“After Work” is a passionate plea for the reduction of domestic labor

Yet a recent study from the Rand Corp. reminds us that Americans enjoy an average of close to five hours of free time each day. I am not the average American (no actual person is), but I suspect I am not alone in devoting almost the whole of this nominally unencumbered expanse to the drudgery of keeping myself and my dependents alive. The thankless trudge of grocery shopping, laundry washing, dish cleaning and dog walking is not commonly considered labor, but I have difficulty conceiving of it as leisure, a word that conjures shimmering images of picnics and palm trees. Between scrubbing and scouring, we might borrow a harried minute to wonder: Is our free time really so free?

This is the urgent question at the heart of “After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time,” a meticulously researched and agilely argued plea for the reduction of domestic labor from feminist scholar Helen Hester and Marxist economist Nick Srnicek. Historically, Hester and Srnicek observe, the anti-work tradition has focused on the indignity of wage labor, which renders us dually unfree — first, because it leaves us at the mercy of our employers (aptly characterized by political philosopher Elizabeth Anderson as unelected “private governments”) and second, because it lays claim to so much of our lives. As long as “access to our means of subsistence is conditional on securing a wage,” Hester and Srnicek write, we cannot find sufficient hours in which to cultivate the interests and callings that ultimately make us who we are. In the end, “the struggle against work — in all its forms — is the fight for free time.”

Hester and Srnicek agree that wage labor is inimical to liberty, but they recognize that dusting shelves and changing diapers can be at least as restrictive. Heretofore, the anti-work movement has been so fixated “on industries and jobs that are dominated by men” that it has turned a blind eye to the equally burdensome “work of social reproduction” — housework, child care and the many other forms of labor required to create and sustain human life. As feminist scholars like Silvia Federici have long argued, anti-work thinkers are not the first to misdescribe jobs disproportionately shouldered by women as labors of love that need not be remunerated. But anti-work thinkers are the ones who ought to be asking what a post-work world would look like for the populations who toil behind the scenes, almost always for vanishingly little reward.

As Hester and Srnicek note, domestic labor raises special challenges for the usual program. One of the anti-work movement’s default solutions is automatization (coupled with a call for a universal basic income or widely accessible social services). It is easy to see how manufacturing jobs could be outsourced to robots, at least in a remote techno-utopia, but how on earth could the exertions of parenting be mechanized? And more to the point, who in her right mind would want to mechanize them?

Does this mean that anti-work advocates must resign themselves to the relentless slog of cooking, cleaning and caring? Hester and Srnicek do not think so: The central claim of their invigorating book is that “the supposed stalemate between reproductive labor and post-work’s ambitions isn’t the end of the story; instead, the post-work project, suitably modified, has significant contributions to make to our understanding of how we might better organize the labor of reproduction.”

What follows is a fascinating dive into the history of timesaving technologies in high-income Western countries. The style of “After Work” is sometimes unpalatably academic — the word “imaginary” is frequently deployed as a noun, and “hegemonic” is a favorite adjective — but the book’s reasoning is both rigorous and absorbing. It begins with a particularly arresting puzzle: the Cowan paradox, named for the historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan, who first demonstrated that “despite all the new labor-saving devices, labor did not appear to have been saved in the home.” Unbelievably, “time spent on domestic work did not decrease between the 1870s and the 1970s.”

Hester and Srnicek suggest that there are two explanations. First, timesaving technologies increase standards, so we end up devoting additional hours to satisfying more-stringent norms. It is easier to launder our clothing than it was before the advent of running water, but as a result, we are expected to look better and clean our wardrobes more frequently. The second culprit is “increasing individualization,” which yielded the fabulously wasteful institution of the nuclear family. With the advent of industrialization and the attendant division of labor, tasks that had historically been distributed throughout neighborhoods and kinship networks began to fall exclusively to an emerging new figure, that of “the lone housewife.” Instead of instituting communal laundries or kitchens, we reached new heights of inefficiency by outfitting isolated houses with washing machines and fancy ovens. If the familiar anti-work agenda might be achieved by automating paid work and leaving the rest of life as we know it intact, a project focused on reducing domestic labor demands a wholesale reimagining of family life. After all, “the home is not simply a refuge, but also a (highly gendered) workplace.”

One way to improve this unregulated domestic workplace is simply to lower our standards. There is no reason, for instance, that American households need to do an average of five loads of laundry a week. But there are other forms of housework — child care, providing nutritious meals, making sure our homes are sanitary — about which we should not compromise. A second option is to devise new technologies that allow us to tackle these necessary tasks more quickly and painlessly. “After Work” details a number of attempts to reimagine living spaces so as to reduce labor, among them the construction of ergonomic kitchens in 1920s Vienna and the invention of a delightfully eccentric self-cleaning house in 1970s Oregon.

Of course, these innovations took considerable ingenuity, effort and, yes, work to maintain. But when Hester and Srnicek surveyed communal living arrangements, they realized that most collectives involved “not a refusal of work, but the reimagining of necessary labor on new, more agential terms.” The problem is not that sweeping and sponging are intrinsically degrading but that so many of us have tragically little say in the basic circumstances of our lives. The activities that we would opt to pursue if we were afforded more autonomy might still be “demanding, frustrating, and onerous,” but they would also be free. To oppose work is therefore not to favor idleness or abhor difficulty: It is only to oppose labor in its current, undemocratic incarnation. A third possibility, then, is for us to transform “our relationship to the activities we undertake,” to demand a society that allows us “temporal sovereignty.”

Hester and Srnicek acknowledge that a special ambivalence bedevils the domestic pursuits that sometimes feel like drudgery and sometimes like passions. Their goal is not to prevent people who like cooking or caring for children from performing these tasks, but rather to ensure that alternatives are available for those who are tired, drained or simply unwilling. There may be no decisive way of distinguishing chores from choices, but this ambiguity need not prevent us from taking the crush of reproductive labor more seriously.

In response to the poet Mary Oliver’s famous query — “what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” — few people would respond that they plan to fiddle with Excel spreadsheets for 90,000 hours. No doubt just as few would respond that they plan to fold socks or scrub toilets.

Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post.

A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time

By Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek