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4th December 2017

Fatima Siraj (fs03865)
Political Economy
Dr. Shahram Azhar

Where Women Rule?

Prompt: Using Resnick and Wolff's reading, explain how a household can be a site of 'class

processes'?

Class and gender struggles take place inside households, just like in any other social site (The

State or The Enterprise) Marxist Feminists have taken the lead in giving it importance and

include household as a social site in their social analysis. Gender processes are conditions of

existence for class processes. (New Departures in Marxian Theory, page 162)

The term “household” has carried many different meaning. In our analysis, it contains an

adult male who leaves the house to take part in capitalist class processes to earn income, an adult

female who remains at the household and it may contain children, elderly family members. (New

Departures in Marxian Theory, page 163)

Upon examining closely, we notice that the household too takes part in production,

distribution and appropriation; implying thereby, that the household creates a surplus. This gives

rise to three basic questions:

1. Who engages in it?

2. Who makes decisions about the surplus?

3. Why produce surplus?

The production takes form of cooking, cleaning, getting groceries and childcare. The

woman is a direct laborer inside the household. She transforms raw materials (uncooked food,

unclean rooms etc) by laboring with means of production (stoves, vacuum cleaners etc) resulting
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in use-values consumed by the household. This implies that she doesn’t only produce for herself

(necessary labor) but also for others (surplus labor) (New Departures in Marxian Theory, page

163) In this type of household, she is engaged in fundamental class processes. But this class

process is not capitalist, because the husband/adult male does not pay the wife/adult female a

wage, there is no exchange of commodities between them, he doesn’t sell the use-values she

produces and finally he doesn’t derive a “profit” from her surplus labor.

So why does the woman engage in producing a surplus? Looking at it from the traditional

gender role’s perspective, we notice that women are brought up with the ideology that mothers,

sisters and daughters are selfless, the notion of a ‘dutiful’ wife is put into play, females

seemingly have no freedom to relinquish. Biological essentialism may also appear in the form of

‘God’s will’ – saying that God created men and women biologically different because he

intended women to remain in the household and bear children while the men function outside the

house. If the worker at the enterprise refuses to work efficiently, he is disciplined. Similarly, isn’t

domestic violence and marital rape a form of disciplining the labor inside the household? Due to

this, women are reluctant to protest about the exploitation because of the fear of:

1. Divorce

2. Lack of acceptance

3. Harassment

Alternately, gender processes may push her to discipline herself. Gender processes may affirm

that the household is the essential support of our society, and the essence of the household is its

wife and mother.

The architecture of our society reflects a class structure, for example Mao’s reforms in

China brought about communal kitchens. There is also a class struggle within the household. The
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structure of the household replicates closest to that of a feudal fundamental class process. Men

and women occupy different class positions within the feudal household – fundamental class

positions as producers or appropriators of surplus labor and subsumed class position as providers

of this surplus labors’ conditions of existence (New Departures in Marxian Theory, pg 168)

Comparing the household to the enterprise shows us that in the household exists the

fundamental class processes, subsumed class processes, class struggle, exploitation and surplus

labor – so why does the woman choose to remain in the household? In many cases, they prefer it

because the of the wage differential gap that exists in the market, absence of laws or lack of

enforcement. The feudal position of a woman is affected by social, economic and political class

processes. Women stay at home, so their husbands can earn more in paid employment, when

women interrupt their careers it becomes difficult for them to find a job which heightens their

reliance on male income – automatically gives rise to a power relation – that the spouse who

earns less does more of the housework.

One way to overcome the struggles within the household could be by dividing the

ownership of the household – political power over property has enabled some women to alter the

terms of their marriage or resist altogether (New Departures in Marxian Theory, page 175), by

dividing the chores if both men and women are working, or even simpler is to accept that if a

couple is going to participate in their traditional gender roles – then they must accept that each is

important in its own regards.