1. Introduction: Kant, Marx and the Symbolic and Anthropological Status of Women

Despite their respective popularity with contemporary feminist thinkers, there is much to give one pause in Kant’s and Marx’s treatment of women. Both Kant and Marx wrote and thought in multiple modes, with anthropological and historical reflections working parallel to more traditional philosophical and political analysis, and their treatment of gender varies across these modes. They tended towards an anthropological framework for considering women’s role in society but on occasion – particularly in their earlier works – conflated their interrogation of the contingent, anthropological conditions that shape women’s experience with essentialized gender as a metaphor for understanding the dialectical relations between nature and culture. Kant’s reflections, for example, on the beautiful virtues of women in the 1764 Observations on the Beautiful and Sublime also posited femininity, in the guise of the beautiful, as an essential and complementary force necessary for the civilizing process (Obs, 2: 238).Footnote ¹ Marx, in the 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, likewise conceives the relation between man and woman as an ‘immediate, natural, and necessary’ gauge of man’s alienation from nature (2004: 103). For both the early Kant and the early Marx, women are not symbolic embodiments of nature, as they are for Rousseau, but they are nevertheless often positioned as a force necessary to the dialectical processes of civilization.

Both Kant and Marx returned to an anthropological analysis of women’s roles towards the end of their careers. In both cases, a new methodological rigor largely replaced the fusion of anthropological investigation with metaphors of otherness. Kant, in his 1798 Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View offers a more strictly anthropological analysis of the relation between the sexes, stripping the female sex of beautiful virtue and focusing instead on how women’s place in the domestic sphere encourages the development of certain tendencies and character traits as wives seek to assert themselves as equals in the domestic sphere. The quirks of women are here revealed to be the result of historically shifting social mores, with Kant comparing women’s characters in ‘barbaric’, ‘gallant’ and ‘civilized’ conditions, and demonstrating that marriage, as well as the purpose of sex difference, evolves through these shifts (Anth, 7: 304–7). This evolutionary theory of sex difference and marriage is evidence of what Allen Wood (Reference Wood1998: 27) has called Kant’s historical materialism. Unlike Kant, Marx never claimed to be an anthropologist studying sexual difference, but he spent the last decade of his life engaged in study of historical and anthropological accounts of shifting family structures, including those by Lewis Henry Morgan, Henry Sumner Maine, John Budd Phear, John Lubbock, Maxim Kovalevsky and Ludwig Lange (Brown Reference Brown2012: 176). Though his notes remain unpublished, other than insofar as they influenced Engels’ 1884 The Origin of Family, Private Property, and the State, the organizing theme of his approach was the dialectic between shifts in political economy and the structure of the family, which points to a certain flexibility in the relation between the economic mode of production and the structure of social relations. Though Engels’ interpretation of these texts pointed to a clear, linear relationship between the role of women, the structure of the family and the emergence of private property, Marx’s own notes emphasize instead the flexibility in these relations, emphasizing both the contingency and artificiality of gendered labour structures (Brown Reference Brown2012: 133–4).Footnote ²

Though Kant and Marx emphasized the historical contingency of the character of women, mapping gender relations against shifting historical conditions, my focus in this article will not be their anthropological reflections. Instead, I argue that this awareness of historical contingency was, in both cases, motivated by a sharp awareness of shifts in the structure of gender and the family in their own historical moments. For both thinkers the contemporary, and often normative, question of the role of women was most clearly taken up not in their anthropological reflections, but in their most rigorous analyses of politics, the state and political economy. In what follows, I examine Kant’s account of women, private property, and labour in Kant’s Doctrine of Right alongside Marx’s treatment of women and labour in Capital. I will argue that a rigorous comparison between the two directs our attention to an analysis of reproductive labour and the valuation of that labour, and those who do it, in the broader matrix of social and economic institutions. In doing so, I will highlight a rather surprising feature of this comparison: that in many ways, Kant has armed us with a more detailed framework for understanding the valuation of reproductive labour than has Marx. Finally, I point to the limits of their respective analyses for contemporary feminist thinkers concerned with revaluing reproductive labour.

