The historiography of social reproduction and reproductive labor

Abstract

This article tracks the categories of social reproduction and reproductive labor as they appear in historical scholarship. Both within and beyond the historical discipline, scholars of diverse political, theoretical, and disciplinary persuasions deploy these concepts to denote a wide range of labors and processes in a manner that seems at times to have little coherence. The intentions of this article are to bring further clarity to these useful, if rather sprawling, terms and to reflect on the analytical work that they can do for historians.