The housewife is central to understanding women's position in capitalist societies. Marxists expected that the expropriation of production from the household would radically diminish its social importance. In the face of the household's continuing importance, Marxists have tried to understand it by applying concepts developed in the study of production." Yet obviously, the household is not like a factory, nor are housewives organized in the same way as wage laborers. As Eli Zaretsky has written, the housewife and the proletarian are the characteristic adults of advanced capitalist societies." Moreover, households and corporations are its characteristic economic organizations. Just as the socialization of production has not abolished the housewife, so accumulation has not abolished the economic functions of the household. Harry Braverman has demonstrated how the accumulation process creates new occupational structures, and he has documented the expansion of capital's activity to new sectors. We will argue that these developments also change the social relations of consumption, an economic function which continues to be structured through the household and performed by women as housewives.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-28-number-3" title="Vol. 28, No. 3: July-August 1976" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>
Every student of city politics knows the class theory of city government—that middle-class voters supported municipal reform and working-class voters supported machine politics. Although historical narratives support this theory, systematic evidence has been elusive. Historians and political scientists alike have recognized very strong regional differences in styles of city government but lacked an explanation. The authors argue that the class theory, historical narratives, and regional differences may be reconciled. Presence of immigrants and turnout account both for adoption or rejection of reform and for the regional pattern of those decisions.
Most political scientists and historians find the home of reform government in the suburbs. The author shows that there was another style of reform government, big-city reform, in the big cities of the Southwest. The political system of big-city reform was distinguished by nonpartisan, city-manager government with citywide elections to the city council, low turnout and participation, and an electorate more Anglo and middle class than the metropolitan area as a whole. Big-city reform governments joined developer-dominated governing coalitions with Anglo middle—and upper-class communities in a growth community benefiting from good government.
What led elites in some U.S. states to surrender policy-making power to voters between 1898 and 1918, while leaders elsewhere retained only representative democracy? The authors argue that progressives behaved as strategic politicians by supporting direct democracy when they were stymied at achieving their goals in the legislature and were confident that the voters who would be empowered by initiatives that agreed with progressive policies. They made their delegation of power conditional on who would receive it. The presence of these underlying conditions made adoption of the citizen initiative likely, the authors posit, while the timing of reforms came when insurgent reformers had a strong presence in state government, when the results of a galvanizing election sent a clear signal, or when the adoption of the initiative in one state diffused to its neighbors. Exploring these hypotheses by analyzing a new data set, the authors find strong support for their expectations about the conditions that created fertile ground for direct democracy.
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