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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
This engaging new text uses a feminist lens to crack open the often hidden worlds of gender and work, addressing enduring questions about how structural inequalities are produced and why they persist. Making visible the social relationships that drive the global economy, the book explores how economic transformations not only change the way we work, but how we live our lives.
The full extent of changing patterns of employment and the current financial crisis cannot be fully understood in the confines of narrow conceptions of work and economy. Feminists address this shortcoming by developing both a theory and a political movement aimed at unveiling the power relations inherent in old and new forms of work. By providing an analysis of gender, work, and the economy, Heidi Gottfried brings to light the many faces of power from the bedroom to the boardroom. A discussion of globalization is threaded throughout the book to uncover the impact of increasing global interconnections, and vivid case studies are included, from industrialized countries such as the US and the global cities of New York, London, and Tokyo, as well as from developing countries and the emerging global cities of Beijing, Shanghai, and Dubai.
This comprehensive analysis of gender and work in a global economy, incorporating sociology, geography, and political economy perspectives, will be a valued companion to students in gender studies and across the social sciences more generally.
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Seitenzahl: 681
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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Gender, Work, and Economy
Gender, Work, and Economy
Unpacking the Global Economy
Heidi Gottfried
polity
Copyright © Heidi Gottfried 2013
The right of Heidi Gottfried to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2013 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN: 978-0-7456-6458-3
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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Contents
Figures
Tables
Acknowledgments
1 An Introduction to Gender, Work, and Economy: Unpacking the Global Economy
PART I Studying Gender, Work, and Economy
2 Theory of Work and Economy
3 An Integrative Framework for the Study of Gender, Work, and Economy
PART II Political Economy of Gender, Work, and Economy
4 The Puzzle of Gender Segregation: From Historical Roots to Contemporary Divisions
5 Serving People: Gender and Services in the New Economy
6 Caring for People: Gender and Social Reproduction in Service Economies
7 State and Economy: Gender, Policy, and Work
8 Terrains of Struggle: Gender, Work, and Labor Organizing
PART III Gender, Work, and Economy in a Global Context
9 Thinking Globally, Global Thinking: Theories of Internationalization and Globalization
10 Gender, Global Labor Markets, Commodity Chains, and Mobilities: Globalizing Production and Reproduction
11 On the Global Economic Grid: Tokyo Tales, London Chronicles, Shanghai Stories
12 New Political Landscapes: Gender Equality Projects in Global Arenas and Nation States
Notes
Bibliography
Documents Cited
Index of Names
Index of Subjects
Figures
4.1 Few cracks in the glass ceiling: women’s pay as a percent of men’s, for high school graduates and college graduates, 25 years and older, 1979–2010 (constant dollars)
5.1a Percent of total, male, and female employment in ICT and information, for the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan (2002)
5.1b Percent of total, male, and female employment in knowledge-intensive industries, for the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan (2002)
6.1 Employment rates of women 25–44, living with partners, FTE employment (2001)
8.1 The declining gender gap in unionization rates, United States (1983–2009)
Tables
4.1 Employment status of women 16 years or older (1890–2010)
4.2 Civilian labor force, persons 16 and over, by gender and race (2000 and 2010)
4.3 Median weekly earnings of full-time waged and salaried workers ($), and percentage of population working, by gender and race (2010)
4.4 Leading occupations of employed women (2010)
4.5 Labor market structure
5.1 Percent employment in services (2007)
6.1 Time spent on household tasks, by gender and country (various years)
7.1 Theoretical frameworks: gender, state, and economy in comparative perspective
7.2 Reproductive bargains in comparative perspective
7.3 Locus of reproduction cross-nationally
7.4 Means of gender inequality factors by welfare regime clusters (percent)
7.5 Public-sector employment and female labor market participation (2006)
7.6 Women in political office, by welfare state clusters (2005)
8.1 National comparisons of labor market regulations and class-based employment regimes
9.1 Differentiating internationalization and globalization
9.2 Approaches to globalization
10.1 The globe-trotting sneaker
10.2 Percent in vulnerable employment, by region (2008)
10.3 Percent in vulnerable agricultural employment, by region (2008)
11.1 Largest cities by population (2010 and 2025)
Acknowledgments
Any book is both a solitary pursuit and a collective effort. In this respect, this book represents the cumulative knowledge gained from conversations with colleagues over the years and the expert advice and encouragement from Polity’s editorial and production staff. A chance communication from Emma Longstaff launched the book project. Her query regarding the Economy and Society series tweaked my interest in writing a book on gender and the economy. One year into the financial crisis, the book on the global economy seemed even more relevant. Nonetheless, crafting a narrative requires more than a little nudging. I cannot imagine the book coming to fruition without Jonathan Skerrett’s encouragement. Throughout the publication process, Jonathan was a one-man rooting section. Authors rely on a good copy-editor whose deft linguistic abilities can turn a tortured sentence into beautiful prose. For this I must thank Leigh Mueller. She always made suggestions for changes without even a hint of a thought bubble inquiring whether I was a native English speaker. Toward the end of the process, Clare Ansell shepherded the book to its publication. Finally, the book benefitted enormously from the detailed comments by two anonymous reviewers and Leslie Salzinger.
Many colleagues influenced my thinking on the issues of relevance to the current era. From its earliest incarnation as a small feminist group meeting at Bochum University, GLOW members have developed a shared body of knowledge on gender, globalization, and work transformation. Though we never realized our original collective fantasy to meet in Bellagio, we discussed and debated our work in the tropical heat of Tokyo, the pastoral retreat of Lowwood, the luxurious landscapes of Monet’s Provence, along with many other places in the US and Europe. My ideas have been shaped by conversations with members and others invited to our workshops, including: Joan Acker, Sylvia Walby, Karin Gottschall, Karen Shire, Ilse Lenz, Mari Osawa, Diane Perrons, Ursula Mueller, Judith Lorber, Ann Orloff, Margarita Abe-Estevez, Myra Marx-Ferree, Keiko Aiba, Kazuko Tanaka, Sawako Shirehase, Makiko Nishikawa, Yuko Ogasawara, Jenny Tomlinson, Susan Durbin, Ursula Holtgrewe, Glenda Roberts, Allison Woodward, Monika Goldmann, Christine Bose, Ulrike Liebert, Sarah Swider, Leah Vosko, and Anne Witz. Frequent visits to Japan gave me a perspective on the importance of gender in explaining the causes and consequences of economic crisis. I want to thank Mariko Adachi, Ruri Ito, and Kaoru Tachi, my hosts at Ochanomizu University, where I spent my sabbatical in 2007.
