Task

4

Is Capitalism Gendered and Racialized?

The class practices, or practices of provisioning, I outlined in chapter

3 are, of course, aspects of the ongoing functioning of capitalism. In

this chapter I make the claim that capitalism as an organization of pro¬

duction and distribution is gendered and racialized. I argue, along with

R. W. Connell (1987) that "gender divisions ... are a deep-seated feature

of production itself. . . . They are not a hangover from pre-capitalist

modes of production" (103-104). The same is true for race divisions. I

explore the ways in which capitalism can be seen as gendered and racial¬

ized and what this analysis means for understanding the ongoing pro¬

duction of gendered and racialized class practices and outcomes such as

continuing gender and race segregation and divisions of labor. This

exploration builds upon the valuable insights in socialist feminist work of the 1970s and early 1980s.

Although talk about globalizing capitalism is common today, class rela¬

tions are usually seen as situated within particular nation-states and are

usually analyzed within national boundaries. Good reasons exist for

doing this: Nation-states and their gendered and racialized class struc¬

tures have differing national characteristics produced by different politi¬

cal, social, and economic histories. However, to see the historical relations

through which capitalism emerged in different countries as gendered and

racially structured, a broader view is helpful. Therefore, in the following

discussion, which deals primarily with the United States, I give some

attention to processes that span state boundaries, or are transnational

from the beginning. Organizations are critical locations for many of the

activities and practices that comprise capitalism and class. The develop¬

ment of large organizations shaped and still shapes changing class proc-

77

78 Chapter 4

esses (Perrow 2002) that are at the same time gender and race processes.

Therefore, looking at these processes requires paying attention to organi¬

zations and what people do within them to create, implement, or oppose

the practices that constitute relations of power and exploitation. I discuss

some actions taken in the name of organizations in this chapter, but

develop a detailed analysis of organizations in chapter 5. Capitalism is racialized and gendered in two intersecting historical

processes. First, industrial capitalism emerged in the United States domi¬

nated by white males, with a gender- and race-segregated labor force,

laced with wage inequalities, and a society-wide gender division of car¬

ing labor. The processes of reproducing segregation and wage inequality

changed over time, but segregation and inequality were not eliminated.

A small group of white males still dominate the capitalist economy and

its politics. The society-wide gendered division of caring labor still exists.

Ideologies of white masculinity and related forms of consciousness help

to justify capitalist practices. In short, conceptual and material practices

that construct capitalist production and markets, as well as beliefs sup¬

porting those practices, are deeply shaped through gender and race divi¬

sions of labor and power and through constructions of white masculinity.

Second, these gendered and racialized practices are embedded in and

replicated through the gendered substructures of capitalism. These gen¬

dered substructures exist in ongoing incompatible organizing of paid

production activities and unpaid domestic and caring activities. Domestic

and caring activities are devalued and seen as outside the "main busi¬

ness" (Smith 1999) of capitalism. The commodification of labor, the capi¬

talist wage form, is an integral part of this process, as family provisioning

and caring become dependent upon wage labor. The abstract language of

bureaucratic organizing obscures the ongoing impact on families and

daily life. At the same time, paid work is organized on the assumption

that reproduction is of no concern. The separations between paid produc¬

tion and unpaid life-sustaining activities are maintained by corporate

claims that they have no responsibility for anything but returns to share¬

holders. Such claims are more successful in the United States, in particu¬

lar, than in countries with stronger labor movements and welfare states.

These often successful claims contribute to the corporate processes of

establishing their interests as more important than those of ordinary

people.

THE GENDERED AND RACIALIZED DEVELOPMENT OF U.S. CAPITALISM

Segregations and Wage Inequalities

Industrial capitalism is historically, and in the main continues to be, a

white male project, in the sense that white men were and are the innova-

is Capitalism Gendered and Racialized? 79

tors, owners, and holders of power.1 Capitalism developed in Britain and

then in Europe and the United States in societies that were already domi¬

nated by white men and already contained a gender-based division of

labor. The emerging waged labor force was sharply divided by gender,

as well as by race and ethnicity with many variations by nation and

regions within nations. At the same time, the gendered division of labor

in domestic tasks was reconfigured and incorporated in a gendered divi¬

sion between paid market labor and unpaid domestic labor. In the United

States, certain white men, unburdened by caring for children and house¬

holds and already the major wielders of gendered power, buttressed at

least indirectly by the profits from slavery and the exploitation of other

minorities, were, in the nineteenth century, those who built the U.S. fac¬

tories and railroads, and owned and managed the developing capitalist

enterprises.2 As far as we know, they were also heterosexual and mostly

of Northern European heritage. Their wives and daughters benefited

from the wealth they amassed and contributed in symbolic and social

ways to the perpetuation of their class, but they were not the architects of the new economy.3

Recruitment of the labor force for the colonies and then the United

States had always been transnational and often coercive.4 Slavery existed

prior to the development of industrialism in the United States: Capitalism

was built partly on profits from that source.5 Michael Omi and Howard

Winant (1994, 265) contend that the United States was a racial dictator¬

ship for 258 years, from 1607 to 1865. After the abolition of slavery in 1865,

severe exploitation, exclusion, and domination of blacks by whites per¬

petuated racial divisions cutting across gender and some class divisions,

consigning blacks to the most menial, low-paying work in agriculture,

mining, and domestic service. Early industrial workers were immigrants.

For example, except for the brief tenure (twenty-five years) of young,

native-born white women workers in the Lowell, Massachusetts mills,

immigrant women and children were the workers in the first mass pro¬

duction industry in the United States, the textile mills of Massachusetts

and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (Perrow 2002). This was a gender and

racial/ethnic division of labor that still exists, but now on a global basis.

Waves of European immigrants continued to come to the United States to

work in factories and on farms. Many of these European immigrants,

such as impoverished Irish, Poles, and eastern European Jews were seen

as nonwhite or not-quite-white by white Americans and were used in

capitalist production as low-wage workers, although some of them were

actually skilled workers (Brodkin 1998). The experiences of racial oppres¬

sion built into industrial capitalism varied by gender within these racial/

ethnic groups.

