Sylvia Walby, Patriarchy at Work, 1986 ✓

Explanations of gender inequality are often classified either as radical-feminist or socialist-feminist […] This dichotomous classification is now surpassed by recent writings which themselves fall into two: some argue that dichotomy in the explanation of gender inequality should be overcome by saying that this inequality results from a single system of capitalist patriarchy; others argue that inequality is the outcome of an interaction of autonomous systems of patriarchy and capital. This would produce four categories of writings on gender inequality — and a fifth, as well, for the sake of completeness, for those writings based on the theoretical insignificance or non-existence of gender inequality:

• gender inequality as theoretically insignificant or non-existent;
• gender inequality as derivative from capitalist relations;
• gender inequality as a result of an autonomous system of patriarchy, which is the primary form of social inequality;
• gender inequality as resulting from patriarchal relations so intertwined with capitalist relations that they form one system of capitalist patriarchy;
• gender inequality as the consequence of the interaction of autonomous systems of patriarchy and capitalism (dualist writings).

Sylvia Walby, Patriarchy at Work, 1986:19-20. The debate about domestic labour thus occurs in a context which takes as a basic presumption the centrality of capital and is merely concerned with the exact delineation and relation of the elements of this system. This framework seriously limits the type of questions and answers which are possible in the issue of how to understand gender relations; most writers on the topic have next to nothing to say about gender relations per se; they discuss only the relationship of domestic labour to capitalism.