How the Pandemic Has Proven the Value of Women’s Work

“American life has been suddenly and dramatically upended,” Keenanga-Yamahtta Taylor wrote in the New Yorker last March, adding, “and, when things are turned upside down, the bottom is brought to the surface and exposed to the light.”

The proverbial bottom of American life being brought to light by the upending caused by COVID-19 is the reality that women’s labor is undervalued in and exploited by the capitalist system, and that the system grinds to a halt without women’s unpaid labor. Women’s labor, unpaid and underpaid, is the foundation on which capital is built. Scholar Leslie Salzinger dubs this “starter capital,” the unthanked base on which all tangible and valued capital production rests. It makes the sun rise in a capitalist society under duress and makes the wheels turn as we navigate this pandemic.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, we’ve experienced a “she-cession.” This term, coined by policy expert C. Nicole Mason, refers to the way the pandemic-induced recession has disproportionately impacted women. Nearly 1 million more women than men have lost their jobs, for a total of around 5.4 million women. In one month alone — December 2020 — women lost 156,000 jobs while men gained 16,000, driving women’s labor force participation to a 33-year low. Sectors predominantly staffed by women (hospitality, touch services, nonessential health care) have contracted dramatically over the past year. Moreover, with child care crumbling across the country, women’s work-life balance has proved unnavigable, particularly for women of color, who disproportionately work part-time positions with few benefits or paid family leave.

Of course, this is a decades-long phenomenon only exacerbated, not created, by the pandemic. Decades ago, in her 1975 essay “Wages for Housework,” legendary Italian anarcho-feminist Silvia Federici asserted that capitalism “has created a true masterpiece at the expense of women,” arguing that capitalism is grounded in the exploitation of reproductive or care labor, which writer Jordan Kisner characterized in the New York Times Magazine as “all the work we do that is sustaining,” which includes “work that seems to erase itself” including cooking, housekeeping, child and eldercare. Reproductive labor can be unpaid (the work female family members do every day without a passing thought) or paid (care givers, front-line workers, grocery store clerks), though compensation is overwhelmingly below the U.S. median income. We now try to ameliorate decades of marginalization by calling these women “heroes.”

Mainstream feminism had, until this moment, failed to grapple with it. Wealthier women bury it by outsourcing care labor to a racialized other. Politicians lack the muster to address it. And capitalists, well, they’d like it to stay that way.

This moment, on the cusp of a new chapter in American history, is a crucial one to seeing who, when push comes to shove, the capitalist system swoops in to save and who falls by the wayside. The government bailed out aviation companies, but didn’t help the thousands of waitresses who lost their health insurance via their employers. While the top five U.S. billionaires (all men) saw an 85 percent increase in their combined wealth over the course of the pandemic, millions of women dropped out of the workforce altogether to stay home with their children.

As the Biden administration “build[s] back better,” the spotlight must remain on women. We cannot use men returning to corporate offices as our metric for recovery. We cannot forget all those moments of terror when moms realized they could have a kid, a job, but not both. This invisible labor, the kind that “erases itself,” must be scrawled across Congress in permanent ink. In 2019, if American women had made minimum wage for the work they did in the home, they’d have earned $1.5 trillion. This figure multiplied during the pandemic. Moving forward, one sure solution would be to finally incorporate this labor into our economic planning.

There are some signs that reproductive and care labor are gaining visibility. This year, Congresswoman Grace Meng, (D-N.Y.,) introduced the Marshall Plan for Moms, a plan that advocates for direct payments to mothers who have had to leave the workforce during COVID. Importantly, the blanketed nature of this pandemic upended the immunity wealthier Americans assumed they possessed. Where there was a child, there was a crisis of child care. Where there was a school, there was a crisis of education. Where there was a woman, there was a series of exasperating choices. Women are sick of facing these choices between home and work, money and motherhood. The time is now to reconstruct an economy that sees care labor, not just our bottom line.