Growing up in suburban Sydney, dinner at my house always followed a familiar pattern. My father’s plate would be the biggest, stacked high with meat, peas and potatoes. My own serving would be substantial – not as large as my father’s, but enough to keep me sated until the morning. Far sparser would be the food on the plate of my younger sister (a notoriously fussy eater), or that of my mother, whose self-distributed portions tended to be dizzyingly small. There are a number of possible explanations for this state of affairs. My father is six foot two; my mother, five foot four. Perhaps the portions of food on our plates were just a reflection of how much each of us wanted or needed to eat – after all, my plate was never short.
But reading Christine Delphy’s ground-breaking essay collection Close to Home, it occurred to me for the first time that there might have been something else at play. That my own servings aside, our pattern of consumption mirrored one that has proliferated across the globe and throughout history, in which men are systematically given more and better food to eat than women.
In ‘Sharing the Same Table’, the book’s third essay, Delphy examines the eating habits of French rural farming families in the 1960s and 1970s: chosen in part because all members of these households engage in hard physical labour (thereby challenging the assumption that men need to eat more because they expend more energy), and because resources in these families are typically limited, meaning that any differences in consumption aren’t just a matter of ‘individuals getting more or less of what is already a surplus’ but of ‘individuals getting more or less than the minimum needed for a healthy life’.
Differences in time and location aside, many of these stories will feel startlingly familiar to the modern reader. There is the wife who would make herself snacks to eat in secret, then quickly hide them from view if an unexpected visitor arrived. The ageing aunt who ate the parts of the paté that had been rejected by her nephew and his out of town guests – ‘the obligation to leave the best part to the others … internalised as a moral imperative’. The Parisian woman who, during a shortage that pushed up the price of potatoes, told a radio interviewer that she would continue purchasing the vegetable for her husband to eat, but that she and the children would switch to rice.
These differentials in consumption don’t just reflect differences in size or appetite, Delphy argues, but differences in status. In the peasant families, it wasn’t just men who ate more than women, but adults who ate more than children or teenagers, the young who ate more than the old, and eldest sons who ate more than their brothers or sisters – irrespective of how big or small each person was, or of how hard they worked.
Hierarchies of what and how much each was allowed to eat were acutely regulated, held in place by aphorisms such as ‘jam spoils children’s teeth’ (but not the teeth of adults), ‘wine gives men strength’ (but destroys women’s virtue), and other deeply held beliefs about men’s and women’s appetites. As Delphy observes, in a comment on the aunt’s self-limiting to the fattiest parts of the pate, ‘There is absolutely no need for [women’s] sacrifice to be liked: it becomes second nature. The mistress of the house takes the smallest steak without thinking, and will not take one at all if by chance there are not enough for everyone. She will say “I don’t want any”; and nobody is surprised, she least of all, that it should always be the same person who “doesn’t want any”.’
These kinds of close observations about how the mechanics of gender inequities play out in everyday life are a staple of feminist literature, from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex to Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. But Delphy’s project is more than just descriptive. Over the course of the essays in this collection, she lays out a radical analysis of women’s oppression that finds its roots not in biology (women as the bearers of children) or in cultural mythology (a society that values qualities associated with men over those associated with women), but in the material relations of production – specifically, the relations of production as they exist within the family.
Just as the working class are exploited by capital, which profits from their labour and sets the terms of how and where they are able to work (and how much they will be paid for that work), Delphy argues that women’s subordination is rooted in their economic exploitation by men, who benefit from the unpaid labour that women disproportionately provide in the home – cooking, cleaning, and caring for children and older family members.
The work women do within the family is not unwaged because it inherently lacks economic value, or because the associated tasks are too intimate or important to ethically enlist to someone outside the family. In the absence of someone to do them for free, all of the tasks associated with women’s household labour are available to purchase in the marketplace – in the form of restaurants, childcare centres or household cleaners, a personal assistant, a bookkeeper or a party planner. Rather, it is unremunerated because of the relationship in which it is performed: specifically, marriage. As Delphy puts it, ‘marriage is the institution by which unpaid work is extorted from a particular category of the population, women-wives.’
