Never heard of her, although yes, I have long loved the mythic and real-life heroine of the Wild West Shows, Annie Oakley – so, are we talking Annie, only now she’s requesting from the great beyond that we call her the more dignified ‘Ann’? Nope. Ann Oakley. Ann. And y’know, it’s yet another instance of how did I not know how she is? How?!!
So, then, who the hell is she? Well, she is a very, very important British sociologist who, when researching a possible topic for her doctoral thesis, decided she wanted to study HOUSEWORK. This was in the late 1960s, and her field, dominated by men – male tutors, professors, administrators, and potential mentors – were simply not interested in housework as a course of study, because of course they weren’t. Sociology in the 1940s or 1950s and yes, in the 1960s did not consider what women (half the population) did to maintain and keep house to be work, making the labor that happened inside the home invisible. There were, however, respected long-term studies of factory labor, office labor, professional white collar careers, and even labor unions, including their central role in British politics.
And. There were no serious academic studies, long or short term – of the unpaid domestic labor performed daily by women and girls in households across Britain or anywhere else. Oakley would later write that the absence of such studies was not ‘just’ an oversight; it was, in her phrase, “the inbuilt sexism of sociology.” Honey, it was and ain’t just sociology.
Oakley followed her true interest and curiosity, doing her research anyway, interviewing forty London women from both the working and middle classes, all of them mothers of young children. She asked them to describe their actual days, querying how many hours did they spend cleaning, cooking, shopping, doing laundry, and managing the household? Did they like the work? Did they find it monotonous? Did they feel autonomous or constrained? The compiled findings were stark, beyond crystal clear.
The average woman in her sample worked 77 hours per week on housework alone. Some worked more than 90. This was a longer working week than almost any (and I assert every) salaried profession in Britain at that time. 70% of the women said they were dissatisfied with the work, with 75% s describing it as monotonous. Notably, the lower-paid the woman’s previous employment prior to marriage and family, the more likely she was to find domesticity tolerable. The higher her former job status and compensation, the more likely she was to describe it as a slow erasure. Oakley’s findings overturned the prevailing (male) view that women were naturally fulfilled by domestic life, an assertion I personally find hilarious, and hilariously stupid.
Oakley published her data in 1974 as The Sociology of Housework; it was one of the first serious academic studies of unpaid domestic labor in any country worldwide. Two years earlier, in Sex, Gender and Society (1972), she had introduced a distinction that would reshape an entire field: she separated biological sex from socially constructed gender. The terminology had existed in scattered psychological literature, but Oakley was the one who placed it at the center of sociology. Her framework became foundational across women’s studies, public health, anthropology, and policy in the decades that followed.
Her argument about housework was sharper than mere monotony versus fulfillment, and more impactful for that reason. She posited that when work is described as natural, flowing automatically from love, instinct, or maternal/female feeling, three things tend to happen to it: 1. its hours are not counted 2. its skills are not named and 3. its absence is noticed only when it stops.
Why this matters then and now is because what is not named cannot easily be paid for, what is not paid for cannot easily be shared and what cannot be shared falls predictably on the same people, decade after decade. I would add to her findings only that what is unpaid – all those volunteer hours women have done for a millennia – is (“women’s work”) not valued. And, where women volunteer, or even work for money – is also not paid as well ergo, not valued.
The work Oakley studied has not gone away, thankfully. The most recent time-use surveys show that women in nearly every country in the world still perform about two to three times more unpaid care and domestic work than men. The U.N. estimates that if global unpaid care work were valued at minimum wage, it would add roughly 9 percent of global GDP to the world economy — about $11 trillion a year. Career interruptions for care responsibilities remain one of the largest drivers of the lifetime gender wage gap, the gender pension gap, and women’s higher rates of poverty in old age.
Many other female scholars have built on what Oakley began. Arlie Hochschild later identified and named the second shift: the unpaid labor women do after their paid workday ends along with emotional labor, the work of managing other people’s feelings on the job and at home. Marilyn Waring, a New Zealand economist, showed how national accounting systems were designed to exclude women’s unpaid work from GDP entirely. Silvia Federici and the Wages for Housework movement made the case that the invisibility was not an accident of economics but a feature of how economies extract value. It is how the system was designed, and the design was built by men, excluding women, assigning women and their work no value.
No value = no respect. No value and no respect = men ain’t gonna do that nonsense, sister, which is where we get man ‘babysitting’ their own children like they’re doing someone (unpaid mom or underpaid domestic help) a favor.
Oakley identified a pattern, which is that a society that depends on care to function rarely asks (or rarely allows the question in truly conservative cultures) how to share, support, or compensate that care. It asks instead who loves or should love enough to provide it for free. Must provide it for free. Should. The harder question — the one Oakley’s tape recorder picked up forty times in living rooms across London — is what changes when the people who have been providing free labor for decades decide to stop performing the work as instinct, and start counting the hours, or stop performing it, altogether?