What Counts as “Drudgery” and Who Decides?

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While I was in Rajasthan, studying India’s traditional mud stove (chulha in Hindi), women who use it, and those looking to improve it, I started a conversation about my research with a kitchen goods retailer in a small-town market. He nodded cheerfully and assured me, “All women are free in India; you can talk with them freely. They have no work.” Apparently, he didn’t get the memo, for cookstove improvers commonly use the word “drudgery” to describe rural women’s hard work to obtain fuelwood for daily cooking.

India’s biomass-burning stoves present a host of health, environmental, and gendered problems, with new cooking technologies proposed as the solution. Alleviating women’s workload is a laudable, feminist goal, but it always seems like a happy byproduct of health and environmental benefits rather than the primary motivation. Cookstove researchers tend to focus their analysis on combustion, emissions, health, environment, and economy. Most acknowledge the emotional experience of fuelwood harvesting by evoking “drudgery” but only in passing; the word flattens a set of complex dynamics that shape women’s actual experience of this activity. I argue that embodied aspects of such subsistence work deserve more serious attention.

The word “drudgery” evokes the physical work women chulha users do to feed their families, as if it is a straightforward description of fuelwood harvesting when it is actually an ideological claim. As a development buzzword, “drudgery” uses emotional calls to action (i.e., development interventions) while being profoundly decontextualized, vague, and formulaic; it is precisely these features that make buzzwords powerful. Undoubtedly, having to cut and haul fuelwood home from a forest is hard, physical work and a burden that in India falls primarily to women, but this doesn’t necessarily make it drudgery. 

The dictionary meaning of “drudgery,” dating back to the 1500s refers to “dull, irksome, and fatiguing work; uninspiring or menial labor.” In the mid-1800s, Karl Marx described the drudgery of assembly line work and other repetitive jobs created by industrialism that were mentally and physically exhausting. Wage earners, who lacked ownership over their work process and the commodities they produced, were emotionally and legally alienated from their effort. For Marx, the organization of waged work under industrial capitalism constituted drudgery.

Many contemporary thinkers have come to see women’s unpaid domestic work as drudgery. Feminists have theorized reproductive labor in opposing ways, as monotonous, mindless, and oppressive work (i.e., drudgery), or as rewarding work over which a person has some control. While most feminists seek to dismantle gendered divisions of labor, it is also clear that women may be personally invested in unpaid work that is simultaneously burdensome and rewarding. In the US, for example, women’s kinwork of remembering birthdays and organizing holidays also gives women control and social capital.

Marx’s concept of “alienation” experienced by factory workers and feminist theorizations of “reproductive labor” can help us understand why so many women resist new cookstoves offered to them for free or at a subsidized cost. Efficient biomass-burning stoves are introduced with the promise that they will reduce subsistence work, thus freeing women to take up waged work or entrepreneurial activities, which, presumably, will be empowering. The twin goals of reducing women’s domestic labor and promoting income generation are central to clean cooking programs. Cookstove improvement efforts have spanned over half a century in India, without having displaced the chulha. And yet, they have been re-energized by our climate crisis and by several United Nations initiatives, including the 2000 Millennium Development Goals, the 2010 founding of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, and the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals. 

The buzzword “drudgery” forecloses further inquiry into people’s subjective experiences of various kinds of work. A woman building her own stove, cooking dinner with fuel she has produced through her own effort, and repairing it when needed, is a sign of energy poverty, but it is also the antithesis of alienation. Firewood collection can be both oppressive and an expression of women’s intention, intelligence, competence, and autonomy. Physical labor performed for subsistence may be dull and repetitive and/or satisfying and pleasurable. When harvesting firewood, women have relative autonomy in the work process and control over the fruit of their labor: fuel.

Government agencies and NGOs promote cookstoves for women with the promise of reducing drudgery. Private companies also market new kitchen technologies as drudgery-reducing (for consumers, not for workers who make the products). Marxists condemn the alienation of work under capitalism, feminists argue that capitalism depends on women’s unpaid domestic care work, while capitalist marketeers promote consumer goods as the enlightened way to ease burdensome work. The buzzword “drudgery” serves many agendas.

