This document discusses the historical development of concepts related to social reproduction and care work. It summarizes how economists in the 19th century began to define unpaid domestic work and caregiving as "unproductive," relegating women who performed this labor to the census category of "dependents." Over time, this gendered definition of productive versus unproductive work became embedded in economic thought and policy despite challenges from feminist scholars. The document also examines how concepts of social reproduction are important for understanding the relationship between labor and capitalism.

1. Feminist Economics
2: Care and Social
Reproduction
12 June 2014
Belfast Feminist Network
Realta Social Space Dr. Conor McCabe
King St. Belfast UCD School of Social Justice

3. Rational Economic Man
• An autonomous agent
• able bodied, independent,
rational, heterosexual male
who is able to choose from an
number of options limited
only by certain constraints.
• Weighs cost and benefits to
maximise utility
• Self interested in
marketplace; altruistic at
home

4. [Lehman collapse, 15 September 2008 - headlines 16 Sep 2008]

9. The purpose of capitalism is self-expansion – capital begets capital – and it does so by
monetizing social value and human labour. This is a circuit of transformation.
“Historical capitalism involved therefore the widespread commodification of processes – not
merely exchange processes, but production processes, distribution processes, and investment
processes – that had previously been conducted other than via a ‘market’. And, in the course of
seeking to accumulate more and more capital, capitalists have sought to commodify more and
more of these social processes in all spheres of economic life.”
Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism (London: Verso, 2011), 15.

11. capitalism in the past (as distinct from capitalism today) only
occupied a narrow platform of economic life. How could one possibly
take it to mean a ‘system’ extending over the whole of society?
It was nevertheless a world apart, different from and indeed foreign
to the social and economic context surrounding it. And it is in relation
to this context that it is defined as ‘capitalism’, not merely in relation
to new capitalist forms which were to emerge later in time.
In fact capitalism was what it was in relation to a non-
capitalism of immense proportions.
And to refuse to admit this dichotomy within the economy of the past,
on the pretext that ‘true’ capitalism dates only from the nineteenth
century, means abandoning the effort to understand the significance
– crucial to the analysis of that economy – of what might be termed
the former typology of capitalism.
If there were certain areas where it elected residence – by no
means inadvertently – that is because these were the only areas
which favoured the reproduction of capital.” (Wheels, p.239)

15. Conventional androcentric assumptions have not been critically
examined in scientific and technological (S&T) culture; in the
international, national and local mediating agencies that deliver
S&T development; or in the communities that are the recipients
of development.
However, because women are primary deliverers of community
welfare on a daily basis to children, the sick and elderly, their
households, and the larger social networks that maintain
communities, the failure of development projects with respect to
women is automatically felt by social groups who depend on their
labour and social services.
Sandra Harding (1995) ‘Just add women and stir?’ Missing Links: Gender Equity in
Science and Technology for Development.

16. Going beyond Braudel’s original argument, household production can be
considered as a case in point for such daily, unconscious routines. This
then signals one trajectory for understanding aspects of social
reproduction over time.
Indeed the politics of the everyday offers a current consideration of the
separation of life purposes (such as working life, family life and sex life)
and the social construction of such spaces.
It should be noted that, despite Braudel’s many valuable conceptual
inroads, he does not apply gender to his analysis and does not explicitly
consider the sexual division of labour in his trilogy.
However… his conceptualisations of material life can aid us in
understanding the historical dynamics that underpin social reproduction.
Isabella Bakker (2007) ‘Social Reproduction and the Constitution of a Gendered
Political Economy’, New Political Economy 12:4.

17. Census data consist of ordered sets of numbers. They appear objective and value-
free, but their meaning grows out of socially constructed concepts that are laden with
cultural and political values.
“Statistical reports exemplify the process by which visions of reality, models of social
structure, were elaborated and revised,” writes Joan Scott [in Gender and History,
1988)
Nancy Folbre, ‘The Unproductive Housewife: Her Evolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought’, Signs, Spring 1991; 16, 3, p.463-4.

