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9 Yale J.L. & Feminism 81 (1997)
Commodification and Women's Household Labor

handle is hein.journals/yjfem9 and id is 87 raw text is: COMMODIFICATION AND WOMEN'S HOUSEHOLD LABOR Katharine Silbaught I. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................ 81 11. THE COMMODIFICATION OBJECTION: SETTING OUT THE CASE AGAINST ECON OM ICS ................................................................................................. 84 A The Basic Problem with Commodification .......................................... 84 B. A Taxonomy of Anticommodification Discourse ................................ 87 C. Feminism and Economic Skepticism .................................................... 90 1. Offense at Economics ..................................................................... 91 2. The Aptness of the Emotional Understanding .............................. 95 1U . A R EPLY ...................................................................................................... 95 A. Plural Meaning ................................................................................... 96 B. The Limited Influence of Talk in Legal Discourse: Plural Meaning as the N orm .......................................................................................... 99 C. The Need for Economic Understandings of Home Labor in P articular ................................................................................................. 100 1. Comparison Between Commodification Concerns over Wage Labor Versus Home Labor ................................................................ 100 2. Women as Non-commodifiable: Questioning the Origins of an Id ea .................................................................................................... 10 5 IV. APPLICATIONS OF THE ARGUMENT ............................................................... 109 A W elfare ..................................................................................................... 11 0 B. Paid Domestic Workers ........................................................................... 113 C . Social Security ........................................................................................ 116 D . C ontracts ................................................................................................. 117 E . D ivorce .................................................................................................... 1 18 F. Caveats on the Use of Economics ........................................................... 120 V C ON CLU SION .................................................................................................. 12 1 1. INTRODUCTION A woman washes a kitchen floor. She puts the mop away and drives to the comer market. She consults a shopping list, and purchases groceries from it, carefully choosing the least expensive options. A four-year-old child is tugging at her leg while she does this, and she tries to entertain him, talking to him about the mopped floor, the grocery items. When she returns from the store, she t Associate Professor, Boston University School of Law. I wish to thank Hugh Baxter, Daniela Caruso, Lawrence Lessig, Theodore Sims, Nancy Staudt and Jane Thrailkill for speedy and helpful comments on an earlier draft. I thank Jennifer Carter and Richard Palermo for research assistance. Copyright * 1997 Katharine B. Silbaugh. Permission to reproduce at cost for classroom use is hereby granted, so long as copyright ownership and initial publication in the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism are identified

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