Giving an Economic Value to the “ housewife” in Society driven by Capitalism

The illusion of the perfect housewife is one that is not displayed in modern media. Though we as a society have tried to break those ties to past stereotypes of women “belonging in kitchen” and preforming all the household labor the evidence still lingers as it weaves in and out of popular sitcoms, movies, and advertisements. The media though most people think of as a reflection of society, one really cannot say which came first the chicken or the egg. Something that we can talk about is how much economic value do these domestic tasks really have, and can it really be a value when it is thought of as a nonmarket production in a capitalist society? Angela Davis gives a prime example of what contributes to this stigma by saying

“In advanced capitalist societies, on the other hand, the service-oriented domestic labor of housewives, who can seldom produce tangible evidence of their work, diminishes the social status of women in general. When all is said and done, the housewife, according to bourgeois ideology, is, quite simply, her husband’s lifelong servant”.

It is true that one of the reasons why housework done by specifically house wives isn’t given as much value is because it a job that is usually is not seen, therefore one puts less value on it then a outside of the home workforce. I think its hard for us living in such a capitalist society to give value to these domestic task but the article “ Accounting For Household Production in the National Accounts, 1965–2010” attempts to do so by measuring the value that house hold productions like cooking, cleaning, childcare, and other odd jobs and calculating it in an economic value.

This chart takes the hours spent doing each job, and calculates the time throughout years 1965–2010. By looking at this work you can also see that that through out time the hours devoted to houseworks goes down, the article credits this by advances in technology and more women joining the workforce .But still on average women are doing more work then men.

If this industry was to be looked at in an economic point it view you could concur that it is a more women dominated field.The article takes into account the rate of a usual domestic worker and averages in the time and jobs to domestic work done by one self. But by comparing the wages of specialized work done by professional and domestic work done by the average person has it draw backs. One is that the quality of work cannot be measured the same between the profession who specialized in a specific task such as (plumbers, gardeners, carpenters) to that of an average job done by a person in a household setting. For example a person who has extensive knowledge in cooking and preparing meals may have little to no understanding of jobs that have to do with plumbing or carpentry. It is likely that the average household worker may not have the specialized tools and skills sets that of professional who has devoted their time to that specific specialized job. The skills between these two are not the same therefore it can lead to an inaccurate and overstatement of the value of household labor services from an economic viewpoint. In contrast to the specialized professional wage difference, the article has decided to use the average cost of a domestic worker but it can also have another drawback because household labor may have many benefits of non-production. Examples of non-production benefits could be childcare or when gardening, car repairs and woodworking are seen, as enjoyable hobbies instead of labor therefore cannot be measured to the extent of an average cost of a domestic worker.

In respect of this argument of value of housework we are specifically looking into the information about women. The Industrialization of society was another contribution of why the value of housework is not given the same economic value of other fields of work. Angela Davis gives an explanation of this when she touches upon the separation that occurred in society after the Industrial Revolution, which resulted in the separation of factory and home.

“While home-manufactured goods were valuable primarily because they fulfilled basic family needs, the importance of factory-produced commodities resided overwhelmingly in their exchange value — in their ability to fulfill employers’ demands for profit. This revaluation of economic production revealed — beyond the physical separation of home and factory — a fundamental structural separation between the domestic home economy and the profit-oriented economy of capitalism. Since housework does not generate profit, domestic labor was naturally defined as an inferior form of work as compared to capitalist wage labor.”

Once there was a profit to be made from housework other then paying for the actual task, capitalism was more then ready to take advantage of that opportunity. We created a market for household products therefor giving an illusion that task that were once before seen as labour like farming for food are now less strenuous .As Angela Davis concludes the one of the many by-product of the revolution was what gave birth to the stereotypically view of women as “ house wives”. Though many people will continue to somehow figure out what value of domestic household work has from an economic point of view, we will never be able to achieve this without erasing the stigma of the “house wife” and all the negative associations that come attached with it.