Toward a Science of Women's Liberation
Larguia, Isabel & Dumoulin, John
The division of labor. . . is based on the natural division of labor in the family and the separation of society into individual families opposed to one another. is given simultaneously ... the...
...Even though the struggle of middle-class feminists, who possess the relative security conferred by their social and economic status, enabled them to force some openings in architecture, engineering, etc., women are still not accepted as welders, lathe operators, or masons...
...By means of these skills, men were liberated from most of the reproduction of their own labor power, permitting them to devote all their energies to social production and public affairs...
...In this way the housewives' efforts remain invisible as before...
...They are our property...
...Ethnological studies of pre-class societies have destroyed the traditional 19th-century image according to which women have, from the onset of history, spontaneously dedicated themselves to weaving and cooking, while men worked in distant fields, waging epic battles against the indomitable forces of nature...
...which are continuously used up...
...In the industrial world...
...It is widely known that even within socialist society small private producers continuously generate the social patterns of class society...
...Under these conditions, unless the Party intervenes vigorously, the first step toward raising women's consciousness will drift toward limited forms of liberation...
...But in a society dominated bv monopolies, petit-b...
...It is neither the comradeship nor the positive psychological aspects of a couple's relations which are in contradiction with the construction of a classless society, but their private economic aspect, which is that of a small sweatshop where women's labor power is confiscated...
...Frederick Engels expressed concern for the future of women, declaring that they would have to choose between being housewives or workers...
...We can estimate the relative magnitude of the surplus generated when we compare it with the total work done for the market as well as for direct consumption...
...PRISONER OF CONSUMER SOCIETY We should not underestimate the enormous ideological and economic importance that sex has today for the survival of class society...
...They tend to utilize services for their individual benefit and thereby reenter the consumer rat race...
...The values of liberalism, with its emphasis on individual rights, its total philosophy and culture of individual liberties, seem to be indispensable to the preservation of a stable capitalism...
...the Marxist leadership understood the impossibility of a reformist solution...
...All her creative forces are chanI'inrique Bvstelmann nelled into the reproduction of the species and the private reproduction of labor power...
...In consumer society there is no shelter, no refuge, that protects human beings from persistent ideological bombardment...
...It would be too optimistic to expect the complete ideological proletarianization of women at this early stage of the transition period...
...the unequal distribution . . of labor and its products, hence property . .. the first form of which lies in the family...
...Thus, women remain subordinate to men in a subtler, less barbarous way...
...But what is not understood is that this simple economic reproduction takes place at two distinct levels which correspond to the abovementioned division of labor...
...But the application of these solutions requires a radical change in the everyday thinking of the people, which has been deeply permeated by individualism and male supremacy...
...The principal problem of contemporary capitalist economy is no longer to create the necessary conditions for the production of commodities but for the sale of these same commodities, the circulation of which is constantly threatening to slow down, preventing the earning of profits...
...Sex-cleverly manipulated through advertising, films, television and the press-impregnated the social consciousness of the developed countries...
...In the words of Betty Friedan, "Housewifery expands until it fills all available time...
...Inheritance and paternity, pillars of the family in class society, lost their economic significance for a large part of the population...
...The rights of woman over herself were recognized by making her the owner of her sex...
...Excluded from heavy or dangerous work, alienated from their creative potential by the division of labor, women who gradually return to forms of invisible labor will not be fully transformed...
...rather, her invisible labor power is simply confiscated by means of the marriage contract, obliging her to look after the family, shop, process, and serve, in exchange for her keep and the attainment of a social status determined by that of her husband...
...Although we are in agreement with the article in general, we nonetheless think that unless one goes beyond the concepts of classic political economy, especially in regard to labor power and surplus value as Marx defines the terms, it is impossible to reveal the role of the housewife in class society, with all its political implications...
...This helps to destroy the vestiges of male supremacy inherited from Spain, plantation slavery, and United States neocolonialism...
...Worried only about establishing their vindictive domination within the love relationship, they will postpone their integration into the struggle that will destroy the system which imprisons them...
...They do not participate in public property relationships through which production surplus is created and expropriated...
...If the condition of women continues to be ignored, it could lead, under adverse circumstances, to the stagnation of revolutionary ideology...
...1) For a mother, the second workshift is as long as her socialized workshift...
...Class culture-poetry, fiction, popular music, the mass media, customs and habits--carries forward the thorough and devastating work begun in childhood...
...Even women in the labor market use the old weapons of "enchantment," "beauty," "femininity," in order to advance economically and socially...
...When it cannot impose itself by force, the symbol of virility assumes a gentle disguise...
...Furthermore, the prevailing bourgeois approach does not recognize the nature of this new commodity and claims that the capitalist buys "labor" rather than labor power...
...Women, expelled from the economic universe where surplus is produced, nevertheless fulfilled a fundamental economic function...
...It is the last refuge of the myths of private initiative and individual sovereignty which, paradoxically, stem from puritan wedlock...
...Cuba is an exceptional case, where officer-training schools and command posts are being opened to women, even though Cuba is not at war...
...Women's fate is intrinsically linked to the class struggle, carried on by the Party against the vices and culture of private property...
...Inspired by Wilhelm Reich, it has had a strong influence on some feminist and new left groups, which see human problems in the context of authoritarian sex relations and not in the class oppression from which it springs...
...This contradiction within the relations of production, which is not only economic but also ideological, is a characteristic feature of the transition period...
...Official recognition of the second shift is an important step, but the socialization of housework through the expansion of services and social benefits is not so much a question of government policy as of economic development...
...She is molded into a decorative, pretty, "feminine," object, and from the beginning the conviction is fostered in her that she was born to please through her sex, rather than expressing herself through work...
...Engels writes: "By changing all things into commodities capitalism dissolved all inherited and traditional relationships, and in place of time-honored custom and historic right, it set up purchase and sale, "free" contract...
...c) the resulting development of a hidden ideology of sex which distorts our conception of male-female relations in a classless society...
...But due...
...n Given that the reproduction of labor power is still considered a secondary sex characteristic rather than a specifically economic function, men consider their participation as degrading...
...It will continue to be a real social necessity as long as competitive individualismthe legacy of earlier social systems-does not disappear...
...Such confusion is the basis for pseudoscientific notions which modern society hails as justification for the division of labor between men and women...
...Thus, the idea that women can perform only auxiliary tasks is fixed in the social consciousness of the proletariat.The ideal of beauty held by the ruling classdisseminated by the mass media-tends to reinforce in women the fear of healthy development of their physical strength...
...Women, especially housewives, are the purchasers of 75 percent of all consumer goods...
...It is not by chance that women have been accepted in the textile and clothing industries, in food-processing, and in the services-as teachers, nurses, secretaries, elevator and telephone operators and domestic workers...
...Thus the housewife does not sell her labor power or its products...
...It is forgotten that the individual family will continue to be "the economic unit of society" as long as its economic functions are not collectivized...