2. Women, Political Economy and the Visibility of Reproductive Labour

Perhaps the most striking thing about comparing the treatment of women in the Doctrine of Right and Capital is how central women and marriage are to the framework of the former, compared to that of the latter. This is particularly striking given that it is Marx, rather than Kant, who takes the conditions of labour as central to his analysis. For Kant, however, the domestic realm plays a critical role in his normative account of the just state. In his discussion of Private Right – the institutional instantiation of possessive rights – Kant highlights three institutional arrangements: property right, contract right (which orders, amongst other things, labour contracts in the public sphere) and domestic right, or the curiously named ‘right to a person akin to a right to a thing’ (MM, 6: 276). This third domain of right organizes all relations within the private sphere, including marriage, parenthood and the employment of domestic servants. But despite that fact that one feature of domestic right is to organize labour within the domestic sphere, Kant explicitly argues that domestic right is more structurally similar to property right than to contract right. The ‘right to a person akin to a right to a thing’ organizes rights to persons rather than rights against them. In the case of marriage, Kant is explicit that this is because marriage requires a mutual possession of each partner by the other, such that they share ends and a domain of mutual interests (MM, 6: 278). But this shared community of ends is also premised on the requirement of exclusive use that characterizes property right: I have a right to my spouse in the sense that no one else has a right to him – just as my right to my house entails that everyone else recognize that they have no rights to it (MM, 6: 278). Like property right, domestic right more explicitly defines the external relations that make possessive rights possible, rather than defining the relations internal to that possessive domain: just as property right tells you not to enter my house, rather than defining the proper way for me to make use of my house, domestic right defines the exclusive function of marriage more explicitly than it lays out the terms by which spouses ought to treat each other. Likewise, it defines the juridical status of husbands and wives as equals from the perspective of law rather than offering guidelines for the internal distribution of labour and responsibilities within the household.Footnote ³

Thus, the defence of marriage and domestic relations is for Kant explicitly tied to the defence of private property right. And this is perhaps not surprising, since Kant is developing and defending the very bourgeois articulation of marriage and the family whose dark underbelly Marx will expose half a century later. But the centrality of marriage, domestic labour and the family to Kant’s defence of the bourgeois order of Private Right deserves close scrutiny, since Kant is more explicit than Marx about how the family elides the economy of labour relations. By embedding this labour in a distinct form of right, he thus distinguishes household labour relations from contractual labour relations in the marketplace. This means that the role of domestic labour is visible in the Kantian account in a way that it is not in Marx’s, and that Kant’s account offers an additional mode of analysis not found in Marx, for whom domestic labour becomes visible only when the sanctity of the family sphere is punctured by the demands of the labour market, and reproductive labour begins to be outsourced.

Both historically and philosophically, Kant and Marx are working at opposite ends of the social construction of the bourgeois family. Kant, like Marx, was acutely aware of writing at a moment of historical sea-change for the structure of the family as the bourgeois family emerges from the ashes of the feudal order, driven by legal and economic reform. His normative account of the family as a core institution of justice in the Doctrine of Right actively reflects on the substantive legal reforms in Prussia in the 1790s, which defined marriage, for the first time, as a universal estate open to all.Footnote ⁴ Marriage was, for the first time, a duty for citizens, one of the key ways in which individuals contributed to the social and economic order of the state. Kant understood his own account of marriage in the Doctrine of Right to be an innovative, normative form of the family that responded to this contemporary debate. Unlike the majority of early theorists of bourgeois family structures, Kant emphasized the legal equality of wives in marriage and the equal right to shared possessions, and framed marriage in terms of a community of ends.Footnote ⁵

But this emphasis on moral and legal equality within marriage must be held in tension with Kant’s material account of the household. For Kant, wives are embedded within the family; servants, protected from minimal labour restrictions by the framework of domestic right, still carry out the bulk of reproductive labour. Labour within the domestic realm is wholly privatized, subject to different logics and labour restrictions than labour in the marketplace.Footnote ⁶ In the Appendix to the Doctrine of Right, Kant defines the master–servant relation within the context of domestic right, arguing that

Labour within the family is thus differentiated from the contractual labour in the marketplace: servants do not contractually agree to fulfil a specific set of tasks, or to work a set number of hours. Their responsibilities, like their working day, are defined by a distinct metric: the sharing of ends. Domestic servitude is thus a hybrid between a labour contract and the commitment to take another’s ends as one’s own that defines marriage. In this way, domestic servitude protects the boundaries of the domestic sphere by operating under the framework of domestic right, with its emphasis on proprietary relations and exclusive use. The status of the head of household, as a political, social and economic entity, is protected by this process of privatization, while the exclusion of servants from this status is obscured by the separate construction of labour within the household. Though this model retains the DNA of the feudal household, it is explicitly defended by Kant in the language of the emergent bourgeois, liberal state. Wives are legally equal to their husbands; marital property is owned in common; marriage is open to all; servants are carefully distinguished from serfs. Domestic labour is unambiguously distinguished from new modes of productive labour emerging in the marketplace, and the privatization of the household under domestic right serves to further enshrine this distinction without compromising the political equality of productive labourers.