When a woman becomes a wife, Delphy argues, her labour power is appropriated by and becomes the property of her husband. Historically, this occurred in a very literal sense. In France, a married woman’s wages were automatically paid to her husband until 1907; until 1965, a husband held the legal right to prevent his wife from working outside the home, keeping her financially dependent on him and ensuring that her labour was directed toward the tasks from which he benefited most. In small businesses and farming families, taking on a wife was seen as a low-cost alternative to hiring an employee. Delphy quotes the mother of one unmarried French farmer, who bemoaned, ‘Michel needs someone to help him and he can’t find a servant. If only he could get married …’ If only, indeed.
Today, this pattern of labour appropriation plays out in more subtle ways. Think of the woman who works all day outside the home, only to finish and do the lion’s share of the housework as well. Or the mother who decides to stay home to care for her children; enabled to do so by her male partner’s wage, but also financially dependent on him. Or the many women who take on the task of caring for sick or elderly relatives, relieving their husbands or brothers of the responsibility. Even in the event of divorce, Delphy argues, the fundamental labour relationship between husband and wife doesn’t change—at least, not if they have children. She is still likely to be the partner primarily responsible for raising the children, and while she might receive money to support them, she is unlikely to receive any payment for the work of raising them.
This might seem like a cold way to look at marriage, a relationship between two people who presumably love one another. Gender roles aside, why couldn’t a female homemaker and male breadwinner, for instance, be symbiotic rather than exploitative – each person’s efforts contributing to the wellbeing of the family as a unit? Is the exchange of one person’s labour within the home for another person’s labour outside of the home inherently unfair?
But Close to Home isn’t a book about the individual relationships between men and women. It is concerned with women’s relationship to the marketplace, and the fact that so much of the labour women perform occurs outside of it. This relationship, Delphy argues, means that women necessarily occupy a different class position than men do. Women’s relationship to production is shaped not just by capital, but also by patriarchy; their work compensated not solely by wages, but by ‘maintenance’ – food, shelter, and a family member’s largesse.
And there are fundamental differences between these two types of labour. Wage work can be unequal and exploitative; that it is often both these things is a key tenet of Marxism. But a wage is also tied to tangible criteria such as the number of hours worked, the nature of the position and the tasks required, and how well those tasks were performed – not to mention the concrete monetary reward itself which may be spent however the recipient sees fit. What financial support a housewife receives for her work in the home, on the other hand, is not dependent on her performance, but on how much her husband earns and how he chooses to distribute his earnings. The tasks she performs are not defined by her role as ‘wife’, but by the nature of the family’s needs. If the family runs a small business, she might do the accounts. If her husband is seeking a promotion, she might prepare dinner for his colleagues. If they live on a farm, she might milk the cows or harvest corn. If he is a crown prince, she will produce an heir and a spare, attend charity events, and tend to her appearance to ensure she looks good in photographs.
Most importantly, whatever status or material comforts a wife might accrue from her position, so long as she is financially dependent on her spouse they are never truly her own. Rather than determining a family’s class position purely on the status of the head of household, Delphy argues we need to recognize the inequalities that exist within families. Just because a woman is married to a rich or powerful man does not at all mean that she herself is rich or powerful. So long as her power is tied to his, she is but an elevated proletariat. To illustrate this point, Delphy notes the number of women who, in the event of divorce or widowhood, experience a sudden and steep drop in their standard of living, ‘often in contrast with the level of their education and the careers they envisaged, or could have envisaged, before their marriage’.
