<<<<<...The domestic labor literature identified family households as sites of production. Reconceptualized as domestic labor, housework and childcare could then be analyzed as labor processes. From this beginning came a series of questions. If domestic labor is a labor process, then what is its product? People? Commodities? Labor power? Does the product have value? If so, how is that value determined? How and by what or whom is the product consumed? What are the circumstances, conditions, and constraints of domestic labor? What is domestic labor's relationship to the reproduction of labor power? to overall social reproduction? to capitalist accumulation? Could a mode of reproduction of people be posited, comparable to but separate from the mode of production? Might answers to these questions explain the origins of women's oppression?
The burgeoning domestic labor literature seemed initially to confirm, even legitimate, socialist feminists' double commitment to women's liberation and socialism. Before long, however, a range of problems surfaced. Concepts and categories that had initially seemed self-evident lost their stability. For example, the notion of reproduction of labor power became surprisingly elastic, stretching from biological procreation to any kind of work that contributed to people's daily maintenance -- whether it be paid or unpaid, in private households, in the market, or in the workplace. Likewise, the meaning of the category domestic labor fluctuated. Did it refer simply to housework? Or did it include childbearing and child care as well? *Circular arguments were common. For example, domestic labor was frequently identified with women's work and conversely, thereby assuming the sexual division of labor women's liberationists wished explain.* In addition, the debate's almost exclusive concern with unpaid household labor discounted the importance of women's paid labor, whether as domestic servants or wage workers. And its focus on the economic seemed to overlook pressing political, ideological, psychological, and sexual issues.
Women's liberationists also found the abstractness of the domestic labor literature frustrating. The debate developed in ways that were not only hard to follow but also far from activist concerns. Concepts appeared to interact among themselves without connection to the empirical world. Not only was the discussion abstract, it seemed ahistorical as well. Perhaps most damaging, much of the domestic labor literature adopted *a functionalist explanatory framework. A social system's need for domestic labor, for example, was taken to imply that that need was invariably satisfied.* Where in the debate, many wondered, was human agency?
Meanwhile, feminist agendas were bursting with other matters, both theoretical and practical. By the early 1980s, most socialist feminists had decided to move "beyond the domestic labor debate." They left behind the ambiguity, conceptual fuzziness, circularity, and loose ends of an unfinished project (Molyneux, 1979).
The shift away from the effort to theorize domestic labor within a framework of Marxist political economy seemed to make sense. *Many women's liberationists assumed theory to be directly pertinent to day-to-day activities and thought a given theory had determinate political and strategic implications. Conversely, they looked to empirical accounts of history and current circumstances as a way to constitute the appropriate basis for theory.[4] Rejecting the abstractions of the early domestic labor literature, they sought a conceptual apparatus that could be used to organize and interpret the data of women's lives.
*This approach reflected a particular epistemological orientation, one that put theory into a kind of one-to-one relationship with the empirical. Theory was assumed to be isomorphic with what was understood to be reality. As such, it could produce empirical generalizations, statements of regularity, and models.* Explanation and prediction would then depend on extrapolation from these presumably accurate representations. In this view, familiar from the social-scientific literature, theory is a broad-ranging intellectual activity, grounded in the empirical and capable of supplying descriptions, explanations, and predictions -- and thereby able as well to guide policy or strategy.
*This is not the only way to think about theory, however.* Much of the early domestic labor literature implicitly adopted a different perspective, rooted in certain readings of Marxist theory current in the 1960s and 70s. Associated most famously with the French philosopher Louis Althusser, this alternative perspective accords theory *specificity and a limited scope*. Theory, in this view, is a powerful but highly abstract enterprise and *sharply different from history* (see, among others, Althusser, 1971; Hindes and Hirst, 1975; Willer and Willer, 1973; as well as Marx, 1973). As Althusser put it, speaking of Marx's _Capital_:
Despite appearances, Marx does not analyze any "concrete society," not even England, which he mentions constantly in Volume One, but the _capitalist mode of production_ and nothing else. This object is an abstract one: which means that it is terribly real and that it never _exists_ in the pure state, since it only exists in capitalist societies. Simply speaking: in order to be able to analyse these concrete capitalist societies (England, France, Russia, etc.), it is essential to know that they are dominated by that terribly concrete reality, the capitalist mode of production, which is "invisible" (to the naked eye). "Invisible," i.e. _abstract_. (Althusser, 1971, 77.)
*From this perspective, theory is necessarily abstract as well as severely constrained in its implications. It can point to key elements and tendencies but it cannot provide richly textured accounts of social life. Even less does it directly explain events, suggest strategies, or evaluate the prospects for political action [Yoshie: those who assume it does become "dogmatic" in the proper sense of the term]. These are matters for a qualitatively distinct kind of inquiry -- one that examines the specifics of particular historical conjunctures in existing social formations.*
To put it another way, this alternative approach conceptualizes *theory as a sort of lens*. By itself, the lens tells us little about the specifics of a particular society at a particular moment. It is only by using the lens that observers can evaluate such specifics and strategize for the future. Compared to theorizing -- producing the lens -- these tasks of empirical investigations and political analysis constitute intellectual work of a different and, I would argue, more challenging sort.
A Different Starting Point
I turn now to my own work on domestic labor. My purpose in so doing is to offer an example of women's liberationist theorizing *within the intentionally abstract framework just described*. From this perspective, the domestic labor debate was a theoretical rather than historical or sociological project. Its outcome would be expected to take *the form of sets of abstract concepts and identifications of possible mechanisms and tendencies*. These could not, by themselves, really "explain" anything concrete -- neither the rich, idiosyncratic, and constructed character of experience nor the specific nature and direction of popular mobilization or social transformation. Even less could they suggest political strategies. Such questions would be matters for empirical investigation and political analysis by the actors involved.
The challenge, then, was to discover or create categories to theorize women's unpaid family work as a material process. Women's liberationists, myself included, examined the classic texts of Marx, Engels, Bebel, and others, discovering only a precarious theoretical legacy at best. This finding led, in my case, to a lengthy critical reading of Marx. In this reading I followed what i understood to be Althusser's advice:
Do not look to _Capital_ either for a book of "concrete" history or for a book of "empirical" political economy, in the sense in which historians and economists understand these terms. Instead, find in it a book of theory analysing the _capitalist mode of production_. History (concrete reality) and economics (empirical economics) have other objects. (Althusser, 1971, 78.)
Using this approach to theory, I hoped to be able to contribute to the construction of *a more satisfactory theoretical lens* with which to analyze women's subordination.... (emphasis added)
[4] See, for example, Brenner and Holmstrom, 1983; Molyneux, 1979; or, in its own way, Nicholson, 1986.
Althusser, Louis. 1971. "Preface to _Capital_ Volume One" (March 1969). Pp. 71-101 in _Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays_. New York: Monthly Review Press. Brenner, Johanna, and Nancy Holmstrom. 1983. "Women's Self-Organization: Theory and Strategy." _Monthly Review_, 34 (April), 34-46. Hindess, Barry, and Paul Hirst. 1975. _Pre-capitalist Modes of Production_. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Marx, Karl. 1973 (1857). "Introduction." Pp. 81-111 in _Grundrisse_, trans. Martin Nicolaus. Hammondsworth, England: Penguin Books. Molyneux, Maxine. 1979. "Beyond the Domestic Labor Debate." _New Left Review_, 116 (July-August), 3-27. Nicholson, Linda. _Gender and History: The Limits of Social Theory in the Age of the Family_. New York: Columbia University Press. Willer, David, and Judith Willer. 1973 _Systematic Empiricism: Critique of a Pseudoscience_. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. >>>>>