Capitalist expansion across the American continent created additional

groups of Americans who were segregated by race and gender into racial

80 Chapter 4

and ethnic enclaves and into low-paid and highly exploited work. This

expansion included the extermination and expropriation of native peo¬

ples, the subordination of Mexicans in areas taken in the war with Mexico

in 1845, and the recruitment of Chinese and other Asians as low-wage

workers, mostly on the west coast (Amott and Matthaei 1996, Glenn

2002).6 Women from different racial and ethnic groups were incorporated dif¬

ferently than men and differently than each other into developing capital¬

ism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. White Euro-

American men moved from farms into factories or commercial, business, and administrative jobs. Women aspired to be housewives as the male

breadwinner family became the ideal. Married white women, working

class and middle class, were housewives unless unemployment, low

wages, or death of their husbands made their paid work necessary (Gol¬

din 1990, 133). Young white women with some secondary education

moved into the expanding clerical jobs and into elementary school teach¬

ing when white men with sufficient education were unavailable (Cohn

1985). African Americans, both women and men, continued to be con¬

fined to menial work, although some were becoming factory workers, and

even teachers and professionals as black schools and colleges were

formed (Collins 2000). Young women from first- and second-generation

European immigrant families worked in factories and offices. This is a

very sketchy outline of a complex process (Kessler-Harris 1982), but the

overall point is that the capitalist labor force in the United States emerged

as deeply segregated horizontally by occupation and stratified vertically

by positions of power and control on the basis of both gender and race.

Unequal pay patterns went along with sex and race segregation, strati¬

fication, and exclusion. Differences in the earnings and wealth (Keister

2000) of women and men existed before the development of the capitalist

wage (Padavic and Reskin 2002). Slaves, of course, had no wages and

earned little after abolition. These patterns continued as capitalist wage

labor became the dominant form and wages became the primary avenue

of distribution to ordinary people. Unequal wages were justified by

beliefs about virtue and entitlement. A living wage or a just wage for

white men was higher than a living wage or a just wage for white women

or for women and men from minority racial and ethnic groups (Figart,

Mutari, and Power 2002). African-American women were at the bottom

of the wage hierarchy. The earnings advantage that white men have had throughout the his¬

tory of modern capitalism was created partly by their organization to

increase their wages and improve their working conditions. They also

sought to protect their wages against the competition of others, women

and men from subordinate groups (for example, Cockburn 1983, 1991).

Is Capitalism Gendered and Racialized? 81

This advantage also suggests a white male coalition across class lines

(Connell 2000; Hartmann 1976), based at least partly in beliefs about gen¬

der and race differences and beliefs about the superior skills of white

men. White masculine identity and self-respect were complexly involved

in these divisions of labor and wages.' This is another way in which capi¬

talism is a gendered and racialized accumulation process (Connell 2000).

Wage differences between white men and all other groups, as well as divi¬

sions of labor between these groups, contributed to profit and flexibility,

by helping to maintain growing occupational areas, such as clerical work,

as segregated and low paid. Where women worked in manufacturing or

food processing, gender divisions of labor kept the often larger female

work force in low-wage routine jobs, while males worked in other more

highly paid, less routine, positions (Acker and Van Houten 1974). While

white men might be paid more, capitalist organizations could benefit

from this gender/racial dividend." Thus, by maintaining divisions,

employers could pay less for certain levels of skill, responsibility, and experience, when the worker was not a white male.

This is not to say that getting a living wage was easy for white men, or

that most white men achieved it. Labor-management battles, employers'

violent tactics to prevent unionization, massive unemployment during

frequent economic depressions characterized the situation of white

industrial workers as wage labor spread in the nineteenth and early twen¬

tieth centuries.8 During the same period, new white-collar jobs were cre¬

ated to manage, plan, and control the expanding industrial economy. This

rapidly increasing middle class was also stratified by gender and race.

The better-paid, more respected jobs went to white men; white women

were secretaries and clerical workers; people of color were absent. Condi¬

tions and issues varied across industries and regions of the country. But,

wherever you look, those variations contained underlying gendered and

racialized divisions. Patterns of stratification and segregation were writ¬

ten into employment contracts in work content, positions in work hierar¬

chies, and wage differences, as well as other forms of distribution.

These patterns persisted, although with many alterations, through

extraordinary changes in production and social life. After World War II,

white women, except for a brief period immediately after the war, went

to work for pay in the expanding service sector, professional, and mana¬

gerial fields. African Americans moved to the North in large numbers,

entering industrial and service sector jobs. These processes accelerated

after the 1960s, with the civil rights and women's movements, new civil

rights laws, and affirmative action. Hispanics and Asian Americans, as

well as other racial/ethnic groups, became larger proportions of the pop¬

ulation, on the whole finding work in low-paid, segregated jobs. Employ¬

ers continued, and still continue, to select and promote workers based on

82 Chapter 4

gender and racial identifications, although the processes are more subtle,

and possibly less visible, than in the past (for example, Brown et al. 2003;

Royster 2003).y These processes continually recreate gender and racial

inequities, not as cultural or ideological survivals from earlier times, but

as essential elements in present capitalisms (Connell 1987,103-106).

Segregating practices are a part of the history of white, masculine-

dominated capitalism that establishes class as gendered and racialized.

Images of masculinity support these practices, as they produce a taken-

for-granted world in which certain men legitimately make employment

and other economic decisions that affect the lives of most other people.

Even though some white women and people from other-than-white

groups now hold leadership positions, their actions are shaped within

networks of practices sustained by images of masculinity (Wacjman 1998).

