Ideology at Work? Rethinking Reproduction

Abstract

The low value of reproductive labor, and the related “crisis of care,” are often attributed to gendered attitudes about work. This article traces this explanation to the attempted synthesis of Marxist and feminist theories of ideology in the 1970s and offers a sympathetic critique with implications for both contemporary theories of labor and the “new ideology critique.” It reconstructs the explanatory role of ideology in feminist analyses of unwaged housework and tracks its uptake in theories of “reproductive labor” more broadly, via what I call the “naturalization thesis.” While these analyses have been influential, I show that they do not provide a convincing account of either gender oppression or the low value of reproductive labor. I offer an alternative explanation for the latter rooted in labor processes and patterns of capital accumulation and argue for the reintegration of ideology critique with the critique of political economy.

INTRODUCTION

In recent years, the “crisis of care” has emerged as an urgent and persistent problem in Western capitalist welfare states, denoting both a widespread lack of access to care and the poor conditions of care work (Dowling 2021; Fraser 2016). In the United States, for example, childcare is prohibitively unaffordable for many, even as childcare providers are among the lowest-paid workers in the country (Gould 2015; Wolfe et al. 2020). The exorbitant cost of eldercare, meanwhile, is putting increasing strain on countries with aging populations, while subjecting caretakers to grueling hours (Abelson 2023). The COVID-19 pandemic is often cited as a watershed moment that revealed the vast amount of “invisible” labor required to keep society functioning, as facilities like schools and daycares shut down. Although many of these workers were declared “essential,” however, they remain underpaid and vulnerable. Academics and activists have argued that society must “revalue” care and “reproductive labor” more broadly, calling for the “true value” of this work to be recognized and rewarded (Garbes 2022; Poo 2022). Many of these diagnoses and strategies echo those of the Wages for Housework (WfH) campaign, which in the 1970s identified housework as a form of unwaged labor. But why, fifty years later, must movements continually “disclose” (Forrester 2022) the value of this ostensibly invisible labor? What, if anything, should we expect this repeated disclosure to do? And why are these forms of work so persistently underpaid, or unpaid altogether?

This article identifies a critical but overlooked element of the WfH project: its ideology critique of housework, which I argue has informed many subsequent theorizations of gender and labor. It builds on this reading to make two contributions: one to contemporary political theories of labor, feminist and otherwise (cf. Turner and Milders 2021); and one to theories of ideology critique. I show that the dominant contemporary framework for feminist theorizations of labor—the analysis of “reproductive labor” or “social reproduction”—relies more heavily on ideology critique than is often recognized and argue that theories which build on it are liable to import a set of political assumptions as a result. Theorists who have explicitly taken up the mantle of ideology critique to analyze gender oppression, meanwhile, have largely moved away from analyses of labor and capitalism. WfH’s effort to reconcile Marxist and feminist analyses of ideology is particularly instructive insofar as it reflects the concerns of both “old” and “new” ideology critiques, illuminates the challenges of synthesizing the two, and suggests how they might be recombined. Yet as I argue, its account of ideology ultimately does not provide a convincing account of either gender oppression or the low value of reproductive work, and its analysis of unwaged housework, implicitly done by women, becomes muddled when extended to address paid reproductive work done by people of all genders.

Part I of the article reviews the tradition of ideology critique and the “new ideology critique.” It argues for a more careful distinction between analytic and political functions of ideology critique, and for renewed attention to the relationship between ideology critique and the critique of political economy. Part II reconstructs WfH’s ideology critique of housework, showing how it sought to extend the Marxist critique of exchange to the underattended space of the household. Part III tracks how this ideology critique circulated in adapted forms beyond the WfH project itself, eventually coming to serve as an explanatory mechanism in theories of “reproductive labor” more broadly—an explanation I describe as the naturalization thesis. Part IV argues that the naturalization thesis does not offer a compelling explanation for either persistent gender oppression or the low value afforded to reproductive labor. Part V sketches, in brief, a different explanation for the low value of so-called reproductive labor. Instead of treating reproductive labor as a distinctive type of activity, one always-already informed by feminism’s “subject question” (Zerilli 2005), I treat it as continuous with other kinds of work, while attending more closely to the material dynamics of the labor process as organized under capitalism (Braverman 1974). Drawing on empirical studies of the service sector—often described in the feminist literature as “waged reproductive labor” (Duffy 2007)—I argue that low wages in these sectors are driven largely by disinterested processes of capital accumulation rather than ideological mystification. Part VI looks to accounts of waged domestic and reproductive work for a different way of thinking about the relationship between gender, labor, and ideology. The article concludes by suggesting how this approach might open up new ways of thinking about the relationship between feminism and Marxism, and more generally between gender and political economy.

IDEOLOGY CRITIQUE OLD AND NEW

Ideology critique has historically been associated with Marxist thought, and in particular with the Ideologiekritik of critical theory. In this tradition, ideology is usually offered as an answer to a political puzzle: why do people accept, or even participate in, their oppression rather than revolting against it? Ideology is in this sense a “pejorative” term describing the false beliefs which distort the reality of oppression and thereby help to perpetuate it (Geuss 1981, 11; Rosen 1996; Shelby 2003). ¹ While ideology critique receded in the late twentieth century, in recent years many thinkers have sought to recover its insights, often applying them to issues of gender and racial oppression (Celikates 2006; Haslanger 2012; 2017a; 2020; Jaeggi 2017). In both old and new guises, the project of ideology critique is usually understood to be both analytic and political: its purpose is typically to reveal ideology as such, implicitly with the assumption that oppression might thereby be recognized and confronted. This blend of analytic and normative functions is what makes ideology critique potentially powerful—and also what makes it challenging to do well. While critique is often held to be “inherently emancipatory” (Geuss 1981, 2), disaggregating the analytic and political functions of ideology critique can be a boon to emancipatory projects.

Ideology critique, I argue, typically performs two analytic functions in service of a political one. The epistemic function of ideology critique simply identifies ideology at work: it is a knowledge-production project concerned with understanding whether something is ideology (Aytac and Rossi 2023; Sankaran 2020; Rossi 2019). The explanatory function of ideology critique offers an account of how ideology serves to stabilize oppressive or unjust beliefs or practices. The emancipatory function, the most explicitly political, is usually—though not always—thought to follow from the analytic dimensions of critique: the exposure of ideology will enable oppressed people to see their oppression more clearly and hence to challenge it. ²

Rather than recommending or rejecting any function in particular, this article looks more closely at how they relate to one another and identifies the problems that can occur when they are conflated or misaligned. In particular, it argues, a convincing explanation of how ideology works is vital for understanding what ideology critique might plausibly be expected to do. Posing Michael Rosen’s question for ideology critique—“does it lead to good explanations that other theories cannot match?” (Rosen 2000, 399)—I argue that while ideology critique can provide good explanations, it too often does not. Many ideology critiques draw overly tight connections between the epistemic and emancipatory functions, bypassing the vital connecting tissue of explanation that articulates the mechanisms by which ideology actually operates to sustain social relations. The expectation that ideology critique is inherently emancipatory, moreover, tends to suggest that ignorance is the primary force in sustaining oppression and that knowledge of oppression is the crucial barrier to ending it. Yet while disclosure is often necessary for altering the conditions it seeks to reveal (Forrester 2022), it is rarely sufficient. The emancipatory aims of ideology critique, moreover, too often inform its analytic functions rather than following from them, with the effect of distorting both epistemic and explanatory accounts of ideology. The point of this critique is not to displace emancipatory goals, but to put them on firmer footing. Ideology critique may be more accurate—and hence more useful—when it is not expected to immediately serve emancipatory ends.

