Can anyone explain to me why the addition of women to the paid workforce did not result in decreased working hours for all?

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So we had a society where most women were not in paid employment and have moved to one where significantly more are. Why aren't we all (men and women) working reduced hours and why hasn't the family unit been elevated into the public consciousness?

I understand some of the issues; i.e. women are now being paid for work that they would have been expected to do unpaid (caring and community responsibilities for example) but still can't get my head around where all this extra work has come from - if indeed it has at all.

Is this some sort of transitional stage we are at or are there wider world forces at work (emerging economies & the growth of import etc)?

My brain is tired. Can someone please explain their take on the situation to me. Using little words if possible!

Am I correct in then saying that capitalism is inherently anti feminist?

I think a better description is 'amoral'. After all, it suited capitalism to employ and accommodate large numbers of women when there was munitions and armaments to be manufactured.

Isn't the NHS the UK's biggest employer and a very big employer of women? Before the NHS most people had very little healthcare unless they were well off and many illnesses werew basically untreatable. The NHS alone is probably responsible for a large growth in jobs.

Surely WC women always worked? Both of my grandmas (one aged 90), one dead, worked before and after marriage/kids.

I think the NHS is one of the worlds biggest employers though every time I think that i think it must be wrong! Will see if i can find whether that is true or not!

Lucie my grandmothers both worked as well, they were both nurses.

I suppose contraception must have had an impact?

If you are permanently pregnant / giving birth / breastfeeding and you have 8 kids then that limits scope for work outside the home? Not sure on that just a thought. What do people think? Obviously before the industrial revolution it was different but afterwards with fixed shifts and stuff.... Dunno.

5th biggest in the world

mind-boggling

Individual enterprise from the home (textile work, taking in washing, keeping chickens, brewing beer, running a shop from one room) has long been done by women. And I think such enterprise is inherently capitalist, so it's hard to make a statement that capitalism is inherently anti-feminist.

I suppose one interesting question is, what is the barrier to entry to any particular income stream for women?

If male gatekeepers have control of who gets jobs, whether in a capitalist structure or in a planned state structure, then that structure may well operate in an anti-feminist way. Ditto for access to education, capital and asset ownership.

Capitalism as it was envisaged by Adam Smith, sounds pretty okay actually. He talked a lot about small entrepreneurs making things at home or selling stuff from a small shop or stall. Very different to the multi nationals that now dominate our society

I would say caplitalism as a systen is not anti-femist.
But many capitalist societies are sexist IYSWIM.

Right, I think I'm getting this now.

1. There has been no great change in the amount of women in paid work over the past 100 years.

1. Historically, this paid work typically either fit around a woman's caring responsibilities (to children/husband/sick/elderly) OR was in replacement of them (e.g. Governess)

1. In Britain today, women are more visibly employed but actually under the veneer of equality, less has changed than it may initially seem.

1. However, the inroads that have been made have enabled us all to enjoy a better quality of life. Particularly for the working classes.

I shall repeat SerialKipper's quote in it's entirety for point #5: If male gatekeepers have control of who gets jobs, whether in a capitalist structure or in a planned state structure, then that structure may well operate in an anti-feminist way. Ditto for access to education, capital and asset ownership.

Thanks for making me feel so welcome here. Oh, and moaning, hairy and lesbian are all fine with me EatsBrainsAndLeaves.

Brilliant article, thanks Bonsoir. I haven't really organised my thoughts about it yet, but it gives lots of great information and viewpoints on lots of the issues that have been circling round my head recently. Thank you.

I think part of it must be do to with how changes in class structure have changed the economy and the history of domestic work. Pre-WWI, one of the biggest sectors of employment was domestic service - I think it was the single biggest employer of women. As class structures slowly began to change after WWI and clerical and retail jobs began to open up to women, women opted for these over service where you had to live in and couldn't on the whole marry. By the end of WWII, a lack of people willing to work in domestic service combined with technological changes like household appliances and the spread of electricity and gas, plus the manufactured ideal of the housewife, meant that living without servants (or at least with only piecemeal help like having a cleaner or a nanny) became the norm for the middle classes. This was a huge, huge shock for the middle classes collectively - naturally the burden of it mostly fell on women and they got fed up with conforming to the housewife ideal. This contributed to the rise of feminism amongst middle class women post-war.

Then you also get a massive expansion of the middle class, so that people who had been working class and always looked after themselves domestically mostly continued to do so once they were middle class. Combine this with a situation where you have rising house prices, inflation and changes in family structure, and you pretty much have to have two incomes, as well as have to look after all your own domestic stuff at the same time. This of course had always been the norm for working class families - working class women have always done work on the side, and everyone in a family who was of an age to earn or work on the land would have been expected to do so.

if more poeple are working then more people will have a disposable income and thus more commodities bought and thus more employment oppertunities.

i know what you mean though, it isnt just that so many more women are working than ever have done, machines are constantly taking the place of the old labour-intensive work, a large digger on a building site must put 10 people out of work, i do sometimes wonder why we havent got an enourmous unemployment problem.

Wages have stagnated over the last 30 years so two wages are now necessary even amongst the middle class. In the past working class women would have worked but now more women have to work.

The capitalist class benefit in several ways, more workers means greater productivity, stagnating wages means higher profit margins. This is a necessary phase in capitalism because as marx predicted profits would fall and ways would have to be found to mitigate against diminishing profits.
Also every worker becomes a consumer. Women who work have control (we would hope!) over the money that she earns, she becomes an individual consumer. Most working women could attest to just how expensive working is when you factor in travel, clothes, child care, lunch, coffee, training courses etc,

Globally women make up something like 2/3rds of the worlds workforce and in developing countries they make up something like 2/3rd of the poorest in society.

In the west we benefit as consumers from the exploitation not of men but of women workers.