II. Economic Sex

II. Economic Sex

id="ii-economic-sex">II. Economic Sex#

Proof of economic discrimination against women does not have to be established here. The evidence is already overwhelming. Fifteen years of feminist research has removed all doubts. However, two major tasks remain. First, we must learn to distinguish three separate arenas in all modern economies. In each of these arenas women are economically discriminated against, albeit in different ways. The three forms of discrimination were heretofore confused. Second, we must grow to understand the difference between this threefold economic discrimination against women and the patriarchal subordination of women in societies not yet penetrated by the cash nexus. Thus, sexist discrimination will serve as a speculum that mirrors what is called “economy” in advanced industrial societies. Any economy based on formal exchanges between the producer and the consumer of goods and/or services is first divided into a statistically reported and an unreported sector – the arenas of reported and unreported discrimination against women on the job. And then there always exists another economy, the shadow of the former, which is the third arena of discrimination against women: that found in the nether sector of shadow work.

The Reported Economy#

Over the years, discrimination against women in paid, taxed, and officially reported jobs has not changed in severity but has grown in volume.13 Presently, 51 per cent of U.S. women are in the labor force; in 1880 only 5 per cent were employed outside the home. Today, women comprise 42 per cent of the U.S. labor force; in 1880, only 15 per cent. Today, half of all married women have their own income from a job, while only 5 percent had outside, paying jobs a century ago. Today, the law keeps all curricula and careers open for women, but in 1880 many of both were closed to them. Today, women averagely spend twenty-eight years in employment; in 1880, the average was five. These all seem like significant steps toward economic equality, until you apply the one measuring stick that counts. The median yearly earnings of the average full-time employed woman still hovers around a magical ratio (3:5) of a man’s average earnings: 59 percent, give or take 3 percent – the same percentage as one hundred years ago.14 Neither educational opportunities nor legislative provisions nor revolutionary rhetoric – political, technological, or sexual – have changed the magnitude by which women, in their earnings, stand below men.15 What at first sight looks like so many steps toward equity is, in the perspective of the average woman, only a series of events by which more women have been quietly incorporated into the population that is economically discriminated against on grounds of sex. The current median lifetime income of a female college graduate, even if she has an advanced degree, is still only comparable to that of male high school dropouts.

When I was first faced with this evidence I could not believe it. I reacted as I had years earlier when confronted with other evidence – when I was studying the effectiveness of the medical establishment. I had been unable to believe that since 1880 the probable lifetime remaining to a middle-aged male in the U.S. had not appreciably changed. I also could not believe that a twenty-five-fold increase in constant dollars for medical care, of which a disproportionate amount now went for the treatment and prevention of diseases affecting people in the fourth quarter of their lifespan, had resulted in no important increase in adult life expectancy. It took months for the significance of this information to sink in. It is true that the survival rate of infants has increased enormously; more people live to be forty-five. Bodies mangled in accidents can be reconstructed with plastic and aluminum; many infectious diseases have almost been wiped out. But the probable remaining lifespan of an adult man has not been significantly altered. And the increase or decrease that has occurred around the timeless threshold of death has little to do with medical efforts. Knowledge about the impotence of money, surgery, chemistry, and goodwill in the struggle against death is constantly repressed in our societies. It belongs to those facts that must seemingly be denied by ritual and myth.16

Although totally different, economic discrimination against women as a group constitutes a reality that is equally unpalatable to most non-cynical contemporaries. As polio and diphtheria have almost disappeared, so has the exclusion of girls from grammar and high schools. Just as we have seat belts to protect us against crashes, so we have TV monitors to protect against rape. Just as we have affirmative action for the health of the poor, so we have special scholarships to get women to the top.

