Susan Ferguson, Women and Work: Feminism, Labour and Social Reproduction, Pluto Press, 2020. £75 hbk, £18.99 pbk.
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Ferguson sets out here with three objectives: to explore the relationship between women and work, to 'renew' social reproduction feminism, and to provide the basis for a 'truly mass, pluralist, anti-capitalist movement' that places 'the fight against oppression at the heart of the class struggle' (8). The link between the first and the second, rooted in 'Marxian' value theory, is that women's domestic and reproductive work is essential to capitalist accumulation, while the link between the second and third, rooted in intersectionality theory, is that anti-capitalist politics must be founded on an alliance between all oppressed groups. There is no link between the first and third, so there are some flaws and inconsistencies in the argument, but they are instructive in themselves: all in all, given the significance of 'social reproduction', and the recent spate of work informed by it, the book is timely, and counts as essential reading.
Ferguson's starting point is 'the different ways in which feminists have understood work, and women's work in particular, in relation to questions of freedom and oppression' (2). In the first half of the book she explores a range of feminist writings, mostly from the 1790s onwards, organised in terms of three 'trajectories': equality (broadly, liberal), critical equality (broadly, socialist), and social reproduction. The latter, she will argue, succeeds 'in showing us what it will take to create a society in which work is an expression of freedom, not oppression' (3). It does so in that it 'directs our attention to the interaction between unpaid and paid labour, positioning these as different but equally essential parts of the same overall (capitalist) system. As such, it sees the division and ongoing relation between the two forms of labour, not the nature of gendered labour, as the central feminist problem' (3). Equality feminism, which sees the gendered division of labour as enforcing the vulnerability of women to the arbitrary rule of husbands and fathers, and breeding dependence on men, argues for education and access to waged work as the remedy, while critical equality feminism shares its focus on dependence on men, but goes beyond it by arguing that waged work for women is only a first step, as women's exclusion from socially productive work can only be reversed by overthrowing capitalism. At the same time, it 'shares social reproduction feminism's critique of capitalism's separation of productive from reproductive work, but ... does so without elaborating a political economic analysis of unpaid women's work' (4). This is a deliberately restricted organising framework: Ferguson recognises that it doesn't incorporate race, sexuality or postcolonial/decolonial themes. She grafts on a brief discussion of black American feminist writing, a little awkwardly, but says she is 'unlikely to do justice to the rich discussions now percolating around settler colonialisms and sexualities in particular within a relatively short book' (7), and sets them aside at this point. The subsequent declaration that while the three perspectives that are the subject of the book share not only 'a common impulse to attend to the gendered dynamics of work', but also a fatal oversight: the tendency to ignore work's racial dynamics', and that 'the modern European "housewife" is not simply the product of patriarchal capitalism. She is the product of a racist, colonial patriarchal capitalism' (18) is left hanging, only to make an unexpected return later, as a central part of a rather different argument to the one with which the book begins.
Ferguson begins by setting out a standard Marxist feminist position - that while pre-capitalist societies were patriarchal to one extent or another, with the advent of capitalist production women lost what autonomy they had previously enjoyed, and became subject to stronger and more systematic forms of male authority. Crucially, their reproductive labour was subordinated to capitalist production, but 'remained outside the immediate value circuits of capital' (that is, while it made a crucial contribution to the production of commodities for profit, it did so indirectly by providing, supporting and sustaining from day to day the workers directly engaged in capitalist production). This is specifically a feature of capitalism, and is the source at the same time of female subordination: 'With the rise of capitalism, the market (that is, the competitive dynamic among capitalists and independent producers) determines production' (11). Unwaged subsistence work necessarily continues, but is marginalised 'because the work of subsisting, of reproducing life, is no longer possible unless one, first, has access to a wage (or other forms of money income)'. 'But,' Ferguson stresses, 'here's the crux: to become waged labourers is itself a feat of labour - of women's labour specifically': while in feudal peasant societies women's work varied across region and time ('women performed the bulk of the tasks required to meet subsistence needs ... women - in a more direct and transparent way than men - reproduced human beings', 12), with the transition to capitalism 'women's reproductive labour is radically reorganized' (12). Following Silvia Federici and Maria Mies, she argues that male authority, exercised through the family and through the state, is oriented to turning women's bodies 'into an instrument for the reproduction of labour and the expansion of the workforce' (13, citing Federici, 2004: 91):
'A burgeoning capitalist state (supported by the Catholic Church and male-dominated craft guilds) variously terrorized, compelled, and induced women to accept new forms of sexist degradation and domesticity. Poor women faced persecution as witches and saw their work as midwives and healers sidelined, diminishing women's control over abortion, live births, and contraception. The state also intensified women's social vulnerability, introducing changes to inheritance laws, criminalizing prostitution, legalizing rape and battery, and ousting women from certain forms of paid labour' (13).
In a process stretching over three centuries, and marked by resistance and struggle, 'modern gender relations (characterized by the separation of a public sphere of industry and politics from the private domestic sphere, and women's relative isolation within and primary responsibility for the latter) eventually prevailed' - 'housewification' or 'housewifization' (Mies, 2014: 100-110) 'takes hold first within bourgeois households, which could absorb the loss of the wife's income from paid labour or professions. Only later, in the mid- to late nineteenth century, after the introduction of protective legislation and a period of wages climbing relative to the cost of living, do increasing numbers of married working-class women become full-time housewives' (14).
This succinct account (which might have been amplified by reference to Picchio, 2004, and Roberts, 2017) is followed by a brief discussion of Marx, and the 'grounding insight of historical materialism: human labour or work - the practical, conscious interaction between people and the natural world of which they are part - creates the social processes and relations that, in turn, determine the processes and relations of that labour' (16); set in this context, Ferguson adds, 'theories of labour attentive to the dynamics of gender offer valuable insight into understanding the forces of oppression and freedom' (17).
The starting point for Ferguson's survey of feminist writing, then, is the general proposition that women's reproductive work 'was radically separated from direct production for capitalists and thereby devalued' (17). While this is fine as far as it goes, as a broad orienting perspective, it has some limitations, even as a provisional organising framework that will subsequently be problematised. First, the exclusion of women from socially productive work has always been the exception rather than the rule; second, not all unpaid reproductive work is done by women (think, stereotypically, or car maintenance or vegetable gardening, or less stereotypically of the tendency, limited though it may be, towards a greater sharing of domestic tasks); third, as is evident in the history of domestic service and in the present 'care economy', some reproductive work done by women is waged, and importantly directly involves a workforce differentiated by ethnicity and country of origin; fourth, some key areas of reproductive work are in the hands of the state, and funded by taxes on private enterprise, with midwifery, health care more broadly, and education prominent examples; fifth, substantial areas of reproductive work are in the hands of private enterprise - in health care and education, for those who can afford it, and more generally in the availability of convenience food, cooked food and so on; and sixth, not only is it a long time since the majority of married working class woman were full-time housewives, if they ever were, but as I discuss at length elsewhere, the household and the family too are very much changed (Cammack, 2020). The majority of these features emerge in discussion as the narrative proceeds, but as a result Ferguson's approach is unsettled and called into question.
So, then, to the review of the three 'trajectories' in the first half of the book. The short version is that it is fatally weakened by the fact that a key text said to herald the social reproduction perspective does no such thing. The long version, I'm sorry to say, is as a result excessively long. First, a short chapter on 'The Rational-Humanist Roots of Equality Feminism' centres on a discussion of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797); the most recent text considered is Mary Ann Radcliffe's The Female Advocate (1799). The focus is more on the question of whether Wollstonecraft was a radical democrat or a utopian socialist than on the value equity feminism places upon paid work: the line of argument is that Wollstonecraft was a radical democrat who valued work as opposed to idleness and the pursuit of frivolous pleasures, not that access to paid work on equal terms as such is important. Ferguson shows that Wollstonecraft wrote approvingly of a male breadwinner - female housewife model, and saw women in paid work as the exception rather than the rule. In this she follows the argument she made in a paper published in 1999, but not referenced here (Ferguson, 1999). The following chapter echoes the same paper, in contrasting the 'political-economy' approach of socialist feminism with the rational humanist approach of equity feminism. Apart from referring to Engels, it considers only the Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain Them in Political, and thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery (published by Longman & Co in 1825 under the sole name of William Thompson but described by its author as conveying the ideas of Anna Wheeler as much as his own), and various works of Flora Tristan, who died in 1844. The Appeal is presented as an important precursor of the social reproduction perspective (the only one, in fact, in this part of the book, as she presents Tristan as a critical equality feminist). I'm not convinced, so for me the link between the two halves of the book is weak.
The Appeal is a classic text, whose principal target was James Mill's argument in his 'Article on Government' for the Supplement to the Encyclopedia Britannica that there was no need for women to have the vote as their interest was 'involved either in that of their fathers or in that of their husbands'. It is available online at the LSE Digital Library. Ferguson does not do it justice, so I urge you to read it in full, for its comprehensive demolition of Mill's argument, and to bear in mind in doing so that it would be over a century before all women gained the vote in the UK, while many of the other inequalities it addresses are still in place. She sees Thompson and Wheeler as significant forerunners of social reproduction feminism because they approached women's work in the home 'through the same lens contemporary political economists were applying to capitalistically "productive" work'. As to its structure, the main text of the Appeal was prefaced by an 'Introductory Letter to Mrs Wheeler'. Part I (1-20) then examined the general argument of Mill's 'Article on Government' as regards political rights, and Part II addressed three questions in turn: Is there an identity of interest between men and women? If there were, would it justify the denial of civil or political rights to women? Can 'equality of enjoyments, proportional to exertion and capabilities' be guaranteed without equal civil rights, and can these in turn be secure without equal political rights? Having answered all these questions in the negative, Part II ended with a Concluding Address to Women (187-211). As Ferguson summarises it, the first nine chapters 'develop familiar arguments promoting rationalism in the face of arbitrary power, equal education and employment opportunities for men and women. They also make a forceful argument for equal political representation' (44). 'Only in their "Concluding Address to Women" do [the authors] switch tracks, announcing a surprising caveat to all they have just presented: even if a rational system of government replaces arbitrary rule, "still evils encompass you, inherent in the very system of labour by individual competition"' (44-5).
