Women & Industrialization (was Re: capitalist patriarchy)

Jim heartfield jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk
Wed Sep 13 03:36:25 PDT 2000


In message <v04210100b5e4154c9b46@[140.254.114.95]>, Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> writes
>Typical faces of industrial workers changed from female & colored to
>male & white to female & colored. The prevalence of the nuclear
>family idealized by conservatives now -- male breadwinner, female
>housewife, & biological children -- was merely a blip in history that
>coincided with the post-WW2 economic boom (say, from the Korean War
>to the Vietnam War & oil shock).

Certainly the evidence in the UK appears to be that the family wage has been abolished, and the nuclear family itself is difficult to sustain in its absence. Having more or less campaigned for the abolition of the family for twenty years I ought to be celebrating, but the conditions under which families are under attack - which is to say the triumph of capitalism over organised labour - don't lend themselves to a positive outcome.

In the first instance, women have been drawn into the labour market in equal numbers but on unequal terms (predominantly on part time pay). At the same time men have systematically lost high-paying jobs. High divorce rates indicate that marriage for life is pretty unsustainable when, as the pundits boast 'there is no job for life'. Not that there is necessarily anything wrong with a high divorce rate - except that single mothers are more often impoverished and unemployed.

-- James Heartfield

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