The sexual division of labor and the social and economic value of women's work in the home has been a problem that feminists, political scientists, and economists have struggled with for over 30 years. The “wages for housework” movement (Dalla Costa and James Reference Dalla and James1975) never entered into mainstream political science discourse, and even Susan Okin's (Reference Okin1989) more modest proposal that housewives be paid a portion of their earning partner's paycheck was never taken seriously by economists or public-policy scholars. The fact that women continue to perform the vast majority of household labor, that such labor is still unpaid, does not count toward Social Security, and entitles women to no medical care (unless they are extremely poor) suggests that the equalities that women have achieved in abstract rights and in the workplace have not translated into the most fundamental equality: within the family. Mainstream political science and political economy do not take women's domestic labor into account in its international indices of wealth and productivity such as United Nations Systems of National Accounts, from which are derived figures such as Gross National Product and Gross Domestic Product (Waring Reference Waring1999, xi).Footnote ¹ Though political science has vastly improved over the past several decades in including gender in its scope (Tolleson-Rinehart and Carroll Reference Tolleson-Rinehart and Carroll2006), contemporary classics in political economy by Schumpeter (Reference Schumpeter1954) and Gilpin (Reference Gilpin1987) make no references to women. Hall and Sockice's popular Varieties of Capitalism (Reference Hall and Soskice2001) contains only one article that refers to gender inequalities in women's “skill formation” and earning power that arise from women's “time off due to childbirth and rearing” without considering the economic value of that work (Estevez-Abe, Iversen, and Soskice Reference Estevez-Abe, Iversen, Sockie, Hall and Soskice2001, 159). Indeed, the standard assumption in political economy is that gender equality can only come when women participate in the formal labor market; the economic and social significance of household labor is ignored (see e.g. Ross Reference Ross2008).

In this, economists may be doing better than political scientists. It is arguably the case that many economists follow John Kenneth Galbraith's (Reference Galbraith1979, 41) recognition of the concealed value of domestic labor. As Juliet Schor notes, “virtually every introductory economics textbook points out in its opening chapter” that “if a man marries his housekeeper, gross national product would fall.” However, after recognizing this “statistical artifact,” Schor notes, “the textbook writer moves on, and never looks back. So, too, have most economists, who have . . . shunned the household as ‘uneconomic”’ (Schor Reference Schor1991, 85). Since Schor wrote this, it is arguably the case that economists have caught on to the importance of what they call “household production” in business cycle models (Benhabib, Rogerson, and Wright Reference Benhabib, Rogerson and Wright1991), in “time use” surveys (Stewart and Stewart 1991), and as a factor affecting participation in paid labor—for instance, what it costs to replace undone household labor, or what the woman could be earning in the market (Greenwood, Rogerson, and Wright, Reference Greenwood, Rogerson and Wright1993; Fernandez, Guner, and Knowles Reference Fernandez, Guner and Knowles2005). But assessing the numerical value of household production is difficult for economists, given its variable nature from household to household (House, Laitner, and Stolyarov Reference House, Laitner and Stolyarov2006).Footnote ² Even more important to political scientists, these economic analyses fail to consider the political and power dynamics involved in such labor. They thus suggest indebtedness to Becker, who not only treated the family as a collective unit whose rational choices always seek to maximize the benefit of the unit even at the cost of personal gain of individual members but also imputed women's responsibility for child care and household labor to efficiency and “biological commitment” rather than to gendered power dynamics.Footnote ³

Even so, feminist economists may have achieved greater success in getting gender into the mainstream than their political science counterparts have been, for various indices such as the Gender-related Development Index, the Gender Equity Index, and the Gender Empowerment Measure are now used to assess women's economic situation and “capabilities development.” Feminist economists have developed arguments for factoring women's unpaid household labor into GDP and have sought to develop indices for including women's “care work” in other economic measures (Folbre Reference Folbre2006, 183 passim).

Similarly, feminist political scientists have raised a number of these issues (O'Connor, Orloff, and Shaver, Reference O'Connor, Orloff and Shaver1999), particularly in the context of welfare reform of the 1990's (Mink Reference Mink1998; Hirschmann and Liebert Reference Hirschmann and Liebert2001). But such arguments are still marginalized; that is, they have not been incorporated into the mainstream of political science and theory. In 2004 Iversen and Rosenbluth won a best paper award from the political economy section of the APSR for their analysis of the effect of the gender division of labor and women's household versus labor market participation on gender gaps in policy preferences (Iversen and Rosenbluth Reference Iversen and Rosenbluth2006). But among the 19 books that have won the section's William Riker best-book award since 1991, only three winners have even mentioned gender, and none have discussed household labor.Footnote ⁴

Political theory should be more attentive to this issue than other political science subfields, given its greater focus on normative categories and arguments that normally make it more accessible to considerations of gender inequities. But many theorists pay no attention to economics at all. With the exception of explicitly feminist theory, egalitarian liberal thought tends to think primarily in terms of legal and political equality, and even theories that note economic inequality pay little or no attention to the unequal division of labor in the domestic sphere, which is thereby placed outside liberal economics and politics (Rawls Reference Rawls1971; Sandel Reference Sandel1982). As a result, even after formal equality of political and economic rights has been achieved, women in practice suffer economically and socially from the disproportionate burdens they bear for the domestic realm (Fineman Reference Fineman1991; Okin Reference Okin1989). Such work, furthermore, tends to be structured in a way that prevents many women from taking advantage of their formally equal political and economic rights.

Nevertheless, political theory has contributions to make to political economy arguments that provide insight into both this exclusion of gender and how such exclusion might be remedied. After all, some of the most classic accounts of political economy were written by key figures in the canon of political theory. Yet “the core treatises and primers on political economy . . . typically neglected women's economic roles, whether inside or outside the household” (Dimand, Forget, and Nyland Reference Dimand, Forget and Nyland2004, 237). In the seventeenth century, John Locke recommended that poor mothers work for wages, at least part time, and that their children be put into “working schools,” which were no more than factories for wool production. Locke's failure to recognize the value of women's child-care work was limited to poor mothers; wealthier mothers' household responsibilities were a full-time occupation. But he did not take such work to be economically significant, only morally so, because “industry” was linked to rationality (Locke Reference Locke and Goldie1997; Hirschmann Reference Hirschmann2002). In the eighteenth century, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations paid little attention to women, even though he makes passing acknowledgment that some women worked for money (Smith Reference Smith2000, 78, 185, 696). Though his Lectures on Jurisprudence discussed women at greater length, particularly regarding marriage and fertility, and suggested that advances in technology would make women's inferior physical strength less significant to their ability to participate in productive labor—a view Condorcet (Reference Condorcet, de and Hunt1996) shared—for Smith “household labor was not only explicitly unproductive, but . . . guided by altruism such as a mother's love, rather than rational calculation” so necessary to political economy (Dimand, Forget, and Nyland Reference Dimand, Forget and Nyland2004, 229, 231; Smith Reference Smith, Meek, Raphael and Stein1976, 60, 143–47). Economist Nancy Folbre (Reference Folbre2001) argues that, despite his theory of moral sentiments, Smith's theory of the “invisible hand” eliminates from economic consideration the “invisible heart,” namely, the work that women do that makes it possible for productive workers to engage in their labor. For David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus in the nineteenth century, “women are likewise barely present,” and neither talked about the contributions of household labor to political economy (Dimand, Forget and Nyland Reference Dimand, Forget and Nyland2004, 229, 233; see Ricardo Reference Ricardo1963; Malthus Reference Malthus1951). Even early feminist writers on political economy such as Wakefield (Reference Wakefield1798) and Martineau (Reference Martineau1859) supported women's careers outside the home rather than argue for the economic contributions of domestic labor.

