Patriarchy has always been about a few people getting richer, paying less than they should (or nothing) for the work we do. Always.
Let’s start with what is going on today. Estimate the value of the services provided by a typical wife, excluding the money she makes if she works, every year, if, every year, hubby had to pay for the services provided by his wife:
Unpaid work at home
Housekeeping, including cooking, shopping and all household management: Full-time housekeeper salaries range from $25,000 to $60,000 per year.
Childcare: Childcare for each pre-school child is $14,088 and after-school care costs approximately $292 per week per child, which amounts to about $15,184 per year
Cooking: Let’s include that in housekeeping services.
Laundry: Housekeepers charge $5 to $20 per load of laundry. Assuming 5 loads per week, this could cost between $1,300 and $5,200 annually.
Personal assistance such as remembering to go to the doctor and dentist, and family events run around $2,500 each year for the no frills version that ensures that you don’t die or alienate your family.
Sexual services, bargain basement, would be worth, say, $6000 per year.
Each child to be carried by a surrogate in the United States is worth approximately $200,000 but I live in Canada where paid surrogacy is illegal so I will assume that he talked a friend into doing it for free.
Adding these figures together, we find that the services typically provided by a wife are worth $43,-ish for the rock bottom value to $100,000 + per year, not including any reproductive or sexual services.
Let’s perform the same calculation for what typical husbands do.
Home maintenance and repairs: $3,000 to $5,000 per year for general maintenance and minor repairs IF he knows how to do a lot of that stuff.
Yard work: $1,000 to $2,000 per year.
Household management: Let’s not pretend that women typically need help with this but let’s say she asks someone to come to the house annually to look at it and forecast home maintenance and repairs for the year: $500.
Adding these figures together, we find that the services typically provided by a wife are worth under $10,000 annually. Let’s go crazy and say that he does the shopping once a month, picks up food for dinner occasionally and does other random errands: add $6000, which is super generous.
$25,000 is what a fairly lousy wife with no kids, who does bare minimum, not counting sexual services, would cost. Most married women provide around $100,000 worth of services to their husbands annually, at no cost. Replacing the services of a pretty good husband would cost under $20,000.
But don’t men share household and child care equally these days? Ha ha ha ha ha. No. In households where both parents work, men shoulder only slightly more of the burden of chores than do men in single-income households. Although women in both types of households are still more likely to be responsible for laundry, meal preparation, dishwashing and cleaning, men in dual-income homes pitch in only slightly more on these chores than do men in single-income homes.
The world economy
To get into how our unpaid labour is a foundation for the world economy, it is useful to briefly describe the historical process that laid the foundation for the current economic model: capitalism. How did we transition from subsistence living in cooperation with our friends and family on shared land to the current situation where we have to pay a fortune for a place to live, which will typically be without a place to grow food, and for which we have to work for most of the day, every day of our adult lives, so we can simply stay alive, let alone raise a family?
This profound transition required quite a bit of infrastructure and process, which was enforced by an increasingly complex and powerful government. Rich men built the state infrastructure to entrench their power, lured and threatened women of the same class, or slightly lower, into cooperating to reproduce more rich men, and pointed to the now-well-established patriarchy baked into religion to provide the moral explanation for why this extraordinary imbalance of power was not only acceptable, but natural and decreed by God. A class of property-less workers was thus created, ripe for exploitation to make the rich richer.
For Karl Marx, this transformation was a transitional “prehistoric stage”, but there is no evidence that the violence, dispossession, and the use of state power to enrich the already rich has ever ceased. Colonialism and imperialism involved the same violent and unfair process, justified by rich men by characterizing simple, cooperative living as “primitive”, and insisting anybody who did not accept the patriarchal religion was doomed to everlasting hellfire. In other words, the theft of commonly held land, cooperative power and culture of sharing was doing us a favour.
For colonization and imperialism to be acceptable, all colonized people have to be characterized as sub-human. The devaluing of some people based on whatever theory works–religion, science, fictional crimes they committed, or the fiction of “protecting” us from the rigours of public life–is the rationale for enslaving us. It is all bullshit.
Takeaway: capitalism is not a voluntary system. Those on the top do extremely well because everybody else has no choice but to work for them.
Making the connection
In her book, Patriarchy and accumulation on a world scale, Maria Mies describes important connections between patriarchy and capitalism. She argues that our current economic system cannot function without the exploitation of women. The work that we do for free reproduces the conditions that capitalism needs in order to function. We create, care for and teach each child (ie new worker) for almost two decades. Often, we house and care for them well into their twenties, and subsidize the education that transforms each child into a more valuable worker. We do all the work that is required to run a house, feed and clothe the household inhabitants, make sure the elderly and sick members of the household and extended family get care. enabling whatever men live there to spend most of their energy at work.
In her book, Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici argues that our exploitation and oppression is not the way we used to be treated, and that we accepted this state of affairs only after centuries of horrific violence against us, perpetrated by the state and institutionalized religion. Federici provides convincing evidence that the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe were not remnants of medieval superstition, but a deliberate strategy to stop powerful women, particularly older women, from organizing resistance against the forced separation of most people from the resources they need to live.
For Federici, an important part of this process was how working class men shared in the benefits of oppressing women. Whatever anger men felt at being separated from their land and freedom was channeled by the state and church toward women. Their mothers, sisters, wives and daughters were to be blamed for all that was wrong in their lives because women are naturally evil, and practiced witchcraft against men. So it is perfectly fine to beat and rape us into doing a lot of work for free. If we fail to provide all the services that men want, we are labelled as bad and it is fine to murder us in public, even burn us alive in front of our children. That was the point of the witch hunts.
Federici goes on to point out that men’s free access to women’s bodies and labour, and the labour of our children, destroyed whatever solidarity could have been activated to resist the rich.
Takeaway: Men were, and remain, the primary tool that the rich use(d) to enforce our now traditional role as sub-human labourers who exist only to be exploited (and attacked when we disobey).
Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the witch: Women, the body and primitive accumulation. Autonomedia.
Gallup. (2019). Women Handle Main Household Tasks. Retrieved from https://news.gallup.com/poll/283979/women-handle-main-household-tasks.aspx
Lerner, G. (1986). The creation of patriarchy. Oxford University Press.[Kindle edition]
Mies, M. (2014). Patriarchy and accumulation on a world scale: Women in the international division of labour (Critique Influence Change ed.). Zed Books. [Kindle edition]
Statistics Canada. (2020, February 19). Family Matters: Sharing housework among couples in Canada: Who does what? The Daily. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/200219/dq200219e-eng.htm
Unlearning Patriarchy 