Marx, on the other hand, writes about the moment in which this model of domestic labour dissolves. Marx’s subject, of course, is not the bourgeois family, with its sanctified wives and bustling servants, but the working-class family for whom this sheltered domestic space was always imperilled. The transformation of the family mapped in Capital traces the decline of the family wage, as the working class loses its grip on economic access to a bourgeois family life. Marx mentions the labour of women for the first time in Capital in chapter 5, when he describes the entrance of women and children into the workforce (Reference Marx1976: 517). They emerge as new factory labourers, entering the workforce with their children as machine labour replaces hard labour in the factories. Women’s participation in the workforce is primarily notable, for Marx, because of its impact on men’s wages. Prior to this development, working men were paid a ‘family wage’: a wage sufficient to support a wife labouring and raising children at home. Embedded in the idea of the family wage is the assumption of reproductive labour within the domestic sphere, and a valuation of that labour as a necessary precondition of the husband’s labour.

This is the wage model tacitly assumed in Kant’s story of the worker and the family – although for Kant, too, this is complicated by class status. For Kant, as for Marx, the family wage is an ideal not necessarily attained by those lower on the economic rungs, for Kant assumes that some women will work for wages, though they will do so primarily within the domestic sphere, as domestic servants. However, even within the domestic sphere, there is some assumption of familial support, as evidenced by Kant’s reaction to the marriage of his manservant Lampe. Kant objected strongly to the marriage, and his lawful right to do so hinged on the assumption that he would become responsible for supporting not only Lampe, but also his family – who would in turn contribute to the labour in Kant’s household (Kuhn Reference Kuhn2001: 223). The Lampe anecdote serves to illustrate the degree to which the family wage model presupposes the family as an economic unit, and sheds light on the ferocity of the debate in Prussia in the late eighteenth century about whether or not servants and wage workers ought to be legally allowed to marry: an unmarried labourer, like an unmarried servant, was simply cheaper. The late eighteenth-century legal reforms that made marriage a universal estate, open to all classes, while assuming the economic indivisibility of the family, placed significant economic pressure on employers both market and domestic.Footnote ⁷

In chapter 5 of Capital, Marx maps the solution to the pressure created by these legal reforms: a new mode of mechanized factory labour that drew women and children into the workforce, and thus forced a redefinition of the family wage: the family wage would become the collective wages earned by each member of the family, wives and children included; the wage of the male labourer would be correspondingly depreciated. Marx describes the transformation of the family into a kind of labouring ‘gang’ and the transformation of the head of household from a provider to a kind of slave-dealer, who must sell the labour of his wife and children in order to survive.Footnote ⁸

But if the transformation of fathers into slave-dealers is problematic, the transformation of mothers into workers is worse, since it entails the total destruction of the domestic sphere. In Marx’s text, mothers themselves become monstrous. Marx points to an 1861 study explaining a spike in death rates among young children, attributing it to ‘the employment of mothers away from their homes, and to the neglect and maltreatment arising from their absence, which consists of such things as insufficient nourishment, unsuitable dosing with opiates; besides this, there arises an unnatural estrangement between mother and child, and as a consequence intentional starving and poisoning of children’ (Reference Marx1976: 521). The report goes on to lay the responsibility for the spike even more squarely at the mother’s feet, describing a transformation of women even more insidious than that of fathers into slave-dealers: ‘the mothers become to a grievous extent denaturalized towards their offspring – commonly not troubling themselves much at death and even sometimes … taking direct measures to insure it’ (Reference Marx1976: 521, n. 46).

