Unpaid Work Quotes

There will be other lives. There will be other lives for nervous boys with sweaty palms, for bittersweet fumblings in the backseats of cars, for caps and gowns in royal blue and crimson, for mothers clasping pretty pearl necklaces around daughters' unlined necks, for your full name read aloud in an auditorium, for brand-new suitcases transporting you to strange new people in strange new lands. And there will be other lives for unpaid debts, for one-night stands, for Prague and Paris, for painful shoes with pointy toes, for indecision and revisions. And there will be other lives for fathers walking daughters down aisles. And there will be other lives for sweet babies with skin like milk. And there will be other lives for a man you don't recognize, for a face in a mirror that is no longer yours, for the funerals of intimates, for shrinking, for teeth that fall out, for hair on your chin, for forgetting everything. Everything. Oh, there are so many lives. How we wish we could live them concurrently instead of one by one by one. We could select the best pieces of each, stringing them together like a strand of pearls. But that's not how it works. A human's life is a beautiful mess.

No man can call himself liberal, or radical, or even a conservative advocate of fair play, if his work depends in any way on the unpaid or underpaid labor of women at home, or in the office.

Women have always worked. They have worked unpaid, underpaid, underappreciated, and invisibly, but they have always worked. But the modern workplace does not work for women. From its location, to its hours, to its regulatory standards, it has been designed around the lives of men and it is no longer fit for purpose. The world of work needs a wholesale redesign--of its regulations, of its equipment, of its culture--and this redesign must be led by data on female bodies and female lives. We have to start recognising that the work women do is not an added extra, a bonus that we could do without: women's work, paid and unpaid, is the backbone of our society and our economy. It's about time we started valuing it.

We like to think that the unpaid work women do is just about individual women caring for their individual family members to their own individual benefit. It isn’t. Women’s unpaid work is work that society depends on, and it is work from which society as a whole benefits.

Today in the US, we’re sending our daughters into a workplace that was designed for our dads—set up on the assumption that employees had partners who would stay home to do the unpaid work...

It is better to do what you love for work, but if it is your day job that enables an unpaid passion, then your life is still sweeter. What is important is that you make time for your dreams, not whether or not you get paid for it.

Women in all cultures are expected to do very difficult, time consuming, laborious and high risk unpaid work to give birth and raise children, and in many cultures they remain as an almost entirely unpaid foundation of slave labour that the rest of the economy is built upon.

Only by remembering to say 'no' will the women of 21st century regain their voice and remember their power. 'No' is the most important word in a woman's dialectic arsenal, and it is the one word that our employers, our leaders, and quite often, the men in our lives would do anything to prevent us from saying. No, we will not serve. No, we will not settle for the dirty work, the low-paid work, the unpaid work. No, we will not stay late at the office, look after the kids, sort out the shopping. We refuse to fit the enormity of our passion, our creativity, and our potential into the rigid physical prison laid down for us since we were small children. No. We refuse. We will not buy your clothes and shoes and surgical solutions. No, we will not be beautiful; we will not be good. Most of all, we refuse to be beautiful and good.

Choice: that was the thing. Other people claimed that you can't choose who you love--it just happens!--but Grace and Roman knew that was a bunch of happy horseshit. Of course you chose who you loved. If you didn't choose, you ended up with what was left--the drunks and abusers, the debtors and vacuums, the ones who ate their food too fast or had never read a novel. Damn, marriage was hard work, was manual labor, and unpaid manual labor at that. Yet, year after year, Grace and Roman had pressed their shoulders against the stone and rolled it up the hill together.

Over the course of the slave trade, an estimated 11,000,000 black African people were transported across the Atlantic Ocean to work unpaid on sugar and cotton plantations in the Americas and West Indies.

I’m going to look at a number of areas – beauty, the body, unpaid work, progress, sex, community, power, violence – in terms of how they are experienced by women in midlife, and how other groups exploit, scapegoat and demonise middle-aged women in order to preserve favoured narratives.

Emotional labor, as I define it, is emotion management and life management combined. It is the unpaid, invisible work we do to keep those around us comfortable and happy.

Claiming that the past was socially better than the present is also a hallmark of white supremacy. Consider any period in the past from the perspective of people of color: 246 years of brutal enslavement; the rape of black women for the pleasure of white men and to produce more enslaved workers; the selling off of black children; the attempted genocide of Indigenous people, Indian removal acts, and reservations; indentured servitude, lynching, and mob violence; sharecropping; Chinese exclusion laws; Japanese American internment; Jim Crow laws of mandatory segregation; black codes; bans on black jury service; bans on voting; imprisoning people for unpaid work; medical sterilization and experimentation; employment discrimination; educational discrimination; inferior schools; biased laws and policing practices; redlining and subprime mortgages; mass incarceration; racist media representations; cultural erasures, attacks, and mockery; and untold and perverted historical accounts, and you can see how a romanticized past is strictly a white construct. But it is a powerful construct because it calls out to a deeply internalized sense of superiority and entitlement and the sense that any advancement for people of color is an encroachment on this entitlement.

…calculated that if you hired workers at the market rate to do all the unpaid work women do, unpaid work would be the biggest sector of the global economy. … As Waring wrote, “Men won’t easily give up a system in which half the world’s population works for next to nothing,” especially as men recognize that “precisely because that half works for so little, it may have no energy left to fight for anything else.

Women in Bolivia are credited with one year of pension contributions per child, up to a maximum of three children. As a side benefit (and a more long-term solution to the problem of feminised poverty), pension credits for the main carer have also been found to encourage men to take on more of the unpaid care load.60 Which raises the question: is women’s unpaid work under valued because we don’t see it – or is it invisible because we don’t value it?

Only the unpaid cooking seems to be a woman’s job to some guys. They don’t want to do it themselves, so they push it on their wife and say it’s women’s work,” Charity said, rolling her eyes. “Given that the top chefs of the world are largely men, they are mistaken. But then, if you can get a good wage for something, men generally assume control.” She paused.

When women can decide whether and when to have children; when women can decide whether and when and whom to marry; when women have access to healthcare, do only our fair share of unpaid labor, get the education we want, make the financial decisions we need, are treated with respect at work, enjoy the same rights as men, and rise up with the help of other women and men who train us in leadership and sponsor us for high positions—then women flourish … and our families and communities flourish with us.

Every society in the world is built on the unpaid or underpaid work of women. If it had to be paid for it would cost, apparently, US$10.9 trillion. But to pay for it would be to redistribute wealth and power in a way that might defund and de-fang patriarchy.

