Gender and Work: A Marxist Feminist Perspective

Every morning across the country, millions of meals are cooked, floors are swept, children are dressed for school, and elderly relatives are cared for-almost entirely by women, and almost entirely without pay. This work keeps households running and, in a very real sense, keeps the economy running too. Yet it appears in no salary slip and no national income figure. Understanding why this labour is invisible, and what it would take to make it visible and fairly shared, sits at the heart of the Marxist feminist analysis of gender and work.

What is the gendered division of labour?
The double burden
How this division reinforces inequality
Economic dependence
The invisible economy
The Marxist feminist explanation
Reproducing the workforce
Why legal equality is not enough
Alexandra Kollontai and the socialisation of housework
From private burden to public service
Theory put into practice
Why this still matters today

What is the gendered division of labour?

The gendered division of labour refers to the way different tasks are assigned to people based on their sex rather than their ability or choice. Men have historically been pushed towards paid work in the public sphere, while women have been confined to unpaid work inside the home-cooking, cleaning, childcare, and caregiving. This arrangement is often presented as “natural,” but feminists argue it is socially constructed and designed to benefit a particular set of interests.

The consequences are measurable. According to the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation’s Time Use Survey 2024, women spend roughly 289 minutes a day on unpaid domestic services for household members, compared to just 88 minutes for men. Add caregiving for children and the elderly, and the gap widens further. This is not a small imbalance; it is a structural feature of how households are organised.

The double burden

The problem does not disappear when women enter paid employment. Instead, they often face what feminists call the double burden or “double shift”-doing a full day of paid work and then returning home to a second unpaid shift of cooking and cleaning. Research analysing the Time Use Survey found that women perform many times more unpaid care work than men, and that this pattern holds even for women who are highly educated or earn their own income. Education and a salary, in other words, do not free women from domestic responsibility.

How this division reinforces inequality

The gendered division of labour is not just unfair in the moment-it builds long-term hierarchies that keep women economically and socially subordinate. When one group is permanently assigned unpaid work, that group is systematically denied the resources and independence that come from earning.

Economic dependence

Because domestic work carries no wage, women who do it full-time have no independent income. This makes them dependent on the men in their households for economic survival. That dependence is not a minor inconvenience. It reduces a woman’s bargaining power within the family, makes it harder to leave abusive or unhappy situations, and leaves her vulnerable in cases of divorce, abandonment, or widowhood. Economic dependence quietly translates into a loss of voice and autonomy.

The invisible economy

Unpaid domestic work is excluded from how economies measure value, which makes it appear worthless even though society could not function without it. Attempts to put a number on it are striking. A 2023 State Bank of India report estimated that women’s unpaid work is worth around Rs 22.7 lakh crore, or about 7.5 percent of GDP. A more recent study from IIM Indore placed the value of unpaid care and household work even higher, at between 11 and 27 percent of GDP. The exact figure depends on the method of calculation, but the message is consistent: an enormous amount of essential economic activity is being done for free, by women, and then ignored.

The Marxist feminist explanation

Marxist feminists offer a distinctive answer to why this happens. They argue that capitalism and patriarchy are not separate problems but interlocking systems that reinforce each other. In their view, capitalism actively depends on women’s unpaid labour to survive.

Reproducing the workforce

The core argument concerns what is called social reproduction. Every worker who shows up to a factory or office each day has been fed, clothed, rested, and cared for-usually by a woman at home. As the Marxist feminist tradition explains, women’s domestic labour reproduces the workforce at no cost to the employer. The next generation of workers is also raised and socialised largely through this unpaid effort. Capitalism thus receives, for free, the continuous renewal of labour power that it needs to keep producing profit.

This builds on a much older insight. Friedrich Engels, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, argued that the first division of labour was that between man and woman, and that the oppression of women emerged alongside class society and private property. For Marxist feminists, fixing women’s status therefore requires changing the economic structures that produce it, not just changing attitudes.