It is hard to face the fact that no program whatsoever has changed either average adult life expectancy or the wage differential between the sexes.17

The unchanged wage differential between the sexes is just one aspect of the economic discrimination practiced against women on the job, just as the unchanged male adult life expectancy is only one aspect of modern medicine’s failure to improve “health.” It can also be argued that the enormous exertions of the modern health establishment have added significantly to adult life expectancy. Without these efforts, some argue, life expectancy in a world of smog and stress would be even further below that of adults in many poor countries. In the same way, it can be argued that the concerted struggles of legislators, unions, feminists, and idealists have prevented the wage differential from increasing in a progressively commodity-intensive and therefore sexist society. It can be argued that such a pessimistic view of industrial society is entirely appropriate. There is good evidence that the decline of life expectancy at all ages that has been observed over the last twenty years in the USSR18 is only the forerunner of a similar trend to be expected in most industrialized countries, and that the cancellation, due to the present job crisis, of many so-called advances toward equal opportunity is actually a movement that will not be reversed.19 However, whether you take the optimist’s or the pessimist’s stance, one thing seems empirically clear: the proportion of earnings withheld because of sex from half the total population seems a factor as fixed as the remaining lifespan of adult males; or, as others argue, as fixed as the incidence of cancer as a herd phenomenon in the human race.

During the sixties, women’s research dealt mostly with two themes: physical violence against women by rapists, husbands, or physicians; and working conditions for wage labor. The patterns discovered by both kinds of research are extremely uniform, and depressing. In every country, discrimination and violence spread at the same rate as economic development: the more money earned, the more women earn less – and experience rape.20 Seldom has such an injustice been ignored for so long and then, within ten years, been so smugly acknowledged. Research on work during this first wave of women’s studies at American universities dealt primarily with wage labor: low pay, limited opportunities, degrading roles, misrepresentation on union boards, and precarious job security. Worldwide, most women work in non-unionized urban jobs, and in only a few categories; when they do belong to a union, they are seldom taken into account in contracts. Even when the union is made up primarily of women, men are the key representatives for it during contract negotiations. However you look at it, new research on the fact that economic progress increases economic discrimination is pointless. Such research could only result in sterile redundance, more academic degrees for would-be careerists, and more smugness by those who would use it to bolster their hand-me-down explanatory theories.21

Most of the early postwar feminist research was movement-borne and action-oriented. Some of its proponents followed liberal rhetoric calling for equal opportunity-cum-affirmative action; others busied themselves with holy writ, chewing on Marx, Freud, and Reich to get another establishment’s approval. Reproduction was discovered.22 Women’s rights and workers’ rights then seemed compatible with industrial development and progress. In spite of its weakness and dullness, this research remains fundamental for our understanding of how industrial society works. It revealed a surprising homogeneity of discrimination against women at work in socialist and capitalist, rich and poor, Latin and Anglo, Catholic, Protestant, and Shinto societies; at equal levels of income, women in such different places as France and Japan got more or less the same kind of bad deal. The pattern of women’s exclusion from privileged wages is more uniform than what is practiced against blacks, Koreans, Malaysians, or Puerto Ricans and Turks. In addition, nowhere are women establishing a female regime; there is a Tanzania for Nyerere, and Israel for Begin, but no Amazonia in sight. The nation-state is invariably sexist.

The Unreported Economy#

There are many kinds of economic activities on which governments and their economists cannot or do not report. In some cases, they cannot get the data; others they could not name or measure, even if they cared to record them. A plethora of names has been given to this accumulation of activities, which economists exclude from their usual statistics. Some call it the informal sector, others the D-sector, others the fourth sector, which they add to the primary “extraction”, the secondary “manufacture,” and the tertiary “service” sectors of the economy. Others speak about the household economy, the modern barter economy, the economy of “transfers in kind,” or the non-monetary market. Still others speak about the area of self-service, self-help, and self-initiated activities. Marxists23 have no difficulty labeling this kind of work; they call it “social reproduction,” and then they themselves divide into sects, each of which claims to know best what that means. To complete the confusion, among feminists during the mid-seventies it became fashionable to call all these activities “women’s work,” and to describe men who do it, in a fem-sexist epithet, as male housewives.