In Floral Heights and the other prosperous sections of Zenith, especially in the “young married set,” there were many women who had nothing to do. Though they had few servants, yet with gas stoves, electric ranges and dish-washers and vacuum cleaners, and tiled kitchen walls, their houses were so convenient that they had little housework, and much of their food came from bakeries and delicatessens. They had but two, one, or no children; and despite the myth that the Great War had made work respectable, their husbands objected to their “wasting time and getting a lot of crank ideas” in unpaid social work, and still more to their causing a rumor, by earning money, that they were not adequately supported. They worked perhaps two hours a day, and the rest of the time they ate chocolates, went to the motion-pictures, went window-shopping, went in gossiping twos and threes to card-parties, read magazines, thought timorously of the lovers who never appeared, and accumulated a splendid restlessness which they got rid of by nagging their husbands. The husbands nagged back.

52 Data from France, Germany, Sweden and Turkey shows that even after accounting for social transfers that some countries employ to recognise the contribution women make through their unpaid care work, women earn between 31% and 75% less than men over their lifetimes.53

Sometimes, she wondered what she was missing, if her life was somehow incomplete because she didn't see the reflection of her face in the face of a son or daughter. Maybe. That's what mothers told her: Oh, you don't know what you're missing; it's spiritual; I feel closer to the earth, to the creator of all things. Perhaps all of that was true--it must be true--but Grace also knew that mothering was work, was manual labor, and unpaid manual labor at that. She'd known too many women who'd vanished after childbirth; women whose hopes and fears had been pushed to the back of the family closet; women who'd magically been replaced by their children and their children's desires.

Unpaid internships are worse than slavery," Gabby said. I looked at her, unsure of what she meant. "They make us work ridiculous hours, for free, and they make us do things an employee would do. It's a scam, and worse, they make you feel like they're doing YOU a favor. It's such mindfuckery.

Fathers are able to see themselves as other things because, typically, their professional identity is less affected by having children, and also because they simply have the uninterrupted time and the space to do so--thanks to mothers doing more than their share of unpaid care and domestic work.

The Bolsheviks argued that only socialism could resolve the contradiction between work and family. Under socialism, household labor would be transferred to the public sphere: The tasks performed by millions of individual unpaid women in their homes would be taken over by paid workers in communal dining rooms, laundries, and childcare centers. Women would be freed to enter the public sphere on an equal basis with men, unhampered by the duties of the home. At last women would be equally educated, waged, and able to pursue their own individual goals and development. Under such circumstances, marriage would become superfluous. Men and women would come together and separate as they wished, apart from the deforming pressures of economic dependency and need. Free union would gradually replace marriage as the state ceased to interfere in the union between the sexes. Parents, regardless of their marital status, would care for their children with the help of the state; the very concept of illegitimacy would become obsolete. The family, stripped of its previous social functions, would gradually wither away, leaving in its place fully autonomous, equal individuals free to choose their partners on the basis of love and mutual respect.

I began to see that while equality often entailed women crossing the sexual divide between women's work and men's work, equality rarely meant that men crossed over the divide to the women's side: our side – women's – the side where work was largely, though not exclusively, unpaid or poorly paid care of dependents.

GDP doesn’t register, as Robert Kennedy put it, “the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, or the intelligence of our public debate.” GDP measures everything, Kennedy concluded, “except that which makes life worthwhile.” Nor does GDP take into account unpaid work, the so-called compassionate economy.

The racial problems that consumed Guitar were the most boring of all. He wondered what they would do if they didn't have black and white problems to talk about. Who would they be if they couldn't describe the insults, the violence, and oppression that their lives (and the television news) were made up of? If they didn't have Kennedy or Elijah to quarrel about? They excused themselves for everything. Every job of work undone, every bill unpaid, every illness, every death was The Man's fault. And Guitar was becoming just like them—except he made no excuse for himself—just agreed, it seemed to Milkman, with every grievance he heard.

That’s why the gender imbalance in unpaid work is so significant: The unpaid work a woman does in the home is a barrier to the activities that can advance her—getting more education, earning outside income, meeting with other women, becoming politically active. Unequal unpaid work blocks a woman’s path to empowerment.

When we strike a balance between the challenge of an activity and our skill at performing it, when the rhythm of the work itself feels in sync with our pulse, when we know that what we're doing matters, we can get totally absorbed in our task. That is happiness. The life coach Martha Beck asks new potential clients, "Is there anything you do regularly that makes you forget what time it is?" That forgetting -- that pure absorption -- is what the psychologist Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi calls "flow" or optimal experience. In an interview with Wired magazine, he described flow as "being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost." In a typical day that teeters between anxiety and boredom, flow experiences are those flashes of intense living -- bright against the dull. These optimal experiences can happen when we're engaged in work paid and unpaid, in sports, in music, in art. The researchers Maria Allison and Margaret Duncan have studied the role of flow in women's lives and looked at factors that contributed to what they call "antiflow." Antiflow was associated with repetitive household tasks, repetitive tasks at work, unchallenging tasks, and work we see as meaningless. But there's an element of chaos when it comes to flow. Even if we're doing meaningful and challenging work, that sense of total absoprtion can elude us. We might get completely and beautifully lost in something today, and, try as we might to re-create the same conditions tomorrow, our task might jsut feel like, well, work. In A Life of One's Own, Marion Milner described her effort to re-create teh conditions of her own recorded moments of happiness, saying, "Often when I felt certain that I had discovered the little mental act which produced the change I walked on air, exulting that I had found the key to my garden of delight and could slip through the door whenever I wished. But most often when I came again the place seemed different, the door overgrown with thorns and my key stuck in the lock. It was as if the first time I had said 'abracadabra' the door had opened, but the next time I must use a different word. (123-124).

the only thing worse than restaurant work was the ceaseless, unpaid childcare inflicted upon an older sister.

This false appearance distinguishes wages labour from other historical forms of labour. On the basis of the wages system even the unpaid labour seems to be paid labour. With the slave, on the contrary, even that part of his labour which is paid appears to be unpaid. Of course, in order to work the slave must live, and one part of his working day goes to replace the value of his own maintenance. But since no bargain is struck between him and his master, and no acts of selling and buying are going on between the two parties, all his labour seems to be given away for nothing.

Why does Joe Normie think it’s a litmus test for morality if one returns one’s shopping cart? Big-box stores put out of business local retailers, they automated their systems to reduce employees, and they got customers to be their own cashiers without getting paid for their labor, and yet to prove I’m a good person, I’m supposed to do more unpaid work for them to streamline their operation?

Unpaid internships lock out millions of talented young people based on class alone. They send the message that work is not labor to be compensated with a living wage, but an act of charity to the powerful, who reward the unpaid worker with "exposure" and "experience." The promotion of unpaid labor has already eroded opportunity—and quality—in fields like journalism and politics. A false meritocracy breeds mediocrity.

The Great Recession and its continuing aftermath have left many twenty-somethings feeling naïve, even devastated.Twenty-somethings are more educated than ever before, but a smaller percentage find work after college. Many entry-level jobs have gone overseas, making it more difficult for twenty-somethings to gain a foothold at home. With a contracting economy and a growing population, unemployment is at its highest in decades. An unpaid internship is the new starter job. About a quarter of twenty-somethings are out of work and another quarter work only part-time. Twenty-somethings who do have paying jobs earn less than their 1970s counterparts when adjusted for inflation.