It is worth noting, however, that it is only as women stop providing basic care to their children that that labour becomes visible: only as factory-working mothers outsource infant care do we find a mention of the value of breastfeeding, for example.Footnote ⁹ As women enter factories, domestic labour must be outsourced, and as it enters the market domain, it becomes, for the first time in Capital, visible. Marx explicitly discusses the labour value of reproductive labour only as it becomes part of the wage labour system: ‘since certain family functions, such as nursing and suckling children, cannot be entirely suppressed, the mothers who have been confiscated by capital must try substitutes of some sort. Domestic work, such as sewing and mending, must be replaced by the purchase of ready-made items. Hence the diminished expenditure of labour inside the house in accompanied by a greater expenditure of money outside’ (Reference Marx1976: 518, n. 39). Where Kant explicitly defines domestic relations in terms of property relations, clearly distinguishing the economic conditions of productive and reproductive labour, Marx develops an analysis of domestic relations only when family members enter the domain of capitalist production; only then do wives and children become property for the head of household to sell.

Marx had described family relations in terms of property in The Communist Manifesto, where he argues that ‘the bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production’ and defines bourgeois marriage as ‘in reality a system of wives in common’ (Marx and Engels Reference Marx and Engels1978a: 488). There, however, he describes the bourgeois as ‘having the wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal’ and emphasizes that under conditions of capitalism, the proletarian ‘is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations’ (Reference Marx and Engels1978a: 482). Marx, like Kant, emphasizes the property-like nature of familial relations under conditions of capitalism, but he does so primarily in order to advocate the abolishment of the bourgeois family along with the abolishment of capitalism (Reference Marx and Engels1978a: 487) rather than to shed light on the valuation of labour within the household. While Kant uses the structure of property to make sense of the distinct labour relations within the household, Marx’s use of property to explain familial relations indicates the moral breakdown of those relationships under the conditions of capital. Marx’s analysis of both labour and the economic structure of relationships operates only explicitly in the market sphere; he gives us few tools to examine the value of labour within the household. Wives and children are visible only when they become workers; reproductive labour within the domestic sphere is, by this rubric, not recognizable labour within Marx’s model.Footnote ¹⁰

There is a strange sense, then, in which Kant has armed us with more analytic tools for thinking about reproductive labour and the economic structure of the household than has Marx, and this is particularly striking given that it is Marx, rather than Kant, who explicitly develops critical tools of analysis for evaluating the conditions of labour. In his normative account of ‘the right to a person akin to a right to a thing’ Kant has offered us a framework for distinguishing the determination of value of labour within the household and outside it, and he has explicitly argued that there are in fact two economic orders, and two models of wage labour, at work within the capitalist system. Relations within the household are explicitly economic for Kant, but they exist outside the norms of the marketplace, where one’s labour can be leased through contract. Within the household, labour is organized by a commitment to shared ends. Though this standard is implicitly assumed for wives, Kant is explicit about it in the case of domestic servants: the domestic servant, he argues, agrees not to sell his or her labour, but to take on the master’s ends as if they were her own (MM, 6: 360–1). In this way, the domestic servitude contract borrows from the marital contract: it is designed to create a community of shared ends, such that all members of a household work towards shared goals, and are free to do so in a manner that does not infringe on the external freedom of any party within the household. The household is, in this way, normatively described as a domain free of exploitation. The master cannot exploit his servant any more than he can exploit his wife, since they have adopted one another’s ends, and work collectively towards those ends.

The flaw in this picture is of course easily exposed: household labour is normatively free of exploitation only if we assume that this relation is truly reciprocal, so that the master has adopted the servant’s ends just as the servant has adopted the master’s. Kant makes this assumption in part because he models the master–servant relation on the husband–wife relation, and simply imports the presumption of mutual concern from the former. But as he himself acknowledges, the formal, legal equality in these relations cannot mask the inequalities that shape them on the ground. Just as he admits the ‘natural superiority of the husband to the wife’ he concedes that the master ‘makes use of’ the servant, rather than vice versa, although he is careful to distinguish this ‘making use of’ from slavery (MM, 6: 283).Footnote ¹¹ And, despite his emphasis on the legal equality of husbands and wives, he is equally clear that this is ‘a society of unequals’ ‘under the head of the household’ (MM, 6: 283). As Kant’s own experience with Lampe bears out, the ends shared by the master and the servant are explicitly the ends of the master; the servant’s employment contract determines not the hours the servant will work, nor the kind of labour he will perform, but his agreement to do ‘whatever is required for the good of the household’ as that good is determined by the master. Though the model of ‘the right to a person akin to the right to a thing’ gives servants juridical rights against their masters (such as the right, presumably, to sue for lost wages) Kant is explicit that this relation works in the master’s favour: the master may ‘retrieve’ a runaway servant and bring him back (MM, 6: 283). Though this is to be held in tension with the servant’s right to terminate the contract in case the master’s use of him ‘amounts to using him up’ (MM, 6: 283), the terms of the contract are explicitly defined in terms of shared commitment to the master’s ends. Thus, Kant’s claim that members of a household are juridically equal to one another, having reciprocal rights to one another, should be held in tension with his own requirement that members of a household must be understood as dependent upon the head of the household (MM, 6: 283), and thus limited to the status of passive citizens (MM, 6: 314), and the distinctions that he himself draws between the status of wives and the status of servants must be more carefully examined.Footnote ¹² Thus, though Kant has offered us more analytic tools for understanding labour within the household, these tools are limited by the normative framework in which they are developed: the Kantian account of domestic labour tends to obscure inequalities of power within the household.