The volume of this unofficial economy is not easy to measure. It is made up of a hodgepodge of gainful activities for which no legally recognized salary is paid and for which no social security accrues, as well as of activities remunerated in kind. Much of it consists of unofficial trading, in the barter of favors or in cold cash, all of which elude the tax collector and the statistician. In Yugoslavia you must bring the government doctor a chicken if you want his attention, and in Poland eggs for the clerk are appropriate to obtain a marriage license. In Russia more than three-fourths of all eggs, milk, cheese, and fresh vegetables purchased by individual households come from the black market; books circulate on the sly or through self-publishing. In the U.S., this market includes the marijuana grower from California who raises and markets a multi-billion-dollar cash crop, and the import agent of Afghan heroin, together with the policeman who is on his payroll. It also comprises the wetback who harvest the grapes, the lawyer for whom you cut the grass and who in exchange sees to it that your illegally constructed house passes county inspection, the mechanic who puts a new carburettor into the car of the accountant who, in turn, fills out the tax return for the gas station. All these clean-cut transactions, each a money-measured trade between contracting partners, are part of the unreported economy. Some of these activities actually use money as a medium of exchange; others barter; all are clearly economic transactions, and on none are statistics properly kept. Some of them are legal, others criminal. Some victimize the client more than professional services, others much less. For both parties, some are more monetarily advantageous than formal, bureaucratic proceedings, while others constitute outright exploitation. But all of them are explicit exchanges of services, products, or currency that fit a market model.

Some attempts have been made to measure the size of this underground economy, at least by comparing it to the gross national product. The British government assumes that it loses an amount equal to 7.5 percent of GNP (and not just of salaries!) through tax evasion.24 This is probably only a small fraction of the market it cannot record. The Internal Revenue Service in Washington, D.C., estimated that in 1976 activities generating 135 billion dollars in personal or corporate income were not reported to federal agencies. This is from a report on tax evasion, not on legally ambiguous tax dodging via business expenses, fabricated loss, and the like, which might account for an equal amount of revenue. Recent estimates suggest that in the U.S. this forgotten economy is growing much faster than the formal economy, outdistancing even inflation.25 If the monetary (but statistically unreported) and the non-monetary markets of the U.S. are added together, their value certainly rivals the non-military economy on which economists base their overall indicators, predictions, and prescriptions. And, while in the formal, taxed, and statistically reported economy the labor force is to a large measure engaged in the artificial creation of pseudowork, producing useless articles, unwanted services, futile social controls, and costly economic intermediation, the real efficiency of the unreported economy is on the average much higher. The thriving black-market economy is the reason why countries like Italy have survived ten years during each of which economists confidently predicted impending bankruptcy, and why the people’s democracies of Eastern Europe have survived theoretically impossible levels of mismanagement.

Throughout, one thing is certain: Even if we carefully exclude from the unreported market all subsistence activities and all typically female housework (both of which, in their own ways, do not fit the market model), this formerly unobserved economy, growing proportionately faster than the reported GNP, contains a share of discrimination against women that has only occasionally been dealt with as an issue. Yet, in this sector of the market economy, where new jobs are created as reported unemployment rises, women might be getting an even worse deal than in the sector the economist’s data dragnets can filter and measure. Here, no anti-discrimination or equal-opportunity laws apply. In contrast to male moonlighters, drug dealers, and bribe takers, whose pursuits are lucrative if sometimes unlawful, women are left with the shoddy consolation of prostitution, puny extortions, and fencing. Women who attempt moonlighting typically wash dishes next door or do typing at home – or, more recently, cover the night shift on the text composer.26

