-Ramphal Kataria
Maintenance or Recognition? Rethinking Women’s Unpaid Labour
Abstract
The recent judgment of the Delhi High Court rejecting the characterisation of a homemaker as an “idle” spouse marks a significant moment in Indian feminist jurisprudence. This article situates the ruling within a broader political economy of unpaid labour, tracing the historical devaluation of women’s domestic and care work from early civilisations to contemporary capitalist societies. It argues that the invisibilisation of household labour is not an oversight but a structural feature of patriarchal economies, reproduced through law, market logic, and social norms. Through a comparative analysis of India, the Global South, and OECD countries, the article demonstrates how maintenance law becomes a critical site where women’s unpaid contributions are either recognized or erased. The article contends that legal recognition of domestic labour is essential to substantive gender equality and economic justice.
I. Introduction: Naming Labour That Law Refused to See
Few phrases reveal the moral economy of patriarchy as starkly as the term “idle wife.” It condenses centuries of economic misrecognition into a single moral judgement—one that equates value with wages and work with market participation.
In February 2026, Justice Swarna Kanta Sharma decisively rejected this assumption, holding that a homemaker’s non-employment cannot be equated with idleness or deliberate dependence. The Court’s insistence that capacity to earn is distinct from actual earnings disrupts a long-standing judicial tendency to treat domestic labour as a personal choice rather than an economic contribution.
This intervention invites a deeper inquiry: Why has women’s unpaid labour remained invisible across legal, economic, and political systems despite its centrality to social survival?
II. Civilisational Roots: From Cooperation to Control
Anthropological and historical evidence suggests that early human societies were not uniformly patriarchal. In many hunter-gatherer and early tribal communities, subsistence depended on cooperation, with women playing central roles in food gathering, caregiving, and knowledge transmission.
The decisive transformation occurred with the advent of settled agriculture. As land ownership, inheritance, and surplus accumulation became central, women’s reproductive and domestic labour was enclosed within the household. Patriarchy emerged not merely as cultural domination but as an economic system regulating women’s bodies and labour.
Even ancient civilizations reflected variability:
In Mesopotamia and Egypt, women could own property and initiate divorce.
In Classical Athens, women were denied legal personhood.
In early Vedic India, women participated in intellectual life; later periods saw severe retrenchment.
These shifts underscore that women’s subordination is historically produced, not biologically inevitable.
III. Domestic Labour and Capitalism: The Invisible Subsidy
Capitalism did not dismantle patriarchal labour relations; it reorganized them. As productive labour moved to factories and offices, reproductive labour—childbearing, caregiving, household management—remained unpaid and feminised.
Feminist political economy identifies this as the social reproduction paradox:
Capitalist economies depend on unpaid care work, yet systematically exclude it from economic valuation.
As Silvia Federici observes,
“What we call ‘love’ is unpaid work.”
This unpaid labour:
Reproduces the labour force,
Maintains workers’ health and emotional stability,
Absorbs social risks that states and markets refuse to bear.
Yet, because it does not generate wages, it is treated as non-work.
IV. Colonialism, Reform, and the Gendered Nation
Colonial modernity in India produced contradictory outcomes. Legal reforms—abolition of sati, widow remarriage, women’s education—expanded women’s rights. Yet these reforms framed women as subjects of rescue rather than autonomous citizens.
Nationalist discourse further complicated matters. Women were valorised as symbols of cultural purity while their material claims remained subordinated. Domestic labour was romanticised as sacrifice, not recognised as contribution.
The post-independence Indian state inherited this contradiction: formal equality alongside substantive economic dependence.
V. Feminist Theory and the Unpaid Work Debate
The intellectual groundwork for recognizing domestic labour was laid by second-wave feminism. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir argued that women are confined to “immanence”—repetitive, invisible labour—while men occupy “transcendence.”
Later feminist economists expanded this critique. As Nancy Fraser notes,
“Capitalism has a free-rider problem: it relies on care work that it does not pay for.”
The concept of social reproduction foregrounds unpaid labour as foundational, not auxiliary, to economic systems.
VI. Indian Family Law: Moral Tests and Economic Amnesia
Indian maintenance jurisprudence has historically oscillated between protection and moral surveillance. Courts routinely inquire whether a woman is:
Educated,
Able-bodied,
“Capable” of employment.
These inquiries individualize what is structurally produced: career interruptions due to marriage, childcare, and relocation.
The Delhi High Court’s ruling disrupts this logic by affirming that:
1. Domestic labour has opportunity costs,
2. Re-entry into the labour market is gendered and unequal,
3. Maintenance is not charity but recognition.
By rejecting the “idle wife” narrative, the Court aligns family law with feminist political economy.
VII. Comparative Perspective: India, Global South, and OECD
India
Unpaid domestic work by women contributes an estimated 7.5%–30% of GDP, yet remains excluded from national accounting. Maintenance law often becomes the only forum where this labour is indirectly acknowledged.
Global South
In Latin America and Africa, women disproportionately shoulder unpaid care due to weak welfare states. Countries like Uruguay and Chile have begun incorporating care into social policy through national care systems, recognizing care as public infrastructure.
OECD Countries
Nordic states demonstrate how institutional design alters gender outcomes:
Paid parental leave,
State-funded childcare,
Recognition of caregiving in pension credits.
Even so, wage gaps and care penalties persist, indicating that policy recognition alone does not dismantle patriarchal norms.
VIII. Class, Caste, and the Double Burden
The trope of the “idle wife” is profoundly classed. For working-class women, the issue is not non-employment but overwork—paid labour outside followed by unpaid labour at home.
For middle-class women, education becomes a double-edged sword, cited to deny maintenance while ignoring years of unpaid domestic contribution.
Caste further intensifies this burden, with Dalit and Adivasi women occupying the most precarious forms of paid and unpaid labour.
IX. Maintenance as Deferred Wages
The Delhi High Court’s insistence that maintenance reflects marital contribution reframes the discourse. Maintenance emerges as deferred wages for unpaid labour, not discretionary support.
The Court’s critique of adversarial proceedings also recognizes how litigation reproduces gendered power asymmetries—through income concealment, expense inflation, and procedural exhaustion.
X. Conclusion: Toward Substantive Equality
The rejection of the “idle wife” trope is not symbolic—it is structural. A legal system that recognizes only market labour reproduces inequality under the guise of neutrality.
As Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own,
“Intellectual freedom depends upon material things.”
So does domestic freedom.
Until women’s unpaid labour is fully recognized—legally, economically, and socially—gender equality will remain formal rather than substantive. The Delhi High Court judgment offers a jurisprudential opening. Whether it becomes a systemic shift depends on how seriously law is willing to confront the economics of patriarchy.
Footnotes
1. Federici, S (2012): Revolution at Point Zero, PM Press.
2. Fraser, N (2016): “Contradictions of Capital and Care,” New Left Review.
3. de Beauvoir, S (1949): The Second Sex, Gallimard.
4. Agarwal, B (1997): “Bargaining and Gender Relations,” World Development.
5. Sen, A (1990): “Gender and Cooperative Conflicts,” in Persistent Inequalities.
6. Woolf, V (1929): A Room of One’s Own, Hogarth Press.
7. Delhi High Court (2026): Maintenance judgment under the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act.
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