Obviously, this problem with political theories of economics is not limited to liberal ones. Karl Marx, who critiqued the fundamentals of liberal political economy, failed to include household labor in his understanding of productive labor: women would be liberated once capitalism was overturned, but Marx failed to say how socialism would change the sexual division of labor, or to acknowledge the necessity of such labor to all other kinds of labor (Hartsock Reference Hartsock1984; but see Engels Reference Engels and Leacock1972). And indeed, it was early Marxist-feminists who, by pointing out this tension in Marx's work, launched contemporary feminist attention to the political economy of domestic labor (Hartmann Reference Hartmann and Lydia1981).

A valuable contrast is presented by John Stuart Mill, who paid considerable attention to women in his theoretical and political writings, advocating not only their ability to compete in the marketplace of paid labor but also their status and respect as housewives. Mill's feminist credentials are strong: jailed at 16 years of age for distributing birth control literature, throughout his life he argued for the end of women's subordination in marriage; their rights to hold property while married; their rights to vote, to education, and to the pursuit of many gender-exclusive professions. Mill's book The Subjection of Women covered a wide variety of issues that persist into the twenty-first century, such as domestic violence, divorce, women's right to compete equally in the professions, the benefits to society of their doing so, and the questionable character of most claims about women's “nature.”

Feminists have argued that Mill is ambiguous on questions of women's work inside and outside the home, however. As Urbinati notes (Reference Urbinati2002, 180), many such criticisms tend to exaggerate the tensions in Mill's work and present the issue of gender in Mill as a moral issue instead of a political one. Clearly, Mill's argument has a strong moral character: the evils to which male supremacy subjects women, and which Mill recounts in the Subjection, led him to moral outrage about the fact that women's individuality and basic humanity are not respected by a patriarchal society that pays lip service to “protecting” the “weaker sex.” Indeed, the moral character of Mill's argument is what makes Mill so attractive to contemporary readers: he considered gender equality a matter of what today we would call “human rights.” Morality is not the only component of Mill's argument that is important to gender, however: his political economy component is also important, but it is not so often considered by political theorists interested in gender.

Similarly, though Mill's Political Economy was, according to Schumpeter (1959, 527), “the most successful treatise of the period,” Mill tends to be ignored in favor of Smith and Malthus by that subset of political economists and theorists who are interested in the history of the field. Mill's work contains various references to women who were members of the working class, as well as an admittedly oblique discussion of women's household labor and its relation to productive labor.Footnote ⁵ In this paper, I demonstrate that Mill offered a somewhat unusual conception of production that could be seen to include the sort of work that women have traditionally done in the home, providing care and sustenance for children and wage-earning husbands. I show what Mill means by productive labor and whether women's household labor can and should be considered productive labor under his conception. I show that despite his unusual conception, he himself excluded domestic labor from the category of “productive.” This exclusion was emblematic of both liberal political thought and classical political economy, but it poses a particular problem for Mill because productivity was key to property for him, and property rights were key to Mill's fight for women's equality. It thus undercut his otherwise radical arguments for women's property rights and economic equality. Moreover, this weakening of his argument was unnecessary, for by extending his unique conception of production to household labor, he would have strengthened his own argument—theoretically, rhetorically, and politically—and could have offered a powerful reconceptualization of the role of the housewife in modern society.

My argument thus does three things: first, and most narrowly, it reengages an unsettled debate within political theory about the place of gender in Mill's work and suggests an alternative interpretation. Mill's position on women's work was motivated as much by political economy considerations as moral ones, and political theorists need to pay greater attention to political economy arguments to fully understand the canonical figures on gender. This reinterpretation leads to the paper's second contribution: it more broadly suggests that Mill is representative of a crucial failure in political economic thought, as well as in egalitarian liberal thought on gender, that persists with major consequences today. Mill's inconsistency on the value of domestic labor is instructive about the more general difficulties political economists have had in “counting” women's housework, a somewhat circular argument that defines value and determines measures so as to exclude such labor.Footnote ⁶ Third, my interpretation simultaneously reveals that, despite Mill's inconsistency in its application, he offers us a conception of production that goes well beyond the narrow limits offered by other prominent political economists, and presents contemporary political scientists and theorists with a way to rethink the relationship of reproductive to productive labor, the requirements for gender equality, and the accepted categories of political economy. This last part of the argument is admittedly the most tentative, for executing those suggestions is beyond the scope of this paper. But my hope is that the political theory analysis offered here may provide provocative openings to scholars in other subfields, as well as to theorists, for developing such insights.

MILL ON WOMEN'S WORK

My argument begins, as do many feminist arguments, with Chapter Two of The Subjection of Women (Mill Reference Mill and Gray1991a). There, in the middle of an exhaustive argument for removing legal barriers to women's participation in the economy and their right to compete in the marketplace, Mill almost offhandedly asserts that most women will not in fact enter the labor force, but will choose the “career” of wife and mother. “Like a man when he chooses a profession, so, when a woman marries, it may in general be understood that she makes choice of the management of a household, and the bringing up of a family, as the first call upon her exertions.” Indeed, he goes beyond simply predicting that women will make that choice; he recommends that they do so. “The common arrangement, by which the man earns the income and the wife superintends the domestic expenditure, seems to me in general the most suitable division of labour between the two persons. . . . In an otherwise just state of things, it is not. . . I think, a desirable custom, that the wife should contribute by her labour to the income of the family” (Mill Reference Mill and Gray1991a, 522–23). This is particularly the case “when the support of the family depends, not on property, but on earnings” (523).

Objections to Mill's argument are made on a variety of grounds, usually centering on his failure to challenge the structure of the nuclear family and the sexual division of labor, or simply on the basis that being a housewife is inherently subordinate. For instance, Eisenstein (Reference Eisenstein1981, 136) maintains that “women remain limited to the patriarchal definition of motherhood, and their rights are limited by the needs of this system. One is left wondering how women experience the personal liberty Mill writes of when women are the economic dependents of their husbands.” Di Stefano (Reference Di1991, 178, 180) similarly notes that “Mill is unable or unwilling to question the sexual division of labor” and maintains that “the woman who wants to reap the benefits of liberalism's egalitarian promise,” which Mill outlines in On Liberty (Reference Mill and Gray1991b) and Subjection (Reference Mill and Gray1991a) needed to become “regendered” as a bourgeois male. Okin (Reference Okin1979) argues that “Mill's defense of traditional sex roles within the family amounts to a denial of freedom of opportunity and individual expression of talents to that majority of women whom he assumes would always choose to marry.” Given that Mill thought the family was “essential for humanity,” she concludes that “his feminism falls short of advocating true equality and freedom for married women” (226).

Shanley holds that Mill's support of the sexual division of labor undercut marital friendship, which was the ideal guiding his argument for women's equality: “Perhaps Mill's greatest oversight in his paean of marital equality was his failure to entertain the possibilities that nurturing and caring for children might provide men with useful knowledge and experiences, and that shared parenting would contribute to the friendship between spouses which he so ardently desired” (Reference Shanley1981, 242). Goldstein argues that “the restraints which Mill believed should be imposed on married women constitute a major exception to his argument for equality of individual liberty between the sexes—an exception so enormous that it threatens to swallow up the entire argument” (Reference Goldstein1980, 320, 328). Annas maintains that Mill “seems to envisage jobs being held only by the unmarried, or by middle-aged women whose children have grown up”; this seriously challenges his arguments for equality, for “How can women's education be a serious affair if it is known that most will not use it?” (Reference Annas1977, 190).