Clarifying the explanatory capacity of ideology critique also requires more sustained attention to its object. Much of the contemporary revival of ideology critique has, more or less explicitly, sought to redress the “economic determinism” said to plague traditional Marxist theories of ideology. While I am sympathetic to this aim, my concern is that the new ideology critique has overcorrected, disregarding the economic dimensions of social life altogether—even where the topic in question is explicitly economic in nature. Although Sally Haslanger defines ideology as a “cultural technē” that “prevents us from valuing things aptly” (Haslanger 2017b, 166), for example, she treats valuation as an almost exclusively cultural and social phenomenon, neglecting the significance of economic valuation. Similarly, even where Haslanger addresses questions of labor—including the status of care work—she disregards the role of economic factors, suggesting instead that ideology itself has explanatory priority. Haslanger elsewhere rejects as “reductive” accounts which foreground capitalism, proposing instead a view in which different “logics” (of gender, race, etc.) are simply “cooking together” and “different elements have explanatory priority in response to different questions” (2020, 223–6). This causal agnosticism has virtues, insofar as it allows for a valuable degree of pluralism in diagnosing and analyzing social inequality rather than identifying a single primary factor. Yet it can tilt into an overly amorphous account of the relationship between different aspects of social life, offering little specificity about how or when certain elements should have explanatory priority. When different “logics” are treated simply as ingredients in a simmering stew, ideology acquires whatever flavor the theorist chooses.

Even critical assessments of the “new ideology critique,” meanwhile, have largely followed its lead in focusing primarily on instances of gender oppression as exemplary ideological phenomena (cf. Aytac and Rossi 2023; Sankaran 2020). The point isn’t that these aren’t rightly thought of as ideological; to the contrary, analyses of ideology have been vital to feminist thought (Finlayson 2016). But we should be wary of the suggestion, implicit in both the new ideology critique and some responses to it, that gender is distinctively ideological, in a way that other aspects of social life are not. My analysis here echoes aspects of these criticisms—notably, Sankaran’s (2020) skepticism about the causal force of ideology and the necessarily emancipatory function of ideology critique—and joins work by “radical realists” and others (Prinz and Rossi 2017; 2022; Rossi 2019) in affirming the importance of empirical analysis for critical social and political theory. But rather than abandoning ideology critique altogether, as Sankaran proposes, I seek to reintegrate it with the critique of political economy. ³ As I argue, WfH’s creative reappropriation of Marxist ideology critique has lasting significance for theorists of labor and political economy writ large, which have been neglected in part because of the assumption that it offers a theory of gender rather than a theory of work. The subsequent debate, however, has often eschewed the Marxist critique of the wage itself and, as such, has tended to neglect the underlying causes of labor’s (mis)valuation.

IDEOLOGY AT WORK: THE MARXIST-FEMINIST SYNTHESIS

Most contemporary theories of household labor qua labor stem in one way or another from Western feminists’ attempt to provide novel answers to Marxism’s so-called woman question in the 1960s and 1970s (Vogel 2014). Amidst the postwar rise of the women’s liberation movement, many Marxist and socialist feminists hoped to root the analysis of gender oppression in material conditions without suggesting, following the traditional “base-superstructure” model, that gender was “secondary” to the more foundational problem of class oppression. To square this circle, many argued that women had a distinctive class position rooted in the unusual status of housework (Benston 1969; Fox 1980; Glazer-Malbin 1976; Malos 1980). Under capitalism, they argued, domestic labor produces a unique commodity: labor power, the ability of human beings to do work. By cooking meals, cleaning house, and tending to sexual and emotional needs, the (female) unwaged housewife readied the (male) waged worker to return to work each day; by gestating and raising children, they produced the next generation of workers; by doing this work for free, they helped keep wages down. While various theories of housework proliferated, I focus here on a particularly influential intervention: the WfH campaign of the International Feminist Collective (Dalla Costa and James 1975; Federici 2012; Federici and Austin 2017; James 2012).

While the WfH movement has received considerable attention from scholars in recent years, addressing various aspects of this multifaceted project (Forrester 2022; 2024a; Toupin 2018; Weeks 2011), its engagements with feminist analyses of ideology and consciousness have largely been overlooked. Ideology was central to many feminist efforts to explain the persistence of gender oppression after the realization of formal equality, reflected in analyses of “sex roles” and cultural portrayals of femininity, and deployed politically via the practice of consciousness-raising (Atkinson 1970; Firestone 1970; Finlayson 2016; Rowbotham 2015; Sarachild 1970). The housewife came under particular scrutiny as the idealized figure of (white) womanhood in the postwar era, one famously diagnosed by Friedan’s (1963) “feminine mystique.” Thinkers associated with the WfH movement echoed this critique, but rooted the housewife’s emergence in capitalism as opposed to “society” in general. The ideology of housework, they argued, not only consigned women to the home: it also concealed their true status as workers. The movement’s founding document, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James’s “Women and the Subversion of the Community” (1975) explicitly posed the housewife as an answer to the woman question: by identifying women as an unrecognized proletariat, the housewife offered a way to reconcile feminism’s “subject question” with Marxism’s. The analysis of housework brought the traditional project of Marxist ideology critique—identifying capitalism’s distortion of reality and demystifying false appearances in order to awaken class consciousness—to bear on the household, a sphere that Marxists had typically ignored. This, however, would require subtle but significant revisions to the Marxist account of ideology itself.

