The cleaning, cooking, and other tasks needed to keep a house clean and organized.
Compound word from 'house' (Old English 'hūs') and 'work' (Old English 'weorc'). The term 'housework' became common in the late 1800s as industrial society created a distinction between paid 'work' and unpaid home labor.
The invention of the word 'housework' itself is revealing—before industrialization, maintaining a home was just called 'life,' but once people started selling their labor for money, housework became categorized as its own separate thing, changing how we think about its value.
Housework has been systematically coded as women's 'natural' labor and devalued economically. Unpaid domestic labor sustains all economies but is feminized as invisible.
Name it as work. Acknowledge that housework is labor requiring skill. Use 'domestic labor' or 'household management' to signal value.
["domestic labor","household management","homecare work"]
Feminist economists have documented housework's GDP equivalent; care workers globally assert recognition and fair wages for essential labor.
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