Housework is Shadow Work

The unpaid work that enables our roles as paid workers and consumers is “shadow work,” according to philosopher and historian Ivan Illich. Shadow work is work that must get done to sustain the life of the individual in our capitalist system, but does not itself provide for subsistence. Shadow work

…comprises most housework women do in their homes and apartments, the activities connected with shopping, most of the homework of students cramming for exams, the toil expended commuting to and from the job.  It includes the stress of forced consumption, the tedious and regimented surrender to therapists, compliance with bureaucrats, the preparation for work to which one is compelled, and many of the activities usually labeled “family life.” (Illich, Ivan, Shadow Work, p 100)

In the pre-modern era, when families lived on farms or ran cottage industries, shadow work did not exist. There was less of a distinction between work performed to maintain life and work performed for money. Cooking, cleaning, tending children, harvesting a crop, and shoeing a horse would all have been seen as contributing to a family’s subsistence. Illich points out that our current concept of “work” did not exist a few centuries ago:

Both “work” and “job” are key words today. Neither had its present prominence three hundred years ago. Both are still untranslatable from European languages into many others. Most languages never had one single word to designate all activities that are considered useful. Some languages happen to have a word for activities demanding pay. This word usually connotes graft, bribery, tax or extortion of interest payments. None of these words would comprehend what we call “work.”

For the last three decades, the Ministry for Language Development in Djakarta tried to impose the one term bekerdja in lieu of half a dozen others used to designate productive jobs. Sukarno had considered this monopoly of one term a necessary step for creating a Malay working class. The language planners got some compliance from journalists and union leaders. But the people continue to refer to what they do with different terms for pleasurable, degrading, tiresome, or bureaucratic actions – whether they are paid or not. All over Latin America, people find it easier to perform the paid task assigned to them than to grasp what the boss means by trabajo.  For most toiling unemployed in Mexico, desempleado still means the unoccupied loafer on a well-paid job, not the unemployed whom the economist means by the term.

What today stands for work, namely, wage labor, was a badge of misery all through the Middle Ages. It stood in clear opposition to at least three other types of toil: the activities of the household by which most people subsisted, quite marginal to any money economy; the trades of people who made shoes, barbered or cut stones; the various forms of beggary by which people lived on what others shared with them. In principle, medieval society provided a berth for everyone whom it recognized as a member—its structural design excluded unemployment and destitution. When one engaged in wage labor, not occasionally as the member of a household but as a regular means of total support, he clearly signaled to the community that he, like a widow or an orphan, had no berth, no household, and so stood in need of public assistance. (Illich, Ivan, Shadow Work, p 101)

 
Karl Polanyi, in The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, describes the destruction that has accompanied the move from subsistence economies to market economies:

To separate labor from other activities of life and to subject it to the laws of the market was to annihilate all organic forms of existence and to replace them by a different type of organization, an atomistic and individualistic one.
 

This effect of the establishment of a labor market is conspicuously apparent in colonial regions today. The natives are to be forced to make a living by selling their labor. To this end their traditional institutions must be destroyed, and prevented from reforming, since, as a rule, the individual in primitive society is not threatened by starvation unless the community as a whole is in a like predicament. Under the “Kraal” land system of the Kaffirs, for instance, “destitution is impossible: whosoever needs assistance receives it unquestioningly.” No Kwakiutl “ever ran the least risk of going hungry.” “There is no starvation in societies living on the subsistence margin.” The principle of freedom from want was equally acknowledged in the Indian village community, and, we might add, under almost every and any type of social organization up to about the beginning of the 16^th century Europe, when the modern ideas on the poor put forth by the humanist Vives were argued before the Sorbonne. It is the absence of the threat of individual starvation which makes primitive society, in a sense, more humane than market economy, and at the same time less economic. Ironically, the white man’s initial contribution to the black man’s world mainly consisted in introducing him to the uses of the scourge of hunger. Thus the colonists may decide to cut the breadfruit trees down in order to create an artificial food scarcity or may impose a hut tax on the native to force him to barter away his labor. In either case, the effect is similar to that of Tudor enclosures with their wake of vagrant hordes.

Now, what the white man may still occasionally practice in remote regions today, namely, the smashing up of social structures in order to extract the element of labor from them, was done in the eighteenth century to white populations by white men for similar purposes. (Chapter 14, "Market and Man")
 

As family members in the modern era began to sell their labor outside of the home, women found their sphere of work in the home devalued. In fact, it became doubtful whether keeping house counted as work at all, as evidenced by the question too often posed to American women in the late 20th century: “Do you work?”  This helps explain why so many housewives found themselves depressed over the last century, and why they struggled to gain access to employment outside the home. Illich advocates a selective return to at least partial subsistence as a way to create happier societies that are better stewards of the environment. When work does not exist to produce goods for industrial consumption, but rather to satisfy human needs, shadow work as such will no longer exist, because all useful activities, including housework, will be valued.

Thanks to my friend Ian Chang for introducing me to Ivan Illich’s Shadow Work through this New York Times  article.

