Standing Up for Ourselves as Care-Laborers

by Lucy S.

I feel like so much is finally starting to come together in my mind. Reading feminists like Silvia Federici is helping me so much. There is a whole issue on domestic labor, care-work, and social reproduction in the Winter 2012 edition of The Commoner, which I have linked on the side with other sites I find valuable. They let you download the whole issue. The introduction is excellent. http://www.commoner.org.uk/

What I'm always fighting is this feeling that no one cares what I do anyway, that there are better people to do any of this, that it's too late, that I don't belong -- in academia, in the struggles I care about, or anywhere really. It is a devastating feeling, and one I think too many of us know too well. But I feel like I finally am grasping something more fully that has eluded me even up to recently. I mean, I knew it, but not as deeply. The writing of Silvia Federici and others has been so vital to this understanding. Now I have to figure out what to DO with these realizations. 

To a large extent, we are ghettoized, and it has very harmful effects on everyone involved, as these segregations do. And it's not enough for some rare one of us to make it into the institution; it can be so hard on that one person, because she may feel so alienated. When I say "we," I mean those of us who have labored at the kinds of work I named earlier, all of it being such a core part of social reproduction. One reason this segregation is so harmful is that those who likewise may later end up ghettoized or who may participate in ghettoizing others hardly hear from us, particularly in academic settings which help everyone to slow down and take what is being said more seriously -- to hear it at a much deeper level. 

Private withdrawal is an ongoing disaster, yet there is so much to pull us that way. People talk about solidarity, but it's not real solidarity if it's only an idea or a phrase. There has to be some reality to it. Reading Silvia Federici, I was thinking about how if what I did for years would have been considered respected work with its own income, I would be so different. I am not saying that in some despairing or wallowing in 'what-if' way, but just as a material fact. 

And demanding some sort of back pay from partners or ex-partners, presenting bills to them or hinting at that, misses the point, though just about everything in our society leads us to think of it that way. (And in this society, it is all we can usually do if we separate.) In my case, that approach is fairly pointless because he doesn't make much. More importantly, this isn't his fault; it's way, way bigger. It's not spouses who owe us; that's just another privatization that distracts us into fighting them and displaces the issue. It is our society that owes us. We didn't produce children for those spouses; we have produced them for the world of humanity.We are part of reproductive labor; we are creating humanity, and why - WHY should it not be considered part of our labor? Why do we not deserve full material support in that society as others deserve it, also?  

And in what way is there really respect for whatever is learned in years of those kinds of labor?  When someone has been a professor for ten years -- and believe me, they struggle with their own precariousness, but still -- won't they have accumulated more wisdom about their areas of study and their teaching practices and their writing?  Is there any way for that to translate to our experiences?  Does it in the end come down to what we are paid for? It is that, but it is also more than that.  

At best, they -- those so disconnected from this labor -- may give us credit that we really DO know how to take care of babies and kids, or do know various aspects of domestic labor -- but what many too often do not recognize is that our OWN studies in life can give us our own kind of class knowledge, our own wisdom about our condition and the larger society which we labor and struggle in and send our kids or other loved ones into, a society that fails many of them so badly both materially and in providing a deep sense of purpose, including work that matters -- work that makes the world better. We see this society damage people we love as it damages us. But also, we know about work that is not alienated, work that is such an integral part of us.  

There were the consciousness-raising groups of the 1960s and 1970s, and everything called "Women's Liberation" back then, but patriarchy as with racism did not go away. Those didn't go away, because capitalism didn't go away, and capitalism always depends on divisions. We don't really benefit from or respect the work of women back then by pretending that it is enough that they did what they did. Anyway, the best of them were far more visionary than what has come to pass as that liberation has been co-opted by liberal capitalism.

And we never got out from under this privatization of this labor. In some ways, it became even more disrespected, especially as "women's liberation" became liberal reformist mainstream feminism in which some women would celebrate climbing into their careers while most women remained in low paying or no-paying jobs. The great African-American feminist bell hooks has made the point that so much of the work of childcare and domestic work and other care-work got placed even more onto the shoulders of Black and Latina women, but most of all onto the shoulders of poor and working-class women of all ethnicities. Even those doing this care-labor who define themselves as middle-class often soon discover how poor and/or working-class they really are if they want to or are forced to separate from spouses. I saw one of my aunts fall way down after her husband left her, even losing custody of the kids she had homeschooled for years because her ex-partner convinced the judge that placing the kids with him would be best since she had no career and would "end up on welfare." 

Think about how in many indigenous societies, the work that women did which we now consider "private" -- their bearing of and caring for kids, their food production, and other domestic labors -- were in themselves their work. And in turn their material needs were provided for. The provision of these needs was not contingent upon staying with this or that spouse -- at least in some indigenous groups. 

I am not by any stretch arguing that women with kids need to all stop working at anything but care-labor. That would be more disastrous ghettoization. Nor am I going back to any notion that it is women who are supposed to primarily do this work.  I am saying that all of these vital issues got sidelined, that we stopped continuing to address them in meaningful ways. I am saying that women in so many ways are constrained and disciplined in this society, and often excluded and extra-exploited, 'even now' -- especially now, with privatization so rampant. Maybe we need new consciousness-raising groups that push further and make material demands.

I was recently reading Zora Neale Hurston's “How It Feels to Be Colored Me," which I absolutely love, and I was thinking about what we might learn from her here. She wrote:

“Sometimes I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves of the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me."

I'm not sure we want to give up our anger, but let it be bound to this astonishment that the rest of our society is depriving itself of our company when we are stopped from MOVING in this society as we are -- as care-laborers. And I love what David Graeber concludes hear the end of Debt: the First 5000 Years. He says, "Perhaps the world really does owe you a living" (387). And he goes on:

I would like, then, to end by putting in a good word for the non-industrious poor. At least they aren't hurting anyone. Insofar as the time they are taking off from work is being spent with friends and family, enjoying and caring for those they love, they're probably improving the world more than we acknowledge. Maybe we should think of them as pioneers of a new economic order that would not share our current one's penchant for self-destruction (390).

I don't think it's best to frame it in terms of "taking time off work" or being "non-industrious," because it again reinscribes the idea that these care-labors aren't "real work."  But I value his larger point here. We learn so much from our relationships and the rest of the world needs us moving among everyone else all the time, instead of silently shut away. We can be pioneers for a new economic order if we draw on, fully grasp, and share what we have learned in our lives.