19 November, 2025
Author: Katy Dollar
In Rethinking Women’s Oppression, a chapter of her book Women and the Politics of Class, Johanna Brenner surveys Michèle Barrett’s well-known book Women’s Oppression Today.
Brenner rejects reductionist Marxist approaches which assert women’s oppression is an integral part of capitalism’s basic mechanics, and thus leave untheorised why it is women who carry out domestic labour and can obscure sexism within the working class and working-class families. She also rejects theories of capitalism and patriarchy as dual systems, because they tend to be ahistorical in their analysis of patriarchy and to posit gender ideology as something autonomous and outside material conditions.
She argues that gender ideology, like all ideology, is rooted in our lived everyday. Gender divisions are produced by a complex balance of forces at a given point in the history of capitalism.
Michèle Barrett posits a historical account of the formation of the family-household system. But she then sees the ensuing ghettoisation of women in low-paying sectors of capitalist production as shaped by protective legislation and union exclusionary practices.
“Better-organised male craft unions and the bourgeois-controlled state were able to override the interests of female workers... These divisions are systematically embedded in the structure and texture of capitalist social relations in Britain and they play an important part in the political and ideological stability of this society. They are constitutive of our subjectivity as well as, in part, of capitalist political and cultural hegemony”.
Brenner’s historical work shows there is little evidence that protective legislation had a determining negative effect. It was not universal and came long after the gender division of labour was established. Trade union action was not the cause of gender division, either. Trade unions were not homogeneous. Sometimes trade unions promoted discrimination against working women with the idea that men and women have or should have “separate spheres”. There are also many examples of trade union support for women’s organisation.
Studies of women’s work in the nineteenth century indicate that usually women withdrew from full-time work in factories at the time of their first child. Women who worked in factory conditions had more difficult pregnancies, and were more likely to miscarry or have a child with health problems. Bottle-feeding was not safe or affordable, and full-time work prevented breastfeeding.
Before protective legislation or union contracts, women changed their employment around family constraints. Mothers found jobs that fitted with the domestic demands: part-time work, seasonal work.
Economies
In pre-industrial economies, reproduction and production accomodated each other. The organisation of production remained in the hands of the workers themselves sufficiently that work rate and location could be flexible around biological needs. The increasing determination of work conditions by machine production posed difficulties.
Pregnancy, childbirth, lactation are not easily compatible with factory or office work without maternity leave, breastfeeding facilities, childcare, and flexibility in late pregnancy. Capitalists will not willingly pay for those provisions as they increase costs. Until we win the provisions, the reproduction of labour power becomes problematic for the working class as a whole and for women in particular.
Working-class families did not have enough money to buy in social reproduction as goods and services (nannies, housekeepers, washing machines, etc.). Given that, a division of labour where one person undertook domestic labour (plus maybe supplementary wage work), while another earned wages full-time made sense.
Of course precapitalist ideologies, and then the bourgeois family ideal, had a role. But the shaping of working-class family norms was reinforced by the material realities of working-class life.
Women’s work was more precarious and paid less because the workforce was usually less able to organise. Mothers had domestic work which left them less time and energy for union organising. Young women not yet married had more time but often stayed in work more briefly.
Gender ideology was and is rooted in and shaped by women’s and men’s experience in everyday life. Gendered divisions were not so much embedded in the barebones fundamentals of capitalist relations of production, as produced by the balance of forces at a point in the history of capitalism.
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