The Supreme Court’s recent recognition of homemakers as “nation builders” has understandably been welcomed as a long overdue acknowledgment of a truth that millions of women have lived for generations and countless families have quietly depended upon without ever quite naming or acknowledging. The Court faced the challenge of calculating the compensation of the death of the wife in a road accident and as it assigned a notional value to domestic work, it did what economic discourses have long historically resisted.
In other words, the Supreme Court recognised that the labour performed within households is labour. It creates value, sustains lives, reproduces communities, and makes possible the very forms of productive activity that economists, governments, and policymakers are accustomed to celebrating.
Yet beneath the welcome symbolism of the judgment lies a more disquieting question. If homemakers are indeed nation builders, why has the nation found it so difficult to see them? Why does recognition arrive most readily at the moment of death, when a court is compelled to calculate the consequences of a woman’s death, while the labour itself continues to unfold every day in a space that remains curiously peripheral to the language of economics?
The question is worth dwelling upon because it directs attention away from the judgment itself and towards the assumptions that make such recognition appear exceptional in the first place. For decades, feminist scholars have pointed out that the distinction between productive and unproductive labour, between economy and household, between production and reproduction, is neither natural nor self-evident. It is a political distinction that has acquired the appearance of nature or natural through repetition. Once established, however, it produces a peculiar inversion. The activities most essential to sustaining life become those least likely to be recognised as economically significant.
This was the insight that animated the ‘Wages for Housework’ campaign of the 1970s. When Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and Selma James demanded wages for domestic labour, they were not merely seeking a salary for homemakers, they sought to expose the hidden structure upon which capitalist economies rest. The worker arriving at a factory, an office, a school, or a government institution does not arrive fully formed. Somebody has fed that worker, cared for that worker during illness, raised that worker as a child, absorbed emotional crises, maintained living spaces, and performed the innumerable acts of care through which human beings become capable of participating in economic life. Yet the labour that reproduces labour power strangely remains outside the categories through which production is understood.
Federici’s contribution lies in her insistence that housework is not external to capitalism but one of its conditions of possibility. Capital accumulates not merely through what happens in factories and offices but through its ability to extract enormous reservoirs of labour for which it does not pay. Domestic labour though highly valuable, is ignored because its invisibility is economically useful.
If Federici exposes why domestic labour remains unpaid, Marilyn Waring reveals why women remain uncounted. In her influential work If Women Counted, Waring demonstrated that national accounting systems were never designed to measure the activities that sustain social life. They were designed to measure only the market transactions. Hence, the frameworks through which nations calculate wealth and prosperity were constructed in ways that rendered large portions of women’s work conceptually invisible from the very outset. To put it simply, it sounds nothing short of absurd. A woman preparing meals for her family contributes nothing to GDP. The same meal purchased from a restaurant contributes to economic growth. A mother caring for her child remains economically inactive. The same care purchased through the market becomes productive labour. The activity remains unchanged. What changes is its relationship to exchange.
Waring’s argument exposes the extent to which economic measurement reflects a particular philosophy of value. GDP records transactions with extraordinary precision while remaining largely indifferent to the activities that make those transactions possible. It can quantify military expenditure, financial speculation, and commodity production, yet fails to recognise the labour involved in feeding children, tending to the elderly, caring for the sick, or maintaining households. The economy, in other words, counts what passes through markets and quietly excludes much of what sustains life.
Devaki Jain, the Indian economist explained this conundrum by demonstrating how statistical categories themselves reproduce invisibility. Through her ‘Time Use Surveys’, Jain shows that women who appeared “economically inactive” within conventional labour statistics were often engaged in a dizzying array of activities like collecting water, gathering fuel, tending livestock, processing food, caring for children, supporting agricultural work, managing households, and sustaining networks of community survival. Once ‘time’ instead of ‘wages’ become the unit of analysis, an entirely different economy comes into view. Women who had been categorised as ‘non-workers’ now emerged as individuals performing longer hours of labour than men.
