Summary
Social reproduction is the daily and generational work of making and maintaining people: feeding, raising, teaching and caring for them. In this sense the term comes from Marxist feminism. In the 1970s the wages-for-housework movement, with Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James and Silvia Federici, argued that unpaid housework is work capitalism depends on while passing it off as love. Later theorists followed it beyond the home into schools, hospitals and public services.
Tithi Bhattacharya, introducing a collection on the theory, puts its opening question as: “If workers’ labor produces all the wealth in society, who then produces the worker?” The work that does, she writes, is “naturalized into nonexistence”.
Rationale
Parents sit beside teachers and town planners in Part 2’s list of people who “help shape the contexts” that form us. This tradition asks who does that shaping daily, unpaid, and why it goes unseen.