She goes on to explain that Wheeler and Thompson observe that women 'contend with two physiological disadvantages making perfect equality impossible: they are weaker than men, and they bear and suckle children':
'Yet, according to the authors, the problem of inequality does not lie with these facts of biology. It lies with the competitive system that organizes the production and distribution of wealth - capitalism. That's because capitalism has no internal mechanism for accommodating those unable to work for a wage. As a result, women are forced to rely on men for their well-being. This, in turn, renders them vulnerable to men's strength and influence at home where: "Superiority in the production or accumulation of individual wealth will ever be whispering in to man's ear preposterous notions of his relative importance over women." Meanwhile, "women's peculiar efforts and powers for the common benefit of the race are looked upon as an additional badge of inferiority and disgrace"' (45).
So, she says, Wheeler and Thompson argue for a communal and cooperative system of wealth creation to undercut this 'tendency to gender inequality inherent in capitalism', which 'releases women from the individual responsibility for meeting people's subsistence needs and raising the next generation from the isolated individual household, making it instead a concern of the community as a whole' (45): 'it is precisely in highlighting the relation of women's reproductive activities to the productive sphere that Wheeler and Thompson theoretically clarify and deepen a general utopian socialist commitment to communal living and working' (46). In short: 'Conceiving women's domestic work as socially productive but systematically degraded and devalued under capitalism - and attributing women's oppression then to the relational dynamic between reproductive and productive work - marks a turning point in the history of feminist theories of labour' (47).
This claim that the Appeal attributes women's oppression to the relational dynamic between reproductive and productive work, and is therefore foundational for social reproduction theory, is important, but imagined - there is no basis for it in the text, which is more a critique of patriarchy than a critique of capitalism. Ferguson's skewed account distorts its argument, and misses some of its most original content: the Appeal does argue that women rely on men for their well-being, and does advocate the communal provision of reproductive work, but it does not anywhere argue that women's domestic work is systematically degraded and devalued under capitalism: its analysis of the relational dynamic between reproductive and productive work is set throughout the book in the context of male (patriarchal) authority, and a critique of the family. Nor is there any 'switching of tracks' in the 'Concluding Address', as the goal of a new society based on 'Mutual Cooperation in large numbers' as a means of overcoming the evils of 'Individual Competition' is announced in the Introductory Letter (ix-xi), and addressed at length in the main text in relation to the three questions around which it is organised. Just as importantly, the early chapters do much more than 'develop familiar arguments promoting rationalism in the face of arbitrary power, equal education and employment opportunities for men and women'. They describe a situation in which women as wives are 'parcelled out amongst men, from the necessity of sexual delights to each of their masters, one weak always coupled and subjected to one strong' (54, emphasis mine): 'Had the constitution of things been such that man was independent of women for the gratification of his most imperious passion, that he had no sexual desires, and that women perpetuated the race without his intervention in the way of pleasure; we should have seen women, because weaker, converted every where by the law of force, into field and manufacturing labourers for the exclusive benefit of the males' (55, emphasis mine; cf. 97). Hence, the Appeal asserts, the 'male-created laws, depriving women of knowledge and skill, excluding them from the benefit of all judgement and mind-creating offices and trusts, cutting them off almost entirely from the participation, by succession or otherwise, of property, and from its uses and exchanges', and its lynchpin, the institution of marriage, and the marriage code (57-8). And in a further twist, 'the threat of withdrawal of sexual favours as a means to induce men to practice benevolent kindness will not work because 'Woman is more the slave of man for the gratification of her desires, than man is of woman' (61 - emphasis original). At the heart of the Appeal, that is to say, is a focus on sexual politics, invoked to explain the role of the wife as the husband's 'involuntary breeding machine and household slave' (63); and one, moreover, who is enjoined to conceal her own desires, practice passivity, and not only to obey her husband, but to swear upon marriage to do so (64-6). In such a regime, 'the whole moral structure of the mind of man is perverted' (71). In short: 'To erect uninquiring obedience into a duty, to weave it into a pretended code of morals, to degrade the mind into an acquiescence in injustice, is the last triumph of unrelenting despotism, rarely exacted from ordinary slaves, and reserved, without any sort of necessity, for the degradation of the domestic female slave in marriage' (73).
This sustained analysis, running to more than 50 pages in total (54-107) of the 'isolated breeding establishments, called married life' (103-4), leads into an equally sustained argument that goes beyond the case for equal representation to suggest that if women were to enjoy a monopoly of political power, government would be both different, and better. Not that Thompson and Wheeler advocate a women-only franchise. They do not. But the manner in which they argue the case is fundamental to an appraisal of the character of their feminism. First: 'From the casualties of gestation, women are necessarily at least for a considerable portion of the time, more stationary and confined than men, and more inclined to mere local and personal sympathies' (123; cf. 177-8, 180-81). Second, only the practice of political rights and engagement with the wider world will prompt the development of wider and more other-regarding attitudes: if women have limited intellectual horizons, it is a result of imprisonment in the domestic sphere, not of innate nature. Third, government would be better if women alone, rather than men, had political rights. While insisting that they would never advocate the exclusion of either group, they consider the hypothetical question, 'To which of the two would it be most useful, most tending to preponderant good - to which of the two, to women or to men, seeing that the happiness of both would be effectually promoted by the exercise of political power in the hands of either, ought the exercise of political rights to be confined?' (126), and they go on to discuss the contentious suggestion that
'the tendency of the organization* of women, from want of equal muscular strength with men, being rather to intellectual and sympathetic pursuits than those of brute force, they would be more apt in legislation to cultivate the arts of persuasion and peace, and to avoid offensive wars, one of the greatest scourges of humanity' (128; *organization: according to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles, 'The action of organizing, or condition of being organized, as a living being; also, the way in which a living being is organized; the structure of an organized body (animal or plant), or of any part of one; bodily (rarely mental) constitution').
The argument that follows, in which an element of essentialism is tempered by frequent insistence that woman's apparently inherent character arises from forced isolation under patriarchal control, is that women would be more likely than men to 'sympathize with all, and to promote the happiness of all', precisely because their lesser physical strength would make it impossible for them to rule by force, and oblige them to rule by persuasion, and to 'calculate in every thing the effect of their regulations on the feelings, on the real happiness, of men, as much of as women' (132). By way of a contrast between the 'warrior' and the 'nurse', and some ingenious reasoning on the relative time subtracted from attention to the duties of government by men through debauchery and women through gestation, they reach the conclusion these cancel each other out, and that women's probity leads to good outcomes, and men's activity to worse. Under the benevolent rule of women, 'human life would gradually transform itself into a paradise' (146). In short, if 'a community of rational beings ... were driven to the absurd necessity of investing all political rights exclusively in the stronger or the weaker portion of the race ... it would be evidently the interest of the whole to choose the weaker part, women, rather than the stronger part, men, for the exercise of such rights, both as electors and elected' (147). There is more here, then, than a forceful argument in favour of equal political representation.
It is at this point, not in the Concluding Address, that the issue of the incompatibility of benevolence with 'individual competition' is developed for the first time at any length:
Most certain it unfortunately is, that under the present system of labor and exertion by individual competition, the interests of all, first for existence and then for splendor, are put in such rude opposition to each other, that they render almost impossible the developement (sic) to any great extent of these kindly feelings of joy in the welfare of others. Till other arrangements of "mutual cooperation" are formed, by means of which personal interests, either for the supply of immediate wants or of all desirable conveniences, instead of being opposed to feelings of benevolence as they now are, shall move uniformly in the same direction with them, all, or almost all the cheap and delightful pleasures of sympathy and benevolence must be lost to mankind: so difficult is it for the bulk of men to extend their views, in opposition to immediate interest, into the distant consequences of actions in the doubtful future. While sympathy urges us to rejoice in the expressive smiles of another's happiness, the habitual distrust of competition tells us such unhappiness was procured at our expense, or that it upbraids our unsuccessful efforts, or is treading on the heels of our superior success. All the blessings of life are turned into curses' ( 149-50).
In what follows, it is clear that 'individual competition' is a feature as much of pre-capitalist as of capitalist societies. Again, the starting point is the 'tremendous advantages' the man enjoys in relation to the woman: 'superior muscular strength and the continued attention which he is able to devote to the object before him, uninterrupted by the pains and disabilities of gestation' (155). Individual competition in earlier times, when such 'knowledge' as there was was rudimentary and easily acquired, greatly favoured men: 'muscular strength and activity were the qualities most useful, not only for the comfort but for the very existence of the race. ... The advantages of strength were little shared with any other quality; they were super-eminent': 'In all rude stages of society, women, even under the most free system of individual competition, must enjoy less than men, because their physical powers of acquiring are less than those of men' (156). As the argument proceeds, it is clear the 'individual competition' to which Thompson and Wheeler refer is competition, in this context between men and women, in relation to 'access to every art, occupation, profession, from the highest to the lowest, without one exception, to which their inclination and talents may direct and may fit them to occupy. [Women] ask the removal of all restraints and exclusions not applicable to men of equal capacities' (159). Similar formulations recur throughout this section: 'arts, professions, pursuits, and offices', 'trades and professions' (163), 'arts, trades, professions, and employments' (164), and 'all species of knowledge and industrious occupations' (167). It is worth noting, too, that in the closing pages of the response to the third question, when the Appeal returns to the theme of strength versus knowledge, it strikes a new note, as relevant now as it was then: 'As society improves, and in proportion to its improvement, the respect paid to brute unconscious force or to muscular strength decreases'. This is due, its authors say, to two concurrent forces: 'the one is the comparative inefficiency of mere force to produce useful results, even in the production of articles of wealth, when compared with knowledge and skill applied through machinery; the other is the new class of pleasures, continually increasing and expanding over a large portion of society, arising from intellectual culture' (183):
'For three fourths of the operations, professions, arts, trades, now carried on by men, the muscular strength of women, moderately developed by healthful physical education, would be abundantly sufficient: the fourth, requiring the greatest developement of strength, would naturally be conducted by those amongst men who excel in that quality, and who are generally deficient in inclination to intellectual pursuits. Qualities are estimated by their utility: mere force or strength is now, and will be every day, of less and less comparative importance with intellectual qualities, from the decreasing benefits to be derived from it. In point of fact, even now the most ill-paid offices are those in which mere force is required: force is so common and brutish a quality, that when not joined with skill, or not necessary to self-defence or attack, it is used as a means of support or influence by those only who have not within their command any more influential or better remunerated qualities (184, emphasis mine).
