as mothers (and nonworkers), almost 45 percent of the women in the United States—38.6 millon—work in the paid labor force, and almost all labor in the home. Nearly a quarter of all working women are single; 19 percent are either widowed, divorced, or separated: and another 26 percent are married to men who earn less than $10,000 a year.48 However, because women are not defined as workers within the ruling ideology, women are not paid for their labor or are paid less than men. The sexual definition of woman as mother either keeps her in the home doing unpaid labor or enables her to be hired at a lower wage because of her defined sexual inferiority. Given unemployment rates, women either do not find jobs at all or are paid at an even lower rate. The sexual division of labor and society remains intact even with women in the paid economy. Ideology adjusts to this by defining women as working mothers. And the two jobs get done for less than the price of one.
All of the processes involved in domestic work help in the perpetuation of the existing society. (1) Women stabilize patriarchal structures (the family, housewife, mother, etc.) by fulfilling these roles. (2) Simultaneously, women are reproducing new workers, for both the paid and unpaid labor force. They care for the men and children of the society. (3) They work as well in the labor force for lesser wages. (4) They stabilize the economy through their role as consumers. If the other side of production is consumption, the other side of capitalism is patriarchy.
Although this sexual division of labor and society antedates capitalism, it has been increasingly institutionalized and specifically defined in terms of the nuclear family because of the needs of advanced capitalism. It now has much more form and structure than it did in precapitalist societies.49 In precapitalist society, men, women, and children worked together in the home, the farm, or on the land to produce the goods necessary for their lives. Women were procreators and child-rearers, but the organization of work limited the impact of this sexual role distinction. With the rise of industrial capitalism, men were brought out of the home and into the wage-labor economy. Women became relegated to the home and were increasingly viewed by men as nonproductive although many worked in the factories. They came to be seen solely in terms of sex roles. Although women were mothers before industrial capitalism, this was not an exclusive role; whereas, with industrial capitalism, women became housewives. “The housewife emerged, alongside the proletariat—the two characteristic laborers of developed capitalist society.”50 The work that women continued to perform in the home was not conceived of as work. Productive labor was defined as wage labor, labor which produces surplus value—capital.
The conditions of production in society then, define and shape production, reproduction, and consumption in the family. So, too, the family mode of production, reproduction, and consumption affects commodity production. They work together to define the political economy. Within a capitalist patriarchal economy—where profit, which necessitates a system of political order and control, is the basic priority of the ruling class—the sexual division of labor and society serves a specific purpose. It stabilizes the society through the family while it organizes a realm of work, domestic labor, for which there is no pay (housewives), or limited pay (paid houseworkers), or unequal pay (in the paid labor force). This last category shows the ultimate effect on women of the sexual division of labor within the class structure. Their position as a paid worker is defined in terms of being a woman, which is a direct reflection of the hierarchical sexual divisions in a society organized around the profit motive.
The bourgeoisie as a class profits from the basic arrangement of women’s work, while all individual men benefit in terms of labor done for them in the home. For men, regardless of class, benefit (although differentially) from the system of privileges they acquire within patriarchal society. The system of privileges could not be organized as such if the ideology and structures of male hierarchy were not basic to the society. It is this hierarchy which protects the sexual division of labor and society along with the artificial needs that have been created through the class system.
The ruling class desire to preserve the family reflects its commitment to a division of labor that not only secures it the greatest profit but that also hierarchically orders the society culturally and politically. Once the sexual division of labor is challenged, particularly in terms of its connection to the capitalist order, one of the basic forms of the organization of work (especially affecting the home, but with wide ramifications for the entire society) will be challenged. This challenge endangers a free labor pool, which infiltrates almost all aspects of living, and a cheap labor pool, as well as the fundamental social and political organization of the society, which is sexual hierarchy itself. The very order and control which derive from the arrangements of power implied in the sexual hierarchy of society will be destroyed.
If we understand that there are basically two kinds of work in capitalist society—wage labor and domestic labor—we can see that we must alter the way we think about workers. What we must do is begin to understand what class means for women. We must not just reexamine the way women have been fit into class categories. We must redefine the categories themselves. We need to define classes in terms of woman’s complex reality and her consciousness of that reality.
Presently class categories are primarily male-defined, and a woman is assigned to a class on the basis of her husband’s relation to the means of production; woman is not viewed as an autonomous being. According to what criteria is a woman termed middle-class? What does it mean to say that a middle-class woman’s life is “easier” than a working-class woman’s life when her status is significantly different from that of a middle-class male? What of the woman who earns no money at all (as houseworker) and is called middle-class because her husband is? Does she have the same freedom, autonomy, or control over her life as her husband, who earns his own way? How does her position compare to that of a single woman with a low-paying job?
Clearly a man who is labeled upper- or middle-class (whatever, precisely, that may mean) has more money, power, security, and freedom of choice than his female counterpart. Most women are wives and mothers, dependent wholly or in part on a man’s support, and what the Man giveth, he can take away.51
I do not mean by these questions to imply that class labels are meaningless, or that class privilege does not exist among women, or that housewives (houseworkers) are a class of their own. I do mean to say, however, that we will not know what our real class differences are until we deal with what our real likenesses are as women. I am suggesting that we must develop a vocabulary and conceptual tools which deal with the question of differential power among women in terms of their relation to men and the class structure, production and reproduction, domestic and wage labor, private and public realms, etc. Only then will we see what effect this has on our understanding for organizing women. We need to understand our likenesses and differences if we are to be able to work together to change this society. Although our differences divide us, our likeness cuts through to somewhat redefine these conflicts.
A feminist class analysis must begin with distinctions drawn among women in terms of the work they do within the economy as a whole — distinctions among working women outside the home (professional versus nonprofessional), among houseworkers (houseworkers who do not work outside the home and women who are houseworkers and also work outside), welfare women, unemployed women, and wealthy women who do not work at all. These class distinctions need to be further defined in terms of race and marital status. We then need to study how women in each of these categories share experiences with other categories of women in the activities of reproduction, childrearing, sexuality, consumption, maintenance of home. What we will discover in this exploratory feminist class analysis is a complicated and varied pattern, whose multigrid conceptualization mirrors the complexity of sex and class differentials in the reality of women’s life and experience.
This model would direct attention to class differences within the context of the basic relationship between the sexual hierarchy of society and capitalism. Hopefully, the socialist feminist analysis can continue to explore the relationships between these systems, which in essence are not separate systems.