Convention typically leaves our loved ones’ place of honor at the end, even though their imprint is there from the beginning. Early on, Bernhard has taught me to observe the world around me and to open myself to new experiences. The book draws on anecdotes derived from the challenges of motherhood. My choice of the word “challenge” is a way to situate our personal biography in a larger context. However, I apologize to my son if my rapid-fire questioning feels too much like an interrogation, something of an occupational hazard. In the end, I hope that my moral judgment over what to include balances my search for truth with respect for his privacy. Also implicated is my partner of more than three decades. I have lost count of the many versions that he kindly and carefully read. Even though he bloodied the text with his red pen, he offered his criticism in the spirit of comradeship. David Fasenfest kept me on track when my utter frustration threatened to derail the completion of the project. This book is dedicated to them, to their compassion toward others and to their commitment to making the world a better place.
CHAPTER
1
An Introduction to Gender, Work, and Economy: Unpacking the Global Economy
RECENTLY, the near economic cataclysm resulting from the financial meltdown exposed hidden fault-lines in the global economy. Lehman Brothers was not the only casualty on that fateful day of September 15, 2008. Soon after, a suit brought by two female ex-vice presidents against the former head of the derivatives unit of AIG raised the specter that the “ ‘boys club’ culture” ignored the impact of risk-taking on women’s careers and on working-class communities at large. In this specific case, the boss allegedly admitted his preference for “young (female) workers with ‘curb appeal’ to those who look like his aunt” (Gallu and Son 2010: 1). Such sentiments, usually left unsaid, express a structural condition valorizing beauty over brains, profits over people’s lives and livelihoods. The usual narrative of the financial crisis glosses over the possibility that such corporate leaders’ hyper-masculine bravado may have contributed to irrational exuberance born out of their neglect of social responsibility for others. Behind the scenes, their abstract financial investment calculations, and hubris rooted in the expression of hegemonic masculine domination over nature, fostered a culture of undue risk-taking, bringing global capitalism to the precipice. Crises such as this allow a glimpse into both the intricacies of global economic processes and the usually shrouded worlds of work.
Another remnant left in the wake of the crisis has been dubbed “The Great ‘He-cession’ ” (Salem cited in the New York Times 2009). Relatively new in this recession, more men than women lost their jobs and experienced long bouts of unemployment. Between 2007 and 2009, the economy shed manufacturing and construction jobs, once the primary engines of muscular economic growth and the underpinning of working-class masculinity and the strong male breadwinner family model. This idea of the he-cession describes a process of economic restructuring already underway. Less clear is what drives the shift from industrial production to service-dominated economies.
These examples cannot be fully understood in the confines of gender-neutral theories of the financial crisis and the he-cession. Though seemingly neutral, definitions of work and economy are themselves gendered. Yet gender is more than juxtaposing men’s and women’s different work experiences and biographies. What mechanisms systematically and systemically disadvantage women in and at work, and how are differences among women structured depending on class, race and national origin? The rest of the introduction provides a brief for studying gender at work in the global economy.
Why study gender at work in the global economy?
During the closing decades of the twentieth century the work world dramatically changed. In the United States, societal norms gave way to civil rights laws opening up new employment opportunities, and women’s paid labor force participation steadily increased. Now, a majority of women with young children work at least part-time or part-year outside of their homes. In addition, young women hold more bachelor’s and master’s degrees than men, and increase their representation in law, business, and medical schools (Rose and Hartmann 2004). By 1982 women college graduates outnumbered men, and by 2007, women accounted for 57% of college graduates (Skapinker 2010: 11). No longer confined to jobs as domestic servants, sales clerks, secretaries, nurses, and teachers, women gained a foothold in management, earning 43% of all MBAs in 2006, up from only 4% in 1970 (Bertrand et al. 2010: 229). Career paths of women and men have become more similar, yet important differences remain. Despite inroads into male-dominated fields and the high rates of male unemployment during the Great Recession of 2008–9, women still earn less than men and end up re-segregated at lower ends of occupational hierarchies. What seemed like steady progress has stalled and the gender revolution remains unfinished.
It is still the case that women bear disproportionate responsibility for unpaid and, increasingly, for paid labor in the household, which makes it difficult for them to compete equally with men outside the home. Moreover, the current economic system places a burden on American men, who have the longest work week in the advanced industrialized world and consequently the least amount of leisure when employed. In this context, the relative lack of social infrastructure to support working parents in the United States, such as subsidized childcare or paid family leave, requires that families cope on their own either through paying for care and services on the market or by using unpaid labor of family members (usually relying on mothers or other female relatives), especially in times of economic distress.
Meanwhile, government cost-cutting measures deprive individuals and families of the social safety net. State and federal government budget cuts add to the economic tsunami, eliminating 581,000 jobs in its wake. Women lost 81% of the jobs disappearing from the public sector from December 2008 to September 2011 (Institute for Women’s Policy Research September 9, 2011). Though men’s employment fell by 1.6% at the local level – less than the 4.7% decline for women – men’s employment grew by 5.3% at the federal level, likely due to the expansion of homeland security jobs. Increasing unemployment and decreasing prospects for good jobs among men add to the sense of economic uncertainty and insecurity. Precarious jobs and livelihoods are now the economic reality for a growing number of men and women, both in the USA and worldwide. This book considers how economic transformation plays out across social locations, and what effects it has on gender as well as class relations.
Making global connections: unpacking the global economy
Seemingly distant work conditions and processes ripple from one location to another as a result of increasing global interconnections. Financialization of assets, already by the 1970s, generated a crisis of capital accumulation on a global scale. From the 1980s onward, the need to absorb excessive profits fueled speculation and boosted property prices, inflating an already overextended housing bubble (Harvey 2010). Meanwhile, the financial elite parked capital in construction sites of older global cities, or created crystalline cityscapes in actual urban deserts like Dubai and other emergent global cities in India and China. Capital’s attempts to overcome the most recent crisis fed the building frenzy, bid up asset values and drove up costs for all residents in the global cities of New York, London, and Tokyo. The built environment, thus, is not merely a façade behind which the real economy must be analyzed. Global urban spaces concretize capital accumulation in both form and function.