Masculinities and Capitalism

Masculinities are essential components of the ongoing male project, capi¬

talism. While white men were and are the main publicly recognized

actors in the history of capitalism, these are not just any white men. They

have been, for example, aggressive entrepreneurs or strong leaders of

industry and finance (Collinson and Hearn 1996). Some have been opposi¬

tional actors, such as self-respecting and tough workers earning a family

wage, and militant labor leaders. They have been particular men whose

locations within gendered and racialized social relations and practices

can be partially captured by the concept of masculinity. "Masculinity" is

a contested term. As Connell (1995, 2000), Hearn (1996), and others have

pointed out, it should be pluralized as "masculinities," because in any

society at any one time there are several ways of being a man. "Being a

man" involves cultural images and practices. It always implies a contrast

to an unidentified femininity.10 Hegemonic masculinity can be defined as the taken-for-granted, gener¬

ally accepted form, attributed to leaders and other influential figures at

particular historical times. Hegemonic masculinity legitimates the power of those who embody it. More than one type of hegemonic masculinity

may exist simultaneously, although they may share characteristics, as do

the business leader and the sports star at the present time. Adjectives

describing hegemonic masculinities closely follow those describing char¬

acteristics of successful business organizations, as Rosabeth Moss Kanter

(1977) pointed out in the 1970s. The successful CEO and the successful

organization are aggressive, decisive, competitive, focused on winning

and defeating the enemy, taking territory from others.11 The ideology of

capitalist markets is imbued with a masculine ethos. As R. W. Connell

(2000, 35) observes, "The market is often seen as the antithesis of gender

Is Capitalism Gendered and Racialized? 83

(marked by achieved versus ascribed status, etc.). But the market operates t trough forms of rationality that are historically masculine and involve a

sharp split between instrumental reason on the one hand, emotion and

human responsibility on the other" (Seidler 1989). Masculinities embed¬

ded in collective practices, are part of the context within which certain

men made and still make the decisions that drive and shape the ongoing

development of capitalism. We can speculate that how these men see

themselves, what actions and choices they feel compelled to make and

they think are legitimate, how they and the world around them define

desirable masculinity, enter into that decision making (Reed 1996). Deci¬

sions made at the very top reaches of (masculine) corporate power have

consequences that are experienced as inevitable economic forces or dis¬

embodied social trends. At the same time, these decisions symbolize and

enact varying hegemonic masculinities (Connell 1995). However, the

embeddedness of masculinity within the ideologies of business and the

market may become invisible, seen as just part of the way business is

done. The relatively few women who reach the highest positions proba¬ bly think and act within these strictures.

Hegemonic masculinities and violence12 are deeply connected within

capitalist history: The violent acts of those who carried out the slave trade

or organized colonial conquests are obvious examples. Of course, vio¬

lence has been an essential component of power in many other socioeco¬

nomic systems, but it continues into the rational organization of capitalist

economic activities. Violence is frequently a legitimate, if implicit, compo¬

nent of power exercised by bureaucrats as well as "robber barons." Meta¬

phors of violence, frequently military violence, are often linked to notions

of the masculinity of corporate leaders, as "defeating the enemy" sug¬

gests. In contemporary capitalism, violence and its links to masculinity

are often masked by the seeming impersonality of objective conditions.

For example, the masculinity of top managers, the ability to be tough, is

involved in the implicit violence of many corporate decisions, such as

those cutting jobs in order to raise profits and, as a result, producing

unemployment. Armies and other organizations, such as the police, are

specifically organized around violence. Some observers of recent history

suggest that organized violence, such as the use of the military, is still

mobilized at least partly to reach capitalist goals, such as controlling

access to oil supplies. The masculinities of those making decisions to

deploy violence in such a way are hegemonic, in the sense of powerful

and exemplary. Nevertheless, the connections between masculinity, capi¬

talism, and violence are complex and contradictory, as Jeff Hearn and

Wendy Parkin (2001) make clear. Violence is always a possibility in mech¬

anisms of control and domination, but it is not always evident, nor is it always used.

84 Chapter 4

As corporate capitalism developed, Connell (1995) and oth rs (for

example, Burris 1996) argue that a hegemonic masculinity i >ed on

claims to expertise developed alongside masculinities organized around

domination and control. Hegemonic masculinity relying on claims to

expertise does not necessarily lead to economic organizations free of

domination and violence, however (Hearn and Parkin 2001). Hearn and

Parkin (2001) argue that controls relying on both explicit and implicit vio¬

lence exist in a wide variety of organizations, including those devoted to

developing new technology. Different hegemonic masculinities in different countries may reflect dif¬

ferent national histories, cultures, and change processes.13 For example, in

Sweden in the mid-1980s, corporations were changing the ways in which

they did business toward a greater participation in the international econ¬

omy, fewer controls on currency and trade, and greater emphasis on com¬

petition. Existing images of dominant masculinity were changing,

reflecting new business practices. This seemed to be happening in the

banking sector, where I was doing research on women and their jobs

(Acker 1994a). The old paternalistic leadership, in which primarily men

entered as young clerks expecting to rise to managerial levels, was being

replaced by young, aggressive men hired as experts and mangers from

outside the banks. These young, often technically trained, ambitious men

pushed the idea that the staff was there to sell bank products to custom¬

ers, not, in the first instance, to take care of the needs of clients. Productiv¬

ity goals were put in place; nonprofitable customers, such as elderly

pensioners, were to be encouraged not to come into the bank and occupy

the staff's attention. The female clerks we interviewed were disturbed by

these changes, seeing them as evidence that the men at the top were changing from paternal guardians of the people's interests to manipula¬

tors who only wanted riches for themselves. The confirmation of this

came in a scandal in which the CEO of the largest bank had to step down

because he had illegally taken money from the bank to pay for his hous¬

ing. The amount of money was small; the disillusion among employees

was huge. He had been seen as a benign father; now he was no better

than the callous young men on the way up who were dominating the

daily work in the banks. The hegemonic masculinity in Swedish banks

was changing as the economy and society were changing.

