In previous parts of this series, we saw how work is depoliticized when it is relegated to the private realm of individual choice. Working to politicize work in much the same ways that feminists have politicized the family and marriage allow us to see a structural system of rewards and punishments that condition these “personal choices.” In what follows, we tie it all together.

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Weeks argues that work and family are not separate spheres but “mutually reinforcing ideologies that shape production and reproduction.” The alliance between the “work ethic” and “family values” sustains capitalism through concrete structural mechanisms that most of us never see. They are each linchpins holding capitalist patriarchy together.

We already know that by relegating childcare, eldercare, cooking, cleaning, and emotional labor to the supposedly private domestic sphere, capitalism obscures the true costs of production. (Also, it flattens the public realm of waged labor of the messy emotional stuff of humans, further dehumanizing it. We learn to mask and leave our emotions and opinions behind when we go to work, which means we leave a lot of our personalities behind as well.) There is no need for universal childcare, paid family leave, or robust social services when families are expected to absorb these burdens privately. Marxist feminism, particularly the “Wages for Housework” tradition, exposed this arrangement: all the work done in the domestic realm, largely by women, is the foundation on top of which the waged economy rests.

Paying even minimum wage for this labor would, as I’ve heard it said, bankrupt the system. And claims made by citizens to these social services are used as an occasion to blame women for the deterioration of the social fabric, and to try to put them “back in their places.” What is wrong with our crumbling systems? Women and feminism. It should sound very familiar. And if women are the problem, then disciplining women and forcing them back into the subjugated roles looks like the solution.

This arrangement keeps wages lower and hours longer than they would otherwise need to be. The standard eight-hour workday, for instance, evolved based on the assumption that a typically male worker was supported by a woman performing unwaged domestic labor at home. The concept of the “family wage” made this explicit: a man’s wage was supposed to support a household because his wife’s unpaid labor was doing the other half of the work. In essence, he was paid for her labor, and was in charge of distributing the resources to “his” family. This gendered division of labor simultaneously ensures what Marxist feminists showed was “a cheaper and more flexible waged labor force.” Women, channeled into unwaged domestic reproduction, could also be pulled into the wage labor force when needed. They are viewed as an inessential surplus reserve — paid less because their wages are deemed “supplementary,” and they can be dismissed when no longer required.

I know that this only applies to middle-class mostly-anglo women, but this is the ideological picture that dominates, even if most women (almost no women) actually fit this patriarchal ideal. It doesn’t matter that this is not the reality for most all women, when it is what Christian Nationalists who preach “complementarity” want to drive us into. Those currently in power in the United States would like to return us to this arrangement-that-never-was, but that is the point — it is a false and falsifying ideal.

It is still and ideal at works in many many other places. For example, I live in Latin America, in a country where it is legal to discriminate in job postings by age and gender. It is shocking for me to see job adverts here, but it is hardly visible (unless ones eyes are open to it) that the work force is completely segregated by gender. You will go into a pharmacy and the people helping customers will be women and there will be a man sitting in the back looking busy at a desk, the manager overseeing their work. Even the same work done inside the home versus outside on the exterior of properties (sweeping and cleaning the floors, watering plants, etc.) is regarded and paid completely differently based on gender. The gender division of labor is good and well around much of the globe still today.

The point is that the “ideal” keeps the reality in check as well. If women were not regarded as supplementary in the workforce because of the “family values” ideal, their work outside the home would be valued alongside that of men, and not held as a separate reserve.