Today, old and emergent global cities and countries vie for power in their region, most prominently in Asia, and in the world economy more generally. Once the economic juggernaut in the region, Japan now faces competition from the ascending geographic powers of China and India. These new economic powerhouses’ rapid industrialization and urbanization leapfrogged into the 21st-century service economy. Exploring Beijing, Shanghai, Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), and Dubai opens a window into the spatiality of changing economic landscapes, especially migration flows within the region. From the vantage point of these new global cities, migration patterns crisscross rural villages and growing metropolitan areas both within and across Asian countries. For example, female domestic workers and male construction workers, sometimes from the same village, embark on journeys from their homes in south Asia to the wealthy oil-producing nation of Saudi Arabia and to the new shopping mecca of Dubai, and from rural areas in the interior to coastal cities in China. Female care workers from nearby countries such as the Philippines are permitted entry to work on temporary visas in the aging society of Japan (Ito 2005; Parrenas 2011). Women from lower castes support the lifestyles and work of a burgeoning middle class and the elite in cities such as Kolkata. Gender is central to understanding these migration processes and their outcomes in global cities and for the homes left behind.
A unique aspect of this book recasts political economy theory using concepts culled from social geography. Social geography has a ready-made vocabulary to map the spatial dimension of work, and to understand what accounts for the placement and spatial arrangement of concrete work performed by men and women. The social geography frame from a feminist perspective pushes us to think beyond the usual borders and categories common to the sociology of work and traditional political economy, enabling us to unpack the dynamics of the global economy.
Outline of the book
This book integrates gender throughout its study of work and economy to reveal how structural inequalities are produced, why they persist, and how they change. Further, the book advocates using a feminist lens to tells us where to look, and why we must consider work in the intimate spaces of the household, inside the offices looming over old and emergent global cities, and in the factories rusting in the span of old industrial corridors. In so doing, a feminist lens sheds light on the less visible work of care, and how this service work is related to global economic forces and political systems. It provides insight into why the same work, such as childcare or cooking, when performed for pay (market work) or unpaid (non-market work) is treated differently legally, theoretically, and socially. In particular, unpaid labor associated with mothering often goes unnoticed, uncounted, and devalued. Without a feminist lens, we cannot explain transformative processes, which in a lifetime have altered the way we live, how we work, and the cityscapes we inhabit.
What follows unfolds in three main parts devoted to the study of gender, work, and economy. Part I introduces theoretical issues at the heart of work sociology and political economy, interweaving non-feminist and feminist alternatives. Chapter 2 revisits the sociological classics of Marx and Weber in more detail to situate contemporary theories of work and economy. A review outlines their contributions and the gender gaps in both classical and contemporary theories. Then the chapter traces the emergence of three waves of feminism. In the first wave, feminists addressed women’s political disenfranchisement and economic insecurity, and directed attention to the relatively neglected private sphere more likely to be occupied by women. These debates ensuing at the dawn of the twentieth century provided the backdrop for second-wave feminism coming to terms with gender inequality. The remainder of that chapter traces the arc of feminism’s second and third waves. Early second-wave accounts introduced and refined the concept of gender (patriarchy) in relationship to class (capitalism). Conceptualizing gender continued as a key concern of later second-wave feminist theory, leading to questions about the sources of male power, how work was gendered, and what constituted the process of gendering work organization. The chapter ends with a short discussion of third-wave feminism to highlight new sensitivities toward complex relationships among women, as well as between men and women, in the division of labor, from the household to the board room. Without third-wave feminist critiques, theorists of work and economy would probably not have trained an eye on the intimate relationship and entanglement between production and reproduction.
Third-wave feminist research on care work and reproductive labor, as detailed in chapter 3, has raised many of the same concerns and conceptual issues that preoccupied first- and early second-wave feminist scholarship and politics. Understanding the shift toward service-dominated economies requires our examination of the most intimate moments in people’s lives. To know where the family and the household fit into the analysis requires focusing beyond firms, markets, or formal work organizations, and broadening conceptualization of the economy to include both activities and practices in the household and those involving care-giving. An examination of the care sector, by crosscutting the family, paid employment, and the state, points out the necessity for examining the relationships between and within these institutions. Outlining a feminist political economy perspective, the third chapter links care work and domestic labor performed in the household to national and global processes.
The chapters in Part II present case studies and other material on historical and contemporary trends, documenting and explaining forms of segregation, new ways of working, and forms of employment differentiated by gender. With the development of capitalism, cities, and industry, a public sphere dominated by men expanded and restricted the activities performed by women. Chapter 4 examines the root causes of horizontal, vertical, and spatial occupational sex segregation and related pay inequities. The chapter poses several questions, asking how and when industries and occupations change the gender composition of work from male to female (such as the historical example of clerical work), despite other employment categories remaining stubbornly gender-typed (top executives as male-typed and childcare as female-typed)? What is the reason only a small proportion of men enter female-typed occupations, while an increasing number of women seek employment in male-typed professions? It is not enough to acknowledge that some work and occupations are gender-typed. How and under what conditions do jobs become associated with gender-stereotypical images and how does this affect their value? Chapter 5 describes in greater detail the new ways of working, forms of employment, and types of economic activity manifest in the emerging service and knowledge economy. The next chapter investigates the organization, institutionalization, and value of reproductive work and caring labor, as central theoretical and empirical concerns in the commercialization of more aspects of people’s lives, including sentiments, love, and affection. Political factors are evaluated to demonstrate that they inform how, and which, services receive support from the state, and the nature of the delivery of services more generally.
Chapter 7 highlights the gender dimensions of political institutions and reviews a range of country-specific policies and regulations in a comparative perspective, integrating usually separate bodies of research on welfare states, employment relations, and policy analysis. Different types of politics, policies, and welfare state regimes have consequences for the reception of women in particular occupations and sectors, and in the paid labor market more generally. Chapter 8 reflects on how new terrains of struggle bring to the surface reasons behind women’s under-representation in traditional labor organizations throughout much of the twentieth century, and points to their increasing representation both in some traditional unions and in newer types of worker associations. Greater parity of union membership and the formation of new worker associations raise women’s profiles in the workplace, improve women’s overall working conditions, and empower women economically and politically.
