Get Your Smart On
Kathi Weeks shines a light on our modern work woes.
Kathi Weeks begins The Problem with Work with this brilliant insight that work and marriage are analogous social institutions. Much of her analysis hangs on this analogy, which extends across the entire book to expose deep structural connections between economic systems, labor practices, gender roles, and even citizenship. This series explores how Weeks develops the analogy, explaining how both work and marriage are:
Perceived to be private, individual matters
Naturalized and reified, resulting in their depoliticization
Sites for subjection and domination
Interdependent conditions for the capitalist patriarchal state
Her analysis helps explain why work often feels dehumanizing, even though it should be the site for personal development and satisfaction. I am a person who loves to work, genuinely enjoy it, but as soon as that work is done in the context of employment, it almost always feels bad or wrong somehow. Even in the best of work conditions—I have been lucky to partake in both academia and tech—what we do is turned into something desagradable, as we say in Spanish — something that does not agree with us and leaves a bad taste in our mouths. This conundrum set me on a path to figure out why work sucks so much, and also led me to question for whom does work work?, because I get the sense that it works better for some than for others.
If you are five feet tall in a world built for people who are three feet tall, your physical environment doesn’t fit you, try as you might. But those three-foot-tall people who have never felt the ongoing discomfort like a low-grade torture may not understand what all the complaining and stooping over is about.
As I write this, how we work is being dismantled: we are seeing inflation and a worsening economy for the many, mass layoffs, AI and the cover it provides for nearshoring and offshoring of jobs, and unpopular return-to-office mandates. After being laid off twice in one year, I really had to think hard about alternatives to just finding another job. It’s scary, but intellectually I also know there is opportunity in this situation. (It’s why I started the Work Matters Substack with a partner.) Given all this, Weeks’ book is even more relevant today than when it was written nearly fifteen years ago. So now, let’s get into it.
It feels completely natural to think of professional success or struggles at home as private matters for which we are personally responsible. Weeks observes how “the workplace, like the household, is typically figured as a private space, the product of a series of individual agreements rather than a social structure.” The family-household is the very definition of the private realm, but waged work is also private in this sense: a private citizen chooses to sell their labor to private business interests, an arrangement recognized by the state through a work contract. The idealized nuclear family is also established by a marriage certificate (technically also a contract), where two individuals declare their union and have it recognized by others and the state.
So these things are only private until they are not. What appears as merely personal choice reveals itself as deeply political when we recognize how the state actively structures, regulates, and enforces the very terms of these supposedly private arrangements. The state controls why and how a marriage can be dissolved. It broadly enforces the rights and responsibilities of all parties to a work contract. So why do we regard them as intimate, private matters? If Weeks is correct, this is strategic:
Privatization and individualization make collective action difficult for us to imagine. They don’t do away with resistance, but channel dissent into individual grievances. So workers complain about particular bosses rather than the system granting those bosses authority; women initially complain about individual husbands rather than their systematic subjugation under patriarchal rule. It took the work of CR groups (Consciousness Raising groups) to put it together: what women were facing was not due to personal failures but a function of our common situations—systematic, and not a failure at all. What is more, even if a complaint is made about an institution, it will most often be heard as a personal grievance, and often the complainer will be tagged as a problem. As notes in her latest Substack piece “Somewhere Else to Go”:
“…complaints often come into the public realm by being turned into scandals.
Behind many scandals are unheard complaints.”
*Have you heard of the Lowell Mill Girls? Their story gives us insight into how the privatization and scandal trick works. At the roaring start of industrialization, when factory workers were badly needed, the owner of the Lowell Mill gathered up these nimble-fingered young women to work in his Massachusetts textile factories. The women earned wages that seemed to offer them unprecedented independence, a step up from the unpaid farm labor they were used to. Under the so-called “Lowell system,” the women lived together in boarding houses under constant moral supervision, so the work was made to look respectable. But then came the wage cuts, and when eight hundred of them walked out in protest, the mill owners framed the strike as ingratitude by individual troublemakers. Press coverage piled on, obsessively focusing on the “unladylike” behavior of specific women—escandalo! The strike was deemed ‘unsuccessful’ at the time, yet it marked one of the first instances of women workers organizing collectively. The Mill Girls continued organizing and formed the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association in 1844, one of the first organizations representing women workers that fought for, and eventually won, a ten-hour workday. *
Political questions about the distribution of power, resources, and time become delegitimized. We are not often free to question how our talents or time is being utilized at work, at least not openly. Our expertise and talents are often reduced down into roles that are designed and defined by others but into which we must fit. The commonly heard phrase “we want you to bring your full self to work” is but an admission that many feel they cannot be themselves at work.