'These favorable tendencies of civilization,' they conclude, 'proceeding from the decreased usefulness of mere force and from the new class of pleasures produced by mental culture, have doubtless mitigated the abuses of savage strength despotically used by man over woman. The progression of the same circumstances must doubtless in the end annihilate this abuse' (184-5).
So, returning to Ferguson's interpretation, it is not necessary to do more than quote the continuation of the few words she quotes (in italics below):
'Still evils encompass you, inherent in the very system of labor by individual competition, even in its most free and perfect form. Men dread the competition of other men, of each other, in every line of industry. How much more will they dread your additional competition? How much will this dread of the competition of your industry and talents be aggravated by their previous contempt of your fabricated impotence? Hard enough now, they will say, to earn subsistence and to acquire comforts: what will it be when an additional rivalship, equal to perhaps one third of actual human exertion, is thrown into the scale against them? How fearfully would such an influx of labor and talents into the market of competition bring down their remuneration?' (197).
The 'Address' goes on to refer to the despotism of the marriage contract, and the risk of 'misery on the death of the active producer of the family, and occasional injustice from domestic abuse of superior strength and influence, against which no laws can entirely guard' (198); a second section that Ferguson quotes goes on (again, with the continuation placed in italics): 'Superiority in the production or accumulation of individual wealth will ever be whispering into man's ear preposterous notions of his relative importance over women, which notions must be ever prompting him to unsocial airs towards women, and particularly to that woman who co-operates with him in the rearing of a family' (198); the system of mutual cooperation is recommended because it removes the 'dread of being deserted by a husband with a helpless and pining family', or seeing your daughters forced into prostitution (199); within it, men would procure sexual gratification only from 'the voluntary affection of woman' (201); women would cease to be dependent on individual men for their daily support' (201, emphasis mine); the partial equality arising from 'the scheme of isolated individual, or family' (202) would be superseded; exclusive individual wealth would disappear; under the system of mutual cooperation by large numbers: 'Women ... are no more dependent on men, or on any individual man, than men are on women' (203, emphasis mine); the ability to produce 'a few more broadcloths or cottons' every year and the increase of the race, 'kindly and skilfully nurtured' would be equally valued, with the latter no longer looked upon (as Ferguson quotes (45), 'as an additional badge of inferiority and disgrace' (206). In short, the focus is not on the division of labour in capitalism, but upon the iniquities of a social system founded on patriarchal power exercised within the individual family as the basic unit: hence the appeal to a time when 'the association of men and women in large numbers for mutual benefit shall supersede the present isolated mode of exertion by individual competition' (207, emphasis mine).
In short, the Appeal does not found or prefigure social reproduction feminism in the manner that Ferguson supposes. It suggests an alternative hypothesis, and it is far from alone in doing so: far from there being a close affinity between patriarchy and capitalism, in that male authority maintains the household as an individual, isolated, female-labour intensive institution that supports capitalist accumulation through the provision of essential reproductive work, this collective exercise of patriarchal power, reflected in the keeping of a woman at home for the provision of sexual services on demand, the unequal provision or denial of civil and political rights, and the virtual exclusion of half of the adult population from the 'public sphere', is a drag on capitalist development, and on social productivity generally. And if so, 'equality' feminism and 'critical equality' feminism are both primarily critiques of the family, in its predominant heteronormative form, differentiated by their positive and negative attitudes respectively towards the class-divided character of society and of the families that together constitute it, and Ferguson's social reproduction feminism is flawed. It is right to insist on the fundamental relatedness of paid and unpaid work, its centrality to the trajectory of capitalist development, and its historical and current implications for 'women's work', but wrong to assume that this is a necessary feature of capitalism in its yet to be realised fully developed form. Quite the opposite - it is an index of its as yet incomplete overcoming of all previous 'primitive' forms of production, and consequently incomplete reshaping of social relations, and centrally those in the family, to bring them into line with the 'capital relation' (Cammack, 2020).
To take this position does not invalidate the material Ferguson has brought together here - but it twists the kaleidoscope, so that the pieces fall into a different pattern. So, to take one example, it makes for an integrated account of the domestic labour process: its complex transformation as a site of production, reflected in a shift from independent artesanal production to a subordinate role, where it continues, in propertyless households at the end of production chains controlled by capital; its primitive character, arising from the limited scope for the division of labour and application of capital to the production process; the significance all the same of both the application of technology and the hiring of labour to carry out basic reproductive tasks; the consequence, grotesque from the point of view of capital, that the capacity of the newly affluent to hire domestic servants was as likely to lead to the ornamental idleness of the wife as it was to an influx of women into the professions; the ethnic dimension, varying from time to time and place to place but still a constant feature of patterns of recruitment into this work; and its increasing operation on a global scale, still heavily inflected by ethnic difference. At the same time, the isolated housewife is vulnerable to physical and mental abuse that is hard to police and hard to escape from; and whole households can become chronically recalcitrant to the task of providing labour to capital - both themes, incidentally, that feature strongly in the Appeal. All of this suggests that the appropriate starting point for any theory of social reproduction has to be the problematic status of the family, the class-divided character of households, the primitive character of household production, and the significance of transformation over time in accordance with the broader logic of capitalist development.
From this perspective, the two short chapters that follow, on 'Equal Work For and Against Capital' and 'Anti-Racist Feminism and Women's Work' respectively, are more hindered than helped by the use of the tripartite framework, but still offer some insights. Frances Willard, writing in 1888, imagines a time when 'the housekeeper, standing at the telephone, will order better cooked meals than almost any one has nowadays, sent from scientific caterers by pneumatic tubes' (62) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman advocates the provision of heating, lighting, feeding, clothing and cleaning by 'large, well-managed business combination', while calling at the same time, disconcertingly for the present day reader, for 'black women to be trained in domestic service (and black men as farm workers) as part of a scheme to manage "negroes below a certain grade of citizenship"' (62-3). Kollontai is cited on the transformation of domestic production in pre-Bolshevik Russia, with her position described, along with that of Zetkin, as being that women's work at home 'has no economically significant productive function' (67), but crucial aspects of their positions are left out: Kollontai argues that the household is no longer a direct producer of value, and states earlier in the same 1920 article on 'Communism and the Family', that 'The family is ceasing to be necessary either to its members or to the nation as a whole' (emphasis original). The old family structure is now merely a hindrance', primarily because the 'old' male breadwinner model has been defunct for sixty years. Zetkin differentiates between the exploitation of proletarian women (arguing like Kollontai that the 'family wage' is a thing of the past, so working class women are forced into factory work), and the discriminatory exclusion of middle class women from the liberal professions (where she echoes Thompson and Wheeler): the primary reason for the slow progress of reform in Germany, she says, is that 'men fear the battle of competition in the liberal professions', and later elaborates: 'The demand for equal professional training and the demand for equal job opportunities for both sexes ... means nothing less than the realization of free access to all jobs and the untrammeled competition between men and women. The realization of this demand unleashes a conflict of interest between the men and women of the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia. The competition of the women in the professional world is the driving force for the resistance of men against the demands of bourgeois women’s rights advocates. It is, pure and simple, the fear of competition' ('Proletarian Women and Socialism', 1896, at https://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1896/10/women.htm). Ferguson devalues their contributions with the comment that 'their theoretical framework did not prove fully adequate to the task they set' (66), but you can equally say that the framework deployed is inadequate to the task of addressing the issues they raise, as their remarks on 'breadwinners' suggest. The same is true of the very short chapter on anti-racist feminism, which is equally thrown off kilter by the attempt to locate the material covered in the tripartite framework, and relate it to the 'social production' approach in particular, when the simple but important point is that the majority of black women in paid work in the early decades of the twentieth century were domestic servants in the homes of white women, so the centrality of domestic service as paid work was a major theme among black feminist writers. This doesn't equate to identifying the dependence of capitalism on women's unpaid labour, so the 'social production' trajectory category remains empty. Beyond this, Sadie Alexander (Ph.D,1921) is described as endorsing 'the equality feminism path to black women's liberation' (77). But she echoes Kollontai on the lack of value generated by such services as remain in the home (quoted p. 77), and argues in a passage not cited that working class solidarity can overcome racial friction: 'Could the great mass of white workers learn from industrial experience with Negro workers, that they have a common purpose in life, the protection of their bargaining power, and that the sooner the untouched wealth of Negro labor is harnessed into this common purpose, the better can they bargain with capital; then and only then would industrial racial friction subside' (Alexander, 1930, in Guy-Sheftall, 1995: 90). It's fair overall to conclude that the first half of the book opens up a wide range of literature for discussion, with much of it likely to be new to many readers, but at the same time that some of the interpretation is unreliable.
The second half turns directly to 'social reproduction feminism', and comes briskly to Mary Inman's contention that women produce 'the most valuable of all commodities ... Labor Power' and her important insistence that we take into account 'the whole system of production' (Inman, 1940: 149, 137 (emphasis original), cited pp. 89, 90); Benston's pioneering 1969 account of the political economy of women's liberation, recently reprinted, with its strong emphasis on the primitive character of domestic production; the seminal 'Wages for Housework' movement of the 1970s; and Sheila Rowbotham's Woman's Consciousness, Man's World (1973), from which she highlights a fundamental insight into the contradictory character of the relationship between the family and capital:
'The family is both essential for capital's reproduction, and a brake on its use of human labour power. The values of the family are both rational for the maintenance of the inhuman relations of commodity production, and irrational for a system of organising the reproduction of human labour which is completely designed to produce commodities efficiently and has freed itself from all earlier property relations' (Rowbotham, 1973, cited p. 100).