Part III more extensively explores global connections, initially through a discussion of non-feminist and feminist theories on globalization, by focusing on global labor markets, globalized work, and global cities. Chapter 9 distinguishes between internationalization and globalization, sorts through alternative definitions and accounts of globalization, and highlights what we lose in nongendered accounts compared with what we gain from feminist theories of globalization. Globalization restructures the location of work and workers in different regions of the world, thereby shaping the contours of power relationships in different places on multiple scales ranging from the city, the nation, to the global. Chapter 10 traces the development of a highly integrated global labor market and the commodity chains interconnecting economic activities across place and space. We cannot understand the value of work and economic outcomes in one part of the world if disconnected from an analysis of the global labor market. Because of their centrality to understanding globalization, chapter 11 surveys the rise of and connections between old and newer global cities. Global cities attract both high-paid professionals in finance and those low-waged workers servicing them. Paradoxically, the global orientation of these cities beyond the nation state requires both local and national government action. Finally, chapter 12 examines new political landscapes encompassing spaces and places for economic governance, and for modes of association at the local and the transnational levels. By cultivating an analysis of new political landscapes in this final chapter, the book captures historical movements occupying the imaginations and spaces in our global economy. The future cannot be known; but having the analytical tools to understand the past and to interrogate the present can improve our chances of arriving at a more just future.
PART I
STUDYING GENDER, WORK, AND ECONOMY
CHAPTER
2
Theory of Work and Economy
So I take phosphates or phosphites – whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and I am absolutely forbidden to “work” until I am well again. (Gilman 1899)
AS evocatively captured by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s lament in her short story The YellowWallpaper, work has a long, but troubled, history in women’s lives and in feminist and non-feminist thought. Although writing around the late 1800s, Gilman anticipates many of the themes taken up by feminists in the late twentieth century. In the above excerpt, the female protagonist’s fragile body dooms her to play the part of the “weaker sex” in this Victorian drama. The story comments on the treatment of middle- and upper-class women as prone to infirmity, and thus physically and intellectually unfit for work and political participation in the public sphere. White male critics of enfranchisement invoked gender-stereotypical images of “true” womanhood, arguing that women were too frail and delicate to take on the responsibilities of political activity, a common trope in male political discourse at the time. The virtue of true womanhood was premised on women’s and men’s perceived different natures. But this ideal depended on the unacknowledged labor of working-class women and women of color, whose bodies suckled elite women’s infants and whose physical labor erased the traces of detritus in other women’s households. Such assumptions have confined work to, and ultimately defined work against, an implicit masculine standard. More generally, women’s life course has been intimately tied to the less visible work of caring labor and reproduction. Looking at work and economy through a feminist lens exposes how restrictions on the type of work available, on where it happens, on its rewards, and even on what counts as work, are related to the gender of who does it (Brush 1999: 162–3).
Recalling the legacy of Marx and Weber highlights the influence of these foundational texts on contemporary theories. In drawing inspiration from the classics, contemporary sociology of work and political economy inherit the vocabulary and preoccupations focusing on non-gendered classes, institutions and work organizations. Further, by elaborating on each approach, this chapter reveals that, like their intellectual predecessors, contemporary theorists do not fully integrate gender and care into analyses of work and economy. The opening section ends by showing that political economy’s core categories of worker and citizen, and the institutions of state and economy, are implicitly constructed in terms of a masculine embodiment. Without a systematic analysis of and analytical framework for examining gender relations, traditional political economy cannot account for gender inequality or fully explain global economic change. Three waves of feminism, the focus of the remainder of this chapter, emerged against this backdrop.
Women’s political mobilization for suffrage, civil rights, and global citizenship fertilized the growth of three major waves of feminism: the first wave coincided with democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century (Scott 1999: 72) and culminated with women’s suffrage at the dawn of the twentieth century; the second wave arose alongside the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s; and the third wave, in which we find ourselves at present, was propelled by new transnational women’s movements arising in the twilight of the twentieth century. A look back at the first wave finds social reformers who raised the questions of women’s economic insecurity and political disenfranchisement. From the earliest writings of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women in the late eighteenth century, feminists have condemned the theory and practice of separate and unequal treatment of women. These reformers saw that women’s inability to fully participate in political and economic activities was connected to their burdens in the family. What united an otherwise divided feminism was the shared recognition of the inter-relationship between reproduction and production, affecting the intensity of both men’s and women’s market and non-market work.
Feminism encompasses diverse political projects and varied theoretical claims about pervasive, ubiquitous, and persistent gender-based hierarchies at work. As discussed in a later section, second-wave feminism noted the absence of women from social analyses and the social world of sociology. Much of classical sociology had essentially focused on men, male activities and experiences, and the parts of society dominated by men, assuming that the social world was primarily the public world of male activities, from the paid labor force to city life and formal politics. By not sufficiently analyzing the so-called “private sphere” of the social world, early sociology failed to develop an understanding of all parts of that world. Early second-wave feminists brought women and women’s work into analyses of the social world and broadened the conception of the social and the economic to include care and emotional labor. Third-wave feminism built on the insights of the second wave, while at the same time acknowledging the limits to structural analyses.
Economic sociology and political economy of work and society
Sociological theory emerged in Europe as a way of explaining modernity and the rise of capitalism. Massive upheavals transforming society after the Industrial Revolution inspired both Marx and Weber to write about the exploitation wrought by, and “spirit” of, capitalism. Both posited that social, political, and economic processes influence one another, but emphasized different relationships between political and economic forces, from which they derived their conceptions of class and power.1 “The woman’s question” also resonated politically at the time. However, since these social theorists primarily were concerned with explaining the emergence of capitalism, its characteristics, forms of development and consequences for the public sphere of social life, they paid little attention to the private sphere more likely to be occupied by women. By considering the antecedents of both conventional political economy and sociology of work, we can see more clearly the gaps in these traditions that have focused on social transformation without the feminist lens.
The Work of Marx and Weber
For Marx, social and political institutions served to reinforce and reproduce a particular set of relations of production. Capitalist production is based on the ownership and control of the means of production by one segment of society. Through that ownership of the means of production, capitalists expropriated profits produced by the labor power (capacities) of workers. The state rationalized and managed this relationship in order to ensure its perpetuation over time, and society’s many institutions (religion, education, etc.) legitimate capitalist social relations. This formulation, supported by his more polemical writings, such as Manifesto of the Community Party (Marx & Engels [1948] 1978), gave primacy to the economic base of society determining common interests and the differential distribution of power.
