Gendered Social Reproduction

Social reproduction encompasses all the necessities such as activities, relationships, and behaviours in order to sustain life and social institutions such as the family. It is a framework that strives to explain capitalism and how it institutionalizes the dependency of the private and public spheres (Trotz, 2016). Domestic work such as caring for household members and homemaking are products of social reproduction that is heavily gendered. In the majority of households, the women are the ones who take on the task of being the homemaker and caretaker. Social reproduction is meant to be a non-reductionist way of exhibiting the relation between gender stratification and capitalism to demonstrate how this unpaid, domestic labour has been enforced

Caring labour refers to the work of looking after a dependent by fostering their physical, emotional or developmental needs (Trotz, 2017). Generally, this includes female migrants from developing nations relocating to work as domestic workers due to the evident stereotype that women are embodiments of more care, love and emotions that make them more suitable as caretakers. By obtaining these maternal features, these women are drafted into the chain of care—a linear proportion of women migrate from the third to the first world while leaving their biological families behind in order to financially support them from abroad (Manalansan, 2008). The act aids the process of globalization through the flow of money from the first world to third world. However, the mothers leaving their own children to take on the physical and emotional labour for the first world family leads to “care drain” which Hochschild claims is essentially is displacing the care for the elderly, children and ill of the third world country to the first world country (Hochschild, 2002). Nevertheless, the concept of the transnational care chain is a consequence of social reproduction that lacks an intersectional

(2) Discuss why time-use surveys have been an important tool for feminists, and offer one example of how they have been used (10). A time-use survey documents a collection of data pertaining to the time, on average, individuals spend on certain activities (Tro. This may be based on different variables such as women, men and if they or their spouse are working and/or single. Statistics Canada utilizes the survey to obtain data on the population and find trends and patterns, such as to demonstrate the drastic differences in hours of household domestic work done by women and men. The results of these are favourable for feminists to analyze and identify major discrepancies between men and