1 Comment

I think you're correctly diagnosing many of the issues embedded in people's fetish for bygone days when women did backbreaking domestic work and nothing else. I also think that plenty of anti-degrowth perspectives are completely uninterested and uncurious about the backbreaking factory work millions of women are currently doing to build appliances such as washers. It's disappointing to me that those women's (and kids') exploited labor is such a non-issue to many first world feminists on the left. People in the west often take for granted that any liberatory feminist future will of course include the same tech amenities they now enjoy, with little thought to where these objects came from, at whose expense, where the ingredients in the supply chain come from, and under what conditions they are assembled. Washers are a good example of a technology that, to date, has 'liberated' the labor of some women while enslaving millions of others. To me it seems implausible to imagine that every single person on the planet will have a modern washer without an invisible underclass far away somewhere building them. For that reason, degrowth arguments broadly make more sense to me than any alternatives I've seen. But, again, I also agree that there is a lurking fetish for the 'natural', as an imaginary idyllic-domestic woman in the home, creeping in to these perspectives in many cases. Often, they too have no interest or concern for the reality of supply chains.

Expand full comment