Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle

Men are able to accept our services and take pleasure in them because they presume that housework is easy for us and that we enjoy it because we do it for their love.

Staples correctly points out that work is inexorably drawn to the home by the pull of unpaid domestic labor, in the sense that by organizing work on a home basis, employers can make it invisible, can undermine workers’ effort to unionize, and drive wages down to a minimum.

For our wagelessness and our dependence have kept men tied to their jobs, by ensuring that whenever they wanted to refuse their work they would be faced with the wife and children who depended on their wage.

But all women should have free access to school, for as long as studying is a commodity we have to pay for, or a step in the “job hunt,” our relation to intellectual work cannot be a liberating experience.

Bertolt Brecht said that what is produced in boredom can only generate boredom and he was right.

capitalist accumulation is above all the accumulation of workers, a process that occurs primarily through immigration.

The women’s movement must realize that work is not liberation. Work in a capitalist system is exploitation and there is no pleasure, pride or creativity in being exploited. Even the “career” is an illusion as far as self-fulfillment is concerned.

It is power—not power over others but against those who oppress us—that expands our consciousness.

The wage and the lack of it have allowed capital to obscure the real length of our working day.