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The Maternal Instinct versus the Realities of Unwaged Labor

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Message Hadley Suter

Not so, Dalla Costa and James prove, as both housework and child-rearing reproduce not just life but "labor power."   The mother is not just feeding and nurturing her children but preparing them for productive lives as wage-earners or future reproducers. The happy slave-mother creates the conditions that ready the happy slave-child to contribute to the production of capital.   The difference between factory work and domestic work cannot then be described as productive versus unproductive, but rather as waged labor versus non-waged.   This argument provided the basis for the International Wages for Housework Campaign, founded by James in 1972.

 

Interestingly, the false distinction between productive/workplace and unproductive/domestic labor is one upheld more rigorously today in the U.S. by left-leaning women than by right-wing men.   Case in point: Democratic Party Commentator Hilary Rosen's denouncement of Ann Romney as having "never worked a day in her life."   Meanwhile, it's usually conservative men (like those who rushed to Romney's defense) who shout the loudest about how stay-at-home moms are in fact doing "real" work (though I wonder if they'd so readily classify it as such if it meant that this work had by law to be remunerated through government wages).

 

Today, we talk about the distinction between productive and unproductive labor as if it were a thing of the past, not only because we believe ourselves to have escaped its division along gender lines but also because the nature of work has changed thanks to industrial outsourcing, the explosion of the service sector, and technological advancement.   This is the movement towards what Autonomists Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt call "immaterial labor," a shift they demonstrate to be linked with the increase of precarious labor, in the form of part-time employment, self-employment, work done from home, and unpaid internships.

 

At first glance, precarious labor would seem like something that only the most rabid free-market freaks would celebrate.   But as Silvia Federici points out in Precarious Labor: A Feminist Viewpoint, even Autonomists like Negri see the precariazation of work as "a trend towards the reduction of work and therefore the reduction of exploitation." She goes on to show how wrong this premise is: not only does exploitation actually increase with precarious labor, but it does so disproportionately for women, who have "always had a precarious relation to waged labor" due to domestic duties, which for women in the workforce translates to more part time jobs, less security, fewer benefits, and lower salaries.  

 

But lately, precarious labor, especially in its work-from-anywhere incarnation, has been increasingly extolled by women as a liberating force, or a way to succeed both at work and at home.   This is Anne-Marie Slaughter's premise when she vaunts the possibility of remote work as a means of proving one's efficiency as a worker even in the midst of domestic duty: "Being able to work from home--in the evening after children are put to bed, or during their sick days or snow days, and at least some of the time on weekends--can be key, for mothers, to carrying your full load versus letting a team down at crucial moments."   This basis of capitalist efficiency pervades the logic of Slaughter's article, from her a priori acceptance that any sort of time not devoted to labor, what we used to call free time, be sacrificed, right down to her suggestion that women freeze their eggs for later use if their careers have not flourished fast enough for them to have children during their fertile years.

 

That precarious labor weighs heavier on women than it does on men should be obvious; what's less apparent is how the very distinctions it seems at first to do away with--divisions between men and women, productive and unproductive labor, the office and the home--are actually reinstated. Federici's main critique of Negri and Hardt's theory of precarious labor is their characterization of "affective labor" as immaterial.   Affective labor is defined by Negri and Hardt as service jobs, held by those such as flight attendants and waitresses, that require certain affective behaviors--friendly smiles and the like--with the goal of producing "states of being." For Federici, the fact that work meant to produce "feelings" and "emotions" is by default categorized as immaterial is tantamount to the reduction of reproductive work to being a "labor of love": in both cases, the work is stripped of its economic value, its contribution to the accumulation of capital, simply because its demands are affective or rooted in emotional work, and thus understood as natural to the (unproductive) female worker.  

 

So belief in a natural maternal instinct is not just an acceptance of self-sacrifice, it's the acceptance of affective labor as being inherently unproductive. It denies the material contributions of reproductive and domestic labor, by painting them as purely emotional products, and implicitly restores the supposedly defunct gender-lines of the distinction between productive and unproductive work--even when both labors are performed by women.   Such is the case with Slaughter's suggestion that mothers continue their work from home after completing their domestic duties: it privileges her career-related "male" tasks as productive while relegating her work as a mother as purely reproductive--because it is affective.  

 

But what's more, to allow for the workplace's colonization of the domestic sphere is to repaint even the most explicitly "productive" work as affective--those midnight email sessions Slaughter suggests as being the key to women's career success should be recognized for what they are: unwaged work parading, like motherhood, as a labor of (if not motherly, then at the very least womanly) love. The happy mommy-slave is as ripe for exploitation by her office as she is by her home.

 


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Hadley Suter is a graduate student in UCLAà ‚¬ „ s Department of French and Francophone Studies.
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