The treatment of Rowbotham is illustrative of the strength and weakness of the book as a whole. On the one hand, the argument reflected here and its theoretical hinterland are not explored in detail (it gets just over two pages in total), nor are they fully taken into account. On the other, the brief discussion flags a crucial issue in a book that readers may not know (I confess to never having read it), but is readily available second-hand, and recently reissued by Verso (2014). Ferguson provides an important service of recuperation. The main purpose of the chapter, though, is to specify further the character of social reproduction feminism. It identifies the organization of capitalist production, with gendered labour as its outcome, as 'the key obstacle to women's freedom' (85); it 'attributes women's oppression to the position of [unpaid domestic labour] relative to paid work, and its contribution to the overall process of wealth creation', so that 'unpaid domestic labour and capitalistically 'productive' labour interact to sustain a society dominated by capital', and women's oppression is 'a feature of the very anatomy of capitalist productive relations - specifically, of the capitalist-prescribed reconfiguration of the relation between paid and unpaid forms of work', and hence 'systemic' in capitalism. This being so, 'patriarchal relations both shape and are shaped by the economic dynamics of dispossession and accumulation' (86-7, all emphasis original). And it concludes that the focus on housework that dominated in the 1970s debates was not enough. The renewal of social reproduction feminism, which is the subject of the chapter (Seven) that follows, involved 'decentering housework from its theoretical apparatus and foregrounding the contradictions posed to capital by the reproduction of life, whatever social relations are involved in that reproduction' (105).
Chapter Seven then addresses this issue as follows:
'Black feminists [have] repeatedly pointed out that not all housework is unpaid and not all women see the work they do to maintain their households (and communities) as inherently oppressive. They also insisted that women are oppressed in ways that have nothing to do with housework. Clearly, then, unpaid housework must be abandoned as the universalising category on which the explanation of women's oppression pivots' (106). Progress from this point will be made 'first by unhinging the understanding of social reproductive labour from an ahistorical and universal concept of housework; and second, by emphasizing and developing the insight about the relation of capitalistically "productive" to "unproductive" work. It further involves doing the necessary empirical and theoretical work to consider how that relation is structured not just by sexism, but by social oppression in general, from racism and heterosexism to settler colonialism, ableism and beyond' (107). Ferguson then proposes two starting points for renewal. The first is intersectional theory, introduced by way of an account of the black lesbian socialist feminist Combahee River Collective, with its focus on 'the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking' (Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977, cited p. 108, emphasis original). The second is Lise Vogel's Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Towards a Unitary Theory (1983): 'For Vogel, there is no singular cause of women's oppression. Rather, there is a systemic logic that sets the conditions whereby people reproduce themselves, on the one hand, and capital produces value, on the other. And women's oppression is sustained and shaped in the working through of the dynamics of that relationship' (110).
Ferguson is engaged here in a process of theory construction, intended to 'renew' social reproduction feminism, and the choices she makes have significant consequences. The key point she takes from her reading of Vogel is that she 'lays the necessary groundwork for socialist feminism to develop a robust politics of class solidarity' by declining to make unpaid housewives the revolutionary feminist subject, and adopting instead an approach that 'allows for an expanded and diverse array of potential class subjects : all those who work to (re)produce the lives of workers - whether their labour is paid or unpaid, whether they do so within households, in state institutions, or as community organisers' (110-11). This leads first to a 'broad definition' of social reproductive labour:
'It includes the daily and generational work women have typically performed of giving birth to and raising and caring for children. But it also includes the work people do to sustain themselves and others as human beings more generally, their individual and collective "survival strategies through which people accomplish their basic life tasks"' (111, quoting Johanna Brenner, Women and the Politics of Class, Monthly Review Press, New York, 2000, p. 86).
And second to a new perspective on the fundamental contradiction at play: 'While on a fundamental level, the goal of social reproductive labour is to support life, it is at the same time a means of ensuring adequate supplies of labour power are available to support capital' (111).
For good or ill, depending on your perspective, there is as shift here away from value theory and the interaction between paid and unpaid work in capitalism to a contrast between supporting life, and supporting capitalism, and Ferguson is clear about the consequences. Oppression is no longer understood 'exclusively in terms of the wagelessness, isolation, or other hardships of women's housework'; instead, 'this perspective calls for a broad exploration of the mechanisms and social relations involved in the devaluation of life-making'. So while gender relations are part of it, 'they can and will take many different forms including, but not limited to, private patriarchal households in which women perform the bulk of the unpaid labour'. And other 'social oppressions' are part of it too - racism, and 'the heterosexism and transphobic dynamics that marginalize and threaten the life-making activities of queer and gender nonconforming people'. So:
'While Vogel does not explore the multiplicity of dynamics that are potentially in play, many who draw on her work have begun to do the theoretical and empirical work that reveals how the devaluing and dehumanization of life necessary to capital is entangled with racist, heterosexist, settler colonial, and other oppressive relations' (111).
Unlike Thompson and Wheeler, Ferguson really has switched tracks here. She has not only decentered unpaid housework but women as well, and uncoupled the issue of solidarity from value theory and the relationship between paid and unpaid work. By adding intersectionality and stirring, she has not only introduced a strategy of alliance-building that is disconnected from capital's supposed need for unpaid reproductive work, but also broken entirely with her opening insistence on the need, for the household if not every individual, to earn a wage (12). In doing so, she has gone too far (for an alternative path, see Sibaugh, 1996-7, Smith, 1999, and Nilliasca, 2011). And she has returned, though not by way of detailed analysis, to themes she declared at the outset were outwith her compass: 'race, sexuality, and postcolonial/decolonial themes' have suddenly emerged at the centre of the stage. What is more, the analysis simultaneously opens to a global level, and calls into question at least one side of the contradiction between life-making and capitalism itself. So as the discussion continues 'toward an integrative theory' (111-14) and to 'capitalism's complex social reproductive labour' (114-18), Ferguson first restates the position she takes from Vogel: 'neither the gender division of labour nor the family itself constitute the material basis of women's oppression. Rather, the necessary but contradictory relation of the reproduction of labour power to capitalist accumulation does. That is, women's oppression in capitalist society is grounded in a socio-material or structural logic of capitalist reproduction that limits the possibilities for women (and all people) to be free' (113); then she leaps to the level of what I would call the world market: 'The full scope of labour power's reproduction is governed through local, national and global regimes that draw on various forms of oppression in ways that tend to reinforce them. In ensuring the social reproduction of certain communities is more precarious and under-resourced than others, they facilitate the reproduction of an unequal, internally divided workforce' (114); then, by way of a discussion of internal and transnational migration that draws on Alessandra Mezzadri and Melissa Wright, she concludes that 'as labour becomes ever cheaper to reproduce, it also becomes in fact "disposable" ... . That is, there comes a point at which labour is socially reproduced at the barest minimum costs, at which the simultaneous reproduction of human life and the production of capital is less of a contradiction' (118). Quite so, and the implications for her argument are profound. If the reproduction of labour power is viewed, as it is here, on a global scale, then its determining feature is that capital can always draw upon disposable reserves, so that from the point of view of capital there is no contradiction between its need for labour power and the threat it poses to life-making: the contradiction is all on the other side. This was precisely Marx's view: capital 'asks no questions about the length of life of labour-power’, as ‘experience generally shows to the capitalist … a constant excess of population’ (Marx, 1976: 376-7); and the same point is made by Martha Gimenez: capital has no need for 'people', but only for exploitable workers, and continuous competition-driven improvements in productivity displace workers all the time, so that there is always a 'surplus' population (Gimenez, 2019: 134, 247, 293; Cammack, 2020, 86-90). Not only that, but the only passage that Ferguson quotes at length from William Thompson (not from the Appeal, but from his earlier Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness: Applied to the Newly Proposed System of Voluntary Equality of Wealth, Longman & Co, 1825) says much the same:
'To the capitalist, as such, neither the useful employment or even the existence, to say nothing of the health, moral, and happiness, of his fellow-creatures, are objects of more regard than the employment of inferior animals or machines. Besides supporting them and making themselves happy by their labour, will they yield him an average profit? If so, let them be employed. Will they not yield him an average profit? Then let them live or die as they may: with their well-being he has nothing to do' (p.46, cited here p. 47).
Over the course of these chapters, then, the character of Ferguson's analysis shifts appreciably, ending on terrain she had initially vacated, and does not explore in depth. After all this, the final chapter is narrowly focused, and arguably redundant. As Ferguson argues it, 'autonomous' Marxists claim that domestic labour is productive for capital as it produces labour power, while the Marxian social reproduction school insists that only workers directly exploited by capital are engaged in productive labour. ln politics, she claims, this disposes autonomous Marxists to focus on movements and struggles outside the arena of capitalist production (in the 'social factory') and the creation of alternative spaces, while the Marxian social reproduction school looks to struggles 'to break the system from within'. But the debate is largely definitional - both sides think that domestic labour produces surplus value indirectly, via the production of labour power, and Ferguson, from the Marxian social reproduction perspective, argues for struggles that 'forge and strengthen ties of solidarity across community and workplace movements (130)', so the two sides coincide on the importance of struggles around reproductive labour. Common sense suggests that while some areas of life remain outside the totalising control of capital, but under threat, it is as important to defend those spaces as it is to contest capital directly in the workplace: so autonomous Marxists advocate the 'social reproduction strike' (which incidentally bears some resemblance to Thompson and Wheeler's 'mutual cooperation by large numbers'), and Ferguson and the Marxian social reproduction school agree that it is 'incredibly important' (133). I don't believe for a minute that autonomous Marxists reject the other possible forms of community-based struggle she goes on to outline, and after describing the example of a teachers' strike she concedes that: 'There is nothing within autonomist Marxist feminism that suggests this form of organizing should not be supported - and those associated with the tradition have been supportive of the teachers' strike and similar struggles' (136). For all the heavy theoretical lifting promised earlier (8), one crucial argument from Marx is missing: that capital seeks ‘to subjugate every moment of production itself to exchange and to suspend the production of direct use values not entering into exchange, i.e. precisely to posit production based on capital in place of earlier modes of production, which appear primitive from its standpoint’ (Grundrisse, p. 408). This suggests that far from depending upon production outside its direct control, capital must destroy it in order to achieve the conditions for its continued self-reproduction (much, in fact, as Rowbotham appears to have suggested in 1973). On the one hand this reinforces the need to resist its encroachment on 'everyday life'. But on the other it undermines the idea that in doing so capital is exacerbating an underlying contradiction, and destroying the conditions on which it depends.
References
Alexander, Sadie Tanner Mosell. 1930. 'Negro Women in Our Economic Life', in Beverley Guy-Sheftall, ed, Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought. New Press: New York.
Benston, Margaret 2019 [1969], ‘The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation’, Monthly Review, 71, 4.
Cammack, Paul. 2020. Marx on social reproduction. Historical Materialism, 28, 2, 76-106.
Federici, Silvia. 2004. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia: New York.
