Quentin, you raise some good points. However, capitalism is never going to value 'caring work' - whether inside or outside the home. Why would it? The goal of capitalism is the maximisation of capital: nothing more, nothing less. Women were not valued in the home, and now they (along with male carers) are not valued as occupational carers - paid a mere pittance and often made to work punishing shifts with few breaks. What else can we expect from such a system?
However, capitalism does not require women to be confined to the home anymore. It did when there was lots of manual labour to be performed by men; but now that's all gone, it is more more profitable for women to be workforce participants. It is indeed rich for IDS to be blaming feminism for destroying the family. In truth, neo-liberals like Margaret Thatcher did more to destroy the family than feminists and baby boomer radicals could ever have done. She ripped apart who industrial communities, removing the bedrock and source of income on which families depended. Women flooded into the work place -
which of course on one level was good - but it was not to participate in a more equal and caring society. Rather, they were encouraged to be individualist careerists, competing for all the money and power that was formerly in the possession of men. Since then male employment has gone into decline as female employment has rose. Another way of putting it would be to say that capitalism has played men and women off against each other while someone laughs their way to the bank. Capitalism came first and co-opted feminism and liberationism, from which it could make a fast buck through no end of make-up, clothes, raunch culture and pornography to be indulged in by the 'liberated' female worker-consumer.
The other issue is the sexual revolution. By this I mean the joint enterprise of the liberal left and libertarian right which aimed to destroy monogamy and family as moral pillars of society. Some of their intentions were good, as there was of course much that was positive about the sexual revolution: but they never thought what to put in place of what they were destroying. In the resultant moral vacuum grew a commodified market in which people - and women in particular - were gradually demoted to disposable instruments of pleasure.
The central ethic of sexual liberation is that of consent. As long as no third parties are affected, there is no “morality”, only an agreed procedure for individuals to decide “what is right for them” – whatever that might be. This radical individualism underpinned the demands of the sexual liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. We have to ask, is this precisely also the logic of capitalism – calculative agents engaging in selfish transactions in a deregulated market place?
Despite its positive aspects, there is a right-wing side to the sexual revolution, where human bodies become goods in a marketplace, and where survival of the sexiest promotes injustice and discrimination rather than fighting against it. Without love and family as governing concepts, there is nothing to glue society together but money and power. Not all feminists are against the family, but many rallied behind the concept of sexual deregulation; the 'zipless fuck' a source of empowerment. Women could be sexually brutal and selfish too, they thought, and this, they naively thought, would bring equality.
In the liberated sexual culture, people cease to be multi-dimensional human beings to whom love is fealty are pledged within a framework of obligations, but instruments of sexual pleasure with market value. Sexual liberationists presume the same level playing-field of ‘equality of opportunity’ as their laissez-faire counterparts on the New Right.
Yet no matter how much makeup is used, or hours are spent at the gym, there are irreducible differences between the sexual attractiveness of people. Therefore sexual deregulation has increased the ability of attractive people to exploit unattractive people. Therefore, the sexual revolution has the equivalent of economic 'collateral': abused women, the unattractive, the exploited, the victimised, the teenage girls starving themselves to death.
Furthermore, the modern sexual consumer, like any consumer, becomes easily bored, and requires harder thrills. Therefore it is perfectly logical that pornography becomes more an more violent and depraved, and acts that were once considered deviant are normalised. Whatever was wrong with the family, it provided a bulwark against the public expression of these impulses. The real children of the 1960's are Charles Manson and all the ritualistic serial killers of the ensuing decades.
Some on both the left and conservative right believe that this moral collapse can be reversed. However, exchange value has triumphed over love, and there will soon be no non-monetizable aspects of life left. We are seeing the end of love as a foundational principle of private relations.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a big fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.