Chapter 01 - Private Households

Section Notes¶

COVID-19 Impacts¶

• COVID generated a care crisis and made invisibilized household labor briefly visible, before corporations recovered enough to fill the gap

• Types of domestic labor exposed by pandemic:

  • Acquiring and preparing food

  • Feeding everyone

  • Accessing healthcare and education

  • Cleaning homes, bodies, clothes

  • Supervising children

  • Tending to elderly and disabled

• Nuclear families are not self-sustaining; need help from the outside world to survive

• Labor management differs between poor and rich families

  • Working-class families of color

    • Interdependent kin structures beyond the nuclear family: grandparents, aunts/uncles, family friends

    • State-subsidized childcare centers

    • Public schools

  • Affluent families

    • More likely to be isolated nuclear family

    • Outsourcing labor

      • Immigrant nannies, housecleaners

      • Ordering takeout

      • Private daycares and schools

      • Laundry services

      • Grandparents in nursing homes

• Care crisis as result of COVID-19 shutting down access to outside help

  • Working-class families faced:

    • Falling wages

    • Fragmentation of marital & other family relations

    • Cutbacks in public services

    • Mothers spending more time on paid and unpaid work

  • Mutual aid support networks appeared

    • Volunteer bike messengers delivered groceries

    • Door-to-door visits to check on neighbors

    • Pandemic pods

  • Replaced again by corporate services

Family as Private Households¶

• Many definitions of family

  • Site of ideological reproduction and socialization

    • Michèle Barrett, Women’s Oppression Today: Problems in Marxist Feminist Analysis

  • Rhetorical trope and fantasy wielded to advance various regressive political positions

    • Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism

  • Institution producing atomization and isolation

    • Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh, The Anti-Social Family

  • System of bio-genetic kinship

    • Kathi Weeks, “Abolition of the Family: The Most Infamous Feminist Proposal”

  • Juridical and legal category

    • Patricia Hill Collins, It’s All in the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation

  • Private household, unit of privatized care

• Household: a group of people who

  • Live together

  • Share resources together

  • Are interdependent on each other in decisions about employment, housing, schooling

  • Function partially as single economic unit

  • Form a formal, legal, and biological kinship unit

    • marriage

    • procreation

    • genetic ties

  • Usually form each other’s primary emotional attachments

• Chosen family

  • Close friends

  • Complex kinship ties

  • Members of a shared community living together

• Access to family is uneven

  • Calling people family doesn’t equal legal recognition as a family

  • Some people are excluded from access to legally recognized family at all

    • Enslaved people

    • Severe poverty (too much instability)

    • Disability

      • Enforced by asset limit

  • Power within family depends on access to outside resources

  • Typically adult men who have best access to outside wages, accrued property, social privilege, legal legitimacy

    • Can leverage them to reduce personal responsibility for household labor, increase authority within family

The Household in Capitalist Reproduction¶

• Family is central to the reproduction of capitalism

• Every worker needs a family to create and maintain them.

• Divisions of labor in public and private, male and female, owning class and working class

  • Capitalism separated public life from private life

  • Industrial work vs. domestic work

  • Public and political sphere vs. privacy of family house

  • Masculinized vs. feminized labor

  • Creation of divisions seemed natural but particular form changed throughout time and depending on power dynamics

• Families function as economic units

  • Capitalist families

    • Pass down accumulated property and wealth through inheritance

    • Structures of ownership and property relationships

    • Spouses generally jointly own assets and debt

    • Bonds between children and adults are managed though promised inheritance or monetary aid

    • Power dynamics unfold through access to wealth and control over financial decision-making

  • Working-class families

    • Important strategies for sharing limited resources, sustaining when work unavailable

    • Primary institution mediating access to wage

    • Share wages and debt

    • Aid adult children in accessing particular form of work

    • Leave inheritance of privately owned home

• Social reproduction theory

  • Argues that the labor of people-making is central to capitalism

  • Evolved in part through Marxist feminist debates in the 1970s about the specific role of the housewife and the private household in capitalist reproduction

  • Question of household labor as linked to struggles over sex, parenting, relaitonship abuse, and their efforts to build fulfilling lives

  • Socialists - struggles over housework integral to struggle against capitalism

  • Question of whether domestic labor creates value

  • Wages for housework campaign

The Family, the Market, and the State¶

• Each of these three institutions are dependent on the other for support and governance

  • They interconnect to reproduce all key aspects of capitalist society

• Households cannot survive without outside support

  • People form families based on available work

• People outside the family form survive directly through market or by relying on state institutions

Quotes¶

“For every worker, someone had to gestate and give birth to them, care for them as infants, raise them as children, and teach them the skills to navigate the labor market and find a job. from one day to the next, someone has to wash their clothes, provide them with the means of bathing, and feed them. This is an immense amount of work, dependent on extensive infrastructures of housing, fresh water, waste disposal, and access to basic goods. The reproduction of the workforce requires a whole other form of work that takes place outside of industrial manufacturing, and often outside the wage relation altogether. These are essential points of social reproduction theory.” (pp. 23-24)

“Each class works to instill in children its particular values and strategies for navigating the world, and to support its children in acquiring the best opportunities available. Class inequality and the class relations of capitalism are reproduced through the family as a system of private households.” (pp. 25)

“States have encouraged particular forms of families, policed family life, determined what types of housing are available, provided public schooling, and legally regulated relationships of shared resources, sex, or parenting.” (pp. 28)