The changing positions of women: In the family and at the workplace

Abstract

The study of women's changing positions in capitalist countries, however cool and systematic, inevitably carries a political charge. Any conceptualization of women's lives must confront the historic inequalities between the sexes. Any analysis of changes in women's lives comments on changes in gender inequalities; any periodization of women's experiences must convey a sense of distinctness from periodizations appropriate for men; and any statements about the interconnections between families, work, and women's lives incorporate judgments about their effects on changes in women's lives. Hence, any analysis comments, at least implicitly, on the viability of alternative proposals to eliminate gender-based inequalities. On both analytical and political grounds, the best analyses are those that cover a wide range of women's activities, finding and exploring the diversity that characterizes women's experiences. These analyses treat women as actors rather than objects of action and deal with women's consciousness. Analysts who use male reference points-men's occupations, periodizations depending on changes in men's employment, and so on-to array female experience almost always get it wrong. The worst errors of all result from imagining work and the family as two separate worlds and supposing that women have only recently begun to enter the public world of work from the private world of the family. Such imaginings ignore that there are fluid boundaries between these worlds,