Hegemonic masculinities are defined in contrast to subordinate mascu¬

linities. White working class masculinity, although clearly subordinate,

mirrors in some of its more heroic forms the images of strength and

responsibility of certain successful business leaders. The construction of

working class masculinity around the obligations to work hard, earn a

family wage, and be a good provider can be seen as providing an identity

that both served as a social control and secured male advantage in the

Is Capitalism Gendered and Racialized? 85

home. That is, the good provider had to have a wife and probably chil¬

dren for whom to provide. Glenn (2002) describes in some detail how this

image of the white male worker also defined him as superior to and dif¬ ferent from black workers.

Masculinities are not stable images and ideals, but shifting with other

societal changes. With the turn to neoliberal business thinking and global¬

ization, there seem to be new forms. Connell (2000) identifies "global

business masculinity," while Lourdes Benerfa (1999) discusses the

"Davos man," the global leader from business, politics, or academia who

meets his peers once a year in the Swiss town of Davos to assess and plan

the direction of globalization. Seeing masculinities as implicated in the

ongoing production of global capitalism opens the possibility of seeing

sexualities, bodies, pleasures, and identities as also implicated in eco¬ nomic relations.

In sum, gender and race are built into capitalism and its class processes

through the long history of racial and gender segregation of paid labor

and through the images and actions of white men who dominate and lead

central capitalist endeavors. Underlying these processes is the subordina¬

tion to production and the market of nurturing and caring for human

beings, and the assignment of these responsibilities to women as unpaid

work. Gender segregation that differentially affects women in all racial

groups rests at least partially on the ideology and actuality of women as

carers. Images of dominant masculinity enshrine particular male bodies

and ways of being as different from the female and distanced from caring.

In the following section, I argue that industrial capitalism, including its

present neoliberal form, is organized in ways that are, at the same time,

antithetical and necessary to the organization of caring or reproduction

and that the resulting tensions contribute to the perpetuation of gendered

and racialized class inequalities. Large corporations are particularly

important in this process as they increasingly control the resources for

provisioning but deny responsibility for such social goals.

THE GENDERED SUBSTRUCTURES

OF CAPITALISM

The ongoing processes of gender and racial segregation, wage inequali¬

ties related to the segregation patterns, and the ideological and practical

dominance of white masculinities are components of capitalist organizing

supported and perpetuated by a gendered and racialized break between

processes of production and reproduction. The idea that there are two

domains of human activity, material production and human reproduc¬

tion, has been important in feminist thinking and much criticized. This

86 Chapter 4

idea formed the basis for theories of patriarchy and capitalism, or gender

and class, dual systems theories that were discarded as unsatisfactory, as

I discussed in chapter 2.14 Although the objections are valid, I still think

the idea of reproduction can be helpful if it is anchored in history, time,

and place, and defined as biological reproduction, the raising of children,

caring labor of other kinds, and domestic tasks. Used in this sense, the distinction between production and reproduction is important in under¬

standing historical processes in the United States, as well as other coun¬

tries, in which unpaid family work and paid market work were divided

and capitalist organizations came to effectively determine the fates of

families and reproduction. In the process, gendered and often racialized

segregation and inequities were, and are, produced. These processes con¬

stitute a gendered and racialized substructure of capitalism and its class

relations. The concept “substructure" stands for practices, arrangements, and

ideologies that organize the broad parameters of daily life. I discuss sev¬

eral components of this substructure: the nature of the division between

production and reproduction; the conceptual consequences of the loca¬

tion of capitalist organizing in the worlds of male entrepreneurs and man¬

agers; the organization of work processes and practices based on gender

assumptions arising from the separations of production and reproduc¬

tion; and the activities of corporations that maintain the subordination of

reproduction to production.

The Separation of Production and Reproduction

The emergence of industrial capitalist economic organization created a

break between material production and human reproduction, as has been

frequently argued. Here I briefly retell this story to make the point that

reorganized gender relations, with racial and ethnic variations, are built

into capitalist processes. My retelling is primarily based on the United

States.15 The break consists of a divergence between the aims and modes

of organizing of capitalist production and the aims and modes of organiz¬

ing of families and reproduction. This is a gendered process, as it reorga¬

nizes the divisions of labor between women and men. This break creates

an immanent contradiction between the work of production and the work

of reproduction in capitalist class societies. Although creating material

goods and bearing and raising children are both essential to human life

and thus ultimately necessary to each other, the goals and organization

of activities in these life processes begin to conflict as well as to diverge.16

The aims of capitalist production are to create profit and to extend the

control of capitalist organizations, either in competitioii or collusion, over

larger and larger geographic areas and domains of activity.17 Production

Is Capitalism Gendered and Racialized? 87

is organized, work processes are invented, to achieve these aims. The

aims of the complex and multiple activities summarized as reproduction

are the social/physical reproduction of human beings, including the pro¬

vision of the necessities of daily life and of the possibility of pleasure, love, and creativity. In other words, as many have pointed out (e.g., Pola-

nyi 1944), with the coming of industrial capitalism, production no longer

directly provided the means for subsistence or provisioning, but the

means for the accumulation of capital. Production might or might not

provide for subsistence and reproduction of ordinary laboring people

through wages and consumption. Money became the link between mate¬ rial production and reproduction.

Intrinsic to this separation was the transformation of human labor into

a commodity sold in a market at the lowest price the buyer could manage.

Karl Polanyi (1944), analyzing the emergence of industrial capitalism in

England, argues that the large-scale, factory organization of production required, in order to turn a profit, a reliable supply of the factors of pro¬

duction, rhost importantly labor, land, and money. In the commercial

society of the time, this meant that these things must be for sale, commod¬

ified. To commodify labor and establish a labor market, the old impedi¬

ments to a freely varying price, such as poor relief, had to be removed. In

Polanyi s account, the Poor Law Reform of 1834, mirrored in similar

reforms in states such as New York and Massachusetts,18 was the defining

legislation that allowed the labor market to develop. As Polanyi (1944, 82)

points out, the abolition of poor relief was the abolition of the "right to

live." This and the effects of the new labor market discipline were cata¬

strophic for ordinary people, especially in England in the nineteenth cen¬

tury. Those now dependent on the wage did not cease to eat when there

was no demand for their labor. The results were so appalling that almost

immediately measures to protect society set in. The consequences of liv¬ ing in societies built on this separation and the concomitant commodifi¬

cation of labor were and are often dire, especially for single women with

children, for both women and men from subordinated minorities, but also

for workers in general. In periods of capitalist crisis and high unemploy¬

ment, some literally starve in the midst of plenty. State interventions,

including new forms of distribution, necessarily develop almost every¬

where to ameliorate the destructions of the market, Polanyi contends.