Most of the proponents of the Chicago-bred discipline that calls itself “new home economics”27 and most recent policy studies focusing on the unreported economy have at least one feature in common: They recognize that both black-market labor, which evades taxes, and unpaid housework (for which some demand payment out of tax funds) make a major contribution to the GNP. But new studies on the hidden economy also have led to a new confusion between hitherto unreported market activities and unpaid female housework. The inability to draw a clear distinction between unreported and unpaid work constitutes the theoretical weakness of the new economic school and makes the “new home economics” treacherous for women.28 Women know that they are excluded from the desirable jobs in the growing arena of illegitimate work – even more so than from taxed wage labor – while their housework is a form of bondage. Drawing a formal distinction between “unreported” economic activities, from which women are unequally excluded, and others, to which women are unequally bonded, is crucial. Taking housework as a paradigm of an “ideal type” of economic activity, it has two characteristics that distinguish it from black-market labor: Its value is imputed and its performance cannot be disintermediated.29 It is part of the modern nether economy that all contemporary money implies and that money therefore cannot measure.

Shadow Work#

30 By the mid-seventies, the orientation of women’s research on women’s work and its economic analysis had changed. Studies began to struggle with insights that could not be properly expressed in the categories to which we had become accustomed in the fields of history, economics, ethnology, or anthropology. For their kind of research, the point was not women’s smaller bite into the salary cake. Something quite different was of greater significance: how to explain that in every industrial society women are discriminated against in employment only to be forced, when off the job, to do a new kind of economically necessary work without any pay attached to it. It was obvious to all concerned that women regularly lose out when they apply for a job, when they seek advancement, when they try to hold on to a paying position. But outside of and along with wage labor, which had spread during the nineteenth century, a second kind of unprecedented economic activity had come into being. To a greater extent and in a different manner from men, women were drafted into the economy. They were – and are – deprived of equal access to wage labor only to be bound with even greater inequality to work that did not exist before wage labor came into being.31

The best evidence of the existence of the new nether economy comes from historians of housework. Their writings made me understand that the difference between housework past and present cannot adequately be put into traditional language, nor satisfactorily expressed in the categories of class analysis or social-science jargon. What housework is now, women of old did not do. However, the modern woman finds it hard to believe that her ancestor did not have to work in a nether economy. Irrefutably, the new historians of housework describe the typical activity of the housewife32 as something unlike anything women have done outside industrial society, as something that cannot be suitably accounted for as just one more facet of the unreported economy, and as something the dogmatic categories of “social reproduction” simply cannot meaningfully signify.

Looking more closely at the phenomena anthropologists and historians of housework study, I began to see that the contemporary labor market, both reported and unreported, constitutes only the tip of the iceberg. True to this metaphor, most of the toil that supports the visible tip is below the waterline, work done in the nether economy. As employment in the various kinds of wage labor increases, the submerged drudgery must expand even faster. And modern housework is a typical, but not exclusive, part of that nether world’s reality – work that is not only unreported but also impenetrable by the economic searchlight. And, since no commonly accepted nomenclature has yet been devised to make the distinction between housework and unreported market activities explicit, I shall contrast the spectrum of remunerated work done in the reported and unreported economy with a nether economy of shadow work, which forms its complement.33

Unlike the production of goods and services, shadow work is performed by the consumer of commodities, specifically, the consuming household. I call shadow work any labor by which the consumer transforms a purchased commodity into a usable good. I designate as shadow work the time, toil and effort that must be expended in order to add to any purchased commodity the value without which it is unfit for use. Therefore, shadow work names an activity in which people must engage to whatever degree they attempt to satisfy their needs by means of commodities. By introducing the term “shadow work,” I distinguish the procedure for cooking eggs today from that followed in the past. When a modern housewife goes to the market, picks up the eggs, drives them home in her car, takes the elevator to the seventh floor, turns on the stove, takes butter from the refrigerator, and fries the eggs, she adds value to the commodity with each one of these steps. This is not what her grandmother did. The latter looked for eggs in the chicken coop, cut a piece from the lard she had rendered, lit some wood her kids had gathered on the commons, and added the salt she had bought. Although this example might sound romantic, it should make the economic difference clear. Both women prepared fried eggs, but only one uses a marketed commodity and highly capitalized production goods: car, elevator, electric appliances. The grandmother carries out woman’s gender-specific tasks in creating subsistence; the new housewife must put up with the household burden of shadow work.34

