Women S Employment And The Capitalist Family

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

"Women's Employment and the Capitalist Family" responds to the growing recognition of the economic, social, and electoral importance of women. This original study draws upon an interdisciplinary approach which fully incorporates both empirical and historical material. Ben Fine provides a critical assessment of the literature which examines the changing labor market participation of women. He explores such issues as the domestic labor debate, the role of patriarchy theory, gender and labor market theory, the capitalist family, and the position of working women in the economy. He uses demographic and historical factors such as the movement towards mass consumption through factory production to explain the timing of women's increasing dependence on waged work. Although economic issues are the main focus of the book, it also considers non-economic contributing factors, making full use of historical and empirical material. "Women's Employment and the Capitalist Family" is written from a marxist-feminist perspective, and argues convincingly that this approach offers a greater challenge to the orthodoxies within economics and sociology which have as yet been untouched by postmodern theories. Despite its theoretical focus, the book avoids technicalities and will be accessible to a wide, interdisciplinary audience.

In the present stage of international capitalist development, women are increasingly being drawn into paid employment by multinational and state investment in the Third World. This volume investigates the interrelations between women's participation in the urban wage economy and their productive and reproductive roles in the household and family. It brings together a selection of important recent research on all major regions of the developing world by leading scholars in this emerging field. It argues that the household itself is an important determinant of the character and timing of women's labour force participation, and it assesses the extent to which family patterns can be expected to change as women increasingly work outside the home.

"Analyzes the ways in which gender roles are institutionalized in Boeing's workplace culture, as well as the contributing policy shifts, economic changes, and social controversies present in American business culture"--

The concept of 'patriarchy' is one which signals a sharp divide between traditions of feminist thought. Sylvia Walby attempts to conceptualize 'patriarchy' in a way that takes account not only of the complexity of relationships of gender, but also of the subtleties of the interconnections of patriarchy and capitalism. She rejects those accounts which treat patriarchy as a unified set of relations, or which confine the site of patriarchy to any one privileged sphere such as the family. Instead, she elaborates a novel view of patriarchy as a set of 'relatively autonomous relations', the connections between which are spelled out through a variety of detailed case studies. In contrast to many other views of 'capitalist patriarchy', Sylvia Walby characterizes the relationship between capitalism and patriarchy as a relationship, not of harmony and mutual accommodation, but of tension and conflict. This thesis is substantiated through a comparative historical analysis of three contrasting areas of employment: cotton textiles, engineering and clerical work. These analyses show the shortcomings of much conventional literature in sociology, history and economics on women's employment, which pays insufficient attention to the independence of patriarchal relations. The book draws upon sociological, historical, economic and geographic materials to argue for an understanding of gender relations in terms of the specific tensions and compromises between patriarchal and capitalist relations. Exploring the impact of the state on patterns of employment and unemployment completes a book rich in theoretical and empirical analysis. Patriarchy at Work will be recognized as a major contribution to feminist thought and the social sciences.

Analyzing the changing conceptions of women's work and family life in the U.S. from colonial times to the present, Matthaei studies the relationship between capitalism and the sexual division of labor. From the integration within the household of family life and commodity production in the pre-Revolutionary period, she traces the separation of these two areas, resulting in the household being considered the woman's sphere and participation in the work force the man's. The author discusses the recent breakdown of this division, which has seen women coming out of their "proper" place and enter into the labor force.

Unmasking Administrative Evil discusses the overlooked relationship between evil and public affairs, as well as other fields and professions in public life.