Re: value and gender

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

In a message dated 11/19/03 9:54:13 AM Pacific Standard Time,
bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx writes
:
Joanna wrote:

I don't know why we'd call [the comfort of a clean house] "bourgeois" --
people have been
> cleaning themselves and their houses for ever.

"We" don't. You just have to decide whose side you're on here.

Jurriaan

The issue is taken out of its historical context. One must examine cleaning
or washing clothes before the advent of electricity and the washing machine to
understand the essence of "cleaning" and a clean home. What was called women's
work was extremely labor intensive.

The role of women in society has changed with every single change in the
means of production in society and their final liberation is going to rest upon -
not the thinking of men, but the absolute elimination of the social division
of labor that assigns them to "kitchen, church and children - and a job."

The introduction of electronic in the workplace has reconfigured the labor
process and draw more and more women into the workplace as the value of labor
falls due to the introduction of this technology. What was it that placed women
in a position of inferiority in the first place? The only way any group
becomes inferior is to be dependent. If you are not dependent, nobody on earth can
place you in a position of inferiority. This means that someone or somehow the
instruments that allow you to be economically independent - no matter what the
means of production are, have to be taken away.

In history women became depndent on the labor expenditure of men and with the
evolution of the value system and the man becoming dependent on the ability
to sell his labor power, the women as an excluded class from production, became
depndent on the wage earning of the men. Here is the bottom line question.

What is still called "women work" in the household is not historical "women
work." In the past and to a large degree today a "women's work was never done."
And she was at the mercy of the person who feed her - whether she loved this
person or not is not relevant, because she could not feed herself by
independent means. Washing clothes and cleaning house was an arduous task before the
washing machine and the vacuum cleaner and floor cleaner.

The man could not have possibility have survived as a modern laborer without
the underpinning of the eighteen hour days of the women. The liberation - to a
degree, of the women in the household has been the product of the revolution
in cooking, cleaning, child rearing and not some spontaneous impulse of man's
thinking.

Once the absolute dependence of women on man was broken and her emergence as
not an agent dependent on the male proletariat, but a proletariat dependent on
the ability to freely sell her labor power in the market combined with the
revolution in the household, the shit hit the fan in a different way.

"Value and gender" means the gender relationship as it evolves on the basis
of the value producing system.

Yes, there is a lot of biology involved and I love this part of the equation
of gender.

The world looks a lot different when you are retired and the wife goes to
work and you get tired of the house being "Not exactly right."

I swear, if the girls do not clean up my stove I am going to kick their
asses. Just because I am not working does not mean you can mess over me.

Nonetheless, the historical dimension of the Women Question cannot be ignored
because we are not equal in present day society.


Melvin P.