Weber ([1922] 1978), on the other hand, focused on institutional rationalization beginning with his analysis of political power and state-making. Weber held that the development of the nation state established basic rules and routines that permitted capitalism to flourish (notably commercial and civil laws and the courts that upheld them). Only then, coupled with the ideological shift to a Protestant ethic, could early entrepreneurial efforts blossom into modern capitalism. Unlike Marx, Weber argued that rationalization and standardization in the economic realm (with the emergence of corporations and bureaucracy) would free up productive forces in the same way the rationalization of power and the rule of law created the modern state. His initial optimism waned as he saw tendencies toward bureaucratization trapping the individual in an “iron cage.” Rather than organizing people into classes depending on their relationship to the productive forces in society, as Marx had done, Weber theorized the development of consumption strata, within which individuals in comparable market situations experience similar life chances. For Weber, one’s economic interest in the possession of goods, along with one’s opportunities for income, determine one’s market situation or exchange relations (Weber 2006: 38).
Classical sociology did recognize that men exercise power over women, the family, and children. Both Marx and Weber shared a relational view of class rooted in the ownership or lack of ownership of private property (Wright 2000a: 3). In emphasizing class struggles as the central dynamic of capitalism, Marx (and his collaborator Engels, who wrote about the family) neglected asymmetrical gender relations as the foundation of the patriarchal economic system. As Hyman (2006: 51) suggests, “Marx himself noted, in the Grundrisse and later in Capital, Volume 1, that the exchange value of labor power encompassed both the day-to-day maintenance of the worker (food, shelter, clothing) and the cost of reproducing a new generation of children to become workers in their turn.” In fact, Glenn (2010: 208) reminds us that the idea of the relationship between production and reproduction originated in Engels’ remark that the “determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of immediate life.” Because Marx’s notion of class excluded these activities from productive labor, he subsumed housework and reproductive labor into the larger economic framework of base/superstructure. Weber saw political power and traditional authority involving control by a senior male over other men as well as women, but did not explore how this control contributed to a system of gender inequality. By centering on exchange relations more than on production relations, Weber’s class analysis abstracted from the market system, less concerned with identifying the logic of patriarchy. In the end, neither Marx nor Weber addressed the analytically salient and historically specific forms of gender-based domination. The corpus of Marx and Weber laid the foundation of sociological theories of work and economy.
Work Sociology, Economic Sociology, and Political Economy
Work sociology, economic sociology, and political economy span related branches of sociological inquiry into the significance of work and value of labor in society. While the sociology of work studies agency, meanings, and orientations rooted in micro-level interactional and organizational processes, economic sociology and political economy focus on meso- and macro-level institutions and structures. In general, work delimits the set of laboring activities aimed at the production of goods and services. The sphere of “collective production and distribution of resources” defines the economy in a given society (Beamish &Woolsey-Biggart 2006: 233). Overall, a sociological examination of work and economy is central to understanding inequality and the social world (Korczynski et al. 2006: 2).
The sociology of work examines work organization and other social and cultural aspects of production. As a central activity and means for providing economic well-being, work confers social status and power. Work also grounds identity, defining who we are and informing our sense of belonging (Vallas et al. 2009). Who we are, in part, is determined by what we do. Meeting someone for the first time often elicits the question “What do you do?” In posing this simple question, we expect the answer to uncover some deeper essence about the person. Our work becomes a symbol, a repository, a signifier, for who we are. Therefore, work is a social activity. However, what constitutes work is itself debated.
Likewise, many work sociologists analyze paid employment either by zeroing in on status, mobility, and job satisfaction in different occupations or by broadening the view to relate technological innovation to workers’ attitudes. A classic in work sociology, Alienation and Freedom: The Factory Worker and His Industry, telescopes Blauner’s (1964) historical subject of the male worker in different work situations. He looks inside the factory to explain the sequencing of four distinct stages in the development of industrial society (Vallas et al. 2009: 26). Each new work process, starting with craft work, then machine-tending through assembly to automated work, corresponds to workers’ attitudes toward freedom and alienation. While his assumption that automated work would free workers from drudgery has been criticized, the paradigmatic use of male-dominated industry to frame his theory falters on other grounds. A more recent example might look at computer technology as an abstract force determining the rise of call-center work and its impacts on people’s feelings – a combination of alienation and freedom on both ends of the telephone. Neither historical narrative acknowledges a range of informal paid (market) and unpaid (non-market) labor activities, including emotional labor and care work associated with women, as conceptions of work. Though less apparent today, the fact that much of work sociology applied the concept of gender only to discussions of women’s work experiences, and not to those of men, has limited our understanding of work and occupations.
What is gained in terms of rich detail from case studies of work organization and occupations in much of work sociology loses sight of the broader interplay of the structural and institutional architectures of capitalism and patriarchal relations. Most work sociology pays insufficient attention to political institutions and politics, regardless of their gender sensitivity. When included, studies of work examine policies, such as affirmative action and parental leave, and their effects on the gender division of labor in and outside the household. Why some countries have larger public sectors providing social investments for care, or stronger labor regulations and others rely on market-based care systems remains beyond the frame of work sociology. Such studies neglect how institutions of welfare regimes are gendered in different ways and with different economic consequences cross-nationally.
Economic sociology and political economy connect work to structure in analyzing markets and institutions. Disciplinary conventions and intellectual loyalties divide economic sociology into two main specializations, emphasizing either production relations derived from Marx or political processes and institutions following from Weber. Political economy more specifically names the lineage of theories framing the relationship between political and economic structures and the sets of institutions governing economic and social life. Marxists argue that the state serves the interests of the dominant classes in society. State-organized welfare in the mid twentieth century appears in response to the problems generated by the operation of the capitalist system, including – and especially – the need to reproduce labor power (the capacity to labor). For Marxists, the capitalist state is a set of political institutions, practices, and policies oriented to maintaining the dominance of the capitalist class and to demobilizing the working classes. Democracy is said to be the best political shell for capitalism because democratic procedural principles mask the lack of substantive freedoms caused by the class system. In other words, the state functions to maintain capitalist relations of production. By contrast, foremost for Weber, political institutions are a form and a force of power in capitalist society. The role of the state shaping social life delineates modernity. In modern society, the state monopolizes legitimate authority to raise citizen armies, collect taxes, and intervene in the economy, civil society, and the family (Calhoun 2002: 6). Pitched at a high level of abstraction, Marxist analyses of the capitalist state had ignored the varieties of capitalism. From another vantage point, a Weberian approach differentiates welfare capitalisms reflecting the relative power of capitalist and working classes in society. Political economy and economic sociology draw on insights from both Marx and Weber.