Such criticisms gain support from Mill's “Essay on Marriage and Divorce,” written 30 years earlier in concert with a companion essay on the subject by Harriet Taylor. Though Mill declares that “women will never be what they should be, nor their social position what it should be, until women, as universally as men, have the power of gaining their own livelihood,” he goes on to say, “It does not follow that a woman should actually support herself because she should be capable of doing so: in the natural course of events she will not” (Mill Reference Mill and Rossi1970, 74). As in the Subjection, Mill distinguishes between the liberty to work and actually working: all women must have the former, but married women should not do the latter.

Mill's Political Economy offers another perspective that may redeem him from such criticisms.Footnote ⁷ It is puzzling that these critiques do not take up Mill's political economy writings, for Mill's arguments about household labor are important to consider the question of women's relation to paid work.Footnote ⁸ In the chapter entitled “Of Co-operation, or the Combination of Labour,” Mill identifies the sexual division of labor as the first instance of the division of labor in production. It forms the foundation for cooperation among families, which he hypothesizes as necessary for survival in a primitive human society (Mill Reference Mill and Robson1965, 116–18). So one could infer that his aforementioned argument in the Subjection is not a simple sexist one about gender roles but a political economy argument about the most efficient way to maximize wealth. Urbinati (Reference Urbinati1991, 641) offers a similar defense on these grounds; “wife and husband must labor to support their family” and the sexual division of labor was the best way to achieve that. This did not rule out working “as a means of self-realization” for women who decided not to have children.

Mill's (Reference Mill and Robson1965) argument also supports feminist views of the “double day.” He notes that so much work is involved in being a homemaker that women's participation in the paid labor force would create unfair burdens. If he did not see this work as important and valuable, he would hardly feel compelled to defend it. Even splitting these tasks between husband and wife, as feminist critics of Mill want him to do, would still provide for an exhausting day for both partners. “Primitive contraceptive techniques, a high rate of infant mortality,” on top of “onerous household chores,” made it “far harder for Mill than it is for us to conceive of the sharing of child rearing and domestic duties” (Okin Reference Okin1979, 228). Even though Okin immediately goes on to say “it is striking that Mill chose not to question the family and the way it had developed, in any way” (Reference Okin1979, 228), perhaps Mill's was the most woman-friendly position, given the rigors of nineteenth-century housekeeping: it is enough to end the subjection of women that they have the capacity—the educational skills, the opportunities, the legal liberty—to earn their living. Such a capacity provides women with power in their marriages by providing the threat of an “exit option” that could effectively forestall husbands' domination and physical abuse, a problem with which Mill was particularly concerned (Mill Reference Mill and Gray1991a, 523). The inability to get out from under husbands' power was the most debilitating aspect of women's condition, making them, as Mill repeatedly said, “slaves:” subject to physical violence, emotional cruelty, and forced sex, producing a psychological disposition that disempowered women from developing their individuality and from making useful contributions to society.

Yet, the suspicion that Mill is promoting sexist assumptions in spite of himself is difficult to dismiss entirely; most obviously, men need not choose between parenthood and wage work but women must. It is particularly puzzling that Mill does not take up a consideration of how the family is structured given the most famous passage in the Subjection, that “what is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing—the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others” (Reference Mill and Gray1991a, 493). A key theme of Subjection is that women are how and who they are because of a patriarchal culture that made them that way. Mill is often criticized for not completing this argument: if women are encouraged not to seek outside employment, they will continue to think of themselves as “merely” wives and mothers, a condition that runs contrary to his railings against the ways in which gender subordination conditions women to love their subordinators.

As I have indicated, Mill's ambiguity should not be surprising given gendered assumptions about reproduction that dominated in the nineteenth-century West. But his stance poses problems for his argument from a political economy perspective that he did not recognize. Specifically, given his arguments in Political Economy about the features of productive labor and the importance of productivity to property and equality, Mill's argument suggests that, insofar as most women choose not to engage in market labor, most women will continue to occupy a subordinate status within society despite their improved legal status. My claim here differs from the aforementioned feminist arguments, which implicitly maintain that it is necessary for women to work for wages in order to be free and equal. That argument is problematic on a variety of grounds ranging from the Marxist rejection of capitalism to feminist theories of care and maternal thinking to postmodern arguments about “difference.” Instead, I maintain, the issue for Mill turns on a different matter, namely, recognizing the economic value of women's domestic labor.

Why this is important is that a central aspect of women's gendered social inequality for Mill is their economic inequality, and particularly the inability of married women to own property. Mill opposed coverture because having control over economic resources is essential to women's ability to maintain their independence within marriage and particularly to exit an abusive one. Property is thus fundamentally tied to women's individual freedom and equality. As early as his essay “Marriage and Divorce,” Mill says that “until . . . every girl's parents have either provided her with independent means of subsistence, or given her an education qualifying her to provide those means for herself” (Reference Mill and Rossi1970, 74), women will not be free and equal.

In Political Economy, however, Mill argues that production is key to property: “Nothing is implied in property but the right of each to his (or her) own faculties, to what he can produce by them, and to whatever he can get for them in a fair market; together with his right to give this to any other person if he chooses, and the right of that other to receive and enjoy it” (Mill Reference Mill and Robson1965, 218). His major objection “to the institution as it now exists,” is “that it recognises rights of property in individuals over things which they have not produced” (1965, 215). Although this criticism is aimed at the idle rich and the aspects of capitalism that privilege ownership over labor, it also implicitly condemns the fact that, because of coverture, men acquire property through marriage that belongs to their wives. Despite the notion that marriage is a contract, Mill notes, such unfair legal power cannot be nullified regardless of the parties' wishes. Hence in Mill's “Statement on Marriage,” he acknowledges that there was “no means of legally divesting myself of these odious powers” that he would acquire by marrying Harriet Taylor; the statement was only “a formal protest against the existing law of marriage” (Mill Reference Mill and Robson1984, 261).

But there is a logical problem with his argument: even if coverture were ended, how could women acquire property if they chose to be wives and mothers? Mill says that only “landowners, capitalists, and productive labourers .'.'. as such, obtain a share of the produce; no other person or class obtains anything, except by concession from them” including “gift or fair agreement” (Mill Reference Mill and Robson1965, 235). Housewives could inherit land or receive gifts, but otherwise they could own property only if they were productive laborers. Given that many women lived in families that “depend not on property, but on earnings” as Mill said in the Subjection (Mill Reference Mill and Gray1991a, 522), then inheriting is an unlikely source of significant property. This means that most housewives will not own property unless he counts household labor as productive labor; that is, if domestic labor produces property. If it does not, and if property rights are an important foundation for equality, signaling the essential elements of individuality and freedom, then the question of whether women can in fact be equal and free if they are housewives becomes a greater challenge. It is a challenge that feminists still face today (Okin Reference Okin1989, Mahoney Reference Mahoney1995); reading Mill reveals this challenge to be in part a result of inconsistent thinking within a liberal political economy framework.