Diane Elson (1994) deals with some of the saTne issues, emphasizing the

interdependence between the productive or monetary economy and the

reproductive or nonmonetary economy. She also recognizes a contradic¬

tion in "that monetized production is subject to inherent dislocations and

crises" (40), necessitating the intervention of the state and community to

meet essential needs and avoid social breakdown.19

Women's unpaid work in the garden, the henhouse, and the kitchen

often mediated this contradiction, providing some of what the market

failed to provide. Women also continued to do the work of nurturing and

caring. Much of reproductive work remained the responsibility of women

even when they worked for pay, while white men in increasing propor¬

tions were only employed in capitalist enterprises. But, as money income

became more necessary to family survival, women's unpaid work was

seen less and less as “economic.” The emergence of an economy seen as

separate from the household is part of the same historical and discursive

processes that produced the gender-coded distinction between produc¬

tion and reproduction, between the public and the private.-" The econ¬

omy” can be seen as a discursive construction with a gendered

undergirding: As industrial capitalism developed, male activities orga¬

nized around money became defined as the “economy,” seen as a sepa¬

rate realm responding to its own laws. This definition was reified in

capitalist practice and in social theory. The separation between produc¬

tion and reproduction of aims, locations, rewards, and organization of

tasks incorporated women's responsibilities for reproduction and unpaid

production as outside of and less important than the “the economy,” or

profit.21 In the process, the intrinsic connections between reproduction

and the “economy” were obscured, made invisible. Once the “market” and the “economy” were seen as separate spheres

and of primary importance, those whose main involvements were else¬

where, in the family for example, were less visible, less valued, to para¬

phrase Ann Jennings (1993). But the separation that hides the value of

women's unpaid labor did not, perhaps, occur as an unintended conse¬

quence of changes in production. As Viviana A. Zelizer (2002) argues,

drawing on the work of Reva Siegel (1994), “splitting the family and mar¬

ket spheres took painstaking legal effort. Focusing on nineteenth-century

debates over the valuation of household labor, Siegel shows how courts

carefully kept that labor as non-market exchange” (291). The decisions, in

cases of interspousal contracts for labor, reinforced the belief that domes¬

tic labor is done for love and nurture and that this structure would be

undermined by market exchange. Male privilege, men's economic inter¬

ests, and their gender identities could also have been involved. Using

changing census definitions in Great Britain and the United States, Nancy

Folbre (1994, 95-96) documents the redefinition of domestic labor in the

nineteenth century from economically important labor to unproductive

labor and finally to nonexistent labor. The pattern was established that reproductive activities and those with

most responsibilities for reproduction—women—were devalued in com¬

parison with men and their market work. This devaluation exists today

in the low pay for domestic and caring work.22 Evelyn Glenn (2002) points

out that the domestic duties, especially mothering, of white women were

valued, whereas the same duties of African-American women were not

Is Capitalism Gendered and Racialized? 89

so honored. She is correct that white, especially middle class, motherhood

was idealized in various ways that emphasized racial devaluation of Afri¬

can-American women. But this idealization was also part of placing white

women in a different realm of economic and social value than that of men.

It did not confer economic power or economic returns to white women

that were equal to those of white men. I think that lack of access to and

control over money by people who do caring work has a great deal to do

with the social evaluation of domestic and caring work. However, race

and class subordination create extreme differences among women. In

some parts of the United States, many middle class white women as late

as the early 1940s ruled their domestic domains, but did not actually do

all of their own housework. They had servants, often African-American

women, for that work.2' Such middle class white women's unpaid work

was not as devalued as that of the low-paid servants they employed.

Thus, race structures class domination among women. In some parts of

the United States, particularly the South, paid domestic labor was almost

the only occupation other than farming open to African-American

women. White working class women were too poor to hire "help," they

did their own housework. The identification of this work with women

who lacked power and money may also have been a factor in its low status and low monetary value.

Such differential evaluations based on class and race are rampant in the

twenty-first-century United States. Poor mothers on welfare, dispropor¬

tionately African Americans, Hispanics, or other women of color, are

expected to work for money without much regard to the welfare of their

children. Although the expectation that children come last is not explicit

in most welfare policies, work is a requirement for receipt of Temporary

Aid to Needy Families and assistance to pay for child care is frequently

inadequate (Acker and Morgen 2001). In practice, mothering is almost

totally devalued (Roberts 1999). At the same time, middle class, dispro¬

portionately white, mothers who quit well-paying jobs to take care of

their children receive no reprimands, and are actually seen as good moth¬

ers. The difference is class, which determines access to money, as well as

race. In summary, I am arguing that separating the aims and organization

of paid production from those of unpaid reproduction provided the

understructure for the devaluation of reproductive, caring labor and

those who do it. These are gendered and racialized class practices that continue into the twenty-first century.

