Domestic labor and economic exploitation: housewives, wages, and social reproduction

This paper argues that capitalism depends on the ongoing devaluation and naturalization of women's domestic labor as unwaged "labor of love," even though this work is essential to reproducing labor‑power and sustaining the wage system. Drawing on Marx, feminist political economy, and social reproduction theory, it traces how the distinction between waged and unwaged work renders housework illegible as "real" labor while offloading the costs of social reproduction onto feminized bodies, households, and, increasingly, racialized and migrant workers in transnational care chains. The paper examines the 1970s wages‑for‑housework movement, especially Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, and Kathi Weeks, as a theoretical and political intervention that seeks to reclassify housework as socially necessary labor, opening the possibility of collective organization, refusal, and state responsibility. It then turns to contemporary "tradwife" culture as a backlash that re‑romanticizes unpaid domesticity through the language of personal choice, aspirational lifestyle, and online entrepreneurship, obscuring the structural conditions and inequalities that make such "choices" possible. The paper concludes that tradwife rhetoric helps resecure a stratified political economy of women's labor at the very moment when feminist social reproduction perspectives have made its exploitative foundations visible, and calls for renewed attention to how care and domestic work might be reorganized beyond privatized, gendered dependence.