New Left Review I/83, January-February 1974

Wally Secombe

The Housewife and Her Labour under Capitalism

The re-emergence of a women’s movement in the late sixties brought with it a flood of radical literature on the oppression of women. The bulk of this writing was descriptive in character. While the portrayal of women’s life-circumstances was often vivid and accurate, the analysis was generally very thin. The immediacy of women’s oppression was seldom penetrated so that its structural roots could be grasped. A partial exception must be made for Marxist analysis of the housewife and her labour under capitalism. In this area, Margaret Benston, [1] Peggy Morton [2] and Juliet Mitchell, [3] to name only three, made valuable investigative contributions. More recently Selma James and Mariarosa dalla Costa [4] have advanced a thesis on the housewife that has provoked a heated debate among radical women. Serious rejoinders have been levelled against their main argument from several quarters of the women’s movement, particularly from its socialist wing. [5] All this has served to raise the level of debate on the entire question and confront the workers’ movement with the fact that housewives remain as a massive labouring population in late capitalism completely outside the organizations and struggles of the proletariat.

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