In English, “work” derives from the Indo-European “werg”, meaning “to do”. Work has been defined as “a purposeful human activity involving physical or mental exertion that is not undertaken solely for pleasure and that has economic and symbolic value”(1). Such a broad definition is necessary considering that the activity itself has a wide range of meanings: it has been conceptualized as a commodity, as essential for personal fulfillment, as a social relation, as the activity of caring for others, as a key component of identity, and as a form of service(2). Second-wave feminist theorizing has been crucial in emphasizing the existence of a gendered division of labor, which ascribes several forms of unpaid work to women. In the contemporary context of neoliberal economies, marked by the rule of the market and a decrease of the regulating role of the state, employment has become precarious and the worker is considered “disposable”(3).
“Work” is not identical to employment; it is a type of activity that goes beyond the wage relation. Unlike employment, work can be private or public, paid or unpaid. In the highly-influential Marxist conception, “living labor” is a form of joyous, collective and creative work(4). It is this potential for “living labor” that is appropriated within a capitalist mode of production where the division of labor leads to workers’ alienation from themselves and the fruit of their work.
Consistently since the 1970s, feminist scholarship has been arguing for expanding the category and for publicizing, politicizing and eventually radically transforming work(5). Liberal, socialist and radical feminists have had somewhat different positionings on gender and labor. For liberals and many socialists, labor market equality with men and an end to unpaid housework were key demands. The sociology of labor which was shaped by these strands of feminism has made significant contributions in the past five decades to understanding phenomena such as the gendered division of labor within families, women’s “double shift” (formal work and housework), the gendered segregation of the labor market, the systematic wage gap between women and men, obstacles to job promotion and other labor market and state policy mechanisms that exclude on the basis of gender, race and sexuality(6). In addition, some of these studies have shown that a significant number of women work in what are called “care services” (homecare of elderly, sick people or people with disabilities, social work etc.), which is a concentration which illustrates the frequent social construction of jobs along traditional gender identity and roles; some scholars have argued that the very nature of this work leads to a blurring of boundaries between paid work and caregiving(7), possibly enabling the devaluation of care work and its underpayment.
The arguably more radical second-wave Marxist feminists developed a series of interesting propositions concerning the role of the gendered division of labor, or of women as a group within the capitalist mode of production. Rather than simply pointing to the need to share housework or pay for housework, scholars working in this vein argued that housework is part of the social reproduction of capitalism, enabling the continual reproduction of the workforce at the lowest possible cost for capitalists. Some also argued that women are “doubly alienated” in capitalism, because they are exploited through both patriarchal and capitalist arrangements, while others argued that private patriarchal power was replaced with a “public patriarchy” which generates and justifies the lower-paid wage labor in which women laborers are concentrated(8).
The Marxian feminist narrative has been criticized by post-structuralists for its economic reductionism and insufficient attention to identities. On the other hand, materialist feminists (who seek to blend postcolonial, postmodern and Marxist feminist theorizing) have sought to keep some of the elements of this analysis(9). For example, according to feminist theorist Kathi Weeks(10), the insistence of feminist scholars on the importance of immaterial labor in capitalist production and the introduction of categories such as “emotional work” or “affective labor” have been crucial contributions to understanding the current service-oriented labor regimes which increasingly dominate parts of Europe, North America, and parts of the Middle East.
In the classical account by Friedrich Engels, the invention of private property led to the subordination of women. While arguing that capitalism thrives on the gendered division of labor, Engels recognized that capitalism also affords women a degree of independence from family patriarchs by enabling them to enter waged work. Yet Engels stressed that because of the problem of unpaid housework, women’s liberation can only be achieved when care is socialized within a socialist system(11). Consequently, he saw working class women’s interests as entirely aligned with the goals and broader demands of the working class movement in general(12). 19th century and 20th century women’s labor activism, as evidenced most famously by the 8th of March 1857 strike by women garment workers in New York for better working conditions(13), seemingly belongs to this vision of an easy fit of the “woman question” within class struggle. On the other hand, women’s demands within the labor movement, whether for fairer public or private work arrangements, have generally been sources of tension and led to expectations of compromise on the part of the feminists(14).
The evolution of a capitalist mode of production, feminists point out, was predicated on the division of private and public, in other words on the creation of two apparently well-differentiated realms of public waged labor and private unpaid labor. Besides this division, capitalism and the so-called Industrial Revolution rested on an international division of labor, in which an industrializing core benefitted from hyperexploitative or coercive work practices in colonized or other peripheral areas that supplied agricultural goods and raw materials. In the case of colonized African states, not only did Europe intentionally underdevelop the continent but also “the colonial process, as it advanced, brought the women of the colonized people progressively down from a former high position of relative power and independence to that of ‘beastly’ and degraded ‘nature’(15).” Economic calculations initially denied slave women the position of mothers and wives and later pushed women in colonized territories out of waged labor into a position of formal dependence (and effectively into invisible unpaid work), through a process famously termed “housewifization”(16).
Since the 1960s, in industrialized countries, women entered male-dominated professions in an accelerated rhythm, challenging patriarchal preconceptions while nonetheless having to deal with obstacles such as acceptance or reconciliation of family life and work and failing to eradicate “occupational segregation”(17) and the double shift. Moreover, the majority of the working poor are women; they also hold the most precarious jobs. In a neoliberal economic context, service economies rely on flexible, deregulated labor. Manufacturing jobs are increasingly outsourced to the so-called developing world to increase production and drive down costs at the expense of workers’ rights. The garment (sweatshop) industry employs predominantly women and is an example of the extremely negative consequences of this production model for workers(18), that has spread to several countries in the Middle East who not only employ the local poor but also import foreign labor. In addition, the capitalist models have led to the development of highly gendered global chains of care labor: professional and middle class women increasingly employ migrant women to do in-home care work and domestic labor, evident not only in some European and North American economies(19)but also in Lebanon, the Gulf states and several economies across the Arab world. This monetization of care work can be interpreted as the unfortunate resolution of the “double shift” issue in richer countries or families with means by precariously employing poorer women.
Feminist political propositions on the question of waged work and the gendered division of labor have ranged from the classical demands for an end to wage discrimination and sexual harassment, to provocative demands of wages for housework(20). For other feminists, thinking about care work has led to the emergence of a feminist moral theory called the “ethics of care”, concerned with what makes actions morally right or wrong and an emphasis on the importance of response and conditions of vulnerability and inequality(21).
Currently, in Lebanon, the majority of working women are employed in the informal sector, in agriculture, domestic work, social care, and NGOs – forms of work that are often unwaged or unregulated by labor law. Women represent only 23% of the paid workforce and are discriminated against in term of employment opportunities, equality in wages, benefits, and sick and maternity leave. Working women often work “double shifts”, since they also perform domestic work. A recent study(22) attested that women in different Lebanese communities perform most of the house work. Nonetheless, the pieces showed a correlation between a decrease of housework done and an increase in the number of women working in paid jobs. Still, access to paid work is not necessarily related to women’s liberation but more to the economic situation of the household and a need to work “outside the house” (barrat al bayt). Women accessing the workforce have left a gap in the care duties, since they were expected to perform duties such as taking care of children, old and sick relatives. A lack of services from the state such as nurseries or homes for the elderly has led to the increasing mobilization of external help, in the form of migrant domestic workers (Syrian women as well as women from Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, and Bangladesh). Vast discrimination against these women (who constitute over 200,000 workers) persists both socially and legally, and the workers have been organizing themselves and demanding equal rights through unionization(23).
