The home, women's oppression, and capitalism

After our intriguing class discussions the other week in regards to the home and the ideology of separate spheres, I wanted to do more research on the home as a source of women’s oppression, as well as the vital role played by unpaid domestic labor (done primarily by women) in the maintenance of the capitalist system.

While we discussed the home as a site for the production of gender identity and gendered difference, we did not dive more deeply into the origins of the feminization of the home, nor did we look into the origins of women’s oppression and its relation to the home.

I would argue that both the gendered division of labor, made apparent through the separation of public and private spheres, and women’s oppression itself have concrete, material origins in the development of class society.

Frederick Engels located the root of women’s oppression in the formation of the nuclear family, which emerged for the sole purpose of passing on private property from one generation to the next in class society.

Furthermore, Engels argues that women’s oppression is a result of the dominance of production for exchange in combination with the gendered division of labor. Basically, because women have the ability to bear children, they were excluded from public production, which was left for men to do, and which was also valued more in society. Engels remarks, “the modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife, and modern society is a mass composed of these individual families as its molecules.”

The association of women with the “private sphere” (i.e. the home) is not separate from the capitalist economic system, rather, it is a direct development of its emergence and plays a crucial role in its maintenance.

Domestic labor (cooking meals, doing laundry, cleaning, raising children) is an essential component to the reproduction and maintenance of workers for the capitalist system. “The burden for the reproduction of labor power still lies primarily within the working-class family–and women’s role within it–both for enabling today’s generation of workers to replenish themselves so they can return to their jobs each day and for rearing the next generation of workers through childhood. The working-class family is extremely valuable to the capitalist system as a cheap means of reproducing labor power”. Thus, the unpaid labor done by women in the private sphere is essential to the capitalist system, ultimately contributing to capitalists' profits as they exploit their workers.

Furthermore, even as women are increasingly entering the workforce (or the public sphere of production), they are still expected to take on the brunt of the domestic labor within the private sphere. Thus, the privatization of reproduction is intrinsic to the capitalist system. This remains true even as some working-class men begin to take on domestic labor. The end to the privatization of domestic labor, the perpetuation of the nuclear family, and, ultimately, women's oppression can only come about through a complete revitalization and transformation of the mode of production in society itself.