We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain that we shall carry nothing out. When that comes into my mind, I think rather of the little things rather than of gold or lands. Intimate letters that a man treasured more than money; little tokens of which the clue has died with him; the unfinished work to which he was coming back, and never came; even the unpaid bills that worried him; for death transfigures all, and makes the commonplace pathetic.

We are not born wanting fake breasts or a work-life based on unpaid domestic labour any more than we are born wanting a can of Coke or Nike runners. In significant ways, society creates our desires and expectations for ourselves.

The sex-based segregation of labour is the key, to maintaining not only the family, but also the economy, because the economy would collapse like a house of cards if this unpaid domestic labour had to be paid for by somebody, either by the husband or the employer. Consider this: the employer pays the employee for his or her labour in the workplace. But the fact that he or she can come back to the workplace, the next day, depends on somebody else (or herself) doing a whole lot of work the employer does not pay for—cooking, cleaning, running the home. When you have an entire structure of unpaid labour buttressing the economy, then the sexual division of labour cannot be considered to be domestic and private; it is what keeps the economy going. If tomorrow, every woman demanded to be paid for this work that she does, either the husband would have to pay her, or the employer would have to pay the husband. The economy would fall apart. This entire system functions on the assumption that women do housework for love. *

Today in the US, we're sending our daughters into a workplace that was designed for our dads, set up on the assumption that employees had partners who would stay home to do the unpaid work of caring for family and tending to the house. Even back then, it wasn't true for everyone. Today, it is true for almost no one, except for one significant group: the most powerful positions in society are often occupied by men who do wives who do not work outside the home, and those men may not fully understand the lives of the people who work for them.

The gender imbalance in unpaid work is such a compelling subject for me in part because it’s a common burden that binds many women together, but also because the causes of the imbalance run so deep that you cannot solve them with a technical fix. You have to renegotiate the relationship. To me, no question is more important than this one: Does your primary relationship have love and respect and reciprocity and a sense of teamwork and belonging and mutual growth? I believe all of us ask ourselves this question in one way or another—because I think it is one of the greatest longings of life.

This is the way it ought to be, he thought to himself, to be able to dance with a girl you like and really get a kick out of it because everything’ on an even keel and one’s worries are of the usual ones of unpaid bills and sickness in the family and being late to work too often. Wh can’t it be that way for me? Nobody’s looking twice at us. Nobody’s asking me where I was during the war or what the hell I am doing back on the coast. There’s no trouble to be had without looking for it. Everything’s the same, just as it used to be. No bad feelings except for those that have always been and probably always will. It’s a matter of attitude. Mine needs changing. I’ve got to love the world the way I used to. I’ve got to love it and the people so I’ll feel good, and feeling good will make life worthwhile. There’s no point in crying about what’s done. There’s a place for me and Emi and Freddie here on the dance floor and out there in the hustle of things if we’ll let it be that way. I’ve been fighting it and hating it and letting my bitterness against myself and Ma and Pa and even Taro throw the whole universe out of perspective. I want only to go on living and be happy. I’ve only to let myself do so.

Maybe you have to be really, really tired before you can answer questions like those. Maybe you have to be deeply discouraged by never having time for all the things that need doing in this world—not just the important things, like spending time with the people you love, taking care of your health, and engaging in purposeful work (paid or unpaid) that gives you a chance to participate in the repairing of the world, but also the minor but nonnegotiable things, like keeping up with the laundry, getting your oil changed, stocking the refrigerator with something other than fat-free yogurt and frozen pizza,

about jobs, bosses, or unpaid electric bills. Freedom is fantastic. Yet my lifestyle is not “normal.” Like wealth, society, through its “Get Rich Slow” mandates, has defined “normal” for you. Normal is waking at 6 a.m., working eight hours at a tolerated job Monday through Friday, save 10%, and repeat for 50 years. Normal is to buy everything on credit. Normal is to believe the illusion that trusting Wall Street and their cohorts will make you rich. Normal is to believe that a faster car and a bigger house will make you happy. You’re conditioned to accept normal based on society’s corrupted definition of wealth, and because of it, normal itself is corrupted. Normal is modern-day slavery.

The actual consumers of knowledge are the children—who can’t pay, can’t vote, can’t sit on the committees. Their parents care for them, but don’t sit in the classes themselves; they can only hold politicians responsible according to surface images of “tough on education.” Politicians are too busy being re-elected to study all the data themselves; they have to rely on surface images of bureaucrats being busy and commissioning studies—it may not work to help any children, but it works to let politicians appear caring. Bureaucrats don’t expect to use textbooks themselves, so they don’t care if the textbooks are hideous to read, so long as the process by which they are purchased looks good on the surface. The textbook publishers have no motive to produce bad textbooks, but they know that the textbook purchasing committee will be comparing textbooks based on how many different subjects they cover, and that the fourth-grade purchasing committee isn’t coordinated with the third-grade purchasing committee, so they cram as many subjects into one textbook as possible. Teachers won’t get through a fourth of the textbook before the end of the year, and then the next year’s teacher will start over. Teachers might complain, but they aren’t the decision-makers, and ultimately, it’s not their future on the line, which puts sharp bounds on how much effort they’ll spend on unpaid altruism . . .

Opportunity Knocks Being selective when deciding what opportunities to go after is one thing, but it can get even harder when opportunities come to us. We get a job offer we didn’t expect. A side project comes along that isn’t really what we do, but it is easy cash. Someone asks us to help out with something we love doing, but it is unpaid work. An acquaintance has a time share available in a less-than-ideal location but at a discounted rate. What do we do? The fear of missing out goes into full effect. How can we say no; the offer is right here for the taking. We might never have gone after it, but now it is so easy to get it we consider it. But if we just say yes because it is an easy reward, we run the risk of having to later say no to a more meaningful one.

Their causes of death differed: hangovers, nightmares, children who couldn’t stop crying, neighbors partying till 4 a.m., broken hearts, unpaid bills, roads not taken, ailing parents, midnight ice cream binges. But every morning.. they dragged themselves here, to the one thing in their lives that never changed, the one thing they could count on come rain, or shine, or dead pets, or divorce: work.

When states need to slash government spending on education, health care, or old age pensions, mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives must pick up the slack, diverting their energies to care for the young, the sick, and the elderly. Capitalism thrives on women’s unpaid labor in the home because women’s care work supports lower taxes. Lower taxes mean higher profits for those already at the top of the income ladder—mostly men.

