Today, middle-class women are urged to “lean in” to waged labor and break the glass ceiling, with the expectation that working-class women can be relied on to care for the children and wash the kitchen floor.

The social upheaval caused by the entrance of large numbers of women into the workforce in the 1970s has never really been reckoned with in the United States — the contradictory demands of modern family life (sell your labor on the market, while taking care of kids at home!) have simply been absorbed by mothers taking on a “second shift,” or a third or a fourth; and by working-class women in low-paid service jobs as maids, day care workers, and home health care aides.

Demands for “work-life balance” are more of a whimper than a bang; in accepting the idea that “work” is what you do in the office and “life” is what you have in your off hours, we are already far from radical Second Wave demands to envision a new way to define and divide labor.