05/19/2026
The Research Group on Constitutional Studies Student Writing Prize is awarded annually to an Arts undergraduate for the best piece of substantial academic writing on the values, institutions, and principles of a free society. This year there was a record-high number of nominations and submissions, with many genuinely excellent papers representing a wide range of disciplines, methods, and topics.
The jury— four RGCS faculty reading the papers anonymously— has selected "Wages for Housework and Family Abolitionism: An Unhappy Marriage?" by Madison Albert '26, and the selection has now been confirmed by the Faculty of Arts.
This paper was Madi's Honours Thesis in Gender, S*xuality, Feminist and Social Justice Studies. She has recently presented it at the conference of the New England Political Science Association, and over the summer will be presenting it at the "Alternate Routes" conference in Milan and the Association for Social and Political Philosophy conference in St. Andrews.
Congratulations to everyone who is doing such interesting and outstanding research and writing; it was a real pleasure to see it all and made for a difficult choice. And congratulations in particular to Madison Albert!
The prize brings a $500 award and will be noted in the Convocation program.
Abstract
This thesis examines the relationship between the 1970s Wages for Housework (WfH) movement and contemporary family abolitionism, asking whether family abolition is conceptually entailed by WfH’s critique of reproductive labour. Recent abolitionist interpretations—most prominently those advanced by Sophie Lewis—argue that because unwaged reproductive labour is central to capitalist accumulation and gendered domination, the family, as the institution that privatizes care, must be abolished. Drawing on foundational WfH texts by Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, this thesis offers a critical reconstruction of this family abolitionist interpretation. I argue that it relies on a functionalist mode of reasoning that conflates institutions with the functions they perform. While reproductive labour is necessary for capitalism, it does not follow that the family is the necessary institution through which it must be organized. WfH, properly understood, targets the organization and valuation of reproductive labour rather than the family as such. The thesis then turns to the normative stakes of this distinction. Engaging Catherine MacKinnon’s critique, I argue that while remunerating reproductive labour can increase women’s autonomy—particularly by reducing economic dependence—it does not, on its own, resolve the gendered division of labour or eliminate relations of male domination. Taken together, the thesis clarifies the scope of WfH as a feminist political project: it offers a powerful critique of the privatization of care without entailing family abolition, and its limitations point not to abolition, but to the need for broader transformations in the organization and distribution of reproductive labour.
