Lakhasly

Reproduction and Production The emphasis on reproduction and on analysis of the household sphere indicates that the traditional focus placed upon commodity pro- duction is insufficient to understand women's work and its roots in pa- triarchal relations. In order to understand fully the nature of sex dis- crimination, women's wages, women's participation in the development process, and implications for political action, analysts must examine the two areas of production and reproduction as well as the interaction between them. An example from the field of economics-the internal labor market model of sex differentials in the work force-illustrates this approach. This model represents a step forward from neoclassical explana- tions of women's secondary status in the labor market. It focuses on the internal organization of the capitalist firm to explain sex segregation and wage differentials, rather than on factors of supply and demand devel- oped by other models.35 The dynamics of this internal organization tend to foster the formation of job ladders and clusters that create hierarchies among workers. Sex is one factor by which workers can be separated. In this model, occupational segregation, wage differentials, and other types of discrimination by sex are viewed as resulting from the hierarchical and self-regulatory structure of production. Two policy implications can be drawn from this model. Radical policy would involve elimination of the hierarchical structure of produc- tion, perhaps by some form of workers' control and equalization of 35. Francine Blau and Carol Jusenius, "Economists' Approaches to Sex Segregation in the Labor Market," in Women and the Workplace, ed. Martha Blaxall and Barbara Reagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).
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wages. To the extent that this would eliminate or reduce differences among workers, it would tend to eliminate or reduce differences by sex. A less radical policy would involve equal opportunity/affirmative action plans that take the structure of production and the labor hierarchy as given, but would make each job equally accessible to men and women. Both of these policies have a major flaw; they focus only on the structure of production and do not take into consideration women's role in the area of reproduction. If women face a double day and if child-care facilities are not available to them, neither of the two policies is likely to solve fully the problem of women's secondary status in the labor market, given that their participation in paid production is conditioned by their work in and around the household. All of this points out how necessary it is to eliminate discrimination within the reproductive sphere. Domestic work must be shared between women and men, child-care services must become available, and both patriarchal relations and gender stereotyp- ing in the socialization process must be eliminated. Within the Marxist tradition, it is interesting to note that the Engels thesis does contain an analysis of the interaction between reproduction and production.36 His view of the origins of women's subordination links the productive sphere-the introduction of private property in the means of production and the need to pass it on from one generation to the next-with reproduction, that is, with the need to identify paternity of heirs through the institution of the family and the control of women's sexuality and reproductive activities. The Engels thesis can be projected to situations, such as those prevalent in industrialized societies, where large segments of the population do not own the means of production, but where there still is a hierarchy and class differences within the prop- ertyless classes. It can be argued that to the extent reproduction implies the private transmission of access to resources-education, for example-the need to identify the individual beneficiaries of this trans- mission remains.37 Engels himself did not extend the analysis in that direction. For him, as for Marx, the production of means of subsistence and the reproduc- tion of human beings are the two fundamental levels of human activity. However, both assumed that the elimination of private property and women's participation in commodity production, made possible by in- dustrialization, would set the preconditions for their emancipation. Thus the initial connection between production and reproduction found in Engels became blurred with the assumption that transformation of
36. Friedrich Engels, The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, reprint ed. (New York: International Publishers, 1975). 37. See Lourdes Beneria, "Reproduction, Production and the Sexual Division of Labor," Cambridge Journal of Economics 3, no. 3 (1979): 203-25, for an elaboration of the point. This notion can explain, for example, why sexual mores are less strict among the poor than among middle- and upper-class people in many urban as well as rural areas.
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productive structures would automatically erase women's oppression. Traditional Marxist thinking and traditional leftist and liberal politics have followed a similar pattern. The new emphasis on reproduction is the result of the questions posed by feminists; it can be viewed as an elaboration of the simplifications inherent in Engels's initial formulation. A variety of recent studies on women in Third World countries have focused on the interaction between production and reproduction to analyze women's work. Maria Mies's study of Indian women lace makers in Narsapur, Andhra Pradesh, for example, shows how the seclusion of women has conditioned their participation in nonhousehold produc- tion.38 Although lace making is a producing industry geared toward the international market, it is highly compatible with seclusion and domestic work. Women are engaged in lace making as much as six to eight hours a day, in addition to their household chores. Their average daily earnings amount to less than a third of the official minimum wage for female agricultural laborers. This situation persists even though the industry has grown considerably since 1970 and represents a very high propor- tion of the foreign exchange earnings from handicrafts in the region. Many of the women are the actual breadwinners in their families. Mies argues that this highly exploitative system has in fact led to greater class differentiation within local communities as well as greater polarization between the sexes. The system is made possible by the ideology of seclu- sion that rigidly confines women to the home, eliminates their opportu- nities for outside work, and makes them willing to accept extremely low wages. A strict focus on the productive aspects of lace making-this is Boserup's approach-to the exclusion of reproductive aspects, such as seclusion, presents only a partial picture of the nature of women's exploitation.