The Work of Caring for Life

Social Reproduction Theory

Social Reproduction Theory is a feminist perspective on society inspired by the writings and activism of radical scholars who in the 1970s highlighted the specific nature of women’s exploitation under capitalism. They emphasised all the work that a capitalist economy requires so that the lives of present and future workers enlisted in commodity production are reproduced and cared for. In modern society, that reproductive work is mostly done by women. Their work is an essential part of the overall economic organisation. Yet through the establishment of a new sexual division of labour, that work is separated from the sphere of economic production, relegated into a domestic sphere that is supposed to be governed only by affect and emotion, and thereby is rendered invisible as a contribution to collective life. As money has become the measure of social value, those who perform the “labour of love” become structurally subordinate to those whose efforts are paid directly in cash.

Key inspirations for Social Reproduction Theory remain the writings of the 1970s, notably from the activists of the “Wages for Housework” Movement, Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James. Angela Davis’ writings also continue to be major reference points.

Lise Vogel’s 1983 Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory is regarded by many as a definitive, synoptic account of the Marxist strand of social reproduction theory.

Kathi Weeks’ 2011 The Problem with Work is another major reference, notably for its detailed analysis of the conceptual and political lessons we can draw today from the Wages for Housework movement.

In an important review published in 1989, Barbara Laslett and Johanna Brenner summed up the notion of social reproduction as, “the activities and attitudes, behaviors and emotions, responsibilities and relationships directly involved in the maintenance of life on a daily basis, and intergenerationally” (Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 15, 1989, 382).

Crucially then, social reproduction focuses centrally on the types of work activities involved in care and the reproduction of life. Through the notion are emphasised the “various kinds of work— mental, manual, and emotional—aimed at providing the historically and socially, as well as biologically, defined care necessary to maintain existing life and to reproduce the next generation” (383).

In recent years, the social reproduction perspective has been reappropriated by new feminist research in political economy.

The notion of social reproduction is also central in the critical model recently developed by Nancy Fraser, one the most important theorists of our time. Fraser uses the notion in a broader sense. For her, social reproduction “encompasses the creation, socialisation, and subjectivation of human beings…, in all their aspects. It also includes the making and remaking of culture, of the various swaths of intersubjectivity that human beings inhabit – the solidarities, social meanings, and value horizons in and through which they live and breathe” (Capitalism. A Conversation In Critical Theory, Columbia UP, 2018, p.32).

Image:

Julius Gari Melcher, Mother and Child, 1906. Art Institute of Chicago.