Soc. 444
Paper 1
Mallori Smith
9-18-07

            “My children come first. I’m working to upgrade my children” (Glenn, 72). “I tell my daughters all the time, ‘As long as you get a steady job, stay in school. I want you to get a good job, not like me.’ That’s what I always tell my daughters: make sure you’re not stuck” (Glenn, 72). “The average Spanish-American girl on the NYA program looks forward to little save a life devoted to motherhood often under the most miserable circumstances” (Glenn, 69). Although all three of these quotes are pertaining to minority women and girls, they paint a picture of the oppression forced upon women through the development of a patriarchal society and the demands of family life structured by such a society. Looking back through history, it is obvious that women’s oppression began long before the Industrial Revolution, yet did not diminish whatsoever after the transformation of life in industrialized society. This paper will focus on three aspects of women’s oppression as they relate to the family, descriptions of each, and explanations of how and why each aspect has led to the oppression women still face today. First, the exclusion of women from the labor market and the sexual division of labor as they both relate to the family and the oppression of women will be discussed. Next, the separate spheres of labor held by men and women will be related to women’s oppression and the family. Lastly, the oppression of women’s roles, rights, and responsibilities in domestic labor and in society as related to the family will be expressed in accordance with different classes, ethnicities, and races. Each aspect of women’s oppression will be explained according to the specific race, ethnicity, and class being discussed at the time. The objective of this research is to prove that inequality between men and women exists in part due to the institution of family. Thus, it is impossible for equality between the two sexes to be reached by means of the family. However, by acknowledging this inequality, along with the oppression of women by the family, there is hope of finding a cure for the age old epidemic of oppression and inequality still affecting the women of today.
            Upon the arrival of the Industrial Revolution came a society based on capitalism and patriarchy. Prior to this historical turning point, men and women’s labor were seen as equal in value (Padavic and Reskin, 10).  Soon after industrialization, men began leaving the home to join the labor market while women remained in the household. Though many of the products once produced by women were suddenly being produced and sold through capitalism, women still made many of the family’s needed items from their homes. However, their labor was no longer seen as important or valuable. The industrialization process had created a sexual division of labor that devalued women’s work in the home because it did not bring in a profit (Padavic and Reskin, 10). This division reinforced the idea that women were to stay at home, care for the children, and perform all other domestic duties. In fulfilling these expectations, women had no autonomy, no independence, no profit of their own. They were forced to rely on their husbands to make a profit to facilitate the family’s financial needs. In this way, women were still laboring in the household but the labor was not valued in comparison with the man’s. According to Marxists, the men were benefiting from the women’s labor by not having to labor in the homes themselves. They were acquiring a paid wage for their work, earning respect and power, and gaining independence by working out of the home (Glenn, 64). By devoting themselves solely to the needs of the family and obtaining no rewards or praise for their at-home labor, women’s oppression through the family began. Inequality between men and women was also manifested out of this devotion of the women to her family. This is just one example of how equality between men and women by means of the family can not be obtained.
            The idea of separate spheres of work for men and women is another way to display the oppression of women through the institution of family. A good way to show just how powerful separate spheres of work can be is by discussing a case study article about Native American life.  The Seneca case study article by J.M. Jensen reveals how the tribe’s way of life was interrupted and destroyed by an invasion of white European Quakers and settlers. Prior to this invasion, Seneca women held positions of power and authority. They were responsible for lawmaking, farming, food distribution, childcare, and many other tasks unfamiliar to the women of the nuclear family. When the Europeans invaded Seneca territory, they reinvented the Seneca lifestyle into a nuclear family way of life (Jensen, 428). Women were confined to domestic work in the homes, men left the home to work for a wage, and children were sent to schools. Thus began the oppression of the Seneca woman by the family. The power and authority once held by Seneca women was diminished, and submissive, pious attitudes were to be adopted.  Men and women were suddenly working in separate spheres structured by the patriarchal, capitalistic viewpoint of the majority race. The plight of the Seneca tribe can be attributed to all races and classes of women and men as well. By leaving the home to earn a paid wage, men’s labor was viewed as more valuable than the reproductive, unpaid labor done by the women in the home (Padavic and Reskin, 10). However, in more urbanized settings, non-white men and women, such as African Americans, worked in a sphere all their own. Separate spheres for minorities barely existed during the Industrialization. Minority women worked alongside their husbands because skin-color identified you and your labor as either valuable or invaluable, clean or dirty, savage or civilized (Padavic and Reskin, 24-25), (Glenn, 67). Even minority women, though ,were still responsible for domestic labor and childcare in the household. The family created oppression for women regardless of race, ethnicity, or class and despite the division of men and women’s labor into separate spheres. Seneca women were forced into nuclear families, their labor divided into a separate, devalued sphere apart from their husbands, and their lives were transformed into the oppressed, ideal picture of a white “family-woman”. The institution of family when combined with the ideology of separate spheres makes it clear that equality between men and women can not be reached through the family.
            The final way that oppression can be expressed through the family is by looking at the expectations, roles, and duties that a woman was to fill when adhering to her responsibilities to her family. Women, whether white or non-white, of the bourgeoisie or the proletariat classes, were to fulfill the role of the “norm” (Rothenburg, 73). This means that women were to be heterosexual to be able to have a successful family with a husband, children, and a home. A woman was also expected to be domestic which meant cooking, cleaning, and childcare. All of these things character to a domestic woman led to working in dirty situations. Contradictory to such an image was that women were to be virtuous which added pleasant, pious, clean, and attractive to the resume of a twentieth-century woman (Glenn, 67). With these to roles overlapping into an inconsistent, impossible combination, the oppression of women through the family increased. Being confined to a family and household also denied women the chance to get an education. Referring back to the Seneca case study, the young Seneca girls were sent to schools to learn domestic duties of a woman when the Europeans invaded (Jensen, 431). This shows how rigid and limited a woman’s options were when it came to her duties to the family. Education was left for the men, domestic work to the women. Another role played by women was procreation. According to Marx, the oppression of women could be linked to their reproductive duties (Eistein, 11). Having children, raising them, teaching them, clothing them, and feeding them was the life that a mother, a woman, was confined to along with all other domestic responsibilities. If a woman was of the poor and working class, she most often worked in the home of a white woman, caring for that woman’s children and doing that woman’s dirty, physically demanding work (Glenn, 67). This also was the plight of non-white, working-poor class women. The “dirty” work was saved for these women were thought of as ignorant and only capable of lowly, physical labor in the home of a white, middle-class woman (Glenn, 67-68). A woman’s role in the family was limited and oppressed. The expectations and responsibilities of a woman, regardless of race, ethnicity, or class, were viewed through the family-structured lens in a patriarchal society. Men and women can not obtain equality by seeing the world in such a limited fashion.
            The concept of women’s oppression by the family can be broken up into many smaller pieces which are other causes of such oppression and different historical contexts in which the oppression occurred. Race, ethnicity, and class all play a part in the oppression of women. The white race, or the “pure” race (Rothenburg, 14) of women, especially middle class women, experienced oppression in different ways than did non-white, or “impure” women. The bourgeoisie experienced it differently than the proletariat. However, the family has historically been a key factor in the oppression of women. The exclusion of women from the labor market, the separate spheres of work along with the sexual division of labor, and the roles and expectations put upon women by a society of patriarchy and capitalism are all pieces of the puzzle that make up the oppression of women. History’s accounts of women’s oppression are far from hopeful for present day women. However, by researching those accounts and by gaining knowledge and insight into how oppression operates, future men and women may have a greater chance of reaching equality and reducing the oppression of women.