THE FAMILY AND POWER IN SOCIALIST-FEMINIST THEORY

Kathleen Jones

Contemporary theorists have attempted to explain the relationship between the

family and social change. Feminists, in particular, have addressed themselves to
this task. Because of their contention that women have been defined in terms of
their functions in the family, and that such definitions represent the persistence
of patriarchalism in modern society, it was logical for them to explore the rela-
tionship between the family and the political system. 1 Feminist theorists explored
the critical role of the family as a political institution. Within the family the sexual
division of labor was reproduced, the ideology of acquisitive individualism was
cultivated, differently for men than for women, and needs were structured in order
to maintain the existing social order.
In the course of these explorations, most feminists concluded that neither of the
two major contemporary epistemologies of consciousness-formation - Marxism
and Freudian psychoanalysis - was adequate to the task of explaining the politics
of gender identification and family dynamics. That both orthodox materialist theories
and classical psychoanalysis tended to remain silent to the woman question seemed
to be the unanimous conclusion of feminist social theorists." The work of these
theorists represented an important attempt to account for women's position in
modern society in terms of the combined effects of the double determination by
an hierarchical sexual order (gender identity) and the class system, where each
of these two systems was defined as relatively autonomous of the other.
The efforts of these theorists to move beyond the methodological strait-jacket
of specific ideologies is laudable. Their works try to situate the family, and women's
place within it, within the context of the mutually supportive though, they insist,
discrete systems of gender identification and class relations. Yet these accounts
of the ideological and economic "functions" of the family do not suffice as an
explanatory model of the relationship between the family and the political economy
of modern society. On the basis of the organizing concepts of feminist social
theory, we have neither an adequate description of the dynamics of contemporary
families, nor a coherent explanation of the material and ideological location of
the family within the structure of late industrial capitalism.
This paper will demonstrate that these problems are rooted in epistemological
and methodological errors. Its central hypothesis is that there is a chronic confusion
in feminist social theory between different levels of analysis. The critique of the
ideology of patriarchy is confused with analysis of the actual structure of material
reality which that ideology both obscures and partially legitimates. This means
that evidence about social definitions of roles that women should perform and the
functions that families ought to fulfill is confused with evidence that describes the
actual roles of women and the empirical life of families. 3 Further errors are a

Praxis International 8: October 1988 02060-8448 $2.00

 Praxis International 285

function of the essentialistic treatments of the family as a concept that pervade

much feminist work on the topic. Rayna Rapp expressed this as the "acceptance
of the distinction between the family itself, and the larger world, " as either a pre-
existing enclave or survival of earlier productive modes, or as an effect of changes
in the mode of production." In either case, the family is "naturalized," rather
than being treated as an essentially contested historical and analytic concept."
This essay will be divided into the following parts. The first section will review
the account of the family offered by major feminist theorists. Particular attention
will be paid to the concept of patriarchy as employed by these writers. The second
section will describe the broad outlines of a methodology that can account for the
historical forces altering definitions of the family. The extent to which heightened
expectations regarding family life were inculcated universally and resulted in the
reconstruction of everyday reality in the life of families of different classes, races,
ethnic groups and regional locations will be the focus of section three. The fourth
section will consider the way in which psychoanalysis might be employed to address
some of the problems raised in earlier sections. Finally, the concluding section
will suggest ways that contemporary capitalism produces contradictory effects which
are expressed in the changing meaning and practice of personal life.

I
Radical feminist social theory seems unanimous in its conclusion that orthodox
Marxist thought is defective when it is applied to the history of women's oppression.
Marxism is wedded to an ontology of production, and women, Lorenne Clark
contended, are not determined primarily by their relationships to the sphere of
production, but by their relationships to the sphere of reproduction. Because the
dynamics of reproduction were excluded methodologically from Marxist analysis,
Marxism projected the problems of gender inequality onto its image of the socialist
future."
Socialist feminists have argued for the need to supplement traditional Marxist
analysis. The operation of patriarchy, they argued, was a relatively autonomous
system of male domination and was analogous to the structural reproduction of class
relations under capitalism. Zillah Eisenstein proposed a social theory which would
account for women's exploitation in terms of the integrated operation of the system
of ''" capitalist patriarchy." The structures of capitalism and of patriarchy were
distinct, but still in symbiotic relationship to one another. According to Eisenstein,
patriarchal gender relations and the class system of capitalism were mutually
supportive. Class relations were built upon the' 'sexual ordering of society, " and
thus patriarchy operated within the parameters of a class system. The patriarchal
ordering of sex roles, along with their legitimating ideologies, provided capitalism
with a form of "political control" stabilizing the' 'economic class system."7
The charge that Marxist analysis was inadequate came to rest on the critique
of the "primacy of production. ' '8 Because gender identity remained at least par-
tially hidden by this paradigm, it was argued that no systematic theory of the family
could be derived from a methodology which underscored "class exploitation as
the primary contradiction. " Eisenstein contended that Marx reduced oppression
to exploitation, thereby seriously limiting the explanatory power of his theory
286 Praxis International