The Male/Masculine Conceptual World of Capitalist Organizing

Discourses of capitalist organizing emerged on the template of the gen¬

dered divisions of societal labor. In the historical development of capital-

90 Chapter 4 *

ism, Dorothy Smith (1987) argues that forms of knowledge were

produced that facilitated organizing large-scale production and markets

and engaging in competitive battles. These forms of knowledge were cre¬

ated within spaces separate from the domestic activities maintaining

daily life: Leading capitalists and their lieutenants were distanced from

the daily exigencies of feeding, cleaning, and managing households and

intimate family relations. This distancing was part of the social arrange¬

ments that allowed these men to focus their attention on making money

and on the increasingly abstract processes of creating and managing pro¬

duction. As discussed in chapter 3, Smith (1987, 1990, 1999) analyzes

these processes as extended social relations, or the relations of ruling, of

capitalism. Her analysis illuminates the ways in which gender is deeply

embedded in the conceptual and material processes that organize, coordi¬

nate, and control capitalist societies. "Relations of ruling" refers to the vast complex of interconnected prac¬

tices that organize, coordinate, and control production, finance, distribu¬

tion, and other noneconomic processes such as education and other state

functions. Relations of ruling articulate local places to each other and to

extra-local places of power, that are at the same time, the places from

which ruling is initiated. Nike, McDonalds restaurants, or the U.S. Post

Office are examples. In each organization, procedures for doing the work

are specified from outside the local unit and complex methods of commu¬

nication, including such activities as advertising and accounting, link

local places to regional and national centers. The lives of clients, custom¬

ers, and taxpayers are linked into the lives of employees and managers as

all participate in some way in the relations of ruling. The concept "rela¬

tions of ruling" is not synonymous with class: It refers to the multitude of

interconnected practices of managing and governing within which class,

gender, race, and sexualities are constituted, usually simultaneously.

Certain forms of knowledge and consciousness are integral to the rela¬

tions of ruling. Two forms of consciousness emerge historically, one

located in the objectified, increasingly textually mediated relations of rul¬

ing and the other in the concrete activities of daily life (Smith 1987, 1999).

The consciousness located in processes of ruling conceptualizes the world

for the purposes of managing and organizing. Abstraction and general¬

ization, which are usually gender- and race-obliterating ways of thinking,

facilitate organizing.24 Working people are turned into factors of produc¬

tion, such as the labor force. Business practices reduce or increase the

labor force, but the lives of those who are reduced or increased are invisi¬

ble on the company books. For example, "business process outsourcing"

is a fairly recent term for relocating jobs such as accounting to Third

World countries, leaving U.S. employees to find new work. Actual work

of people producing their lives is turned into a mythical commodity,

Is Capitalism Gendered and Racialized? 91

labor power, to be bought and sold, as Polanyi (1944) argues. The wage is

represented theoretically as an abstract, gender-neutral process. (One

might ask. If the wage relation is an abstract, gender- and race-neutral

process, how is it that one of the most persistent manifestations of gender

and racial disadvantage arises through that relation?") People seeking

financial assistance are cases; cases or clients are bureaucratic categories

with no bodies, no gender or race, although a majority of people seeking

aid are women from minority groups. People who stop getting welfare

benefits are called "leavers," an administrative term that hides their ongo-

ing financial need and the fact that most are single mothers and many don't "leave" (Morgen, Barry, and Acker 2003).

From a standpoint within the relations of ruling where those with

power are mostly men and only a few women, the ongoing practical activities of keeping daily life going, mostly carried out by women, are

invisible, simply assumed to exist. This aspect of social reality is periph¬

eral, uninteresting from the standpoint of the practices and procedures of

running production and government, unless it can somehow be orga¬

nized to produce profit or it becomes an object of control. Making a simi¬

lar point, Diane Elson argues that macro-economic policy, representing

the interests and perspectives of production, implicitly assumes that

"there is an unlimited supply of unpaid female labour, able to compen¬

sate for any adverse changes resulting from macro-economic policy, so as

to continue to meet the basic needs of their families and communities and

sustain them as social organizations" (Elson 1994, 42).

In sum, the invisibility of race, gender (of men and women), and every¬

day unpaid reproduction except as a source of demand for products from

a standpoint within the ruling relations is written into the processes and

procedures, including the conceptual practices, that organize our socie¬

ties. The ostensibly rational, objective, calculative competitive practices of

the financial and industrial corporate world operate in such a way that

the needs of women, children, and most men are simply absent, as Smith

(1999) puts it. I think this holds as a very general statement, although

some corporations consider the need, or the demand, for social responsi¬

bility, and national politics, culture, and overall economic conditions pro¬ duce much variability.

The entry of a majority of women in the wealthy countries into the paid

labor force and the increasing success of a few white women and women

and men of racial minority groups in gaining entrance to top corporate

and government positions has not altered the abstract, textual practices

of organizing. The bureaucratic abstractions of organizing that make gen¬

dered and racialized patterns of power and disadvantage invisible still

exist. Most women as well as most men now face these abstractions and

their practical applications as organizers of their lives, as they contend

92 Chapter 4

with seemingly disembodied processes that result in wage dependence

and sometimes unemployment. The effects of apparently disembodie

processes vary widely. Women and men negotiate the effects on their own

and their families' lives by varying the time they spend at paid work on

a daily, weekly, and lifetime basis (Moen 2003).

THE GENDERED AND RACIALIZED

ORGANIZATION OF WORK

With the emerging dominance of waged work in large organizations in

the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the gender-coded separation

between production and reproduction became an underlying principle in

the conceptual and actual physical and temporal organization of work. At

the same time, race, along with gender, became a principle for allocating

people within this total social organization of work (Glucksmann 1995).

The separation also shaped the spatial and time relationships between

home and paid work, bodily movements through time and space, the

general organization of daily life, and the ways that groups and individu¬

als constructed meaning and identities. For example, the rules and expec¬

tations of ordinary capitalist workplaces were and still are built on hidden

assumptions about a gendered separation of production and reproduc¬

tion (Acker 1990), within which is embedded the image of the worker as

a man. Although in academic and managerial discourses "the worker" is

represented as gender and race neutral as well as disembodied, this con¬

cept conceals the assumption that the disembodied worker is a white

male and that "work" is organized on the basis of this assumption. Thus,

work is organized on the assumption that reproduction concerns are left

at home, that the worker has no other responsibilities that might interfere

with total attention to tasks or projects assigned by the employer.