The “locus classicus” of the Marxist theory of ideology is, Stuart Hall argues, the sphere of exchange, where the proletarian and capitalist appear to meet as formal equals and agree to a mutually satisfactory exchange of labor power for a wage (Hall 1986, 35–6). Marx’s famous descent into the hidden abode of production is itself an act of ideology critique, intended to reveal the domination and exploitation that lurk beneath surface ideals of freedom and equality. Here, the wage itself is the vehicle of mystification: it appears to be fair payment for a given amount of work and a deal to which both parties voluntarily agree. If the apparent freedom and fairness of this exchange purports to justify it, however, ideology does not explain why people work in the first place. The “doubly free” status of the worker does that: proletarians work “in order to live” (Marx 1976, 270; 1978, 204; Roberts 2017). This account is more challenging to apply to the household than it might initially seem. After all, the unwaged housewife doesn’t enter into the ideological sphere of exchange at all. So what mystifies work if the wage does not? And how does the capitalist compel work in the absence of the wage? The theoretical moves of the WfH analysis are best understood as responses to these problems, as elaborated below. Where the Marxist analysis identified exchange itself as a realm of “appearances,” WfH identified ideology in the exclusion from exchange, and wagelessness rather than the wage as a tool of mystification. WfH also drew on ideology to explain why women worked at all. Ultimately, WfH demanded the wage as an emancipatory strategy aimed at reconstituting housewives as a revolutionary class of workers. Importantly, this emancipatory aim motivated the WfH analysis, most significantly informing its explanatory account of gender.

First, WfH argued that the wage structures social life far beyond the direct exchange between the worker and the capitalist. In a society in which wages mediate access to goods necessary for survival, those who don’t earn wages directly become dependent on those who do. So too, Dalla Costa and James argued, does the wage “comman[d] a larger amount of labor than appeared in factory bargaining,” exploiting not only the waged worker but his unwaged wife: the capitalist paid one worker, but benefited from the work done by two (Dalla Costa and James 1975, 23, 28; Ngai 2020; Weeks 2011). Whereas the traditional Marxist critique located ideology in the wage itself, then, WfH argued that the lack of the wage also indexed ideology at work: wagelessness “hid” housework; rendered it “invisible”; “obscure[ed]” the length of the working day; “mystified” the function of the family (Federici 2012, 17, 35; Federici and Austin 2017, 33). It made housework “appea[r] to be a personal service outside of capital,” a favor done by a wife for her husband, instead of labor exploited by capital (Dalla Costa and James 1975, 28).

Second, WfH explained the seemingly “voluntary servitude” (Rosen 1996) of the housewife as motivated by the naturalized ideology of gender. If housework was work, gender was its disciplinary mechanism—backstopped by the authority of nature itself. This is a familiar charge made of ideology: it is said to misattribute social relations to nature, a phenomenon sometimes discussed in terms of “objectification,” “deproblematization,” “reification,” or simply as “naturalization” (Geuss 1981; Jaeggi 2017; Rosen 1996). Here, WfH’s contribution was to link the Marxist analysis of naturalized social relations to distinctively feminist critiques of naturalized accounts of women’s oppression following de Beauvoir (2009). What made housework different from other forms of work, Silvia Federici argued, was the fact that it had been treated as “a natural attribute of our female physique and personality… an internal need, an aspiration, supposedly coming from the depth of our female character” (Federici 2012, 17–8). This ideological trick served an economic function: capitalism had “gotten a hell of a lot of work almost for free,” without which it could not survive (16-17).

Finally, the emancipatory function of the WfH ideology critique was expressed in the demand for the wage. Against charges of economism, WfH were clear that the demand for the wage was a strategy for revealing housework’s ideological status: it was above all “a political perspective” which could “demystif[y] and subver[t] the role to which women have been confined in capitalist society” (Federici 2012, 15; cf. Weeks 2011, 128). The demand also contained a theory of emancipation: it was not only an act of disclosure, revealing an underlying truth (Forrester 2022), but a more active project of redefinition. By redefining housework, WfH also sought to redefine housewives—metonymically standing in for women but often dismissed as merely “nagging bitches”—as “workers in struggle” against capital (Federici 2012, 16). Consider, for example, the litany which begins Federici’s “Wages Against Housework” (Federici 2012, 15):

They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.

They call it frigidity. We call it absenteeism.

Every miscarriage is a work accident.…

Neuroses, suicides, desexualization: occupational diseases of the housewife.

Each statement—each a slogan in itself—names an activity, affect, or identity widely understood as intimate, private, or natural and redescribes it as perceived from the standpoint of the housewife, in terms of labor relations. The demand therefore sought not only to build a constituency of housewives (Forrester 2022), but to interpellate housewives differently: to constitute them as a different kind of subject altogether, as a class of workers conscious of themselves as such. The demand for the wage can therefore be read as an instance of what Amia Srinivasan calls “worldmaking”: a form of representation that aims to remake the world by describing it differently (2019, 145).

While the political function of this demand has been widely acknowledged and, indeed, often embraced, its complexity remains underappreciated. The demand for the wage targeted three dimensions of ideology simultaneously. First, it sought to denaturalize both housework and the housewife: the wage, WfH theorists argued, would simultaneously make housework “visible” and “demystify” femininity, such that both housework and the “the female role that capital has invented” could be refused and work redistributed (Federici 2012, 18–9; cf. Malos 1978; Forrester 2022; Weeks 2011). Wages were therefore explicitly deployed “against housework”—and implicitly, against the housewife as a figure of gendered ideology. Less often noted, however, is the difficulty of using the wage as a tool for demystification, since the wage itself also mystifies. Deployed uncritically, then, the call “wages for housework” threatens to reinforce the idea that the wage is a fair price for labor—precisely the idea that the Marxist ideology critique challenged and that WfH also called into question. In a crucial but largely neglected move, they framed the demand for the wage as also a struggle “against the wage” itself and “the capitalist relation it embodies” (Federici and Cox 1975, 11). If the demand called for wages against housework, in other words, it could also potentially mobilize housework against wages: housework reveals that wages do not actually pay for a great deal of useful labor, and can call into question the idea that the wage is an accurate measure of work’s “true value”—its social or moral worth (Roberts 2017, 172–4; Ngai 2020). The emancipatory function of the demand for the wage therefore entailed a tricky double move, in which the wage must be simultaneously demanded and disavowed.

As the complexity of the demand reflects, the WfH ideology critique wavered between a focus on the housewife (and more broadly gender), housework (and, more broadly, gendered labor), and the wage (and its inverse, wagelessness). This fluidity could be overlooked when these categories coincided in the figure of the unwaged female housewife. But it has proved more problematic as the WfH ideology critique has circulated beyond its initial purview. So too have the problems with an ideology critique rooted in the “woman question” become more glaring. In particular, the movement’s explanatory account of gender has become increasingly unstable as the theory has traveled.

EXTENDING THE CRITIQUE: THE NATURALIZATION THESIS

Theories of housework exploded precisely as the age of the housewife drew to a close. The housewife had always been a historically and racially specific figure, as Angela Davis noted: Black and working-class women had always worked outside the home, often as domestic servants, and labor power could be reproduced in barracks as well as in the family (Davis 1981; Vogel 2014). Even early theories of housework noted that middle-class white women, too, were increasingly working outside the home, especially in the emerging “service sector” (Benston 1969). By the 1980s, the analysis of housework alone seemed increasingly ill-equipped to address the complexity of both labor and gender (Hartmann 1979). While many feminist theorists in this period abandoned the framework of housework altogether, a smaller current of feminist theorists sought instead to extend its insights beyond the household per se. Two traditions—“housewifization” theory and social reproduction theory—have been particularly influential in developing theories of reproductive labor since.

