I read Simone de Beauvoir in college, and her distinction of productive and reproductive labor has persisted in my mind as a pretty good model of gendered labor. In Beauvoir’s framework, productive labor is relatively linear work that builds on itself to create something lasting, and reproductive labor is cyclical. Reproductive work maintains the conditions for production to happen – cooking, cleaning, and I suppose raising children. The former has historically been the province of men. Women were locked out of doing work that leaves a more permanent mark on the world.
I have no disagreement with this as a model of gendered labor in most parts of the world. It’s a good model. But I’ve been struggling for months to get out some thoughts on being a housewife, and Beauvoir’s model gives me some nice conceptual vocabulary to talk about my ambivalence about being the kind of housewife I am, which is a housewife with a lot of slack, thanks to wealth and a third parent who takes the dawn shift. What jumps out at me, one year in, is that well-off housewives (can) do an astonishing amount of Beauvoirian-productive labor.
Laundry machines and dishwashers have greatly reduced the work of a housewife since Beauvoir’s time, and the material costs of creativity have gone down also. I can fit quite a bit of writing and sketching into my day, and so have found being a wealthy modern housewife to be a strange combination of being an aristocrat and a servant.
The servant side: keeping rooms clean and organized, baby clean, dishes washed. Classic Beauvoirian-reproductive labor. My brain knows deeply that this is work that people who have lost out in a social struggle do. Economically it is work, same as any other work. But sociologically it is associated with lack of power or value, and personally it is not fun. It is often chaotic and demoralizing.
The aristocrat side: Art, writing, and hosting devious events comprise a steady minority of my day. Some of my housework is drudgery, but other parts are creatively tending to a space to be more enjoyable to myself and my family. Looking at hundreds of rugs online. Playing the secondhand furniture game. To my own faint incredulity, I’m gardening personally instead of outsourcing it, because I enjoy the work and don’t trust anyone I can hire cheaply. Childcare is gruesomely tiring sometimes, but I am spending time with and doting on someone I love. I’d do these same things in a post-scarcity society and I feel like I, alone in my family, virtually emigrated into one.
What is interesting to me about my life now is that some of the aristocrat-work is more Beauvoirian-productive than my partners’. Their work in software is less cyclical than cooking and cleaning, but stabilizing digital infrastructure is arguably Beauvoirian-reproductive labor that maintains the conditions of production. My husband does not have the time plus inclination to create something like this website. When we die, I will have left more of a mark on the world than he. Because I had the burning desire to, and he gave me the money and time.