THE AMENITIES OF DOMESTIC LIFE 5 exploitation, operate inside the sphere of relationships of love, nurture and sexuality, are indeed inseparable from them. It is not surprising then, that women themselves find it difficult or impossible either to separate the personal from the structural or to see themselves outside the orbit of such relationships. Nor is it surprising that most domestic ideologies prescribe, elevate and idealise those personal relations of mother, wife, daughter, daughter-in-law into which unpaid domestic labour and services are packaged. Perhaps it is because these latter cannot be measured in time or money, and are implicated in questions of human reproduction and survival, that women, persistently and at certain historical conjunctures, emphatically, become the natural subjects of ideologies of selfless devotion, sacrifice, altruism. An affiliation between domestic labour and this complex of sacrificial ideologies is structured both into the nature of the work and into its positioning within familial relationships. The religious and cultural rationales for motherhood, wifehood and non-dissoluble marriage may be seen as trying to not only to underwrite this source of labour but to guarantee a private domain of non-alienated labour, or rather what can often be made to appear as a domain of non-alienated labour being itself unmeasurable and occurring in the frame of lasting 'non-contractual' personal relationships. If we go by Matx's definition of unalienated labour,5 it is possible to see the discordant and equivocative nature of domestic labour (childcare, service, cleaning, house maintenance, food preparation): it can carry elements of affectivity and individual confirmation even as it is shot through with relations of power, entangled with ideologies of 'non-alienated' labour, and can often 'deindividuate' women reducing them to their 'functions'. Though forced to mimic 'non-alienated' labour these activities would only genuinely approximate it, in Marx's sense, if power relations were erased inside and outside the home. Its imbrication in 'non-contractual', lasting personal relationships in turn helps to preserve domestic labour as an unsullied domain 'outside' the market economy and the circuit of exchange. If the reproduction of this ideological matrix is recursive, it simultaneously occupies a space subject to constant threat of rupture under capitalism where the tasks of domestic labour enter a comparative schema on an unprecedented scale—they can be carried out unpaid in the sphere of the home or some of these tasks can enter the market economy and be tied to exchange value. Since the same tasks—child rearing, cooking, cleaning, care of the sick etc—also co-exist, to varying extents as services that can be bought,6 the same labour is subject to two distinct evaluative systems.7 Does the possibility of buying and selling parallel services and computing the market cost of domestic labour, dilute those nineteenth century middle class domestic ideologies