Certainly, gifts are an important exception to my claim; property produced through productive labor can be transferred. “The right of each to what he has produced, implies a right to what has been produced by others, if obtained by their free consent” (Mill Reference Mill and Robson1965, 217). That gifts and bequests are included in Mill's conception of property under the right of contract is consistent with women's owning property even if they do not engage in productive labor. And in On Liberty Mill disparages men who fail to support their wives and children economically (Reference Mill and Gray1991b, 108). He also opposes primogeniture and claims that parents have a moral obligation to bequeath to their children who are “unable to provide for themselves,” both positions that might help some daughters (Mill Reference Mill and Robson1965, 223–25, 887–88). But he does not suggest husbands' legal duty to bequeath to wives, and he never discusses women's legal entitlement to such support either during marriage or after death or divorce. Granted, husbands were already required by law to support their wives and children (Glendon Reference Glendon1989, 112). But as Braunstein and Folbre (Reference Folbre2001) note, “the concept of ‘support’ was never explicitly defined and was legally construed as providing only a bare minimum of subsistence” (33). That leaves many housewives dependent on “gifts” from their husbands as their only means of gaining property in marriage. Yet as recent critics of “no fault” divorce have demonstrated, even if a marriage is based on mutual trust such that actual fund transfer between husband and wife is not necessary during marriage, at the time of divorce such trust hurts women, whose standard of living almost always goes down while their former husbands' standard goes up. Being able to reckon the economic value of the wife's household labor would provide women economic leverage to demand compensation for the lesser earning power they can command by virtue of being out of the labor market during the time they were housewives (Fineman Reference Fineman1991). Mill's failure on this point undercuts his feminism.

It is possible that Mill thought wages—or quid pro quo “gifts”—for housework would place the husband in the role of employer rather than a “partner”; the wife would thus still be a subordinate, even if a compensated one. After all, Mill criticized the wage contract in industry in favor of profit sharing or cooperative ownership, arguing that workers who had a stake in the success of a business would work harder and develop themselves more fully (Mill Reference Mill and Robson1965, 792–93). But “fair agreement” would have been a consistent way for Mill to realize his arguments for women's equality: namely, arguing that women's labor in the home is productive, and therefore entitled to an equal share in the property earned by the husband in the market, just as the worker in the factory trades the productive value of his labor for a share in the cooperative ownership of the business, which Mill's contemporaries Stanton and Anthony were urging (Stanton, Anthony, and Gage Reference Stanton, Anthony and Gage1882). Such an argument would strengthen his case for women's property rights and social equality and fill a significant gap in his feminism and his political economy. And indeed, Mill's somewhat unusual conception of production would lend itself to such a move.

MILL'S CONCEPTION OF PRODUCTION

Mill's (Reference Mill and Robson1965, 31) most basic definition of “productive labor” is “The labour which terminates in the production of an article fitted for some human use,” whether directly (such as a baker baking bread) or indirectly (“the miller, though employed directly in the production not of bread but of flour, is equally part of the aggregate sum of labour by which the bread is produced”). In this, he is in accord with other political economists like Smith, Malthus and Ricardo. Smith argued that productive labor, epitomized by the manufacturer, “adds, generally, to the value of the materials which he works upon, that of his own maintenance, and of his master's profit” (Reference Smith2000, 360). Ricardo even more strongly links productive labor with the production of commodities; “the value of a productive service is nothing else than the value of the commodity, which is the result” (1973, 160, 162).Footnote ⁹ And Malthus defines productive labor as “so directly productive of material wealth as to be capable of estimation in the quantity or value of the object produced, which object is capable of being transferred without the presence of the producer” (Reference Malthus1951, 35).

But although productive labor in Mill's view refers to “only those kinds of exertion which produce utilities embodied in material objects,” Mill then adds “I shall not refuse the appellation productive, to labour which yields no material product as its direct result, provided that an increase of material products is its ultimate consequence. . . . Such labour may be said to be productive indirectly or mediately, in opposition to the labour of the ploughman and the cotton-spinner, which are productive immediately” (Reference Mill and Robson1965, 49–50). The notion of “mediate production” permits Mill to engage a more generous notion of productive labor than that offered by other political economists, and might include household work. In Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy,Footnote ¹⁰ Mill counts three kinds of labor as “always productive,” the first echoing the basic definition of creating commodities. The second is “Labour and expenditures, of which the direct effect and object are, to endow human or other animated beings with faculties or qualities useful or agreeable to mankind, and possessing exchangeable value,” which would include technical training and education. And last is “Labour and expenditure, which without having for their direct object the creation of any useful material product or bodily or mental faculty or quality, yet tend indirectly to promote one or other of those ends, and are exerted or incurred solely for that purpose” (Reference Mill and Robson1967a, 84).

These passages indicate that productive labor is not simply the making of specific commodities but a larger enterprise within the economic framework of capitalism for the production of wealth: “Productive labour means labour productive of wealth” Mill says in Political Economy. But in defining wealth, he asks “whether only material products, or all useful products, are to be included in it.” In answering this question, Mill links wealth to utility. Indeed, he discusses productive labor as a whole in terms of utility: “Labour is not creative of objects, but of utilities. . . . We should regard all labour as productive which is employed in creating permanent utilities, whether embodied in human beings, or in any other animate or inanimate objects” (Mill Reference Mill and Robson1965, 46).

Mill differentiates among three kinds of utility. The first is “utilities fixed and embodied in outward objects,” and involves labor that produces such objects. The second utility, “utilities fixed and embodied in human beings,” is a bit more abstract; it includes the labor of education, both technical and general, the work of physicians, “as far as instrumental in preserving life and physical or mental efficiency,” and even the labor expended by government officials, “so far as they aim successfully at the improvement of the people” (Mill Reference Mill and Robson1965, 46). Here Mill criticizes the view that productive labor only produces “material things,” for the labor expended in learning how to build products is a necessary step of production, and therefore is itself productive. Otherwise, when a carpenter builds a piece of furniture or a house, he engages in productive labor, but the prior learning of his trade would have to be considered unproductive, which Mill calls “a purely arbitrary division” (Mill Reference Mill and Robson1967a, 77). But this second utility is subject to interpretation to determine the threads linking the labor performed to “improving the knowledge or cultivating the bodily or mental faculties of themselves or others” (47). As such, the links between such “improvement” and “production” are somewhat ambiguous, since some improvements enhance production directly, others indirectly, and others not at all.

The third utility, “consisting in a mere service rendered,” is not productive of wealth at all in Mill's view, consistent with Smith and Malthus. His examples of such labor often refer to the work of musicians and performers, who do not enhance or produce wealth but only transfer it from the ticket buyers to the performers and theater-owner (Mill Reference Mill and Robson1965, 51). The fact that they produce utility but not wealth emphasizes Mill's point that productive labor is not simply “labour which serves any useful purpose.” Though such a definition is commonly encountered, Mill disparagingly notes, it makes “the words productive and unproductive . . . superfluous” (Mill Reference Mill and Robson1967a, 76).

And yet the expansiveness of his term does seem to blur those very lines. Mill goes so far as to define productive labor as “labor that produces sources of enjoyment, either immediately or indirectly” (Mill Reference Mill and Robson1967a, 81), a definition that seems extremely broad in scope. For “the wealth of a country consists of the sum total of the permanent sources of enjoyment, whether material or immaterial, contained in it: and labour or expenditure which tends to augment or to keep up these permanent sources, should, we conceive, be termed productive.” The emphasis on enjoyment might seem to contradict his earlier assertion that performers are not engaged in productive labor; but Mill specifies here not enjoyment per se but permanent sources of enjoyment. That is, “Labour which is employed for the purpose of directly affording enjoyment, such as the labour of a performer on a musical instrument, we term unproductive labour” (82). It is important to note that the distinction Mill makes here turns not on practicality of the enterprise, but rather on the notion of accumulation. Hence, in contrast to the musician when he performs, the maker of the instrument that the musician uses engages in productive labor because “the musical instrument is a permanent source of enjoyment, which does not begin and end with the enjoying, and therefore admits of being accumulated” (83).

