From wages for housework to self-care: feminist perspectives on the care economy

Anna Moser connects two feminist moments that can appear far apart: the 1970s Wages for Housework movement’s politicization of unpaid reproductive labor and the contemporary industry that packages self-care as consumption, lifestyle, and personal responsibility. The former exposed cooking, cleaning, childcare, sex, and emotional support as necessary work sustaining labor power and accumulation, rather than natural expressions of love. The latter can return institutionally produced exhaustion to the individual, asking her to repair herself through products, scheduling, and emotional optimization.

The argument is not a simple rejection of self-care. Rest, boundaries, and bodily recovery matter for people living under oppression, and Black feminist traditions have understood self-preservation as political resistance. Moser criticizes the commercial form detached from those contexts. Employers, states, and household institutions leave exhausting hours, low pay, and care shortages intact while making individuals responsible for resilience. The care crisis is rewritten as failed time management, and those able to buy therapy, leisure, or outsourced domestic work gain a further class advantage.

Returning to Wages for Housework also shows that recognizing labor does not require turning every relationship into a commodity. The movement’s radical force lay in refusing the home as a private sphere outside capitalism and enabling women to formulate collective demands. Moser carries this legacy toward public services and social infrastructure. If care is a common condition of social survival, the response cannot be only private compensation; it must include universally accessible health care, education, housing, childcare, transport, and long-term support.

This is a theoretical article, and its broad genealogy cannot replace empirical research on particular care regimes, racialized workforces, or global care chains. Universal services must still answer who designs and provides them, and under what labor conditions. The article nevertheless identifies a defining contradiction: society celebrates care and self-love while withdrawing the public resources that make either sustainable. It moves the feminist question from how individuals can care for themselves more effectively to why the costs of restoring life have been privatized and what collective institutions could actually return time and security.