In all societies there is a mutually determining relationship between women’s mothering and the organization of production. Women’s work has been organized to enable women to care for children, though childbirth, family size, and child-tending arrangements have also been organized to enable women to work.6 Sometimes, as seems to be happening in many industrial societies today, women must care for children and work in the labor force simultaneously.
Historically and crossculturally, women’s mothering has become a fundamentally determining feature of social organization. Michelle Rosaldo has argued that women’s responsibility for child care has led, for reasons of social convenience rather than biological necessity, to a structural differentiation in all societies of a “domestic” sphere that is predominantly women’s and a “public” sphere that is men’s.7 The domestic sphere is the sphere of the family. It is organized around mothers and children. Domestic ties are particularistic—based on specific relationships between members—and often intergenerational, and are assumed to be natural and biological. The public sphere is nonfamilial and extra-domestic. Public institutions, activities, and forms of association are defined and recruited normatively, according to universalistic criteria in which the specific relationships among participants are not a factor. The public sphere forms “society” and “culture”—those intended, constructed forms and ideas that take humanity beyond nature and biology. And the public sphere, therefore “society” itself, is masculine.
Societies vary in the extent to which they differentiate the public and the domestic spheres. In small hunter and gatherer bands, for instance, there is often minimal differentiation. Even here, however, men tend to have extra-domestic distribution networks for the products of their hunting, whereas what women gather is shared only with the immediate family.8
The structural differentiation between public and domestic spheres has been sharpened through the course of industrial capitalist development, producing a family form centered on women’s mothering and maternal qualities. In precapitalist and early capitalist times, the household was the major productive unit of society. Husband and wife, with their own and/or other children, were a cooperative producing unit. A wife carried out her childcare responsibilities along with her productive work, and these responsibilities included training girls—daughters, servants, apprentices—for this work. Children were early integrated into the adult world of work, and men took responsibility for the training of boys once they reached a certain age. This dual role—productive and reproductive—is characteristic of women’s lives in most societies and throughout history. Until very recently, women everywhere participated in most forms of production. Production for the home was in, or connected to, the home.
With the development of capitalism, however, and the industrialization that followed, production outside the home expanded greatly, while production within the home declined. Women used to produce food and clothing for the home. Cloth, and later food and clothing, became mass-produced commodities. Because production for exchange takes place only outside the home and is identified with work as such, the home is no longer viewed as a workplace. Home and workplace, once the same, are now separate.9
This change in the organization of production went along with and produced a complex of far-reaching changes in the family. In addition to losing its role in production, the family has lost many of its educational, religious, and political functions, as well as its role in the care of the sick and aged. These losses have made the contemporary nuclear family a quintessentially relational and personal institution, the personal sphere of society.10 The family has become the place where people go to recover from work, to find personal fulfillment and a sense of self. It remains the place where children are nurtured and reared
This split between social production, on the one hand, and domestic reproduction and personal life, on the other, has deepened the preindustrial sexual division of spheres. Men have becone less and less central to the family, becoming primarily “bread-winners.” They maintained authority in the family for a time, but as their autonomy in the nonfamilial world decreased, their authority in the family itself has declined,11 and they have become increasingly nonparticipant in family life itself. Psychoanalyst and social theorist Alexander Mitscherlich speaks of “society without the father.”12 Women lost their productive economic role both in social production and in the home.
This extension and formalization of the public-domestic split brought with it increasing sexual inequality. As production left the home and women ceased to participate in primary productive activity, they lost power both in the public world and in their families. Women’s work in the home and the maternal role are devalued because they are outside of the sphere of monetary exchange and unmeasurable in monetary terms, and because love, though supposedly valued, is valued only within a devalued and powerless realm, a realm separate from and not equal to profits and achievement. Women’s and men’s spheres are distinctly unequal, and the structure of values in industrial capitalist society has reinforced the ideology of inferiority and relative lack of power vis-à-vis men which women brought with them from preindustrial, precapitalist times.
At the same time, women’s reproductive role has changed.13 Two centuries ago marriage was essentially synonymous with childrearing. One spouse was likely to die before the children were completely reared, and the other spouse’s death would probably follow within five years of the last child’s marriage. Parenting lasted from the inception of a marriage to the death of the marriage partners. But over the last two centuries, fertility and infant mortality rates have declined, longevity has increased, and children spend much of their childhood years in school.
Women’s Mothering and Ideology about Women
Just as the actual physical and biological requirements of childbearing and child care were decreasing, women’s mothering role gained psychological and ideological significance and came increasingly to dominate women’s lives, outside the home as well as within it. In this society it is not assumed, as it has been in most societies previously, that women as mothers and wives do productive or income-producing work as part of their routine contribution to their families. The factual basis for this assumption is fast being eroded—as the number of wives and both married and single mothers in the paid labor force soars—but the ideology remains with us. Whatever their marital status and despite evidence to the contrary for both married and unmarried women, women are generally assumed to be working only to supplement a husband’s income in nonessential ways. This assumption justifies discrimination, less pay, layoffs, higher unemployment rates than men, and arbitrary treatment. In a country where the paid labor force is more than 40 percent female, many people continue to assume that most women are wives and mothers who do not work. In a situation where almost two thirds of the women who work are married and almost 40 percent have children under eighteen, many people assume that “working women” are single and childless.
The kind of work women do also tends to reinforce stereotypes of women as wives and mothers. This work is relational and often an extension of women’s wife-mother roles in a way that men’s work is not. Women are clerical workers, service workers, teachers, nurses, salespeople. If they are involved in production, it is generally in the production of nondurable goods like clothing and food, not in “masculine” machine industries like steel and automobiles.14 All women, then, are affected by an ideological norm that defines them as members of conventional nuclear families.
This ideology is not merely a statistical norm. It is transformed and given an explanation in terms of natural differences and natural causes. We explain the sexual division of labor as an outgrowth of physical differences. We see the family as a natural, rather than a social, creation. In general, we do not see the social organization of gender as a product or aspect of social organization at all. The reification of gender, then, involves the removal of all imputation of historicity and all sense that people produce and have