So is Mill distinguishing between goods (violins) and services (performance)? No; this is clear when he makes the still more remarkable claim that, even if the musician's performance is unproductive labor, his or her labor in acquiring musical skills is productive. In Mill's account, a musician's skill is as permanent as the instrument on which she plays. Musical skill is something that one “accumulates,” one must retain and build on the knowledge one has learned in order to perfect one's craft. The labor involved in musical practice thus operates through time, which is a key factor in accumulation; and such labor is as productive as is making the instrument on which one practices. Performance involves unproductive labor because the enjoyment it produces is immediate and fleeting. In such labor “society or mankind grow no richer by it, but poorer. All material products consumed by any one while he produces nothing, are so much subtracted, for the time, from the material products which society would otherwise have possessed” (Reference Mill and Robson1967a, 50).

In this, Mill follows Smith (Reference Smith2000, 361), who considers “opera singers, and opera dancers” as unproductive. But Mill's calling the study of music productive is distinctive, even though it makes labor involved in production of the second utility (“fixed and embodied in human beings”) harder to determine, rather than easier. How can we say, for instance, that last night's musical performance does not make a worker more efficient in his work the following day? After all, according to Mill, labor that is either directly or indirectly an investment in people who will produce objects that increase wealth is productive. Mill in fact notes this possibility: “some good may no doubt be produced . . . beyond the moment, upon the feelings and disposition, or general state of enjoyment of the spectators.” However, “neither the one nor the other is the effect intended, is the result for which the exhibitor works and the spectator pays; nothing but the immediate pleasure” (Mill Reference Mill and Robson1965, 47). Why intention should be relevant to the productive status of labor is a puzzle, though it is a factor Mill gestures toward several times. But at the least, we are prompted to ask: why else would the musician study and practice her craft but to perform? And if performance is not productive, how can study and practice be?

I will return to the issue of motive shortly, but what is notable is that Mill acknowledges the immaterial goods of human society, such as musical skill, as not only important to utility, but also a “permanent source of enjoyment,” a product, suggesting a broad, “humanistic” conception of production. This conception is quite distinctive to Mill, and it is precisely the breadth of Mill's conception of productive labor that allows us to consider the possibility that women's household labor is productive.Footnote ¹¹

IS WOMEN'S HOUSEHOLD LABOR PRODUCTIVE?

Mill's analogizing the occupations of wife and mother to a “profession” in the Subjection suggests that the activities engaged in by women in the household make valuable contributions to society. The rather expansive idea he has of productive labor, furthermore, as contributing sources of permanent enjoyment, his recognition that productive labor can yield intangible goods, such as skills and learning, his focus on utility rather than on objects as the outcome of productive labor, and his recognition that utility includes “improvement” of humankind all permit points of entry for a consideration of women's household labor as productive. Is Mill's lead one that contemporary political scientists can follow?

In the most basic sense, housewives produce things such as clothing that they sew or food that they cook. But the items produced do not enter into exchange and do not make wealth on Mill's view; they provide enjoyment but not “permanent sources” of enjoyment. “All labour is . . . unproductive, which ends in immediate enjoyment, without any increase of the accumulated stock of permanent means of enjoyment” (Mill Reference Mill and Robson1965, 50). This is an idea that Smith expressed as well; unproductive labor, epitomized by the “menial servant . . . does not fix or realize itself in any particular subject or vendible commodity. His services generally perish in the very instant of their performance” (Smith Reference Smith2000, 360). Though such a claim is arguably more true of cooking and cleaning that it is for a shirt a woman makes for her husband, contemporary feminists have similarly noted the transient character of household labor (Hartsock Reference Hartsock1984), suggesting that such labor does not fit the first category of direct production.

But what about the second category, of indirect or mediate production that can “endow human . . . beings with faculties or qualities useful or agreeable to mankind, and possessing exchangeable value?” Household labor might be considered productive in the mediate sense: without cooking and cleaning, workers could not go to work and produce things, they would be malnourished and dirty, succumbing more easily to disease. But two problems arise. First, this could be the case only insofar as such labor actually contributes to the worker's ability to work; perhaps cooking nutritious meals would count, for instance, but not desserts. Second, a consistency problem arises in labeling: the wife of an unemployed man or a wealthy aristocrat would not perform mediate productive labor, even if she performed the same tasks as the wife of a productive worker. Not the labor itself but the circumstances in which it was performed would constitute its productive status, which would seem at odds with Mill's definition. Whether such labor produces “exchange value” is similarly ambiguous. For instance, one may develop in one's child many “faculties or qualities” that are not exchangeable on the market, yet are crucial to developing those that are; being able to get along with others is an important contribution to various forms of production. In this, domestic labor would be quite different from technical training or specialized education, because it produces not just labor power, but human beings more generally.

Could producing humans “more generally” count as productive labor of the third kind? “Labour and expenditure, which without having for their direct object the creation of any useful material product or bodily or mental faculty or quality, yet tend indirectly to promote one or other of those ends, and are exerted or incurred solely for that purpose” (Mill Reference Mill and Robson1967a, 84) might cover the labor involved in keeping children healthy and growing until they, too, can enter the labor force. Mill in fact notes that “every human being has been brought up from infancy at the expense of much labour to some person or persons, and if this labour, or part of it, had not been bestowed, the child would never have attained the age and strength which enable him to become a labourer in his turn. To the community at large, the labour and expense of rearing its infant population form a part of the outlay which is a condition of production, and which is to be replaced with increase from the future produce of their labour” (Mill Reference Mill and Robson1965, 40). I read Mill here to include not just the direct activities of childrearing but the everyday activities of housework such as cooking and cleaning, because they are necessary to the “reproduction” of humans. In acknowledging that this labor can have an indirect relationship to production, that wealth and utility, as the measure of productive labor, can be immaterial as well as material, and that sources of enjoyment, rather than money per se, are the measure of productivity, Mill certainly sets the stage for an account of household labor as productive. Indeed, this seems to be the clarion call that feminists concerned about the economic value of housework have been looking for.

The phrase “exerted or incurred solely for that purpose,” however, is significant, indicating that intention and motive in performing such labor play a significant role; this is a somewhat unique feature of Mill's conception of production, though he never justifies its relevance. Mill maintains that “this labour and expense” of raising children and running a household “are usually incurred from other motives than to obtain such ultimate return, and, for most purposes of political economy, need not be taken into account as expenses of production” (Mill Reference Mill and Robson1965, 41). In other words, one cares for one's children not because one sees the child as a future source of labor and income, but because one loves the child (and seeks to keep it, and oneself, alive). Cooking and cleaning, care-giving activities, and the “moral education” historically attributed to mothering are thereby excluded from productive labor, even if they are important to a child's development. Such development is important and necessary regardless of whether the child becomes a productive laborer or a singer when it grows up. Hence, “we need not include the labour of producing subsistence or other necessaries of life to be consumed by productive labourers; for the main end and purpose of this labour is the subsistence itself; and though the possession of a store of it enables other work to be done, this is but an incidental consequence” (Mill Reference Mill and Robson1965, 35).

