After Work : A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time

A vital and timely manifestol for a feminist post-work politics Does it ever feel like you have no free time? You come home after work and instead of finding a space of rest and relaxation, you're confronted by a pile of new tasks to complete – cooking, cleaning, looking after the kids, and so on. In this ground-breaking book, Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek lay out how unpaid work in our homes has come to take up an ever-increasing portion of our lives – how the vacuum of free time has been taken up by vacuuming. Examining the history of the home over the past century – from running water to white goods to smart homes – they show how repeated efforts to reduce the burden of this work have faced a variety of barriers, challenges, and reversals. Charting the trajectory of our domestic spaces over the past century, Hester and Srnicek consider new possibilities for the future, uncovering the abandoned ideas of anti-housework visionaries and sketching out a path towards real free time for all, where everyone is at liberty to pursue their passions, or do nothing at all. It will require rethinking our living arrangements, our expectations and our cities. A Vital And Timely Proposal For A Feminist Post-work Politics Would You Let A Robot Clean Your House? When We Think About Work, We Still Tend To Think About Workplaces - If We Think About Reducing Work, We Think About Reducing Working Hours And Spending More Time At Home. But The Home Has Never Been Free From Work, And With The Continued Gendered Division Of Labour, Women Still Do The Bulk Of Domestic Activities. As Two-income Families Find Themselves Ever More Time-poor, Many Look To Outsource To Cleaners, Nannies, And Care Workers. More And More, It Would Seem, People Are Finding Themselves Without Either The Emotional Or The Financial Resources To Take Care Of Themselves And Each Other. The Home, Rather Than An Escape From The Work And Its Pressures, Is In Fact An Extension Of It. After Work Is A Crucial Corrective To This Trend, Extending Its Attention Beyond Paid Jobs, To The Impact Of Domestic Work Upon Familial Relationships, Social Bonds, And Our Very Conceptions Of Domestic Space. What If We Automated Housework? In This Groundbreaking Work, Helen Hester And Nick Srnicek Argue That There Is A Crisis That Can And Should Be Tackled. Only By Rethinking The Way We Organise Our Living Arrangements, Redefining Our Domestic Standards And Remaining Open To The Automation Of Work Done In The Home, They Argue, Can We Imagine A World That Is Truly Post-work.