On the political economy of women - Conference of Socialist Economists

Contents

• Introduction
• Women's domestic labour
• Women, the state & reproduction since the 1930s
• Glossary

Introduction

The papers in this pamphlet were written by members of the Political Economy of Women group. This group was started ip 1973 by some women within the Conference of Socialist Economists, though it quickly grew to include other women (and occasionally men) from outside the C.S.E., and from outside the field of 'economics'. Nevertheless the group's orientation has been towards the study of women at the economic level 一perhaps the area of theory which had at that time been most neglected within the women's movement.

It was this orientation that led us in the beginning to examine housework. As Marxists, we were interested in the material basis of women's oppression and located that material basis within woman's role in production. In modern western capitalist society, women work in two ways. First they are wage workers for capital or for the state, and secondly they work within the home. We decided to concentrate on the latter, on domestic labour or housework because, while there is obviously much work that needs to be done in explaining the intensity and particular aspects of women's exploitation in wage work, analysis of exploitation in wage work in general does exist. We also felt that any explanation of the particular nature of women's exploitation within wage work must depend crucially on her role in domestic labour.

The first paper in this pamphlet was the result of this initial focus of the group on housework. Though it comes out of group discussion and has by now been fully discussed by the group, it was written by three members of the group for the 1975 C.S.E. Annual Conference. Since then, it has appeared in the 1975 Bulletin No.II. The present version has been somewhat revised. The paper examines how certain key Marxist categories can be used in the analysis of a capitalist mode of production which explicitly incorporates domestic labour, and indeed whether such categories are applicable to this more complete specification of the capitalist mode of production. It also examines the relations of production specific to domestic labour and makes some tentative predictions as to how we may expect the needs of capital to change domestic labour both qualitatively and quantitatively.

At the same time as the work on domestic labour was crystallizing into written form, subgroups of the Political Economy of Women Group were beginning to work on other areas; on women and the welfare state, women's wage work, the family in industrialisation and social legislation as it affects women and the family.

The second paper in this pamphlet comes from one of these subgroups. The group working on the welfare state centred their work around women's reproductive role and its privatised nature in capitalist society. They examined in what ways and for what reasons women's role in reproduction changed in the period since the 1930s in Britain. These questions are fundamental to an analysis of the state in that period.

In this paper the theoretical points are developed with a specific political purpose, to understand how women should organise around reproduction and what our demands should be. It also goes on to raise some points about reproduction under socialism.

Both the papers in this pamphlet were presented to a one-day workshop of the Women and Socialism conference on June 7th, 1975, together with other papers from the Political Economy of Women Group. The work of the group continues and we are always interested in new members and new projects. We can be contacted through the C.S.E.

A glossary of terms employed follows the two papers.