There are a whole bunch of really good texts, written from various perspectives (though mostly with a roughly autonomist bent) over the last 40 years, collected here <http://caringlabor.wordpress.com/>. Silvia Federeci and Maria Dalla Costa have a lot of good essays, and Leopaldina Fortunati's The Arcane of Reproduction is very good. Less theoretically, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas has couple of interesting ethnographic studies on Filipina migrant care workers. It's been awhile since I've read it, but Arlie Hochschild's Second Shift might be useful to you.
>Second has anyone
> done work specifically on how gendering of housework affects respect
> or lack of respect for this kind of work, even when it is men who do
> it?
Okay, this, from Christian Marazzi, is only kinda related to your query, but I'm posting it anyway cuz I lurv it..
Detailed analysis of domestic work reveals that there is a difference in the intensity of the work performed by men and women even when labor time and the level of technological development are the same. According to Taylor’s theory of “scientific management,” an intensification of labor has occurred when a greater quantity of goods is produced in the same time, with the same technology, and by the same number of male and female workers. The increased productivity results from an acceleration of the rhythm of work, achieved by the elimination of the workday’s “pores” (that is, of “dead” production time).
Countless examples could be invoked to illustrate this concept. One is that of the pair of socks. For a man, the socks are in their proper place when a woman doesn’t think so at all. She ends up putting them in the place she considers to be the right one. In by-passing the verbal stage and simply putting the socks back “where they belong,” the woman creates a new habit that modifies the initial positions of the two partners. She reproduces and aggravates sexual division. Field research shows that, when their partner is away, only 65 percent of men take care of their laundry, compared to 90 percent of women. Similarly, only 44 percent of men iron their clothes, compared to 87 percent of women. The reason lies in the specific function played by clothing in the relationship between the sexes: clothing is a pivotal “tool” in feminine seduction.
Technology, represented by the washing machine (constant capital), is certainly helping men to appropriate some domestic activities, but men still refuse to establish an excessively intimate relationship with their laundry, and don’t respect it very much. Men have invented washing machines, but clearly this invention has not been sufficient for developing a relation of quantitative reciprocity between men and women.
Women’s notion of the “proper place for the socks” has a long history. An infinity of sexual and social classifications are preserved in the housewife’s simple gesture. The accumulation of countless silent gestures traversing the entire gamut of domestic labor forces us to speak with great caution of sexual reciprocity and the reconstruction of the private sphere through the equitable distribution of housework. Even within a juridical and economic framework premised on sexual equality, the exploitation of women by men is reproduced.
The issue has political implications beyond the strictly domestic sphere—implications concerning the question of measure. No jurist and no economist will ever be able to adequately define the measuring unit by which to equitably quantify male-female parity, except in an a posteriori manner. Even with equal rights and working schedules, different histories and sensibilities recreate hierarchies and forms even when their juridical form is considered to have been overcome.
The “place for the socks,” the silent gesture that condenses thousands of years of sexual role-distribution, poses the question of rights on a qualitatively new level. Amartya Sen is right to point out that, in conventional economic theory, “individuals and firms are visible,” but families are not, such that the attempt to elaborate an economic theory of the family merely results in the application of market models to exchanges between family members: “Conceptualizing marriage as a ‘two-person firm with either member being the entrepreneur who hires the other and receives residual profits’ can be called a rather simple view of a very complex relationship.”7 It’s not a matter of questioning the need for a measuring device capable of defining as equitably as possible the exchanges that take place between men and women within the family unit. Years of research into the “new forms of poverty” have allowed for the development of “equivalency scales” that allow for improvements in the distribution of wealth between domestic economies, but little attention has been paid to redistribution within the family unit (with one exception: the case of single-parent households, in which the child is treated like a husband). What needs to be discussed is the nature of the measuring device. The economic measuring device, which reproduces the juridical principle of sexual equality within the family sphere, reveals a break in the very possibility of comparing the work performed by men and women. Family life certainly involves elements of cooperation and conflict—elements that define the “problem of negotiation” between members of the family unit. But the exchange between male and female labor cannot be reduce to its “unionized” dimension, which is legally regulated by lawyers in the courtroom (as in the cases of alimony payments or divorce).
Male-female exchange transcends its “unionized” form. It transcends the quantitative dimension of negotiations concerned only with “precise economic value.” This is true even in the best of cases, when the assessment of women’s domestic activities involves an extension of the concept of family patrimony, such that the income capacities of the husband are recognized as dependent on the wife’s willingness to perform a series of supporting duties.8 The idea of sexual equality is strongly developed on the level of society and on that of contract negotiation, but not on the individual level. Inequality insinuates itself in the rift between representation (universality of the law) and real practices (concrete singularity of habits)—between the formal and the material constitution. Much like the question of sexual harassment, that of housework involves issues of power and authority. This is precisely why we are confronted with incommensurable criteria of valuation. It is useless to pretend that we are eliminating male power simply by subordinating male-female exchange to a common regime of equality. No such regime exists, because the exchange will always involve a supplement and a subjective difference—a disparity in experience that escapes any reduction to units of measure, to units applied to qualitatively heterogeneous quantities of concrete labor.
As is well known, the problem of measure can be approached on various levels. First of all, there is the need to abstract from the variety of concrete tasks performed: there are those who iron clothes and those who take care of the children, those who work outside and those who work within the home. In the case of domestic work, the process of abstraction is usually effected by comparing the different activities in terms of labor time (where a specialist job requires a certain amount of training time, this time is included in the calculation). However, and as was seen in the example of the “proper place” for the socks, this abstraction is violently thwarted by the “lived history” of women, which problematizes the reduction to temporal units and the attempt to measure the work performed. Even if the hours worked are the same, the tasks performed by women are much more intensive than those of men. This intensity cannot be reduced to a purely quantitative dimension, as if it were the straightforward result of a specialist knowledge acquired over time (from childhood onward); rather, it reflects the division of sexual roles. Behind the disparity in labor intensity lies an entire history of asymmetrical power relationships. The power exercised over women sends into crisis the very possibility of measuring quantities of labor time while applying the same unit of measure to both sexes.