The ‘Time Use Survey’ extends beyond methodology as it reveals that invisibility is produced through the categories by which societies choose to organise knowledge. Michel Foucault’s analysis that systems of knowledge do not simply describe reality but actively organise it, reveals that statistics, classifications, surveys, and economic indicators function not as neutral instruments but as technologies of visibility. They determine what becomes legible and what recedes into oblivion. GDP does not simply measure the economy, more dangerously it defines what economy is. And if the homemaker disappears, it is because the dominant economic frameworks have already determined where value resides. Even when the homemaker finally gets recognition as with the Court’s ruling, it only addresses the cultural invisibility because as Nancy Fraser argues, it is the redistribution that would addresses material inequality. The problem confronting homemakers is that they have historically been denied both. Their labour has been culturally devalued and materially uncompensated. In order to recognize homemakers as nation builders, structural redistribution is essential, lest it remains only a symbolic inclusion.
Diane Elson extends the argument in analysing how economies depend upon women’s unpaid labour not only within households but also as a mechanism through which states manage crises. When public healthcare deteriorates, when childcare remains inaccessible or when welfare provisions are reduced, the resulting burdens do not vanish, it gets transferred and more often than not, they reappear within households as additional responsibilities carried by women. Elson’s description of women as the economy’s “shock absorbers” remains one of the most powerful formulations in feminist economics because it captures the silent transfer through which public failures become private obligations which we all witnessed at a large scale during the Covid-19 Pandemic. The fiscal prudence at the level of policy during whether during emergencies, lockdown or any other calamity translates into longer days, intensified caregiving responsibilities, and greater unpaid labour at the level of everyday life for women.
Does it mean that we are asking the wrong question all this time and it’s not really about the monetary value of domestic work. Amartya Sen’s capability approach offers a useful way of thinking beyond the language of valuation alone. Sen’s central insight was that human well-being cannot be reduced to income. What matters are the substantive freedoms individuals possess to live lives they have reason to value. The predicament of homemakers is not merely that they remain unpaid. It is in reality those decades devoted to sustaining households that of the leave women physically unfit without independent assets, pension rights, social security, economic autonomy, or meaningful control over their futures. Thus, we need to move the conversation from compensation to capability.
A society genuinely committed to recognising care would therefore have to think beyond symbolic gestures and beyond wages alone. It would require pensions for caregivers, universal social security, robust childcare systems, healthcare guarantees, inheritance protections, and policies that expand women’s capabilities rather than merely assigning monetary value to their labour like 30,000 rupees.
The Supreme Court’s judgment is not merely the value of domestic labour but the limitations of the frameworks through which value itself is understood. For too long, economies have been imagined through the language of production while treating the reproduction of life as an afterthought. Feminist scholars have spent decades challenging this hierarchy. Societies survive not because markets function efficiently but because vast amounts of labour continue to be performed beyond the market’s gaze.
The homemaker has always been a nation builder. The real challenge posed by the Court’s judgment is whether we are prepared to reconstruct our understanding of the economy around that fact, or whether we will continue to celebrate the labour that sustains society while organising our measures of prosperity around everything except the work that makes life possible.
(The author teaches at Sarojini Naidu Centre for Women’s Studies at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi)
[1] “We are also of the view that the housewife contributes to the growth of the human being and the nation. The homemaker builds nation. So we have laid down the principles, and as a nation builder, we have housewife, we have quantified the amount that the loss of domestic care monthly income minimum in any event would be 30,000 per month,” Justice Karol said at the time of pronouncement. “The homemakers, to put it directly, actually are the ‘nation builders’ and they ought to be recognised as such.” The Court stringently observed that homemakers continue to be perceived as dependent on earning members despite the household substantially depending on their labour and care. The bench noted that unpaid domestic and caregiving work performed by women remains economically undervalued despite its enormous contribution to society and the economy. “It is ironic to describe a homemaker as dependant on earning members, when, in reality the household’s functioning depends substantially on the homemaker,” the Bench said. The judgment contains an extensive discussion on the social, emotional, economic and psychological contributions made by homemakers. Referring to women as the first teachers of children and the unseen force behind families, the Court said homemakers play a central role in shaping human capital, social bonds and national development: https://www.livelaw.in/top-stories/homemakers-are-nation-builders-supreme-court-quantifies-homemaker-contribution-as-rs-30k-per-month-537483
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