Manifesto for Maintenance Art

There is something appalling about the daily repetition of cooking and cleaning, the fact that it goes on endlessly, without an external goal. The circularity of the process—you cook and clean in order to live, only to get up each day to cook and clean some more—invites existential brooding. This brooding is valid in some ways—the circularity of the work of staying alive does beg the question “What’s it all for?”—but I’m also suspicious of my own horror of cleaning. Why does housework feel more futile than other kinds of work that I do to stay alive, such as getting up and going to work each day to earn a paycheck? 

An artist I interviewed for this project told me that he has an embroidered sampler that reads “A clean house is a sign of a wasted life.” I’ve spent most of my life following that philosophy. For me, disdaining housework was part of my emancipation as a woman.  I grew up in a generation where women were attaining education and entering the workforce in higher numbers than ever before.  Our freedom was freedom to do something other than child-rearing and keeping house. Yet there’s something a bit rotten in my finding liberation in disdaining the work my mother and grandmothers did. This is one of the shortfalls of women’s emancipation. We have gained the right to enter the working world, but we have not succeeded in raising the stature of the work traditionally performed by women, not even in our own minds.

That's why Mierle Laderman Ukeles' “Manifesto for Maintenance Art” is still so provocative over forty years later. In 1969, Laderman Ukeles mounted an exhibition that consisted of her cleaning and maintaining a gallery space for several weeks, asserting this care as a work of art. In the accompanying manifesto she writes, “Clean your desk, wash the dishes, clean the floor, wash your clothes, wash your toes, change the baby’s diaper, finish the report, correct the typos, mend the fence…change the sheets, go to the store…I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother (random order). I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Also (up to now separately) I “do” Art. Now I will simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them as Art.” 

The “Manifesto for Maintenance Art” asks us to question the paradigm that values cultural creation above the maintenance of life. Housework, child care, and elder care are still either unpaid or poorly paid work with little protection for workers. This won’t change until we begin to value the work of caring.  We can begin by valuing it in our own daily lives.

Talking about Cleaning

When I began this project with the simple desire to have conversations about cleaning, I could not have predicted how stimulating those talks would be. Stories about cleaning opened out onto all sorts of vistas: family dramas (and comedies), accounts of ingrained tradition, class positioning, existential struggle, philosophies of life, and historical musings. I left each interview feeling enlarged by a perspective outside my own. It was invigorating to encounter different orientations toward the labor of life. Several times, I went home with a resolve to be more like the person I had interviewed, to emulate their energy, kindness, humor, or wisdom.

After the first few interviews, I began to think that I should gather these stories into a book, along with making the film. The stories people were sharing were rich and elaborate, and yet the film could only contain a couple of paragraphs of text for each person. I immediately thought of one of my favorite books: Working: People Talk About What They Do All Do and How They Feel About What They Do, by Studs Terkel. I wanted to do for cleaning what Studs Terkel had done for working.

When I read Working, I felt incredibly stimulated by other people's accounts of their working lives. Halfway through the book, I felt compelled to make a list of all the jobs I had ever had in my life (29 jobs in 28 years, it turns out, including several summer jobs, like "shoe salesperson," that I had almost forgotten.) Working made me want to reflect more deeply on my own daily routine of work. I sort of wanted to be interviewed myself, to have an interlocutor draw out my thoughts on the topic. But I was alone with my book; there was nobody around to ask me questions or listen to my answers.

I hope that the stories gathered here will stimulate you to reflect on your own practices and mental orientation toward cleaning. If they do, please enlarge the breadth of this discussion by sharing your stories and images on this site.

New Year's Cleaning

A couple of days ago, I gave my stove the most thorough cleaning I've ever given it, or any other stove. Glen, one of the people I interviewed for Cleaning: People Talk About Housework, confessed, "It's sort of mysterious to me how somebody can make the top of a stove clean. I can wipe stuff off, but I can't scrub. It seems to me there's a gene missing." I relate to that. I categorize cleaning the stovetop with other disgusting jobs that require getting close to unidentifiable funk: mopping up the sticky substances that pool on the lower shelves of the fridge, or wiping off the crusty layer on the pedestal of the toilet.

I was expecting houseguests, so my plan was to spend three or four hours in a high intensity (but not overly thorough) clean-up of the entire house. The plan quickly veered off course when I spent two solid hours scraping and scrubbing the stove. It's a beautiful, old, white enamel stove, an O'Keefe and Merritt that I've lived with for ten years. I started with my usual cursory wipe to get rid of coffee spills and crumbs. Then I noticed the waxy brown substance oozing from behind the dials. I must see that ooze all the time, but suddenly it occurred to me that it might be possible to get rid of it. Maybe this novel thought popped into my head because it's almost the New Year, and I know that new year's cleaning is a ritual in many cultures. I was also thinking about the feng shui notion that a clean stove brings prosperity. So I tried putting some vinegar on a toothbrush to see if that would dissolve the ooze. That didn't do much. Then I soaped the dials with a warm rag and followed up by digging into the crevices with a wooden skewer that I found in a drawer next to the stove. Ribbons of brown waxy stuff peeled away on the skewer. It was quite satisfying. I felt like a dental hygienist, plying my sharp implement to free the enamel from the encasing crud.