This is particularly troubling when considering the status of wives. Though wives clearly have greater status in the household than servants, and are protected by the heightened form of mutual concern and possession required by the marriage contract, the labour of wives is generally governed by the same framework as that of servants: all reproductive labour, done by wives or by servants, is guided by the requirement of doing ‘whatever is necessary for the good of the household’. Wives may play a greater role in determining this good, but their labour, too, is valued in accordance within this rubric. And, while servants have the right to terminate their labour contract if their employer exploits them, wives are necessarily bound by the lifelong marital contract (MM, 6: 277).Footnote ¹³ Wives retain few legal mechanisms for transforming domestic relations if their husband’s use of them ‘amounts to using them up’.

Marx’s account of labour relations within the family are comparatively paltry. In The Communist Manifesto, he emphasizes the gendered oppression built into the bourgeois household, arguing that ‘the bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production’ and describing the bourgeois family as a concealed ‘system of wives in common’ (Marx and Engels Reference Marx and Engels1978a: 488). But Marx’s emphasis here is on sexual and procreative access to wives, rather than on the labour they perform. Though he distinguishes the conditions of bourgeois and working-class women, the working-class women he describes are those who have entered the productive labour market, not those who find employment within the domain of reproductive labour. Thus, though Marx’s focus in Capital is explicitly on working-class, rather than bourgeois, women, his omission of domestic labourers is an exclusion of a significant subset of working-class women. Marx’s silence on the status of domestic labourers is particularly striking given that, like Kant, and despite his lifelong poverty, he retained domestic workers to maintain his household. In addition to hiring wet nurses on several occasions, he and his wife Jenny employed Helene, known to the family as Lenchen, to run their household. She had been with Jenny’s family since the age of 7, and joined Marx and Jenny’s household in 1845 when they were expecting their second child (Gabriel Reference Gabriel2011: 81). Their relationship more closely resembles the Kantian model of domestic servitude than any Marxist account of labour relations. Not only was Lenchen treated as a member of the household, the terms of her employment were clearly delineated by a commitment to shared ends. When Lenchen gave birth to Marx’s illegitimate child in the summer of 1851, only three months after Jenny gave birth to their fifth child, she briefly left the Marx family to spare Jenny’s feelings (Gabriel Reference Gabriel2011: 211–15). Ultimately, she gave up her child in order to return to her post within the Marx family. In exchange, Marx protected her reputation – and his own – by convincing Engels, who was a well-known womanizer, to claim the paternity of the child (Gabriel Reference Gabriel2011: 212). Domestic labour as a radically intimate form of employment was thus a mundane part of Marx’s experience, making his refusal to analyse this form of labour all the more disappointing.

