de este mismo artículo.

Marilyn Waring (1988, 1997, 2004) and Nancy Folbre (1994, 2000) are two of the most incisive feminist voices contesting dominant approaches to political economy at the tail end of the 20th Century. Waring argued for an inclusion of unpaid work in national accounting measures, most famously through her study of the UN system of national accounts and the value of unpaid work done largely by the world’s women. Folbre on the other hand has argued for an understanding of care as a social responsibility. Both have played the wholesome, slow-food chefs of the economic world, cautioning against fast hits of calories, and championing the importance of understanding our diets.

Feminist thinking about the concerns of gender and political economy as exemplified by Waring and Folbre have motivated some reforms of economic structures, as will be shown below and in Chapter Three on feminist economic activism in Australia. I suggest here, however, that a dominant heterosexism is still imbued in the logic of placing feminized unpaid work in a binary with the market. In leaving this binary in tact, these feminist representations recommend symptomatic address of the inequalities generated by this binary through a valuing of feminised labour. I suggest, drawing on Cameron and Gibson-Graham, that we might go further in identifying common struggles in/between the binary frame such as class struggle in/outside household or enterprise.

In this section I look to Marilyn Waring and Nancy Folbre’s challenge to the assumptions of both left and right wing political economy. Just as Andrea Dworkin (1974) and Naomi Wolf (2000) challenged the body modifications and mythologies of beauty so important to the subjection of women, Waring and Folbre’s work has challenged the lack of inclusion of feminised unpaid labour in modern economics. Drawing on the insights of feminists such as Carol Pateman (1988) who had contested the notion that the private was not part of the political,

Waring and later Folbre pointed out that an emphasis on markets and production on both sides of the political spectrum, ignored the vital contribution of the private sphere - dominated by and associated with women - to what was typically considered economy. Their work presents touchstone analyses of the ways in which care work is undervalued by the market or not valued at all, and why this is so. I outline their strategies below.

Marilyn Waring’s contribution to the debate rests on her analyses of the absence of household, and other unpaid labour, from the major international accounting systems that measure economic production, challenging the narrative in which accounting invisibilizes labour performed outside of market/s. Most work done by women globally is unpaid and outside the accounting definitions of the formal economy and measures of economic success such as GDP. Much of it is grimy, grubby, backbreaking work; work with bodies (animal and human) and bodily fluids, dung, dirt, and carrying of water (Waring 1988). Waring thus describes herself as writing about “shit work” (1997: 44). In her book dealing with the United Nations System of National Accounts (UNSNA), If Women Counted, Waring states:

every time I see a mother with an infant, I know that I am seeing a woman at work. I know that work is not leisure and it is not sleep, and it may well be enjoyable. I know that money payment is not necessary for work to be done (1988: 21).

Invisible to accounting measures, ‘shit work’ attracts minimal government support and has limited legitimacy as work.

From the premise that this unpaid ‘shit work’ is invisible to national accounts, Waring’s work exposes the impacts of economic inequality based on gender. Her analysis of the UNSNA, which informs GDP calculations, shows that work performed by women in unpaid capacities goes unmeasured and therefore, she argues, economically unvalued. Waring argues that this is the very work that sustains families and communities and reproduces labour (children). At the same time this reproductive work is seen as an extension of women’s physiology, and thus natural and without possibility for change or analysis (Waring 1988: 15-18). She describes the typical day of a woman in a developing country, noting which activities are productive according to UNSNA:

The woman goes to collect water. She uses some to wash dishes from the family evening meal (unproductive work) and the pots in which she previously cooked a little food for sale (informal work). Next, she goes to the nearby grove to collect bark for dye for materials to be woven for sale (informal work), which she mixes

with half a bucket of water (informal work). She also collects some roots and leaves to make a herbal medicine for her child (inactivity). She uses the other half of the bucket of water to make this concoction (inactivity). She will also collect some dry wood to build the fire to boil the water to make both the medicine and the dye (active and inactive labour). All this time she will carry the baby on her back (inactive work) (Waring 2004: 38).

Child-rearing, breast feeding, and housework remain absent from national accounts twenty-five years after Waring published her groundbreaking study of the United Nations System of National Accounts (UNSNA), the accounting system that measures the wealth, debt and productivity of nation states around the world. Waring argues that this absence demonstrates the fraternal interests of international accounting measures (1988: 79). Just as feminists have argued that weight is not a sole indicator of wellbeing, so too Waring argues that measurement does not have to leave women’s unpaid work in the realm of the invisible. While Waring begins to argue that the naturalisation of women’s reproductive roles is harmful to economic wellbeing, in focusing on this unpaid work she also emphasises its status as the ‘other’ to the formal economy.

Implicit in Waring’s argument is the suggestion that work done by women, much of which is caring work, contributes to wellbeing and that wellbeing could be better understood and improved if women were, in fact, counted. The implicit argument is that wellbeing will be more likely when one’s contribution is valued. Of the various attempts to address the absences of the UNSNA, Waring favours the United Nations Human Development Index (HDI). The HDI, Waring argues, comes close to approximations of gender and work data “for the purpose of policy making” (Waring 2003: 39; Folbre 2001: 73-74). I suggest that while this strategy is useful for making visible and attempting to value feminised work, it is in itself insufficient for challenging the hegemonic binary thinking of capitalism and neoliberalism, as it represents the economy as a whole in which a binary is still present.