From the beginning of publicly funded schooling in the United States (and Europe), teachers have been pressed to treat their work as a calling, to dedicate long hours outside of the classroom to it, and to do this out of care for their students. Yet such expectations have existed in tension with the idea that teachers’ skills are little more than a “natural” inclination to care for children, rooted in a love that is simultaneously too big and too unimportant to be fairly remunerated. Like the work done in the home—paid or unpaid—teachers’ work is considered both necessary and not really work at

I can count on one hand with fingers to spare the number of heterosexual relationships I know in which the man creates the domestic and other conditions for the woman to enjoy her time in life to an equal extent as she does for him. Things in the rear-view mirror are closer than they appear. To benefit from the work of someone who is invisible and unpaid and whom it is not necessary to thank because it is their inescapable purpose in life to attend to you, is to be able to imagine that you accomplished what you did alone and unaided – whether you wrested a fortune from a conquered isle, or words from the void.

For women who spend all their hours doing unpaid work, the chores of the day kill the dreams of a lifetime. What do I mean by unpaid work? It’s work performed in the home, like childcare or other forms of caregiving, cooking, cleaning, shopping, and errands, done by a family member who’s not being paid. In many countries, when communities don’t have electricity or running water, unpaid work is also the time and labor women and girls spend collecting water and gathering wood. This is reality for millions of women, especially in poorer countries, where women do a much higher share of the unpaid work that makes a household run. On average, women around the world spend more than twice as many hours as men on unpaid work, but the range of the disparity is wide. In India, women spend 6 hours a day doing unpaid work, while men spend less than 1. In the US, women average more than 4 hours of unpaid work every day; men average just 2.5. In Norway, women spend 3.5 hours a day on unpaid work, while men spend about 3. There is no country where the gap is zero. This means that, on average, women do seven years more of unpaid work than men over their lifetimes. That’s about the time it takes to complete a bachelor’s and a master’s degree.

The Great Recession and its continuing aftermath have left many twentysomethings feeling naïve, even devastated. Twentysomethings are more educated than ever before, but a smaller percentage find work after college. Many entry-level jobs have gone overseas making it more difficult for twentysomethings to gain a foothold at home. With a contracting economy and a growing population, unemployment is at its highest in decades. An unpaid internship is the new starter job. About a quarter of twentysomethings are out of work and another quarter work only part-time. Twentysomethings who do have paying jobs earn less than their 1970s counterparts when adjusted for inflation.

THE SIX-HOUR SEMINAR that Jack was forced to attend at the beginning of each new semester had been called Orientation until a few years ago, when the university changed the seminar’s name to Onboarding. The name change coincided with a revamp of the orientation curriculum, which had bloated into this all-day human resources horror during which members of the HR team attempted, at unmerciful length, to “socialize the mission statement’s DNA,” is how they put it. They were referring to the many-planked mission statement the university had spent two years and countless consultant dollars developing in a campus-wide effort to express everything the university did in just one sentence. This was the brainchild of the university’s new CFO, who told the faculty in all seriousness that developing a mission statement that captured everything the university did in just one sentence was akin to their “moonshot,” and he asked for their help in this endeavor “not because it is easy, but because it is hard.” Why the university needed to corral its collective intelligence and creativity and energy for the task of expressing everything it did in just one sentence was a mystery to most faculty, but this did not stop their administrator bosses from enthusiastically assigning them to “mission statement working groups” so that they could have a voice (unpaid) in developing this one magical sentence, this one statement that would distill everything everyone did into a phrase ideally small enough for letterhead.

Dearest Henrietta’s position has long made me uneasy, and, since she frees me into confidence by her confidence to you, I will tell you so. Most undesirable it is that this should be continued, and yet where is there a door open to escape? ... My dear brothers have the illusion that nobody should marry on less than two thousand a year. Good heavens! how preposterous it does seem to me! We scarcely spend three hundred, and I have every luxury, I ever had, and which it would be so easy to give up, at need; and Robert wouldn’t sleep, I think, if an unpaid bill dragged itself by any chance into another week. He says that when people get into ‘pecuniary difficulties,’ his ‘sympathies always go with the butchers and bakers.’ So we keep out of scrapes yet, you see....

For if single women are looking for government to create a "hubby state" for them, what is certainly true is that their male counterparts have a long enjoy the fruits of a related "wifey state," in which the nation and its government supported male independence in a variety of ways. Men, and especially married wealthy white men, have a long relied on government assistance. It's a government that has historically supported white men's home and business ownership through grants, loans, incentives, and tax breaks. It has allowed them to accrue wealth and offer them shortcuts and bonuses for passing it down to their children. Government established white men's right to vote and thus exert control over the government at the nation's founding and has protected their enfranchisement. It has also bolstered the economic and professional prospects of men by depressing the economic prospects of women: by failing to offer women equivalent economic and civic protections, thus helping to create conditions whereby women were forced to be dependent on those men, creating a gendered class of laborers who took low paying or unpaid jobs doing the domestic and childcare work that further enabled men to dominate public spheres. But the growth of a massive population of women who are living outside those dependent circumstances puts new pressures on the government: to remake conditions in a way that will be more hospitable to female independence, to a citizenry now made up of plenty of women living economically, professionally, sexually, and socially liberated lives.

The relationship between humanity and work involves money, but in something of a negative correlation. The jobs and roles that are the most human and would naturally be most attractive tend to pay nothing or close to nothing. Mother, father, artist, writer, musician, coach, teacher, storyteller, nurturer, counselor, dancer, poet, philosopher, journalist—these roles often are either unpaid or pay so little that it is difficult to survive or thrive in many environments. Many of these roles have high positive social impacts that are ignored by the market. On the other hand, the most lucrative jobs tend to be the most inorganic. Corporate lawyers, technologists, financiers, traders, management consultants, and the like assume a high degree of efficiency. The more that a person can submerge one’s humanity to the logic of the marketplace, the higher the reward.

Situated in the center of family values debates is an imagined traditional family ideal. Formed through a combination of marital and blood ties, "normal" families should consist of heterosexual, racially homogeneous couples who produce their own biological children. Such families should have a specific authority structure, namely, a father-head earning an adequate family wage, a stay-at-home wife and mother, and children. Idealizing the traditional family as a private haven from a public world, family is seen as being held together through primary emotional bonds of love and caring. assuming a relatively fixed sexual division of labor, wherein women's roles are defined as primarily in the home with men's in the public world of work, the traditional family ideal also assumes the separation of work and family. Defined as a natural or biological arrangement based on heterosexual attraction, instead this monolithic family type is actually supported by government policy. It is organized not around a biological core, but a state-sanctioned, heterosexual marriage that confers legitimacy not only on the family structure itself but on children born in this family. In general, everything the imagined traditional family ideal is thought to be, African-American families are not. Two elements of the traditional family ideal are especially problematic for African-American women. First, the assumed split between the "public" sphere of paid employment and the "private" sphere of unpaid family responsibilities has never worked for U.S. Black women. Under slavery, U.S. Black women worked without pay in the allegedly public sphere of Southern agriculture and had their family privacy routinely violated. Second, the public/private binary separating the family households from the paid labor market is fundamental in explaining U.S. gender ideology. If one assumes that real men work and real women take care of families, then African-Americans suffer from deficient ideas concerning gender. in particular, Black women become less "feminine," because they work outside the home, work for pay and thus compete with men, and their work takes them away from their children. Framed through this prism of an imagined traditional family ideal, U.S. Black women's experiences and those of other women of color are typically deemed deficient. Rather than trying to explain why Black women's work and family patterns deviate from the seeming normality of the traditional family ideal, a more fruitful approach lies in challenging the very constructs of work and family themselves. Understandings of work, like understandings of family, vary greatly depending on who controls the definitions.