This exclusion of subsistence from the category of productive labor would seem to eliminate domestic labor. But Mill describes “the labour and the wages of domestic servants,” who are often engaged in much of the same labor as housewives, as “partly productive and partly unproductive, and cannot with propriety be ranged decidedly with either class.” Mill grudgingly acknowledges that labor “of a productive nature” includes “cookery, the last stage in the manufacture of food; or gardening, a branch of agriculture” (Mill Reference Mill and Robson1967a, 84). But even if it “does indeed create, or promote the creation of, some useful material product or bodily or mental faculty or quality,” it “is not incurred or exerted for that sole end; having also for another, and perhaps its principal end, enjoyment or the promotion of enjoyment” (84), as motive once again becomes relevant, though again we are not sure why. There is likely some disapproval of the idle rich implicit in his remarks, for the notion of enjoyment takes on a decidedly different significance when Mill talks about household labor than it does elsewhere in his writings.Footnote ¹² Permanence and accumulation factor into his assessment as well: the work servants do, like that of the housewife, results in transient results rather than permanent ones. But housewives also participate in cookery and gardening, which he allows as productive when servants do them. These remarks about paid domestic labor therefore somewhat undercut his exclusion of subsistence labor from the category of production, for the only significant difference between the work of the servant and that of the wife is that the latter is unpaid. Mill thus demonstrates a dominant theme in classical political economy: it is not “the nature of the work performed by women which explains their relationship to production” but rather “their relations of production which explain why their work is excluded from the realm of value” (Delphy Reference Delphy1984, 60).

This inconsistency on the part of a leading feminist such as Mill suggests a deeper blockage to calling household labor productive. Mill's disparaging picture of paid domestic labor and his refusal to call such labor productive when wives perform it for free dovetail with his aforementioned argument in the Subjection that wives in families dependent on wages rather than on property should not work outside the home. Of course, this might imply that wealthy married women should pursue productive labor if they paid other people to perform their household labor for them. That would suggest that it is not merely gender, but the practical necessities of class and the hardships of housework in the nineteenth century that inform his argument. The right of women to work for wages is a consistent theme in the Subjection, but many feminist commentators have wrestled over what Mill means. Many agree with Rossi that Mill consistently maintained that “a woman's goal would continue to be marriage to a man she loved . . . he saw no benefit to a wife's contributing to the income of the family” (Reference Rossi and Rossi1970, 23). On the other side, Urbaniti argues that “Mill wanted to assure his Victorian readers that even without formal obligation, women would choose to raise a family”; this was “a prudent strategy . . . very common among the early emancipationists and not only in England” (Reference Urbinati1991, 640). Though I agree with Urbinati about the rhetorical force of Mill's argument, I believe it is more problematic than she indicates, though on different grounds than Rossi. For beginning in “Marriage and Divorce,” Mill offers specifically economic justifications, and not just moral or even political ones: “It is not desirable to burthen the labour market with a double number of competitors. In a healthy state of things, the husband would be able by his single exertions to earn all that is necessary for both: there would be no need that the wife should take part in the mere providing of what is required to support life” (Mill Reference Mill and Rossi1970, 74–75). This would seem to sacrifice women's individuality, which he otherwise champions, to a greater collective good of political economy.

This same reasoning is later echoed in Political Economy, where Mill claims that overpopulation among workers depresses wages; he advocates mass emigration and controls on reproduction in order to reduce the supply of workers and thereby push wages up (Mill Reference Mill and Robson1965, 367, 374–76). Women's participation in paid labor would thus similarly depress men's wages by doubling the supply of workers. In “Marriage and Divorce,” however, Mill instead continues in a vein that is arguably more “moral” in character: “it will be for the happiness of both that her occupation should rather be to adorn and beautify [the home]. Except in the class of actual day-labourers, that will be her natural task, if task it can be called, which will in so great a measure be accomplished rather by being than by doing” (Mill Reference Mill and Rossi1970, 74–75). Here he not only advocates against women's participation in paid productive labor; he does so in a rather sexist way. Instead of relying on standard sexist clichés of women's passive role in “beautifying life,” why does he not add to his political economy argument in that essay by emphasizing the necessary work that women do in the home that indirectly supports production?

Obviously, this essay predates Political Economy (1965) by 15 years, and the chronology of these three works raises the obvious question: might Mill have changed his mind over the course of his career? After all, in Subjection Mill indicates that women's swelling of the labor market is a good thing, “doubling the mass of mental faculties available for the higher service of humanity” such as “a public teacher, or an administrator of some branch of public or social affairs” (Mill Reference Mill and Gray1991a, 561). His long affiliation with Harriet Taylor might have produced an increasingly radical view on this issue, for she considered women's paid employment essential to their emancipation (Jacobs Reference Jacobs2002). In 1851, three years after the first edition of Political Economy, Mill wrote his “Statement on Marriage,” and on the evidence of their correspondence he did not seem to think that Taylor's domestic responsibilities should usurp her political and intellectual activities.

This is where Political Economy is particularly important. Taylor was quite involved in Mill's writing of this work, advising numerous modifications, and indeed possibly writing portions of his remarks on socialism. As Jacobs notes, “Harriet and John together were far more committed to complete equality than when John worked alone” (Jacobs Reference Jacobs2002, 217). After the original manuscript was completed around 1847, there were multiple published editions of the Political Economy issued in 1848, 1849, 1852, 1857, 1865, and 1871. Though the 1871 edition is considered authoritative, because it was the final edition, each of these prior editions was revised by Mill. Robson's meticulous notation of these changes in the Collected Works provides useful clues to the trajectory of Mill's views on married women's working, and whether the Subjection—written in 1861, but not published until 1868—should be interpreted to support it, in contrast to “Marriage and Divorce.”Footnote ¹³

In Book 2, chapter 14, Mill discusses this issue most directly; specifically, the depressing effect on income when women work with their husbands, for “the earnings of the whole family” will generally be no more than the man would have earned if he were the sole provider (Mill Reference Mill and Robson1965, 393). This foreshadowing of Becker's (Reference Becker1991) efficiency model of the family may have been limited to the artisan trades, for in the original manuscript, 1848, and 1849 editions, Mill then says on the following page that “The case of factory women and children may be quoted on the other side of the question; but that case is an exception to ordinary principles, inasmuch as from successive improvements in machinery, and a consequent progressive cheapening of the manufactured article, the expansion of factory employment has for half a century outstripped even the rapid growth of the factory population” (394). This statement could be read as an argument in favor of married women's working in factories, for they do not depress wages—that is why this is “the other side of the question”—and so women's wages would enhance the family's income. This would seem to directly contradict his political economy reasoning in “Marriage and Divorce” (Mill Reference Mill and Rossi1970) and suggest a trajectory of increasing radicalism on this issue.

But in 1852, the first edition after Taylor and Mill were married, this sentence was deleted and replaced by the following: “No argument can be hence derived for the exclusion of women from the liberty of competing in the labour market. Even [changed to “: since even” in 1865] when no more is earned by the labour of a man and a woman than would have been earned by the man alone, the advantage to the woman of not depending on a master for subsistence is [changed to “may be” in 1862] more than an equivalent” (Reference Mill and Robson1965, 394). This statement might seem an even stronger endorsement of married women's working, suggesting Taylor's possible influence. But a closer reading shows that it is actually weaker. Mill here seems to withdraw from the position that women's work in factories does not depress wages; otherwise, what would their independence need to be “an equivalent” for? Given his repeated arguments elsewhere in Political Economy about the detrimental effects on wages of a too-large labor supply, here he must mean that independence is the trade-off for depressed wages, and Mill instead makes the same moral argument found in the Subjection about the value of women's liberty. Moreover, his stress on the “liberty of competing,” is consistent with the view he expresses in “Marriage and Divorce”: that women should have the freedom to work does not mean that they actually should work, unless they have to (e.g., to get free of an abusive husband).