Changes in housework reach far below the surface. Rising standards of living have made it more capital-intensive by providing numerous machines and gadgets. The investment in the household equipment of a median Canadian family – and the same would be true in every other modern home – is now higher than the median plant investment per factory job in two-thirds of all nations. As a result, housework has become more sedentary, and the incidence of varicose veins has decreased. For a minority of women, this has meant an interesting, well-paid part-time job and free time “to write their books or go fishing.” But the “new” kind of housework most present-day women perform has also become more lonely, more dull, more impersonal, more time-polluting. Valium consumption and addiction to TV soap operas have often been regarded as indicators of this new, muffled stress.35 But, much more fundamentally, housework has become the paradigm for the new unpaid economic activity that in a computer-policed and microprocessor-equipped society is economically more fundamental than productive labor, whether this production is recorded by economists or not.

Shadow work could not have come into existence before the household was turned into an apartment set up for the economic function of upgrading value-deficient commodities. Shadow work could not become unmistakably women’s work before men’s work had moved out of the house to factory or office. Henceforth, the household had to be run on what the paycheck bought – one paycheck for the engineer and almost inevitably several to feed the hod carrier’s family, whose wife took in piecework, while his daughter hired out as a domestic. The unpaid upgrading of what wage labor produced now became women’s work. Women were then defined in terms of the new use to which they were being put. Both kinds of work, wage labor and its shadow, proliferated with industrialization. The two new functions, that of the breadwinner and that of the dependent, began to divide society at large: He was identified with overalls and the factory, she with an apron and the kitchen. For the wage labor she was able to find as a sideline, she received sympathy and low pay.

While, during the nineteenth century, technological change revolutionized work outside the household, at first it had little impact on housework routine, except for tightening the enclosure into which each housewife was locked. Tap water put an end to her carrying the jugs to and fro, but also to her meeting friends at the well. While women’s work was economically without precedent, technically it seemed to go on as always. Indoor plumbing and the new fuels, gas and electricity, which were to become nearly universal in U.S. urban areas by 1920 and in small towns by 1930, were for the great majority of people no more than technological possibilities at the turn of the century. Only as recently as the second quarter of this century did technology really change the material reality of housework; simultaneously, radio and TV began to act as substitutes for community conversation. Industry then started to produce machinery for shadow work. As industrial work became less labor-intensive, housework, without diminishing, became by several orders of magnitude more capital-intensive.36

Economic progress is usually measured by the number of work places, meaning jobs, that are created. But it can with equal right be called that process by which more goods are offered on the market, each new commodity requiring a greater “input” of shadow work.37 Development conventionally means that production has become more capital-intensive; it can just as well be described as the course through which more and more capital-intensive shadow work is made necessary for the achievement of a minimum level of well-being.38 It is highly improbable that the volume of productive wage labor will ever again increase anywhere in the world, or that make-work, now called “service,” will be paid for as extravagantly as has occurred up to now. Rather, I expect that automated production will decrease the overall volume of wage labor and lead to the marketing of commodities requiring more, not less, unpaid toil by the buyer/user. This shadow side of economic growth – a foreseeable increase in shadow work as wage labor decreases – will further accentuate a new kind of sexual discrimination, a discrimination within shadow work.

Shadow work is not women’s exclusive domain. It is as clearly genderless as wage labor. Unpaid work to upgrade industrial production is done by males, too. The husband who crams for an exam on a subject he hates, solely to get a promotion; the man who commutes every day to the office – these men are engaged in shadow work. True, the typical “consumer” is “the household”, and this is run by a woman – the expression being but a euphemism for her toil. But if women alone carried the burden of shadow work, it would be silly to say that, within the realm of shadow work, discrimination works against women. Yet this is precisely what happens. In shadow work much more intensely than in wage labor, women are discriminated against. They are tied to more of it, they must spend more time on it, they have less opportunity to avoid it, its volume does not diminish when they take outside employment, and they are penalized more cruelly when they refuse to do it. What women are cheated out of through discrimination in reported and unreported jobs is only a small fraction of the shadow price due them for their unpaid shadow work in the home.

