Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 October 2022
I wish to thank Allen Gerlach for his insightful comments on earlier versions of this essay.
1. For a discussion of how domestic labor contributes to the capitalist system, see Clair (Vickery) Brown, “Home Production for Use in a Market Economy,” in Rethinking the Family, edited by Barrie Thorne and Marilyn Yalom (New York: Longman, 1982), 151–67; Paul Smith, “Domestic Labor and Marx's Theory of Value,” in Feminism and Materialism, edited by Annette Kuhn and AnnMarie Wolpe (London: Routledge, 1978), 198–219; and Batya Weinbaum and Amy Bridges, “The Other Side of the Paycheck: Monopoly Capital and the Structure of Consumption,” in Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, edited by Zillah Eisenstein (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), 190–205.
2. This argument was first set forth in Ester Boserup, Women's Role in Economic Development (New York: St Martin's Press, 1970). It is also found in Women and World Development, edited by Irene Tinker and Michele Bo Bramsen (Washington, D.C.: Overseas Development Council, 1976), 22–34; and Rae Lesser Blumberg, “Rural Women in Development,” in Women and World Change, edited by Naomi Black and Ann Baker Cottrell (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1981), 32–56.