Theorists of “housewifization” drew directly on the WfH ideology critique to explain the persistent “wagelessness” of a wider array of work, focusing in particular on peasant women in the “Third World.” “Housewifization,” the sociologist Maria Mies argued, described the process of “universalizing the housewife ideology” in which women were “defined” as “housewives and sex objects” (1986, 142). Claudia von Werlhof similarly characterized it as a “strategy” for reducing costs: when women were defined as housewives, they could be paid less, while work that was “housewifized” was made subject to a set of poor working conditions (1988, 119). Housewifization theorists also developed the analogies, already incipient in WfH, between women, colonies, and nature: women were the “last colony”; women had been “defined into nature” so their work could be appropriated, while nature itself had been defined as costless (Mies 1986, 119, 142; Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen 1999; von Werlhof 1988). Federici herself would increasingly take up similar arguments, arguing that capitalism had identified women and colonized peoples with nature in order to “justify and mystify the contradictions built into its social relations” (Federici 2004, 17).

As these metaphors and analogies circulated, however, distinctive arguments blurred into a looser set of associations. An initially fertile exchange among theorists of colonization, the household, and nonhuman nature gradually solidified into a series of mimetic arguments built on circular reasoning. The unwaged status of work was said to result from the oppressive portrayal of women, while women’s subordination was conversely explained as stemming from housework’s lack of a wage. Theorists of housework had drawn on accounts of colonial and peasant economies in theorizing housework; in turn, theorists of colonialism and peasant labor drew on arguments about housework (Hall et al. 1978; Mies 1986). These analogies grew still more tangled with the emergence of a parallel strain of ecofeminist work diagnosing the association between women and nature in Western thought (Merchant 1980; Plumwood 1993). With respect to nature, too, arguments often looped back on themselves: housewives were “naturalized” because capitalism needed their work to be unwaged; on the other, housework was unpaid because it was associated with women and thus with nature. Had women been naturalized or nature gendered? Had the household been colonized, or had wage workers in the internal colony been housewifized? As different arguments flattened into a catch-all explanation, “naturalization” became the force lurking behind free, cheap, or devalued work.

This expanded ideology critique would, in time, converge with an expanded analysis of the labor of “social reproduction,” developed via a largely separate strain of socialist feminist thought. These theorists also looked beyond the household to identify a more comprehensive array of activities required for the reproduction of labor power, and gradually expanding still further to describe the reproduction of “people” or “life” in general (Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser 2019; Bhattacharya 2017; Ferguson 2019; cf. Munro 2023). Social reproduction, in Johanna Brenner and Barbara Laslett’s oft-cited definition, is an expansive category, describing “the activities and attitudes, behaviors and emotions, and responsibilities and relationships directly involved in maintaining life, on a daily basis and intergenerationally” (Brenner and Laslett 1991, 314). This work may be organized in various ways, as Evelyn Nakano Glenn observes: both “in and out of the household, as paid or unpaid work” (Glenn 1992, 4). Notably, this definition centers on the product of labor: social reproduction produces labor power and/or life rather than “things,” a distinction echoed in many feminist critiques of both capitalism and Marxism (Benhabib and Cornell 1987; Bhattacharya 2019; Brenner 2000; Mies 1986; Young 1981).

As “naturalization” became a catch-all category, so too, as Lise Vogel notes, have categories like “reproductive labor” become more “metaphorical than analytical” (2014, 196). Invoked to describe low-wage food service jobs alongside unwaged gestational labor, public sector education, and waged cleaning work, the category of social reproduction increasingly strains the limits of conceptual coherence. If waged food preparation can be classified as part of social reproduction, why not industrial agricultural work? Conversely, why does the highly capitalized field of biotechnology not constitute a form of “life-making”? These ambiguities reflect an imprecision about the definition of housework within WfH itself: as one document declares, “We are teachers and nurses and secretaries and prostitutes and actresses and childcare workers and hostesses and waitresses” (Federici and Austin 2017, 44).

What ultimately holds these categories together, I argue, is the residual mark of the “woman question” under which they were originally posed. Reproductive labor is usually defined according to some combination of three criteria, which typically remain implicit: first, the social identity or classification of those performing labor (“women”; “Black women”); second, labor’s status under capitalism (“unwaged”; “value-producing”); and third, the material activity or kind of product generated by labor (“labor power,” “life”). While social reproduction is a technically gender-neutral category defined by the product of labor (labor power; life), for example, it often remains implicitly defined in terms of the subject tasked with this kind of labor (women). Similarly, while “housewifization” ostensibly describes a way of reducing labor costs, it rests on the perception and treatment of people in keeping with certain social categories (women, housewives). The imperative to link the analysis of “reproductive labor” to the “woman question” has often encouraged the conflation of these distinct categories of analysis—even as empirical changes have rendered the relationship between these categories more tenuous than ever.

Although the intellectual traditions of social reproduction theory and housewifization theory largely developed on separate tracks, their insights are often combined in contemporary feminist analyses, which employ expansive definitions of reproductive labor and feature the ideology critique of naturalization as the central mechanism by which these kinds of work are rendered invisible and un(der)paid. This increasingly axiomatic argument explicitly contrasts reproductive labor to other kinds of labor, which are presumably recognized and valued rightly, and attributes its mistaken valuation to a distinctive kind of ideological mystification. It reifies a separate sphere of “reproduction” and its ostensible relationship to both capitalism and gender, casting a wide array of activities in terms of unvalued “women’s work,” regardless of who actually does them or under what conditions. Yet it is precisely in treating reproductive labor as an exception to the rule that this critique tends to obscure the reasons for its persistently low value.

THE LIMITS OF NATURALIZATION

The widening of the theoretical aperture described above rightly seeks to capture major changes to work and gender in the past several decades: the rise of the service sector; informal and wageless work; changing family structures; globalized care chains; and many other phenomena (Cooper 2017; Duffy 2011; Glenn 2010; Hochschild and Ehrenreich 2004). The problem, however, is that an account of ideology developed expressly to extend the critique of waged labor to unwaged work becomes incoherent when applied to categories like “social reproduction” or “reproductive labor,” in which waged and unwaged work intermingle. None of the aspects of the ideology critique developed by WfH—the location of ideology in wagelessness; the explanation of wageless work via a naturalized gender ideology; or the proposal to demystify unwaged work through the demand for the wage—functions in quite the same way when (re)applied to waged work. As I argue, however, the explanatory account of ideology in particular has become an obstacle to understanding the conditions of this work today.