Finally, the state explicitly demonstrates the alliance between gender and work roles through social welfare policy. As Weeks points out, waged work and traditional heterosexual marriage are promoted as essentially the only two socially recognized and politically approved paths from dependency to personal responsibility. Don’t have a job? You’re compelled to get one or risk starvation and becoming unhoused, no matter what your contributions or abilities. Can’t support yourself as a woman, maybe you have been pushed out of tech in these past couple years? Get yourself married to a man who does have the social and political access to the resources needed to stay alive. Both institutions (work and marriage, production and reproduction) are presented as solutions to dependency, but both also require subjection to authority, be it to the boss or the husband.1

As I wrote in an earlier piece in this series, coverture laws meant married women couldn’t own property, sign contracts, or control their own wages. Even after these laws were reformed, women couldn’t get credit cards in their own names or mortgages without a male co-signer until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974. Marriage wasn’t just an option; it was an economic necessity, a structural requirement for women’s survival. And guess what? Many of these laws are still on the books, just not enforced. I used to live in Memphis, where they have laws saying that more than 3 unmarried women living together is considered automatically a brothel. We used to laugh and joke about it. I don’t want to sound alarmist, but it is a matter of taking over the courts to begin enforcing these laws, bringing them back into play.

Weeks asserts that the struggle against work is interdependent with the struggle against the nuclear family. Neither can be adequately challenged without confronting the other. They are both integrated and integral to how capitalism extracts value and maintains control. If you think that marriage will protect you from misogyny or work from precarity, you have it exactly backwards.

For whom does work work?

Common sense tells us that it would work best for those who can offload reproductive labor onto someone else. Historically this has been men who had wives performing unwaged domestic work. But also, it can be women who have well paying jobs and can also offload domestic duties to others. It works less well for those performing the double shift of waged and unwaged labor, working-class women, especially working-class women and women of color, who never had the option of staying home. (Again, when we view reality only through the dominant lens, taking middle-class women as the norm they are not, we fail to comprehend reality, period.) And it utterly fails those who refuse or cannot conform to either institution’s demands.

In my experience of academia, there are a lot of unwritten rules that are class-coded. A working-class person, an immigrant like myself, may never really feel at home in an institution built by and for the leisure classes, and it may not be easy to pin-point the source of the unease. Just an example, you will be able to come up with your own examples based on your own experiences.

Work also works better for those whose feelings are dampened down, or who can set these aside and mask well.

Understanding the interdependence — that work:man::marriage:woman — also helps explain why work feels dehumanizing, even when you love what you do. Maybe especially when you love doing what you do. The c. system isn’t designed for human flourishing; it’s designed for extraction and control. It demands that you develop a taste for your own subjugation. It turns us into boss and underling, sadists and masochists, and it celebrates sadism and cruelty as sport. These systems produce women like me as unhirable, and as likely candidates of elder poverty. Unhirable is the new unfuckable.

But I also recognize that for some, these structures offer comfort in an illusion of security. Work can be a compact or compromise, giving up autonomy in one area of life to gain it in another realm. In the same way, some women find that femininity gives them access to power and social recognition. Having to squeeze a whole person into a persona designed for another’s benefit is not unlike fitting yourself into a corporate work role. The limits of a role, whether work role or gender role, can give some people structure within which to gain social and political recognition. For all of us, that recognition is a matter of utmost importance.

So each of us must make our “choices,” left on our own to find the good in fundamentally bad choices. As Weeks argues, our focus on these bad, personal, choices with which we’re left are less relevant than the really significant political questions they obviate: How do we challenge systems that require our subjection? How do we build alternatives that don’t rely on extraction and exploitation? How do we create conditions where work and care can be done with autonomy and dignity, rather than domination? These are the questions that really matter, and they can only be answered collectively, not individually. We have to coordinate to align our choices, the ones we’re allowed to make, for mutual benefit, the work of politics.

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If you’ve read this far, thank you. I don’t want to leave you on a downer, so here is something else to consider: these systems fail more often than not. They do not work. It’s an emperor’s clothes situ. They only succeed in so far as we believe in the systems and don’t test the reality it sets up for us. These systems, really one interlocked system of production and reproduction, produce irreverent women, worker owned co-ops, and a myriad of life forms that remain invisible to us so long as we believe. As the graffiti artists have put it, “Capitalism is over, if you want it.”

It is not only a matter of belief, in case that is what your thinking, but of real material conditions that constrain us. But the belief is the social glue that keeps the seems shut against the light. You can put your thumb right through it, let in the light.