Why legal equality is not enough

A key claim of this school is that giving women equal legal rights, while leaving the material organisation of housework untouched, cannot deliver real freedom. A woman may have the legal right to work, vote, and own property, but if she still carries the entire domestic load alone, her practical ability to participate in public life remains crippled. Liberation, in this analysis, demands transforming the material conditions of daily life-who does the cooking, who minds the children-not merely passing better laws.

Alexandra Kollontai and the socialisation of housework

Among the boldest voices in this tradition was Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952), a Russian revolutionary, theorist, and the world’s first female government minister. Kollontai insisted that political revolution had to be accompanied by social revolution, and she put the “woman question” at the centre of her work.

From private burden to public service

Kollontai’s central proposal was the socialisation of housework. If domestic labour was the chain binding women, she argued, then society should collectively take it over rather than leaving it to individual women inside individual homes. In her essay Communism and the Family, she asked why only the rich should be relieved of the burden of cleaning, cooking, washing, and mending, while for working-class and peasant women this work amounted to little more than “domestic slavery.” Her solution was to move these tasks out of the private family and into public, collectively provided institutions.

In concrete terms, this meant communal dining halls run by professional cooks instead of individual kitchens, central laundries instead of household washing, and collective childcare facilities instead of mothers managing everything alone. These services would free women from daily drudgery and isolation, allowing them to take part fully in paid work, education, leisure, and the running of society.

Theory put into practice

Kollontai did not stop at theory. As the People’s Commissar of Public Welfare after the Russian Revolution, she helped enact reforms on civil marriage, divorce, and maternity protection. At her initiative, the Women’s Department (Zhenotdel) was established in 1920 to campaign against female illiteracy and push for family law reform. The 1919 programme of the Communist Party explicitly committed to replacing the “material burdens of obsolete household work” with communal houses, public eating places, central laundries, and nurseries.

The experiment faced enormous obstacles. The Russian Civil War, economic collapse, and shifting political priorities meant that communal facilities were unevenly built and often poorly resourced. Kollontai herself was sharply criticised for ideas considered too radical for her time. But the underlying vision-that domestic work is a social responsibility rather than a private female duty-remains influential. Kollontai also argued that genuine change required psychological and attitudinal shifts in both men and women, not just new institutions.

Why this still matters today

The conditions Kollontai described have not vanished. The persistence of an enormous unpaid care burden, falling overwhelmingly on women, is one of the main reasons female labour force participation remains low. As the analysis of unpaid work makes clear, public spending on care infrastructure-childcare centres, pre-primary education, support for the elderly-remains a small fraction of GDP, far below what would be needed to genuinely redistribute domestic responsibilities.

The Marxist feminist framework suggests two complementary directions. First, the redistribution of labour: men sharing domestic work rather than treating it as women’s natural duty. Second, the collective provision of care services-accessible crèches, affordable elder care, and public support that takes routine domestic tasks out of the household entirely. As policy analysts have argued, recognising and valuing unpaid work is a necessary first step before it can be fairly shared or compensated.

The deeper lesson from this tradition is that true liberation cannot be achieved by addressing economics alone or culture alone. Equal pay laws mean little if women have no time to work; communal kitchens mean little if society still believes a woman who works long hours is neglecting her “real” duties. The economic structures and the socio-cultural attitudes must be tackled together.

What do you think? If the unpaid domestic work done in homes were suddenly counted as part of the economy and paid a fair wage, how might that reshape the way we value different kinds of work? And which of Kollontai’s ideas-shared domestic duties between partners, or publicly provided care services-do you think could realistically reduce the burden on women today?

How useful was this post?

Click on a star to rate it!

Average rating 5 / 5. Vote count: 1

No votes so far! Be the first to rate this post.

References

PDF 📄

Table of Contents

What is the gendered division of labour? 🔗

The double burden 🔗

How this division reinforces inequality 🔗

Economic dependence 🔗

The invisible economy 🔗

The Marxist feminist explanation 🔗

Reproducing the workforce 🔗

Why legal equality is not enough 🔗

Alexandra Kollontai and the socialisation of housework 🔗

From private burden to public service 🔗

Theory put into practice 🔗

Why this still matters today 🔗