to her husband’s laboring ability. The result is a capital-driven and carefully hidden dichotomy between those who are able to earn a wage for their labor on the open market and others which cultural norms dictate as being unfit to sell their labor directly. This places the adult male as the primary wage earner within the household, the member whose laboring capacity is such that it can reliably sustain the basic consumption needs of the unit. However, it also relies on the assumption that behind every man laboring, unseen and unpaid, is a woman whose chief concern and main “job” is the care and maintenance of the family unit.

In the previous quote women are lumped within the family-unit with “children, the old, the ill, in a word all those who do not receive a wage.” James and Dalla Costa note that capitalism and wage relations are responsible for perpetuating the “exploitation of the wage-less” and draw on their reading of Marx to build a case that demonstrates how, without equal access to equally waged labor positions, those who are exploited will continue to be exploited:

Since Marx, it has been clear that capital rules and develops through the wage, that is, that the foundation of capitalist society was the wage laborer and his or her direct exploitation. What has been neither clear nor assumed by the organizations of the working-class movement is that precisely through the wage has the exploitation of the non-wage laborer been organized. This exploitation has been even more effective because the lack of a wage hid it. That is, the wage commanded a larger amount of labor than appeared in factory bargaining. Where women are concerned, their labor appears to be a personal service outside of capital.25

In exposing the concept of the “hidden” value and personal service, Dalla Costa and James demonstrate feminist theory’s ability to identify gaps in Marxism, as well as Marxism’s unique aptitude to allow feminism a more fulsome critique of society. This is an argument that Dr. Floyd was able to make in regard to what we now call “Queer” theory and Marxism, which owes it theoretical grounding to the work by Benston, Dalla Costa, and James.

To reiterate a tenet of Marxism initially utilized by Benston, we must remember how Marx explains that the basic underpinning of capitalism is an exploitative exchange between laborer and capitalist, with the wage serving as the site of the capitalist exploiting the workers’ labor. In Capital, Marx tells us directly:

The fact that half a day’s labour is necessary to keep the worker alive during 24 hours does not in any way prevent him from working a whole day. Therefore, the value of labour-power, and the value which that labor-power valorizes . . . in the labour-process are two entirely different magnitudes; and this difference was what the capitalist had in mind when he was purchasing labour-power. . . . What was really decisive for him was the specific use-value which this commodity possesses of being a source not only of value, but of more value than it has itself.26

Critically, it is because of unique nature of the commodity labor-power that surplus value can be created and gathered up by the capital. This commodity and this alone has the ability to produce not just value, but value above and beyond its own market-dictated worth. What is also unique to labor power is that the laborer needs to be able to reproduce this strange and critical commodity in the time when he is not laboring directly for the capitalist, a time and place that capitalist society wants us to believe exist separately form the world of the factory or office. There are only so many hours in the day and only so many hours the capitalist is willing to recognize as the “workday” when considering an hourly wage. Capitalist society would want us to believe that what a laborer does on their own time and the home they return to is beyond the reaches of market influence.

Again, building off of Marx’s original theory what James and Dalla Costa are suggesting is that this perception is a deliberate abstraction. Because of our perception that the “housewife” is a non-worker and that anything within the “home” is beyond the reaches of capitalist society, it then falls on the female family member to reproduce the labor power of her male laborer as a “personal service.” Because a woman is “naturally” concerned with homelife and her family, whatever she does to care and maintain them is implicitly beyond the bounds of market-relations. Yet in light of the previous excerpt from their essay, Dalla Costa and James make plain that because a laborer does not have the time or the physical stamina to reproduce their own labor these activities have to be done in a place and by a person functioning in a role that is perceived as existing outside of the realm of waged-labor and direct production—a point the Endnotes Collective explicates fully in “The Logic of Gender.” Hidden behind the capitalist’s pilfering of surplus value directly from the laborer is an identical process being enacted upon the non-wage laborers. However, this exploitation is compounded because it is essentially hidden by lack of a wage, creating an arrangement where, in previous generations, a woman was “trapped” and isolated within the home. They explain how even if she enters into the workplace, the role of the housewife awaits her when she gets home inducing her to complete the tasks necessary to the reproduction of labor without considering this to be value creating “work” at all—she is merely doing what any loving wife and mother ought to do. Without these obscured and deliberately unvalued efforts of the “housewife”— given the vital role that the “peculiar” commodity labor value places in capitalist accumulation—the entire system ceases to function. As Dalla Costa and James observe, “we have to make clear that, within the wage, domestic work produces not merely use values, but is essential to the production of surplus value.”27