...65-66...
...If they were going to incorporate women into production and defense they had to attempt the complete destruction of the patriarchal ideological superstructure...
...It represents the only serious attempt we know of to explore the economic implications of housewives's labor under capitalism...
...This corpus of "virtue," (with the social pseudonym of "femininity") alienates women from their human condition, and is conducive to private reproduction of labor power...
...Furthermore, biological reproduction affects men as much as women, with the exception of the nursing period and, in a few societies, the last months of pregnancy...
...Along with these early playthings, she receives a long decalogue of "don'ts," which tend to instill in her the fear of exploration of the outside world...
...It is not easy for women who perform difficult and exhausting work to bear the hours of invisible labor which await them at home...
...What is more important, it conceals one of the oldest and most enduring bases of class society...
...Origin of the Family, p. 67...
...hence, it is considered the most natural thing in the world for women workers to bear the burden of the second shift...
...Thus, the secret division of labor is assured and the base of class society remains unchangedthanks to this early recruiting of invisible labor power...
...Meekness, passivity, abnegation, and pathological fear of independence are required of the classic woman...
...Though women in underdeveloped countries have performed feats of limitless heroism and sacrifice in the struggle against imperialism, they must overcome a deeply instilled ideological cowardice if, through internal struggle, they are to transform their servile condition...
...Taking the United States and the Soviet Union as examples, we see that in the United States women constitute 7 percent of all doctors, I percent of all engineers and 3 percent of all lawyers, while in the Soviet Union the figures are 79 percent, 32 percent and 37 percent respectively...
...The theory that culture is the product of the sublimation of the sex instinct was given a scandalized but nonetheless warm welcome by the ideologues of the ruling class, who soon incorporated it into the bourgeois system of thought...
...The worker who is a militant activist on the job does not realize that part of the surplus value which the owner appropriates is created by his own wife, with himself as intermediary (in this respect he is fulfilling the role of a foreman...
...If the individual family were the economic unit of class society, a return to it through the reinforcement of invisible labor would inevitably lead to a reinforcement of the social consciousness of private property that still exists vestigially...
...The conceptual confusion between biological reproduction and reproduction of labor power lends physiological overtones to social consciousness...
...that of man over woman is another...
...they belong to us as a tree that bears fruit belongs to the farmer...
...Consumer-goods fetishism becomes a religion whose believers hasten the cycle of commodity circulation...
...It thus creates a special area, a kind of sanctuary the desecration of which would inflict endless evils on humanity, and in which the seeds of private property and competitive individualism survive, grow and multiply...
...Isabel Larguia and John Dumoulin 1. This article was originally written and circulated in early 1969, under the title "For a Scientific Feminism," Since then Margaret Benston's "Political Economy of Women's Liberation" (Monthly Review, September 1969) appeared, and deserves a brief comment here...
...The incorporation of women into production does not signify their total liberation...
...Women constitute the group that suffers the highest degree of distortion in class society...
...Through mass elementary education, the opportunity of invading the outside world was conceded to young women (and young men...
...Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family...
...One of these is the most primitive form of enterprise, the household...
...Sex competition is to women what competion for work is to men...
...they are making a mistake...
...One thing seems clear nonetheless: reformist ideas tend to perpetuate invisible work...
...To create these 'free' and "equal" people was one of the main tasks of capitalist production...
...Since her specific labor is invisible, her contribution to the development of productive forces remains hidden...
...It frequently appears among intellectuals and students who have a position of relatively high status and do not face domestic problems...
...2) Since the second workshift increases with the number of children, working mothers are forced to limittheir socialized workshift, a third of which is thus sacrificed...
...They have a marked class character and their function is to accelerate production in light industry and especially to infiltrate the consciousness o/' the exploited classes with the aesthetic and moral values of the ruling class...
...nor does it explain the role of women in work and their resulting social position...
...The left movements of the Western world have neglected to study these specific ideological traits...
...Paradoxically, the women who reveal this ideological characteristic strengthen the vestiges of the old double standard by perpetuating the classic role of the mistress, even as they demand women's rights...
...The conservative political forces of France and other highly industrialized countries, while admitting that women work more than eighty-four hours per week, propose as a solution the reactionary measure of part-time work...
...But the position of women, of all women, also undergoes significant change...
...With the exception of wartime, in which necessity forces the incorporation of women into heavy industry, they tend to be systematically excluded from all technologically advanced branches of industry...
...they revolve around men just as their grandmothers revolved around one man...
...Women are nothing but machines to produce children...
...What causes this...
...at the same time, throughout the ages a very powerful ideology developed which even today determines the image of women and their role in social life.In order to discover the bases of this ideology and the enormous importance it has had in the development of class society, it is necessary to specify the privatized activities performed by women within the bosom of the family...
...Therefore, they believe that the reasons for their oppression are to be found in biological reproduction, instead of social production...
...They also analysed the division of labor and the evolution of private property, with its close links with the individual family, revealing how under capitalism it continues to be "the economic unit of society...
...29, pp...
...it tends to emphasize the original division of labor and the sexual roles which emerged from the latter, roles which are based on an exaggerated valuation of beauty, the maternal function of the housewife, as well as rivalry between families to attain a higher social standing...
...Private Property...
...Thus, the class suicide of the housewife, her transformation into a proletarian, requires the elimination of the social traits acquired under capitalism...
...The labor of men, on the other hand, crystallized, through the different modes of production, into economically visible objects, destined to create riches upon entering the exchange process...
...An analysis of them is, nevertheless, 14 very necessary: the survival of these traits in socialism can severely block the development of proletarian consciousness...
...The "emancipated" woman begins to consider them as instruments of pleasure and play...
...The overestimation of sexual freedom as the only objective of feminine rebellion arises from the growth of consumer society and brings with it strong individualistic tensions...
...Even when rejecting the traditional "feminine mystique" and the burden of class culture, even when joining the revolutionary struggle, they tend to seek the approval of a superior masculine authority...
...The culture of class society has inculcated in women the notion that they can fulfill themselves within the narrow limits of sex...
...In 1919 Lenin confirmed Engel's analysis, pointing out that the first conquests of socialism revealed the true nature of the economic exploitation of women...
...The pressure of female economism limits the integration of women to work requiring minimal physical effort at work centers located near the home...
...upon returning to their "home sweet home" a second workshift awaits them, nonsalaried, unskilled, stupefying drudgery, which banishes from their minds any illusions of equality with men and of their new muchtouted social independence...
...John XXIII: "God and nature gave women different tasks, which perfect and complement the work assigned to men...
...the abyss between them exists because of the division of labor...
...The division of labor within the proletariat helps to consolidate the old prejudices concerning the sexes in the work area...
...Beginning with the breakdown of collective structures and their replacement by the patriarchal family, women's labor was progressively individualized and limited to the making of use-values for direct and private consumption...
