The wealth of a household = disposable income + unpaid work.
You wouldn't catch me saying that. If I was married and said things like that, my wife would have a fit, and boot me out.
Why, it would be the truth. The man who fixes a car or paints a room or shovels the snow is equally unpaid and also contributes to the wealth of the household.
If the wife
earns less than the man, then it is "reasonable" for him to expect her to do most or all of the housework.
This doesn't follow at all. In the first place, it would depend on actual hours worked. Secondly, you cannot make such generalisations about what is "reasonable" in some logical or moral sense about personal or intimate relations. You can only make such generalisations, on the basis of systematically gathered empirical observations of what couples in households actually do, and why they do it (previously I have posted some findings about that on PEN-L).
I put reasonable in quotes for a reason :) It's not quite clear to me why women wind up doing most if not all of the housework. Quite possibly it has nothing to do with the fact that they earn less. But if Shaw is right in noting that money is society's way of telling you how much it loves you, then this is a possibility. The wife earns less, therefore she is less important and her time and energy may be claimed in a disproportionate way.
Some years ago, when I worked for a large, multinational computer company, I sent out an email to everyone in the company asking why men don't do housework. I was amazed by the torrent of email that came back. A handful of men said they "helped," but for the most part responses came from working women who wrote despairingly of their situation. I'm very sorry I didn't keep those emails.
Moreover, when household income is
insufficent, a lot of women make it sufficient by sewing clothes, cooking from scratch, etc.
I don't know whether that is so true in the USA. I found that in some places, eating out was cheaper than doing home cooking. I haven't got full data on this just now, but my estimate is that the vast majority of American women today under 32 years old wouldn't have a clue of how to make clothes. My sister does it at times, but that is only because my mother taught her how to do it. It is true that if you could not buy a good or service, then you would be inclined to work something up yourself, but these days there are other ways around that. There is very detailed data on this, because it is heavily used by marketing agencies, for example.
Cheaper food is not necessarily better food. I read this anecdote once about a doctor who, when making housecalls, always went and shook the cook's hand first for giving him good business. If you eat crap, you'll save on food costs (maybe) but possibly see the doctor more often than those who eat healthily.
I think it is impossible to measure the worth of the work women contribute to a household. Some of it is easy: you can compare the price of home-made clothing vs store-bought clothing. You can compare the price of women acting as chauffeurs, vs paying for a taxi...etc. But there are lots of things that are not measurable: how do you measure the value extracted from the myriad social connections/networks that women dedicate themselves to maintaining...which often translate into valuable information, contacts, free services, free babysitting, job opportunities, etc.? How do you measure the value of a woman's loving attention and awareness of her children, without which an army of shrinks couldn't fix the damage? I could go on a long time. But I'll conclude by saying that economics (which finds its root meaning in the "running of the household") is not even in its infancy if it cannot talk about the significance of these non quantifiable elements of the reproduction/creation of life.
Well in fact not just inadequate, but wrong. Household "wealth" in the material sense, refers to the total monetary value of physical and financial assets privately owned by the household, i.e. net asset values, and this is nowadays estimated statistically in most OECD countries and some developing countries, through household surveys or special asset surveys.
Well then, I'd say that measuring household wealth in these terms doesn't tell us much.
Statistically the vast majority of women do want to raise their own children, but most women also want to have childcare facilities available, primarily because they have to work for pay.
That's not the only reason. It is indescribably exhausting to be a mother 24/7; and it doesn't necessarily make you into a better mother. Moreover, children need to be with other children and with other adults, so there are many more reasons for having some kind of community-based child care then that the mother has to work.
Right. OK.I studied this in detail in 1980-81, looking at all the available modern literature from Wally Seccombe's NLR article onwards and data on voluntary labour. I did a fair bit of thrashing at that time. Often feminists became neo-liberals, because capitalist economics usually only values or validates labour if it is priced or can impute a price. But in fact the capitalist marketplace depends crucially on the performance of unpaid labour. There are several different trends, but a recession basically results both in more unpaid ("voluntary") labour being performed, and in the greater marketisation of labour than was previously not marketised (also the refusal to perform labour unless it is paid for).
The demand for "wages for housework" never took off, partly because unpaid housework labour is often performed through free consent, i.e. people want to do it or it is considered part of having a relationship, and workingclass people are in general much more concerned with owning a home of their own. In addition, feminists often depict women as victims, and that hasn't been very popular, apart from raking up conflicts with men where there are none. An acquaintance of mine thought the demand for "wages for housework" (Selma James/Della Costa) actually referred to informal prostitution, and I had to explain it. Many Dutch women solve the whole problem by not living with a man, but they still have to do the labour for themselves anyhow.
I never argued for wages for housework. I am arguing for a non-quantitative examination of the problem. I am suggesting it is an economic issue as much as a social issue and that it would be wonderful if we could come up with a way of describing the intersection of those two realms.
Joanna