to account for the position of women and the importance of the family. The concept
of exploitation, she argued, is derived from Marx's analysis of the economic
relations of capitalism. Dependent as it is on the definition of wage labor's producing
surplus value, it remains silent on the problem of labor in reproduction and house-
hold work, which produce no surplus value. Since these do not enter immediately
into the calculus of capitalist equations, we have no measure of the exploitation
of these' 'producers, " much less the social significance of their' 'work," to the
maintenance of the capitalist system. Having subsumed relations of reproduction
under the general rubric of relations of production, an account of women's oppres-
sion is missing from Marx's analysis. Thus, only a theory which successfully explores
the double determination of women's position by both the hierarchical sexual order
and the class structure of modern society would be acceptable. Given the institu-
tionalization of patriarchy in the bourgeois family and the political economy such
a theory would have to clarify the relationship between the family and the political
economy."
These criticisms implied that an adequate theory of the family would, then, treat
the family as a complex totality of relations which represents in microcosm the
diversity of the separate structures of women's situation; i.e., production, reproduc-
tion, sexuality and the socialization of children. Rather than criticize the family
per se, and demand its abolition, socialist strategy would demand the diversification
of the socially acknowledged relationships that are today forcibly and rigidly
compressed into it. ID
The most recent attempts to develop a theory of women's exploitation employ
psychoanalysis to argue that the origin of women's plight lay in the process of
gender differentiation. Going beyond an analysis of the political-economic functions
of sex roles they suggest that it is in the "very psychology of femininity that women
bear witness to the patriarchal definition of human society." 11 Nancy Chodorow
offers a detailed account of women's mothering in an effort to locate those object-
relational experiences that give rise to "the psychology and ideology of male
dominance. " 12
Socialist-feminist theory, therefore, situated the family, and women's place in
it, within the context of the mutually supportive, though discrete, systems of
patriarchy and capitalism. Patriarchy, defined as male supremacy, "provides the
sexual hierarchical ordering of society for political control." Since it operates as
a political system, it cannot be understood when reduced to its economic struc-
ture. Capitalism was defined as an "economic class system" which "feeds off"
patriarchal hierarchies. Like that of the shark and the pilot fish, the relationship
between capitalism and patriarchy could best be described as an ecological one.
Although socialist feminist theory rejects the assumption that patriarchy is a purely
biological system in favor of the position that gender roles are culturally determined,
it remains inadequate in accounting for the centrality of the historically specific
sexual division of labor under capitalism. Despite the assertion that patriarchy is
integral to the capitalist system, socialist feminists only have suggested its parallel
operation. 13
This "dual systems approach" 14 unjustifiably limits the scope of Marxist
analysis to the explanation of economic' 'facts. " The theory of patriarchy appears
as an ad hoc device used to explain the residual structural and ideological elements
 Praxis International 287

of gender relations for which Marxist analysis allegedly has not accounted. The
most recent psychoanalytic efforts to account for gender divisions tend to substitute
useful descriptions of the psychodynamics of gender differentiation for explanations
of the functional and metaphoric significance of gender differentiation in advanced
capitalism. 15
At best what we have is the juxtaposition of two sets of dynamics whose rela-
tionship is never adequately explored. Granted that the sexual division of labor
stabilizes society through the family, while it organizes the realm of domestic work,
the question remains why this particular form of political control endured under
capitalism. Explaining this as a vestige of pre-capitalist patriarchy operating in
a capitalist context only obscures the issue by making patriarchy a "transhistorical
and autonomous system" instead of a "set of relations in a particular society. " 16
The allegation that male power is rooted either in a vague prehistoric psychology
or derives from male domination of such institutions regulating reproductive
processes as law or medicine is not a sufficient explanation for the existence of
patriarchy. Moreover the more universally patriarchy is defmed, the more obscured
the relations between biology and society become." The social organization of
gender identity must be viewed as an historical problem, and subjected to a
materialist analysis.

Materialist analysis should not be defmed narrowly as "economic" methodology.

Rather, it grants priority to "concrete social institutions and practices, along with
the material conditions in which they take place." 18 The complexity of Marxist
analysis of the development of social relations under capitalism is worth careful
consideration. The issue is not whether Marx himself offered a complete picture
of women's condition, but whether his methodology is broad enough to enable
contemporary scholars to accomplish this task.
Understanding how society organizes its productive activities is fundamental
to understanding the nature of society itself in any historical period. 19 This is not
because there is some crude correspondence between economics and culture, but
because human productive activity, or social activity as Marx calls it, expresses
a relation between the producer and external nature, while it simultaneously
represents the ways that an individual develops specific capacities and needs.
Production is a "definite form of (individuals') activity, a defmite way of expressing
their life, a definite mode of life' , .20 The development of specific social relations
is conditioned by the unfolding of productive forces in any historical period.
The importance of production is not that identity is reduced to a mere reflection
of it, but that the life-process of individuals is how' 'they work, produce materially,
and act under defmite material limitations, presuppositions, and conditions indepen-
dent of their will" .21 Marx's emphasis on production is the attempt to provide a
method of analysis that is historical and concrete, as opposed to speculative and
idealist. The narrowing of the meaning of productive activity to its definition as
wage labor is an historical premise of the development of capitalism. For Marx,
the distinguishing feature of capitalist productive activity is that property relations
become completely independent of the community. 22 In a market system, exchange
288 Praxis International

relations, no longer limited by the kinship system of social organization, become

the fundamental dynamic and organizing principle of society. Thus, the production
of material life becomes the purpose of social intercourse itself. All other rela-
tionships, including relations in the family, become subordinate to the determinant
relation to production. 23
It is, in fact, more precise to argue that different structures or ideologies of the
family emerge simultaneously with changes in the productive mode. The theory
that family forms reflect changes in the economy is inaccurate for two reasons.
First, it arbitrarily and abstractly separates "the family" from the productive mode,
i.e., from the historicallyspecific "life-process" that any epoch constructs. Second,
it assumes "an essential family whose internal structure may vary and whose
relations to the system of production may vary, but which nevertheless persists
across these historical transformations. " 24
That "the family" has been an essentially contested concept is reflected both
in contemporary controversies about adoption rights of homosexuals as well
as the fact that, until the early eighteenth century, the word family was neither
coterminous with eo-residents in households, nor limited to kin relations who were
eo-residents." Rather, "family" has been used as a metaphor to express rela-
tionships that may include kin, but are not limited to relations among kin. In
contemporary capitalist culture, family seems to carry expressive force primarily
as a code that represents certain specific emotional bonds connected to "personal
life". In early modern Europe, "family" signified all those joined together by
their common subjection to a male head, or "pater-familias." The apparent
disjunction between authority patterns, work relationships and emotional ties
distinguishes the modern bourgeois family ideal.
With the rupturing of feudal ties to the land and to kin, the "free" individual
is born. Individual talent and initiative seem to replace the accidents of birth as
the primary determinants of an individual's position in the division of labor. "To
each according to his ability" becomes the credo of the day. A free market, free
trade, free exchange and free labor facilitate the unlimited production and accumula-
tion of wealth which characterizes the capitalist system.
Nevertheless, the dependence of each individual on the market means that while
certain arbitrary divisions of rank and status have been superseded, other equally
arbitary distinctions have replaced them. Individuals seem freer but, in reality,
have become less free "because they are to a greater extent governed by material
forces. "26 The exigencies of exchange based on private appropriation of social
wealthlimit the ability of individuals to escape from the "particular exclusive sphere
of activity" which represents their position in the division of labor.
The transformation of social relations effected by the development of commodity
production is contradictory. On the one hand, the satisfaction of human needs is now
more dependent than ever on the market system. At the same time that very market
system acts as a "barrier" to the fulfillment of different needs for specified classes
of individuals. Thus, the bourgeois system of production creates new needs for' 'the
development of a totality of (individual) capacities. " But, it can only sustain itself
as capital by fulfilling these needs within the terms set by private property.
These insights can be applied to the study of the family and the social organization
of gender. In precapitalist systems of production, the household itself was the
 Praxis International 289