Many development researchers associate nonmechanized tools, such as mud stoves and grinding stones, with drudgery. Traditional technologies and cultural practices are often viewed as symbols of women’s backwardness and oppression in the Global South. Consequently, technological modernization and the market participation it necessitates are seen as the path to freedom. Even in the US, however, household technologies have alleviated some tasks while creating new chores and new expectations of a proper home or meal, often intensifying women’s work. Moreover, key questions go unanswered: How, if at all, are particular forms of work valued, and by whom? What are their socioemotional qualities? What counts as “work”? How are notions of skill shaped by gender, class, and so on? 

Women’s fuel collection work is described as “drudgery” by the logic that it is time-consuming. Time is not a good proxy for burden, effort, and equity, for it conflates all forms of activity as “work” and conveys little about the intensity or socioemotional experience of different forms of work. When collecting fuel for household use, women can work at their own pace, stop for a rest, socialize, and multitask. Many women I met complained about having to trek further and further in search of wood due to deforestation and enclosure, but they typically do this work collectively and do not uniformly describe it as drudgery. What likely goes unstated is a comparison to the kinds of jobs available to them. Many of the women I talked with in Udaipur district of Rajasthan are non-literate indigenous Bhils, for whom employment likely means working at large farms, brick kilns, mines, or construction sites—jobs characterized by low wages, intense supervision, informality, and lack of basic legal and safety protections. Why is hauling a headload of fuelwood for one’s own use considered, a priori, to be drudgery, while hauling a headload of rocks for shockingly low wages on a dangerous worksite (where mothers may not be allowed to tend to a crying baby) assumed to be empowering? Both paid and unpaid work may involve hard physical labor, but neither is, in itself, drudgery. Circumstances matter. 

Cookstove research overlooks the diversity and ambivalence in women’s feelings about their search for biomass fuel. Some women I met described this work as a backbreaking chore, but, for others, it was no problem at all. Many combine this task with grazing of livestock, which complicates isolating fuel collection as the sole reason women go to the forest. As a collective activity, fuelwood collection can be an opportunity for socializing and for escaping a mother-in-law’s surveillance. One grandmother told me she used to walk five kilometers to gather wood with a group of women from her village. Since acquiring a gas stove, she no longer goes with them. While she misses these forest walks, she still sees her friends in self-help group meetings. “It is not the same,” she added, “as spending hours with them walking and cutting wood, and singing.” They sang because they “felt happy.” A group of women in another village all seemed to share the view that the mud stove caused no hardship, except that cooking utensils and walls became stained from the smoke. The word “drudgery” suggests that arduous, subsistence work is a singular thing (dull and unpleasant), but I found that women’s feelings about wood collection were diverse and shaped by multiple factors, including forest access and social status. Compared to low-wage manual labor, subsistence activities may offer more autonomy.

Development goals such as forest protection or increased crop yield may require substantial physical work, but experts rarely describe such effort as drudgery. Household biogas, promoted by many organizations, provides relatively clean, sustainable cooking energy. Its benefits include improved indoor air quality and a (“waste”) sludge that provides organic fertilizer at no monetary cost. However, biogas must be carefully managed, and it is women who do this work.  While women may welcome biogas for improving their standard of living, this does not necessarily mean it reduces their workload. Stove improvers may pity rural people for working too hard (gathering fuel) but may also admonish them for not working hard enough (to manage biogas). The degree to which new stoves save women time, and how they might use any time savings, remain open questions.  Women’s feelings about wood harvesting and other subsistence work are varied and often  ambivalent. Cookstove researchers call it “drudgery” with little or no attention to its social and economic value, its intensity, its relation to other activities, whether it helps people meet their needs and social obligations, or the degree of autonomy it affords. Indeed, as feminist anthropologists have shown, no sociocultural practice is in itself oppressive or empowering in all instances. The word “drudgery” represents an ideological claim about Global South women engaged in unpaid and low-tech subsistence work such as cutting wood with an axe and burning it in a mud stove they have built. It has no place in scholarly work or policy statements.

Maja Jeranko and Anika Jugovic-Spajic are section contributing editors for the Association for Feminist Anthropology.