3. Monstrous Mothers and the Transformation of the Family

If Kant and Marx were writing from opposite ends of the crystallization of the bourgeois family, both were acutely aware of the historical and economic processes producing the changes they discuss. Kant was responding to both the rise of the bourgeois economic order and sweeping legal reforms in Prussia; Marx was concerned with shifts in the mode of production that forced women into the workforce, puncturing the domestic sphere Kant had so carefully enshrined in law. Of course, Kant and Marx are telling two radically different stories, about two radically different classes of women. Marx tells the story of the working-class household crushed by the depreciation of the family wage; women enter the workforce out of economic necessity, not to seek their own fulfilment or socio-economic independence. Women are of interest to Marx only when they become workers; the exploitation of women within the domestic realm is of limited interest, particularly in his analysis in Capital, and this means that Marx tends to collapse two binaries into one another: bourgeois women are assumed to be housebound women, mere ‘instruments of production’, while working-class women become wage earners. There are, in Marx, no working bourgeois women, nor domestic working-class women, nor working-class women employed as domestics in bourgeois households. Marx’s working class women outsource the duties of reproductive labour in the cheapest possible way, which requires them to accept the terrible conditions of childcare collectives that feed infants cordial to sedate them rather than breastmilk; the economic cost of this outsourcing places ever greater financial pressure on the family, which must supply more workers to offset these costs.

Kant’s account of the bourgeois family, on the other hand, focuses on wives with the option of outsourcing domestic labour within the household, to domestic servants who share their commitment to the ‘good of the household’. But the spectre of working women haunts Kant’s account of the family, too, and animates much contemporary scholarship on Kant and women, which focuses on the question of whether women, too, have the right to ‘work his way up’ to active citizenship by entering the workforce (MM, 6: 315).Footnote ¹⁴ This analysis tends to be strictly bourgeois, focusing on the case of women who enter the workforce in order to gain political equality and economic independence. The Kantian framework for women entering the public sphere, like Marx’s analysis, assumes that, as individual women enter the workforce, domestic labour must be outsourced. But in the Kantian, bourgeois story, it is likely to be outsourced within the domestic sphere, taken up by domestic servants and nannies in addition to the dependence on ready-made domestic items and the creation of economies of care within the wage-labour system. And, because Kant has offered us a framework for understanding the potentially exploitative terms of domestic employment, we have the tools to distinguish the economic emancipation of individual, bourgeois women from the economic emancipation of all women: as bourgeois wives leave the household as professionals and wage workers, domestic labour itself is not transformed, but merely outsourced, to others, who will labour within the household under the exploitative conditions that these emancipated women escaped. The Kantian story of women entering the workforce is thus also the story of what contemporary feminists have called the ‘care drain’ (Hochschild 2000: 131) as women higher on the economic ladder achieve economic equality only through the exploitation of (largely) women who work for them; the children of bourgeois women are cared for by nannies who must neglect their own children to do so. The Kantian story of independence, after all, is one in which each can work his way up; this independence relies on the performance of reproductive labour in such a way that it is never suggested that all might work their way up.Footnote ¹⁵

The Kantian story of the economic emancipation of women is thus a cautionary one that does not preclude the Marxist story of exploitation: bourgeois women who enter the workforce often do so on the backs of working-class women who must neglect their own children in order to provide care for the children of their wealthy employers. And, as domestic workers rather than wage-workers, they have less control over the conditions of their employment, exacerbating the challenges of outsourcing reproductive labour in the cheapest possible way.

If Kantian musings on women entering the workforce merely exacerbate the problems of exploitation caused by the devaluation of domestic labour, Marx, by contrast, offers a limited vision of a potentially transformed household. Later in Capital, Marx shifts from his descriptive account of the monstrous transformations wrought by the entrance of women into the workforce and offers a merely suggestive, normative vision. He suggests that large-scale industry, ‘by assigning an important part in socially organized processes of production, outside the sphere of the domestic economy, to women, young persons, and children of both sexes, does nevertheless create a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and of relations between the sexes’ (Reference Marx1976: 620–1). He expands this vision with insights about the ongoing historical fluctuations of forms of the family, which suggest that the bourgeois family need not be the final form.Footnote ¹⁶ But he gives little account of what this ‘higher form of the family’ might be, other than to suggest that in a collective working group, the labour of all members of the family would be valued as a source of human development.Footnote ¹⁷ Marx’s ‘higher form of the family’ is then either one in which reproductive labour is valued alongside productive labour, or one in which reproductive labour is distributed equally by all family members, whose economic contributions are then equally valued. But this vague vision gives us no account of how reproductive labour itself is transformed: whether there is some preferable form of outsourcing it, or some ideal method of distributing it equally.

