By saying that it's a "sexual" division of labor, instead of a "gendered" division of labor, you are giving the division of labor in question a natural or biological determinant for its origin & development, given your understanding of sex. (This in fact is a problem in Marx's and Engels's works as well.) With your understanding, gender lapses back into sex (understood as a biological given in common sense) continually.
>recognized the good sense of Hubbard (corrected your
>misunderstanding of her in fact), raised the question of why sexual
>dimorphism is actually less pronounced in humans than other primates (note
>Ehrenreich makes the same point), emphasised that this dimorphism has no
>relevance to how the family and social division of labor can and should be
>organized.
You know, you are giving a much more conservative understanding of sex than Hubbard does herself. She for instance emphasizes how biology as an academic discipline has shaped sex (as a political interpretation of biological facts) by focusing on reproduction as if it were a biological determinant of the rest of the body & its behaviors and by engaging in research after research to seek "sexual differences" in all aspects of human behaviors. She notes that this overwhelming interest in the scientific production of "sexual differences" _is_ political:
***** ...*I want to stress that we need have no ideological investment in whether women and men exhibit biological differences...*. [I]t is in the nature of scientific research that if we are interested in differences, we will go on looking until we find them. And if we do not find any, we will assume that our instruments were wrong or that we looked in the wrong place or at the wrong things....Research comparing blacks and whites must first generate the group differences it pretends to catalog and analyze. *Differences, be they biological or psychological, become scientifically interesting only when they parallel differences in power.* We do not frame scientific questions about differences between tall people and short people, although folk wisdom suggests there may be some. Nor do we, in this society, pursue differences between blue-eyed, blond people and dark-haired, dark-eyed people. Yet the latter were scientifically interesting differences under the Nazis.... (emphasis mine, Ruth Hubbard, _The Politics of Women's Biology_, pp. 128-9) *****
It appears that Ruth Hubbard thinks that, *without gender oppression,* biological differences between "sexes" could be just as trivial as those between blue-eyed and dark-eyed people. Scientific investment in the production of "sexual differences" will cease in a society without gender oppression.
Yoshie