1 - Introduction: From the sociology to the science of housework

Summary

Most of the world's labour isn't manufacturing articles in factories, farming the land or the sea for food, providing financial, social or health care services, engaging in technological flights of fantasy, or thinking and analysing all of this. Most of human labour is housework. How do we define housework? Most obviously, housework is concerned with the care of people's bodies and the material environments in which they live. Feeding, washing, cleaning are its core. But then, as societies become more complex, other items get attached to the core: housework struggles under the weight of an assigned additional responsibility for moral values, social relationships and psychological health.

In her historical study of housework in Ireland, Joanna Bourke raises the complication that:

‘[H] ousework’ suggests work inside the ‘house’, although not necessarily one's own house, but what are the boundaries of the ‘house’? … In rural households, what is farm work and what is housework? … Is an Irish woman who feeds chickens from her front door performing housework if the eggs are to be consumed by the household rather than sold?

For the purposes of her book, Bourke decides to define housework as ‘those uses of household time, outside the arrangements of paid markets, which are aimed at the production of goods and services that might be replaced by market goods and services’. This line, that housework is a form of unwaged labour providing services that otherwise could be paid for, has been adopted by those few economists who have taken housework seriously. The same case was central to the wages for housework movement which emerged in tandem with the women's movement in Europe and North America in the late 1960s. These two movements, for paid housework and women's liberation, were associated because one can never get very far discussing housework (in this case, two paragraphs) without landing on what ought to be an earth- shattering statistical fact, that more than three-quarters of the world's unpaid domestic work is done by women.