The change indicated previously from “is equivalent” to “may be equivalent” in 1862, a few years after Taylor's death, suggests a modest further weakening of Mill's support. But in 1865 Mill added the following more definitive sentence: “It cannot, however, be considered desirable as a permanent element in the condition of a labouring class, that the mother of the family (the case of single women is totally different) should be under the necessity of working for subsistence, at least elsewhere than in their place of abode” (394). This is a clear statement that agrees with the sentiments of both “Marriage and Divorce” and the final passages of Chapter 2 of Subjection; most married women, particularly those whose families depend on wages rather than property, should not work. Moreover, this prescription holds regardless of context, that is, whether there is an overabundance of labor, as was currently the case, or a shortage, as would be the case if some of his proposals for emigration were adopted.Footnote ¹⁴

This reading is further supported by chapter 3 of the Subjection, published in 1868, in a passage not often cited. There, Mill blames women's responsibility for “superintendence of the family . . . [and] household” for women's apparent inferiority “even in the pursuits which are open to both” sexes, because it leaves them “no time” to develop talents. But he then says that families “so rich as to admit to delegating that task to hired agency” suffer for it, “submitting to all the waste and malversation inseparable from that mode of conducting it” (Reference Mill and Gray1991a, 551). Instead, as Mill said in “Marriage and Divorce,” upper class housewives should do their own housework: “As for household superintendence, if nothing be meant but merely seeing that servants do their duty, that is not an occupation; every woman that is capable of doing it at all can do it without devoting anything like half an hour every day to that purpose peculiarly. . . . But if it be meant that the mistress of a family shall herself do the work of servants, that is good and will naturally take place in the rank in which there do not exist the means of hiring servants; but nowhere else” (Reference Mill and Rossi1970, 75). In conceding that most wealthy women will not likely do their own domestic work, he wants such women to have jobs rather than be useless ornaments who pay social calls. By the time of the Subjection Mill seems to have a deeper appreciation for the burdens of household management even when there are servants (Reference Mill and Gray1991a, 551); but Mill's preference seems to be that they take up household labor themselves. When combined with his recognition of the burdens of housework in chapter 2, the logical conclusion is that no married women should work outside the home. This obligation should last until age “forty or fifty” (Reference Mill and Gray1991a, 580) at which point a woman could then take up other activities. Thus while not a universal proscription against married women's paid labor, Mill clearly advocates a serious curtailment. Does this fundamentally challenge his feminism, as others have claimed? I think not, for Mill criticizes the idea “that it is [women's] nature, to live for others. . . . and to have no life but in their affections . . . [for] the men with whom they are connected, or to the children who constitute an additional and indefeasible tie between them and a man” (Reference Mill and Gray1991a, 486). But consistency between these two apparently opposing sides of Mill could be maintained only if he argued for the social and economic value of women's domestic labor.

MILL'S POLITICAL ECONOMY: WHAT CAN IT GIVE US?

In one sense, it might seem that Mill's failure to grant domestic labor productive status does not really affect his argument. For as Mill (Reference Mill and Robson1965) notes, “There is much labour, and of a high order of usefulness, of which production is not the object. . . .Production not being the sole end of human existence, the term unproductive does not necessarily imply any stigma” (45). In terms of political economy, women's labor could be useful and important even if it is not productive. This could have made an important contribution to feminist arguments; most feminists care less about whether women's work is labeled “productive” than they do about recognizing and compensating its economic worth. Blaug (Reference Blaug1978, 188) suggests that Mill is actually less concerned with production than he is with distribution, an emphasis arguably shared by twentieth and twenty-first century feminists. In this light, Mill could have written an elaborate defense of women's work and the role that women play in the family, calculating principles of economic redistribution to ensure women's economic support if their husbands should let them down. This would have been particularly useful to the rhetorical strategy that Urbinati (Reference Urbinati1991, Reference Urbinati2002) identifies in the Subjection; what a brilliant rhetorical move it would have been to highlight for men the social and economic value of women's household labor. It would have strengthened the justification for women's continuing in that role, thus reassuring his skeptical readers that their wives would not abandon their current duties, while simultaneously providing a foundation in that labor—rather than despite it—for women's rights to vote, property, education, and even paid work in the event of widowhood, domestic abuse, or other familial tragedy. That Mill made no such argument is particularly puzzling given the variety of instances where United States legislatures, in granting women control over their earnings and other property rights after the Civil War, explicitly denied women any right to compensation for household labor (Braunstein and Folbre Reference Folbre2001, 34). Mill must have been aware of such cases.

Perhaps his failure stems from the fact that sustaining a division between “productive” and “useful” as applied to housework would have required Mill to redefine the foundation for property, which he claims can only derive from productive labor. This is a conception that harkens back to Locke (Reference Locke and Laslett1993) whose theory established an indelible link in capitalism between property and (certain kinds of) labor. If housewives are not engaged in productive labor, then by definition the only way for them to obtain property is “by gift or by fair agreement . . . from those who produced,” namely, their husbands or parents. But Mill (Reference Mill and Rossi1970, Reference Mill and Gray1991a) has already shown his readers that women's “subjection” is tied up with their lack of power to bargain a “fair agreement” in the first place; and women's reliance on “gift” continues a relation of dependence. Mill's definition also excludes many women from property rights altogether, particularly the working class women whose families depend on wages rather than property. Thus, given the link Mill establishes among production, property, and individuality, the designation of women's household labor as unproductive weakens his arguments for all women's equality.

It also led Mill to an inconsistency regarding the role of intention and motive in production, which seems to be relevant primarily when applied to women's household labor. Mill's view was consistent with the contemporary view of the “sentimental family” that emerged in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, in which a woman works out of love for children and spouse, or perhaps a sense of duty about her social role (Okin Reference Okin1982); her intention is different from that of the domestic laborer, who cleans and cooks to earn a wage. But this stress on women's motives produces a glaring inconsistency, for motives do not affect the status of factory labor conducted by men. If motives did apply to such labor, then Mill would need to argue that the portion of the father's income devoted to the child's upkeep should not be counted in productive labor either. One could certainly argue that the father works in a factory in order to support his family because he loves them, much as the mother cares for her children and husband because she loves them. That the father's work coincides with the needs of production is not his motivation any more than it is the mother's motivation that her children should grow up to be factory workers: if he could make more money by singing comic opera, he would do it. Indeed, men's motives in performing factory work could be trivial or selfish—to earn enough to get drunk, for instance—without affecting its productive status. It would seem that the only difference between the father's wage labor and the mother's household labor is, once again, that the latter is unpaid.

This somewhat circular reasoning turns things on their head: the father's motive may be love for his family, but his salary is the result of productive labor by virtue of the work he performs, regardless of whether he did it for his family or not. By contrast, even if the woman performs domestic labor because she has no choice—if she fears her husband, is economically dependent on him, or has become an unthinking drudge—in Mill's account her labor is unproductive because she does it for her family. But why should baking a loaf of bread differ whether it is made by a baker, a household cook for wages, or a wife for free? After all, if servants' work has at least some exchange value, then the wife's similar labor should have the same exchange value: if she did not do it within the framework of patriarchal marriage, the man would need to buy it. The fact that she does it for free thereby makes an active contribution to the household economy: as Delphy notes, production for self-consumption does involve a form of remuneration, both in terms of the product produced—a loaf of bread—and the savings incurred by not purchasing the item. In families, however, husbands and children also consume the wife's labor, and she is not remunerated by them directly, sometimes not even indirectly. Rather, her labor is expropriated. (Delphy Reference Delphy1984, 81–85; Waring Reference Waring1999).