18. Gender bias in the definition of economically
productive activity has important implications
for the analysis of changes in female labour-
force participation. One aspect of such gender
bias – the concept of the unproductive
housewife – gradually coalesced in the
nineteenth-century censuses of population in
England and the United States.
In 1800, women whose work consisted largely
of caring for their families were considered
productive workers. By 1900, they had been
formally relegated to the census category of
“dependents,” a category that included infants,
young children, the sick and the elderly.
Nancy Folbre, ‘The Unproductive Housewife: Her Evolution in
Nineteenth-Century Thought’, Signs, Spring 1991; 16, 3, p.463-4.

19. From the very outset, political economy was
preoccupied with the distinction between
productive and unproductive labour. In the
eighteenth century, the French Physiocrats
suggested that agriculture was the only true
source of surplus and described profits earned
in manufacturing as mere distribution.
But the Scottish economist Adam Smith offered
a spirited defence of manufacturing and called
for a new definition of productive labour, based
on the addition of “net value” to a vendible
commodity.
He argued that services were unproductive
because they did not contribute to the
accumulation of physical wealth.
Domestic servants, for example, merely
enhanced their employers’ standard of living.
Nancy Folbre, ‘The Unproductive Housewife: Her Evolution in
Nineteenth-Century Thought’, Signs, Spring 1991; 16, 3, p.469

20. By the end of the nineteenth century, most
economists had come to agree that all paid
services should be considered productive, and
many advocated the term “unproductive” be
dropped from the language of their discipline.
Yet, almost to a man, they also agreed that
nonmarket services lay outside the realm of
economics and therefore did not contribute to
economic growth.
While paid domestic servants were considered
part of the labour force, unpaid domestic
workers were not.
Nonmarket production – a wife’s work in the
home, for instance – was implicitly defined as
unproductive.
Nancy Folbre, ‘The Unproductive Housewife: Her Evolution in
Nineteenth-Century Thought’, Signs, Spring 1991; 16, 3, p.470

22. Over the past thirty years, despite
being essential to human life,
neoliberal restructuring across the
world has privatised, eroded and
demolished our shared resources,
and ushered in a ‘crisis of social
reproduction.’
‘Cuts are a Feminist Issue’,
Soundings (Dec 2011), p.73.

23. The term social reproduction
encompasses all the means by which
society reproduces its families, citizens
and workers. It includes all the labour that
is necessary for a society to reproduce
itself: the biological production of people
and workers, and all the social practices
that sustain the population – bearing
children, raising children, performing
emotional work, providing clothing and
food, and cooking and cleaning.
As a concept social reproduction has
been key to feminist social theory,
because it challenges the usual
distinctions that are made between
productive and reproductive labour, or
between the labour market and the home.
‘Cuts are a Feminist Issue’,

24. Labour in this sphere is often devalued
and privatised, and is typically
performed by women in their ‘double
day’ or ‘second shift’, alongside paid
wage labour.
But reproductive labour of this kind is
just as central to capitalist
accumulation as are other forms of
labour, which means that struggles
over its structure and distribution are
fundamental to any understanding of
issues of power and the relationships
between labour and capital, as well as
the potential for their transformation.
‘Cuts are a Feminist Issue’,

27. Bangladesh
Independence in 1971 – went from public-
sector led import-substituting regime to
one characterized by measures to
promote the private sector and export-led
activities.
Institutional policies – privatization of
public sector, reduction in the number of
sectors reserved for public investment,
relaxation of rules and procedures for
foreign investment
Incentive policies – trade liberalization
and tariff rationalization, financial sector
reforms, export subsidies, corporate tax
rebates – dine in part to attract foreign
investment
1980 – establishment of an export
processing zone in Chittagong, Bangladesh

28. The idea of an export processing zone was
suggested to Bangladesh President, Ziaur
Rahman in 1976 by the then president of the
World Bank, Robert McNamara
The idea did not come out of an internal
debate within the state – in fact, elements
within the state were suspicious of foreign
investment.
The foreign investment side won through and
in 1978 the National Economic Council
approved the establishment of a zone in
South Halishahar, Chittagong.
It opened in 1980 with limited incentives, and
became fully operational in 1984.
The export processing zone in Dhaka was
opened in 1993.