Education provides a good example. In former times, growing up was not an “economic” process; what a boy or girl learned living at home was not scarce. Everyone learned to speak his vernacular tongue and the basic skills necessary for vernacular life. Growing up could not possibly have been described, with rare exceptions, as a process of capitalization of the labor force. Today, this is all changed. Parents have become teaching assistants within the educational system. They are responsible for those basic inputs of human capital, in the jargon of economics, through which their offspring will be qualified as Homo oeconomicus. Quite reasonably, the educational economist worries about how to get the mother to inject the largest possible unpaid capital input into her child. In an economist’s words: “… By the time the children enter the first grade, significant differences in verbal and mathematical competence exist among them. These differences reflect, first, variations in native ability and, second, the amount of human capital acquired before the child reaches the age of six. The stocks of acquired human capital reflect, in turn, varying inputs of time and of other resources by parents, teachers, siblings, and the child itself. The process of acquiring pre-school human capital is analogous to the acquisition, later on, of human capital through schooling and on-the-job training.”39 Quite correctly, the mother’s unrewarded time-cum-effort inputs into the capitalization of her child are here described as the prime source of human capital formation. Even if one considers such expressions grotesque, it is necessary to concede the truth of their substance in a society in which competence is assumed to be scarce and must be economically produced. The mother’s shadow work constitutes an economic activity on which the cash flow, salaries, and surplus value for capital formation all ultimately depend. And the state-sponsored, professional “operationalization” of shadow work, at the center and in the economic peripheries, constitutes a new development strategy best called the colonization of the informal sector.40

Shadow work, however, cannot be measured in units of currency, although it is possible to transform a specific activity now exacted as shadow work into labor done for wages. This has been tried in the case of commuters. Some Austrian unions, following the lead of a Swedish union, obtained recognition by the employers that commuting was part of their employees’ work. Commuting, they argued, is a burdensome task imposed on each worker. It becomes necessary because factories are located not where workers live, but where property is cheap, highways numerous, and sites for executive residential areas close. Commuting constitutes that shadow work by which the worker picks up his own labor force each morning, puts it into a car, and then, acting as the chauffeur of the commodity the employer has contracted to rent during the eight-hour workday, drives this commodity to the workplace. In addition, this shadow work requires a high level of capital investment. A significant percentage of each workday’s wages must be spent by the worker for the purchase and maintenance of the car, and to pay the taxes that finance the construction of the highways on which the car runs. And commuting remains shadow work, whether the vehicle is a car, a bus, or a bicycle. Some small unions won their point. Their members then acted each morning as the chauffeurs employed by the factory to transport their own bodies to work. If, however, this kind of argument were generally accepted and workers were paid for the now unpaid toil expended on “capitalizing themselves” for the job and then transporting themselves to and from it, the industrial system would cease to function.41

As these men have done, women can also demand that their shadow work be transformed into paid labor. But as soon as the shadow price of shadow work and the cost of wage labor are compared, the paradoxical nature of the former becomes evident. At least in the non-militarized sector of every modern economy, the shadow work input required is arguably greater than that of wage labor.42 The industrial system is based on the assumption that most basic needs must be satisfied for an increasing majority of society’s members by the consumption of a bill of goods. Hence, the toil that is connected with the consumption of these commodities is anthropologically more fundamental than the toil connected with their production. This has been hidden, as long as technical imperfections made human hands or memories necessary ingredients in the production process: Consistently productive labor was identified with legitimate work, and toil that was associated with consumption was passed over in silence or associated with satisfaction. Now, the time input in production decreases sharply, while the growing commodity intensity of society increases the time input necessary for consumption. At the same time, more different forms of consumption have become “musts” – not satisfactory but instrumental forms of time use: John drives, not because he likes driving, nor because he wants to drive like the Joneses, but because he cannot avoid it. It would be mislabeling most acts of consumption, if we called them “satisfaction” – they constitute unadulterated toil, full-blown shadow work. The total volume of shadow work rapidly surpasses the total volume of available production-associated work or ritual. No matter how you compute a money equivalent to housework, its total value exceeds the volume of wage labor.

