A professor at Eugene Lang College is trying to resurrect a decades-old radical-feminist crusade for the 21st century.
Eugene Lang College will be offering a class in the fall that is based around the belief that women should get paid for “emotional labor” and doing chores around the house.
The course, called “Love and Currency,” is based on Silvia Federici’s 1975 essay “Wages Against Housework.”
“Wages for housework is only the beginning,” Federici writes, explaining that husbands should “pay us . . . not one wage, but many wages, because we have been forced into many jobs at once.”
As Campus Reform notes, the essay was written during a time when almost 40 percent of women did not have jobs outside of the home, and it is commonly taught in women’s-studies courses, though “this appears to be the first class that takes Federici’s original arguments and extends them into the type of intersectional analysis that is now de rigueur in women’s studies departments.”
“‘They say it is love, we say it is unwaged work.’ So began Silvia Federici’s 1975 manifesto ‘Wages Against Housework,’” the course description states. “Taking Federici’s claim as a point of departure, this course will explore the unrecognized, invisible, poorly remunerated and unremunerated labor that keeps our society afloat.”
“Many forms of labor, which are often not recognized as labor, fall along lines of gender, race and class,” it continues. “Whether changing nappies and washing an endless build of up dishes, caring for elderly and infirm family members, working multiple jobs without legal protection, or bearing up under everyday sexual harassment, constricting gender norms and systemic racism, invisible labor is exhausting.”
The description alleges that we live in a world where even our “leisure” activities “are instrumentalized, incorporated,” and that “we are all treated as natural resources, whose labor (whether active or passive) is harnessed by corporate entities.”
There is, of course, no doubt that doing chores is exhausting. I had a party over the weekend, and I would be lying if I said that I had finished cleaning it up yet. It’s hard work to keep a living space in good shape. Still, I don’t expect to actually be paid for this work — and that’s not just because I live with a cat who has no ability to pay me for cleaning his litter box, rather than a husband. It’s because there are some things in life that you just do. Everyone performs labor that they don’t get paid for. Walking to the store is labor. Going grocery shopping is labor. Some days, taking a shower and brushing your teeth can feel like labor. That doesn’t mean that you get paid for it. It’s something you do because it isn’t pleasant to live in a pigsty, or for all of your teeth to fall out. Cleaning your living space is something you do to be kind to yourself and those you live with. Although it’s true that women, on average, still do more housework than men, and although it’s true that that’s not fair, the solution is not for women to demand wages. It’s for women to demand that men do more — unless, of course, the man that you live with happens to be a cat.