At the end of a long auto ride through Delhi, I was asked a rather unexpected and intrusive question. “What do you identify as?” I didn’t know how to answer that. As a woman who dons a pixie cut, I often see people confused about what my gender is. I have overheard people arguing whether I am a man or a woman. I almost always feel like I need to be offended by all this. More often than not, I am provoked into wondering what determines identity, what we are conditioned to believe as identity markers.
Very often, we tend to assume someone’s gender by what we see. What we see is determined by what we know or are conditioned to believe are markers of gender identities. Inherent biases like racism, sexist notions, orthodox beliefs play a huge part in this. Appropriation or affirmation of one’s identity according to societal constructs, is an inherently problematic notion. One field where this receives undue attention is the various debates about gender. Nearly all aspects of our social and political life are gendered which leads to the construction of what constitutes gender and what is “accepted” as the embodiment of a certain gender. The role of the body plays a major role in what is subject to identification with a specific gender.
This idea of gender pervades everyday activities where humans are subject to play their roles as deemed by the gender that they identify with. The gendered division of labour is a case in point. Determining what is considered socially acceptable behaviour for each gender and further, the appropriation of gendered work is highly contested.
Reproductive labour and the appropriation of feminised labour construct the body and lead us to question the nature of biology, psychology, sociology and politics in determining the body. Reproductive labour is the work that is carried out in order to sustain life and reproduce the workforce. There is an urgent need to see the categorisation of sex as an ideological tool that institutes certain norms that are detrimental to the limitation of what gender can be. This article aims to analyse the construction of the body by focussing on the centrality of time in what is defined as reproductive labour.
Labour is measured by time in that it is valued on the terms of time. The amount of time given to complete a task is a determinant of the value of your labour, especially in a capitalist society. In a capitalist society, time is objective, it is money. Time determines labour including domestic and reproductive labour. We will see how the ideas of family time, labour time and leisure time coincide and how they diverge to construct a “gendered body.” There will also be a focus on differentiating between time for what we will, time for what we want and time for what we will be. The never-ending demand for time and money acts as the epicentre of freedom for women. But will that suffice?
Temporal Constructs and the Gendered Division of Labour
Who is time worthy of? Very often, it is justified that men work so long and so hard which gives them the leeway to consider time after work as leisure time. What does this mean for the women of the family, who are expected to toil all day within the household? Why is there a fixation on who gets to spend their time leisurely and where? From the simple question of who has more time, or whose time is worth more, who has more skill or more power, it is clear that a complicated relationship between the structure of work imperatives and normative gendered expectations determines the ultimate allocation of members' time to work and home.
Marx and Engels define the family to be a reproductive relationship. Through this, reproductive labour is described as the work that is essential to sustain human life and raise future generations. This is demonstrated in Talcott Parsons’ famous articulation of the ‘Warm Bath Theory’, where he describes the return of the man of the household from work. After this, his wife waits for him to help him relax and destress after his tough day at work. The family, more specifically, the wife functions as a warm bath, stabilising and invigorating.
This helps us conceptualise ‘productive masculinity’ and ‘reproductive femininity.’ The age-old saying, “The man has to earn money for the family so the woman must devote her time to the household,” tends to define the roles of male and female in the household and a marriage. Marriage helps sustain the capitalist notion of production which in this case takes the shape of the production of gender roles and household goods like childcare and domestic work.
“What is produced and reproduced is not merely the activity and artefact of domestic life, but the material embodiment of wifely and husbandly roles, and derivatively, of womanly and manly conduct,” write West and Zimmerman. The societal norm of how one is supposed to utilise their time is determined by who should take care of the household and the feminised aspect of work This in turn creates an idealised perception of what the male and female body ought to embody.
As written by West and Zimmerman, “Simultaneously, members "do" gender, as they "do" housework and child care, and what [has] been called the division of labour provides for the joint production of household labour and gender; it is the mechanism by which both the material and symbolic products of the household are realized.”
The Appropriation of the Reproductive Body
Judith Butler in her landmark work, Gender Trouble, formulated the concept of Performativity, which theorised that the body materialised over time through the repeated performance of gender. Here, Butler argues that gender predates sex (determined biologically) because sex is produced by gender through a series of performances. The assumption of roles that are ascribed to portray a certain gender through fixed social, economic and political standards, ensures the repetitive performance of these gendered roles which are internalised to make the body.
Fertility is a concept that is attached to women and all the characteristics thought to be a result of fertility are presented as feminine roles. Thus motherhood, lactation, reproduction, and nurture are some factors that are characterised as feminine, and since it depends on the need to care for the future generation, it is imposed on the women as a duty to be upheld at all costs.
In her satirical piece on menstruation, Gloria Steinem creates a utopian world which envisions a world where men menstruate instead of women. She brings out how the world would adapt to making menstruation something that accords much more value and privilege to men just because they wield the superpower to bleed.