When feminists argue that women should be paid for what they do to ready for consumption what the family income buys, they are mistaken when they ask for wages. The best they can hope for is not a shadow price but a consolation prize. The gratis performance of shadow work is the single most fundamental condition for the family’s dependence upon commodities. Even if these commodities were to be produced increasingly by robots, industrial society could not function without shadow work. It is to money what the neutron is to the electron. It is as unlike productive “employment,” in which commodities for others are produced, as it is unlike homesteading and traditional household activities, which are performed neither for nor with much money.

Shadow work today hides behind much that passes for self-help. Self-help is a modern term: Not so long ago, it was used to suggest masturbation. Self-help divides the acting subject into two parts: One hand washes the other. The term became current in international development through its widespread use by U.S. agencies for international assistance. Through this term, the economist’s traditional distinction of all activities into either production or consumption, either productive or reproductive “relations,” is projected right onto the consumer: With his right hand he is taught to produce what his left hand supposedly needs. He is taught to do as much with as little as possible, to perfect the most deficient commodities with the greatest possible amount of shadow work. Not only are new products continually being designed for shadow work, for self-help, but microprocessors are increasingly taking over certain jobs, and those people no longer needed in wage labor are then pushed into shadow work.43 Thus, shadow work ceases to be predominantly women’s domain. With every year that passes, shadow work becomes more obviously genderless, and so turns from being an arena of woman’s oppression into the main arena of the economic discrimination against her.44

Now middle-class fathers increasingly claim for themselves the experience of the kitchen and of childcare. They want to “do the steaks” for the guests, to spend an hour playing with their infant son. But under the guise of shouldering some of the “housework,” they open a new field for competition and resentment between the sexes. Formerly, women felt forced to compete for equal opportunities in wage labor. Now men begin to demand special considerations in the shadow work of the home. During the last twenty years, as women have gained legal protection for equal opportunities, on-the-job discrimination has become more widespread and more acutely felt. Now, with more men being forced into shadow work as employment becomes ever more scarce, discrimination against women, right in their homes, will become more pronounced.

This, then, is the picture suggested by recent studies.45 Discrimination against women in formal employment and in shadow work is worldwide, and the same is probably true, although seldom discussed, for women in the unreported or submerged market. Discrimination both on and off the job spreads with a rising GNP, as do other side effects like stress, pollution, and frustration. None of these forms of discrimination is seriously affected by cultural background, politics, climate, or religion. Reports on discrimination follow a pattern not unlike that of reports on cancer of the breast and uterus: When the per-capita GNPs are equivalent, geography influences the way in which the malady is discussed and recognized, rather than the way it occurs. Australian women keep splendid statistics and Italian women cultivate abrasive cynicism. The barriers that keep women from privileged wage labor and the traps that lock them into the kitchen are explained in different ways in Japan and in the USSR, but everywhere they are comparable in height and depth. Again, the educational process provides a good example. Even when, in different countries, it is of equal length, even if the curricula are the same, its consistent result everywhere is a lower lifetime salary for women than for men. Indeed, the more advanced the levels of education scaled, the more tightly are women locked into their place, for they then have less chance than men for a new start on a different track. The battles of the seventies may have opened the executive suite to women, or have weakened the springs on the traps of the kitchen, but this change has disproportionately benefited “sisters” from privileged backgrounds. A few more women behind the operating table or on the university faculty, an occasional husband domesticated for washing the dishes – these rare tokens only highlight the persistent discrimination against women as a group. At the same time, off-the-job resentment has sharpened its sex-related edge.

