About

Social reproduction labour consists of ‘the activities and attitudes, behaviours and emotions, responsibilities and relationships directly involved in the maintenance of life’ (Laslett & Brenner, 1989: 383). These are the ‘activities’ that enable the worker the go to work, facilitating the functioning of capitalist society, and they largely take place within the home. Working-class women are at the crux of contemporary debates surrounding the contradictory reliance upon and disavowal of this labour within Western capitalist states, including Britain (Fraser, 2017). Austerity measures introduced by Conservative governments following the 2008 Financial Crisis have hit working-class women the hardest, not least through the systematic dismantling of the welfare state (De Benedictis, 2012; Gillies, 2007; Jensen, 2018; Jensen et al., 2019). Recent reports have also found that working-class women were left ‘carrying the burden’ of the increased unpaid workload during the Covid-19 pandemic, being least likely to benefit from flexible working policies (Warren et al., 2021). Amidst the ongoing cost-of-living crisis, women in low-paid work and women with caring responsibilities are among the worst affected by escalating costs (Scottish Women's Budget Group & The Poverty Alliance, 2022). Throughout these successive ‘crises’ of social reproduction, then, working-class women’s unpaid domestic labour has been increasingly relied upon to plug the gaps left by a retreating state, even while it is simultaneously undermined and undervalued (Fraser, 2017).

This disavowal of working-class women's unpaid labour has been disseminated through mainstream media, where images of romanticised domesticity and affluent stay-at-home mothers appear alongside narratives of working-class mothers as subjects of derision and social anxiety (Orgad, 2019; Tyler, 2008, 2013; Jensen, 2018, 2014; De Benedictis, Allen and Jensen, 2017). Meanwhile, on social media sites such as Instagram and TikTok, depictions of ‘polished and glamorous’ domestic femininity proliferate (Casey & Littler, 2022: 495). This project offers timely insights into the relationship between these mediated depictions of classed and gendered domestic labour and working-class women’s lived experiences of this work. Using a mixed methodology of textual analysis, interviews, and text-in-action methods, this research places working-class women’s subjective experiences at the centre of burgeoning feminist efforts to resist and reimagine the gendered division of domestic labour within contemporary Britain.