Ferguson, Susan. 2016. Intersectionality and Social Reproduction Feminisms: Towards an Integrative Ontology. Historical Materialism, 24, 2, 38-60.
Gimenez, Martha E. 2019, Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays, Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.
Inman, Mary, 1940. In Woman's Defense. Committee to Organize the Advancement of Women: Los Angeles.
Mies, Maria. 2014. Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour. Zed Books: London.
Nilliasca, Terri. 2011. 'Some Women's Work: Domestic Work, Class, Race, Heteropatriarchy, and the Limits of Legal Reform', Michigan Journal of Race and Law, 16, 377-410.
Picchio, Antonella. 1992. Social Reproduction: the Political Economy of the Labour Market. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
Roberts, Adrienne. 2017. Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare: Feminist Political Economy, Primitive Accumulation, and the Law. Routledge: London.
Rowbotham, Sheila. 1973. Woman's Consciousness, Man's World. Penguin: Harmondsworth.
Silbaugh, Katharine. 1996-7. 'Turning Labor into Love: Housework and the Law', Northwestern University Law Review, 91, 1, 1-86.
Smith, Peggie R. 1999. 'Regulating Paid Household Work: Class, Gender, Race, and Agendas of Reform', American University Law Review, 48, 4, 851-923.
Ferguson's starting point is 'the different ways in which feminists have understood work, and women's work in particular, in relation to questions of freedom and oppression' (2). In the first half of the book she explores a range of feminist writings, mostly from the 1790s onwards, organised in terms of three 'trajectories': equality (broadly, liberal), critical equality (broadly, socialist), and social reproduction. The latter, she will argue, succeeds 'in showing us what it will take to create a society in which work is an expression of freedom, not oppression' (3). It does so in that it 'directs our attention to the interaction between unpaid and paid labour, positioning these as different but equally essential parts of the same overall (capitalist) system. As such, it sees the division and ongoing relation between the two forms of labour, not the nature of gendered labour, as the central feminist problem' (3). Equality feminism, which sees the gendered division of labour as enforcing the vulnerability of women to the arbitrary rule of husbands and fathers, and breeding dependence on men, argues for education and access to waged work as the remedy, while critical equality feminism shares its focus on dependence on men, but goes beyond it by arguing that waged work for women is only a first step, as women's exclusion from socially productive work can only be reversed by overthrowing capitalism. At the same time, it 'shares social reproduction feminism's critique of capitalism's separation of productive from reproductive work, but ... does so without elaborating a political economic analysis of unpaid women's work' (4). This is a deliberately restricted organising framework: Ferguson recognises that it doesn't incorporate race, sexuality or postcolonial/decolonial themes. She grafts on a brief discussion of black American feminist writing, a little awkwardly, but says she is 'unlikely to do justice to the rich discussions now percolating around settler colonialisms and sexualities in particular within a relatively short book' (7), and sets them aside at this point. The subsequent declaration that while the three perspectives that are the subject of the book share not only 'a common impulse to attend to the gendered dynamics of work', but also a fatal oversight: the tendency to ignore work's racial dynamics', and that 'the modern European "housewife" is not simply the product of patriarchal capitalism. She is the product of a racist, colonial patriarchal capitalism' (18) is left hanging, only to make an unexpected return later, as a central part of a rather different argument to the one with which the book begins.
Ferguson begins by setting out a standard Marxist feminist position - that while pre-capitalist societies were patriarchal to one extent or another, with the advent of capitalist production women lost what autonomy they had previously enjoyed, and became subject to stronger and more systematic forms of male authority. Crucially, their reproductive labour was subordinated to capitalist production, but 'remained outside the immediate value circuits of capital' (that is, while it made a crucial contribution to the production of commodities for profit, it did so indirectly by providing, supporting and sustaining from day to day the workers directly engaged in capitalist production). This is specifically a feature of capitalism, and is the source at the same time of female subordination: 'With the rise of capitalism, the market (that is, the competitive dynamic among capitalists and independent producers) determines production' (11). Unwaged subsistence work necessarily continues, but is marginalised 'because the work of subsisting, of reproducing life, is no longer possible unless one, first, has access to a wage (or other forms of money income)'. 'But,' Ferguson stresses, 'here's the crux: to become waged labourers is itself a feat of labour - of women's labour specifically': while in feudal peasant societies women's work varied across region and time ('women performed the bulk of the tasks required to meet subsistence needs ... women - in a more direct and transparent way than men - reproduced human beings', 12), with the transition to capitalism 'women's reproductive labour is radically reorganized' (12). Following Silvia Federici and Maria Mies, she argues that male authority, exercised through the family and through the state, is oriented to turning women's bodies 'into an instrument for the reproduction of labour and the expansion of the workforce' (13, citing Federici, 2004: 91):
'A burgeoning capitalist state (supported by the Catholic Church and male-dominated craft guilds) variously terrorized, compelled, and induced women to accept new forms of sexist degradation and domesticity. Poor women faced persecution as witches and saw their work as midwives and healers sidelined, diminishing women's control over abortion, live births, and contraception. The state also intensified women's social vulnerability, introducing changes to inheritance laws, criminalizing prostitution, legalizing rape and battery, and ousting women from certain forms of paid labour' (13).
In a process stretching over three centuries, and marked by resistance and struggle, 'modern gender relations (characterized by the separation of a public sphere of industry and politics from the private domestic sphere, and women's relative isolation within and primary responsibility for the latter) eventually prevailed' - 'housewification' or 'housewifization' (Mies, 2014: 100-110) 'takes hold first within bourgeois households, which could absorb the loss of the wife's income from paid labour or professions. Only later, in the mid- to late nineteenth century, after the introduction of protective legislation and a period of wages climbing relative to the cost of living, do increasing numbers of married working-class women become full-time housewives' (14).
This succinct account (which might have been amplified by reference to Picchio, 2004, and Roberts, 2017) is followed by a brief discussion of Marx, and the 'grounding insight of historical materialism: human labour or work - the practical, conscious interaction between people and the natural world of which they are part - creates the social processes and relations that, in turn, determine the processes and relations of that labour' (16); set in this context, Ferguson adds, 'theories of labour attentive to the dynamics of gender offer valuable insight into understanding the forces of oppression and freedom' (17).
The starting point for Ferguson's survey of feminist writing, then, is the general proposition that women's reproductive work 'was radically separated from direct production for capitalists and thereby devalued' (17). While this is fine as far as it goes, as a broad orienting perspective, it has some limitations, even as a provisional organising framework that will subsequently be problematised. First, the exclusion of women from socially productive work has always been the exception rather than the rule; second, not all unpaid reproductive work is done by women (think, stereotypically, or car maintenance or vegetable gardening, or less stereotypically of the tendency, limited though it may be, towards a greater sharing of domestic tasks); third, as is evident in the history of domestic service and in the present 'care economy', some reproductive work done by women is waged, and importantly directly involves a workforce differentiated by ethnicity and country of origin; fourth, some key areas of reproductive work are in the hands of the state, and funded by taxes on private enterprise, with midwifery, health care more broadly, and education prominent examples; fifth, substantial areas of reproductive work are in the hands of private enterprise - in health care and education, for those who can afford it, and more generally in the availability of convenience food, cooked food and so on; and sixth, not only is it a long time since the majority of married working class woman were full-time housewives, if they ever were, but as I discuss at length elsewhere, the household and the family too are very much changed (Cammack, 2020). The majority of these features emerge in discussion as the narrative proceeds, but as a result Ferguson's approach is unsettled and called into question.
So, then, to the review of the three 'trajectories' in the first half of the book. The short version is that it is fatally weakened by the fact that a key text said to herald the social reproduction perspective does no such thing. The long version, I'm sorry to say, is as a result excessively long. First, a short chapter on 'The Rational-Humanist Roots of Equality Feminism' centres on a discussion of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797); the most recent text considered is Mary Ann Radcliffe's The Female Advocate (1799). The focus is more on the question of whether Wollstonecraft was a radical democrat or a utopian socialist than on the value equity feminism places upon paid work: the line of argument is that Wollstonecraft was a radical democrat who valued work as opposed to idleness and the pursuit of frivolous pleasures, not that access to paid work on equal terms as such is important. Ferguson shows that Wollstonecraft wrote approvingly of a male breadwinner - female housewife model, and saw women in paid work as the exception rather than the rule. In this she follows the argument she made in a paper published in 1999, but not referenced here (Ferguson, 1999). The following chapter echoes the same paper, in contrasting the 'political-economy' approach of socialist feminism with the rational humanist approach of equity feminism. Apart from referring to Engels, it considers only the Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain Them in Political, and thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery (published by Longman & Co in 1825 under the sole name of William Thompson but described by its author as conveying the ideas of Anna Wheeler as much as his own), and various works of Flora Tristan, who died in 1844. The Appeal is presented as an important precursor of the social reproduction perspective (the only one, in fact, in this part of the book, as she presents Tristan as a critical equality feminist). I'm not convinced, so for me the link between the two halves of the book is weak.
The Appeal is a classic text, whose principal target was James Mill's argument in his 'Article on Government' for the Supplement to the Encyclopedia Britannica that there was no need for women to have the vote as their interest was 'involved either in that of their fathers or in that of their husbands'. It is available online at the LSE Digital Library. Ferguson does not do it justice, so I urge you to read it in full, for its comprehensive demolition of Mill's argument, and to bear in mind in doing so that it would be over a century before all women gained the vote in the UK, while many of the other inequalities it addresses are still in place. She sees Thompson and Wheeler as significant forerunners of social reproduction feminism because they approached women's work in the home 'through the same lens contemporary political economists were applying to capitalistically "productive" work'. As to its structure, the main text of the Appeal was prefaced by an 'Introductory Letter to Mrs Wheeler'. Part I (1-20) then examined the general argument of Mill's 'Article on Government' as regards political rights, and Part II addressed three questions in turn: Is there an identity of interest between men and women? If there were, would it justify the denial of civil or political rights to women? Can 'equality of enjoyments, proportional to exertion and capabilities' be guaranteed without equal civil rights, and can these in turn be secure without equal political rights? Having answered all these questions in the negative, Part II ended with a Concluding Address to Women (187-211). As Ferguson summarises it, the first nine chapters 'develop familiar arguments promoting rationalism in the face of arbitrary power, equal education and employment opportunities for men and women. They also make a forceful argument for equal political representation' (44). 'Only in their "Concluding Address to Women" do [the authors] switch tracks, announcing a surprising caveat to all they have just presented: even if a rational system of government replaces arbitrary rule, "still evils encompass you, inherent in the very system of labour by individual competition"' (44-5).