Employees are expected to arrive at stated times, stay on the job except

for toilet, coffee, and lunch breaks, accomplish certain amounts of work,

and often work overtime. They are expected to show up day after day, no

matter what is happening in the other parts of their lives. Enforcement of

these assumptions is probably more stringent for working class employ¬

ees, such as women in lower-level service and clerical jobs or men in man¬

ufacturing jobs, than for those in managerial or professional positions.

The lack of fit between work and the rest of life increases with long or

irregular work hours. The lack of fit may also increase as the employee is

more and more involved in coordinating and knitting together activities

within workplaces and between workplaces (Acker 1998). Webs of social

practices link and coordinate the work in one department with other

departments in an organization, or the work in one organization with the

Is Capitalism Gendered and Racialized? 93

work in many other organizations: Very few jobs exist in isolation, with¬

out demands from other places. Supervisors coordinate the flow of work

across departments (in universities department secretaries do this kind

of coordination), retail managers coordinate the ordering and choice of

products, social workers coordinate services to clients across organiza¬

tional borders. Maintaining these linkages, meeting the demands may be

absolutely essential for the survival of the job and the activities. These

linkages only complicate and intensify the lack of fit of paid work with

the exigencies of the rest of life, making it more difficult to arrange work

in flexible ways. Such difficulties exist even in countries that recognize the rights of employees to do caring work.

For example, in Sweden, many policies exist to facilitate the combina¬

tion of parenting and paid work (Acker 1994b). Parents are guaranteed a

certain number of months of paid leave—with the guarantee that they

will not lose their jobs—upon the birth or adoption of a child. Parents of

young children may reduce their working hours without fear of retalia¬

tion from .employers. Parents who have children in daycare routinely

leave work to pick up the children. Most do not work overtime. In my

experience in Sweden, these rights to combine paid employment and par¬

enting complicate the logistics of the workplace for managers and other

workers. Replacements must be found for those on leave. Reduced hours

may mean that tasks are undone or passed on to others. Picking up the

children may require walking out of a meeting just when a decision is

about to be made. Work that crosses the borders of organizations may be

even more disrupted as people have to coordinate several schedules and

time tables with the hours of day care centers and the potential absences

of key employees (Acker 1998). Women are still much more likely than

men to use the family-friendly measures (Leira 2002). Their lengthy leaves

and reduced working hours contribute to different career patterns for

women and men and the continuance of gender inequalities.

In sum, in Sweden as in the United States and Britain, the model

worker, for whom work routines are designed, is still a man who does

not have to stay at home with a sick child or do the ordinary tasks of keep¬

ing a household functioning. This gendered structure of work persists

even though women are almost half the paid labor force in the United

States and high proportions of mothers of young children are working for

pay: Family life has been transformed to meet the needs of paid work,

but paid work has not been transformed to meet family needs. Rosemary

Crompton (2000) suggests that, as more men assume caring responsibili¬

ties, employers' provisions for child care resources may become a class

issue as well as a gender issue. Moreover, "the debates over gender and

class have brought into prominence significant sources of tension and

conflict in the organization of market capitalism that have long been

94 Chapter 4

masked by the predominant gender division of labour” (Crompton 2000,

180). These are tensions over the contradictions between reproduction

and production.

THE NONRESPONSIBILITY AND

PRIVILEGING OF ORGANIZATIONS

The break between production and reproduction embedded in the emer¬

gence of capitalist societies is continually reconstituted through two addi¬

tional processes: first, the ongoing efforts of capitalist corporations and

their coordinating associations to make successful claims of nonresponsi¬

bility for human reproduction and the environment, and second, the priv¬

ileging of economic organizations over other areas of life.21' Both of these

processes are particularly ascendant now in the United States, with the widespread acceptance of neoliberal economic ideas and the seeming rule

of the "market.” Claims of nonresponsibility are not always as successful

as they have been at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-

first centuries. I define nonresponsibility as refusals or attempts to avoid contributions

to meeting the needs of people, if these contributions do not directly

enhance production or accumulation. Nonresponsibility may be focused

on employees of a particular employer or on the community or society as

a whole. Nonresponsibility includes practices that deny workers living

wages, safe working conditions, reasonable hours, and job benefits, and

refusal to support more general community welfare. It includes resistance

to affirmative action and pay equity, as well as refusal to support the pro¬

vision of day care and paid leave for family responsibilities. In addition,

nonresponsibility includes refusal to take responsibility for environmen¬

tal damage and damages to the health and safety of communities. It also

includes unwillingness of business groups to support public programs

such as various forms of income replacement, provision of medical care,

public housing, or job creation. Economists classify some of these

neglected needs as externalities, paid for by communities, families, or

individuals. I prefer the notion of nonresponsibility because it includes

more areas of action and suggests to me an active process in which claims

for both responsibility and nonresponsibility are made and challenged. Capitalism's nonresponsibility has negative effects on men and women,

but impacts are differentiated across gendered and racialized class proc¬

esses. Nonresponsibility contributes to the marginalization and devalua¬

tion of caring and reproductive activities and those responsible for these

activities, mostly women. Nonresponsibility consigns caring needs to

areas outside or at least peripheral to the capitalist organization's inter-

Is Capitalism Gendered and Racialized? 95

ests and, thus, helps to maintain the image of the ideal, even adequate,

employee as someone without such obligations. Thus, organizational pol¬

icies and practices continue to encode this gendered notion of the

employee in spite of lip service to the values of family and caring. In addi¬

tion, business organizations and their political allies control societal resources and allocate them first to their own interests, not to caring and

reproduction, particularly of low-income African-American, Hispanic,

and other racial/ethnic families. The privileging of large organizations facilitates their nonresponsibility.26

