Marginalization in the Domestic Labor Market: An Analysis of the Structural Linkages Between Capitalism and Patriarchy
Keywords:
Feminist Political Economy, Domestic Labor, Social Reproduction, Capitalism, Patriarchy, Informal Work, Care WorkAbstract
This literature study employs a feminist political economy approach to analyze the relationship between capitalism and patriarchy in creating and sustaining a marginalized domestic labor market. Through a qualitative synthesis of scholarly work, the research examines the symbiotic interaction between these two systems. It finds that capitalism depends on cheap social reproductive labor, while patriarchy provides the mechanism to allocate this labor to women, unpaid or underpaid. The commodification of this labor produces a domestic work market characterized by informality, legal exclusion, and personalized power relations, which facilitate the extraction of value from a predominantly female workforce. Furthermore, the study identifies a reinforcing set of economic, legal, and ideological mechanisms that maintain this marginalization, including exclusion from labor laws, restrictive immigration policies, naturalizing care work as women's innate role, and social stigma. The analysis concludes that the marginalized position of domestic workers is not a market anomaly but a structural outcome of the capitalist-patriarchal nexus. Effective transformation requires an integrated strategy that simultaneously addresses legal recognition, regulatory enforcement, the provision of public care services, and challenges to the gendered devaluation of reproductive labor.
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