Love or exploitation: domestic work as a system of oppression and subordination

Abstract

Housework is associated, even today, with “the feminine”, from an essentialist perspective of gender. Thanks to Beauvoir’s work, we can look at gender as a social construct that assigns the roles that each person must fulfill in a society, to start pointing out that the idea of a “full-rime housewife” is not at all a category that has always existed, but is situated within a historical context used to promote capitalist development, as Silvia Federici points out. Christine Delphy’s materialist feminism perspective offers a critique of classical Marxism, which ignores the conditions of oppression and exploitation of which women are victims. We present an analysis of the way in which the development of capitalism and, at the same time, of patriarchy, has tied women to situations of violence based on economic dependence.