Domestic Labor

From the author of Factory Girls, a two-year investigative report revealing how globalization's promise of liberation paved the way for oppression. Follow three Egyptian women navigating between traditional culture and modernization demands.

Yolande Strengers and Jenny Kennedy trace how voice assistants, domestic robots, and intimate technologies encode wifework into the future home, then propose a feminist reboot.

Grace Chang traces how immigration policy, welfare reform, and global capital create a low-paid, stigmatized, yet socially essential workforce of immigrant women.

Centered on migrant Filipino domestic workers, Parreñas develops the international division of reproductive labor and offers a foundational account of global care chains, transnational families, and migrant women's labor.

An oral history of Zapatista women’s cooperatives, the Women’s Revolutionary Law, and the unfinished struggle over land, care, and community autonomy.

Joan C. Tronto recasts care as a central public concern of democracy, asking who sustains life, who is permitted to evade care, and how markets produce a democratic care deficit.

Jeo Baby turns repetitive cooking and cleaning into a rigorous account of how marriage naturalizes women’s unpaid labor, bodily discipline, and religious exclusion.

A tropical melodrama about two sisters separated by patriarchal deception, revealing how women’s ambitions, labor, sexuality, and kinship are made invisible in mid-century Brazil.

Lila Avilés's debut centers a hotel room attendant in Mexico City, using minimalist drama to show hidden cleaning labor, fantasies of mobility, and women's isolation.

This Brazilian drama uses the conflict between a live-in housekeeper, her daughter, and an employer's family to expose domestic labor, separated motherhood, class boundaries, and women's dignity.

There's no rioting, protesting, or marching for civil rights here. Jeanne Dielman, single mother and sometime sex worker, has a simple life: laundry, dinner, the occasional john. The mundanity of being a housewife is on achingly tedious display for three-plus hours in Chantal Akerman's experimental film. And that's why it's brilliant.

Starting from billions of daily unpaid-care hours, Sharmi Surianarain argues that employers must design work around care rather than leaving employees to absorb it privately.

In this video essay, oliSUNvia critiques the cultural backlash against 'choice feminism' and the rise of stay-at-home girlfriend discourse. She argues that autonomy must include the right to make non-normative or traditionally feminine choices without being dismissed as brainwashed or anti-feminist. Through nuanced commentary and community responses, the video explores the tension between agency, internalized norms, and feminist respect for individual paths.

Tashny Sukumaran asks why women’s educational achievement does not translate automatically into equal employment, tracing attrition to care infrastructure, workplace culture, and family expectations.

Drawing on Malaysia and the wider region, Aina Salleh explains how unpaid care restricts women’s time, income, and public participation, and argues for care as a shared responsibility.

Economist Marilyn Waring asks why national accounts exclude most unpaid household services from their core production boundary, and why that statistical rule must be distinguished from a judgment about their social value.

In this TEDWomen talk, Ai-jen Poo frames domestic workers, nannies, caregivers, and cleaners as invisible infrastructure and argues for rights, wages, and dignity.

This TED audio episode discusses why domestic workers, child care workers, caregivers, and household employment relationships should be treated as infrastructure and policy questions, not merely private arrangements.