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Teachers as Housewives and the Covid-19 Pandemic: A Teacher's Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2024

Áila KK O'Loughlin
Áila KK O'Loughlin*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA, and Department of Philosophy, North Hennepin Community College, Brooklyn Park, MN, USA
*
Email: oloup001@umn.edu and aila.oloughlin@nhcc.edu
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Abstract

The 1970s Wages Against Housework (WAH) movement has much to offer as we form a “new normal” for life and work within the Covid-19 pandemic. WAH feminist philosophers Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, and Silvia Federici, as well as WAH critic Angela Davis outline the ways in which the housewife functions as a laborer within capitalist accumulation, as her duties to care for the home and rear the children generate the possibility of the husband to labor outside the home. This role of the housewife in Dalla Costa and James’ “social factory” parallels the work of teachers and the chorus of demands to “return to the classroom” that were placed on teachers in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. Highlighting these parallels, the argument of this essay is simple: Covid-19 has visibilized the underpaid and unpaid labor of teachers. We ought to engage this moment of visibilization to demand transformative change to the teaching profession. Due to the parallels between WAH's “housewife” and teachers, we have much to learn from WAH theorizing as we demand those transformative changes, especially now as we solidify our “new normal” more than two years since the Covid-19 pandemic began.

Type
Musing
Information
Hypatia , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , Winter 2024 , pp. 137 - 144
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Hypatia, a Nonprofit Corporation

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