...That sex was the base of all culture and the therapeutic value of releasing inhibitions-concepts 12 formulated by psychoanalysts-was promptly accepted and commercialized by class culture and the mass media...
...It seems to us that women must make a great effort to attain the place that they should really hold in society...
...And in the same way...
...Jean-Jacques Rousseau: "The entire education of women must be relative to men...
...At the least it would lead to: (1) an increment of individual wages at the expense of social benefits...
...This theoretical inertia has permitted the resurgence in left movements of, on the one hand, a romantic conception of the traditional family as a positive element in the construction of socialism and, on the other, its total negation, along with the theory of the abolition of the family...
...Aristotle: "It is a general law that naturally dominant elements and naturally dominated elements exist...
...The subtle individualism that characterizes developed countries had not reached them, and a few traces of the old collectivism remained...
...Neocapitalism, which chains women to their condition as sex objects, offers them escape valves which channel their potential rebelliousness . . . and stamps them with well-defined ideological traits, which they will bring with them, even as they enter the struggle for the rights of women and for socialism...
...Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology...
...These ideological traits manifest themselves as follows: (1) Sexual Liberalism Sexual liberalism, the last stronghold of the traditional values of liberalism, is a contemporary ideological projection of the social division of labor between the public and domestic spheres...
...The standards of behavior that crystallized throughout the ages predetermine absolutely the educational formation and social destiny of the new human being, according to sex classification...
...Competition among housewives has its concrete symbols...
...the necessity of creating real social equality between them and the way to do it...
...and (3) the strengthening of petit-bourgeois individualism...
...The prospects for extending education were increased...
...When female economism reasserts itself, despite the advances of proletarian culture, women take advantage of increased purchasing power and the newly created services, not by transforming themselves in a revolutionary way, not by total dedication to work and political activity, but by the acquisition of a social status comparable to that of a housewife in consumer society...
...Industrialization required a rise in the cultural level of the exploited classes...
...The invisible product of the housewife is labor power...
...of Paid Children Work Housework Total 0 50 27 77 54 1 45 39 84 71 2 37 47 84 76 3 or more 34 50 84 78 La femme dans la societe: Son images dans les differents milieux sociaux, Chombart, de Lauwe and others, Paris Editions Ouvrieres, 1964...
...From this moment on, womencollectively and not in isolated groups-start the long march toward their total liberation...
...These semiliterate women, hampered by a heritage of age-old discrimination and abuse, were trained in a class culture to exclusively reproduce labor power in the home: they were made into sex objects, into serfs, whose destiny was marriage...
...Simultaneously, there emerged the belief that women were incapable of performing "heavy," "dangerous" or "responsible" tasks...
...Not only the need to prevent stagnation in the circulation of commodities, but fundamentally the need to create a "no man's land," where the ideals of individualism and free exchange can survive (ideals which are the foundation of the bourgeois world), leads to the creation of a distorted culture of sex which in turn becomes an obsessive feature of neocapitalist popular ideology...
...New York, International Publishers, 1947), p. 21...
...The ideal woman, as presented by the mass media, literature, and popular songs, unquestionably belongs to the ruling class: slender, with velvety complexion, delicate, lacking any kind of muscular development...
...These household tasks must be collectivized as far as possible...
...When it survives under socialism it is both an expression of petit-bourgeois individualism and a "poor relation" of cultural neocolonialism...
...The division of labor between the sexes is merely the faithful reflection of the secret division of labor which frees men for public activities, while isolating the majority of women within the narrow confines of the private reproduction of labor.power...
...Still bound to a culture evolved over centuries of discrimination, women unconsciously cling to "traditional feminine values," that is, to the hidden ideology of sex...
...Therefore we can say that women's labor in the household is converted into surplus value by the wage-labor force...
...The expectations that the young man must satisfy are exactly converse...
...Then it will be plain that the first condition for the liberation of the wile is to bring the whole female sex back into puliic industry: and that...
...Equal rights," marriage for love, and the values of consumer society were nonexistent...
...the co-participation of men was not taken into account...
...They denigrate women in various ways...
...Cigarette factory in Brazil 10 ItlE SECOND SHIFT In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State...
...Socialism is a transition stage between capitalism and a classless society, which cannot be built until we resolve existing contradictions between the need for invisible labor and the need to incorporate the neglected half of humanity into productive work and political life...
...Their principal investigations responded to the urgent necessity to arm the working class with a scientific knowledge of the basis of teir exploitation, thus demystifying bourgeois society and revealing the internal dynamics of the capitalist, commodity economy...
...Revolutionary ideas reveal that the physical inferiority of women is not inevitable but is a historical product of the division of labor...
...that is to say, of their own products...
...The military is the armed force of the class in power, Exclusion from it on sexual grounds-with the corresponding implications for women's social con-20 sciousness-is logical in an oppressive society which systematically excludes women from positions of authority, but it is out of place in revolutionary armed forces, which represent the entire people...
...however, the Chase Manhattan Bank estimates that North American working women expend about one hundred hours a week...
...they still do not understand that the development of their true capabilities can come only from work...
...whereas great historical transformations occurred in the former, the latter, which developed much more slowly, acted as a brake on the former...
...Female economism continues to cling to traditional status symbols, and exerts heavy pressure on light industry to produce unnecessary merchandise...
...It is there because if all my sisters understood to what extent they are deformed, to what extent they are exploited, the collapse of the foundations of class society would be hastened...
...the peculiar character of the supremacy of the husband over the wife in the modern family...
...Just as slavery, imperialism and fascism gave rise to innumerable pseudoscientific theories intended to demonstrate the inferiority of oppressed peoples and to justify genocide, an impressive number of theories designed to keep women "in their place" have been contrived by psychoanalysts, biologists, doctors, sociologists and anthropologists...
...Such a solution would tend to defend the traditional division of labor and impede the socialization of the second shift and the increase in social wages...
...It is a process which can be carried out only through a long and conscious struggle, and that is precisely why the lack of interest in a scientific theory of women's liberation-given its fundamental importance for the construction of a classless societyleaves the way open for a rebirth of reformism...
...The basic canons of beauty which govern the sex market are very far from being expressions of a spontaneous popular culture...
...Thus, the following pattern emerges: (a) strictly biological reproduction...
...On the economic level, it constantly hampers socialist planning...
...2)to assign to women "light" production tasks, in order to justify the female workers' obligation to continue reproducing labor power in the home after completing the factory work day...
...In the last few years, advertising has led to the convergence of two ideals: the beautiful, fashionable woman (Be lovely...
...These activities are merely the projection into the public sphere'of the tasks performed by women in the household...
...Ibid., p. 39...
...The revolutionary process requires their assimilation into the basic working classes, which are the only ones able to stand up to imperialism...
...He could not imagine, and in our judgement he was right, that women could undertake both tasks...
...The real emancipation of women, real communism, will begin only where and when an all-out struggle begins (led by the proletariat wielding the state power) against this petty housekeeping, or rather when its wholesale transformation into large-scale socialist economy begins...