She goes on to explain that Wheeler and Thompson observe that women 'contend with two physiological disadvantages making perfect equality impossible: they are weaker than men, and they bear and suckle children':
'Yet, according to the authors, the problem of inequality does not lie with these facts of biology. It lies with the competitive system that organizes the production and distribution of wealth - capitalism. That's because capitalism has no internal mechanism for accommodating those unable to work for a wage. As a result, women are forced to rely on men for their well-being. This, in turn, renders them vulnerable to men's strength and influence at home where: "Superiority in the production or accumulation of individual wealth will ever be whispering in to man's ear preposterous notions of his relative importance over women." Meanwhile, "women's peculiar efforts and powers for the common benefit of the race are looked upon as an additional badge of inferiority and disgrace"' (45).
So, she says, Wheeler and Thompson argue for a communal and cooperative system of wealth creation to undercut this 'tendency to gender inequality inherent in capitalism', which 'releases women from the individual responsibility for meeting people's subsistence needs and raising the next generation from the isolated individual household, making it instead a concern of the community as a whole' (45): 'it is precisely in highlighting the relation of women's reproductive activities to the productive sphere that Wheeler and Thompson theoretically clarify and deepen a general utopian socialist commitment to communal living and working' (46). In short: 'Conceiving women's domestic work as socially productive but systematically degraded and devalued under capitalism - and attributing women's oppression then to the relational dynamic between reproductive and productive work - marks a turning point in the history of feminist theories of labour' (47).
This claim that the Appeal attributes women's oppression to the relational dynamic between reproductive and productive work, and is therefore foundational for social reproduction theory, is important, but imagined - there is no basis for it in the text, which is more a critique of patriarchy than a critique of capitalism. Ferguson's skewed account distorts its argument, and misses some of its most original content: the Appeal does argue that women rely on men for their well-being, and does advocate the communal provision of reproductive work, but it does not anywhere argue that women's domestic work is systematically degraded and devalued under capitalism: its analysis of the relational dynamic between reproductive and productive work is set throughout the book in the context of male (patriarchal) authority, and a critique of the family. Nor is there any 'switching of tracks' in the 'Concluding Address', as the goal of a new society based on 'Mutual Cooperation in large numbers' as a means of overcoming the evils of 'Individual Competition' is announced in the Introductory Letter (ix-xi), and addressed at length in the main text in relation to the three questions around which it is organised. Just as importantly, the early chapters do much more than 'develop familiar arguments promoting rationalism in the face of arbitrary power, equal education and employment opportunities for men and women'. They describe a situation in which women as wives are 'parcelled out amongst men, from the necessity of sexual delights to each of their masters, one weak always coupled and subjected to one strong' (54, emphasis mine): 'Had the constitution of things been such that man was independent of women for the gratification of his most imperious passion, that he had no sexual desires, and that women perpetuated the race without his intervention in the way of pleasure; we should have seen women, because weaker, converted every where by the law of force, into field and manufacturing labourers for the exclusive benefit of the males' (55, emphasis mine; cf. 97). Hence, the Appeal asserts, the 'male-created laws, depriving women of knowledge and skill, excluding them from the benefit of all judgement and mind-creating offices and trusts, cutting them off almost entirely from the participation, by succession or otherwise, of property, and from its uses and exchanges', and its lynchpin, the institution of marriage, and the marriage code (57-8). And in a further twist, 'the threat of withdrawal of sexual favours as a means to induce men to practice benevolent kindness will not work because 'Woman is more the slave of man for the gratification of her desires, than man is of woman' (61 - emphasis original). At the heart of the Appeal, that is to say, is a focus on sexual politics, invoked to explain the role of the wife as the husband's 'involuntary breeding machine and household slave' (63); and one, moreover, who is enjoined to conceal her own desires, practice passivity, and not only to obey her husband, but to swear upon marriage to do so (64-6). In such a regime, 'the whole moral structure of the mind of man is perverted' (71). In short: 'To erect uninquiring obedience into a duty, to weave it into a pretended code of morals, to degrade the mind into an acquiescence in injustice, is the last triumph of unrelenting despotism, rarely exacted from ordinary slaves, and reserved, without any sort of necessity, for the degradation of the domestic female slave in marriage' (73).
This sustained analysis, running to more than 50 pages in total (54-107) of the 'isolated breeding establishments, called married life' (103-4), leads into an equally sustained argument that goes beyond the case for equal representation to suggest that if women were to enjoy a monopoly of political power, government would be both different, and better. Not that Thompson and Wheeler advocate a women-only franchise. They do not. But the manner in which they argue the case is fundamental to an appraisal of the character of their feminism. First: 'From the casualties of gestation, women are necessarily at least for a considerable portion of the time, more stationary and confined than men, and more inclined to mere local and personal sympathies' (123; cf. 177-8, 180-81). Second, only the practice of political rights and engagement with the wider world will prompt the development of wider and more other-regarding attitudes: if women have limited intellectual horizons, it is a result of imprisonment in the domestic sphere, not of innate nature. Third, government would be better if women alone, rather than men, had political rights. While insisting that they would never advocate the exclusion of either group, they consider the hypothetical question, 'To which of the two would it be most useful, most tending to preponderant good - to which of the two, to women or to men, seeing that the happiness of both would be effectually promoted by the exercise of political power in the hands of either, ought the exercise of political rights to be confined?' (126), and they go on to discuss the contentious suggestion that
'the tendency of the organization* of women, from want of equal muscular strength with men, being rather to intellectual and sympathetic pursuits than those of brute force, they would be more apt in legislation to cultivate the arts of persuasion and peace, and to avoid offensive wars, one of the greatest scourges of humanity' (128; *organization: according to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles, 'The action of organizing, or condition of being organized, as a living being; also, the way in which a living being is organized; the structure of an organized body (animal or plant), or of any part of one; bodily (rarely mental) constitution').
The argument that follows, in which an element of essentialism is tempered by frequent insistence that woman's apparently inherent character arises from forced isolation under patriarchal control, is that women would be more likely than men to 'sympathize with all, and to promote the happiness of all', precisely because their lesser physical strength would make it impossible for them to rule by force, and oblige them to rule by persuasion, and to 'calculate in every thing the effect of their regulations on the feelings, on the real happiness, of men, as much of as women' (132). By way of a contrast between the 'warrior' and the 'nurse', and some ingenious reasoning on the relative time subtracted from attention to the duties of government by men through debauchery and women through gestation, they reach the conclusion these cancel each other out, and that women's probity leads to good outcomes, and men's activity to worse. Under the benevolent rule of women, 'human life would gradually transform itself into a paradise' (146). In short, if 'a community of rational beings ... were driven to the absurd necessity of investing all political rights exclusively in the stronger or the weaker portion of the race ... it would be evidently the interest of the whole to choose the weaker part, women, rather than the stronger part, men, for the exercise of such rights, both as electors and elected' (147). There is more here, then, than a forceful argument in favour of equal political representation.
It is at this point, not in the Concluding Address, that the issue of the incompatibility of benevolence with 'individual competition' is developed for the first time at any length:
Most certain it unfortunately is, that under the present system of labor and exertion by individual competition, the interests of all, first for existence and then for splendor, are put in such rude opposition to each other, that they render almost impossible the developement (sic) to any great extent of these kindly feelings of joy in the welfare of others. Till other arrangements of "mutual cooperation" are formed, by means of which personal interests, either for the supply of immediate wants or of all desirable conveniences, instead of being opposed to feelings of benevolence as they now are, shall move uniformly in the same direction with them, all, or almost all the cheap and delightful pleasures of sympathy and benevolence must be lost to mankind: so difficult is it for the bulk of men to extend their views, in opposition to immediate interest, into the distant consequences of actions in the doubtful future. While sympathy urges us to rejoice in the expressive smiles of another's happiness, the habitual distrust of competition tells us such unhappiness was procured at our expense, or that it upbraids our unsuccessful efforts, or is treading on the heels of our superior success. All the blessings of life are turned into curses' ( 149-50).
In what follows, it is clear that 'individual competition' is a feature as much of pre-capitalist as of capitalist societies. Again, the starting point is the 'tremendous advantages' the man enjoys in relation to the woman: 'superior muscular strength and the continued attention which he is able to devote to the object before him, uninterrupted by the pains and disabilities of gestation' (155). Individual competition in earlier times, when such 'knowledge' as there was was rudimentary and easily acquired, greatly favoured men: 'muscular strength and activity were the qualities most useful, not only for the comfort but for the very existence of the race. ... The advantages of strength were little shared with any other quality; they were super-eminent': 'In all rude stages of society, women, even under the most free system of individual competition, must enjoy less than men, because their physical powers of acquiring are less than those of men' (156). As the argument proceeds, it is clear the 'individual competition' to which Thompson and Wheeler refer is competition, in this context between men and women, in relation to 'access to every art, occupation, profession, from the highest to the lowest, without one exception, to which their inclination and talents may direct and may fit them to occupy. [Women] ask the removal of all restraints and exclusions not applicable to men of equal capacities' (159). Similar formulations recur throughout this section: 'arts, professions, pursuits, and offices', 'trades and professions' (163), 'arts, trades, professions, and employments' (164), and 'all species of knowledge and industrious occupations' (167). It is worth noting, too, that in the closing pages of the response to the third question, when the Appeal returns to the theme of strength versus knowledge, it strikes a new note, as relevant now as it was then: 'As society improves, and in proportion to its improvement, the respect paid to brute unconscious force or to muscular strength decreases'. This is due, its authors say, to two concurrent forces: 'the one is the comparative inefficiency of mere force to produce useful results, even in the production of articles of wealth, when compared with knowledge and skill applied through machinery; the other is the new class of pleasures, continually increasing and expanding over a large portion of society, arising from intellectual culture' (183):
'For three fourths of the operations, professions, arts, trades, now carried on by men, the muscular strength of women, moderately developed by healthful physical education, would be abundantly sufficient: the fourth, requiring the greatest developement of strength, would naturally be conducted by those amongst men who excel in that quality, and who are generally deficient in inclination to intellectual pursuits. Qualities are estimated by their utility: mere force or strength is now, and will be every day, of less and less comparative importance with intellectual qualities, from the decreasing benefits to be derived from it. In point of fact, even now the most ill-paid offices are those in which mere force is required: force is so common and brutish a quality, that when not joined with skill, or not necessary to self-defence or attack, it is used as a means of support or influence by those only who have not within their command any more influential or better remunerated qualities (184, emphasis mine).