As the category of reproductive labor has expanded to include both paid and unpaid work, a subtle but significant shift in terminology has occurred, from the critique of “unwaged” or “wageless” work to the more subjective categories of “devalued,” “undervalued,” or “invisible” work. This change in language indexes a shift in the epistemic dimension of ideology critique: where “unwaged work” is an empirical category, the description of certain activities as undervalued or devalued registers an unarticulated normative claim about what the value of work ought to be. It becomes an ideology critique rooted in morality (cf. Aytac and Rossi 2023).

The demand for the wage as an emancipatory strategy of denaturalization, meanwhile, has been applied in recent years to a wide range of activities, including sex work, dating, surrogacy, gestation, clinical medical trials, ecological stewardship, artwork, social media engagement, and the work of nature (Battistoni 2017; Cooper and Waldby 2014; Gotby 2023; Jaffe 2021; La Berge 2019; Lewis 2019; Smith and Mac 2018; Weigel 2016). This in itself has raised the specter of unlimited “labor creep,” since according to the criteria of wagelessness, any unwaged activity might plausibly be labor in disguise (Forrester 2024b; Horgan 2021). When the target is waged reproductive work, though, the demand for the wage doesn’t work in the same way. Many strategies for “revaluing” reproductive labor nevertheless echo the structure of the demand for the wage in the effort to make this labor more “visible,” whether through eye-popping estimations of its value or demonstrations which bring workers into the public eye (Gago 2020; Wezerek and Ghodsee 2020). But are reproductive laborers really invisible—at least, any more so than workers in general? There’s a reason Marx describes the abode of production as hidden, after all. If anything, reproductive laborers are often more immediately visible than those engaged in the likes of manufacturing: people do tend to know the person who watches their child or cleans their apartment in a way that they will never know who makes their sneakers or television. Demands which seek to reveal the value of “hidden” work, moreover, tend to suggest that wages can and should reflect the “real value” of labor: that wages should valorize work rather than create the means for refusing it. They abandon the critique of the wage itself as a tool of mystification, and the double move against the wage.

Internal Contradictions

The most significant problem, however, which I address at length in the rest of this section, is the explanatory account which operates as the hinge between the identification of ideology at work and strategies for addressing it. Why is reproductive labor in particular “devalued” even where it is waged? Or, as Federici asks, “why is producing cars more valuable than producing children?” (Shulevitz 2016). The naturalization thesis offers an explanation in two parts: certain activities are “naturalized” as women’s work, such that women are expected to do them for little or no pay, while at the same time, certain activities are seen as less valuable because women do them. In other words, it makes two claims simultaneously—one about why women tend to do certain kinds of work; and one about why certain kinds of work are not valued. Each account of ideology has problems in its own right: the first is overly functionalist; the second, overly idealist. Read together, they offer contradictory accounts of the relationship between capitalism and gender.

On the one hand, the naturalization thesis relies on a functionalist understanding of gender: capitalism needs reproductive labor to be free, and thus, it is made so by the naturalized ideology of gender. This was often stated explicitly by WfH: “housework was transformed into a natural attribute, rather than being recognized as work, because it was destined to be unwaged,” Federici once declared, explicitly analogizing capital to God: “capital create[d] the housewife to service the male worker” (2012, 16–7). Many analyses of reproductive labor make frequent and telling use of the passive voice: housework has been “naturalized,” seen as emergent from women’s essential character; women are “associated with” or “defined into” nature; women and reproduction are devalued (Bhattacharya 2017, 2; The Care Collective 2023; Mies and Shiva 1993; Patel and Moore 2018, 158; Salleh 1997, 130; Shiva 1999, 44). In others, a personified capital seems to act intentionally with the explicit goal of rendering reproductive labor free (Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser 2019, 21; Barca 2020, 6; Fraser 2022, 57, 60, 96). ⁴ These accounts come surprisingly close, given the self-declared break with older models of Marxism, to the “false consciousness” arguments, which once characterized analyses of working-class quiescence—and suffer the same well-documented shortcomings (Cicerchia 2022; Doherty 2023; Hall 1986; Rosen 1996; Weeks 2011). They prompt a new set of questions: How, exactly, does capitalism do all of this? How does it so successfully deceive us, to the extent that we willingly live in the family orders it requires or express ourselves in the gender presentations it finds useful?

This is a familiar stumbling block for Marxist feminism, whose critics have long charged that capitalism alone cannot explain the complexity of gender relations (Barrett 1980; Hartmann 1979; Weeks 2011). What is striking, then, is that recent analyses of reproductive labor do little to respond to these longstanding critiques or to integrate theories of gender developed since. Their ideology critique is largely unreconstructed. The problem is not that such an account is, ipso facto, untenable. One might actively defend functionalism, as some scholars have (Bright et al. Forthcoming; Cohen 1978, 249–96)—but social reproduction theorists typically reject functional explanations (cf. Arruzza 2016). Even the circularity of these accounts is not necessarily a problem: there indeed is something circular about ideology, insofar as it stems from what Ugur Aytac and Enzo Rossi describe as “self-justifying power” (2023, 1215). Ideology is slippery, and its workings aren’t always straightforward (Prinz and Rossi 2017; Shelby 2003). But a claim this strong—that capital is remaking people’s most intimate sense of themselves, on a global scale—demands at least some account of the mechanisms by which ideology operates (Sankaran 2020). It demands, too, an account of what distinguishes capital’s treatment of reproductive labor: if capital has the power to make labor free or cheap through ideological mystification, why would it not simply “naturalize,” and thereby appropriate, more forms of work? Instead, many accounts of reproductive labor simply gesture to a capital that operates as Federici describes it—as an omnipotent, quasi-divine power.

What is less often noted, however, is that analyses which rest on the naturalization thesis are not only inadequate as theories of gender: they also fail as theories of labor. They fail, in other words, to offer a convincing explanation for why certain kinds of labor are poorly paid even when they are waged. The naturalization thesis transmutes the widely recognized justificatory role of ideology into a causal force. In so doing, it reflects another unresolved tension between certain Marxist and feminist accounts of ideology. Most theorists of ideology acknowledge its justificatory role—the way ideology disguises domination or makes it palatable. Some, however, argue that the beliefs of the dominant also have causal effects. Catharine MacKinnon, for example, argues that the way men “see and treat women” makes women what they are, explicitly posing this account as a challenge to what she sees as a Marxist disregard for “attitudes, beliefs, and emotions” (MacKinnon 1989, 5; cf. Srinivasan 2019). Sally Haslanger and Kate Phelan similarly argue that ideology is, in Phelan’s terms, “causal,” such that the “ruling class’s beliefs create reality” (Haslanger 2012; Phelan 2022, 2).