...The male-female polarity created by the original division of labor is exaggerated to ridiculous extremes...
...Romanticism emphasized the rights of woman over her sex (laying down a heavy smoke screen over the confiscation of her labor power within the framework of her voluntary surrender in marriage-no longer property but a continuing, legal object of exploitation...
...Its reactionary content is less evident...
...A female proletariat was created-a new force in history, which assumed enormous importance in the development of society...
...Women must be evaluated in terms of their role as workers, political leaders, or fighters...
...Demand no longer "exists" but is "created...
...In primitive society, work and all other social activities were carried out collectively, and both property and kinship relations reinforced these collective bonds...
...From the following table of the weekly working hours of French women in 1959, we may draw several conclusions: Weekly Working Hours for Women Women Workers Housewives No...
...Implacable border guard of the division of Puerto Rico.- 1933labor, it appears at each step the new woman takes on the road to her liberation...
...The formation of the working class created a group of free workers which had virtually no material possessions...
...Thus it is an example of a frontal attack against sex discrimination during the early years of revolutionary transformation...
...Sharp tensions arise within the family...
...and clashes with the social economy created by the revolution-an economy no longer governed by private property and commodity relations...
...Marx and Engels discovered how, in the process of formation of a class society, the family was crystallized into a means of control over the labor power of women, into a means of private accumulation...
...So flexible is the intrafamilial division of labor between the sexes, that the relationship can easily adapt itself to any form of class society, be it feudal, capitalist or otherwise...
...It seemed to vanish into thin air, because unlike men's work it did not produce visible products...
...Thus are created the internalized bonds which make women conservative, insecure and afraid to launch an open struggle for their full liberation...
...This ideological confusion prevents a complete understanding of the functioning of the economy...
...Such had not always been the case...
...one of the rights of woman...
...it provides the field on which thel'ight can befound out...
...it is very difficult to put it into revolutionary practice in the underdeveloped countries, where it implies the incorporation of women into social production and political action...
...They work one shift in a factory, receiving a salary for this work...
...In this frenzied race of sex and profit, women become attractive commoditiesobjects of consumption for a masculine population eager for new experience...
...It is only under capitalism, with the creation of the working class, that labor power becomes a commodity...
...where wife and children are the slaves of the husband...
...Scarce attention has been given to Engels' and Lenin's insistence on the role of the family in class society...
...must become a permanent focus of sexual attraction...
...Demand has become the ultimate product of radio, television and mass publications which stimulate the continuous creation of new needs, guaranteeing a permanent condition of unsatisfied and inflated material wants...
...This second dimension is not usually taken into account, reflecting the fact that economists limit themselves to the categories of commodity production, i.e., those of capitalism...
...Revolutionary advances by the mass of women seem to be made more easily in those areas where the social transformation of capitalism has not been completed, particularly in the vast peasant regions of Asia where patriarchal slavery was so brutal that women were still bought and sold like cattle...
...The neocapitalist solution is the so-called consumer society in which advertising becomes the motive force of continuing economic expansion...
...Certain pseudoscientific theories have been advanced, preventing women from taking jobs traditionally reserved for men...
...The family, as we know it today, arose with the breakdown of primitive society...
...Women were relegated to the domestic sphere by the division of labor between the sexes...
...those who expended the c/iort were excluded from the economy, from society and /r),m history...
...It is generally believed that women are marginal to the process of production: that their incorporation into the process began with their participation in the commodity economy, in which they were destined to perform an auxiliary role...
...Sad examples of the contrast provoked by the division of labor are the public figures with which capitalism bombards men and women for their respective emulation and identification: the President and Marilyn Monroe...
...wage differentials are eliminated...
...they are stopped short and frozen into transitional patterns containing features of both past and future...
...These conservative and utopian conclusions arise from a failure to analyze the following activities, which take place behind the facade of the monogamous family: (a) biological reproduction...
...As long as labor power continues to be produced in thousands of domestic sweatshops, the influence of private property will not be eradicated from social conscioussness, and the attempt to build a classless society and a new man and woman will necessarily remain incomplete...
...Modern women find no rational explanation for their historical situation...
...Throughout the history of class society, the fundamental task of women has been to stay in the home and maintain the family...
...the ultimate aim is the confiscation of her invisible labor power through the marriage contract...
...and the wile represents the proletariat...
...The race for prestige is one of the characteristics of this society...
...One of the products of sex competition (and one of its barometers), is a fluctuating, generally accepted fashion, which is nothing more than the normative expression of the sex market, analogous to the stock market...
...a sustained effort is made to increase social services and to incorporate women into production...
...We have a thousand times the right to be proud of what we have done in this field...
...When this ideology of female economism is not rejected by national and social1s C7othinR and shoe factories in Puerto Rico liberation struggles, it can become an invisible enemy of proletarian consciousness...
...Our Western Christian society knows how to strangle with silken cords...
...But like all property under capitalism, sex has the character of a commodity, and thus implies the unending search for buyers: women, in order to enter a marriage contract (i.e., to sell themselves...
...Reformist ideas appear when ideological concessions are made to the division of labor between the sexes and the invisible workshift-which tend to be accepted as permanent necessities...
...In The History of the USSR by Briusov and others, we read, "In the neolithic metropoli(ses) of Transbaikal, hunting weapons--bows and arrows-were found in both men's and women's graves, which is characteristic of a matriarchal order...
...When these three features are combined, biological reproduction is systematically confused with the private 4 reproduction of labor power, not only that which is used up by men and women in the process of social production, but also the early training of the new generation of workers...
...The property rights of the head of the family implied inheritance through the paternal line, the total ownership of women, as well as control and expropriation of female labor power...
...Arrogant, curt, disagreeable, playing the touch guy, threatening-such is the symbol of classic virility...
...There is a tendency to impose rigid standards of sexual behavior, the validity of which is questionable on a longterm basis but which serves to eliminate the moral duality that used to stimulate in men what it brutally repressed in women...
...Having been objects they will attempt to become sexual subjects, adopting authoritarian attitudes,living an imaginary independence which cannot lead to their fulfillment as human beings...
...If it is true that male and female workers daily reproduce labor power by means of the creation of goods for exchange, and accordingly for their indirect consumption, it is also true that housewives daily reproduce a great part of the labor power of the entire working class...
...The ideology born from the male-female polarity finds its familiar expression in false gallantry and wolf-whistles, and inculcates in women the conviction that they are nothing more than objects of masculine possession...
...Thus, this type of work has not been considered to have value, even though it uses up many hours of arduous effort...
...The new liberty of women fulfilled the ideological function of an escape valve for neocapitalism...
...REFORMIST IDEAS It is relatively easy to proclaim the legal equality of women...
...It also encourges the perpetuation of individual households as the economic unit of society...
...Thus men's work was crystallized into objects, into economic and socially visible commodities...
...the broad, strong hands of a woman worker...