The use of rewards—what might be called positive coercion—does not work in the long run any better than threat and punishment, or negative coercion. In the reward, the child senses the parent’s desire to control no less than in the punishment. The issue is the child’s sense of being forced, not the manner in which the force is applied. This was well illustrated in a classic study using magic markers.2 A number of children were screened to select some who showed a natural interest and inclination for playing with magic markers. Those who did were then divided into three different groups. For one group, there was no reward involved and no indication what to do with the markers. Another group was given a small reward to use the markers, and the third was promised a substantial reward. When retested sometime later, the group that had been most rewarded showed the least interest in playing with the magic markers, while the children who had been left uninstructed showed by far the greatest motivation to use them. Simple behaviorist principles would suggest it ought to have been the other way around, another illustration that behavioral approaches have no more than short-term efficacy. At work here, of course, was residual counterwill in response to positive coercion. In a similar experiment, the psychologist Edward Deci observed the behaviors of two groups of college students vis-à-vis a puzzle game they had originally all been equally intrigued by. One group was to receive a monetary reward each time a puzzle was solved; the other was given no external incentive. Once the payments stopped, the paid group proved far more likely to abandon the game than their unpaid counterparts. “Rewards may increase the likelihood of behaviors,” Dr. Deci remarks, “but only so long as the rewards keep coming... Stop the pay, stop the play.” We

The idea is to intentionally design a relaxing environment that is off-limits to many of the stresses and distractions that define your waking hours. Begin with aesthetics, making an effort to keep your bedroom neat and attractive. In other words, aim for Southern Living in your private quarters even if the rest of your house looks like Mechanics Weekly. Then begin to work on behaviors, keeping your bedroom off-limits to activities other than sleeping, relaxing, or making love. Nix the stacks of unpaid bills, piles of dirty laundry, collections of unread newspapers, and file folders from the office. By fostering this kind of space, seemingly untouched by the nitty gritty of daily life, you will have created a quiet haven where-by simply stepping inside and closing the door behind you-you can take a mini-vacation from stress. This time can then be used to pray, to relax, or to lavish your undivided romantic attentions on your husband.

These caring arrangements are unreliable and unjust. The nuclear family cannot be the assumed basic unit of care, nor can market outsourcing be the solution to the gender inequality of current care expectations or practices. In both cases, after all, women end up doing the lion's share of both unpaid and paid care work (two-thirds of paid and three-quarters of unpaid care work globally). Why should women have to do all this care work? And what if you don't have a family that can support you - what if your family has rejected you, or you have rejected them? What if you cannot afford to pay for privatised care services? At best, the consequences of this regime of care have often led to the neglect and isolation of those most in need of care, and at worst to needless sickness and death. The neoliberal insistence on only taking care of yourself and your closest kin also leads to a paranoid form of 'care for one's own' that has become one of the launch pads for the recent rise of hard-right populism across the globe.

The taxi driver has told me his entire life story for only 97 kroner, but from his story I gather what really happened: he got drunk last night and had a hangover this morning. He was about to call in sick but then remembered all his unpaid bills and went to work anyway. He quit working at sea and went ashore because he couldn’t keep his job. When he was no longer able to control his drinking, he was urged to quit his job as a fireman and now he earns a living driving a taxi. He has never been close to his mum but now that she doesn’t have much time left, he tries to show that he’s a good son. His wife left him. He gives money to his daughter in order to keep in touch with her … He wants to be heard. He wants to exist. He tries to avoid being lonely by talking about himself. If he had bothered to ask me, I would have told him that I just witnessed a child’s first breath, but I don’t give a fuck that he didn’t ask. Today, I resist the temptation to criticise anybody, and decide to show patience instead. ‘Thank you,’ I say with a smile. ‘Same to you. Have a nice day,’ he answers.

The politics of time was clarified in my women's liberation group in the 1970's when one of us, a mother of small children, found herself single. Parenting and providing seemed irreconcilable. Within a generation it had become the norm. By 2010 single parents comprised 25 per cent of all families and 60 per cent had a paid job. The agenda this implies is obvious: not the trick of work-life balance that assigns responsibility to women but a political economy that has at its heart not a breadwinner who is an unencumbered, cared-for man but a mother. Women's appeal to men to share parenting has, of course, been answered by millions of men. They attend the birth of their babies, they fall in love with them and then soon, too soon, before they have even got acquainted, they leave the babies and the mother's from morning till night and go back to their paid jobs. Nowhere have men reciprocated women's paid work and unpaid care by initiating mass movements for men's equal parental leave or working time that synchronizes with children and women; nowhere have men en masse shared the costs—in time and money—of childhood.

But nothing encapsulated the subordinate status of wives more obviously than the fact that their domestic labour was unpaid. ‘They are excluded from the realm of exchange and consequently have no value,’ wrote Delphy. Even outside the home, women were more likely than men to work as volunteers. This couldn’t be explained by the nature of the work they were doing. It wasn’t that cleaning, cooking, caring, or doing agricultural work were always unpaid. People could be hired to do these jobs, and these workers would expect to receive wages. It wasn’t the case, either, that wives were getting nothing in return. It’s just that what they were getting in return was so little. The wife’s job was to work, honour, and obey, Delphy concluded. What she got in return was upkeep. This situation was so obviously exploitative that ‘when a farmer couldn’t afford to hire a domestic worker he took a wife’. Delphy’s argument was that, rather than her work being worthless in monetary terms, it was a wife’s relationship to production that gave her labour so little value. It was because she was a wife doing it, in the same way that if a slave were doing it, they wouldn’t be paid either. In the family, and by extension in wider society, the product of her labour was seen to belong to her husband.