An intervening figure, Karl Polanyi, reflected on epochal change in the world order during the 1950s. Through the marriage of sociology and economics, Polanyi argued that markets are not reducible to purely economic laws of motion, and, rather, that markets are always socially constructed and embedded, although to different degrees across time and place. Polanyi, like Marx, viewed labor in terms of social relations. He posited that labor is “a fictive commodity,” by which he means that labor itself is not “produced for sale … It is only another name for human activity that goes with life itself” (1944: 72). Through the extension of the social to the economic, economic sociologists consider how densely embedded production activities are fixed in a place, or “different degrees of connection to their production sites” (Collins 2003: 151). Polanyi’s influence is most evident in large-scale comparative research on the varieties of capitalism and other meso- and macro-structural approaches. Another great transformation associated with the advent of globalization has led many political economists (Collins 2003; Silver 2003) and economic sociologists to revisit Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944).
Comparative Political Economy: Three Worlds and Varieties of Capitalism
Building on insights of new institutional analyses, comparative political economy formulates variants of national capitalisms. Principally, the observation that social inequality and economic growth vary in systematic ways across countries pushed political economists to establish typologies for comparing capitalisms. Two main theories clustered countries according to the relationship between state and economy. Esping-Andersen (1990) put forth a model for understanding the tripartite division of welfare capitalisms. This theory informs the political dimension of such an approach. Several scholars, steeped in the field of industrial relations, matched countries according to the arrangement of economic governance institutions. The latter theory came to be known as varieties of capitalism (VOC). Both theories seek to define the core principles for organizing variants of capitalism and their social and economic consequences.
The pioneering analysis of “three worlds” captures the consequential variation between different types of welfare capitalisms. Esping-Andersen identifies the liberal market-based economies in the US, Canada, Australia, and UK, characterized by their modest redistributive welfare policies and minimal social investments; and the social democratic welfare capitalisms in the Scandinavian countries, providing a host of social investments such as childcare, housing, and medical care, funded by higher taxes. The third type, social conservative countries such as Germany, Belgium and France, fall in-between the two polar types. According to the three worlds approach, political principles for organizing social investments and directing economic interventions produce significantly different outcomes. Consistent with expectations, social democratic welfare states reduce income inequality relative to liberal market welfare states.
Emphasizing economic governance more than welfare policy, the varieties of capitalism approach differentiates the logic undergirding the institutional architectures of capitalism.2 Their neo-Weberian ideal types involve the constellation of complementary production regimes and employment relations systems. Complementary suggests that the institutions operate together to form either a liberal or a non-liberal model of capitalism. Liberal and non-liberal models designate “regimes of economic governance”: the former allows for more play of the free market and the latter relies on forms of “hierarchical organizational coordination” to realize non-economic transactions. Germany represents the paradigmatic case of a non-liberal, coordinated market economy with which to contrast liberal Anglo-American capitalism (Streeck 2001: 3–6). Streeck (2001: 6–7) makes an important caveat that liberal economies are neither unregulated nor devoid of institutions. He argues that the dynamism once fueling economic miracles in Japan and in Germany stemmed from coordination among institutions in these non-liberal varieties of capitalism. A second generation, literally students of the original VOC theorists, has pushed the boundaries of their intellectual fathers. Influenced by welfare state theories, this second generation calls for a view that integrates the welfare state into analysis of production systems (Ebbinghaus and Manow 2001b: 304).
Political economy and economic sociology energized theoretical inquiry, showing why political systems and institutional varieties inform our understanding of distributional patterns as a result of work and employment within and across countries. Despite different emphases, liberal market economies exemplify the pivotal type of capitalism with which to compare other models. Both approaches find that greater social inequality corresponds to less regulated liberal market economies. Without a systematic account of the gender dimensions of employment practices, institutions, and regulations, however, varieties of capitalism theories neglect gender relations embedded in the way major institutions are organized, creating blind spots in their political-economic models. Varieties of capitalism theories implicitly refer to work and social regulations designed for a standard male industrial worker and a corresponding form of standard family life. For this reason, the VOC approach is ill equipped to explicate the systematic disadvantage of women in both paid and unpaid work, such as the growth of low-wage services and temporary employment among women. Nor can the theory explain differences among men. By ignoring the importance of gender, like their precursors Marx and Weber, these political economic models miss important factors behind economic growth and distributional outcomes. Non-feminist political economy remains rooted in classical social theories. Returning to these roots in the next section reveals the historical motivation for the emergence of both initial and subsequent waves of feminism.
Social theories, feminist waves
Riding the First Wave: The Woman’s Question
First-wave feminism, rising and abating from the late 1800s through the early 1920s, addressed the social ills of the day. Reformers posed “the woman’s question” to campaign against sweatshop conditions faced by women workers when large-scale manufacture altered traditional ways of working and disrupted agrarian rhythms of work. One of the few systematic theoretical contributions, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State by Frederick Engels (1968), offered a compelling historical-materialist conception linking women’s oppression to class exploitation.3 According to Engels, asymmetrical relations between men and women constituted the first class relation. Under capitalism, Engels related male domination to the bourgeois family in which men had an economic interest in controlling individual women’s reproductive capacities in order to establish clear paternity lines for the transmission of private property to their male heirs. With rhetorical flourish, Engels (1968: 495) intoned, “The overthrow of mother right was the world historical defeat of the female sex. The man seized the reins in the house also, the woman was degraded, enthralled, the slave to the man’s lust, a mere instrument for breeding children.” In this critical passage, Engels establishes the basis of women’s oppression, but narrowly reduces the woman’s question to a class dynamic, and the “female sex” to a class relation.
