Patriarchy v. Capitalism?

[philbee]

I've been thinking about this for a while and just managed to clarify it to myself today. It seems like on becoming a mother you either take a domestic role with a down graded career, and so are patriarchally approved, or back to work full time to carry on as before, and so valid in a capitalist sense because you are 'contributing to society' because you are economically visible (as put at the Tory party conference, apparently SAHMs contribute nothing).

I come under the former category. I think a lot about whether it's possible to ever really feel that you've freely chosen how to be a mother, given these two choices and how they fit within those systems. I am much happier having given up my career job, but there is pressure from many sides not to do this, that it's a loss of feminist face to be at home etc. And i find myself wondering if I've been duped, or if there is any freedom of choice really. Just wondering if others also feel like this or have wondered similar.

The family and domestic labour are vital to the continuation of capitalism; how much would all that free labour cost? SAHM's can get pulled into the labour force if needed for wars, etc

philbee: What about Nicola Horlick.She was the investment fund manager who was known in the media as Superwoman for balancing her high flying career with bringing up six children.When she wasn't at work or home she was at the gym.

An old issue. I'm with Heidi Hartmann (she wrote an essay in the seventies on the unhappy marraige of feminism and marxism in resolving the 'women' question!) . Patriarchy and capitalism work togther to contiue women's position generally.

Women within patriarchal capitalism are seen as homemakers and capitalism benefits from not paying for the work they do within the home. If they go out to work, they are paid less (due to their association with the home) and again this makes for higher profit margins.

As women get paid less usually, and childcare is so expensive, it makes economic sense for women to give up/reduce/downgrade their work once they have children whilst men continue to work. This is then seen as the norm, which reinforces the idea of women's place.

Among my friends aged 40-50 (so no way scientific) many had men who earned enough to make staying at home economically very viable, but going back to work are reluctant to work full time - I sense they don't want to, have parents to look after, home, other interests. All are well-educated and most are teachers, NHS managers. The idea of the pressure of senior education jobs - head teacher etc - fills them with horror.

I recall Yvette Cooper deciding not to stand for Labour leader last year. Why not? Ed Balls stood and wisely only one of them should stand, but why not her? She's easily more talented than some of the others who stood and Ed had lots of 'baggage' from the last administration. I get the feeling that too many talented women seem happy with getting near the top. Maybe she's biding her time for when the job comes up again.....

I am not sure it is as black and white as that. With the advent of contraception, women have been able to take and make more choices about when and if to have children.

When children come, nowadays I see more shades of grey, many more women work pt to ensure they are able to meet both sets of requirements.

What I find interesting is that work is seen to directly opposing motherhood, but not fatherhood?

Because fatherhood is just being, while motherhood is doing.

I find the ideas of The Patriarchy and Capitalism hard to get along with (as opposed to patriarchy and capitalism). Also Society....

I am not splitting hairs, or saying they don't exist - I just think it makes more sense to think of these systems as the result and the sum of the choices made by billions of people, and the institutions they have built and inherited, rather than as personified things. (it doesn't mean they can't and shouldn't be changed, just means it is going to be messy!!)

So for example Philbee when you talk about the tension between work and motherhood as being about conforming to patriarchally approved roles of captalist validated ones, and betternextlife when you talk about women's unpaid work 'benefiting capitalism' I think you are sepperating out the systems as an entity from the people that make them up, and that doesn't make sense to me - since we are part of those systems and we also benefit from them (when you work you get wages to support your family, when you look after your children you get to contribute to their welfare - the question is why do so many parents split the role in such a binary way?.

That's a very good point himalaya.

philbee, are you anti-capitalism? If I understand you rightly, you're happy to be going against the expectation to be 'economically active', but you're upset that by doing so you're fitting in with sexist expectations of women's roles?

Personally I don't think it's necessarily unfeminist to choose to be a stay-at-home partner. I think raising children and caring roles ought to be valued more highly by society, whether it's done by a man or a woman. But I think it depends on how you reached this decision (assuming you have a male partner), whether it was just assumed that you should be the one being a SAHP because you're a woman, or whether you both considered your partner being the SAHP and then came to this decision for non-sexist reasons.

Job is defined as 5 days/40 hours with wife as SAHM
If the norm was a job defined as fitting round maternity leave and childcare, then both genders would benefit from shorter hours, work/life balance etc.
Some men want to retain financial (therefore social) control
The main beneficiary is capitalism, but men enjoy some privileges within that

Society is founded on women's unpaid labour. SO far, no one has managed to come up with a recipe for a stable society that doesn't involve not just the existence of a designated slave class, but a way of ensuring that the slave class accept slavery.
Sooner or later, the slaves realise that they are people too, and start asserting their rights.

""back to work full time to carry on as before, and so valid in a capitalist sense because you are 'contributing to society' because you are economically visible"

I don't see myself, a sole parent in paid employment, as contributing to patriarchal capitalism or being economically viable. Rather, my part in the capitalist system is my route to social and financial independence - two of the main prizes of feminism, surely? The millstone hanging around the necks of women down the ages was the crushing dependence that we were forced to have on husbands. They owned us, literally. If we were 'economically viable' within marriage the money generated became theirs. A woman without a husband was a non-person. I know SAHPs get upset that their work is not valued in the same way as paid employment but it never was.... that's why we fought so hard to get out from under, be taxed separately, paid equally, able to accumualate assets in our own name and enjoy that independence that is so taken for granted now. To go back to the old ways and then try to claim that it's OK to be a stay at home feminist because you're not contributing to the patriarchy of capitalism .... sorry, I don't think that works.