People strut and swagger in front of others, but rarely alone. These are social gestures. Walking, the slowest form of travel, is the quickest route to our more authentic selves. We can't return to some long-lost paradise that probably never was. But we can walk. We can walk to work. We can walk our daughter to school. We can walk alone, to nowhere in particular on a crisp and breezy autumn afternoon. We walk to forget. We walk to forget the cranky boss, the spat with the spouse, the pile of unpaid bills, the flashing warning light in your Subaru, indicating either that the tire pressure is low or the car is on fire. We walk to forget, if only momentarily, a world that is "too much with us," as William Wordsworth, another fine walker, put it. We walk to forget ourselves, too. I know I do. The surplus fifteen pounds resistant to every diet known to man, the recidivist nasal hair, the decade-old blemish that suddenly, for reasons known only to it, has decided to self-actualize on the crown of my bald head, spreading like an inkblot. All forgotten when I walk. Walking is democratic. Barring a disability, anyone can walk. The wealthy walker has no advantage over the impoverished one. Rousseau, despite his literary success, always saw himself as "the son of a worker," what we now call blue-collar. People like that didn't ride in fancy carriages. They walked. They walked as I do now: attentively, one step at a time, relishing the sturdiness, and the springiness, too, of serious earth.

Still, there was hope of progress. In March 1865, Congress created an organization, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, which had a range of responsibilities including the reallocation of abandoned Southern land to the newly emancipated. The bureau’s charge was to lease forty-acre parcels that would provide economic self-sufficiency to a people who had endured hundreds of years of unpaid toil. Already, in January 1865, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman had issued Special Field Order No. 15, which, to take some of the pressure off his army as thousands of slaves eagerly fled their plantations and trailed behind his troops, “reserved coastal land in Georgia and South Carolina for black settlement.” Less than a year after he issued the order, forty thousand former slaves had begun to work four hundred thousand acres of this land.36 Then, in July of the same year, the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, General Oliver O. Howard, issued Circular 13, fully authorizing the lease of forty-acre plots from abandoned plantations to the newly freed families. “Howard was neither a great administrator nor a great man,” noted W.E.B. Du Bois, “but he was a good man. He was sympathetic and humane, and tried with endless application and desperate sacrifice to do a hard, thankless duty.”37 Howard made clear that whatever amnesty President Johnson may have bestowed on Southern rebels did not “extend to … abandoned or confiscated property.”38 Johnson, however, immediately rescinded Howard’s order,

She could envision Shakespeare's sister. But she imagined a violent, an apocalyptic end for Shakespeare's sister, whereas I know that isn't what happened. You see, it isn't necessary. I know that lots of Chinese women, given in marriage to men they abhorred and lives they despised, killed themselves by throwing themselves down the family well. I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I'm only saying that isn't what usually happens. It it were, we wouldn't be having a population problem. And there are so much easier ways to destroy a woman. You don't have to rape or kill her; you don't even have to beat her. You can just marry her. You don't even have to do that. You can just let her work in your office for thirty-five dollars a week. Shakespeare's sister did...follow her brother to London, but she never got there. She was raped the first night out, and bleeding and inwardly wounded, she stumbled for shelter into the next village she found. Realizing before too long that she was pregnant, she sought a way to keep herself and her child safe. She found some guy with the hots for her, realized he was credulous, and screwed him. When she announced her pregnancy to him, a couple months later, he dutifully married her. The child, born a bit early, makes him suspicious: they fight, he beats her, but in the end he submits. Because there is something in the situation that pleases him: he has all the comforts of home including something Mother didn't provide, and if he has to put up with a screaming kid he isn't sure is his, he feels now like one of the boys down at the village pub, none of whom is sure they are the children of the fathers or the fathers of their children. But Shakespeare's sister has learned the lesson all women learn: men are the ultimate enemy. At the same time she knows she cannot get along in the world without one. So she uses her genius, the genius she might have used to make plays and poems with, in speaking, not writing. She handles the man with language: she carps, cajoles, teases, seduces, calculates, and controls this creature to whom God saw fit to give power over her, this hulking idiot whom she despises because he is dense and fears because he can do her harm. So much for the natural relation between the sexes. But you see, he doesn't have to beat her much, he surely doesn't have to kill her: if he did, he'd lose his maidservant. The pounds and pence by themselves are a great weapon. They matter to men, of course, but they matter more to women, although their labor is generally unpaid. Because women, even unmarried ones, are required to do the same kind of labor regardless of their training or inclinations, and they can't get away from it without those glittering pounds and pence. Years spent scraping shit out of diapers with a kitchen knife, finding places where string beans are two cents less a pound, intelligence in figuring the most efficient, least time-consuming way to iron men's white shirts or to wash and wax the kitchen floor or take care of the house and kids and work at the same time and save money, hiding it from the boozer so the kid can go to college -- these not only take energy and courage and mind, but they may constitute the very essence of a life. They may, you say wearily, but who's interested?...Truthfully, I hate these grimy details as much as you do....They are always there in the back ground, like Time's winged chariot. But grimy details are not in the background of the lives of most women; they are the entire surface.

Still, there was hope of progress. In March 1865, Congress created an organization, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, which had a range of responsibilities including the reallocation of abandoned Southern land to the newly emancipated. The bureau’s charge was to lease forty-acre parcels that would provide economic self-sufficiency to a people who had endured hundreds of years of unpaid toil. Already, in January 1865, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman had issued Special Field Order No. 15, which, to take some of the pressure off his army as thousands of slaves eagerly fled their plantations and trailed behind his troops, “reserved coastal land in Georgia and South Carolina for black settlement.” Less than a year after he issued the order, forty thousand former slaves had begun to work four hundred thousand acres of this land.36 Then, in July of the same year, the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, General Oliver O. Howard, issued Circular 13, fully authorizing the lease of forty-acre plots from abandoned plantations to the newly freed families. “Howard was neither a great administrator nor a great man,” noted W.E.B. Du Bois, “but he was a good man. He was sympathetic and humane, and tried with endless application and desperate sacrifice to do a hard, thankless duty.”37 Howard made clear that whatever amnesty President Johnson may have bestowed on Southern rebels did not “extend to … abandoned or confiscated property.”38 Johnson, however, immediately rescinded Howard’s order, commanding the army to throw tens of thousands of freedpeople off the land and reinstall the plantation owners.39 While this could have come from a simple ideological aversion to land redistribution, that was not the case and, for Johnson, not the issue; who received it was. Beginning in 1843, when he was first elected to the U.S. Congress, and over the next nineteen years, Johnson had championed the Homestead Act,

It’s not that I didn’t love him, because I did. I really did. But it’s like trying to stop an alcoholic from drinking. When nothing else works, you just have to watch them like a hawk, throw every drop down the sink, try to take temptation out of the equation. And the person has to want to stop, of course.’ ‘And did he? Stop gambling? Or want to?’ ‘I’m afraid the cancer did the stopping for him in the end, love. He just got too ill to carry on, too ill to care. He left quite a lot of unpaid bills that I had no idea how I would deal with, but the life insurance money just about put things back on track for me after he’d gone.

This was not the first he had heard of the bill being overdue and unpaid. The bill had been brought to him noted a month since, and then he had simply told the youth who brought it that he would see Mr. Fitzgibbon and have the matter settled. He had spoken to his friend Laurence, and Laurence had simply assured him that all should be made right in two days, — or, at furthest, by the end of a week.