Finally, Mill fails to see the overtly productive value, by his own definition, of biological reproduction. Given the inadequacy of birth control, as Mill knew, pregnancy was very often unplanned. In large families with low incomes, children would have to become productive laborers at a young age. Though opposed to children being “overworked,” Mill did not express blanket opposition to child labor (1960, 925). However, Mill disapproved of “excessive” reproduction among the lower classes as the primary cause of poverty, and he supported Poor Law reforms aimed at reducing the population of the workers (Mill Reference Mill and Robson1965, 367, 359).Footnote ¹⁵ But this was also tied up with his championing of women's economic rights; one of the first ways in which married women would exercise their new found power would be to limit the number of children they had. Overpopulation was the result of male moral failings and abuse of power; “men follow their brute instincts without consideration” (Reference Mill and Robson1965, 372, 367).

Mill's argument also had a political economy rationale, however; fewer children not only made it easier for working fathers to support them, but also reduced the future population of workers, which would force wages up. This ignores the possibility that, given high infant mortality rates among the laboring classes, women could desire multiple pregnancies out of economic self-interest, viz. to produce children who could be put to paid work (Zerilli Reference Zerilli1994, 105). This likely possibility runs against Mill's romantic idea of why mothers do the work they do: but whether children's worker status was the result of their parents' thoughtless procreation or whether children were specifically produced to contribute to the family's income, raising children under such conditions locates women's work in the second kind of productive labor, for it directly contributes to the production and maintenance of productive workers and is intended to do so. In this regard, Mill is more short-sighted than Adam Smith, who says “a marriage which affords three children is certainly more productive than one which affords only two” (Smith Reference Smith2000, 731).

The inconsistencies I have outlined here suggest that Mill was blind to his own biases. I believe that pointing them out not only deepens our understanding of his theory, but also makes more apparent the similarities to our own contemporary biases, thus helping explain the entrenched resistance to recognizing and compensating the economic value of women's household labor. After all, Mill's denial of productive status to domestic labor is perfectly in keeping with the dominant strains of modern and contemporary political economy, and “the sentimental family” is an ideal that still persists to explain the sexual division of labor today (Hochschild Reference Hochschild1989; Mahoney Reference Mahoney1995). The circularity of the exclusion of women's domestic labor from productive labor is part and parcel of the liberal political and economic project. Despite Mill's careful distinction between “productive” and “useful”—one insisted on by most other nineteenth-century political economists as well—the former is not simply a scientific term of political economy in Mill's account, but a term of social value and moral significance: in short, as Galbraith (Reference Galbraith1979) suggests, it is ideological, a function of power in how categories are defined and whose labor is valued.

So my argument should not be taken to single out Mill for his sexism. Rather, it is precisely because of Mill's strong feminism, and because his conception of production allows space for an argument that women's labor is productive, that his withdrawal from that potential poses such a puzzle. The tensions in Mill's argument permit us to read him against himself, and widen the path that he opened but was reluctant to follow for whatever reasons. Mill's Subjection, like many of his other writings, shows that he is not afraid of radical change. His second and third concepts of production and his definition of wealth along three different lines of utility permit him to argue for the productive value of household labor because it maintained productive workers. This would not only have offered a much stronger argument for women's choosing the “career” of wife and mother, but at the same time would have strengthened his argument about equality in marriage. It also would have strengthened his claims that women are entitled to rights of suffrage and property. Contemporary political theorists, political scientists, and political economists might draw on Mill's expanded conception of productive labor that I have detailed here to complete the argument he began.

A particular suggestion Mill's argument offers would be to reconnect the concepts “useful” and “productive.” Mill's distinction between the two probably hails back to Smith (Reference Smith2000), whose opening pages of Wealth of Nations uses the terms synonymously, a move criticized by Ricardo (Reference Ricardo1963, 6–7) and Malthus (Reference Malthus1951, 35; see also Bladen Reference Bladen1960, 626–28, Schumpeter Reference Schumpeter1954, 631). Mill seems to be engaged in a similar effort to reestablish a distinction, and yet the concept of “usefulness” is contained in his definitions of all three kinds of productive labor. By reconnecting the two, Mill could have sustained his conception of property as being founded on production, but extended it to include rights to remuneration for, and a duty to acknowledge the value of, socially “useful” labor, such as housework. He implicitly relies on such an argument when he declares that the work of soldiers in protecting the country from invasion is not productive labor, yet soldiers must be paid. Indeed, comparing the soldier's work to the musician's is instructive; though both are unproductive, the latter is paid when audience members choose to attend his performance, in a voluntary transfer, whereas the soldier is remunerated out of taxes regardless of citizens' preferences.Footnote ¹⁶ Both constitute a “fair agreement,” but reflect different degrees of autonomous choice on the part of the payer. The housewife, I suggest, would be something between the two: individual men who desired a housewife would have an obligation to remunerate the individual women they contract with; but at the same time, society as a whole would benefit from the domestic labor that resulted in the husband's, and eventually children's, work performance in turn.

Considering domestic labor as useful to production would allow women to qualify for a minimum subsistence dividend, which Mill gestures toward briefly in his discussion of Fourierism. Though Mill saw such dividends linked to production—for without production, the society would be unable to pay anything to anyone—this “certain minimum is first assigned for the subsistence of every member of the community, whether capable or not of labour. The remainder of the produce is shared in certain proportions, to be determined beforehand, among the three elements, Labour, Capital, and Talent” (Mill Reference Mill and Robson1965, 212). Given his recognition of the burdens of household labor, Mill could not consistently say that housewives are “not capable of labor.” So this would require Mill to count domestic labor as productive, or at least as a “useful” part of the labor cooperative. If Mill thought marriage should be, in Urbinati's terms, a cooperative venture among equals and friends (Reference Urbinati2002, 188) this would be an easy way to recognize the collective good of women's labor. Some, such as Urbinati, Sarvasy (Reference Sarvasy1984), and Schumpeter (Reference Schumpeter1954) have maintained that Mill is a socialist, which would surely be in keeping with this interpretation, though I believe this passage is too slight evidence from which to infer Mill's support of socialism, on which he wrote several chapters that were excluded from Political Economy (Mill Reference Mill and Robson1967b).Footnote ¹⁷ But if he was, the extension of the concept of productive labor to domestic labor would have even more heft, as numerous Marxist-feminists have argued. At the least, tying “useful” to “productive” would support Mill's advocacy for changing marriage laws, permitting wives to negotiate marriage contracts—as Mill and Taylor were not free to do—that establish “fair agreements” binding husbands to economic support in exchange for household labor by their wives, even in the case of divorce.

More broadly, Mill's second and third concepts of productive labor, and his inclusion of the second utility in his calculation of wealth, provide significant conceptual apparatuses for the economic valuing of women's labor and its inclusion in major economic indices. Scholars such as Martha Nussbaum (Reference Nussbaum2001) and Amartya Sen (Reference Sen1999) have sought to change economists' conceptions of development in ways that help recognize the economic contributions that women make, particularly “in the home,” which is defined to include whatever unpaid work women do, such as walking miles to obtain water. Moreover, Mill at least recognizes that there is some productive labor in the household when, against Smith, he recognizes cooking and agriculture performed by servants. This is something that feminist economists have advocated, in opposition to the dominant view that women's baking, cooking, or growing produce in small vegetable gardens is part of housework and excluded from productive labor (Waring Reference Waring1999).

The fact that Mill failed to realize fully the radical potential in his own argument does not negate the fact that he has shown us a way to declare the economic value of women's household labor. I suggest that political scientists, feminist or not, would do well to attend closely to his arguments. Political theorists need to attend more to the political economic arguments of the figures they study; political economists would do well to return to the historical figures for arguments of contemporary relevance; and all political scientists can learn from Mill the centrality of gender equality to a fair and just world.