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I don't disagree...

Posted by Sick Rose on 2024-June-11 13:32:00, Tuesday
In reply to Re: Women probably put Harding in the White House.. posted by Pharmakon on 2024-June-10 18:55:42, Monday

that "capitalism's demand for a wage-based labor force" wasn't the root reason both for the disruption of the male life journey that had historically seen boys socialized by man and for pulling women out of the home and into the paid labor force.

(I would quibble that capitalism was a "marvelous invention of rich white men" -- I'm enough of a Marxist to see it as an inevitable stage in human history brought on by the development of the "productive forces" to use Marxist terminology; it wasn't a matter of a bunch of rich merchants in Venice, Genoa, and Amsterdam gathering together to draw up blueprints on the means to enrich themselves and screw the working class; capitalism's original theorists -- e.g., Adam Smith -- were describing what was going on around them, not writing recipe books.)

Having said that, I do find it interesting -- and worth pondering -- that the origins of feminism lie in efforts to protect and enhance the nuclear family. To be sure, many capitalists of the time (e.g., John D. Rockefeller) were enthusiastic proponents of prohibition -- both because they didn't want workers showing up with hangovers and, less consciously, because prohibition would help to break up proleterian/immigrant male spaces (taverns; saloons) that would foster loyalties that could conflict with loyalties to the workplace and were potentially subversive (it bears remembering that Marx wrongly anticipated that the origins of revolution would lie in the coming together of groups of male industrial workers.)

Feminism's reversal a half century later in its stance towards the nuclear family demonstrates that it is an "objective" (again to use that Marxist jargon -- it can be really helpful) ally of the capitalist ruling class (although again -- we've discussed this before -- the emerging managerial capitalism of mid 20th century America and Europe differs fundamentally from the haute bourgeoisie of Marx's day -- and it requires female labor of a different sort, e.g., hordes of gender studies grads in HR departments ferreting out thought crime that might disrupt the smooth functioning of the institutions of managerial capitalism as opposed to, say, legions of telephone operators, stenographers, and female factory workers running looms in textile plants.

If current economic arrangements and power alignments were really working wonderfully for most women, well, we might have to resign ourselves to being outcasts for good. But they're not. (I made this point -- satirically to be sure -- in the post linked below.) The most perceptive feminists (post-feminists?) understand this (e.g., Mary Harrington) and seem to be groping towards a recognition that while there's no going back to some sort of premodern Arcadia (and you're right to imply that even if the 19th amendment hadn't passed, female suffrage was inevitable) that we might manage a more humane society -- and that one way to do that is a recovery of truths of the human condition that our so-called culture has tried to make deliberately unthinkable: e.g., many women long for motherhood at a deep, atavistic level; boys need men in their lives.

SR
Sick Rose
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