Or should one condemn an economic system that gave some families mansions on Summit Avenue and left others so poor that they would risk their children and their own lives for the sake of a single cow? They called it “The School Children’s Blizzard” because so many of the victims were so young—but in a way the entire pioneer period was a kind of children’s disaster. Children were the unpaid workforce of the prairie, the hands that did the work no one else had time for or stomach for.

That feeling of over-due bills, of bills coming due, of accounts overdrawn, of tradesmen unpaid, of general money cares, is very dreadful at first; but it is astonishing how soon men get used to it.

When you're part of an illegal government conspiracy, your actual job description gets hazy...If you're working off the books, but the books don't officially exist in the first place, have you really gone rogue, or are you just putting in unpaid overtime?

The work was done by hundreds of undocumented Polish immigrants known as the “Polish brigade.” The men toiled through spring and summer of 1980 with sledgehammers and blowtorches, but without hard hats, working twelve- to eighteen-hour days, seven days a week, often sleeping on Bonwit Teller’s floors. They were paid less than $5 an hour, sometimes in vodka. Many went unpaid and were threatened with deportation if they complained.

The drone told him one in ten of the people he passed on the street would be treated for mental illness at some point in their lives. The figure was higher for males than for apices, and higher for females than either. The same applied to the rates of suicide, which was illegal. Flere-Imsaho directed him to a hospital. It was typical, the drone said. Like the whole area, it was about average for the greater city. The hospital was run by a charity, and many of the people working there were unpaid. The drone told him everybody would assume he was a disciple there to see one of his flock, but anyway the staff were too busy to stop and quiz everybody they saw in the place. Gurgeh walked through the hospital in a daze.

Then there’s emotional labor. Now, that’s a good one. It describes all the unpaid, uncounted, often unseen work that people—overwhelmingly women—perform to keep their families and workplaces humming along.

Then there’s emotional labor. Now, that’s a good one. It describes all the unpaid, uncounted, often unseen work that people—overwhelmingly women—perform to keep their families and workplaces humming along. Organizing office birthday parties. Arranging the kids’ summer camp. Coordinating visits with in-laws. Helping the new employee feel welcome and included. The list is endless: all the little details without which life would devolve into chaos and misery. Not all women take on these tasks, and that’s fine, and some men do, and I salute them—but it’s largely women’s work. Finally, someone thought to name it.

A (house)wife now performs the tasks once distributed between servants of different rank or undertaken by the maid of all work. Her ‘core’ jobs are cleaning, shopping, cooking, washing-up, laundering and ironing.44 She also looks after her children, frequently cares for aged parents or other relatives, and is sometimes incorporated to a greater or lesser degree as an unpaid assistant in her husband’s work. This aspect of being a wife is visible in many small shops or in the activities of the wives of clergymen and politicians, but the same service is provided, less visibly, to husbands in all kinds of occupations. A wife, for example, contributes research assistance (to male academics), acts as hostess (to a business man’s clients), answers the phone and keeps the books (for a small business man).45 However, as Christine Delphy has argued, to list the tasks of a housewife tells us only so much. The list cannot explain why exactly the same services can be bought in the market, or why a particular task is performed without pay by a wife, yet she would get paid for providing the service if she worked, for example, in a restaurant or for a firm of contract cleaners.46 The problem is not that wives perform valuable tasks for which they are not paid (which has led some feminists to argue for state payment or wages for housework). Rather, what being a woman (wife) means is to provide certain services for and at the command of a man (husband). In short, the marriage contract and a wife’s subordination as a (kind of) labourer, cannot be understood in the absence of the sexual contract and the patriarchal construction of ‘men’ and ‘women’ and the ‘private’ and ‘public’ spheres.

Aggressive? Does she mean - tall? Because... I can't change that... No, the bottom drops out of my planet. The planet of me. The planet that has always tried to spin as closely to friendly planets and as far from aggro ones as possible. I've never been called aggressive out loud, but it's definitely something that's floated in the air... It's because the general cloud of my presence causes disruption that I want to orbit the chill planets, the ones with the spaceship landings, the ones little kids look up through their telescopes and think... wow... that looks like a friendly planet... I work unpaid overtime at not wanting people to think I mean them harm. So now the bottom falls out of everything I live on... She's surprised to see me vulnerable. It's not a possibility she's considered. That words based on assumptions might break me. That those simple words might unleash an ocean made up of the little sips of sadness that come from being repeatedly misinterpreted as a glance... All she sees is an aggressor. Someone she needs to protect herself from at all costs, protect an audience from... The others who might have to witness me.

In the absence of additional reputational or financial benefits, maintaining code for general public use quickly becomes an unpaid job you can’t quit.

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The majority of people who work in the arts will identify themselves as liberal to left wing, often radical left wing. This is going from the poorest artist to the highest paid curators in institutions....But if this is the case—that we are all in a field where everyone is left-wing values then why are we all agreed that the art world is a giant piece of capitalist shit that is relying on private capital that exploits its workers, that exploits it's artists, that relies on unpaid labor? This to me is living proof that art can't change the work and we need to organize. Artists need to realize how little power we all actually have and how power needs to be built. It doesn't come naturally and isn't a divine gift you get by being an artist. --Kerry Guinan

The ideal woman has always been conceptually overworked, an inorganic thing engineered to look natural. Historically, the ideal woman seeks all the things that women are trained to find fun and interesting—domesticity, physical self-improvement, male approval, the maintenance of congeniality, various forms of unpaid work.

Every job I had in the UK was hourly with overtime pay. All jobs I had in the USA were salaried with no overtime pay and an expectation to work really long unpaid hours at some of them!

I always cringe when I take a salaried job in the USA and find there is an expectation for me to work really long unpaid hours.

I leave salaried jobs at the earliest opportunity that require long unpaid hours to be worked.

I feel this intense pressure to step in and be this amazing “bonus mom.” Everyone expects me to just naturally be maternal and love my step-kids and take care of everything for them. I feel like I do all the hard work of parenting, but I don’t get any of the benefits that bio-parents get. I don’t get love, loyalty, or affection from the kids, no matter how kind I am to them. They never hug me or say thank you. I certainly don’t get acknowledged on Mother’s Day. I really try to be a good stepmom, but I feel like all my efforts are looked at with suspicion or resentment from my step-kids, because they think I’m “trying too hard.” It also feels like my husband wants it both ways. He expects me to love his kids “just like they’re my own,” and he expects me to take care of them and be involved and support them and help raise them. But then he gets defensive and territorial, and he resists my input if I try to be involved in any actual parenting, because they’re “his” kids, not mine. And his ex-wife gets threatened, and she basically tells me to “butt out and stay in my place.” So, my husband and his ex both expect me to help them do the hard work of parenting and provide childcare for them, but only on their terms. Apparently, I don’t get a place at the decision-making table. I feel like an unpaid babysitter, not a partner. And it seems like the harder I work and the nicer I am, the less anyone appreciates me. I can’t win.

