Between the Living Room and the Factory: Margaret Harrison’s "Homeworkers"

Beginning in the mid-1970s, the British feminist artist Margaret Harrison worked closely with union organizer Helen Eadie on the London Homeworking Campaign. At that time, British women’s labor was moving out of the factories and into domestic spaces, where housewives performed piecework for starvation wages. Isolated inside their homes, “homeworkers” struggled to organize for higher pay rates, benefits, and labor protections. Over the course of several years, Harrison embarked on a collaborative, research-intensive process that resulted in Homeworkers, a multidisciplinary project encompassing collage, drawing, photography, text, and interviews. While many other left-wing British artists of the era focused on factory-centered labor struggles, Harrison attended to a mode of production that destabilized binary divisions between industrial and domestic labor, the factory and the home, and public and private space.

In my paper, I trace Harrison’s research-intensive process, and the different collaborations that informed her work. I argue that through its use of everyday objects and a documentary approach, Harrison’s work materializes the untenable boundaries between “productive” and “reproductive” labor. By situating the domestic as an overlooked site of labor struggle, Homeworkers reveals how, historically, the home has always been inextricably tied to the industrial workplace.