Thus, Delphy argues, marriage isn’t caused by women’s economic inequality but is rather a key creator of it. Marriage relieves men of their domestic obligations, allowing them to progress in their work more quickly; whereas the resulting greater responsibility in the home for women cause them to move backwards over time, financially and professionally, or, at best, to advance more slowly than their male, and single female, peers. The longer a woman is married, the more she needs her marriage to survive, as her economic prospects and those of her husband continue to diverge.
In the first essay in this collection, Christine Delphy argues that oppression is a historically specific entity. ‘An institution which exists today cannot be explained by the simple fact that it existed in the past,’ she writes. Rather, we must ‘explain its existence at each and every moment in the context prevailing at that time; and its persistence today (if it really is persistence) must be explained by the present context.’
It is reasonable then to ask how the relations of power and production Delphy describes in Close to Home translate to the present day. We live in the age of what journalist Hanna Rosin has famously dubbed ‘the end of men’, in which single people in the United States slightly outnumber their married counterparts,1 and there are more single women than single men.2 Of those women who do marry, one quarter earn more than their husbands do.3 Nor is marriage an exclusively heterosexual institution anymore: in twenty countries around the globe, same-sex couples now have the right to marry.4 But even if women are increasingly less economically dependent on men, that does not mean that women are no longer economically exploited, or that the family no longer plays a role in that exploitation – whether implicit, via increased domestic responsibilities and decreased earning capacity, or explicit, through vulnerability to financial abuse and manipulation.
Even in the 1970s, when most of the essays in this book were first published, there were large numbers of women across all races and social classes who participated in the paid workforce. But earning money didn’t exempt them from their responsibilities at home – a fact which Delphy argues only serves to highlight the way in which wives’ labour is appropriated by their husbands. When women work at home, it can be argued that their housework is done in return for their upkeep, and that this upkeep is the equivalent of a wage. But women who work outside the home provide their own upkeep, through the money they earn themselves. ‘It is therefore clear’, she writes, ‘that they perform domestic work for nothing.’
The same patterns hold true today. Data from the UNDP reveals that women in high- and middle-income countries spend twice as much time providing unpaid care for family members as men do.5 A paper published in the Journal of Marriage and Family in 2015 found that while there was no gender gap in time spent on housework when couples had no children, once children were born, women’s total work increased almost twice as much as men’s did.6 And these inequities have concrete economic consequences. Where women in their twenties earn slightly more than men of the same age, this pattern reverses when they hit their thirties – precisely the point that those extra household responsibilities start to kick in.7
My husband and I devote around the same amount of time each to housework (that is to say, not very much) – but then, we also don’t have children. He earns more than I do – hey, I’m a writer – and I feel the sting of that inequality acutely, but I also don’t think it would be fair to say he appropriates my labour. If anything, his labour allows me to do the work I love.
But I also recognise that in all of this, I occupy a privileged position. And that, like the bourgeois housewives Delphy writes about in Close to Home, economically at least, my privilege is tied to my relationship with a man. Like them, I am but an elevated proletariat, and unexploitative though my marriage may be, it is also arguably instrumental in my long-term economic subordination. It is being a wife, after all, that affords me the financial security to make my living writing essays about the economic subordination of women through marriage. But it is the choice to make my living writing essays about the economic subordination of women through marriage that means I am not otherwise financially self-sufficient.
These are the kinds of uncomfortable questions Close to Home prompts, about where we’ve come from in our lives, or where we are headed next. But it does something even more important. Like many of us who came of age in the ‘third wave’ and beyond, I grew up in an era in which feminism was spoken of primarily in terms of gender, asking important and transformative questions of how how men and women are socialised, and how the roles we are assigned serve both to limit us and to reinforce existing power structures.
But in putting forth a materialist analysis of women’s oppression, Delphy beckons us to look deeper. She asks us to consider not just the ideas and ideologies that circulate in relation to gender, but where they come from, why they persist, and whose pockets they ultimately line. In an age in which feminism can seem as much a fashion statement as a political one, Close to Home offers a deliciously radical alternative, in which the stakes are bigger, the possibilities greater.