Housework is indispensable labour – we need to decide what it’s worth
SUFFRAGE campaigner Hanna Sheehy Skeffington was never one to mince her words. Writing to this paper in May 1937, she described the newly drafted Irish Constitution as being based on a “fascist model, in which women would be relegated to permanent inferiority, their avocations and choice of callings limited because of an implied invalidism as the weaker sex”. De Valera’s ideal was “the domestic type of woman” who eschewed politics altogether, she tauntingly claimed.
Among the causes of Sheehy Skeffington’s concern was Article 41.2, which stated that “by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved”. The clause was opposed at the time by an assortment of women’s groups, coming as it did on the heel of a series of government efforts to enshrine discrimination against women in both industrial employment and civic life.
Legislative enactments including the 1924 and 1927 Juries Act, and the 1936 Conditions of Employment Act, had appeared to suggest women’s roles outside the home were secondary to their reproductive functions, as historians such as Caitríona Beaumont have highlighted.
But the debate over women’s rights in the Free State at times betrayed the class position of many of the country’s leading female activists. Like many other middle-class feminists, Sheehy Skeffington regarded domesticity with barely concealed disdain. She proclaimed in one particularly memorable quip that she washed up only “in acute domestic crisis”.
The 1937 Constitution represented to her a return to “the tyranny of the pots and pans”, undermining women’s hard-won rights as citizens. Rarely acknowledged in either her writing or campaigning is the value of work done by women who scrubbed, cooked and reared children out of economic necessity.
In the 1911 census return for their home in Rathmines, Francis Sheehy Skeffington was listed alongside his son and two servants: Philomena Morrissey (23) and Mary Butler (21). Hanna, his wife, withheld participation as a form of suffrage protest, but we can never know if her two maids were asked to join the action.
Campaigns for women’s rights today often have the same blind spot when it comes to domestic work. The dirty busi- ness of keeping house still drives one of the deepest fissures between two distinct models of feminism, delineated usually by class. On the one hand is an individualistic model of rights pushing for boardroom progression and shared power with men.
Domestic labourers are marginal to the concerns of high-flying feminists like Ivanka Trump, whose recent book, ‘Women Who Work’, makes only one mention of the family’s nanny. Housework is to many privileged women a burden to be avoided, shifted onto someone poorer.
Another way of thinking is provided by social feminists who shirk from such liberal notions of self-actualisation. Take the International Wages for Housework Campaign, which has called attention to the economic value of unpaid work in the home.
So-called housewives are an indispensable workforce, and their labour should be treated as labour, as activists including Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa have argued. “If our wageless work is the basis of our powerlessness,” to quote a later introduction to the pair’s seminal 1975 manifesto, ‘Women of the Subversion of the Community’, “then wages for that work, which alone will make it possible for us to reject that work, must be our lever of power”.
The need to recognise and properly compensate domestic work is the central focus of a conference taking place this Friday at the Trinity Long Room Hub. Jointly supported by Rutgers University and Trinity College Dublin, ‘Working for the Home: Past and Present’ is a one-day symposium that aims to open up new conversations about both paid and unpaid housework, bringing together leading historians, activists and policy experts.
The event takes its title from a contribution to the debate on Article 41.2 by Louie Bennett of the Irish Women’s Workers’ Union. A trade unionist and suffragette, Bennett suggested the clause’s reference to “life within the home” be substituted with the phrasing “work for the home”.
There is an opportunity now, ahead of a possible referendum on scrapping or amending that provision, to discuss how care work might be better supported as we move away from traditional domestic roles and place more weight on the shoulders on migrant cleaners and carers.
We need to have a conversation about housework. Please join us.
The 1937 Constitution represented to Sheehy Skeffington a return to ‘the tyranny of the pots and the pans’
‘Working for the Home: Past and Present’ takes place in the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute tomorrow. See tcd. ie/ trinity long room hub for details, and register on Eventbrite via bit. ly/2DimsPN. Catherine Healy is a Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholar at the Department of History, Trinity College Dublin.