productive mode. Work within it was divided along gender lines, but the inequality
of status that existed resulted from the combined effects of prolonged child care
and the primitive level of technology. 27 But as long as the household remained
the primary locus of production, the restriction of tasks to one sex or the other
did not contradict their reciprocal dependence. 28
Even when, in urban cultures, some husbands began to work primarily away
from the home, wives were engaged either in home-centered labor, or in activities
outside the home which were parallel to their household chores. In either case,
the economic contribution of women's work was so critical to the livelihood of
lower-class families that married women within this strata could be characterized
best as "working partners in the family enterprise. "29 Equally important was the
fact that personal life was rooted in the mutual labor of family members. 30
The concept of the family, family relationships, and the definitions of women's
place in the family and in the economy were altered in major ways with the
development of commodity production. The idea of the family as an aggregate
of eo-residing kin came to be seen as the norm. Sexual polarity gradually replaced
sexual complementarity as a feature of the division of labor. 31 Capitalist produc-
tion was based on a disjunction between' 'material production organized as wage
labor and the forms of production taking place within the family. " Consequently,
the family's economic function was obscured, as its moral purpose was emphasized,
and its symbolic significance as an emblem of "ernbourgeoisement' - a cultural
norm distinguishable from both the aristocracy and the working class - was
highlighted:
The contradiction between, on the one hand, the disruption and squalor caused by
manufacture and urban development which were the bread and butter of the middle
class and, on the other, the intense desire for order and moral superiority, was bridged
by the romantic vision ... the romantic imagination indelibly fixed the image of the
rose-covered cottage in a garden where womanhood waited and Manhood ventured
abroad: to work, to war and to the Empire. So powerful was this dual conception
that even the radical fringe subscribed. 32

III
The effects of the separation between' 'work" and' 'personal life, " however,
varied with class and ethnicity. Among merchant classes of the late eighteenth
century, for instance, requirements of large capital sums for investment necessitated
the "disengagement of capital from family firms." The evolution of exogamous
forms of kin-marriage conducive to capital accumulation altered the nature and
structure of the family and authority patterns in critical ways:
In the MoSiDa (mother-sister-ciaughter) marriage, the only link to a potential patriarch
is through women. . . In the sibling exchange there is no direct line of authority at
all. . . In both these patterns authority loses its generational depth ... In such a situation
the nuclear family and the authority of the father as its head becomes far more
important than the authority of the kin-group and the grandfather. 33

Such families were clearly paternally controlled, because the husband was the
legal owner of the family's property. But, in the strictest sense, they were not
290 Praxis International

,'patriarchal" in terms of their relation to capital. Moreover, the exercise of paternal

authority shifted to shaping the behavior of children to norms which were institution-
ally determined." As the socialization of the young began to define the female
sphere, the mother's role in the inculcation ofvalues became critical. Despite the social
significance of childrearing, women, as individuals, remained legally and economic-
ally subordinate to their husbands." This, of course, varied by class and race.
The rationalization of sexuality which accompanied the rise of industrialization
was represented in the' 'Cult of True Womanhood. " Women, protected from the
corrupting influence of the masculine world of ' 'work, " were viewed as the proper
guardiansof the moral sphere. True femininity was defmed by standards of behavior
and a set of activities that reflected bourgeois values. The ideal woman tended
to "home and hearth," while her husband occupied himself with business and
public affairs. Though these ideals were unrealizeable for the majority of the
population, they nonetheless were universalized."
Within the working class, the impact of industrialization had different effects. In
the early stages of development of the British textile industry, for example, whole
families moved together into the mills." In the United States, too, recruitment
to the labor market initially was age and sex neutral. The subsequent development
of industry intensified the specialization and differentiation of labor, thereby
reducing traditional work opportunities for some women. Unions contributed to
the process of restricting most paid labor to men by arguing that female employment
had a depressing effect on men's wages. 38
Among skilled workers, increased wages decreased the necessity for the wives
of those male workers to work outside the home. At the same time, hazardous
working conditions led to the opposition of organized labor to married women's
employment on the grounds that it led to higher rates of infant mortality. 39
Toward the end of the nineteenth century in the U. S., both the increasing mechaniza-
tion of industry and successive waves of immigration increased the competition
for jobs. These forces, coupled with the enlargement of the sphere of consump-
tion which the stability of capitalism required, widened the division of labor
between men and women of the working class, both within industry and within
the family.40 Moreover, the alienating effects of work placed an increased burden
on the family to serve as a place of retreat and release. That women's position
in this case, even employed women, was defined largely in terms of their familial
roles is not a reflection of the persistence of a patriarchal ideology, but of the
particular quality of the emergent needs of personal life which were structured
and/or restrained by market forces.
One cannot rely on patriarchy to explain the centrality of gender differences
in a capitalist system of production. Market relations undermine the operation of
a patriarchally organized social system because the exchange of labor substitutes
for the exchange of women as the basic social bond. Gender differentiation remains
significantas a form of social control because the capitalist division of labor requires
a more dichotomized organization of gender identity as a necessary support. Despite
the fact that the rationalization of productive processes appears to undermine gender
hierarchies, the differentiation of tasks and' 'spheres" of activity on the basis of
gender is built into the very definition of work and its purposes under capitalism.
As Davidoff and Hall put it:
 Praxis International 291

Manhood was to become part of the central claims to legitimate middle class
leadership ... Manhood also implied the ability and willingness to support and protect
women and children. Men would enter the market as free agents but would thus
preserve the moral bonds of society in their private and philanthropic activity."

