Jane Lewis, « The Debate on Sex and Class », 1985 ✓

Brenner and Ramas maintain that in the 19th century the harsh material realities of biological reproduction were such that sexual divisions were not negotiable and that there was little possibility of any outcome other than that women would bear primary responsibility for children and domestic labour. They also suggest that because of the extent of women’s domestic burdens, this sexual division of labour secured the greatest possible welfare for members of the working-class family (p. 51).

But it is also necessary to explain, as Brenner and Ramas do not, how it is that the assumption that women will occupy a secondary place in the labour force persists in the minds of large numbers of women and even larger numbers of men after World War II, when women’s domestic burdens eased.

their analysis [Johanna Brenner et Maria Ramas] does not account for the persistence of the pattern of sexual divisions. I would suggest first that in prioritizing the need to theorize the exigencies of biological reproduction, Brenner and Ramas are in danger of underestimating the extent to which women’s economic position is dependent upon multiple, complex changes in social relationships.

… we are no further forward in our understanding of why it is women who continue to bear the responsibility for domestic tasks. What is it that stops men sharing domestic labour, and why is it that all women continue to perform the labour of caring for husbands, children and kin…? Brenner and Ramas acknowledge that the persistence of sexual divisions is ‘partly an effect of gender ideology’ (p. 61), but insist that the vicious circle of familial responsibilities and low-paid, low-status and often part-time work forces women into a primarily domestic role. But the emergence of sexual divisions has been explained in terms of ‘the exigencies of biological reproduction’ in the 19th century, which no longer hold. […] why do women continue to bear primary responsibility for childrearing and domestic labour when the control they are able to exercise over childbearing and the material conditions of reproduction has changed so much? Certainly free wage labour requires the separation of most aspects of reproduction from production, but this does not account for the powerful link that continues to be made in the late twentieth century between childbearing and childrearing and the domestic segregation of labour on the basis of gender. Despite the firm rejection of biological determinism by … Brenner and Ramas …, there is at the very least, as Michèle Barrett has observed, a fatalism about these arguments.