...socialist practice demonstrates that marriage based on equality becomes possible only after the seizure of power by the proletariat...
...will only be seen in the full light of day when both possess legally complete equality of rights...
...Fascism has not proved to be a lasting solution...
...Based on obviousbiological differences, a vast cultural superstructure has been erected, postulating not only physical types, but also temperaments, character traits, preferences, tastes and talents, which are all assumed to be biologically inherent in each sex...
...Furthermore, it can count on an immense ideological reserve-the complete and unconscious popular acceptance of opposing sexual models...
...The private reproduction of labor power under socialism continues to be a cruel and unavoidable necessity...
...The anti-economic nature of such a measure is self-evident...
...It sanctifies the eternal feminine as a concept 17 which lies outside social classes, instead of identifying it as nothing more or less than the product of the division of labor and class interests...
...The division of labor assigned to them the task of reproducing the greater part of the labor power which moves the economy, through the transformation of raw materials into use values for direct consumption...
...This phenomenon requires the elaboration of a whole policy and ideology of selling, inseparable from the dominant values of the ruling class...
...Today...
...During the Tet offensive, for example, more than two million took up arms...
...They produced valuable studies on the oppression suffered by women, and the ideological superstructure which justified it...
...Women's work remained hidden behind the facade of the monogamous family, and is invisible even today...
...Both the vanguard of the art world and, later, the mass media, incorporated into the social consciousness of the highly developed countries concepts such as "sexual-repression" and its counterpart "release from inhibition...
...Economists today understand that men must produce new material goods in order to reproduce the means of production and subsistence (machines, foodstuffs, clothing, etc...
...Romanticism became the most formidable smokescreen behind which exploited slave labor could be concealed...
...In practice, revolutionary ideas will destroy the inhibiting reflexes of exploited women...
...The practical basis for this is found in the second shift...
...In certain capitalist countries, the bourgeoisie in power tends to conceal this savage discrimination with a facade of health and safety regulations on the job...
...Advocating a private morality, it is opposed to the necessary universality of social values, essential to the proletarian ethic...
...While the labor power of men is the commodity which they sell and with13 Glass factor in Chile which they compete, the socially recognized value of women is their sex-and the mystique with which it is concealed...
...Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p. 22...
...Consumer society reaps fat benefits from this new stage in their lives, glorifying the role of the housewife through the mass media, and stimulating women to buy television sets, refrigerators, mixers and so on...
...Sexual puritanism, which originally characterized bourgeois morality, was replaced by a call for "an end of inhibitions," for a rejection of the established norms...
...When a socialist revolution takes power, a sudden equalizing process takes place among members of its society, which is qualitatively different from the paltry gains made under capitalism: for the first time in history, women have complete legal equality...
...Emulating the big stick policy, it was present during the early years of my childhood, to inhibit me and hamper the full development of my physical strength...
...The large-scale incorporation of women into the people's war is one of the most important achievements of revolutionary ideology, and is also the most effective measure for the total proletarianization of women, with all that that signifies for the destruction of traditional female taboos...
...Though women have advanced greatly by participating in visible labor, they have done so in exchange for a sacrifice which is conveniently overlooked by the ruling class...
...But a contract requires people who can dispose freely of their persons, actions and possessions, and meet each other on the footing of equal rights...
...l'HE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION: THE SELECTIVE INCORPORATION OF WOMEN INTO THE WORKING CL.4SS With the full development of capitalism, the family unit began to undergo important changes, but the exploitation of women in the home remained unchanged...
...Economic necessity has strengthened this alienation...
...The struggle of the revolutionary parties against ideas of inferiority in women is most delicate, for when women spontaneously break with their traditional insecurity, they are then subject to ultra-leftist deviations, similar to those which plagued slave and peasant rebellions in centuriespast...
...Engels foresaw thatsuch circumstances would lead to a heightened awareness of the antagonism between the sexes which exists in class society...
...In the underdeveloped countries, limited economic resources make total socialization of domestic work impossible...
...The working woman has wages at her disposal which permit her to socialize part of the second shift through the utilization of launderies, restaurants, daycare centers and other services...
...In evaluating a country's economy and its possibilities for development, it is not enough to compare the surplus value a worker produces with.that part of the worker's labor which pays for his family's subsistence...
...it also appears with great force in cultural milieux where individualistic traits persist...
...Despite the relative modifications that this change produced in traditional sexual patterns, these modes continue to have a powerful influence on the range of occupations open to women...
...It was only with the emergence of the patriarchal family that social life was divided into two clearly differentiated spheres: the public and the domestic...
...A tragic war breaks out in which the sexes conquer one another, seeking escape from the tremendous pressures of monopoly-based society...
...Fidel Castro, Speech to Plenary Session of Federation of Cuban Women, December 1966...
...prostitution and the double standard cease to exist...
...To the extent that housewives either become completely proletarian or perpetuate in part the ideological values of class society, we shall witnesses the advent of a revolutionary current in the social consciousness of women...
...This new economic function of women in consumer society emphasizes their responsibilities as owners of their sex and as partners in family standing...
...all are systematically excluded from class culture and, consequently, not recommended for the woman who is prepared from earliest childhood for sex competition...
...P. J. Moebius: "If women's capabilities were developed to the same extent as man's, their generative organs would suffer and we would have a repulsive and useless hybrid...
...Prestige is associated with the purchase and enjoyment of consumer goods, the establishment of social standards increasingly remote from the life of the exploited classes and the Third World...
...But this should not prevent the creation of amorality in which men share housework, thus making it possible for their wives to hold outside jobs...
...it is enough to create in them monstrous inhibitions, enough to provoke the death of audacity, energy and curiosity...
...we would arrive at a number well over three billion hours of invisible labor performed...
...not understanding that their oppression arises out of the division of labor, they adopt vindictive attitudes towards males...
...We really razed to the ground the infamous laws placing women in a position of inequality, restricting divorce and surrounding it with disgusting formalities, denying recognition to children born out of wedlock, enforcing a search for their fathers, etc., laws numerous survivals of which, to the shame of the bourgeoisie and of capitalism, are to be found in all civilized countries...
...n 0rWomen do not perform domestic tasks because it is "natural" to do so...
...c) reproduction of labor power...
...Its effective attainment is one of the most beautiful ideals of socialist men and women who struggle together for communism...
...Whereas in the classical female typology reproductive behavior is determining, in masculine typology, labor for the creation of exchange and for juridical and military defense of the goods produced is the primary factor...
...b) education and care of children, the sick, and the elderly...
...Notwithstanding all the laws emancipating woman, she continues to be a domestic slave...
...These prejudices pursue two aims: (1) to justify the payment to women workers of lower wages than men (about 45 percent lower), for the same work and same level of skills...
...The rule of the free man over the slave is one type of domination...
...248-249...
...b) the division of labor between the sexes, which forces women to be responsible for invisible labor...
