WOMEN HAVEN’T BEEN SITTING around all these years, allowing our work to be counted out or military and consumerist values to go uncriticized. There were such economic thinkers in the suffragist era as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a largely self-educated theorist who wrote Women and Economics, a still relevant exposé of androcentric values,52 and Olive Schreiner, whose Women and Labour assumed that equality in work and sexual life went hand in hand.53 There were also pioneers of a then progressive new field called “domestic science” or “home economics,” and others of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who were trying to redefine productive work. They wanted to include any activity ending in a product or service that another person could be hired to perform: a definition that would have included most of women’s productive work, though not reproduction, as well as large parts of men’s unsalaried labor. They also protested the limited and joyless characterization of work by patriarchal economists—for example, Adam Smith’s assumption that work itself must require the worker (always male) to sacrifice “his tranquility, his freedom and his happiness.” As Gilman wrote, from that “pitiful conception of labour as a curse comes the very old and androcentric (i.e., male-centered) habit of despising it as belonging to women and then to slaves. … For long ages men performed no productive industry at all, being merely hunters and fighters. … They assume as unquestionable that ‘the economic man’ will never do anything unless he has to … and will, inevitably, take all he can get and do all he can to outwit, overcome, and if necessary destroy his antagonist.”54

Perhaps because women’s traditional labors, however unpaid, yielded clear results and were not “alienated,” as many men had come to think was inevitable in factories where fragmented tasks lacked even the satisfaction of finishing one process or product, many female activists brought with them into the public sphere a belief in the possibility of humanized, satisfying, even joyful work. Many hoped the Marxist promises of communalizing homemaking would be the answer to women’s isolation and powerlessness within the household; or that eliminating private property would eliminate the ownership of women as reproductive property; or that subordinating sex and race to class would bring some magical, automatic liberation in a classless society. It was in response to women’s demand for inclusion in class-bound Marxist theory that Engels wrote The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. He drew a parallel between the rise of private property and the subordination of women as property, and became one of the very few male economic thinkers to include the interplay between production and reproduction. The tasks that those generations of suffragists and abolitionists performed included the official elimination of slavery as an economic system, achieving a legal identity as persons and citizens for females of all races, and bringing many women into the paid labor force. What they couldn’t do was get beyond theory about the definition of productive work, the solution to women’s double burden of salaried and unsalaried work, or changing the semantic slavery of “women who don’t work.”

It remains for this feminist wave to create viable substitutes for the patriarchal values underlying economics. It won’t be easy. As the Nobel Prize Committee commented in 1984 when it awarded Sir Richard Stone the Nobel Prize for inventing a system that rendered half the world’s work and all of its environment invisible: “The system has become accepted as so self-evident that it is hard to realize that someone had to invent it.”

That’s exactly the problem. We have to make what’s wrong visible before it will be moved aside. Our willingness to rebel against our role of managing consumption, whether as a homemaker or as Superwoman, should be increased by realizing that our rebellion will help balance the world’s consumption. As Hazel Henderson wrote:

As a result of the changing role of the American woman, who no longer has time to serve as the “heroic consumer,” the world’s economies can no longer look to the United States to be the consumption-led “locomotive.” … Over 60 percent of U.S. women who are now in the workforce have drastically changed their consumption habits to basic needs, fewer goods and more services, e.g., education, day care, energy and shelter. Already we see how such shifts have changed basic patterns of production and consumption. Daycare is one of our fastest growing industries as parenting became monetarized. Cooking is now in the money economy with fast food eateries, while all those other time-consuming chores, from food shopping and cleaning to cooking and waiting for the appliance repairman, babysitting and home maintenance, are shared by men. For example, one Madison Avenue survey leads to the conclusion that advertisers must now sell washing powders and toilet bowl cleaners with real respect, since almost 50 percent of their users are now men.55

This change is not yet creating a new definition of productive work. It is only fitting more of women’s tasks into the old one by turning them into paid jobs. But it is creating an economy more focused on creating services than on manufacturing objects—which is all to the good, for women, for the environment, and for men too.

If the simple act of refusing to be an obsessed consumer can challenge the values at the heart of the maze, imagine what else we can do. Every time we balance our checkbooks in a new way, or vote on budget values, or invest charitable dollars in creating self-sufficiency, we challenge those values. Every time we insist on comparable worth, or compare notes with coworkers on how much we make—the one fact employers try to keep us quiet about—we are recreating them. Every time we value those living natural resources that would otherwise be counted only when dead, we’re facing down a minotaur. Every time we refuse to be misled by experts who are themselves lost in the maze and instead follow our Ariadne’s thread of values, we’re getting closer to the heart of it. Every time we speak out, we bring others along. For instance, here is the latest letter from Saskatoon homemaker Carol Lees:

I want to tell you of a local TV interview that I did on Sunday. Before the TV crew arrived, I prepared a clear glass bowl containing water, salt, sugar, shortening and yeast and I used this in the interview to illustrate my point.

Voice-over footage of me filling a bowl: “Carol Lees is putting the ingredients for bread into a bowl, but she is purposely leaving out a key ingredient—flour. The point is to make an analogy. She says it’s a lot like how the federal government leaves out a group of workers in its census forms.”

Shot of me sitting at my kitchen table with the bowl in front of me: “This is a bowl of bread. I’ve put everything in except the flour—so, of course, it is not really a bowl of bread. And that’s a parallel for what the government is trying to do. They’re trying to present measures of the labour force and productivity but they’re leaving out half of what should be included.”

More interview: “If that work is not counted on the census, I’m going to try and initiate a national boycott of the section on work on the 1996 census, and I’m going to ask all Canadians to refuse to complete that census unless the work of all Canadians is included.”

In the wind-up footage, I’m adding flour and mixing up the dough. The crew did a good job of it all—it was on national TV too.

To those who refuse to revalue economics, we need to say: Half the world’s labor and all of its resources will not be invisible anymore. To those who add environmental values only, we need to say: Unless women control reproduction, population pressures will keep on degrading the environment. Unless the male/female, Man/Nature paradigm ends, domination will continue. We are here to issue a Declaration of Interdependence.