“The Wife Glitch” (Across the Sundering Seas 2020 #19)
Hello there, readers! Another week, another missive!
(This is Across the Sundering Seas, a newsletter by Chris Krycho—me—about the things I’m learning and thinking about. You can unsubscribe here if this fills you with angsty dread; or you can forward it to a friend if you love it and think they might as well!)
This week I want to interact with an essay I read online: The Wife Glitch, by Jennifer Schaffer. Schaffer makes a really provocative claim:
There isn’t enough time in the day to fulfill the demands placed on a modern human: to be available to work throughout all our waking hours; to show determination and ambition so that we are not made redundant; to service debts and taxes and run a cost-effective household; to source and consume healthful meals three times a day; to exercise our bodies the recommended amount; to maintain mental well-being amidst chaos; to care for dependents (aging parents, young children); to be present and attentive to those we interact with; to find, build, maintain, and perpetually assess the longevity of meaningful and fulfilling partnerships; to get eight hours of quality sleep. Literally: how does one do it?
For most of Western history, the answer was: the wife. Now what?
The answer is: “There’s an app for that.” We’ve outsourced domestic activity—long undervalued, especially by the men who haven’t historically done it—from our homes and to strangers we can summon with the push of a button. Laundry, dog-walking, food preparation, you name it: there is an app that connects you with someone willing to do the job for a comparatively nominal amount of money. That is: a critique of the dynamics of startup venture capitalism familiar to anyone who’s been paying attention to the space in the last few years: How much of our “innovation” is really making things better, vs. simply let us get out of doing our own chores while simultaneously destabilizing the wages of an entire class of workers (where the word “class” does a lot of work)?
Mixed in with all of this: a set of claims, familiar to anyone who’s read any substantive feminism—not just of the last century, but ever: that the kind of work women carry out, especially wives, is perpetually treated as less valuable than the work men do. Schaffer notes ways in which this has been particularly pernicious in the industrial era, where the idea of a family wage (itself mostly an industrial-era invention) assumed a man earned most or all of the family’s money, and a woman did all the other labor in the household—cleaning, cooking, child-rearing, you name it; all of it unpaid. When, over the last four decades, that family wage model no longer worked, because men’s wages didn’t cover the family salary, women entered the workforce to make up for it. With that move (and with the encouragement of certain feminisms of the 20th century), those old domesticities were yet further devalued. And yet they remain necessary. So, her argument runs, we come to today, where the app economy takes those necessities, hands them to those most economically vulnerable—and hand the profits to a small group of mostly men.
Schaffer, perhaps unsurprisingly, ends up using Marxist categories to frame all of this. Her starting point is power relations between capital and labor, and the only actor available in her analysis besides the market is the state, so she ends up saying things like this:
Without federal assistance in the form of publicly funded childcare for all, wage protections for workers, or a universal basic income—to name but a few of the creative opportunities at hand—the individual becomes increasingly reliant on her employer. It is no coincidence that technology companies, particularly keen to co-opt and commodify historically feminized care work, offer the most pointed range of reproduction-related benefits for their employees: egg freezing and paid parental leave abound, though often not childcare.
The end result is that we now all have at least three jobs, three modes of survival to tend to: our financial survival, the survival of our communities, and the survival of our family units. The state has long shirked its responsibilities in each sphere; now, the wide, slobbering maw of the tech industry waits, ready to commodify whatever it can.
In other words, the options are that the state provides these things, or the market does; there are no other options. From where I stand, though, this is just saying “Which devouring monster would you like to be eaten by?” There are things the state does well, things the market does well, and things that neither does well. But if your frame for political economy only has those two on offer, you end up with either Marxism or Libertarianism or some weird thing trying to blend the two, a.k.a. neoliberalism. My own take is that some of the goods she wants to preserve simply cannot be handled by the state or the market.
“The survival of our communities?” Governments and markets both have goods they contribute to that end—security, prosperity, the rule of law, productive and creative exchange of good—but neither each apart nor both together can actually manage the survival of our communities. We also need families (extended families, not just the little nuclear family we made normative in the mid-20th-century), sources of thick ethical norms and rich communal support in hard times (you may have heard of these strange things called “churches”).
Schaffer’s critique has some sting to it—
…for centuries, women asked for recognition of the value of “women’s work”—which is to say, the practical labor that makes the world go round and has historically been placed on the shoulders of wives and mothers and daughters without question. Many simply asked that the work be recognized as just that: work—not a calling, not a natural state, not a pure act of love. Others asked that men take on their share of domestic labor, and in so doing, free women to pursue other, potentially more fulfilling or stimulating forms of work—and leisure. And through the Wages for Housework movement led by Silvia Federici, women even asked that that value of their work be recognized in capital’s primary currency: a wage. This demand was more radical provocation than concrete policy proposal, one which attempted to speak the language of capitalism in order to undermine it. To pay wages for housework would require a wholesale transformation of the economy, revealing at the core of capitalism a fundamental reliance on the unpaid labor of women.
How strange and predictable it is, then, that wages for housework have, at last, become widespread—but in the form of our subscription to digital services and gig economy labor. This work has become concretely valuable at the precise moment its value can be effectively captured by a small cadre of men sitting at the top of the tech industry.
…
Robot mistresses, digital nurses, smartphone secretaries, algorithmic wives, and app-based mommies: huge swathes of the modern tech boom are a reaction against women’s partial liberation from housework and our increasing resistance to performing unpaid and undervalued emotional and sexual labor.
In other words: we automate “women’s work” away, devaluing it even further in the process. It’s valuable only insofar as it generates profits and comforts for men. But while she’s right on a lot of fronts, there is one thing she gets incomplete here and one thing she gets wrong here.
The incomplete bit is that the cadre of “innovators” at the top are equally eager to eliminate labor traditionally bracketed as male (at least in the industrial era): the factory job, the taxi driver, the farmer. Insofar as the Marxist note in the piece is correct, she doesn’t go far enough: the problem she identifies is in fact that everyone in jobs our tech economy undervalues is vulnerable. The feminist bit here is, to be sure, correct: far more of those vulnerable jobs are stereotyped as feminine. But the problem is deeper, and though she hints at this in one paragraph, it’s worth saying both of those pieces—even if only to heighten the terms of the critique.
The part she gets wrong is in her view (at least insofar as I understand it) of the place we find ourselves: with the Scylla of the tech industry’s “devouring maw” consuming domesticity on the one hand, and the Charybdis of a slavish domesticity on the other. These are, though, not the only options, even if they are the ones most current in the public imagination. And precisely because I believe in genuine alternatives, I don’t share her despair, though I understand and even to some degree sympathize with it. Household economies can be viable! Men can genuinely come to value (and contributing to!) the things women love—the things the real women in their lives really love, whether that’s physics research or child-rearing or both. Communities can be rich and healthy and ethically thick and genuinely mutually supportive. The market and the state can both be appropriately restrained.
And yes, all of these things imperfectly in this broken world: my final hopes here are eschatological. But we need to imagine and pursue those better alternatives, not least by, again, loving the real women and their real loves in our lives.