While I do not think that Marxist and feminist accounts of ideology must be distinguished so sharply, much less that they are necessarily incompatible, the synthesis attempted by the naturalization thesis fails to reconcile the tensions of these positions. The naturalization thesis similarly holds that ideas are constitutive of reality, but extends this argument beyond the construction of “women” in general to the valuation of work, through the claim that attitudes toward women actually cause “women’s work” to be compensated less highly. This corollary presents a stronger claim than is often recognized. It suggests that capital itself is hoodwinked by ideology, such that it employs and pays people on the basis of attitudes rather than costs—a claim that implies a substantial revision of the theory of capitalism (cf. Elson and Pearson 1981). If ideology can have such strong causal effects in the realm of “reproductive labor,” it can have nearly any effects, and we should expect them to extend much further. Tellingly, this is also directly at odds with the functionalist tendency described above. To see gender as functional for capital implies that gender is a “merely cultural” phenomenon generated by the more foundational economic base (Butler 1998), while claims that beliefs about gender drive the valuation of labor suggest that ideology has primacy over the economic. The synthesis of these opposing accounts thus generates an internally contradictory view of ideology.

The account of gender as causal for the valuation of labor also has analytical problems in its own right. To explain the globally low value of reproductive work as a function of gender (rather than the reverse) requires a remarkably powerful and unitary theory of ideology capable of producing the same effects worldwide, such that “housewifization” can operate even in societies where the Fordist housewife has never existed. This reliance on the explanatory power of gender can have the familiar effect of collapsing differences between women, while neglecting other kinds of social identities and cultural variations in the perception of gender (Glenn 1992; hooks 2000; Mohanty 2003). There is an important difference between the claim that, because domestic labor or care work is poorly waged and often unpleasant work, it tends to be done by those with the least power in the labor market—frequently subjects of gendered and racial oppression—and the claim that domestic labor is poorly waged because it is done by those who suffer gendered and racial oppression. Similarly, there is a difference between the argument that some people are seen as more suited to certain kinds of poorly paid labor, perhaps because they have indeed been socially “trained” in certain skills (e.g., women are often socialized to be nurturing) and the argument that those kinds of work are poorly paid because the people who typically do them have been “defined into nature.” In the former, ideology is justificatory; in the latter, it is causal. The former claims are often compelling, but I think the latter are not (Fields 1990). Where attitudes are afforded causal significance, ideology critique threatens to become a set of just-so stories that claim to explain everything and end up explaining little.

Here it is worth returning to the reason why WfH developed an account of gender in the first place: they sought to explain why housewives work without wages, in conditions of literal “voluntary servitude.” Leaving aside any assessment of this position, it’s clear why a theory of ideology might seem necessary under such circumstances. But it’s not clear that we need an account of gender ideology to explain why people do reproductive labor for wages: presumably they need to earn money. Has the private equity firm which owns a home healthcare agency convinced health aides that what they are doing, for a clearly defined wage, is not “really work”? Internalized gender norms may compel the housewife to clean the bathroom—but is it motivating the hotel housekeeper? Is the unwaged housewife really the best starting point for understanding waged service work? Detaching the analysis of reproductive labor from the “woman question” under which it has typically been posed, I suggest, allows for sharper and more nuanced analyses of both labor and gender, capable of responding more adeptly to significant changes in both. In the next section, then, I sketch an alternative account of reproductive labor’s low value.

THEORIZING LABOR BEYOND THE WOMAN QUESTION: THE COST DISEASE

To answer Federici’s question—Why is producing cars more valuable than producing children?—my account brackets the identity of the laborer and focuses instead on the relationship between the social relations of capitalism and the concrete labor process, considering the physical activities that certain kinds of work require and how they are organized within a broader structure of production (Braverman 1974; Knights and Willmott 1990). As such, I pose an additional set of questions: What happens when the same activities (cooking, cleaning, caring, etc.) are performed in the commercial service sector as opposed to the personal household? Why do certain kinds of work remain poorly remunerated even where they are waged and even when they are no longer done only or even primarily by women? In addressing them, I build on Davis’s (1981) suggestive but brief comments about the unprofitability of housework with insights from recent social scientific analysis of the service sector.

My epistemic provocation is that understanding reproductive labor may require theorists to take not only the standpoint of the housewife (Hartsock 1998), but that of capital—to consider how and why capital organizes labor as it does. I begin from the basic assumption, articulated by Diane Elson and Ruth Pearson, that “capitalist firms are compelled by competitive forces to select their labour force and constitute their division of labour on the basis of profitability, not ideology” (1981, 92). The goal of capital is to reproduce itself by generating profit, not to reproduce a particular set of gender relations. The former may entail the latter—but it may equally entail the “supersession” of a gendered division of labor, as Davis elsewhere observes (Davis 1998, 173). I also assume that capital is neither intentional nor omnipotent in its ability to coordinate social activity in service of accumulation. Indeed, as research on the service sector shows, certain kinds of labor have proven remarkably difficult to make valuable despite capital’s best attempts.

In contemporary economic thought, the defining characteristic of services, most prominently discussed by the economist William Baumol (Baumol 1967; 2012), is that they tend to resist the kinds of productivity gains which characterize manufacturing. Manufacturing, in Baumol’s account, is “technologically progressive”: improvements in machinery make it possible to make goods more efficiently, such that the same output can be achieved with fewer workers. What Baumol calls “personal services,” by contrast, require “direct, face-to-face interaction” between provider and consumer and, as such, are difficult to mechanize or industrialize—which means that it is difficult to reduce the amount of labor they require (2012, 20). In Baumol’s terms, these sectors are “technologically stagnant.” Increasing labor productivity tends to correlate with decreases in quality: seeing more patients in an hour, for example, usually results in a lower standard of care. Whereas wage increases in technologically progressive sectors can be offset by growing productivity, in labor-intensive sectors, wage increases have an outsized effect on costs—and suppressing wages is the central way to keep costs down. Over time, the disparity between productivity in “technologically progressive” and “stagnant” sectors tends to rise, as efficiencies develop in the former while productivity in the latter remains low. The costs of technologically progressive goods continually decline, while those of labor-intensive services stay even or increase. Even when the costs of labor-intensive services are stable, they tend to rise relative to the persistently falling costs of goods in high-productivity sectors. The result, Baumol warns, is that even as manufactured goods become increasingly affordable, including once-luxury items like cars and computers, services like healthcare will become increasingly unaffordable—even as workers in the latter sectors are paid relatively low wages. Baumol names this phenomenon the “cost disease.”

