Social Reproduction: Feminist Political Economy Challenges Neo-Liberalism.

Margaret Conrad is a history professor at Acadia University and editor
of They Planted Well: New England Planters in Maritime Canada.

One of the major contributions of feminist scholarship has been to identify and explore the concept of social reproduction, defined here as maintaining and reproducing people on a daily and generational basis. While corporations take human resources very seriously indeed, social reproduction—giving birth, feeding, clothing, sheltering, nursing, nurturing, and socializing—has only recently received the attention it deserves. The recent interest has emerged, in part, because this is caring work, and it has historically been done by women, without pay, within family and community contexts. Twentieth-century welfare state programs shouldered some of the burden of social reproduction, but were seriously undermined by governments that emphasized unregulated markets, lower taxes, and individualism. Recognizing that women bear the brunt of deregulation and privatization, participants in the Toronto-based Feminism and Political Economy Network began in the 1990s to explore the redistribution of social reproduction work across the state, market, household, and voluntary sectors under the impact of neo-liberal policies. Most of the ten essays in this volume are the result of this highly successful collaborative effort.

Care was taken to make this collection accessible and comprehensive. The first four chapters offer valuable contextual information: the evolution of feminist political economy scholarship; the Canadian federal system that makes social reproduction policy a political football among various jurisdictions; the global power relationships that enable Canada to import cheap immigrant labour to do caring work; and the role of unions in nudging society toward better work-life balance. With one exception—an essay on how privatization served as a strategy for eliminating pay equity in health care services in British Columbia—the remaining essays focus on Ontario, which, under the premiership of Mike Harris (1995–2003), embraced neo-liberalism with uncommon zeal. The evidence from this well-grounded research demonstrates that women do shoulder most of the burden of neo-liberal policies. It challenges the notion that community, family, and friends can make up for the cuts in social spending that supports the work of social reproduction in Canada’s highly urbanized and individualized society. A call to action, this book is also a starting point for anyone interested in the theoretical foundations and experiential complexities of social reproduction in Canada.