However, some of Waring’s proposals do seem deconstructive in nature. One proposal Waring makes for making economic measures less discriminatory is that the definition of unemployment would change dramatically. If one was not employed in the formal economy but self-producing or caring, and this work was counted as producing something of value, then the definition of unemployment according to UNSNA would become patently inadequate (Waring 2004). Those charged with administering the UNSNA have expressed concerns that such a

definition would mean the measure being overwhelmed by non-monetary values. However, for Waring this is a welcome prospect. If governments recognise non- monetary contributions to livelihood, policy may look significantly different: home industries might receive support, agricultural policy might support subsistence farming, community centres might be seen as providing valuable services that should be paid accordingly. In this hypothetical situation, a notion of economic wellbeing starts to look much more inclusive of home and women. The market and monetary economy might be seen more as a support to other means of livelihood (such as home production), rather than the other way around.

Waring believes that an adequate representation of the economy, one that would be of more use to policymakers, is the three sphere model shown at Figure 2.1. Developed by Pietila (cited in Waring 1988: 244; see also Pietila 2002), the diagram shows three circles in which the free economy is the voluntary unpaid and household economy, the protected sector is “the home market as well as public services… protected and guided by official and legislative means,” and the fettered economy is export and international trade (1988: 243).

This three-sphere model, Waring suggests, more adequately represents the economy as experienced by all and as is useful for policy makers. This model, with its porous boundaries, decentres and deprioritises capitalist production, and centres the feminised and often deprioritised space of unpaid or informal work.

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For Nancy Folbre, it is an invisible heart, rather than Adam Smith’s invisible hand that primes the body economic. She insists that in addition to the cheap nutrients of the junk food market economy, it is the nutrients of the home kitchen, care and reproduction that are primary for a functioning society and economy. However, these elements are obscured by the individualistic definition of self-interest encouraged by mainstream economics. Folbre argues that people can and do perceive their interest as collective rather than individual. Indeed many women do, which at least partially explains their ‘irrational’ behaviour in prioritising care. Complementing Waring, Folbre is critical of the capacities of both classical liberal and Marxist theory to explain the connections between gender and caring labour. Rather like the individual diet plan (perhaps South Beach or a liver cleanse), liberalism, with its focus on freedom, tells us how individuals might pursue economically rational preferences: “some theory of purposeful choice lies at the heart of any claim that individuals can challenge the constraints of their culture and context” (1994: 27). However, liberal theories fail to account for collective ‘self- interest’, as in the case of women and care work. Alternatively, Folbre argues that Marxist and socialist feminism have a useful analysis of power, but this is limited by an economism that shields from view many aspects of social and creative life, perhaps somewhat like the top-down approach to obesity of regulating advertising by junk food companies (1994: 29-35). An intertwining of these theories is necessary for an analysis of gender relations and the importance of the invisible heart. Groups, Folbre goes on, face fractured possibilities and responsibilities that they have to negotiate to achieve their perceived interest. She argues that men, with certain given structures of constraint, typically use their collective actions to ensure a lesser responsibility for reproduction and care (1994: 74-78, 91). Instead, as in the formal economy, these responsibilities are determined by a complex power play.

Folbre is arguing that women find themselves in a situation where their view of the collective interest (social responsibility and care) conflicts with their individual capacities for financial gain, and where they lose out on the individual front due to men’s group capacity to focus on their individual interest, thereby gaining economic power in the game of life. This is how Folbre, like Waring, reaches the conclusion that care is or should be a social responsibility, something that must be quite literally taken into account for a sustainable economy. This power play, Folbre continues, comes with a distinct economic cost to those groups (largely women) who ‘choose’ to act ‘responsibly’ or in other words, collectively.

Care, then, should be a social responsibility. For it to become so, however, we must find new ways to divvy care up, like public kitchens. Folbre’s theory about reproduction also rests on the point that “however important the ideals of meritocracy, democracy and equal opportunity may be, they do not provide guidelines that specify our responsibilities to dependents, to future generations or to other species” (Folbre 1994: 88). In other words, these ideas that are so important to political culture (of the West) do not address the feminised responsibility of child care and social reproduction. Care must be quite literally taken into account for a sustainable economy. Folbre is thus critical of popular notions of gender equality on both sides of politics.

One solution Folbre proffers is an index of household production, the Dolly Jones Index (2001: 66). She does not stop there, but proposes multiple indexes: following populist Jim Hightower, she supports a Doug Jones Index for the working class man (2001: 64) and the Wa Jones index to measure workplace harmony (2001: 77- 79). She has also, with Tamara Ohler, proposed improvements to the PAR index, a relative wealth measure (2006). While one group in society (women) should not be constrained to do the bulk of caring work, nonetheless the work needs to be done for the health and wellbeing of any population. Hence the idea that for the economy to be a whole picture, care work must be valued. These kinds of measures, while lacking traction at an inter/national level, have proven useful to feminists time and again, as will be further explored in Chapter Three.

Waring and Folbre’s innovative focus on the unrepresented and uncounted ‘half’ of the economy shows much of the work and transactions typically ignored by formal definitions of economy. It also makes visible such work as work, rather

than simply the innate domain of women and thus goes some way to denaturalising the typically gendered division of labour, making it available as the object of political decision making. However, it also leaves the representation of halves – paid and unpaid – largely intact, meaning the unpaid half is “locked in the subordinate, under/ devalued position vis a vis the ‘core’ economy” (Cameron and Gibson-Graham 2003: 151). Additionally, the focus on gendered labour fails, to some extent to consider other areas such as enterprise, which are both gendered and assumed capitalistic.

Beyond shifting scales: Economic diversity and