While critical theories of service work have addressed the cost disease, its significance for the analysis of “reproductive labor” has gone largely unrecognized (cf. Benanav and Clegg 2018; Smith 2020). Baumol’s analysis suggests that the low value of reproductive work stems from the fact that its physical qualities tend to resist the productivity gains associated with industrialization and automation. Healthcare is an exemplary case of the cost disease for reasons long noted by feminist theorists: care fundamentally requires attention and responsiveness to the needs of others (Tronto 1993; 2013). While someone who is ill may not require constant attention, for example, their need for care is likely to emerge unpredictably, such that someone must always be available. Similarly, children need to be watched more or less continuously: there is no way to shorten the time of this task, and a given person can supervise only so many children at once. These and other activities which are difficult to make efficient and hence difficult to make profitable tend to attract less capital investment. Where they are privately provided, the effort to contain costs and eke out profit margins often translates into intense wage suppression (Winant 2021). Other sectors are so labor-intensive as to attract no capital investment at all. The household, on this view, is a remnant of capitalism’s reorganization of labor writ large; housework, a catch-all for activities that can’t be profitably organized and aren’t provided by states (Battistoni Forthcoming; Gardiner 1975; Gonzalez and Neton 2014; Mann 1980).

If the cost disease analysis draws attention to the qualities of certain labor processes, it also casts doubt on claims that the low wages of reproductive labor result from a lack of social recognition or a “cultural technē” that has “masked” what’s valuable (Haslanger 2017b). To the contrary, it is in part because people do value care so highly, and hold it to high standards, that they are likely to resist productivity-enhancing measures which reduce cost at the expense of quality (e.g., “care bots”). Many people pay astronomically high costs for care; indeed, care is the most significant expense of many households (Child Care Aware 2022; DeParle 2021). The problem, then, is not that people are unable to recognize the value of this work or unwilling to pay for it. Moreover, while care work constitutes an exemplary case of the Baumol effect, it also occurs in sectors that are perceived very differently. Baumol originally considered the paradox of low wages and high costs via the example of a string quartet, observing that to play the same piece of music in both 1850 and 1950 would require the same number of people working for the same amount of time. Classical music hardly seems a candidate for devaluation through ideological naturalization: it is held in high social esteem, is seen as a pinnacle of high culture, requires years of specialized training, and has historically been dominated by men. Yet it suffers from precisely the same cost disease (Baumol and Bowen 1966, 167–71).

Baumol insists that “there is no guilty party here”: although the cost disease is often attributed to corruption or greed, these are not its causes (2012, 26). Nor is it, I argue, the result of ideological mystification. It is, rather, an unintended consequence of the way that particular labor processes develop and diverge within a broader structure of economic organization: the result of what Baumol describes as “economic forces so powerful that they constantly break through all barriers erected for their suppression” (1967, 415). It is because capital allocates investment according to the prospects of profitability that labor-intensive services are costly and underprovided while manufactured goods are cheap and prevalent. Instead of requiring increasingly complex accounts of the ideological apparatus that capitalism constructs in order to appropriate women’s work, this account offers a parsimonious explanation: the low value of “reproductive labor” stems from the disinterested processes of capital investment rather than a plot to keep reproductive labor in particular cheap or persistently patriarchal attitudes toward “women’s work.”

The reminder that the social worth of many kinds of work is not reflected in the wage remains powerful. Restoring the double move embedded in WfH’s demand for and against the wage can help us recognize that capitalism will never pay what any labor is “really worth,” because that is simply not what the wage does. This recognition can point our inquiry in another direction: asking not why reproductive labor in particular is devalued, but why is any work valued as it is. What system of valuation places such a low value on the work of generating and sustaining human life—and why would we trust it to value any other kind of work correctly?

A Baumolian analysis of service work answers only some of the questions posed above: it explains why certain kinds of work remain poorly paid, but not why women, and women of color in particular, remain disproportionately responsible for them. The point is not that gender differences are not significant in the division of reproductive labor: they demonstrably are. Nor is it that ideological perceptions play no role in the distribution of labor: they surely do. But attending to labor processes rather than the identities of laborers offers a less functionalist and essentializing account of the relationship between labor and gender and makes space for more precise analysis. In some instances, gender may be the most significant factor in the distribution of labor—but in others, race, ethnicity, caste, or other social distinctions may play a larger role (Glenn 1992; 2010; Nadasen 2023). This thin account of economic logics must also be supplemented with richer analyses of waged work in the areas designated “reproductive labor.”

REEXAMINING THE IDEOLOGY OF WAGED WORK

As I have argued, the ideology critique developed to analyze unwaged work is not well suited to waged work, even where tasks are similar. Instead of extending the analysis of unwaged housework, we might look to theories of waged reproductive work itself. Consider, for example, Claudia Jones’s ([1949] 1995) analysis of the position of Black women employed as domestic workers. In Jones’s account, Black women’s overrepresentation in domestic work stems from a number of factors: the low earnings of Black men barred from union jobs, the realities of de facto and de jure segregation, the legal exclusion of domestic workers from labor protections, and the macroeconomic demand for labor. Ideology, too, plays a role: Jones notes that Black women were stereotyped as “mammies” who would put others’ children above their own; treated as “natural slaves”; and subjected to racist prejudice and “chauvinism” ([1949] 1995, 111–2). Rather than presenting racial and gender ideology as universally causal, as the naturalization thesis does, in Jones’s account it is selectively justificatory. Black women’s overrepresentation in domestic service is overdetermined (Althusser 2006).

Jones also offers a view of ideology not as invincibly seamless and protean, capable of shape-shifting to fit any requirement, but rather, as contradictory and open to contestation. As she observes, ideologies which affirm women’s “place in the home” are belied by the fact that Black women work in other people’s kitchens ([1949] 1995, 118). Similarly, while Davis agrees with other socialist feminists that the ideology of the housewife is a capitalist invention, she argues that it is glaringly contradicted by the status of immigrant white and Black working-class women, who not only worked for wages but often worked outside the home altogether, in factories and fields (Davis 1981). Frances Beal, too, notes that although Black women were also “browbeaten” with the ideal image of the white housewife, “the reality of the degrading and dehumanizing jobs that were relegated to us quickly dissipated this mirage of ‘womanhood’” (Beal 2008, 167). Instead of drawing on the ideology of the housewife to explain the conditions of all women workers, as the housewifization critique does, these Black feminists argue that simply observing the variety of work that women actually do can serve as the basis for denaturalizing gender ideology in its own right.

