Work outside the accounts
Calling something work changes what can be counted, paid and negotiated. These sources take different routes into that question. Their arguments should not be reduced to a single explanation of every household.
An editorial comparison of works, not a documented lineage. Specialist passage review pending.
1. Marilyn Waring
Start with the critique of national accounting in If Women Counted. Ask what the chosen measure makes visible.
What does the account leave outside its boundary?
- Waring, Marilyn. If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics. Harper and Row, 1988.Bibliographic reference. Consult the named edition through a library or publisher.
- Waring, Marilyn. Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth. University of Toronto Press, 2nd ed. 1999.Bibliographic reference. Consult the named edition through a library or publisher.
- United Nations Statistics Division. System of National Accounts revisions, 1993 and 2008, on unpaid household service work.Bibliographic reference. Consult the named edition through a library or publisher.
2. Silvia Federici
Read housework as part of the organisation of labour. An economic argument can reveal an arrangement without deciding what an individual should do.
Who depends on work that is described as love?
- Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, 2004.Bibliographic reference. Consult the named edition through a library or publisher.
3. Carolina Maria de Jesus
Read a diarist’s account of material life. Test the distance between an economic category and the daily experience it describes.
What can a diary show that a total cannot?
- de Jesus, Carolina Maria. Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus. Trans. David St. Clair. Dutton, 1962.Bibliographic reference. Consult the named edition through a library or publisher.
- de Jesus, Carolina Maria. Quarto de Despejo. Livraria Francisco Alves, 1960.Bibliographic reference. Consult the named edition through a library or publisher.
Find Matria on the App Store