Working Class Household Quotes

“It should then be clear that it is not the power of working-class men (or women’s reproductive roles) that keeps women as the primary agents of reproduction within working-class households nor is it the power of men that creates segregated labour markets and other barriers to equality between the sexes. It is the power of capital which establishes structural limitations to the possible ways in which the propertyless class can have access to the conditions necessary for its daily and generational reproduction and it is the relative powerlessness of working-class men and women as individuals struggling for survival that forces them into these relations of reproduction which are both relations of cooperation and unequal relations of personal economic dependence. The contradiction between capital and labour, between production and reproduction, and the protracted class struggle thereby generated are the determinants of the contradictory nature of the relations between working-class men and women. The mode of reproducing labour power can thus be accurately understood as a unity of opposites, where bonds of cooperation and solidarity are also bonds of dependency grounded in the set of structural possibilities open to male and female members of the working class under capitalist conditions.”
― Martha A. Gimenez