'These favorable tendencies of civilization,' they conclude, 'proceeding from the decreased usefulness of mere force and from the new class of pleasures produced by mental culture, have doubtless mitigated the abuses of savage strength despotically used by man over woman. The progression of the same circumstances must doubtless in the end annihilate this abuse' (184-5).
So, returning to Ferguson's interpretation, it is not necessary to do more than quote the continuation of the few words she quotes (in italics below):
'Still evils encompass you, inherent in the very system of labor by individual competition, even in its most free and perfect form. Men dread the competition of other men, of each other, in every line of industry. How much more will they dread your additional competition? How much will this dread of the competition of your industry and talents be aggravated by their previous contempt of your fabricated impotence? Hard enough now, they will say, to earn subsistence and to acquire comforts: what will it be when an additional rivalship, equal to perhaps one third of actual human exertion, is thrown into the scale against them? How fearfully would such an influx of labor and talents into the market of competition bring down their remuneration?' (197).
The 'Address' goes on to refer to the despotism of the marriage contract, and the risk of 'misery on the death of the active producer of the family, and occasional injustice from domestic abuse of superior strength and influence, against which no laws can entirely guard' (198); a second section that Ferguson quotes goes on (again, with the continuation placed in italics): 'Superiority in the production or accumulation of individual wealth will ever be whispering into man's ear preposterous notions of his relative importance over women, which notions must be ever prompting him to unsocial airs towards women, and particularly to that woman who co-operates with him in the rearing of a family' (198); the system of mutual cooperation is recommended because it removes the 'dread of being deserted by a husband with a helpless and pining family', or seeing your daughters forced into prostitution (199); within it, men would procure sexual gratification only from 'the voluntary affection of woman' (201); women would cease to be dependent on individual men for their daily support' (201, emphasis mine); the partial equality arising from 'the scheme of isolated individual, or family' (202) would be superseded; exclusive individual wealth would disappear; under the system of mutual cooperation by large numbers: 'Women ... are no more dependent on men, or on any individual man, than men are on women' (203, emphasis mine); the ability to produce 'a few more broadcloths or cottons' every year and the increase of the race, 'kindly and skilfully nurtured' would be equally valued, with the latter no longer looked upon (as Ferguson quotes (45), 'as an additional badge of inferiority and disgrace' (206). In short, the focus is not on the division of labour in capitalism, but upon the iniquities of a social system founded on patriarchal power exercised within the individual family as the basic unit: hence the appeal to a time when 'the association of men and women in large numbers for mutual benefit shall supersede the present isolated mode of exertion by individual competition' (207, emphasis mine).
In short, the Appeal does not found or prefigure social reproduction feminism in the manner that Ferguson supposes. It suggests an alternative hypothesis, and it is far from alone in doing so: far from there being a close affinity between patriarchy and capitalism, in that male authority maintains the household as an individual, isolated, female-labour intensive institution that supports capitalist accumulation through the provision of essential reproductive work, this collective exercise of patriarchal power, reflected in the keeping of a woman at home for the provision of sexual services on demand, the unequal provision or denial of civil and political rights, and the virtual exclusion of half of the adult population from the 'public sphere', is a drag on capitalist development, and on social productivity generally. And if so, 'equality' feminism and 'critical equality' feminism are both primarily critiques of the family, in its predominant heteronormative form, differentiated by their positive and negative attitudes respectively towards the class-divided character of society and of the families that together constitute it, and Ferguson's social reproduction feminism is flawed. It is right to insist on the fundamental relatedness of paid and unpaid work, its centrality to the trajectory of capitalist development, and its historical and current implications for 'women's work', but wrong to assume that this is a necessary feature of capitalism in its yet to be realised fully developed form. Quite the opposite - it is an index of its as yet incomplete overcoming of all previous 'primitive' forms of production, and consequently incomplete reshaping of social relations, and centrally those in the family, to bring them into line with the 'capital relation' (Cammack, 2020).
To take this position does not invalidate the material Ferguson has brought together here - but it twists the kaleidoscope, so that the pieces fall into a different pattern. So, to take one example, it makes for an integrated account of the domestic labour process: its complex transformation as a site of production, reflected in a shift from independent artesanal production to a subordinate role, where it continues, in propertyless households at the end of production chains controlled by capital; its primitive character, arising from the limited scope for the division of labour and application of capital to the production process; the significance all the same of both the application of technology and the hiring of labour to carry out basic reproductive tasks; the consequence, grotesque from the point of view of capital, that the capacity of the newly affluent to hire domestic servants was as likely to lead to the ornamental idleness of the wife as it was to an influx of women into the professions; the ethnic dimension, varying from time to time and place to place but still a constant feature of patterns of recruitment into this work; and its increasing operation on a global scale, still heavily inflected by ethnic difference. At the same time, the isolated housewife is vulnerable to physical and mental abuse that is hard to police and hard to escape from; and whole households can become chronically recalcitrant to the task of providing labour to capital - both themes, incidentally, that feature strongly in the Appeal. All of this suggests that the appropriate starting point for any theory of social reproduction has to be the problematic status of the family, the class-divided character of households, the primitive character of household production, and the significance of transformation over time in accordance with the broader logic of capitalist development.
From this perspective, the two short chapters that follow, on 'Equal Work For and Against Capital' and 'Anti-Racist Feminism and Women's Work' respectively, are more hindered than helped by the use of the tripartite framework, but still offer some insights. Frances Willard, writing in 1888, imagines a time when 'the housekeeper, standing at the telephone, will order better cooked meals than almost any one has nowadays, sent from scientific caterers by pneumatic tubes' (62) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman advocates the provision of heating, lighting, feeding, clothing and cleaning by 'large, well-managed business combination', while calling at the same time, disconcertingly for the present day reader, for 'black women to be trained in domestic service (and black men as farm workers) as part of a scheme to manage "negroes below a certain grade of citizenship"' (62-3). Kollontai is cited on the transformation of domestic production in pre-Bolshevik Russia, with her position described, along with that of Zetkin, as being that women's work at home 'has no economically significant productive function' (67), but crucial aspects of their positions are left out: Kollontai argues that the household is no longer a direct producer of value, and states earlier in the same 1920 article on 'Communism and the Family', that 'The family is ceasing to be necessary either to its members or to the nation as a whole' (emphasis original). The old family structure is now merely a hindrance', primarily because the 'old' male breadwinner model has been defunct for sixty years. Zetkin differentiates between the exploitation of proletarian women (arguing like Kollontai that the 'family wage' is a thing of the past, so working class women are forced into factory work), and the discriminatory exclusion of middle class women from the liberal professions (where she echoes Thompson and Wheeler): the primary reason for the slow progress of reform in Germany, she says, is that 'men fear the battle of competition in the liberal professions', and later elaborates: 'The demand for equal professional training and the demand for equal job opportunities for both sexes ... means nothing less than the realization of free access to all jobs and the untrammeled competition between men and women. The realization of this demand unleashes a conflict of interest between the men and women of the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia. The competition of the women in the professional world is the driving force for the resistance of men against the demands of bourgeois women’s rights advocates. It is, pure and simple, the fear of competition' ('Proletarian Women and Socialism', 1896, at https://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1896/10/women.htm). Ferguson devalues their contributions with the comment that 'their theoretical framework did not prove fully adequate to the task they set' (66), but you can equally say that the framework deployed is inadequate to the task of addressing the issues they raise, as their remarks on 'breadwinners' suggest. The same is true of the very short chapter on anti-racist feminism, which is equally thrown off kilter by the attempt to locate the material covered in the tripartite framework, and relate it to the 'social production' approach in particular, when the simple but important point is that the majority of black women in paid work in the early decades of the twentieth century were domestic servants in the homes of white women, so the centrality of domestic service as paid work was a major theme among black feminist writers. This doesn't equate to identifying the dependence of capitalism on women's unpaid labour, so the 'social production' trajectory category remains empty. Beyond this, Sadie Alexander (Ph.D,1921) is described as endorsing 'the equality feminism path to black women's liberation' (77). But she echoes Kollontai on the lack of value generated by such services as remain in the home (quoted p. 77), and argues in a passage not cited that working class solidarity can overcome racial friction: 'Could the great mass of white workers learn from industrial experience with Negro workers, that they have a common purpose in life, the protection of their bargaining power, and that the sooner the untouched wealth of Negro labor is harnessed into this common purpose, the better can they bargain with capital; then and only then would industrial racial friction subside' (Alexander, 1930, in Guy-Sheftall, 1995: 90). It's fair overall to conclude that the first half of the book opens up a wide range of literature for discussion, with much of it likely to be new to many readers, but at the same time that some of the interpretation is unreliable.
The second half turns directly to 'social reproduction feminism', and comes briskly to Mary Inman's contention that women produce 'the most valuable of all commodities ... Labor Power' and her important insistence that we take into account 'the whole system of production' (Inman, 1940: 149, 137 (emphasis original), cited pp. 89, 90); Benston's pioneering 1969 account of the political economy of women's liberation, recently reprinted, with its strong emphasis on the primitive character of domestic production; the seminal 'Wages for Housework' movement of the 1970s; and Sheila Rowbotham's Woman's Consciousness, Man's World (1973), from which she highlights a fundamental insight into the contradictory character of the relationship between the family and capital:
'The family is both essential for capital's reproduction, and a brake on its use of human labour power. The values of the family are both rational for the maintenance of the inhuman relations of commodity production, and irrational for a system of organising the reproduction of human labour which is completely designed to produce commodities efficiently and has freed itself from all earlier property relations' (Rowbotham, 1973, cited p. 100).