This connection of masculinity with the ability to support women and children
who were defined as dependent operated as a strong ideological support for the
sharpening of a sexual division of labor even among the working classes where,
class obstacles notwithstanding, masculinity came to be equated with having an
occupation. The flip side of this was the necessity to hold, or aspire to the holding
of, the "substance of domesticity. "42
Any careful analysis of the transformation of family life under capitalism must
consider the difference between prescriptive ideals of family life reflected in the
literature and public policies of the time, and the reality of everyday experience.
Feminist theorists have not always heeded the warnings of social historians and
thus they have mistaken ideological dicta about femininity and the family for the
actual behavior and values of a specific time." In addition, they have made
ideology an independent variable instead of considering cultural norms within the
class-specific context of changing, often contradictory, social relations.
For instance, if mothering was viewed as ultimate fulfillment of woman's nature
in the early nineteenth century, and if childrearing literature of the times affirmed
the mother's predominance, it is to the very real changes in the social context of
mothering that we should look for an explanation of this phenomenon, rather than
to an unalloyed patriarchalist mentality. For reasons that are rooted in the capitalist
organization of work and its gender coding, the development of industrialization
triggered a greater differentiation of parental roles. There was, in other words,
a split between the punitive and the nurturing aspects of authority. Fathers were
generally associated with the former, and mothers with the latter, although the
mother's role in the socialization of children along sex-differentiated lines into
"proper" norms of behavior did not exempt her from some measured participation
in the inculcation of disciplinary codes. The advice manuals of the time, properly
analyzed, are records of this shift towards more exclusive and intense relations
between mothers and their children in a more discrete and specialized milieu."
At the same time they should be read as attempts to legitimate the changing
status of women in terms which essentially fit the demands of the burgeoning
capitalist order. Tracts on the "proper" methods of childrearing, like attempts
to instill "proper" work habits, should be understood as part of the process of
inculcating in whole classes of people the behavioral norm and values of industrial
civilization." Nevertheless, the extent to which these canons were internalized
and practiced by the audiences for whom they were intended cannot be ascertained
from the pronouncements themselves. For many, economic and cultural exigencies,
as well as racial discrimination, proved insurmountable barriers to the realization
of ideal (bourgeois) family life. 46
In order to understand the consequences of what has been called the "emotional
intensification of family life" on developing forms of gender identity, we must
explore the impact of the changed relation between the family and the outside world
as this was mediated by class and race. This requires a methodology that moves
292 Praxis International

beyond the assumption that attitudes about' 'women's proper place" accurately
reflect, in an uncontradictory way, universal behavior.
Marx observed that the development of private property contributed to the
evolution of a "separate domestic economy. ' '47 According to the law of capital,
work performed within this "domestic economy" of the private household, though
economically significant, is not productive labor. Housework, falling outside the
general domain of social production defined by capitalist exchange relations, is
"valueless." Nevertheless, women's work in the home remains determined by
the capitalist mode of production." Capitalist social relations of production,
which derive from its ontology of work as wage labor, structure the economic
dependence of all who are wage-less workers, housewives included, on the market
system. The connection between housework and the economy of capital is obscured
by the fact that the labor time embodied in the goods and services produced at
home is not sold in the marketplace. Also, the fact that the advent of modern
technology seems to have diminished the amount of time and energy spent on
housework attenuates the relationship between housework and "work" itself. 49
The dominance of this ontology of productive labor arbitrarily focuses on one
moment of what Marx called the circuit of production, which included not only
production based on the appropriation by capital of surplus value created by labor,
but also distribution and consumption. This dominance obscures the complexity
of the way that production depends upon consumption for the realization of surplus
value. It also ignores the way that capitalist consumption creates a very specific
subject who has a need for the "products" of capitalism; a subject whose particular
needfulness is mediated by a whole range of social relationships - the 'relational'
element of class - and whose specific social identity comes to be defined by
"particular desires and pleasures ... [that are] represented as cultural products." 50
Because of these relational dimensions of class, each of these moments has important
,'gender boundaries" which represent the ontological distinctions of hierarchy and
"otherness" that capitalism both requires and threatens to erode. In other words,
gender, as a metaphor of difference and classification, and as the representation
of the sociallocation and life experience of actual men and women, becomes central
to the way that class belonging is coded. It is in this sense that the importance
of the conceptual distinction of family life from economics per se can be appreciated
as one of the means of constructing class identity within a market society.
Nevertheless, although the private household seemed isolated from the productive
sphere, family life structured and was permeated by market relations. "Most
production for profit was through the family enterprise . . . The forms of property
organization, and authority within the enterprise framed gender relations through
marriage, the division of labor and inheritance practices." 51 In addition, the
development of the forces of production gradually displaced education, recreation,
and a variety of "welfare" services onto the market directly, or onto social
institutions (hospitals, schools, social service agencies)." The paramount change
was the family's redefinition in terms of an ethos of "personal life." The family
came to be idealized as the "primary institution in which the search for personal
happiness, love and fulfillment takes place. " The growth of wage labor intensified
the weight of meaning attached to personal relations in the family. 53 This was
made more pronounced by the development of the family as an important market
 Praxis International 293