First-wave Feminism: Home Economics and the Economics of the Home
As a counterpoint to Engels, Charlotte Perkins Gilman published her study of the “economic relation between men and women as a factor in social evolution.” In the political ferment at the beginning of the twentieth century, Gilman puts women and economics together in her treatise on “one of the most common and most perplexing problems of human life” (1898: 2).4 Beginning with the story of Genesis, she evoked the original state of equality between men and women before man succumbed to the tempting pleasures in the bountiful garden of delights:
Close, close he bound her, that she should leave him never;
Weak still he kept her, lest she be strong to flee (1)
Her prescient account brought unpaid domestic care work into the economic analysis, implicitly refusing to accept both Marxist and classical assumptions that housework created no economic value. In 1903 Gilman explains the genesis of the downgrading of domestic labor.
The phrase “domestic work” does not apply to a special kind of work, but to a certain grade of work, a state of development through which all kinds pass. All industries were once “domestic,” that is were performed at home and in the interests of the family. All industries have since that remote period risen to higher stages, except one or two which have never left their primal stage. ([1903] 1972: 30–1)
In Gilman’s words (217), the drudgery of unpaid domestic labor deprives women of their humanity: “The house-life does not bring out our humanness, for all the distinctive lines of human progress lie outside.” Gilman perceptively genders the concept of production and integrates reproductive labor into a broader conception of the economy.
In the antebellum US many prominent Black women abolitionists fought for both racial and gender equality. Best known among them, Sojourner Truth had a profound impact on expanding notions of womanhood. In 1851, Sojourner Truth delivered the speech on “Woman’s Rights,” when she rhetorically declared, “Ain’t I a woman?” Not deterred by either the White men or the White women at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Truth used her own life experiences to reveal the “contradictions between the ideological myths of womanhood and the reality of black women’s experience” doing hard labor and domestic work (Crenshaw 2011: 32).
Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me – and ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man when I could get it and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most of ’em sold into slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me – and ain’t I a woman? (cited in Flexner 1974: 91)
Crenshaw suggests that Truth’s oratory offered a rebuttal to the claim that women were categorically weaker than men. It was in the midst of such emancipation speeches and anti-slavery campaigns that a Black feminist literature emerged to challenge Victorian notions of true womanhood and rigid racial categories (James & Sharpley-Whiting 2000).
Second-Wave Feminism: Gender, Patriarchy, and Discrimination
The adoption of the 19th Amendment5 ended feminism’s first wave. Still, feminist ideas flourished even after the peak of political activity around women’s issues.6 A second wave swept in a more self-conscious feminism. As the women’s movement gathered steam during the 1970s, liberal, radical, and socialist feminists debated the root causes of women’s oppression. Liberal feminism drew on nineteenth-century political theory in positing that the subordination of women rested on “a set of customary and legal constraints that blocks women’s entrance to and success in the so-called public world” (Tong 2009: 2). Like their predecessors in the suffrage movement, liberal feminists argued that unfair discrimination against women derived from the “false belief” that women are less capable than men (Tong 2009: 2). Equal-opportunity laws were seen as the best way to uproot gender inequality in the public sphere. Both radical and Marxist feminists took issue with the central theoretical premise of liberal feminism that female subordination was principally based on customary and legal constraints. On theoretical and political grounds, radical and Marxist feminists dismissed the call for equal opportunities as merely reshuffling hierarchies by giving some women a chance to emulate men without changing the structures of male power and dominance that disadvantaged all women.
The work of Engels served both as an inspiration and as a foil to radical, socialist, and Marxist feminists who applied a historical-materialist method in deconstructing the architecture of capitalism to fashion structural accounts of patriarchal arrangements. Their materialist feminist perspective posited that gender was not simply about a difference between men and women, but a hierarchical division produced by patriarchal domination (Jackson 1998a: 139). Feminists also rediscovered Gilman’s ideas about housework and domestic labor, which informed ensuing debates over the conceptualization of capitalism (Davis 2000) and the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism (Delphy 1977; Hartmann 1979; Walby 1986). This debate over what constituted patriarchy forced feminists to rethink class analysis and to put gender relations and the gender division of labor into the forefront of analyses of work and economy. The attempt to show that capitalism was not indifferent to the gender of individuals in the class structure gave rise to second-wave feminist materialist theories of patriarchy as a system of social relations enabling men to control women’s labor. Among materialist feminists, radical feminism gave primacy to the sex/gender system of patriarchy to explain the origins and persistence of male power, dominance, and hierarchy (Tong 2009: 2). Arguing for a view of patriarchal capitalism, Marxist and socialist feminists raised historical questions in their search for the origins of women’s oppression in relationship to class exploitation.
Second-Wave Feminism: Capitalism and Materialist Analyses
One of the more faithful Marxist feminist theories gave a nod to Engels, while criticizing his account of women’s oppression (Davis 2000: 176). Citing Engels, Angela Davis grounded the structures of women’s oppression as “inextricably tethered to capitalism.” Though never using the term “patriarchy,” Davis went beyond Engels by examining the historical “specificity of the social subjugation of the women who live outside of the privileged class under capitalism” (173). She traced the source of the bourgeois notion that woman was man’s eternal servant to the historical consolidation of industrial capitalism severing the new economic sphere of factory production from the old home economy. The resulting cleavage transformed the value of women’s work in the home. In the agrarian economy of pre-industrialized North America:
A woman’s work began at sunup and continued by firelight as long as she could hold her eyes open. For two centuries, almost everything that the family used or ate was produced at home under her direction. She spun and dyed the yarn that she wove into cloth and cut and hand-stitched into garments. She grew much of the food her family ate, and preserved enough to last the winter months. She made butter, cheese, bread, candles and soap and knitted her family’s stockings. (Davis 1981)
With the rise of the factory system, domestic labor, formerly contributing to the community’s survival in pre-capitalist economies, lost its value in the circuits of capital. Housework became an inferior form of work because it did not generate profit, the only value attached to labor in a capitalist economy. Black women were forced to work outside of the home, first to produce a profit for the slave master and later to provide for her own family (Davis 2000: 175). When women entered the wage labor market, and sold their labor power, they did so on different terms from men: capitalists treated women not as “abstract labor power in general but rather as an already socially stigmatized female labor power” (171). Thus, women could be paid less for the work they performed for wages. Within capitalism, women’s subordination extends from the domestic sphere to social production.