...Their situation (which seems unique, though similar in some respects to patriarchal slavery and in others to subsistence peasantry), is that of contributing to this 6 process as a satellite, through the direct reproduction of the labor power of the rest of the workers...
...it leads to a general emulation of consumer society...
...They do not form part of the public parade of gentlemen, serfs, slaves, capitalists or other groups...
...In the sex typologies of class society, the repressive function belongs to man...
...Women themselves sanction the perpetuation, under socialism, of the division of labor between the sexes which had taken shape under capitalism as a projection of their menial, domestic duties...
...The roots of women's oppression can be found in: (a) the original economic necessity of privately reproducing labor power...
...The source of this conflict and the path toward its solution were pointed out by Engels in 1884: "We are now approaching a social revolution in which the economic foundations of monogamy as they have existed hitherto will disappear just as surely as those of its complement-prostitution...
...as droit de la lImme...
...The original meaning of the word "economy" is, "the art of managing household affairs...
...to just one more irrationality of the capitalist system, women are burdened with both tasks, with the weight of superexploitation which wipes out for them the benefits of the shorter hours won by the working class...
...At last, exhausted by the ups and downs of this chronic warfare, they will surrender to the privatized home, where they will docilely proceed to reproduce the labor power of the ultimate conqueror...
...W()MAN...
...Under present conditions, the proletariat can produce surplus value in the social economy thanks only to these hours of invisible labor...
...because petty housework crushes, strangles, stultifies and degrades her, chains her to the 16 kitchen and nursery, and she wastes her labor on barbarously unproductive, petty, nerve-racking, stultifying and crushing drudgery...
...VISIBLE AND IN VISIBLE LABOR I The egalitarian position held by women in primitive society was determined by the value of their productive labor, performed collectively...
...birth control is facilitated...
...This 5 process of constant replacement of production is known as reproduction, and occurs within each business enterprise as well as within society as a whole...
...The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships . .; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore the ideas of its dominance...
...Their function is, increasingly, that of purchasers...
...The biological factor could not have determined the changes which have occurred in the family since primitive society, inasmuch as it has remained identical throughout the entire existence of the species...
...As the economic unit, it is no more than a tiny...
...private...
...DI VISION OFLABOR: CONSOLIDA TION OF OPPOSING SEX MODELS Division of labor and private property are . . . identical expressions: in the one the same thing is affirmed with reference to activity as is affirmed in the other with reference to the product of the activity...
...We must denounce domestic slavery and foster a social morality which provides for sharing of housework by men...
...Under capitalism, through the sale of his labor power, man defines himself essentially as the producer of commodities, be it as the owner or operator of the means of production...
...In this context, the correctness of Lenin's statement is even more evident: the proletariat cannot attain its full liberation until women are fully liberated...
...urgeois liberalism has completely ceased to correspond to economic and political reality...
...The acceleration of these cycles depends on the creation of a specific social consciousness among women, which motivates them to consume goods totally unnecessary to the perpetuation of the species-from false eyelashes to face creams to electrical appliances (which do not solve the problem of the second workshift), to ideological and cultural goods such as women's magazines and films, which strengthen the bonds that enslave them to the formidable mythology of sex...
...And, "The difference in natural talents between different individuals is not so much the cause as the effect of the division of labor...
...however, the basic division of labor between the sexes was not modified...
...In a comment on Adam Smith, Karl Marx wrote: "By nature a philosopher is not in talent and intelligence half so different from a street-porter as a mastiff is from a greyhound...
...We must think in terms of the total labor supply, the entire labor force that maintains and develops an economy...
...The second shift was not denounced politically until very recently, in spite of the fact that it placed women in the same situation as those (nineteenth-century) English workers who worked twelve hours and more a day...
...Sexual liberation as a feminist ideology usually appears among students, professionals, and middle-class women, and is less common among urban and rural workers...
...Their integration into the proletariat is not complete, even if they work, for example, as lathe operators...
...Women were made responsible for the perpetuation of the species...
...Their regular use conditions the users to acceptance, physically and psychologically...
...One of the most difficult problems facing the women's liberation movement today is the resistance, not only of men, but also of women themselves, to revolutionary change...
...Too much physical development resulting from manual work and sports...
...Collected Works, Vol...
...The bourgeoisie favored universal elementary education, which required state participation in the training of new generations of workers, training in which the family shared a role...
...The division of labor created skilled male workers, concentrating in their hands the creation of the surplusproduct...
...a forehead wrinkled by study...
...The best example can be found in the territories held by the National Liberation Forces of Vietnam, where the division of labor between the sexes in production and in warfare appears to have been reduced to a minimum...
...Capitalism introduced some substantial changes in the legal status of married women, granting them, at least in principle, the rights of an individual...
...The radically opposing sex models that prevail are the product of the division of labor...
...determines her fundamentally individualist status...
...With the development of commodity exchange and the division of society into classes, all economic, political and cultural changes centered around the public sphere, while in the household only the individual family unit, as we know it today, was strengthened...
...But we must remember that both ideological currents were propagated by neocolonialism in its effort to stimulate artificial need...
...This latent slavery in the family, though still very crude, is the first property, but even at this early stage it corresponds perfectly to the definition of modern economists who call it the power of disposing of the labor power of others...
...3) With respect to the social utilization of labor power, full-time housewives spend far more hours solving problems that paid women workers face...
...Within this domestic context, housewives of the working-class sector ("ladies of leisure" are not included), have the special status of a subclass...
...To put it crudely, if the proletariat could not rely on this type of female labor power to provide it with food, clothing, etc., in a world where collective replacement is not provided for, the hours of surplus labor would be significantly reduced...
...The chubby Cupid which fluttered around our grandmothers was in reality a most effective policeman in the service of private property...
...Keep your husband.'), and the good housewife, firmly anchored in the kitchen...
...The average woman does not realize that not only are her "beauty," her "poetic and ideal self," possessed...
...Restricted to the narrow limits of the home, the first and inevitable gift a girl-child receives is the traditional doll, toy pots and pans, chairs, brooms, sewing kits, combs and mirrors...
...the love marriage was proclaimed as a human right, and indeed not only as a droit de i'homme, one of the rights of man, but also...
...The "household" emerged as the first form of private enterprise, as the property of the head of the family, for production, exchange, and competition with other households, and for the accumulation of the surplus product...
...The system of values with which they have been provided, and to which they desperately cling in a world hostile to their full development, convinces them that their social advancement can come only from 78 the exercise of their sexual traits...
...Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry...
...sweatshop for the production of labor power...
...Nevertheless, the exercise of this right-as with all other liberal rights-remained subordinate to the realities of the division of labor...
...the position of men will be very much altered...
...Ibid., p. 72...
...In this long process juridical structures and cultural traits that reinforced the situation were developed and implanted...
...It is not easy to distinguish reformist ideas of women's liberation from revolutionary ones because, among other18 reasons, their systematic formulation is lacking-all the more reason to try...
