Socially necessary reproductive work is devalued though no shared life can do without it

Evidence

In this tradition and in modern ecology, there is potential to realize that work is not only industry, the productive action that transforms the world, but also reproduction, the work of remaking life with each year and generation. Seeing nature’s work in this light would align environmental politics with the key feminist insight that much socially necessary work is ignored or devalued as “caregiving,” a gendered afterthought to the real dynamos of the economy, when in reality no shared life could do without it. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 655

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s prior economics-of-reputation reading; the devaluation of care work parallels how social capital/cooperation get discounted in rational-choice frameworks. — connects to: Proudhon reduces wives’ role to reproduction that must then be discarded
• DEFINE: Establishes the work/reproduction distinction that anchors her redefinition of productivity ahead of manifest dismantling.