Hmm, I'm not sure that's about not contributing ot patriarchy Cogito, it's about saying that actually, this work is worth something, it props up all the paid work and enables the paid stuff to be done and it props up communitities and social ties.

It's about recognition for the fact that it is in fact, work. Worthwhile, valuable work, which makes a real contribution to society which is denied.

We are all propping up capitalismaby staying at home every bit as much as by working in the cash economy. And if it were another patriarchal system - communism, feudalism, whatever, we would still be propping up that social system whether we work in or outside the home, visibly or invisibly. Unpaid labour props up a system as much as paid labour does, I think that's what I'm getting from that post.

Cogito thats an interesting pov because all the historical evidence indicates that capitalism can't operate effectively unless workers are treated as individuals. The cult of individualism permeates cap. and undermines the economic role of the family in some(but not all) respects - hence early ffactories employed the whole family andpaid thefather/husband.it was a hangover from feudalism when the family was the unit of production and family relationships were relations of production. early factory production didn't work because of infant mortality.

This is an interesting article. I don't have much to add to the debate....it seems that the way society is structured at the moment, Capitalism and Patriarchy go hand in hand and to the detriment of women.

Don't for the love of God, read the comments.....

So as soon as anybody suggests loosening the domestic labour=women's work equation, they all come out of the woodwork with the psycho-kids stories and mums should stay home/mass unemployment crap
Wish I taken your advice, MsR

"this work is worth something"

I'm not arguing that the work is worth something. If the SAHP came from an outside agency they would be paid a salary and enjoy all the legal protection afforded to any other employee. But they're not. I'm sure some couples manage the arrangement in a respectful, mature, equitable fashion but far too often I see women - still, after fifty or sixty years of female emancipation - worried about 'asking him for money' or telling him they bought some minor purchase or nervous about whether it's OK to expect their partner to do a bit of housework or give up his lie-in on a Saturday because they're not well. And that's the trivial everyday stuff. When you get into the more serious problems so many feel trapped because they are so dependent that they can't visualise any alternative. That's the real slavery someone referred to early. Not capitalism

Oh I won't argue with you there.

I beleive being without meaningful activity is detrimental to humans. But all too often, the current organistion of work means that it is not a meaningful activity or that the pressure too perform is too much.

When you have grown up within a cultural that produces certain discourses, it is often difficult to see beyond them. This is not to say that women (or men) should not be able to choose to dedicate themselves to working at home raising their children, but the discourses encourage certain understandings of this.

In the current organisation it makes perfect sense for women too opt to stay at home, but this does not mean that it is a free choice. To paraphrase Marx 'women make their own history but not in circumstances of their own choosing'

Cogito, how do you manage then to be a sole parent and in paid employment?

When I was working and had young children, I paid somebody else to look after my children. That was an unequal exchange of labour and money, because they were paid very little for their labour. They certainly couldn't have kept themselves and their children housed, clothed and fed purely from that hourly wage. It would require them to have additional support, either from a partner or the state.

Similarly, the amount of money I had left after I had paid them would not allow me to feed, clothe and house myself and my children. I was also dependent on my partner, and if he had not been there, the state.

So I am not sure how working makes women as a group independent. It may, at best, move unequal labour and financial exchange away from one woman and on to another person, almost always another woman. What would seem to be creating greater independence for mothers is that through child tax credits, many of them receive state support both for their mothering and for child care through the child care element of tax credits. But it will only really create independence for women if free child care is available to all mothers and child care workers are paid a living wage.

The central issue of capitalism is that its unit of measurement is money, which allows us to effectively ignore the fact that most exchanges between people are unequal ones when measured in time or energy.

I have never felt that feminism is against sitting at home with children. For me it is movement for free choices for women and for couples, for respect and recognition of house work.

A female fund manager mum of 6 is not an example of effective feminist as long as she has 6 low-paid female helpers cleaning her house and rearing her children. Such woman operates within patriarchal system, and is in perfect harmony with capitalism.

Here is an interesting article on relations between female independence and social order (West vs East Germany).

"Eastern women are more self-confident, better-educated and more mobile, recent studies show. They have children earlier and are more likely to work full time. More of them are happy with their looks and their sexuality, and fewer of them diet. If Western women earn 24 percent less than men, the pay gap in the East is a mere 6 percent (though overall levels of pay are lower)."

Socialism as a mechanism of redistribution of resources from advantaged to disadvantaged is beneficial for women. I am not campaigning for socialism, just pointing out that Patriarchy is not vs Capitalism, they are marching together.

IMO Patriarchy and Capitalism love each other because one supplies the cheap labour for the other to flourish. If I remember correctly, Marx compared the domestic servant , ie. the wife, to the proletarian worker who was practically enslaved by his capitalist boss because the paucity of his wages meant that he would never be able to accumulate his own capital and escape his predicament.

Obviously that was when women were the legal property of their husbands and had no rights so slightly different now but concept still interesting.

excellent post mrsaverage