Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
- 1 The Rise and Decline of the Male Breadwinner Family? An Overview of the Debate
- 2 The Origins and Expansion of the Male Breadwinner Family: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Britain
- 3 Gendered Exclusion: Domesticity and Dependence in Bengal
- 4 Breadwinning Patterns and Family Exogenous Factors: Workers at the Tobacco Factory of Seville during the Industrialization Process, 1887–1945
- 5 Family, Work and Wages: The Stéphanois Region of France, 1840–1914
- 6 Welfare State Attitudes to the Male Breadwinning System: The United States and Sweden in Comparative Perspective
- 7 Comparing the Post-War Germanies: Breadwinner Ideology and Women's Employment in the Divided Nation, 1948–1970
- Notes On Contributors
3 - Gendered Exclusion: Domesticity and Dependence in Bengal
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
- 1 The Rise and Decline of the Male Breadwinner Family? An Overview of the Debate
- 2 The Origins and Expansion of the Male Breadwinner Family: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Britain
- 3 Gendered Exclusion: Domesticity and Dependence in Bengal
- 4 Breadwinning Patterns and Family Exogenous Factors: Workers at the Tobacco Factory of Seville during the Industrialization Process, 1887–1945
- 5 Family, Work and Wages: The Stéphanois Region of France, 1840–1914
- 6 Welfare State Attitudes to the Male Breadwinning System: The United States and Sweden in Comparative Perspective
- 7 Comparing the Post-War Germanies: Breadwinner Ideology and Women's Employment in the Divided Nation, 1948–1970
- Notes On Contributors
Summary
In Western Europe, industrialization brought far-reaching changes in the family-household system by separating the household from the workplace. Factories, especially, took work away from home and eroded the integrity of the household. The spatial separation between the household and the workplace became the foundation for a conceptual separation between the community and the market. Families were separated from trades, consumption from production, women's activities from men's. These separations, often expressed in the generalized formula of a “private-public” divide, have underscored a thoroughgoing gender division of labour far beyond the original divisions supposed to be rooted in biological reproduction. In industrialized Europe, the working-class household's needs could not be met from the combined economic activities of its members: men, women and children. Rather, the daily bread was to be “won” by individual wage earners and clearly the breadwinners were to be men. In contrast, the home became the site of women's reproductive activities devoid of assignable exchange value. Wives’ and daughters’ unpaid work was increasingly underwritten by family ideology and was eventually to be covered by the “family wage” paid to husbands and fathers.
In South Asia this type of household arrangement did not take effect among the working classes in the early phase of industrialization and is still not yet widespread. No clear separation of the household and production was effected: the household's own productive functions proved tenacious and in poor households, especially, women combined consumption, wage earning and reproduction, often simultaneously.
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- Information
- The Rise and Decline of the Male Breadwinner Family?Studies in Gendered Patterns of Labour Division and Household Organisation, pp. 65 - 86Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998
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