The family under capitalism reinforces woman’s oppressive condition. The family supports capitalism by providing a way for calm to be maintained amidst the disruption that is very much a part of capitalism. The family supports capitalism economically by providing a productive labor force and supplying a market for massive consumption.45 The family also performs an ideological role by cultivating the belief in individualism, freedom, and equality basic to the belief structure of society, although they are at odds with social and economic reality.46 Mitchell concludes that by focusing on the destruction of the family alone, woman’s situation will not necessarily be substantially altered. For Mitchell “socialism would properly mean not the abolition of the family but the diversification of the socially acknowledged relationships which are forcibly and rigidly compressed into it.”47
The importance of Mitchell’s analysis lies in the fact that she focuses on the powerlessness that women experience because they are reproductive beings, sexual beings, working individuals, and socializers of children—in all the dimensions of their activities. She makes it clear that woman’s oppression is based in part on the support the family gives the capitalist system. Power is seen as a complex reality. We are still left, however, with the need to clarify the relationship of the family and the political economy in capitalist patriarchal society. What Mitchell has supplied us with is an understanding of the family in capitalist society.
3. The Sexual Division of Labor and Society in Capitalist Patriarchy: Toward a New Feminist Theory
One of the problems in trying to analyze the interconnections of patriarchy and capitalism is that our language treats the family and the economy as separate systems. The sexual hierarchical division of labor cuts through these two, however. Patriarchy and capitalism operate within the sexual division of labor and society rather than within the family. A sexual division of labor and society that defines people’s activity, purposes, goals, desires, and dreams according to their biological sex, is at the base of patriarchy and capitalism. It divides men and women into their respective hierarchical sex roles and structures their related duties in the family domain and within the economy.
This statement of the mutual dependence of patriarchy and capitalism not only assumes the malleability of patriarchy to the needs of capital but assumes the malleability of capital to the needs of patriarchy. When one states that capitalism needs patriarchy in order to operate efficiently one is really noting that male supremacy, as a system of sexual hierarchy, supplies capitalism (and systems previous to it) with the necessary order and control. This patriarchal system of control is thus necessary to the smooth functioning of the society and the economic system and hence should not be undermined. This argument is to underscore the importance of the system of cultural, social, economic, and political control that emanates from the system of male supremacy. To the extent the concern with profit and the concern with societal control are inextricably connected (but cannot be reduced to each other), patriarchy and capitalism become an integral process; specific elements of each system are necessitated by the other.
Capitalism uses patriarchy and patriarchy is defined by the needs of capital. This statement does not undermine the above claim that at the same time one system uses the other, it must organize around the needs of the other in order to protect the specific quality of the other. Otherwise the other system will lose its specific character and with it its unique value. To state this as simply as possible one could say that: patriarchy (as male supremacy) provides the sexual hierarchical ordering of society for political control and as a political system cannot be reduced to its economic structure; while capitalism as an economic class system driven by the pursuit of profit feeds off the patriarchal ordering. Together they form the political economy of the society, not merely one or another, but a particular blend of the two. There are problems with this oversimplified statement. It severs relations which exist within both spheres. For instance, capitalism has a set of controls which emanate directly from the economic class relations of society and their organization in the workplace. And it seems to assume a harmony between the two systems at all points. As we move further into advanced capitalism, we can see how uneasy this relationship is becoming. As women increasingly enter the labor force, some of the control of patriarchal familial relations seems to be undermined—the double day becomes more obvious. But the ghettoization of women within the labor force at the same time maintains a system of hierarchical control of women, both sexually and economically, which leaves the sexual hierarchy of the society intact. Deference to patriarchal hierarchy and control is shown in the very fact that the search for cheap labor has not led to a full integration of women into all parts of the labor force. Although women’s labor is cheaper, the system of control which maintains both the necessary order of the society and with it the cheapness of women’s labor must be protected by segregating women in the labor force. Nevertheless, the justification for woman’s double day and unequal wages is less well-protected today.
It is important to note the discrepancy between patriarchal ideology and the reality of women’s lives. Although all women are defined as mothers (and nonworkers), almost 45 percent of the women in the United States—38.6 millon—work in the paid labor force, and almost all labor in the home. Nearly a quarter of all working women are single; 19 percent are either widowed, divorced, or separated: and another 26 percent are married to men who earn less than $10,000 a year.48 However, because women are not defined as workers within the ruling ideology, women are not paid for their labor or are paid less than men. The sexual definition of woman as mother either keeps her in the home doing unpaid labor or enables her to be hired at a lower wage because of her defined sexual inferiority. Given unemployment rates, women either do not find jobs at all or are paid at an even lower rate. The sexual division of labor and society remains intact even with women in the paid economy. Ideology adjusts to this by defining women as working mothers. And the two jobs get done for less than the price of one.
All of the processes involved in domestic work help in the perpetuation of the existing society. (1) Women stabilize patriarchal structures (the family, housewife, mother, etc.) by fulfilling these roles. (2) Simultaneously, women are reproducing new workers, for both the paid and unpaid labor force. They care for the men and children of the society. (3) They work as well in the labor force for lesser wages. (4) They stabilize the economy through their role as consumers. If the other side of production is consumption, the other side of capitalism is patriarchy.
Although this sexual division of labor and society antedates capitalism, it has been increasingly institutionalized and specifically defined in terms of the nuclear family because of the needs of advanced capitalism. It now has much more form and structure than it did in precapitalist societies.49 In precapitalist society, men, women, and children worked together in the home, the farm, or on the land to produce the goods necessary for their lives. Women were procreators and child-rearers, but the organization of work limited the impact of this sexual role distinction. With the rise of industrial capitalism, men were brought out of the home and into the wage-labor economy. Women became relegated to the home and were increasingly viewed by men as nonproductive although many worked in the factories. They came to be seen solely in terms of sex roles. Although women were mothers before industrial capitalism, this was not an exclusive role; whereas, with industrial capitalism, women became housewives. “The housewife emerged, alongside the proletariat—the two characteristic laborers of developed capitalist society.”50 The work that women continued to perform in the home was not conceived of as work. Productive labor was defined as wage labor, labor which produces surplus value—capital.
The conditions of production in society then, define and shape production, reproduction, and consumption in the family. So, too, the family mode of production, reproduction, and consumption affects commodity production. They work together to define the political economy. Within a capitalist patriarchal economy—where profit, which necessitates a system of political order and control, is the basic priority of the ruling class—the sexual division of labor and society serves a specific purpose. It stabilizes the society through the family while it organizes a realm of work, domestic labor, for which there is no pay (housewives), or limited pay (paid houseworkers), or unequal pay (in the paid labor force). This last category shows the ultimate effect on women of