What if we finally recognised women’s unpaid care work?

June 24, 2024

DHAKA – In 1929, Virginia Woolf, in her renowned essay A Room of One’s Own, raised the issues of economic and social barriers faced by women, including their unpaid labour. Though her primary focus was on women’s intellectual and artistic potential, she implicitly addressed this issue by highlighting women’s economic independence and financial resources. However, she was not the first to bring this concern to light.

American sociologist and novelist Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote extensively about women’s economic independence. In her 1898 book Women and Economics, she argued that women’s dependence on men for economic support due to unpaid household labour was detrimental to their status and freedom. Another influential figure, British social reformer and economist Beatrice Webb, worked in the late 19th and early 20th centuries on issues of women’s labour and the conditions of the working class. While her focus was not specifically on unpaid household labour, her broader social and economic reforms were relevant to understanding women’s roles in the economy.

Canadian economist Margaret Reid conducted the first systematic economic analysis of unpaid household labour with her 1934 book Economics of Household Production. Her work laid the foundation for incorporating household labour into economic theory and measurement. Here, we refer to cooking, cleaning, and looking after poultry and livestock, etc. as unpaid household work, and taking care of children, elderly, and other family members as care work.

Although historically undervalued and overlooked in traditional economic analyses, there has been a significant amount of literature on unpaid household and care work over the past three decades, both from