The domestic labor debate is less compelling than it was in 1970 partly because a significant portion of the work _has_ been moved out of the home. (To take just one example: childcare). Wages for housework seems a bit, well, odd when half the paid workforce is female.
The question is, where does the care work come from when both parents are working outside the home for wages? That's a working class question, one that working class parents (women, mostly) are dealing with on a daily basis--raising the kids on the phone from work and so forth, relying on their own parents. As me and my colleagues in Redstockings argue, the employers are getting that work for free now, when they used to incorporate it, however meagerly, into the man's 'family wage.' Two parents are bringing in what one used to, and the care work is entirely on the side. One way to resolve this--without going back to the family wage--is the social wage, which builds in the assumption of women as individual citizens rather than as male dependents.
Jenny Brown