Flexible Work & Parenting (Was Re: Gender, Race,

hoov hoov at freenet.tlh.fl.us
Sat Jun 20 06:57:27 PDT 1998



> >shared parenting
> >evidence
> >indicates that couples professing a commitment to such mantain
> >conventional divisions of labor that produce unequal & uneven
> >responsibilities...seems that no matter how cosmopolitan or how
> >'sensitive & understanding' the male, the burden of childcare rests
> >firmly with women ..Michael Hoover
>
> Yeah, but that is an effect of how labor is organized in our society, and
> not the law of nature. Women tend care of the children mainly because it
> is the male who has a gerater chance of earning a 'family wage.'
> Wojtek

my above post doesn't suggest law of nature...but certain forms of oppression suffered by women pre-date and can post-date capitalism - oppression which results from reproduction and domesticity...reproduction/ production dialectic in capitalism has resulted in women doing domestic work/rearing children in the family and doing lesser paid domestic, food service, retail sales, and clerical in the wage labor economy...

Alexandra Kollantai, envisaging women entering more fully into the work- force in large-scale industry, introduced a number of proposals (some later stifled by Stalin) in the early years of the Soviet Union - domestic cleaning services, nurseries/child care, public kitchens, communal households, mass free education, abortion on demand...and more recent socialist feminists have suggested the expansion of free birth control, health care for women, and recognition of household labor...

but K also believed that frequent changes of partner were healthier than monogamous relationships...in her view, sex shouldn't be taken so seriously; in fact, she suggested that jealousy and sexual possessiveness should be discouraged by the state as the last vestiges of an outworn private property mentality...and, in some recent socialist-feminist thought (for example, Alison Jaggar), there is ambivalence about the role of the family - men playing a significant part in childrearing, but heterosexuality not necessarily the norm...

the social relations of both production and reproduction must be confronted. ..Michael Hoover



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