In the APSA Public Scholarship Program, graduate students in political science produce summaries of new research in the American Political Science Review. This piece, written by Ewa Nizalowska, covers the new article by Alyssa Battistoni, “Ideology at Work? Rethinking Reproduction.”
In recent years, Western capitalist states have faced a deepening “crisis of care.” In the United States, childcare and eldercare have become prohibitively expensive, even as care workers face grueling hours in exchange for some of the lowest wages in the country. Although the COVID-19 pandemic shed temporary light on the social importance of “reproductive labor”—cooking, cleaning, or taking care of children and the elderly— the once-celebrated “essential” workers who perform it remain underpaid and exposed to egregiously precarious working conditions.
In a recent APSR article, political theorist Alyssa Battistoni asks: why is care work so widely underpaid, or unpaid altogether? Conventional explanations for the low value of care work tend to focus on gendered attitudes about work. In these accounts, care work is undervalued because, under the sway of gendered ideology, we assume that the people who perform it (most often, women) are naturally disposed towards it. Battistoni calls this the “naturalization thesis”—the idea that capitalism makes housework appear as part of women’s essential nature in order to continue exploiting women’s reproductive labor.
These mainstream explanations tend to draw on the diagnoses and strategies of the 1970s Wages for Housework (WfH) campaign. Leaders of the WfH campaign like Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and Selma James tried to synthesize Marxist and feminist thought to offer an analysis of gender oppression rooted in the material conditions of women’s work. The WfH campaign aimed to reveal how the unwaged domestic labor of cooking, cleaning, or tending to sexual and emotional needs—typically done by the housewife—reproduced labor power, or the capacity for human beings to do work. The call for wages for housework redescribed acts previously seen as intimate, private, or natural as work deserving of wages. However, WfH’s call for wages for housework was just one part of a larger political strategy to reconstitute housewives as a revolutionary class. Of equal importance to the WfH campaign was a critique of the wage—the recognition that wages can never accurately reflect labor’s value. WfH’s demand for the wage thus entailed a tricky double move: it simultaneously sought the wage and disavowed it.
Over time, as feminist theorists attempted to extend the WfH campaign’s analysis beyond unpaid housework, feminist ideology critique abandoned this critical orientation to political economy. Two traditions in particular—“housewifization” theory and social reproduction theory—built on the WfH campaign’s ideology critique to develop new theories of reproductive labor. However, as Battistoni argues, these new theoretical currents came to rely on the “naturalization thesis” as the catch-all explanation for care work’s low value, whether they examined unpaid housework or underpaid work in the service sector. Assuming that women’s labor is rendered invisible because it is considered natural, critics of care work’s undervaluation increasingly called for “disclosing” the “true” value of care work.
“If ideology is not the primary cause behind care work’s undervaluation, then the way to challenge the downward pressure on care workers’ wages cannot be merely “redisclosing” the value of “invisible” or naturalized labor.”Battistoni argues that this reliance on the naturalization thesis poses two problems. First, it produces an inaccurate explanation for care work’s persistent low value. Although the naturalization thesis may have helped explain why housewives’ unpaid domestic labor is taken for granted, it becomes incoherent when extended to underpaid service work performed by people of all genders. Second, efforts to estimate the “true” value of “naturalized” care work assume that wages accurately reflect the value of work performed—an assumption that the WfH campaign explicitly challenged. By contrast, Battistoni’s own explanation for the undervaluation of care work loosens the tight connection between the low value of care work and the gender of those who perform it. She offers an explanation for the low value of care work rooted in the economic concept of the “cost disease”—the idea that the costs of labor-intensive services tend to rise relative to the falling costs of goods in high-productivity sectors. Unlike manufacturing work, which can be made more efficient as technology improves, care work is difficult to mechanize and thus make less labor-intensive. Care work, in other words, is not costly and underpaid primarily because people are sexist or greedy, or because those who perform it are ignorant of their own oppression. Rather, it’s costly and underpaid because the capitalist market invests according to the prospects of profit.
At stake in Battistoni’s argument is the way we approach and seek to resolve the crisis of care. If ideology is not the primary cause behind care work’s undervaluation, then the way to challenge the downward pressure on care workers’ wages cannot be merely “redisclosing” the value of “invisible” or naturalized labor. Rather, we must ask why we should trust any system that places such low value on care, pursue political action that seeks to both improve care workers’ conditions, and challenge the systems that value care work according to its capacity to generate profits.
- Ewa Nizalowska is a PhD candidate in political theory at Cornell University with research interests in American political thought, feminist theory, and theories of political economy and empire. Her dissertation examines how early to mid-twentieth-century radicals theorized the organization of economic power in the United States and strategized for its rearrangement. Her work has been supported by, among others, the American Political Science Association, the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University, and the Yan P. Lin Centre at McGill University
- BATTISTONI, ALYSSA. 2024. “Ideology at Work? Rethinking Reproduction.”, American Political Science Review, 1–14.
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