29. At about the same time international lending
and aid agencies such as the International
Monetary Fund urged elites in Third World
countries to increase the production of
foreign financed industrial goods for export
in order to offset their increasing imbalances
of payments - imbalances that were growing
in the 1970s due to the higher price of
imported oil, private purchases of foreign
luxury goods for local elites and government
purchases of expensive weaponry to bolster
nervous regimes.
Out of these discussions - typical all-male
affairs - came the formula for development
now referred to as Export Processing Zones
(EPZs).
http://www.culturalsurvival.org/ourpublica
tions/csq/article/third-world-women-
factories

31. The creation of a Third World
female industrial work force
"took off" in the 1960s and by
the 1980s was a major
phenomenon in dozens of
Asian, Latin American and
African societies. -
http://www.culturalsurvival.org/ourpublications/csq/art
icle/third-world-women-factories
In the twenty years from 1970 to
1990, the number of textile,
clothing and footwear (TCF)
workers increased by 597
percent in Malaysia; 416 percent
in Bangladesh; 385 percent in Sri
Lanka; 334 percent in Indonesia;
271 percent in the Philippines;
and 137 percent in Korea.
http://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/media-
centre/press-releases/WCMS_008075/lang--
en/index.htm

32. The creation of a Third World
female industrial work force
"took off" in the 1960s and by
the 1980s was a major
phenomenon in dozens of
Asian, Latin American and
African societies. -
http://www.culturalsurvival.org/ourpublications/csq/art
icle/third-world-women-factories
the executives of certain types of manufacturing companies began to worry about the
increasing unionization of their own previously unorganized women workers [in the
West] and the consequent pressures for better working conditions and more reasonable
wages.
These companies operated in some of the most intensely competitive industrial sectors
and survived by substituting cheap labour for expensive equipment.

33. The creation of a Third World
female industrial work force
"took off" in the 1960s and by
the 1980s was a major
phenomenon in dozens of
Asian, Latin American and
African societies. -
http://www.culturalsurvival.org/ourpublications/csq/art
icle/third-world-women-factories
the executives of certain types of manufacturing companies began to worry about the
increasing unionization of their own previously unorganized women workers [in the
West] and the consequent pressures for better working conditions and more reasonable
wages.
These companies operated in some of the most intensely competitive industrial sectors
and survived by substituting cheap labour for expensive equipment.
Top priority was given to minimizing labour costs. In fact, minimizing labour costs was
the chief reason why factory workforces were women in the first place. [Western
workforce was replaced by Asian, Latin American and African workforce.]
Firms that deliberately adopted these labour practices were manufacturers of toys,
textiles, garments, footwear, electronics and processed foods.

78. Closing down of Dissent - Attacks on Equality in Ireland
Equality Bodies – closed down or with reduced Budgets
 Combat Poverty Agency –closed 2008 incorporated into the Department of Social Protection
 Equality Authority – 2009 43% cut and now being merged with the Human Rights Commission
 Women’s Health Council – closed 2009
 Crisis Pregnancy Agency – closed and merged with the Health Service Executive
 Irish Human Rights Commission -Budget cuts since 2009 and merged with Equality Authority
 Equality for Women Measure - co-funded by EU Operational Programme ---budget partly transferred out of
this area and now under Dept. For Enterprise, Trade and Employment
 National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism (NCCRI) _Closed 2009
 Gender Equality desk at the Department (Ministry) of Justice, Equality and Law Reform – Desk Closed 2009
 Gender Equality Unit – Department of Education – Closed early 2000s
 Higher Education Equality Unit – UCC -Closed and merged into Higher Education Authority (early 2000s)
 National Women’s Council of Ireland -158 member organisations- budget cuts of 15% in 2008-11 and 38% in
2012
 Traveller Education cutbacks 2011 and 2012 – all 42 Visiting teaches for Travellers removed*
 Rape Crisis Network Ireland – core Health Authority Funding removed 2011
 SAFE Ireland network of Women’s’ Refuges - core Health Authority Funding removed 2011
 People With Disabilities in Ireland's (PWDI) - funding removed 2012
 National Carers’ Strategy – abandoned 2009
Kathleen Lynch, Equality Studies UCD
School of Social Justice 78