for industrial commodities. The result was that women's isolation in the family
was reinforced. At the same time, of course, the subordination of women's own
"personal needs" to their traditional role as maintainers of the family's stability
was submerged between the ideology of "personal life" and the constricted forms
in which it was contained.
In order to have a measure of the real impact of these changes on the quality
of family life it would be necessary to demonstrate the specific ways in which
socialization expectations and behaviors were modified by alterations in the struc-
ture, the relation and the representation of the family to the larger social system.
Without empirical evidence to verify the significance of changing forms of family
life, one is left with a model of social change that presumes the universality of
the conjugal family and its congruence with the industrial capitalist order. 54 We
need to test the idealization of family life against the experience of real families
in order to explore the ways that different classes and races adapted to or resisted
the demands of a changing world."
Furthermore, if a sexual division of labor is institutionalized in capitalism because
of the specific impact of commodity production on family life, we need to account
for why it is structured so that the division of roles between men and women
in the family seems at once paradoxical and more rationally compelling than
before. Psychoanalytic methodolgy offers a theoretical method for approaching
this problem. Psychoanalysis calls attention to the way that the asymmetrical
organization of parenting affects the development of the ideology of male superiority
as well as submission to the requirements of production. Mothering in the isolated
context of the nuclear household creates a "sexual division of psychic organization
and orientation" and thereby underlies the personality structure which perpetuates
the social organization of gender. 56

IV
Psychoanalysis enables us to chart the course of character development and to
observe how changes in the process of identification alter personality. In other
words, psychoanalysis allows us to observe how the internalizationof cultural norms
reverberates in the psyche. In particular, it points to the significance of familial
relations to psychological processes of gender personality. But a psychodynamic
account does not provide us with a complete enough account of the ways that
changes in the social structure affect the organization of parenting and, in turn,
"create ... differential relational needs and capacities in men and women that
contribute to the reproduction of women as mothers." 57
Although it is a commonplace assumption of some psychoanalysts that the child's
internalization of object-relations has been altered significantly by the relative
exclusivity of its early attachments to the mother, there has been little evidence
offered to suggest how the situation has changed over time. On the contrary, as
Lasch argued, most of the evidence seems to suggest that even in pre-bourgeois
society, infants were left exclusively in the care of women. In some cases, the
degree of sexual segregation that existed was greater than in contemporary bourgeois
society." Nor does the father's absence alone explain the change, since fathers
historically often were "absent" from nurturing functions. Rather, it is the gradual
294 Praxis International

erosion of the material base for family authority, coincident with the growth of
industry, which alters identification processes. Fathers not only participate less
in family life, but the quality of their interaction with their children is apt to be
one-sided. The image of the father as the one meting out punishment is untempered
by any other practical everyday experience of the father. Consequently, children
growingup in such families lack an integrated ego, and remain dependent on external
authority. Fragility of self-concept results from extended dependence on exclusive
maternal involvement, so the argument goes.
Even if this account of the impact of contemporary family structure on character
development is accurate, we need to know how typical it is of family life in all
classes and races. 59 But were we to have this information, it still would not enable
us to conclude that the difficulty lies in the parenting relation itself. The claim
that the' 'social organization of parenting produces sexual inequality" or that the
"social rootedness of mothering" helps explain the reproduction of a particular
sex/gender system tends to lead implicitly to the demand for equal parenting without
recognizing the class, not to mention sexual preference, blindness of such proposals.
Such a demand rests upon changes in the structure of production which would
have to be accomplished before the practice of shared parenting could extend beyond
the narrow sphere of professionals, with flexi-time schedules, who now practice
it. 60 Ironically, shared parenting, in the absence of structural changes in the
organization of production, could exacerbate class conflicts even as it modifies
sexual inequalities within the more affluent strata of society. If the earliest rela-
tionships between mothers and children are fraught with tension and conflict, what
needs to be explored is the specific way that capitalism deforms personal life even
as it creates it as a possibility for more people.
The transformation of the work process itself - the separation of "work" and
"life" -led to the ideology of the family as an autonomous sphere which satisfied
the laborer's needs for human comfort. If both sexes were degraded systematically
at work, then it might be argued that the ability of the family to survive as a viable
institution was undermined. Therefore, it became imperative to the stability of
capitalismthat a sexual division of labor be enforced. "The apparently autonomous
individual man, celebrated in both political economy and evangelical religion, was
almost always surrounded by family and kin who made possible his individual
actions. "61 The retreat from paid employment of one sex or the other to attend
to the domain of personal needs became integral to capital itself, both functionally
and ideologically. Women were identified as the chosen sex in ideological tracts
of the 18th and 19th centuries which stressed the ways that women's "natural"
reproductive and child rearing roles, enhanced by arguments about the "cultural
capital" that women were responsible for developing, limited both women's direct
participation in the economic enterprise and the labor force. Employers too, relying
on the assumption that women's paid employment was transient in nature, engaged
in the common practice of paying women workers on a scale substantially below
men's. Finally, the action of unionists who, fearing that the depressed wages of
women would threaten both the adequacy of wages paid to men, as well as the
struggle within the craft unions to maintain control of their trade, worked to exclude
women from the paid labor force. The combined effects of these variables dictated
women's place within the home. Though this pattern varied with class, race and
 Praxis International 295

ethnicity, nevertheless it grew to become both a pattern and a goal of the industrial
capitalist order. This dynamic was reinforced by mass consumption which spread
capital to the sphere of personal life itself, though not without contradictory effects.
In the early twentieth century the inordinate demands placed on the family and
on women in it to meet the needs of personal fulfillment strained the institution
itself. Developments within the productive process, however, increased both the
necessity and the opportunity for women's paid employment. Married women's
employment increased between 1890 and 1920 in the U. S., especially in clerical
fields. Nevertheless, the radical potential of these changes once again was contained
by a gendered response to the exigencies of the productive mode. Social reformists
reacted to this situation with an array of legislative programs designed to save
the family. Social welfare services were extended and protective legislation was
passed. The net effect of these programs on the family was to undermine its
autonomy by integrating it more completely with the political-economic system.
Protective legislation actually reinforced the segmentation of the labor market along
sex lines. For women who needed to or wanted to work outside the home, the
regimentation of a gender division of labor within the home meant that paid work
was simply added on top of primary responsibility for maintaining the sphere of
domesticity. The outpouring of expert advice to the housewife/mother concerning
the performance standards of her' 'natural" roles eroded the autonomous control
of women over the territory that had been ceded to them and heightened their sense
of dependence, as well as increasing levels of guilt for "working"mother, at
precisely the moment when household chores were becoming less burdensome,
at least for the more affluent classes.

