Adam Smith introduced the metaphor of the invisible hand to describe the unseen forces that move the market economy; in his eyes, unintended greater social benefits and public good would be brought about by allowing individuals to act freely in pursuing their own self-interests. However, feminist economists have shown Adam Smith was wrong. Their work has made clear that the true invisible hand(s) in the economy can be found elsewhere — in the unpaid care and domestic work that women have provided.

Capitalism is structurally dependent on wage labor, which is made possible by the reproduction of the workforce. Without care, there simply would be no healthy, well-fed workers to engage in wage labor. No economy is possible in the absence of processes of social reproduction. (1) Yet mainstream economics has separated public production from social reproduction and undervalued the immense contributions of the latter in line with a sexualized division of labor. (2) Feminist economists position care and domestic labor as vital parts of the economic system, and consequently, place interdependent and interconnected people at the center of their analysis, rather than an isolated individual. (3)

Just like our economic system undervalues much of women’s (re)productive lives and work, it too views the environment as a ‘free’ exploitable resource. We can see a clear connection between the exploitation of women’s work and the abuse of our planetary resources based on their valuation as ‘other’. Men and masculinity are associated with culture/reason and are valued, whereas women are associated with nature/care and both are devalued. (5) Based on this constructed hierarchy, women and the environment are both marginalized in their positions within the formal economy. Biesecker and Hofmeister introduced the concept of (re)productivity to describe this layered and interconnected appropriation of nature’s productivity and the social (re)production of life through women’s caring activities. (6)

(1) Marilyn Power, “Social Provisioning as a Starting Point for Feminist Economics,” Feminist Economics 10, no. 3 (2004): 3-19.

(2) Jamie Winders and Barbara Ellen Smith, “Social Reproduction and Capitalist Production: A Genealogy of Dominant Imaginaries,” Progress in Human Geography 43, no. 5 (2019): 871-889.

(3) Marianna A. Ferber and Julie A. Nelson, Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993)

(4) International Labor Organization, Care Work and Care Jobs: For the Future of Decent Work (Geneva: ILO, 2018), 3.

(5) Christine Bauhardt, “Rethinking gender and nature from a material(ist) perspective: Feminist economics, queer ecologies and resource politics,” The European Journal of Women’s Studies 20, no. 4 (2013): 361-375. 

(6) Adelheid Biesecker and Sabine Hofmeister, “(Re)productivity: Sustainable relations both between society and nature and between the genders,” Ecological Economics 69, no. 8 (2010), 1703-1711.