A new focus on dual systems sought to provide an analytical specificity to patriarchy in relationship to capitalism. The French feminist, Christine Delphy (1977) identified separate spheres, locating the central dynamic of asymmetrical gender relations in a patriarchal domestic mode of production within families, whereby men as a class exploited and benefitted directly from the appropriation of women’s labor in the household. Like Gilman, she focused on housework and the household as a key to male domination, and insisted on mainstreaming gender into the concept of production. In collaboration with Leonard, Delphy argued that men and women as groups are distinguished socially because one dominates the other.7 One came into being in relationship to the other. Just as classes only existed in relationship to each other, there was no bourgeoisie without the proletariat; “[it was] the exploitative relationship that binds men and women together and sets them apart. There would be no ‘women’ without the opposing category of ‘men’ ” (Jackson 1998a: 135). However, Delphy pays too little attention to women’s paid labor outside the home (Jackson 1998b: 17).
Both Sylvia Walby and Heidi Hartmann historicized the connections between patriarchy and capitalism. Patriarchy at Work by Sylvia Walby (1986) pushed forward the approach; it wove an intricate theory of patriarchy as relatively autonomous from other structures, with particular reference to a set of patriarchal relations permeating domestic work, paid work, state, male violence, and sexuality in articulation with capitalist relations. Heidi Hartmann (1979) traced women’s disadvantage in the capitalist labor market to the late nineteenth century when White male workers and employers settled on a family-wage. A family-wage supposedly compensated male workers for their family’s upkeep, supporting the idea of a male breadwinner. Though the working class and capitalists had opposing class interests, the family-wage promoted their common gender interests in maintaining patriarchal gains. The ideology of the family-wage justified the hiring of women in low-wage jobs, which in turn kept women dependent on men for their economic survival, perpetuating a vicious cycle of male and class domination. In both theories, analytically, patriarchy had its own dynamic in relationship to capitalism. Through the general exclusion of women from paid work and the patriarchal relations in the household, reinforced by state policies and violence (Walby) and by the male breadwinner receiving a family-wage (Hartmann), men maintained superiority over women. As suggested by Pollert (1996: 641), this mode of theorizing implied an abstract structuralism, reducing motivations, interests, and strategies for male domination of women either to the abstract needs of capital or to the equally abstract role of patriarchy.8
Debates acknowledged the unhappy marriage of Marxism and feminism (Sargent 1981), and expressed ambivalence about the category of patriarchy itself (Beechey 1979, 1987). Although ambivalent, many feminists reserved the concept of patriarchy for specific historical structures, that is, “the patrilocal extended household in which the senior male holds authority” (Acker 1989: 236). While acknowledging the problems riddling the concept of patriarchy, Cockburn defended retaining the concept to define one form of sex–gender system in which fathers exercised customary or juridical rights to and over women. This “father-right” gave way to a more generalized “male-right” through a brotherhood of men under capitalism. Cockburn (1991: 8) sought to analyze the articulations of sets of social relations – that is, the way they were lived and reproduced – and took care to distinguish patriarchy from other possible sex–gender systems. Acker (1989: 239) advocated applying less abstract concepts, such as reproduction, to encompass “all those activities that have to do with caring for human beings.” In Gender Transformations, Walby (1997) revised her previous formulation to differentiate between private and public patriarchy, with the former rooted in family life and the latter in the labor market.9 The shift to public patriarchy occurred with the influx of women into the wage labor force in large numbers, segregated into low-paying jobs. Walby addressed the implications of various forms of inequalities and politics for the transformation of gender relations, especially in employment.
The second wave of Western feminist scholarship had coalesced around tripartite divisions of liberal, socialist, and radical political theories, and then splintered into multiple versions expressing the loss of confidence in conceptualizations of patriarchy, sex/gender distinctions, and gender. As Toril Moi (1999: 15) puts the problem: “Gender may be pictured as a barricade thrown up against the insidious pervasiveness of sex.” Any broad consensus around a feminist intellectual project centering on overwhelmingly structuralist discussions of gender and sexual divisions of labor, whether in the labor market or in the household, was destabilized in a number of ways and for a number of reasons. The structuralist tone of this research was challenged by developments, particularly within feminist philosophy and post-modernism, which posed serious challenges to early feminist conceptualizations of power and – more significantly – of the very concept of gender.
The postmodern turn and return: conceptual reconsiderations
Until second-wave feminism came of age during the 1960s, there were no adequate theories to explain gender inequality in the labor market. Feminists inherited analytical concepts and theories narrowly conceptualizing sex differences in the division of labor. Within sociology, the leading Parsonian approach posited a dichotomy of differentiated sex roles that implied parallelism, which “constantly collapse[d] into biological differences” (Connell 2002: 35). This binary of sex differences “excluded patterns of differences among women and among men and between alternative masculinities and femininities” (9).10 Feminists moved away from an analysis of sex differences (individual characteristics and biological essences) to gender relationships. Such a relational perspective called for recognizing diversity of work experiences among women (e.g. in paid domestic work) as well as hierarchies of power among men in such institutions as armies and multinational corporations (Connell 2002: 9).
The central positioning of the category of gender has been questioned. More specifically, intervention by Black and Latina feminists criticized second-wave feminist discussions of the inter-relationship between gender and class for failing to integrate an analysis of race, and rendering Black women and women of color more generally invisible, just as traditional social science had, by and large, rendered all women invisible (Spelman 1988; Collins 1990). Recalling the long but forgotten history of Black women’s activism, Black feminists sought to understand the multiple oppressions that Black women face, while emphasizing resistance and the need to interrogate the ways that Black women experienced patriarchy (Guy-Sheftall & Hammonds 2008: 159). Feminists had ignored how their own race functioned to mitigate some aspects of sexism and how it often privileged them over and contributed to the domination of, other women (Crenshaw 2011: 33). Second-wave feminist theories of patriarchy highlighted the history of White women’s exclusion from the workplace, all the while ignoring how Black women traditionally worked outside the home in numbers far exceeding the labor participation rate of White women (33). Moreover, “many white women were able to gain entry into previously all white male enclaves not through bringing about a fundamental reordering of male versus female work, but in large part by shifting their ‘female’ responsibilities to poor and minority (and increasingly racialized immigrant) women” (33). Studies of paid domestic work showed why gender-only analysis distorted the picture of, and complicated, the relationship between women (Rollins 1985; Hill-Collins 1990; Romero 1992).