v
From this review of the history of the development of the modern ideology of
the family it is evident that the creation of the bourgeois ideal of family life is
not attached merely to a pre-existing patriarchalism, but is rather the mode within
which modem ideas of gender are expressed. If women's roles are associated more
narrowly with nurturing activities, and if the sign of productive labor is associated
more narrowly with market activity and wage labor, the question is not whether
care-giving activities are represented by the primacy of production, because clearly
they cannot be "seen" within this metaphor. The point is, rather, to understand
how the definition of women's work provides productive labor with its rationale,
and its real contradiction.
The contradiction between personal life and social production is crystallized in
the situation of women in modem capitalist society. The capitalist system requires
a sexual division of labor in part because, given the alienating effects of work
itself, the main available arena within which personal needs can be met is defined,
ideologically, as the family .A particular kind of family is the necessary complement
to gendered definitions of class. For this family to be an effective retreat, within
the limits set by capital, it is imperative that women in it, upon whom the nurturing
responsibilities have devolved, be untainted by the distortions of alienated labor.
Hence, the division between what Parsons called "expressive" and "instrumental"
functions within the family is rooted in the capitalist organization of work which
296 Praxis International

cannot be understood apart from these gendered divisions. Moreover, as Rubin

notes, the more alienated the labor of the wage earner is, the more stark the
segregation of roles within the family may become. This separation serves to
undermine the extent to which the family can offer any comfort at all.
For the majority of families, the situation is made even more complex by the fact
that the luxury of depending upon the wages of one earner is all but precluded by the
realities of economics. This fact reverberates in the inner life of working class families.
Tensions caused by the respective partner's inability to live up to cultural expectations
of appropriate gender roles are displaced from the social system onto each other, so
that' 'each blame[s] the other for failures to meet cultural fantasies." 62
In middle class families this strain partly is mitigated by the fact that the wife's
earnings constitute a much smaller percentage of family income, except among
professional couples. Within families of this class, however, affluence itself affects
the woman's role. Housework becomes more routinized, less physically demanding.
Even child care does not make up for the difference. The key to women's experience
in this class is the isolation of "women's work" itself from the social fabric and
the standards of value of the "outside" world. Though the woman expresses herself
in a wide range of roles, and hence, appears to have more latitude and freedom
than does the man, the freedom is constricted:

From the outside she appears freer than a man working for someone else and without
any affection in his job. But because this caring work goes on in a context of a society
where work is predominantly divorced from care, because she is isolated in the home,
bearing the load of all the sentiment which is out of place in the man's work, and
because the division of labor which relegates caring to women and brands women
as inferior, distortion is inevitable. 63

The contradictions behind all the factors, personal and "economic," contributing
to the changing sex composition of the labor force are highlighted especially in
the increased labor force participation rates of the fastest growing sector of the
labor force: women with pre-school age children. The autonomy of the division
of roles within the family is threatened most by this group of woman workers.
To the extent that its autonomy is preserved, it is women who still bear the brunt
of the responsibility: their work outside the home is simply added on top of their
work within it. Even today, the percentage of time spent sharing household labor
by husbands with employed wives is not different significantly from the amount
of time contributed by husbands with wives who are full-time homemakers."
In sum, the very separation between personal life and work which the capitalist
system institutionalized, and which required a strict division of roles in the family
along sexual lines, now appears to be in the process of being undermined by the
dynamics of capitalist production itself. The marginality of the economic security
of the working class, the strains implicit in the housewife's work as it is increasingly
commodified, and the changing composition of the work force all threaten the
family's ability, within its traditional form, to serve as a viable support system
within the market economy. The instability of the capitalist system makes the
family's function to nurture personal needs all the more critical. At the same time,
this very instability crystallizes the contradiction between personal life and work
upon which capitalism is founded by altering the traditional sexual division of roles
 Praxis International 297

within the family without, however, fundamentally restructuring the sphere of

production or the family itself. Because the system of production remains organized
essentially so that personal needs are met outside it, women continue to bear the
responsibility for meeting these needs. Yet capitalism demands that the family
function as a seemingly autonomous sphere of privatized personal life, capable
of maintaining itself on the withered ground that monopoly capital allows. Thus, the
demand for the recognition of women's place in the family - for the acknowledge-
ment of how the ontology of productive labor is constructed by its distance from
the ontology of care-giving - challenges the ability of capitalism to humanize society
within the limits of commodity exchange.