The experiences of paid reproductive workers also cast further doubt on the account of ideology as a causal force in motivating work. Paid domestic workers do not usually believe that they are naturally suited to housework or that they are actually “part of the family” that employs them—even if they are skilled at giving that impression, and even if they do genuinely care for their charges (cf. Fields 1990; Nadasen 2015; 2021; 2023). Geraldine Roberts, a domestic worker and organizer working in the late 1960s, explains her performance of emotional labor and subservience not in terms of internalized self-perception but recognition of the external power of her employer: “we were afraid we may not have the job—that we might get fired.” Similarly, Carolyn Reed, the head of the Household Technicians of America, formed in 1971, states bluntly: “I don’t want a family. I need a job.” (Nadasen 2021, 170–2). These workers are motivated, in other words, not by an internalized sense of gendered duty but by the familiar power of employer over employee: the power of the sack, given force by the double freedom of the worker. Whether they think they are suited to the work or not, people have to work in order to live. In explaining why people do reproductive work for low wages, in other words, the ideology critique of the wage itself is more useful than the ideology critique of unwaged work. If anything, as Premilla Nadasen argues, the language of “care,” by evoking emotion and intimacy, threatens to “obscure[e] the inequality and exploitation” that underpin this work (2021, 166). When ideology is presented as a causal rather than justificatory force, it threatens to wrongly characterize involuntary aspects of labor as forms of voluntary servitude. In such cases, ideology critique itself might come to function ideologically in its own right, insofar as it mischaracterizes the forces which serve to compel work and potentially misdirects efforts to challenge them (Aytac and Rossi 2023; Finlayson 2015).

Finally, to see ideology as justificatory rather than causal suggests a different approach to political strategy, one that places less emphasis on the representation or recognition of labor as a means by which to “revalue” it. Describing childcare or nursing as work rather than nature does not make those activities less labor-intensive; it does not reduce the number of people required to care for a given number of children or patients. Nor is sheer appreciation for the social value of this work likely to compel private employers to raise wages, as the COVID-19 pandemic illustrated all too clearly. Widespread cultural recognition of “essential workers” as “heroes” did not generally translate into improved working conditions or better pay—as workers themselves, clearly undeceived by this ideology of heroism, pointed out (Leyva Del Río and Medappa 2020). Rather, the downward pressure on wages must be challenged through political action which seeks to change working conditions and which ultimately tackles the structural conditions in which labor’s value is determined by its ability to generate profits. Again, Jones saw no need to disclose that waged domestic service was work: it clearly was. Instead declaring housewives to be workers of the world, she appealed to the Communist Party to organize them as such ([1949] 1995, 121). Her multifaceted analysis of domestic work led to a similarly broad set of prescriptions, ranging from formal labor organization to legislative change.

My argument for reviving the ideology critique of the wage is not an argument for reviving classical Marxist ideology critique in its entirety. Theorists of the new ideology critique are right to be wary of arguments which too quickly explain cultural dynamics as a function of capitalist logics, as I have argued above. Those seeking to reassert the centrality of capitalism might articulate more carefully the mechanisms by which capitalism is said to remake social life, and the inevitably messy and even contradictory ways in which it does so. Yet conversely, the new ideology critics should take care not to dispense with the analysis of labor or economic factors altogether out of fear of economic determinism. More generally, rather than simply thinking about the relationship between feminism and Marxism as overarching and internally coherent “systems” which might be more or less happily “married” (Barrett 1980; Hartmann 1979; Young 1981), those returning to the questions of this unresolved debate might instead imagine more complex interrelations of capitalist social relations with both material practices and social identities.

In this respect, WfH has made lasting contributions. Despite their tendency to make sweeping claims about capital’s invention of the housewife, WfH theorists also theorized more specific mechanisms by which the material practices of labor habituate us to gender. As James observed, in a riff on Beauvoir, “women are not born housewives, but can only become housewives because we are trained to it almost from birth” (2012, 169; cf. Federici 2012). These comments suggest a more complex account of ideology as not handed down by capital from on high but instantiated through the materiality of rituals and practices. This view resonates with Althusserian insights, anticipates elements of Judith Butler’s later theorization of gender, and suggests connections to feminist phenomenology (Althusser 1971; Butler 1990; Young 2005). So too do some currents of contemporary social reproduction theory point toward different ways of considering the processes by which capitalism constitutes people as gendered and laboring subjects, even as subjectivity informs practices of both labor and politics (Arruzza 2014; 2016, 27; Ferguson 2019; Weeks 2018). Rather than abandoning the analysis of ideology as it pertains to political economy, then, theorists might attend more closely and precisely to the ways that gender and racial formation inform the composition of different sectors, industries, and workplaces, and the way that gender itself is forged not only in the household or hospital but in the factory, the mill, and the office (Elson and Pearson 1981; Fernandes 1997; Salzinger 2003; Wills 2018; Winant 2021). While I cannot explore these ideas in detail, I want to suggest the importance for theorists of ideology critique who proclaim an interest in “material practices” (cf. Haslanger 2015; 2017a) of attending more closely to labor—one of the most pervasive, regular, and indeed compulsory practices of daily life.

CONCLUSION

The problem with many feminist analyses of labor is not that they continue to tell us what we “already know,” per Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s influential critique of “paranoid reading” (Sedgwick 2003, 123), but rather, that they tell us what we think we know, while failing to actually clarify the dynamics of political and economic life. The ideology critique of housework and the housewife advanced by WfH and adopted by many feminist theorists of labor since stands as a vital contribution to theorizing the politics of both gender and labor. But this critique of ideology does not, in itself, offer a convincing account of gender oppression. Nor, I have argued here, does it provide an adequate account of why certain kinds of work, frequently described in terms of reproductive labor, tend to remain unwaged or poorly paid. While I have argued that low wages are rooted in material labor processes and capitalist political economy, my account does not purport to explain the persistently gendered, and often racialized, division of labor in many care sectors, nor to suggest that this division has no ideological component. These dynamics demand further study and are likely to involve a range of factors, as Claudia Jones suggested, including macroeconomic phenomena like deindustrialization and migration; domestic family policies which structure gender relations; public support for costly, labor-intensive goods; and broader patterns of labor market segmentation. Here, too, feminist thought has a wealth of resources to offer, which might be productively paired with empirical research (cf. Forrester 2024a; Gonzalez and Neton 2014; Winant 2024).

My purpose in this article is not to provide a comprehensive account of the contemporary relationship of labor, capitalism, and gender, but rather, to emphasize the need for theorists to reexamine this relationship rather than repeating a now-routine set of explanations. What is clear is that as changing patterns of education and employment reshape the traditional demographics of work and family, theorists will need to keep pace rather than returning repeatedly to theories of gender forged over half a century ago. Emancipatory projects need what Haraway (1991, 187) describes as “better accounts of the world”—and this is precisely why we must continuously and vigorously interrogate the critical explanations we have to hand. More broadly, theorists of all stripes might take a harder look at the accounts frequently proffered to explain the stability of seemingly unjust social systems and consider alternative possibilities (Bright et al. Forthcoming; Cicerchia 2022). Indeed, the kind of sympathetic but critical evaluation I have undertaken here is relevant more generally to theorists interested in understanding the relationship between critique, diagnosis, and prescription within political movements. Rather than reinstating the position of the omniscient scholar, developing better accounts of the world calls for humility: for being willing to revisit and revise inherited wisdom, whatever its source; for the imperative to renew, rather than simply rehearsing, the insights of the past in service of advancing political thought in the present.