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Comment by stretchwithme | Hacker News Reader

As long as you consider surviving and having your children supported financially to be worthless, yes, the labor was free.

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"free" in this case meaning uncompensated, not worthless.

I didn't say their labor was worthless.

But free definitely implies they did in exchange for nothing, which is false.

That's why there were the airquotes. Not-paid, and not priced in to the actual compensation of others directly. It was simply assumed that this was the way things were. (IIRC the legal terms also made the union a single person in a lot of respects.)

And if I say men died for their families in war or in the struggle to make a living and did it for "free", that also would be a vast oversimplification and a distortion of the situation.

Enlisted military men (and women) get paid, at least in the US.

Yeah, I think if you are forced to do something and not paid a mutually agreed upon wage, and then you die, you are not getting monetary compensation for that sacrifice.

But you may gladly go along with all of it, even the risk of death, because of what you care about. Your family, your town, your country.

Which is why claiming the work of either men or women is done for free is silly. There are so many other values in life.

No, that's not what free means. In this context, free means women are not getting economic retribution for domestic work (even nowadays).

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