Introduction

The household is a key site for the reproduction of gender inequalities as well as of capitalism on a global scale. What happens in the household is made invisible and depoliticized, but feminists have continuously placed the spotlight on households – studying both the inner workings and their embeddedness in the wider economy and society, not least in the contemporary globalized and financialized world.

This chapter looks at what the household is and why it is relevant in feminist economics and feminist political economy (section 5.2). It starts with a review of the conceptualization of the household in mainstream economics – Gary Becker's new household economics (NHE) (section 5.3) – and then discusses the feminist critique of NHE (5.4). Such critique led to a shift in economic theory, from unitary to collective household models, which saw some improvements while continuing to suffer from significant limitations (section 5.5). The chapter considers feminist political economy perspectives on the household, touching upon key debates from the 1970s to today's financialization (5.6), and section 5.7 sketches the foundational dimensions of a feminist conceptualization of the household.

Definitions of the household and relevance in economics and political economy

The household is normally defined as a physical place – the home or housekeeping unit – where one or more people live, share resources and make decisions on a range of issues bearing economic and social relevance.

The definition of the household provided by the UN report Families in a Changing World (UN Women 2019) places the emphasis on the act of sharing resources and the importance of familial and marital relations in the vast majority of households across the world.