The Price of Unpaid Female Reproductive, Sexual & Domestic Labour

Radical and socialist feminists have long understood the systematised biological reproduction of the working class through childbirth and childrearing. The female body is seen as the site of reproducing and sustaining workers to enter the capitalist marketplace, churning out laborers at no expense to those who profit off them. Unpaid female reproductive, sexual & domestic labour currently accounts for over £606 billion of GDP in the UK, for example. It is this historical conveyor belt of social reproduction that makes the female body a necessary site of male control in order to keep the systems of power and profit running smoothly.

In other words: unpaid labour is not merely extracted by the capitalist class only from the waged workday; rather, it is also extracted from unwaged domestic workers (that is: women). If corporations and governments were held to account in a meaningful way, and legislated to compensate women’s unpaid domestic and emotional labor, this would have real economic affects. If we were able to fully recognise women’s reproductive labour, our systems would change fundamentally. Failures of political imagination and pushback from Leftist men have drowned out the possibility of “Wages for Housework” since the slogan first appeared in 1970s socialist feminist circles.

As feminists, we posit that any substantial analysis of class and power must clearly articulate how the chains of drudgery keep women shackled to the “private” sphere of domestic and reproductive labour. But this sphere is not private at all. In fact, it is only private for men who have purposefully benefited off the social imposition of the private/public divide in order to be able to act with impunity within the family. It is our position to shine a spotlight on the ways in which women and girls are still controlled by social reproduction behind the veil of privacy and domesticity. We have the potential to upset fundamental power structures and control over the female reproductive system by recognising that the personal is political, and indeed, that the private is not so private after all.