Sublime

As the professor of women’s studies Chandra Talpade Mohanty has asked, ‘How is it possible to refer to “the” sexual division of labor when the content of this division changes radically from one environment to the next, and from one historical juncture to another?’ If there were some fundamental aspects of male and female natures that put men in co

Marx understood how capitalism was inseparable from this reorganization of time, specifically the time of living labor, as a way of creating surplus value, and he cited the words of Andrew Ure, the Scottish advocate of industrial rationalization, to amplify its importance: it was “the training of human beings to renounce their desultory habits of w

Recall how more women in the United States are doing more than one part-time job. In Japan too, women as well as men are increasingly immersed in multiple jobholding, combining what appear to be full-time jobs with informal side-jobs

“I think the biggest reason that labor-saving technology in the home didn’t actually reduce labor for housewives is that the opportunity cost of women’s labor was socially valued at zero,” Schor told me. “By that I mean, a lot of men wanted their wives to keep busy but assumed that they would be worthless outside the home, as salaried workers, like

What appears to be a small slowdown becomes a very noticeable gap over time, and typical American families have been living with a growth slowdown for almost forty years. If you’re wondering, this observation about median income is not a secret, but we haven’t yet given it the correct interpretation. The American left has pointed out and indeed str

They argue that working women leave households bereft of homemakers and children without a mother’s care. Yet they consistently ignore the degree to which consumer capitalist culture, not feminism, pushed women into the workforce and keeps them there.

However, with industrialisation came time regimentation. The nascent proletariat was disciplined by the clock, as the historian E. P. Thompson (1967) so elegantly chronicled. A national industrial market society emerged, based on enforced respect for the time, the calendar and the clock.

As socialist feminism usefully highlights, capitalism is dedicated to ensuring that as much vital labor as possible goes uncompensated. Fauxtomation must be seen as part of that tendency.

In her now classic 1975 essay, ‘Woman the Gatherer’, anthropologist Sally Slocum challenged the…

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