NOTES
* The author wishes to thank Jean Elshtain, Howard Kushner and Paul Thomas and the reviewers
and co-editors of Praxis, for their critical comments and suggestions.
1. Susan Okin, Women and Western Political Thought, (Princeton, 1979).
2. For example, Shulamith Firestone rejected traditional Marxist analysis in favor of a "materialist
view of history based on sex alone." The Dialectic of Sex, (New York, 1970), 5. Lorenne Clark
reached similar conclusions in her essay, "The Rights of Women: The Theory and Practice of the
Ideology of Male Supremacy, " in Contemporary Issues in Political Philosophy, ed. Shea and King-
Farlow (New York, 1976),55. Zillah Eisenstein contended that class was not an adequate category
on the basis of which to explore the history of women's oppression. "Developing a Theory of Capitalist
Patriarchy," in Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, ed. Z. Eisenstein (New
York, 1979), 24, 28. More recently, Catherine MacKinnon contended that Marxian categories were
of limited relevance for the development of feminist theory because they failed to explain the struc-
turing of sexuality, the basic social process that defined, directed and expressed the production of
desire. Since this process operated independently of the mode of production to exploit women -
as the continued exploitation of women under' 'socialist" systems demonstrated - class-based analysis
was inadequate to explain women's subordination. "Marxism, Method, Theory and the State," Signs
7, no 3 (1982). As far as Freud was concerned, most feminists argued that his pronouncements
on femininity were ideologically motivated. Firestone, The Dialectics ofSex, and Kate Millett, Sexual
Politics, (New York, 1970) are typical of this school.
3. I am not disputing the fact that ideology has a material component. Attempts to employ
psychoanalysis in order to argue that origins of women's plight lie in the process of gender dif-
ferentiation itself are at least partially successful at indicating the importance of the internalization
of an ideology of femininity to the analysis of the political stablization of capitalism. Nevertheless,
as this paper will show, even the accounts of this psychoanalytic school have their mechanistic
shortcomings. cf. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering, (Berkeley, 1978).
4. Rayna Rapp, Ellen Ross, and Renate Bridenthal, "Examining Family History," Feminist
Studies, 5, no. 1 (Spring, 1979).
5. Cf. Michelle Barrett, Women's Oppression Today: Problems in Marxist Feminist Analysis,
(London: 1980), 188; and Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women
of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850, (London, 1987).
6. Clark, Contemporary Issue in Political Philosophy, 55.
7. Eisenstein, Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, 24, 28.
8. Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell, Feminism as Critique (Minneapolis, 1987,), 4.
9. Eisenstein, Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, 23-27.
10. Juliet Mitchell, Woman's Estate (New York, 1973), 151.
11. Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (New York, 1975), 413.
12. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley, 1978), 208.
13. Even the idea that patriarchy is an important ideological adjunct to the class system of capitalism
may be incorrect, given the undermining of the patriarchal authority of the father by the process
of what Lasch called the "socialization of reproduction," and what Marcuse had called "repressive
298 Praxis International

desublimation." Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World (New York, 1977); Herbert Marcuse,
Eros and Civilization (Boston, 1955).
14. Iris Young, "Socialist Feminism and the Limits of Dual Systems Theory, " Socialist Review,
50-51, (March-June, 1980, 169.)
15. Even Chodorow's argument that it is women's mothering which reproduces the social organization
of gender and links it with the social organization of production presupposes the gender-differentiated
split between affective and instrumental attributes of personality which it was supposed to explain.
An important distinction between the materialist roots of the "social organizaton' of gender and
the familial context within which gender differences are internalized is missing from her analysis.
16. Joseph Interrank and Carol Lassner, "Victims of the Very Songs They sing: A Critique of
Recent Work on Patriarchal Culture and the Social Construction of Gender, " Radical History Review,
20 (Spring/Summer, 1979), 34.
17. Interrank and Lassner, "Victims of the Very Songs They Sing," 36.
18. Young, "Dual Systems Theory," 185.
19. Karl Marx, The German Ideology (New York, 1970), 42.
20. Marx, The German Ideology, 42.
21. Marx, The German Ideology, 46-7 , (emphasis added).
22. In all other societal forms "individuals are united by some other bond: family, tribe, the
land itself, etc." Whereas in the bourgeois system individuals seem "independent of one another
and are only held together by exchange." Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works V
(London, 1973), 86-89.
23. This does not mean that the family is irrelevant. The point is that the structure, function and
meaning of family relationships are qualitatively transformed with the extension of the division of
labor predicated on private property.
24. Barrett, Women's Oppression Today, 195.
25. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 31; cf. Barrett, Women's Oppression Today, 200.
26. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 73.
27. In fact, as some anthropologists have demonstrated, the division of social tasks along gender
lines and the extent of inequality varied considerably among "traditional" societies. See Ann Oakley' s
discussion of this in Woman's Work (New York, 1973).
28. EH Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life (New York, 1976), cf. Peter Laslett,
The World We Have Lost (New York, 1965); Phillipe Aries, Centuries of Childhood (New York,
1962); loan W. Scott and Louise A. Tilly, "Woman's Work and the Family in Nineteenth Century
Europe," in The Family in History, 00. Rosenberg (Philadelphia, 1975); and Alice Clark, The Working
Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1919).
29. Scott and Tilly, "Woman's Work and the Family in Nineteenth Century Europe," 161.
30. Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life, 29-30.
31. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 181.
32. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 27-28.
33. Peter Dokin Hall, "Family Structure and Economic Organizations: Massachusetts Merchants,
1700-1800," in Familyand Kin in Urban Communities: 1700-1800 ed. T. Haraven, (New York,
1979), 45-46.
34. Peter Dobkin Hall, "Family Structure and Economic Organization," 50.
35. Passage of married women's property acts by the various states during the first half of the
nineteenth century altered the state of dependence to some extent for women who had property of
their own. However, these reforms, together with liberalization of divorce laws, actually represented
the permeation of marriage itself by contract relations.
36. Ann D. Gordon and Mari 10 Buhle, "Sex and Class in Colonial and Nineteenth Century
America," in Liberating Women's History, ed. B. Carroll (Chicago, 1976),83-6. Though the "cult
of domesticity" permeated the culture of the early nineteenth century, it was not without its contra-
dictions. For a discussion of the impact of these ideals on middle class women's political activism
see El1enCarol Dubois, Feminism and Suffrage (Ithaca, 1979); Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "Beauty,
the Beast and the Militant Woman: A Case Study of Sex Roles and Social Stress in Jacksonian
America," American Quarterly, xxiii, (Oct., 1971), 562-84.
37. cf. Neal Smelser, Social Change in the Industrial Revolution: An Application of Theory to
the British Cotton Industry (Chicago, 1959.)
 Praxis International 299

