Get Your Smart On
Kathi Weeks shines a light on our modern work woes, running an analogy between work and marriage.
In the first part of this series, we explored how both work and marriage are framed as private, individual matters, even though the state actively structures and enforces both arrangements. We’re taught to see the choices we make in our personal lives as pure expressions of our authentic selves, when really our desires have been shaped all along. This privatization makes collective resistance harder to imagine, channeling dissent into individual complaints. The mechanism through which power is created and maintained hides itself. Two humans may stand before each other as equals, but as soon as one hires the other, the other is expected to submit their autonomy to the interests of the one, for a made up thing we call money. Or, another way to put it, through the work contract, the other becomes indebted to the one/boss, which is exactly backwards; the worker is seen as being “given” an opportunity. The work of work isn’t just producing goods and services; more importantly, it’s producing us as workers and citizens, long before we ever show up to work.
*In the same period as the Lowell Mill Girls, American society was constructing an equally powerful privatization of marriage through an emerging cult of domesticity. Catherine Beecher’s influential Treatise on Domestic Economy, for the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School (1841) presented marriage as the natural expression of an individual woman’s calling and morality. This rhetoric of individual choice masked the economic reality that coverture laws made marriage a structural necessity for most women, who could not own property, sign contracts, or earn meaningful wages independently. A woman’s survival depended on her getting married, or at least being attached to a man. In this early period of industrialization, employment and marriage are considered as private matters, structural coercion vanished. But not for long: the Seneca Declaration of Sentiments kicks off the first feminist wave in 1848, explicitly listing coverture’s effects as grievances. *
By the by, many of these coverture laws technically remain “on the books,” and it is the wish of rightwing Christian Nationalists who espouse something called “complementarism” to make the laws enforceable once again. (I have written about Doug Wilson and his Canon Press in my series on “The Anti-Empathy Playbook,” and specifically in “The Christian Right’s Anti-Empathy Crusade I.”) Coverture is the idea *that the woman/wife is covered under the “protection” of the husband, who is responsible for her and her actions, justifying even the disciplining of wives by husbands, including spanking. ** speaks about her own experience in Doug Wilsion’s rightwing extremist Reform Church in *A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy - well worth the read.
For a long time, it seemed inevitable that women would want to marry—no need to look at how remaining unmarried has been impossible for most women throughout history. (As you probably know, women couldn’t get credit or mortgages in their own names without a male co-signer until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974.) Similarly, work appears as an inevitable fact of life even though, as David Graeber showed in Bullshit Jobs, most of what keeps us busy is unnecessary for human survival or flourishing. Should we question whether we all must work as we do, all the time and with most all of our energy, we will seem lazy and be shamed — think of the “welfare queen” stereotype from the Reaganite 80’s. When it is a given that we must work to “earn a living” (an oxymoron since we are, in fact, all very much alive by definition), the socially and politically constructed employment relationship itself escapes scrutiny.
As with wifely duties in marriage, work becomes moralized — the hard worker is personally virtuous, and the non-worker lazy. Husbands can do no wrong and are praised for any domestic efforts, and we are not to question the morality of the obscene accumulation of wealth by the bosses. A “good” woman is fulfilled through marriage, in her roles of wife and mother. The worker’s participation in labor makes them a worthy citizen, worthy of health care for example. But when you really think about it, this dual pressure — what is natural and what is moral — are at odds: If either marriage or work really were facts of natural law, like gravity, there would be no point moralizing about it. What is inevitable, what we can’t help, what is not a choice we can make, is not something for which we can be morally responsible. You cannot indict a rock for rolling down the hill.
The combined effects of privatization, individualization, naturalization, and moralizing reification add up to the depoliticization of work and family matters. It is the same logic that we should not interfere with a man “disciplining” “his” wife or children under his “spiritual covering,” that if you experience wage theft or workplace bullying, it’s your problem to solve. We know those who are bullied are often the ones to leave, paying the ultimate price. I left my first tech job due to hazing by my male colleagues, chose to just find another job rather than try to “fix” what the manager obviously did not see as a problem. In both cases, the message is clear: if you question the terms of your subjugation, be it in marriage or employment, you’re the problem, you ungrateful, lazy troublemaker! I can say that I have certainly felt the compulsion to be grateful, as a Latina woman in academia and philosophy; being a troublemaker has definitely been in my wheelhouse.
The point is that “the system” itself remains beyond critique, naturalized as just the way things are. Even the fact that it’s a depersonalized “system” hides the faces and the identities of those people responsible, because every cog has a boss who has a boss who has a boss, and it’s turtles all the way up. Most of the really really wealthy bosses are invisible to us, and out of our reach. This is also known as the “god trick” of seeing without being seen, a real effect of power.
Weeks challenges the forces that place work beyond political contestation by showing us how the trick works. Just like a magician appears to place a coin in their left hand, the very act of directing the audience’s attention to that hand conceals the drop of the coin into their right palm. The misdirection simultaneously conceals the mechanism that makes the magic trick magical. When focus is fixated on the individual choices before us, the coin of structural power slips unnoticed into the other hand. The real mechanism, society’s role in structuring these supposedly private arrangements, disappears from our immediate view.
Once you see how the trick is done, though, you can’t unsee it. The coin was never in the left hand at all. Work and family were never simply private matters of personal responsibility. They were always already political, always regulated and enforced by collective structures that benefit from us not noticing. The unknown unknown becomes unknowable. We may feel like who we marry and what job we take are up to us, but the choices are molded by opaque forces; our choices are not our own, this is part of the lie of individualism. Sure, you may think “Captain Crunch” is your guy among hundreds, but when all are made at the same handful of factories from mostly the same ingredients… Choice under late capitalism is an illusion, and this applies just as well to our business and love affairs.
Work sucks in much the same way being a woman in patriarchy sucks, so if you are masculine identified and you have felt the burn of work, you now have some inkling of what it feels like to be a woman, except you can never clock out of gender. We women gain social recognition at the expense of, and to the degree of our subjugation, by playing the role of object of masculine domination (n.b., masculine, not men or man). Being a feminist woman gives us insight into the mechanism of subjugation at work: in capitalism, we gain our worth by becoming indebted to those who wish to extract value from our life force. And we are told we should enjoy it, too.
Next up, we dig into work as the site for subjugation and domination, continuing with the analogy to marriage. Out Thursday Tuesday.
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Beecher, Catherine Esther. A Treatise on Domestic Economy. 1841. Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/21829/21829-h/21829-h.htm. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025.
National Women’s History Museum. “Coverture: The Word You Probably Don’t Know But Should.” Women’s History Museum, www.womenshistory.org/articles/coverture-word-you-probably-dont-know-should. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025.
Levings, Tia. A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy. St. Martin’s Press, 2023.
Levings, Tia. “The Well Trained Wife With Tia Levings.” Interview by Monte Mader, Flipping Tables, 3 June 2025, www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yATDF5Oj6Q.
“Lowell Mill Girls and the Factory System, 1840.” The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/spotlight-primary-source/lowell-mill-girls-and-factory-system-1840. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025.
Mill, John Stuart. The Subjection Of Women was published 1869 but written earlier 1860-1861 after the death of his wife Harriet Taylor Mill in 1858. Harriet Taylor Mill’s contribution to “The Subjection of Women” was substantial, though the exact extent remains debated by scholars. Mill himself credited her extensively in his autobiography, stating that the book was “more directly and literally our joint production than anything else which bears my name.”
“Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, 1848.” Internet Modern History Sourcebook, Fordham University, sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/senecafalls.asp. Accessed 29 Sept. 2025.
Weeks, Kathi. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Duke University Press, 2011.