ABSTRACT
The category of domestic work has a paradoxical status. Its name reminds us that the type of activity it aims to cover is indeed work in its own right. Yet, during the Industrial Revolution, it was in opposition to domestic work that the category of professional work was constructed and then ended up being assimilated into the category of work itself. In order to shed light on this paradox, the chapter provides a genealogy of a historical nature and highlights the way in which the social sciences have problematized the making of the category of domestic work in Western countries. The chapter then examines attempts to statistically objectify the category of domestic work by considering national accounting studies that have tried to evaluate the contribution of domestic tasks to national wealth and which have provided decisive insights into the distribution of tasks by gender. The chapter ends with a section devoted to the way in which the theme of care work might have come to compete with the way in which domestic work is considered and categorized.
