Reproductive labor as in labor that is necessary but takes place outside the economy. Not being pregnant with the baby, but being on call for the baby at night. Taking the kid to the doctor. Cleaning and cooking. Managing what all the household needs and figuring out how it’s going to get done. Shit like that
It makes sense when you’re trying to specifically talk about the labor involved in reproduction. Humans reproduce via sexual reproduction. It takes two to tango. That’s why the term reproductive labor applies to both men and women.
You could use more vague terms like “domestic labor,” but you lose a lot in generalizing this much. Often you want to talk about just the kind of labor that arises in the period after a child is born. But all couples, all individuals have domestic labor. Reproductive labor is something much more specific.
I have been lucky enough to split child raising labor fairly evenly with my wife (after the pregnancy at least), though it’s been at the expense of retirement savings and lost potential earnings.
There are lifelong divisions of labor that we should all have the freedom to share, but capitalism and its billionaires is always trying to squeeze every penny from most of us and adding needless stress with artificial scarcity and profit taking to fuck all of us, but especially women and those with less political power (at this stage, that’s 95% of us by my estimate).
Reproductive labor as in labor that is necessary but takes place outside the economy. Not being pregnant with the baby, but being on call for the baby at night. Taking the kid to the doctor. Cleaning and cooking. Managing what all the household needs and figuring out how it’s going to get done. Shit like that
That seems like a really weird phrase for household labor and parenting, tbh
It makes sense when you’re trying to specifically talk about the labor involved in reproduction. Humans reproduce via sexual reproduction. It takes two to tango. That’s why the term reproductive labor applies to both men and women.
You could use more vague terms like “domestic labor,” but you lose a lot in generalizing this much. Often you want to talk about just the kind of labor that arises in the period after a child is born. But all couples, all individuals have domestic labor. Reproductive labor is something much more specific.
Yeah but I’m not the one who coined it. It goes back at least as far as Sylvia Federici. The idea is that it’s the labor of reproducing society
I have been lucky enough to split child raising labor fairly evenly with my wife (after the pregnancy at least), though it’s been at the expense of retirement savings and lost potential earnings.
There are lifelong divisions of labor that we should all have the freedom to share, but capitalism and its billionaires is always trying to squeeze every penny from most of us and adding needless stress with artificial scarcity and profit taking to fuck all of us, but especially women and those with less political power (at this stage, that’s 95% of us by my estimate).