For a long time, it would not have made sense to ask why women (of a certain kind, namely the 1950s housewife, usually white and of reproductive age) were relegated to the private domestic realm—that’s just how things were. As Weeks reminds us, second-wave feminists had to explicitly challenge this barrier, refusing to honor the “do not enter” sign marking family, marriage, and sexuality as private terrain governed by individual choice or natural law, rather than political structures. The mantra of second-wave feminism became: “the personal is political.” When political matters are reduced to personal problems, we find ourselves trying to solve problems that are much larger than ourselves, problems that cannot be addressed through individual efforts alone. In that scenario, we are being set up to fail, and then we will be shamed and blamed for that failure.
Weeks’s project applies this same feminist strategy to work, to develop a political theory that challenges the privatization and depoliticization of work. She examines how depoliticization is achieved through naturalization and reification, processes that make historical, contingent social arrangements seem like immutable facts of reality, like gravity. It’s just the way things are, right?
It’s funny how publishing something and sleeping on it will make you realize what is missing or how to make it even better.
In this part one, I should add this: People can get mad when you point this out, but we think who we fall in love with or choose to partner with romantically is somehow an expression of our desires, of us as persons. And that is not untrue, but what we less often realize is that our desires are shaped and constrained socially and politically. There is a standard issue “who i will like based on who I think I am, so liking this person is an expression of who I am” and that is where we all start. Those of us who are more adventurous will test these bounds, and soon run into the coercion - sweet as romance at first, but in the end backed up by violence.
I used to tell my students this analogy: if you control a dog’s nose, you control a dog’s body. Desire is the nose of humans, it’s how we navigate identity and selfhood. A lot a lot a lot of work goes into shaping and controlling our human desires, especially in high control societies and groups. But that control has effects — purity culture turns into pedophilia.
So now, let see if we can turn that analysis on work. The work of work is not just or even primarily production of goods of services, but even before we get to that, the work of work is the production of people as workers and as citizens. You may think your career choices are private individual matters, just as you might think your successes really are merit based, but you express yourself (think expresso, you brew yourself through these choices) and become you by going after this or that job, occupation, vocation, career.
It is clear to me now that I studied philosophy as an expression of the racism and misogyny I experienced, and as a long-covid-like effect of colonialism. As a Latina woman, it was a way to prove I was not stupid, a way to become more european/”civilized” as well (some latin@s think they are more european than mulat@ and I was raised with these racist white latino beliefs, caused by shame imposed upon my father during his education in the states), and being able to argue well and defend myself verbally has served me very well as a bulwark against men’s bullshit. Training in masculine rationality (a weapon) is self-defense training. So even before I ever stepped foot in a classroom or conference room as a philosopher, philosophy had done a lot of work to shape me, and it gave me pleasure. I didn’t realize most of this until well after leaving academia, of course.
What about you, why did you choose to do what you do or want to do? Can a little suspicion about our own desires, as the psychoanalysts tell us, be in order here?
Beecher, Catherine Esther. A Treatise on Domestic Economy. 1841. Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/21829/21829-h/21829-h.htm. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025.
National Women’s History Museum. “Coverture: The Word You Probably Don’t Know But Should.” Women’s History Museum, www.womenshistory.org/articles/coverture-word-you-probably-dont-know-should. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025.
“Lowell Mill Girls and the Factory System, 1840.” The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/spotlight-primary-source/lowell-mill-girls-and-factory-system-1840. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025.
Mill, John Stuart. The Subjection Of Women was published 1869 but written earlier 1860-1861 after the death of his wife Harriet Taylor Mill in 1858. Harriet Taylor Mill’s contribution to “The Subjection of Women” was substantial, though the exact extent remains debated by scholars. Mill himself credited her extensively in his autobiography, stating that the book was “more directly and literally our joint production than anything else which bears my name.”
“Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, 1848.” Internet Modern History Sourcebook, Fordham University, sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/senecafalls.asp. Accessed 29 Sept. 2025.
Weeks, Kathi. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Duke University Press, 2011.