The treatment of Rowbotham is illustrative of the strength and weakness of the book as a whole. On the one hand, the argument reflected here and its theoretical hinterland are not explored in detail (it gets just over two pages in total), nor are they fully taken into account. On the other, the brief discussion flags a crucial issue in a book that readers may not know (I confess to never having read it), but is readily available second-hand, and recently reissued by Verso (2014). Ferguson provides an important service of recuperation. The main purpose of the chapter, though, is to specify further the character of social reproduction feminism. It identifies the organization of capitalist production, with gendered labour as its outcome, as 'the key obstacle to women's freedom' (85); it 'attributes women's oppression to the position of [unpaid domestic labour] relative to paid work, and its contribution to the overall process of wealth creation', so that 'unpaid domestic labour and capitalistically 'productive' labour interact to sustain a society dominated by capital', and women's oppression is 'a feature of the very anatomy of capitalist productive relations - specifically, of the capitalist-prescribed reconfiguration of the relation between paid and unpaid forms of work', and hence 'systemic' in capitalism. This being so, 'patriarchal relations both shape and are shaped by the economic dynamics of dispossession and accumulation' (86-7, all emphasis original). And it concludes that the focus on housework that dominated in the 1970s debates was not enough. The renewal of social reproduction feminism, which is the subject of the chapter (Seven) that follows, involved 'decentering housework from its theoretical apparatus and foregrounding the contradictions posed to capital by the reproduction of life, whatever social relations are involved in that reproduction' (105).
Chapter Seven then addresses this issue as follows:
'Black feminists [have] repeatedly pointed out that not all housework is unpaid and not all women see the work they do to maintain their households (and communities) as inherently oppressive. They also insisted that women are oppressed in ways that have nothing to do with housework. Clearly, then, unpaid housework must be abandoned as the universalising category on which the explanation of women's oppression pivots' (106). Progress from this point will be made 'first by unhinging the understanding of social reproductive labour from an ahistorical and universal concept of housework; and second, by emphasizing and developing the insight about the relation of capitalistically "productive" to "unproductive" work. It further involves doing the necessary empirical and theoretical work to consider how that relation is structured not just by sexism, but by social oppression in general, from racism and heterosexism to settler colonialism, ableism and beyond' (107). Ferguson then proposes two starting points for renewal. The first is intersectional theory, introduced by way of an account of the black lesbian socialist feminist Combahee River Collective, with its focus on 'the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking' (Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977, cited p. 108, emphasis original). The second is Lise Vogel's Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Towards a Unitary Theory (1983): 'For Vogel, there is no singular cause of women's oppression. Rather, there is a systemic logic that sets the conditions whereby people reproduce themselves, on the one hand, and capital produces value, on the other. And women's oppression is sustained and shaped in the working through of the dynamics of that relationship' (110).
Ferguson is engaged here in a process of theory construction, intended to 'renew' social reproduction feminism, and the choices she makes have significant consequences. The key point she takes from her reading of Vogel is that she 'lays the necessary groundwork for socialist feminism to develop a robust politics of class solidarity' by declining to make unpaid housewives the revolutionary feminist subject, and adopting instead an approach that 'allows for an expanded and diverse array of potential class subjects : all those who work to (re)produce the lives of workers - whether their labour is paid or unpaid, whether they do so within households, in state institutions, or as community organisers' (110-11). This leads first to a 'broad definition' of social reproductive labour:
'It includes the daily and generational work women have typically performed of giving birth to and raising and caring for children. But it also includes the work people do to sustain themselves and others as human beings more generally, their individual and collective "survival strategies through which people accomplish their basic life tasks"' (111, quoting Johanna Brenner, Women and the Politics of Class, Monthly Review Press, New York, 2000, p. 86).
And second to a new perspective on the fundamental contradiction at play: 'While on a fundamental level, the goal of social reproductive labour is to support life, it is at the same time a means of ensuring adequate supplies of labour power are available to support capital' (111).
For good or ill, depending on your perspective, there is as shift here away from value theory and the interaction between paid and unpaid work in capitalism to a contrast between supporting life, and supporting capitalism, and Ferguson is clear about the consequences. Oppression is no longer understood 'exclusively in terms of the wagelessness, isolation, or other hardships of women's housework'; instead, 'this perspective calls for a broad exploration of the mechanisms and social relations involved in the devaluation of life-making'. So while gender relations are part of it, 'they can and will take many different forms including, but not limited to, private patriarchal households in which women perform the bulk of the unpaid labour'. And other 'social oppressions' are part of it too - racism, and 'the heterosexism and transphobic dynamics that marginalize and threaten the life-making activities of queer and gender nonconforming people'. So:
'While Vogel does not explore the multiplicity of dynamics that are potentially in play, many who draw on her work have begun to do the theoretical and empirical work that reveals how the devaluing and dehumanization of life necessary to capital is entangled with racist, heterosexist, settler colonial, and other oppressive relations' (111).
Unlike Thompson and Wheeler, Ferguson really has switched tracks here. She has not only decentered unpaid housework but women as well, and uncoupled the issue of solidarity from value theory and the relationship between paid and unpaid work. By adding intersectionality and stirring, she has not only introduced a strategy of alliance-building that is disconnected from capital's supposed need for unpaid reproductive work, but also broken entirely with her opening insistence on the need, for the household if not every individual, to earn a wage (12). In doing so, she has gone too far (for an alternative path, see Sibaugh, 1996-7, Smith, 1999, and Nilliasca, 2011). And she has returned, though not by way of detailed analysis, to themes she declared at the outset were outwith her compass: 'race, sexuality, and postcolonial/decolonial themes' have suddenly emerged at the centre of the stage. What is more, the analysis simultaneously opens to a global level, and calls into question at least one side of the contradiction between life-making and capitalism itself. So as the discussion continues 'toward an integrative theory' (111-14) and to 'capitalism's complex social reproductive labour' (114-18), Ferguson first restates the position she takes from Vogel: 'neither the gender division of labour nor the family itself constitute the material basis of women's oppression. Rather, the necessary but contradictory relation of the reproduction of labour power to capitalist accumulation does. That is, women's oppression in capitalist society is grounded in a socio-material or structural logic of capitalist reproduction that limits the possibilities for women (and all people) to be free' (113); then she leaps to the level of what I would call the world market: 'The full scope of labour power's reproduction is governed through local, national and global regimes that draw on various forms of oppression in ways that tend to reinforce them. In ensuring the social reproduction of certain communities is more precarious and under-resourced than others, they facilitate the reproduction of an unequal, internally divided workforce' (114); then, by way of a discussion of internal and transnational migration that draws on Alessandra Mezzadri and Melissa Wright, she concludes that 'as labour becomes ever cheaper to reproduce, it also becomes in fact "disposable" ... . That is, there comes a point at which labour is socially reproduced at the barest minimum costs, at which the simultaneous reproduction of human life and the production of capital is less of a contradiction' (118). Quite so, and the implications for her argument are profound. If the reproduction of labour power is viewed, as it is here, on a global scale, then its determining feature is that capital can always draw upon disposable reserves, so that from the point of view of capital there is no contradiction between its need for labour power and the threat it poses to life-making: the contradiction is all on the other side. This was precisely Marx's view: capital 'asks no questions about the length of life of labour-power’, as ‘experience generally shows to the capitalist … a constant excess of population’ (Marx, 1976: 376-7); and the same point is made by Martha Gimenez: capital has no need for 'people', but only for exploitable workers, and continuous competition-driven improvements in productivity displace workers all the time, so that there is always a 'surplus' population (Gimenez, 2019: 134, 247, 293; Cammack, 2020, 86-90). Not only that, but the only passage that Ferguson quotes at length from William Thompson (not from the Appeal, but from his earlier Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness: Applied to the Newly Proposed System of Voluntary Equality of Wealth, Longman & Co, 1825) says much the same:
'To the capitalist, as such, neither the useful employment or even the existence, to say nothing of the health, moral, and happiness, of his fellow-creatures, are objects of more regard than the employment of inferior animals or machines. Besides supporting them and making themselves happy by their labour, will they yield him an average profit? If so, let them be employed. Will they not yield him an average profit? Then let them live or die as they may: with their well-being he has nothing to do' (p.46, cited here p. 47).
Over the course of these chapters, then, the character of Ferguson's analysis shifts appreciably, ending on terrain she had initially vacated, and does not explore in depth. After all this, the final chapter is narrowly focused, and arguably redundant. As Ferguson argues it, 'autonomous' Marxists claim that domestic labour is productive for capital as it produces labour power, while the Marxian social reproduction school insists that only workers directly exploited by capital are engaged in productive labour. ln politics, she claims, this disposes autonomous Marxists to focus on movements and struggles outside the arena of capitalist production (in the 'social factory') and the creation of alternative spaces, while the Marxian social reproduction school looks to struggles 'to break the system from within'. But the debate is largely definitional - both sides think that domestic labour produces surplus value indirectly, via the production of labour power, and Ferguson, from the Marxian social reproduction perspective, argues for struggles that 'forge and strengthen ties of solidarity across community and workplace movements (130)', so the two sides coincide on the importance of struggles around reproductive labour. Common sense suggests that while some areas of life remain outside the totalising control of capital, but under threat, it is as important to defend those spaces as it is to contest capital directly in the workplace: so autonomous Marxists advocate the 'social reproduction strike' (which incidentally bears some resemblance to Thompson and Wheeler's 'mutual cooperation by large numbers'), and Ferguson and the Marxian social reproduction school agree that it is 'incredibly important' (133). I don't believe for a minute that autonomous Marxists reject the other possible forms of community-based struggle she goes on to outline, and after describing the example of a teachers' strike she concedes that: 'There is nothing within autonomist Marxist feminism that suggests this form of organizing should not be supported - and those associated with the tradition have been supportive of the teachers' strike and similar struggles' (136). For all the heavy theoretical lifting promised earlier (8), one crucial argument from Marx is missing: that capital seeks ‘to subjugate every moment of production itself to exchange and to suspend the production of direct use values not entering into exchange, i.e. precisely to posit production based on capital in place of earlier modes of production, which appear primitive from its standpoint’ (Grundrisse, p. 408). This suggests that far from depending upon production outside its direct control, capital must destroy it in order to achieve the conditions for its continued self-reproduction (much, in fact, as Rowbotham appears to have suggested in 1973). On the one hand this reinforces the need to resist its encroachment on 'everyday life'. But on the other it undermines the idea that in doing so capital is exacerbating an underlying contradiction, and destroying the conditions on which it depends.
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