Mothers' work

A friend's blog post "Post Feminist Musing" http://chretienfamilyblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/post-feminist-musings.html got me thinking on the topic of mothers, their work--paid and unpaid, and the way we still find no value in the kinds of work that sustain life--what by some is considered unproductive labor since it does nothing to further material wealth.

Here is an overview from Wikipedia (not the best resource but an ok place to start):
The classical political economists, such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo raised the economic question of which kinds of labour contributed to increasing society's wealth, as against activities which do not produce a vendible commodity which can be resold at a profit. They regarded human labour as the mainspring of wealth, and therefore they regarded the economical use of labour as highly important.
Within an enterprise, for example, there were many tasks which had to be performed, such as cleaning, record and bookkeeping or repairs, which did not directly contribute to producing and increasing wealth in the sense of making a net addition to it - in other words, such tasks represented a net cost to the enterprise which had to be minimized.

From this 18th/19th century spouting about an industrial economny, we can begin to understand how it is that "women's work" was denigraded and classified as less important.   The work that was less important wasn't even necessarily women's work, but it seems that as that work was classified as less important, men gravitated to the important and left the women with the place "they deserved" and the work that they "deserved".  I'm quoting because I think these attitudes are old fashioned and I don't believe that we have the same attitudes toward women today, yet we do have these same attitudes towards that type of work--no matter who is performing it.

If we truly looked at the human costs of not doing this work--then the work of raising children, keeping house, home cooking high quality food, record/bookkeeping becomes much more valuable.  If these things didn't get done, how would any of the people doing the "productive" work accomplish anything?   How would we even have anyone who was willing and able to do the "productive" work if mothers/fathers and teachers weren't raising thinking, caring human beings?

My suspicion is that if the Smith and other economists had valued the "unproductive" human work instead of the "productive" work, then the 19th and 20th century men would have been scrambling to find a way to get paid for staying home with their kids and would have sent their wives off to the factories.  Of course all of this discussion of choice about who does which work completely ignores the poor and/or ethnic minorities who did and still do both productive and "non-productive" work just to keep themselves afloat because of their status in the U.S.

Still shouldn't we value the human contributions more?  Probably not in our society--contributing to material wealth is always more important than the human wealth or costs of not valuing humans, animals, or not valuing anything beyond our own material needs.