In making a case for capital’s need for and direct role in perpetuating female subjugation through not just the home/factory divide but specifically via the figure of the housewife, the authors note that it is social ideology necessary to perpetuating market relations that drives women’s secondary status and not some biologically imposed “natural” constraint. Instead, from birth until death women are indoctrinated with the cult of the housewife, meant to accept this role and this toil as their predetermined lot in life. As Dalla Costa and James observe:

It is often asserted that, within the definition of wage labor, women in domestic labor are not productive. In fact, precisely the opposite is true if one thinks of the enormous quantity of social services which capitalist organizations transform into privatized activity, putting them on the backs of housewives. Domestic labor is not essentially “feminine work”; a woman doesn’t fulfill herself more or get less exhausted than a man from washing and cleaning. These are social services inasmuch as they serve the reproduction of labor power. And capital, precisely by instituting its family structure has “liberated” the man from these functions so that he is completely “free” for directexploitation: so that he is free to “earn” enough for a woman to reproduce him as labor power.28

In this light, one can understand second-wave feminism concluding that women could become “free” from the debasement and devaluation of their labor within the domestic sphere by a mass exodus into the public sector.

It is significant to acknowledge that Dalla Costa and James were not so naïve as to suggest that simply allowing women access to factory jobs or other sectors of industry is enough to enact the “emancipation/liberation” of women. Grasping Marx’s notion of freedom, not with positive connotations in terms of liberty or free will but rather that a laborer is simply “free” from the means of production, they are careful to note that under capitalism all labor is exploited labor:

Work is still work, whether inside or outside of the home. The independence of the wage earner means only being a “free individual” for capital, no less for women than for men. Those who advocate that the liberation of the working class woman lies in her getting a job outside the home are part of the problem, not the solution. Slavery to an assembly line is not a liberation from slavery to the kitchen sink.29

They go on to add:

What we wish to make clear here is that by the non-payment of a wage when we are producing in a world capitalistically organized, the figure of the boss is concealed behind that of the husband. He appears to be the sole recipient of domestic services, and this gives an ambiguous and slave-like character to housework. The husband and children, through their loving involvement, their loving blackmail, become the first foremen, the immediate controllers of this labor.30

Here, the authors expose the naivety of viewing an escape from the factory of production hidden within the home as enough to grant female empowerment. Instead, they turn their attention to challenging the structure of family and the usage of familial relations as a means of inducing women to labor in this manner without a wage. Therefore, Dalla Costa and James call for a woman-centric collectivizing that seeks to expose the double exploitation inherent in housework:

Rather we must discover forms of struggle which immediately break the whole structure of domestic work, rejecting it absolutely, rejecting our role as housewives and the home as the ghetto of our existence, since the problem is not only to stop doing this work, but to smash the entire role of housewife.31

Part of this project of struggle, of smashing the housewife, is to seek a new identity: “In the sociality of struggle women discover and exercise a power that effectively gives them a new identity. The new identity is and can only be a new degree of social power.32 Bearing in mind that it necessary for “feminine work” or “women’s work” to be seen as non-social production occurring outside of the confines of the workday and market, then “the home” does become a place to escape from, as Benston insisted. Given the temporal constraints of this historical moment, the language of breaking out, smashing, and escaping becomes a point of potential systemic rupture, and it is easy to see how the second-wave goal of escaping from the home would be conceived as an unequivocal victory against a system that feeds upon the oppression of women.

Dalla Costa and James further this concept by insisting that feminism also must challenge the perception of “feminine,” “domestic,” or “women’s work” as a devalued category of labor, as well as the beliefs indoctrinated in women surrounding the notion of the “housewife” which suggests that women are naturally better suited to these tasks than direct participation in the labor market. In doing so their theory exposes the value creation process-driven necessity of some quotient of potential laborers being held in a hidden basement of surplus value-producing toil, a group historically populated by women. While the ideology and collectivizing that resulted may be antiquated given evolutions in societal norms and labor force participation, the interpretation of Marxist theory is still relevant in our present moment if we are willing to consider our definition of who the market perceives as “women” or “feminine” workers.