They’d be considered superior beings, “Military men, right-wing politicians, and religious fundamentalists would cite menstruation ('menstruation') as proof that only men could serve in the Army ('you have to give blood to take blood'), occupy political office ('can women be aggressive without that steadfast cycle governed by the planet Mars?'), be priest and ministers ('how could a woman know what it is to give her blood for our sins?') or rabbis ('without the monthly loss of impurities, women remain unclean').”
The subjection of the body to a gender is a subjection towards its subordination or domination over another. The institution of the family perpetuates this identity and patriarchal domination by strengthening it.
Wages for Housework and Making the Personal Political
Household work or domestic labour has been invisibilised. This invisibilisation is part of a deliberate effort by the capitalist state and society to avoid the remuneration that needs to be paid to women who are the bearers of this burden. In the 1970s, the first wave of feminism began with a demand for wages for housework. It was put forward by Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici, Brigitte Galtier, and Selma James.
The concept of social reproduction is the logic that justifies the force exerted towards continued maintenance of the population through biological reproduction. Social reproduction as a sociological subject was initially proposed by Marx in his writings; it evolved as a concept that contributed to the studies of gender and reproductive labour.
Though the capitalist state is well aware that social reproduction is a necessary factor for the production of surplus value, wages for housework are something that it wishes away. We need to, “contest at once the invisibility of domestic work and its moralization, to redress both its devaluation as work and its overvaluation as a labour of love”. Women need time, leisure time, and time to be themselves without having to be subject to something that they are not or do not want to be.
The demand for time and money and the concept of refusal of work are deemed to be outrageous and dereliction of one’s duty. But it is not merely that. Dalla Costa writes, “We want canteens too, and nurseries and washing machines and dishwashers, but we also want choices: to eat in privacy with few people when we want, to have time to be with children, to be with old people, with the sick, when and where we choose.”
This clearly shows that ‘what women want is to have a choice.’ To have that choice they need to have time. For time they must domesticate less. The identity of what makes a woman cannot be reduced to that of the household work they do. Women need time to organise themselves. To look within themselves and question realities. There is a need for women to work together as a collective.
As Kathi Weeks puts it, “Wages for housework was not primarily or immediately about power; the demand was a provocation to collective action… It was not a goal but also a movement, a process of becoming the kind of people who- or, rather, the kind of collectivities that- needed, wanted and felt entitled to a wage for their contributions.
“In this respect, it was a demand for the power to make further demands- for more money, more time, better jobs, and better services. A demand is in this sense always a risk, a gamble, the success of which depends on the power that the struggle for it can generate.”
In her seminal work on Gender Gap, Claudia Goldin has written about how differences between gender in pay and labour force does not arise out of biological differences but out of the inequality that comes out of unpaid care work that women do and household labour, in the context of heterosexual couples. Her research shows how it is usually post birth that an earning gap occurs between a husband and a wife. We can conclude from Goldin’s work that equality in labour can arise only when there’s equity within a family especially in the valuing of and division of reproductive labour.
Temporal Resistance and Alternative Temporalities
Motherhood and reproductive activities are very often seen as private activities that symbolise an individual identity. However, it needs to be noted that gender is not a stable or homogeneous identity. Often, the institution of the family and societal structuring work as forces coercing women into accepting and embodying these roles deemed to be part of the private sphere.
This coercion into the invisibilisation of the work undertaken by women has largely prevented the making of reproductive labour a problem that seeks solutions through the public sphere. Carol Hanisch put forth her argument about the need to make the personal political by postulating that collective problems need collective solutions in her landmark essay titled, “The Personal is Political''. This notion brought forth a major boost to the feminist movement which by then was in its second wave.
As has been brought out in this article so far, women’s experiences within the household are shaped and conditioned by systems of patriarchy, capitalism and oppression. The idea of “personal is political” brings this issue to the forefront to address the devaluation of individual and personal struggle that can be woven together to bring out a collective struggle.
Women need to stop blaming themselves and need to start thinking and speaking out for themselves. They need to put forward demands and start entering the public space to politicise their problems. This is not an easy task given that women have been subject to institutional oppression and their voices are suppressed. In the context of reproductive labour, this demand needs to take the shape of less work and more leisure. This demand mostly revolves around the concept of time.
Ashis Nandy writes about how there is ‘institutionally entrenched jealousy’ that men feel which leads to the oppression of women. A woman’s potential and her right to leisure have been restricted by men due to what Freud has termed ‘penis envy’. This insecurity, jealousy and hostility toward women arise out of man’s deepest anxieties. Females have the power to select a mate who is deemed to be biologically fitter, this determines the social value of men in a society. This upper hand has led to men oppressing women.