...Advertising tends to exaggerate sexual characteristics and functions to an intolerable degree...
...It is there to serve the ruling class, to confuse the people, to prevent women from realizing our creative potential, which, if turned to social labor on a mass scale would provoke an immense advance...
...RE VOLUTIONA R Y IDEA S Revolutionary ideas come into their own when the Party concentrates its efforts on the reeducation of women (and men), with the understanding that the abolition of private property, the integration of women into socialized work, and the creation of social services provide the necessary but not sufficient conditions for their liberation...
...These two spheres underwent unequal development...
...All the symbolism that contributed to the 19 reification of women, as well as to class standards of beauty, must be destroyed, eliminating from the mass media the image of woman as commodity...
...Consequently...
...Sex is he only terrain where liberalism is still actively fr, .cioning...
...they are considered to be secondary sex characteristics-immutable, inevitable and ahistorical...
...His social position and his class are determined by his activity and by the position he occupies within the world of production of goods for exchange...
...It appears in all sectors of work activity, to snatch work tools from my hands, to close to me the roads to political leadership, to impede my access to the army, and to all branches of high-level production...
...The worker and his family do not subsist merely on what they buy with his wages...
...Their enduring preoccupation with men continues...
...This morality requires of men the demonstration of sexual aggressivity, which in some societies becomes obsessive...
...In the family (the man) is the bourgeois...
...Thus, if for neocapitalism the creation of a "feminine" social consciousness is a condition for survival, under socialism its total extinction is an immediate necessity for the development of the proletarian economy and ideology...
...The incorporation of women into the Vietnamese people's war would not have been possible without the continuous effort of the NLF, which carries on a resolute struggle against sex discrimination in Vietnam...
...As long as invisible labor persists, as long as the ideology of sex is not fought fiercely, traditional prejudices will survive-as evidenced by opposing sex models, female economist, and biological theories designed to justify the division of labor between the sexes...
...The resurgence of female economism under socialism tends to reinforce the traditional division of labor between the sexes and perpetuate the home as the economic unit of society...
...I know it well, I know its ideology and its reason for being...
...2) the weakening of the egalitarian position attained by women in the revolution, conferring on them a different legal status from that of men-a status that would sanction "biological determinism," and condemn women to continue in the role of serfs who reproduce labor power...
...A very marked psychological factor intervenes-the tendency of the housewife to occupy herself obsessively with household duties and to overprotect her children, discharging on them all the energies repressed by the division of labor...
...in turn, demands the altolition of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society...
...The first decades of this century saw the development of a powerful culture of sex, whose most important ideologist is Sigmund Freud...
...light industry, aimed at the consumer, becomes its most dynamic sector...
...While commodity relations pervade all areas of social life, men and women are increasingly subjected to the world of things...
...this leads to an overemphasis on light industry, subjecting it to the collective whim, obliging it to produce silk stockings for summertime use, false eyelashes, cosmetics and creams worthy of the court of Louis XIV, fashions and literature...
...Unfortunately, the revolutionary theory of women's role in the family has been little developed since Lenin...
...The childless housewife requires twice the amount of time a woman worker does to attend to her household...
...Bourgeois science has produced numerous theories designed to prove the biological inferiority of women...
...and the State (New York, International Publishers, 1942), pp...
...Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, International Publishers, New York, 1942, p. 70...
...c) reproduction of labor power consumed daily...
...The proposal to reduce the working day for married women has been offered as a solution...
...For the first time in history women are considered to be human beings...
...As children, both males and females receive the tools which they will use as adults in the form of toys...
...Hence, we may assume the corrupting power of the presence of these invisible female artisans, semi-proletarians, semi-serfs, whose social condition prevents their transformation into full-fledged proletarians...
...The husband who understands his wife, who shares the cleaning, washing and ironing equally, is considered in certain social circles to be physically and mentally deficient...
...This same tendency leads her to give up other activities (cultural, recreational and political...
...Mothers spend some thirty hours per week more on housework when they have no outside occupation...
...Like the eunuch who kept the keys of the harem, it is entrenched in the social consciousness, to guarantee a semi-slave labor force for the private reproduction of labor power...
...Capitalism links women more directly with the monetary economy, because they actually produce for the market-the labor market...
...it offers strong analogies with private artisanry in its privatizing effect on social consciousness...
...It advocates the destruction of the family without acknowledging its continuing status as the "basic economic unit of society," or that it cannot be abolished as long as class society exists...
...they will exchange the traditional husband for countless transitory encounters...
...If men move upward socially, acquiring a certain standing in the class structure through their work, women accomplish the same feat by a subtle use of sex...
...They deny the economic value of the work women have generally performed, and they claim, at the same time, that women are born with physical and spiritual characteristics, the nature of which leads them to carry out a specific type of work...
...Capitalists have no direct relationship to subsistence production, although they exploit it indirectly...
...muscular arms...
...Feigning a protective, paternal concern, it claims that good working conditions and the integrity of the family will 'protect me.' When force is unsuccessful, it retreats (temporarily), adopting an air of wise, self-sufficient irony...
...Napoleon Bonaparte: "Nature intended women to be our slaves...
...if she has two children or more, it is longer...
...The economists' omission reflects the discrimination against women and the confusion between biological reproduction and the private reproduction of labor power...
...Keeping in mind that these are times of conditional peace, the mass of women must be prepared for participation in defense, and must be admitted to the armed forces...
...The care and education of the children becomes a public affair...
...To achieve the social status recommended by the mass media, it is necessary to acquire certain consumer goods...
...In addition, the increasingly rapid changes in fashion, standardization and mass production facilitated the expansion of light industry...
...Small producers however, in developed and underdeveloped countries (where they continued to exist in large numbers), maintained patriarchical relationships...
...Small producers, including housewives, are marginal, secondary classes, which lack the necessary authority to govern the country...
...How does a woman experience this repression...
...Women's work in the bosom of the family did not directly produce a surplus product nor a visible commodity...
...The education of the girlchild, especially in underdeveloped countries and exploited classes, inhibits her from engaging in rough play and games, to the detriment of her physical and personality development...
...The latter trend constitutes the best breeding ground for economic and political revisionism...
...Thus, they will tend to rebel spontaneously against traditional patterns of sexual conduct...
...Prisoners of this constraining anthropological pattern, women inevitably see their best creative energies diverted toward a hypertrophied culture of love and reproduction...
...As the initial process in the struggle against colonial backwardness, as the revindication of the economic importance of domestic work, as an answer to the most brutal discrimination, it usually presents, like sexual liberalism, positive aspects...
...The existence of a dual morality sanctions oppression of women in everyday relationships...
...Morality, legislation and culture consolidated and buttressed the opposing sex models...
...The consciousness required of women (especially women leaders) by the revolutionary process is similar to that propounded by the Guinean revolutionary leader, Amilcar Cabral, for the petit bourgeoisie--in Africa the petit bourgeoisie plays a leading role in the independence struggle-namely, that it must commit suicide as a class, through struggle and through merging with the proletariat...
