We've Devalued Domestic Labour
20 Jul 2026 · 1 min
0:51
James Barry examines how domestic labour and childcare lost economic value, and why women's independence is still framed around male workforce participation rather than the work itself.
James Barry examines how domestic labour and childcare lost economic value, and why women's independence is still framed around male workforce participation rather than the work itself.
What it has done is it's actually devalued the contributions of things like domestic labor and childcare, because those used to have some monetary representation when it came to a single-income family, say where the husband was going out to bring in the money and then pay for the needs and expenses of the wife and children. The work that she was putting in was financially represented in that agreement. You can get paid for cleaning someone else's house. You can get paid for babysitting someone else's children. We've just sort of eliminated the value of these things in our monetary representation.
How can we define femininity without comparing it to masculinity?
We decided that the way to make women independent was to model what men have done in terms of going outside the home and getting into the labor force.