There is a need to re-emphasise the call for politicisation of reproductive labour due to the growing phenomenon of what is now termed, “Regressive feminism”. Conservatism is being promoted on the internet in the name of a woman’s choice. There are many new terms within it, being defined as the period of post-feminism. These include the concepts of Choice Feminism, Dissociative Feminism, Bimbocore Feminism and the concept of Trad Wife Revival. These new concepts tend to reverse the demands of feminism. Therefore, there is a rising need to bring back the voice of women and the need for discourse.
Time is socially constructed and mediated through human experience. For example, our notion of time in terms of length and speed depends on the temporal activities and our experience associated with it. The meaning of time, including seasons, dates, day and night, and tempo of life, vary significantly across cultures, societies, cities, organisations, and even individuals. A practice-based view of time departs from the notion of linear, chuckable, clockwork to being porous, fluid, and multiple.
How does one spend their time? How do they embody themselves through their time? How is one to assert their identity over time? What authority does time hold over a person? Can time dictate one’s identity?
Less Work, More Leisure
Women are always under time constraints. They spend most of their time taking care of the household and their work is unpaid. This creates a scarcity of time rightly theorised as ‘time poverty,’ where women are in a constant state of not being able to afford time. There is constant pressure on women to be productive throughout the day.
Very often, especially in a family where it is the male who’s the sole earning member, a woman’s household labour is not valued enough. Conversations around how the female of the house barely does work is very common in Indian society. From a personal standpoint, the author of the article has experienced familial conflict where the mother in the family has been subject to constant scrutiny and blamed for not having worked up to her potential, though the men of the house have never permitted her to go to work outside of home.
With the gendered division of work, the concept of leisure has also been the victim of a gender gap. There is a division of time into four categories which are paid work time, unpaid work time, self-care time and free time. The last category also indicates the time for leisure.
Paid work time refers to the time that is spent in producing income or surplus value that contributes to the economy. Unpaid work time in this context refers to domestic work which is unpaid and takes the form of cleaning, doing the laundry, washing dishes, cooking food, and taking care of children and the elderly. Self-care time is the time that is devoted towards taking care of the self in the form of sleeping, eating, washing, grooming, dressing, and receiving medical treatment.
The last —free time— is the time for leisure, to engage in discretionary pursuits like religious and civic activities. Even when women engage in paid work, they still bear the burden of carrying out unpaid labour. Leisure as experienced by men is differentiated from the leisure time spent by women. There is a difference in the quality of leisure. Leisure time spent by women is said to be fragmented and interrupted.
Bittman and Wajcman write, “Two people can experience the same aggregate of leisure time, but those with more fragmented leisure, consisting of a greater number of leisure episodes of shorter duration, may justifiably feel more rushed.” Women need to assert their right to leisure. As Paul Lafargue says, “If, uprooting from its heart the vice which dominates it and degrades its nature, the working class were to arise in its terrible strength, not to demand the Rights of Man, which are but the rights of capitalist exploitation, not to demand the Right to Work which is but the right to misery, but to forge a brazen law forbidding any man to work more than three hours a day, the earth, the old earth, trembling with joy would feel a new universe leaping within her. But how should we ask a proletariat corrupted by capitalist ethics, to take a manly resolution....” A “womanly” resolution in this case.
The centrality of time in reproductive labour profoundly shapes women's experiences and the construction of the female body within contemporary society. By interrogating how societal perceptions of time intersect with gendered expectations of reproduction, people can gain insight into the complex dynamics underlying women's embodiment and reproductive agency.
Moving forward, addressing temporal inequalities and promoting alternative temporalities is essential for fostering gender equality, reproductive justice, and bodily autonomy for all individuals. To understand the centrality of time, it is imperative to understand the centrality of unequal work distribution.
There is a need to pay more attention to social infrastructure, to invest more in research and data collection to better inform policies regarding reproductive labour, redistribution of care responsibilities and make work arrangements more flexible for women. Differential treatment and the imposition of norms through coercion act as a threat to people who are minorities.
The domination of one cannot lead to the oppression of another. Everybody should have the autonomy to make choices for themselves, to make choices about what they identify as to assert their voices against oppression, what role they get to play, what work they choose to do and how much they work, to have a say over how much they need to get paid, the right to choose how to assert one’s bodily autonomy and above all what to do with one’s time.
This article serves as a call to de-gender time. The female body is shaped and constructed by the patriarchal society and capitalism plays its own part in constructing the body through time. The female body needs to be able to afford time, time for its own needs, time for one's own self and time for leisure. A woman's body functions according to time constructs of the household and reproductive labour. Shulamith Firestone’s words ring true today when she emphasised the “tyranny of reproduction” and called for women to seize control over “human fertility”. No trait or characteristic, be it a biological, social, cultural, political or psychological construction can be used for the oppression of anyone.
Edited by Ananya Karthikeyan
Illustration by Shreya Adhav
Asvika (she/her) is a student of Political Science at OP Jindal Global University, and a Copyeditor at Political Pandora. Her research interests lie in anthropology, culture, grassroots politics and the intersection between literature and politics.
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