...Therefore, of fundamental importance is the assumption of leadership in the women's revolt, by revolutionary organizations, which must stimulate and channel, rather than stifle, or permit the movement to turn -into female revanchism...
...It would seem that working women are unable to carry a workload of more than eighty-four hours per week (against forty-nine for men...
...ROA DS TO LIBERA TION If' women think their situation in society is an optimal one if women think their revolutionary unction in society has been ltillilled...
...If for a moment we were able to free ourselves from all the prejudices and the distorted personal experiences which have formed our ideology of sex, we would recognize that the opposing models of today are not due to basic biological differences but to the thousands of years in which the division of labor has prevailed...
...In political life, sexual liberalism focuses primarily on "the sexual liberation of women" and underestimates the class struggle...
...For example, the Routledges indicated in With a Prehistoric People that in the group studied, men were incapable of lifting loads of more than sixty pounds, while women were able to carry a hundred pounds or more...
...If we prefer to disregard ethnology and archaeological findings, the daily press offers ample information about the struggle of Vietnamese women...
...Domestic work, invisible and apparently lacking in value, continues to be considered a secondary sex characteristic, and is given a biological quality...
...and from women, the corresponding masochistic provocation...
...In the period of transition, a violent ideological struggle goes on among the masses of the underdeveloped countries, where male supremacy has been most brutal, and where-with some exceptions like Vietnam-mass integration of women has not taken place in the liberation movements, in armed struggle or in political leadership...
...The Industrial Revolution required the massive incorporation of women into industrial production...
...It does not demand ritual sacrifices: worse yet, it is a vampire that sucks from us millions of hours of invisible, unskilled, unpaid labor...
...revolutionary ideas reflect the need to incorporate women fully and definitively into the construction of a classless society...
...But the more thoroughly we clear the ground of the lumber of the old, bourgeois laws and institutions, the clearer it is to us that we have only cleared the ground to build on, but are not yet building...
...In order to gain an understanding of the contribution of housewives, let us assume that they dedicate only one hour a day to the maintenance of each human being living today (an absolutely conservative estimate...
...Housewives, like slaves, do not participate in the exchange process as producers-either among themselves or with any other class-unless they become part of a collective working unit...
...b) education and care of the children, the sick and the elderly...
...women were isolated from the sphere of exchange where all values were connected with the accumulation of capital...
...The enormous quantity of subsistence labor-especially in the non-industrialized countries-added to the low standard of living, allows capitalists to pay the lowest wages and to extract enormous profits even when productivity is relatively low...
...Female economism emphasizes both the housewife's purchasing function and maternal overprotection...
...As the future visible worker, he must develop his physical strength to the maximum (adevelopment repressed in women), as well as his combative intelligence and courage, characteristics defined by that worn-out word, "masculinity...
...Finally, this principle was extended to the marriage contract...
...All interest in mechanics, in work tools, is forbidden to her...
...Competition between families and individuals is stimulated to the maximum, in order to guarantee the sales of neocapitalism...
...It is not by chance that the word "family" referred originally to the right of private property held by the paterfamilias over its members as well as over the material goods that made up his household...
...the specific character of the economic ,ppress.ion burdening the proletariat is visible in all its sharpness only when all special legal privileges of the capitalist class have been albolished andl complete legal equality of both classes established...
...As the authors state, "When a man says 'This task is too heavy for me, it should be performed by a woman,' he is merely confirming a fact...
...A struggle to incorporate women into traditionally "male" jobs will reveal that, far from impairing their health, women will develop their body and mind...
...Only their incorporation into the proletariat began to modify substantially the situation of the mass of women...
...It is not necessary to bind the feet of our young women...
...Many partial solutions are possible, based on cooperation among neighbors, which do not require large expenditures by the state...
...In periods of shortages, it feeds the black market and is a magnificent conduit for the infiltration of imperialist values, avidly absorbing as it does all the echoes of fashion and middleclass life-styles, conveyed by the mass media of consumer society...
...The working-class woman who cannot acquire consumer goods is no less a prisoner of the mass media than the middle-class woman...
...The obligation to do housework while looking like Jacqueline Kennedy, the conflict between the slave and the lady, is resolved in favor of light industry...
...Such ideas, widely held by both people in general and specialists, are based on profound ideological confusion...
...With the transfer of the means of production into common ownership, the single family ceases to be the economic unit of society...
...Excluded from the world of the surplus product, women became the invisible economic base of class society...
...When women try to liberate themselves it proves difficult to escape the ideological rules of the game...
...By the time women reach adulthood, they are, objectively speaking, atrophied beings, who look upon themselves as a human byproduct...
...Only the existence of an age-old alienating ideology of sex prevents a clear perception of the economic importance of this form of direct and private reproduction of labor power...
...the narrowness holds a danger of hardening and reverting toward a sectarian, reactionary ideology...
...But they are not the owners of the labor power which they produce: the power belongs to their husbands and sons, who sell it...
...why is she not given a gun or a carpentry set...
...Accordingly, it maintains the right to existence of a privatized morality as opposed to a collective morality...
...the result is that domestic work is con%i(lered a secondaryy sexual characteristic rather than an Ce0,cnomic category...
...A woman might well describe her situation as follows, "If I protest my situation, the whole of society will put me 'in my place,' utilizing morality and culture which do not tolerate outbursts of 'feminine hysteria.' Machismo acts as a vigilant policeman, preventing me from losing control and stripping away any process of humanization and awareness on the part of men...
...a great deal of advertising is focused on women, "dignifying" them in relation to men, stimulating them to buy goods which create a mystic sphere of masculine attraction and approval...
...2) Iemale EIconomism In consumer society, women are usually encouraged to buy rather than to produce...
...Upon becoming aware that they are objects-i.e., that their human essence has been alienated by a dominant and uncontrollable power-they tend to project this condition on men...
...the housewife a'nd other household members must also invest many hours in domestic work...
...To please them, to be useful to them, to make themselves loved and honored by them, to educate them as children, to care for them as adults, to counsel them and console them, and to make life sweet and agreeable to them-such are the duties of women at all times and should characterize them from their earliest childhood...
...This woman suffers from a contradiction which can only be resolved by the acquisition of household articles, because she must provide a high level of consumption in the household, without ever appearing to be a worker...
...The social existence of the housewife, isolated in her small dorne.stic sweatshop where she produces labor power...
...The democratic republic does not do away with the opposition of the two classes: on the contrary...
...that their fundamental duties are in the home and in the family where they have a woman's role, unrelated to the economy...
...In practice it distracts women from such fundamental problems as the struggle to collectivize the second shift, eliminate the division of labor between the sexes, and to achieve full integration of women in the structures of proletarian power and the army...
...They thus provide food, clothing, household maintenance, as well as the education of the children...
Vol. 6 • December 1972 • No. 10
