Reproductive Labor

Hochschild explains global care chains through the story of a Filipina migrant nanny: wealthy countries receive care while sending communities absorb care drain and emotional displacement.

Parreñas's classic article makes global care chains concrete through migrant Filipina domestic workers, showing how care crises in middle-class households are displaced onto women from the Global South while creating new care gaps in sending communities.

This classic Marxist feminist text reveals the truth of housework as central to capitalist relations of production. Federici argues that by naturalizing housework as women's 'labor of love,' capitalism obtains massive amounts of unpaid labor. Demanding wages for housework is not about institutionalizing this labor but about politicizing it, exposing capitalism's exploitation of women's labor.