A basic income will not reinforce women’s domestic roles – that argument relies on classist and racist assumptions

In the feminist literature there is a divide between those who think that a basic income is a good thing for women and those who think it will reinforce women’s disproportionate responsibility for care. They are worried that people will say that women should stay in the domestic sphere because now they are being compensated for doing so. What’s interesting to me about the welfare rights movements that originated in the 1960s and ’70s in the US and in Europe is how they inform this feminist debate. In those movements, the women who would have been the immediate beneficiaries of an unconditional guaranteed income were absolutely in favor of it. It was middle class and professional women in the 1970s who were against the idea of a basic income and who thought it would be something that would relegate women to the domestic sphere. This argument clearly doesn’t offer an intersectional understanding of feminism. When we think about what’s good for women, we have to think about what’s good for women of different classes and what’s good for women of different races and ethnicities. The outsourcing of childcare is one of the things that makes it possible for middle class and professional women to have careers. When women join the labor market, it’s not the case that care work is redistributed evenly among men and women. It’s being redistributed among women—specifically to poor women of color, to legal and undocumented immigrants, who now have to leave their own families in the care of someone else, who is typically unpaid, and earn a wage by caring for other people’s families. Redistributing care work in this way does not solve gender division of labor. We have to redistribute it to men as well. HB: In her famous essay “Welfare is a Women’s Issue,” former chairperson of the National Welfare Rights Organization [NWRO] Johnnie Tillmon made that connection about domestic service work and the division of labor—her analysis, gained from lived experience, was spot on, which I think says a lot about the importance of participatory policy design. AZ: It’s absolutely important to hear from the people who are going to be the biggest beneficiaries of a basic income or any other kind of policy of welfare reform. I’m drawn to the welfare rights movement because women were arguing for increased and unconditional welfare benefits. Those demands are clearly important to the discourse around basic income today.