Thus, the limits of the prophetic Kantian vision of individual women entering the workforce in search of independence and political equality are easier to delineate, since within this vision, the valuation of domestic labour itself is not transformed. The Kantian feminist vision is a squarely bourgeois one, in which individual women may achieve independence through entry into the workforce and the outsourcing of domestic labour both within the household and within a service economy. But, without a framework for radically rethinking the structure of domestic labour and the ideal of independence, the Kantian vision offers no pathway for the liberation of women as a class, since the independence of some women can only be achieved on the backs of other women.Footnote ¹⁸

The limits of the Marxist prophetic vision are harder to map, since it is unclear in what way domestic labour must be revalued for this vaguely defined ‘higher form of the family’ to emerge. Marxist feminists have tried to clarify this ‘higher form of the family’ for generations, from Charlotte Gilman Perkins’ call for the socialization of housework (Reference Gilman1898) to Rosa Luxemburg’s claim of the capitalist system’s blindness to reproductive labour as productive labour (Reference Luxemburg1971). The lack of tools available to analyse reproductive labour in Marxist theory has been fodder for a range of feminist arguments. Alison Jaggar (Reference Jaggar1983) argues that while classical Marxist theory seems to assume that women will escape oppression only when they enter the workforce, socialist feminists have tended to build on Engels’ call for a socialization of housework and a radical rethinking of the divide between public and private spheres. Radical feminist Marxists like Angela Davis (Reference Davis1983) and Silvia Federici (Reference Federici1975) have called for wages for housework, both as an end to women’s oppression within the home and as a challenge to the capitalist devaluation of non-productive labour; Nancy Folbre (Reference Folbre1982) has developed economic models for valuing household labour and thus determining wages for those who engage in this kind of labour. Marxist feminists thus come at the problem from both ends, engaging both the question of the revaluation of reproductive labour, and that of conceiving of women as a distinct class within Marxist inquiry (Ferguson Reference Ferguson1979: 294; Mohanty Reference Mohanty2003: 142). The flexibility of the Marxist feminist vision, then, owes much to the gaps left open in Marx’s own account of women and work. As Nancy Folbre argues, the lack of tools in Marx to analyse reproductive labour and the exploitation of women can simply be taken as a call to develop our own (Reference Folbre1982: 320).

4. A Final Thought

I have argued that, in laying out the ‘right to a person akin to a right to a thing’ to organize domestic relations, Kant gives us a clearer framework for understanding domestic relations and the valuation of labour within the household than the Marxist model, which is primarily concerned with domestic labour when it is outsourced. The Kantian approach’s commitment to domestic labour as a normative feature of the just state could learn much from the Marxist willingness to radically rethink the structure of domestic labour. Nevertheless, the Kantian model is a useful addition to Marxist models of conceiving of the exploitation of labour within feminist frameworks, since it gives us the tools to analyse the exploitation of domestic labourers in both their eighteenth-century and contemporary contexts.

But there is a second, slightly odder way in which the Kantian domestic labour contract might help us to analyse contemporary labour relations and the transformation of the working day. By framing the employment contract purely in terms of an agreement to ‘take my employer’s ends as my own’ and ‘do whatever is necessary for the good of’ my employer, the Kantian domestic servitude contract in some ways better explains contemporary professional employment contracts than does the wage-labour model. I am thinking here of the various ways in which members of the professional and creative class now work effectively twenty-four-hour days, much like servants in Kant’s time, because their employment contract designates a shared set of goals rather than a concrete set of tasks or productive goals, or a clearly defined working day.Footnote ¹⁹ As digital access has blurred the lines between the marketplace and the domestic sphere, the working day, as Marx understood it, becomes increasingly difficult to calculate; it has been replaced by the requirement that employees do ‘whatever is necessary for the good of’ the business, with little concern for the domestic responsibilities or leisure time of the worker.

This is, I think, an interesting problem from a Kantian perspective, given Kant’s own hesitations about the capacity of domestic workers to maintain their own domestic sphere. Kant wrote his analysis of the domestic servitude contract in the wake of legal reforms in Prussia that allowed, for the first time, servants to marry in significant numbers. This development was generally greeted with shock by members of nobility and the emerging bourgeois class: how could servants, who are already committed to the good of a domestic sphere, possibly maintain their own without conflict between the two sets of domestic contracts? Embedded in this debate are many of the concerns built into contemporary narratives about work–life balance: how many sets of ends can I take as my own, without finding that they conflict with one another? How far can the working day expand without inevitably exploiting the worker? How is the domestic sphere to be maintained when there is no one whose primary responsibility is its maintenance?