The Feminization of Poverty#

Although sex discrimination is worldwide, it looks different in underdeveloped countries. Neither income nor economic discrimination is distributed equally in societies of the Third World. There, sex discrimination is primarily an experience reserved to those women who have somehow benefited from economic growth. The dentist’s wife in Oaxaca has learned to appreciate the advantages of the new economic put-down. Unlike the New York doctor’s wife, the Mexican woman with the two-car garage leaves the house in charge of a domestic when she escapes to a feminist gathering. Only the capitalist Third World still provides a propitious environment for the cultivation of the sex parasite – which South African feminist Olive Schreiner foresaw in 1911 – for, unlike her counterpart in New York, she can flourish as a house wife. Her experience is totally beyond that of her distant cousin who lives with the tooth puller in the village. Each Tuesday, this woman walks behind her man to the market and peddles her tomatoes, while he pulls teeth and sells charms. She defers to her husband but is not economically dependent upon him. The tooth puller’s concubine still knows by magic and gossip how to keep men in their place. The bourgeois latina has traded both for the servant plus car, and the right to flirt with feminist rhetoric. The New York teacher has neither magic nor servant nor words to tell the market woman what she has lost. The social science sexist gibberish forces her into genderless thought.46

In Latin America the immense majority of people, men as well as women, now live unlike either the Mexican doctor’s wife or the tooth puller’s woman. Most live in the modernized poverty of the slum. Their household depends largely on income. But income has grown at a much slower rate than that by which progress has destroyed the utilization value of their surroundings. For a generation, development has swallowed those environmental resources that had allowed people to meet most of their needs without recourse to the marketplace, and in the process they have unlearned most of the skills necessary for subsistence. Unlike their cousins who went as wetbacks to Texas and who then moved into the ruins of the South Bronx, the Third World slum dweller still finds shared progress credible; these people still believe in the rhetoric of the Brandt Report and Castro. They cannot yet understand why Latinos in the South Bronx organize against the modernization of poverty and try to keep teachers, social workers,47 or hospital care out of their neighborhood. Without any economic distinction on the basis of sex, they have become commodity-dependent in a world that has no employment to offer. They are denied the traditional opportunities for subsistence and find themselves unwanted in the good jobs that development begrudgingly provides.48 Thus, both men and women share the double bind of the New York housewife: exclusion from decent employment and from subsistence. For these modernized poor in poor countries, economic development has become equivalent to the feminization of their genderless poverty.

The export of shadow work from rich to poor countries has been consistently overlooked. This occurs because students of economics find themselves crippled by the terminological impotence of their discipline: Their concepts cannot distinguish shadow work as an entity sui generis. Just as the “new home economics” cannot distinguish the activities of a homesteading woman from the upgrading of packaged junk carried out by the American housewife, so it is incapable of differentiating between use-value-oriented subsistence activities and the economy of trash, in which the slum dweller recycles other people’s crates and refuse to make his shelter. Claudia von Werlhof calls the production generated by this kind of nether existence the blind spot of economics, into which modern society pushes the wage earner’s dependent partner in order to turn him or her into the invisible “source of primitive accumulation.” A question concerning this ideal type of consort immediately arises: Is the shadow-working housewife made in the image of the Latin American slum dweller, or is the latter, within the world economy, the new genderless housekeeper of the northern partner?49

Economic discrimination against women appears when development sets in. It does not then go away; nothing indicates that it ever will. In conversation with Frank Hubeny, I came to the conclusion that the struggle to create economic equality between genderless humans of two different sexes resembles the efforts made to square the circle with ruler and straight edge. Eudoxus tried and learned how to compare irrational numbers. The problem remained unsolved until Lindemann, in the nineteenth century, showed that there could be no solution to it. He demonstrated that π was not an algebraic number, and thus increased our awareness of the incommensurability among real numbers. Political economy is still in a state comparable to mathematics before Lindemann. Faced by the evidence of its consistent failure to create economic equality between the sexes, we might now entertain a long overlooked possibility: The paradigm of Homo oeconomicus does not square with what men and women actually are. Perhaps they cannot be reduced to humans, to economic neuters of either male or female sex. Economic existence and gender might be literally incomparable.