The Ethical Dimension of Work: A Feminist Perspective (original) (raw)

Revaluation of 'Work' from a Gender Perspective

Work usually means gainful employment for pay or profit. This definition of work excludes subsistence production such as collection of basic necessities like water, firewood and fuel, domestic work and care of the family. This means that the so called 'reproductive' sector is left to the women where their activities go unrecognized. Efforts have been going on for acknowledging women's work to raise women to economic, social and political parity with men. Women themselves have come forward to fight for their rights through trade unions and through their own organization by pressing for a revaluation of their paid work and for valuation in cash for their unpaid work. No one can deny the importance of unpaid work-it lowers the cost of reproduction of the labour force. Of course there are difficulties in the statistical system of identifying, enumerating and quantifying the work performed by women. Many of the activities associated with household maintenance, provisioning and reproduction, are not subject to explicit market relations. There is always a tendency to ignore the actual productive contribution of these activities. Similarly, social norms, values and perceptions also operate to make most of women's work invisible. These invisibilities get directly transferred to data inadequacies, making officially generated data in most countries very rough and imprecise indicators of the actual productive contribution of women. We need to do away with all these difficulties and revaluate the concept of 'work' to make women's work accountable.

WOMEN'S WORK AND THE QUESTION OF AUTONOMY

isara solutions, 2017

This write up will focus on women's work and women's participation of different types of production organizations and its impact on the enhancement of their autonomy. The sexual division of labour prevailing in these production will also be discussed. The relation between work of women and their autonomy will be discussed.

Introduction: Life's Work: An Introduction, Review and Critique

Antipode, 2003

This special issue of Antipode addresses the ways in which people produce value in all domains of their lives. We are particularly interested in the relationship between the production of value "at work" and the social reproduction of labor-power along with the conditions that enable its deployment. Consider these three vignettes of contemporary life:

The problem with work: Feminism, Marxism, antiwork politics and postwork imaginaries

Contemporary Political Theory, 2013

Postwork Imaginaries is a brave, important and politically exciting book. Weeks uses her opening question, 'Why do we work so long and so hard?' to good effect (p. 1). With it, she begins a far-reaching discussion of radical political theory that is ultimately used to advance and defend the notion that we ought to demand less work and more free time, concluding with suggestions for the development of a feminist 'time movement' (p. 171). Weeks productively engages with a wide variety of theories and literature, deftly ranging from David Harvey, to Moishe Postone, to Max Weber, to Betty Friedan, to science fiction, to Marx and others too numerous to name. The extraordinary range of Weeks' scholarship is only outdone by her ability to weave those many complexities into a tapestry that concludes with an inspiring political exhortation. Particularly exciting is Weeks' reengagement with elements of second wave and Marxist feminist theories that many may have not considered apart from the 'history of feminist theory' portion of their syllabi. For example, Weeks' return to the second wave feminist discussion of wages for housework is enlightening. The discussion of several key Marxist-feminist texts foregrounds Maria Dalla Costa's 1975 work, The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community. Weeks situates Dalla Costa in the Autonomous Marxist tradition. The effect is a revelatory reinvigoration of second wave Marxist feminist insights that re-centers the figure of the housewife as a site of gendered work and the production of subjectivity. The status of housework in Marxist feminism has always been important, though 1970's debates about it became somewhat tedious. Discussions of the differences between reproduction and production, how labor is defined as against work, what constitutes the family wage (and whether it still exists), whether or not housework is related to the production of surplus value and so on, were perhaps of questionable importance if one's interests went beyond trying to keep feminist analyses

Re-envisioning the Dignity of Women’s Work

2017

The concept of dignity of work presumes universally that work is good for you. In this worldview work is an enabler that provides material well-being and intrinsic satisfaction. Dignified work provides a status to those who undertake it, accords them respect as contributing citizens and promotes cohesion in society. This conception regards the right to work as uplifting.

The Ethics of Care: Valuing or Essentialising Women’s Work?

Springer eBooks, 2020

A major theme of ethics, introduced by feminist philosophers in the 1980s, concerns the role of care in human life. While the importance of care has historically been neglected by philosophy, some argue that it should be placed at the centre of our ethical systems and understood as a locus of distinctive virtues that have been wrongly devalued as feminine. Whether caring reflects a characteristically feminine set of virtues has been a source of controversy, with some arguing that women have different ethical approaches from men, while others argue this has no basis in an essential sexual or gender difference. Despite these important questions, it is valuable to explore what an ethics looks like that places central importance on relations of care.