38. In 1836, the report of the National Trades Union Committee urged the exclusion of women
from the factories because it produced' 'ruinous competition ... to male labor" resulting ultimately
either in the discharge of male workers or the reduction of their wages "to a corresponding rate
of wages with the female operative." John R. Commons, et al., (eds.) A Documentary History
of American Industrial Society, vi, "The Labor Movement" (Cleveland, 1910), 195, cited in
Alice Kessler Harris, "Women, Work and the Social Order," in B. Carroll, Liberating Women's
History, 335. Ruth Milkman argued that there is strong evidence to suggest that the skilled craft
and trade union were particularly effective in structuring the labor market along gender lines.
Categorizing certain occupations as "female" and others as "male" helped restrict the labor supply,
thereby enhancing labor's bargaining position. "Organizing the Sexual Division of Labor" Historical
Perspectives on 'Women's Work' and the American Labor Movement," Socialist Review, 49
(Jan-Feb, 1980), 101-114.
39. cf. Margaret Hewlett, Wives and Mothers in Victorian Industry (London, 1958), esp. 99-122.
40. It also widened the division of labor between women of different classes and races. In 1890,
while only 5 % of all married women were employed outside the home, one quarter of married black
women were employed, as were two-thirds of widowed black women. Married women immigrants
followed the blacks' pattern. But by the 1920's, changes in the compositionof the labor force increased
the jobs available to native-born white women, at the expense of immigrant women and blacks,
both because of the nature of the skills required for those jobs, and the cultural defmitions of different
sorts of work. See Francine Blau, "Women in the Labor Force: An Overview, in Women: A Feminist
Perspective ed. J. Freeman (Palo Alto, 1979), 2nd edition, 269-70; Kessler-Harris, "Women, Work
and the Social Order," 334, 336, 337.
41. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 199.
42. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 269.
43. cf. Jay Mechling, "Advice to Historians on Advice to Mothers," Journal ofSocial History,
9, (Fall, 1975),44-63; Howard Kushner, "Nineteenth Century Sexuality and the 'Sexual Revolu-
tion' of the Progressive era," The Canadian Review ofAmerican Studies, ix, no. 1 (Spring, 1978),
34-49.
44. Nancy Cott, "Notes Towards an Intpretationof Antebellum Childbearing," Psychohistory
Review, 6 (Spring, 1978), 9.
45. For an excellent discussion of the extent to which traditional work habits and values had to
be supplanted see E. P. Thompson, "Time, Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," Past and Present,
. 38 (1967), 56-97.
46. For a good discussion of the situation of women of different classes in Latin American cultures,
see Ann M. Pescatillo, "Latina Liberation: Tradition, Ideology and Social Change in Iberian and
Latin American Culture," in Liberating Women's History, ed. B. Carroll, 161-178.
47. The German Ideology, 49. See also Grundrisse, (New York, 1973), 101.
48. There is a considerable literature on the debate among feminists concerning the definition
of housework as "unproductive labor. " For a review of this literature see Natalie Sokoloff, Between
Money and Love, (New York, 1980). .
49. In a provocative article Ruth Swartz Cowan argued that the ironic impact of labor-saving
household technologywas to increase the burden of household chores. "A Case Study of Teehnological
and Social Change: The Washing Machine and the Working Wife," in Clio's Consciousness Raised:
New Perspectives on the History of Women, ed. M. Hartmann and L. Banner (New York, 1974),
245-253. See also Batya Weinbaum and Amy Bridges, "The Other Side of the Paycheck: Monopoly
Capital and the Structure of Consumption," in Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist
Feminism, ed. Eisenstein, 190-205.
50. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 30. See also Rosalind Coward, Female Desire (London,
1984).
51. Davidoff and Hall, Famity Fortunes, 32.
52. ef. Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World; Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost
(New York, 1963).
53. Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life, 65.
54. This is the difficulty with William Goode' s by now classic treatment of the relation between
changing economic systems and family patterns. See World Revolution and Family Patterns
(New York, 1963).
300 Praxis International

55. Interesting examples of the kinds of evidence which could provide historical depth for such
an analysis is to be found in Diane Hughes, "Domestic Ideals and Social Behavior: Evidence from
Medieval Genoa," in The Family in History, ed. Rosenberg, 115-143; and Laura Owen, "The
Welfare of Women in Laboring Families: England, 1860-1950," in Clio's Consciousness Raised,
ed. Hartman and Banner, 226-244.
56. Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering, 180-181.
57. Chodorow herself acknowledges this. The question is whether her account of the social
structuring of parenting is a successful reformulation of the psychodynamic account in sociological
terms. What is altogether missing from her analysis is the exploration of gender as a metaphor for
the representation of specific activities, attributes and relationships.
58. Christopher Lasch, "The Emotions of Family Life, New York Review of Books.
59. cf. Claus Mueller, The Politics of Communication (Oxford, 1975).
60. Diane Ehrensaft notes that' 'inadequate maternity [sic] policies at the workplace, income and
job inequalities between men and women, and lack of flexible job structures are among the reasons
why the practice of shared parenting is not widespread, despite the fact that in some 28 % of American
households, both mother and father are employed." "When Women and Men Mother," Socialist
Review, 49 (Jan-Feb, 1980),41. It should be mentioned that Chodorow acknowledges that the social
organization of gender must be considered in its relation to an economic context. Nevertheless, her
analysis tends toward reductionist solutions to complex political-economic problems. The Reproduction
of Mothering, 34, 211-19.
61. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 33.
62. Lillian Rubin, Worlds of Pain: Life in the Working Class Family (New York, 1974), 178.
63. Sheila Rowbotham, Woman's Consciousness, Man's World (Middlesex, England, 1974), 178.
64. Survey cited in MS, (Feb, 1988). For women who are single parents, the situation is even
more burdensome.