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>
Research into the origins of Western classical literature has considered the performance of epic poetry by male performers, but the possibility of women’s participation in the creation of the oral literature that gave rise to the classics has not been adequately investigated. Here I look at the role of women chanters in the creation of spontaneous lament, point to similarities in the structure of the poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, and suggest that these two epics of classical literature may have been based originally on women’s words.
The Marxist concept of revolution is that the means of production should be taken away from those who currently own them. But even after removal of productive properties from the once-ruling classes, women's oppres sion has continued, in socialist countries. Socialists explain this, inadequately, in two ways: either as a problem of inherited consciousness and ideology lagging behind structural economic change; or, as a problem of underdevelopment, forc ing women to continue sacrificing equality, no matter what class takes control. I have been pursuing a further problem: what other structural economic changes must be made to free women from oppression? Like a Marxist, I am looking for a material basis; as a feminist, I am looking for what is going on underneath the problems identified by Marxism as well.
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