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Households used to be sites of production -- nearly everything families used to use was made by the peasant/homesteading household. Women and men worked cooperatively (though often separately) to harvest food, tend to beasts, make food, make clothing, /1
build living quarters, churn butter, etc. the tasks were almost endless, with small children as young as 3 and 4 being given chores as soon as possible. In this manufacturing household, men, women and children were kept very busy. Meals were repetitive. Cleanliness /2
standards were much lower, with dirty dishes and laundry allowed to accumulate in order to make time for production. Since industrialization, the household has ceased to be a site of production - most goods are made outside the home and paid for through wages. Starting by the /3
1900s, infant mortality decreased, mainly due to improvements in sanitation infrastructure. With this decrease came a decrease in birth rates. The household became a site of consumption only, and remains such. With it the role of women from actual producers of goods to /4
producers of immaterial services (very high standards of cleanliness, care, decor, "making a home" etc.) The shift from producers, to consumers, back to producers (now that 1/2 of the workforce are female wage labourers) has had the largest impact on the status of women within /5
class society. Whatever value judgement you may have, there is no going back to the previous paradigm, there never is. Women have been apart of the working class since the inception of the class, and now their part in it is cemented. Working men and women have shared interests /6
through their shared experience of exploitation. The biological implications of gestation are felt by working-class men as it is a means of lowering the floor for all wages. What synthesis will this reality yield? Can the working class remake the world in their joint /7
image? what would it look like to have a society that supports the realities of female and male biology? What would that mean for the female sex? Will "woman" still exist? Being a mere aesthetic expression under capitalism, it seems like she is disappearing /8
but, perhaps if the working class succeeds, she will rise again, as a full participant in production as in the patriarchal household, but this time as equal partners, as comrades. I wonder what she will become. /end