Enamel is an amazing substance. It can last for generations and clean up to look new, with a little work. I was reminded of what Jo Ann and Richard said in their interview: "We take care of things so that they last. Our folks were that way, because they lived through the 1933 Depression. Young people today tend to want to throw things out and get something new." We've been sold this bill of goods about convenience that tells us not to be bothered to scour a pot to make sure it lasts for thirty years. Instead of "wasting time" like that, we are advised to use a disposable one. It's much more convenient. It saves time. And time equals money. But the thing is, it doesn't. It's an illusion. The money it costs to buy a new one, is much more than the time it takes to care for it. If you take care of your things, it's worth it.

My dad, who also grew up during the Depression, has had pairs of shoes for thirty years, and suits for forty years. He'd pull out his shoe polish and polish those shoes, and they looked great. And he was always telling us kids that we needed to do that. But it kind of fell on deaf ears. Fortunately for me, I have had another frugal influence in my life over the last several years: my wife Colleen Hennessey. The seventh item in her Financial Manifesto is "Clean the objects you own, rather than buying more. Wanting something new is often an illusory desire. Sometimes all that is wanted is the sheen of newness, which can be achieved by cleaning the objects you already have." Come to think of it, there are a lot of old time "make it last" values in Colleen's family: Her sister Molly de Vries is on a mission to live "a non-disposable life," creating kitchen textiles that remind us of older traditions that preceded our current throw-away culture. And another of Colleen's sisters, Mikaela, sews "moon pads," menstrual pads that can be washed and used repeatedly.

I have to admit that I felt some waves of panic during the second hour of cleaning the stove, because I felt like I was going to run out of time to get all of the other cleaning done. The deep cleaning blitz started to spread out to the areas adjacent to the stove, which I now saw with a razor vision. All that oozy stuff on the wall behind the stove. The dusty ladles hanging on the wall. The grease on the hood over the stove. It all got cleaned. But I also really enjoyed the activity, and I pondered how arbitrary it is that we classify certain activities as chores, as opposed to leisure. My loving attention to the enamel stove gave me an inkling of what it must be like to spend an afternoon polishing an antique custom car. It was satisfying. It gave me time to think. And now whenever I look at the stove's gleaming surfaces, I feel good. And a little bit more ready for a new year.

How do we see cleaning?

Photo by Gjon Mili, from Life Magazine, September 9, 1946, originally printed with the caption, "Pattern of light streaks show how an efficient housewife makes a bed."

A couple of years ago, I ran across this photograph by Gjon Mili and stared at it for a long time. It took me a few moments to puzzle out what I was seeing. To make the image, Mili had affixed a light to a woman’s hands while she made a bed in a darkened space. Leaving the camera’s shutter open for several minutes caused all of her movements to collapse into one image. That compression of time, along with the aerial perspective, seemed to ask me to take a big step back as a viewer, to try looking afresh at something as familiar as making a bed.

The photograph stuck in my mind. I started to imagine how I could make a film that would invite viewers to take that kind of “big step back” in looking at housework.

It is only at a certain distance (and from a certain angle) that we can recognize the character of the communal life of the individual – or the communal reality of those who appear so convincingly under other conditions to be individuals.      – Jeff Wall

Soon I began asking people to tell me about their experiences with cleaning. I also asked them to perform some of their regular housekeeping tasks for the camera. The 91 minute film that resulted is titled MAINTENANCE. My main motivation in making the film was to have conversations about cleaning. I wanted to know how people made sense of the never-ending cycle of messing and tidying. I wanted to know whether they resented the work, the way I often do. I wanted to know what it meant in their lives. I learned a lot from these conversations, and I’ll share more thoughts about them in future posts, but for now, I want to return to that photograph by Gjon Mili that was the catalyst for the project.

Gjon Mili created the bed-making photograph in 1946 as part of a commission by Life Magazine to illustrate efficient housekeeping techniques (September 9, 1946, p.97-107). A few years later, Mili used a similar technique to make time-lapse photographs of Pablo Picasso drawing with light.

The photographs of Picasso drawing with light are familiar. They are famous representations of his virtuosic artistry, the kind of thing you find on a postcard in a museum gift shop. It’s interesting to ponder what the arcing line of light in the photograph of Picasso represents, as compared to the squiggly line of light in the photograph of the woman making the bed. Both represent movements of the hand, but the work Picasso performs is much more highly valued than the work performed by the housewife. These photographs represent two sides of a dichotomy that is deeply rooted in Western culture: creation, immortality, genius, and spirit on one side; and maintenance, the ephemeral, grunt work, and the body on the other side. Part of the purpose of this project is to explore this dichotomy, and all of the other cultural conceptions we bring to the work of keeping house.