There is one type of work that reliably causes conflict for couples—unpaid work. Couples fight more about the division of labour in the household—dishes, cleaning, laundry—than they do about outside or paid jobs. In fact, another Pew Research study in 2007 showed that after faithfulness and a good sex life, sharing household chores was listed as the most important element of a successful marriage. Adequate income, good housing, shared religious beliefs, shared interests, and children all came below sharing household chores.

The fairness of karma can rob people of the incentive to help alleviate the suffering around them, because if you stop the hurt, you are only postponing the inevitable, even postponing what is needful: the suffering person needs to work off their karma because it is the one-to-one ratio of suffering and deserving it—and we mustn’t get in the way of that process grinding out moral justice by alleviating someone’s hardship. They have to work it off or it remains an unpaid debt.

Corporations began to take a more active and public role in free software projects, contributing time and equipment, and sometimes even directly funding the development of free programs. Such investments could, in the best scenarios, repay themselves many times over. The sponsor only pays a small number of expert programmers to devote themselves to the project full time, but reaps the benefits of everyone’s contributions, including work from unpaid volunteers and from programmers being paid by other corporations.

Similarly, we see a common discriminatory assumption embedded in our view of a woman’s caregiving years spent out of the paid workforce as a yawning gap on her résumé and our failure to include the hundred million–plus hours of unpaid care work done in households across the country every year in our national GDP. In both cases we assume that care work is not work that really matters, even though it is essential to the dignity and the wellbeing of the elderly and the sick and to the very brain formation and growth of the young. Nor do we assume that it can in any way benefit the caregiver in ways that are individually valuable and desirable in other contexts.

The disparity, however, between the rewards offered in the labor market and the vital interest to have good dependency care makes it clear that market forces have not been relied upon to supply adequate dependency work. Indeed, a clear-eyed look at the nearly universal twin features of female caregiving and female subordination indicates: 1) that a certain class of persons has been subjected to and socialized to develop the character traits and the volitional structure needed for dependency work; 2) that certain sexual behaviors commensurate with forming attachments, being submissive to another's will, and so forth have been made compulsory for women; and 3) that poor women and women of color have been forced into paid employment as dependency workers by the scanty financial resources and limited employment opportunities available to them, and middle-class women have been forced out of paid employment not commensurate with their (largely unpaid) duties as dependency workers. It has not merely “happened” that women have consistently “chosen” to make dependency relations and dependency work central to their vision of the good life, while men have chosen a wider variety of options.

The distinction between "paid labor" and "housework" implied in working-class men's yearning for the domestic ideal persisted in later-nineteenth-century analyses of women's unpaid labor and was eventually replicated in Capital. Because wives' work was laregely unpaid, and because husbands came to the marketplace as the "possessors" of their wives' labor, Marx did not address the role of housework in the labor exchange that led to surplus value. Neither did he attend to the dynamics that permitted the husband to lay claim, in the price of his own labor, to the value of his wife's work.

But the abolition laws of the other northern states freed no living slave. Rather, slave children born after a specified date would work for the mother’s owner as indentured servants until well into adulthood (age twenty-eight, for example, in Pennsylvania, far longer than what was customary for white indentured servants), and only then would become free. Most Latin American nations also allowed slaveholders to retain ownership of existing slaves, as well as the labor of their children for a number of years. These laws, in effect, required slaves to compensate their owners for their freedom by years of unpaid labor. As one official wrote, they “respected the past and corrected only the future.” In

In the early 1970s, Buchanan orchestrated a campaign that overrode Congress, ignored polls showing strong public support, and so utterly obliterated a bill that would have created a high-quality universal child-care system in America that in forty years, the very idea has never surfaced for discussion again. Ever. The veto of the child-care bill set the stage for unpaid medical leave and all subsequent U.S. family policy. Schulte, Brigid (2014-03-11). Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time (pp. 97-98). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

I have argued elsewhere that DWYL is an essentially narcissistic schema, facilitating willful ignorance of working conditions of others by encouraging continuous self-gratification. I have also argued that DWYL exposes its adherents to exploitation, justifying unpaid or underpaid work by throwing workers’ motivations back at them; when passion becomes the socially accepted motivation for working, talk of wages or reasonable scheduling becomes crass. This book examines the many expectations about what work can provide under the DWYL creed, and the sacrifices that workers make in order to meet those expectations.

Postering. From the start, our main way of finding new people with job or housing conflicts has been by putting up posters on telephone poles. We mostly post them in working class neighborhoods or in industrial areas where a lot of people work. The most effective places to stick them seem to around high-traffic bus stops. Someone who’s standing around waiting for a bus is more likely to take the time to read a poster than someone who’s walking past. We keep the content of our posters extremely simple and direct. Because we want to elicit fights that we can win with our current size and strength, our posters list specific problems that we think we can potentially deal with: “unpaid wages?” “stolen deposit?”. If someone is currently facing one of these problems, these words are likely to catch their eye.

Work is the main event. It is central to our economy and our society, and it makes family life possible. It underpins our finances and our sense of purpose in life. Given work’s overriding importance, it is imperative to recognize the profound, far-reaching transformation that shadow work is having, and the way it is redefining our very notion of work. We will track down shadow work in its natural habitats, which are the familiar environments of daily life: the home and family, the office, shopping, restaurants, travel, and the digital world of computers and the Internet.

In the United States of 1850, the Industrial Revolution had amped up labor to an astonishing all-time high of 3,650 hours, based on seventy-hour weeks and fifty-two weeks per year.

Instead of trying to create the most enjoyable experience, they unthinkingly worked as much as possible, stockpiling useless treasure.” The researchers called this phenomenon “mindless accumulation

The market/non-market boundary does not define the edge of the economy: unpaid work in preparing a meal for someone is as much an economic act as preparing pizzas for sale – or selling computers or insurance.

The data flow so fast that that the total accumulation of the past two years—a zettabyte [one sextillion bytes]—dwarfs the prior record of human civilization.

In our view, when women fight for the wage for domes­tic work, they are also fight­ing against this work, as domes­tic work can con­tinue as such so long as and when it is not paid. It is like slav­ery. The demand for a domes­tic wage denat­u­ral­ized female slav­ery. Thus, the wage is not the ulti­mate goal, but an instru­ment, a strat­egy, to achieve a change in the power rela­tions between women and cap­i­tal. The aim of our strug­gle was to con­vert exploita­tive slave labor that was nat­u­ral­ized because of its unpaid char­ac­ter into socially rec­og­nized work; it was to sub­vert a sex­ual divi­sion of labor based on the power of the mas­cu­line wage to com­mand the repro­duc­tive labor of women, which in Cal­iban and the Witch I call “the patri­archy of the wage.” At the same time, we pro­posed to move beyond all of the blame gen­er­ated by the fact that it was always con­sid­ered as a female oblig­a­tion, as a female vocation.