Unpaid Labor Reading List

My solo show at Art Reach of Mid Michigan has just opened and I’ve included a vintage time card clock and a stack of books in that show! Below, I’ll share the titles and authors of those books.  If you’ve been to my shows before, you’ve seen this clock before.

Here it is at my solo show in 2022:

Time clock and books at The Compassion Factory, Brookfield, IL, 2022.

Instead of a pedestal, the time clock (punch clock?) is sitting on top of a small bookshelf, that contains some of the same books as in the current show, plus cookbooks and parenting books.

And here it is in the big time card show at the Orland Park Public Library the following year.

Time card by Elaine Luther, 2021, part of the series, “Time Cards for Mothers.” And a vintage punch clock.  Shown as installed at Orland Park Public Library in 2023.

The List of Books that are in the Art Gallery – Books on Women’s Labor

I thought it would be fun and useful to list the books here that are currently in the gallery. Plus there are two more that I’ll add to the stack soon.

Wages for Housework by Louise Toupin
Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor by Emily Callaci
The Price of Motherhood by Ann Crittenden
Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich
More Work for Mother by Ruth Schwartz Cowan
Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs that Fill Your Day by Craig Lambert
Scandalous Women: The Loves and Loves of History’s Most Notorious Women by Elizabeth Kerri Mahon
Birth Strike by Jenny Brown
Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years by Elizabeth Wayland Barber
Holding it Together by Jessica Calarco

All excellent reading.  Here’s a definition of shadow work, as I understand it from the book by Craig Lambert:

“Shadow work is work that you do that someone else used to get paid for.” Blue light reactive dye printed doily, stitched to 12″ x 12″ canvas, wrapped with gingham cotton fabric. Copyright Elaine Luther 2023.

So many books!  Where to start?  More Work for Mother is about how “labor saving devices” such as vacuum cleaners didn’t ended up saving labor, but rather raised standards of cleanliness, so that women spent even more time cleaning!

The Price of Motherhood was deeply depressing, as it describes my life, personally, and the financial sacrifices I’ve made to be a mother in the U.S.  But still, it’s good that someone has done the research, and published it.

Shadow Work by Craig Lambert – Shadow work consists of things such as: instead of quickly dropping a quarter into the meter, you spend what feels like 5-10 minutes interacting with an annoying machine.  This eliminates the job of the person who used to remove the quarters.  Other tasks include – filling out medical forms at home, on your own time, instead of with a pen in the waiting room.  This eliminates the paid data entry job of typing up your answers; weighing and tagging your own bag at the airport, and so many, many more tasks.  These have happened over time, and until you become aware of shadow work, you just kind of get used to the idea that this is how the world is.

Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years is a fascinating book about “the story of textiles in human history,” but also the role of women in textiles, how incredibly valuable textiles have been throughout history, and how archaeologists completely overlooked women’s roles until Elizabeth Wayland Barber came along.

Jess Calarco is the sociologist who said, “Other countries have social safety nets, the U.S. has women,” and she is the author of Holding it Together.  I forgot to take that one because it was on my nightstand and not on the bookshelf.

The two books entitled Wages for Housework are about the 1970s, international, intersectional campaign to pay people (not only women) for housework. They called the people who did such work Houseworkers. I’ve made three quilts that use slogans or quotes from that movement and all three are in this show, you’ll get to see those soon in videos

I’m writing a zine to talk about those quilts and give an overview of the Wages for Housework movement. It will be available for sale here on the website sometime soon.

When I first made those quilts about the Wages for Housework Campaign, starting last fall (fall 2024), I didn’t know there were any books on the movement, and I also didn’t know that it was an international movement. I thought it was limited to the U.K. The Louise Toupin book was published in French in 2014 and in English in 2018. The Emily Callaci book came out just this year, in March!  It’s interesting that there are finally books on the subject – I wonder why now? and I’m also just glad they exist, so I can learn about the movement.

Not in the gallery, but also terrific books that cover women’s labor in history are the Laurel Thatcher Ulrich books A Midwife’s Tale and The Age of Homespun.

And an honorable mention to the following books:

Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner: A Story about Women and Economics by Katrine Marcal
The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live by Danielle Drellinger

The latter book talks about the amazing women chemists who were able to work and research under the cover of home economics, at a time when they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to work in that field.

Here’s a quote from Craig Lambert, the author of Shadow Work, and a few more.

Light reactive dye printed artwork on (mostly) vintage linens by Elaine Luther. Top row, L to R: “Your chauffeur Today was Mom;” “Housework is the original and fundamental form of shadow work, Craig Lambert;” Elizabeth Catlett quote; Deborah Frances-White quote.  As installed at the Orland Park Public Library, 2023.

See More Art about Labor

If you’re newer here on the blog, maybe you haven’t seen the Clocking in for Unpaid Labor Project, which was a public participation art project where folks would mail me a self-addressed, stamped envelope, and I’d mail them a blank time card. They’d make art on it and send it back. You can see almost all of the cards here on this site. (Whoops, these are looking distorted on my computer, I’ll get that fixed asap.)

Here’s the whole blog category on the subject, where you can learn how you can replicate the project; see the Canadian iteration of it, see the show of the cards referenced above, and more.

I’ve been making art about unpaid labor since 2021, and before that, I made Our Ladies of Perpetual Housework.  You can see those here on the site, under portfolio and in various blog posts.  There’s also a terrific video on YouTube, where I am represented by a PlayMobil figure, and we tell the story of how that series came about.

That’s it for today!  Enjoy your reading!