It is now apparent that despite earlier “waves” having made significant strides towards ending sex-based exploitation feminism must—guided by a Marxist critique of capitalist systems and society— reconsider its tactics and collectives. Moreover, capitalist society in our present age wishes us to believe that it is simply natural that groups of the population are oppressed, disparaged, and devalued for some reason determined by biology; some in-born marker. We must be rigorous in challenging this perpetual bias if we would call ourselves students of Marx, whether we go on to self-identify as feminists theorists, queer theorists or any other term meant to identify those who wish to unsnarl the totality of our present moment for the sake of collectivizing.

A rereading of works we can identify as seminal Marxist feminist theory allows us to perceive and reappraise the relationship between societal norms, they usage of “nature,” as an excuse for any groups secondary status, and capital’s need for the valueless reproduction of labor. Whatever name we might now give to what has historically been “women’s work,” regardless of who performs it, and whether it is performed in the home or in the “market” for a precarious pittance to those employed in this capacity, it is this form of devalued reproduction that perpetuates the status quo. Undoubtedly women still share a site of oppression through our shared sex. However, the historic stigma against women and “women’s work” is now deployed by capital in a way that feminizes a much wider range of laborers and posits more than just biologically marked women as the “women of the world.” Technology cannot—at least for now— ameliorate the features of tasks such as childcare, education, or other activities that cannot be mediated by the market directly, tasks that comprise the “abject.” Until we find ourselves in a society imagined only in dystopian fiction where the old are disposed of when their laboring powers wane and future laborers are gestated in robotized wombs, society will find ways to mark individuals as “other,” forcing them to carry-out the duties of the abject. Capital runs on the group historically composed of women toiling as unwaged workers to reproduce labor, and uses feminized labor and the wage gap to maintain profit—it will and it must as long as the system seeks to function, otherwise the accumulation of surplus value comes to a screeching halt.

While women may now have better access to education, training, and the highest paying traditionally “masculine” jobs we risk attaining equity at a point where global labor has been devalued and made precarious to the extent that these coveted jobs have disappeared. I argue that seeking to achieve the end of sexuality inequality—or anything other systemic inequality such as racism, xenophobia, ageism, and ablesim —will be impossible if we fail to consider the relationship between labor-relations and the women’s movement. Not only will looking to achieve equity within an intrinsically sex-prejudice system fail to fully empower women, what gains we do achieve will occur at the expense of shunting off the forms of oppression experienced by our mothers and grandmothers onto different portions of the population.

1. Women’s Voices, Feminist Visions: Classic and Contemporary Readings,ed.Susan M. Shaw (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2007) 11.
2. Guy Standing, “Global Feminization Through Flexible Labor: A Theme Revisited,” World Development27. 3 (1999): 583-602.
3. Endnotes Collective, “The Logic of Gender: On the Separation of Spheres and the Process of Abjection” Endnotes: Gender, Race, Class, and Other Misfortunes 3 (September 2013) 17.
4. American Women: The Report of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women and Other Publications of the Commission, ed. Frances Bagley Kaplan and Margaret Mead, (New York: Scribner’s and Sons, 1965) 25.
5. American Women 187.
6. Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights inModern America (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004) 69.
7. Carol Hymowitz and Michael Weissman. A History of Women in America (New York: Bantam Books, 1978) 322.
8. Hymowitz and Weissman, History of Women 322.
9. Margaret Benston, “The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation: Women as Housewives.”Monthly Review (January 1970) 1.
10. Marilyn Waring, If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics (New York: MacMillan, 1988) 27.
11. Waring, If Women Counted 28.
12. If Women Counted 2.
13. If Women Counted 2.
14. If Women Counted 3.
15. If Women Counted 3-4.
16. If Women Counted 4.
17. If Women Counted 4.
18. Benston, “Political Economy” 9.
19. “Political Economy” 9.
20. Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, “The Power of Women and the Subversion of theCommunity,” All Work and No Pay: Women, Housework and the Wages Due, ed.Wendy Edmond and Suzie Felming (Bristol, London: Power of Women Collective and Falling Wall Press, 1972) 11.
21. Dalla Costa and James, “The Power of Women” 11.
22. “The Power of Women” 11.
23. “The Power of Women” 24.
24. “The Power of Women” 24.
25. “The Power of Women” 27-28.
26. Karl Marx. Capital, Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ernest Mandel (London: Penguin, 1990) 124.
27. “Power of Women” 33.
28. “Power of Women” 33-34.
29. “Power of Women” 35.
30. “Power of Women” 35.
31. “Power of Women” 36.
32. “Power of Women” 35-36.