Nonresponsibility is constituted through particular practices that are

part of the continual organizing of capitalist societies, historically consti¬

tuted, sometimes contested, and highly variable. These processes are

linked into fundamental relations of capitalist societies: those that orga¬

nize production toward profit and the accumulation of capital and not, in

the first instance, toward provisioning the population or assuring human

reproduction, as I discussed above. Thus, claims to nonresponsibility for

both human beings and the environment are affirmations of the central

aims of profit-making organizations. I think it is very important to see nonresponsibility as actively constructed through diverse organizational

inventions and state actions, such as legislation in the nineteenth century

that reformed the Poor Law in Britain (Polanyi 1944) and the United

States, discussed above, or that created the rights of corporations to act in

their own interests, as their leaders defined those interests (Perrow 2002).27

The establishment in the nineteenth century of laissez-faire ideology

with rational economic man as the iconic figure supported denial of

responsibility by economic organizations. Rational economic man acted

purposively in his own interest, his decisions contributing to positive out¬

comes for the community and nation.28 The worker, too, was to act in his

own interest, defined as working for a wage. The needs of reproduction,

to the extent that they were visible, would be provided for by wage labor

and other positive economic outcomes. Polanyi (1944) argued, as I dis¬

cussed above, that the establishment of labor as a commodity necessitated

cutting the worker "free" from any supports, such as public assistance,

that would allow him to exist without working for a wage. The reform of

the Poor Law in Britain that abolished "outdoor relief" was an essential

step in legislating free market ideology and a victory for nonresponsibil¬

ity. The history of Anglo-American capitalism can be read as a series of

ongoing battles between workers, reformers, and their social movements

and employers and their associations over issues related to responsibility

for reproduction and provisioning, such as the payment of starvation

wages, the refusal to provide safe working conditions, insistence on long

working hours, or the destruction of environments. In the late nineteenth

96 Chapter 4

and early twentieth centuries, factory acts to protect workers were passed,

efforts were made to establish the ten-hour day, to regulate child labor, to

provide workmen's compensation for injuries, and Mother's Pensions

were established in some states.29 Capitalist employers and their associa¬

tions frequently claimed that protections were antithetical to the health of

business and opposed them. At the same time, it would be a mistake to see only a unified opposition

by capitalist firms to any sort of intervention to support reproduction.

Capitalist organizations and the men who lead them have historically

(and still do today) sometimes paid attention to the needs of workers and

of human reproduction in general. A distinction should be made between

measures to support the reproductive needs of their own employees and

measures to support the needs of the population in general. When firms

are well-established in a particular place and dependent on a local labor

supply they may be willing to support their own workers or employees in

positions critical to the operation of the organization. They may provide a

living wage, some parental leave, medical insurance, and on-site day care,

while opposing tax-supported measures to give these protections to non¬

employees. At particular times, larger groups of employers may even

push for reforms, as Polanyi (1944) argues. To secure an appropriate and

committed labor force, to assure a community of consumers, to achieve

legitimacy and civil order, large capitalist organizations have adapted to

particular conditions of production or acceded to demands for reform

from employees, labor unions, other social movements, and from govern¬

ments responding to the politics of these movements.

Capitalist organizations have even reluctantly acquiesced to demands

for new forms of distribution to ordinary people.30 Responding to the cri¬

sis of reproduction brought on by the Depression in the 1930s, the United

States passed the Social Security Act, a tremendous step toward social

protection through new distribution programs, forcing employers to

assume through tax payments some responsibility in the areas of support

of the unemployed and the elderly. The Act also established income sup¬

ports, or welfare, through Aid for Dependent Children, for children living

with their single mothers. The further development of welfare states after

World War II—especially in the rich Northern countries—diluted corpo¬

rate power over workers by establishing job protections as well as state

supports for reproduction and forcing firms to also take some responsibil¬

ity (Esping-Andersen 1990). Although outcomes varied, welfare states

were usually based on the assumption that women still provide the

unpaid work of caring (O'Connor, Orloff, and Shaver 1999). In the same

period in the United States, under pressures of the labor movement, large

corporations negotiated higher wages, medical care, vacations, and other

benefits with their workers, even as they may have still opposed national

Is Capitalism Gendered and Racinlized? 97

and state legislation for welfare programs. Thus, in the United States

many work organizations took some responsibility, but primarily for

their own employees, while in Europe, benefits tended to go to all work¬

ers, with highly variable supports for women doing unpaid caring work

(see, for example, Esping-Andersen 1990; Williams 1990; O'Connor,

Orloff, and Shaver 1999). Although many U.S. employers did begin to

provide for some of the needs of their employees, particularly male

employees, in the post—World War II period, they collectively began

immediately after World War II to reduce the power of the labor move¬

ment, achieving the passage of the federal Taft-Hartley Act that under¬

mined the protections labor had won with the Depression-era Wagner

Act.11 That legislation began a long campaign to weaken labor organiza¬ tion and protect the corporate claims to nonresponsibility.

No fundamental economic logic of capitalism exists that results in one

way of managing the break between reproduction and production, or one

pattern of organizational nonresponsibility. As Fred Block (1990) has

argued, there are different strategies of accumulation and capitalism has

prospered with different kinds of government policies. Similarly, capital¬

ist states and organizations have prospered with different strategies of

reproduction, different policies in regard to the reproductive needs of

employees, and different stances toward communities and toward gov¬

ernment supports for redistribution and reproduction in general. These

differences are embedded in different histories and in different gendered

and racialized class relations, and, in turn, help to recreate those relations.

Charles Handy (2003), a British management expert, argues that the "cur¬

rent Anglo-American version of stock market capitalism" in which share¬

holder value is the primary criterion of success, "had no place for many

of the things that Europeans take for granted as the benefits of citizen¬

ship—free health care and quality education for all, housing for the disad¬

vantaged, and a guarantee of reasonable living standards in old age,

sickness, or unemployment" (70). Handy notes that the American model

started to take hold in Europe, but that many Europeans now believe that

it went too far. European capitalism continues to live with welfare state

supports for income and reproduction that far exceed those in the United

States, in spite of some retrenchment. This is also the case in Scandinavia.

For example, in Sweden, supports and protections for reproductive work

have not been substantially reduced in spite of attacks on and some

downsizing of the welfare state (Leira 2002). Employing organizations

must pay attention to employees' reproduction needs because in many

instances such attention is guaranteed by law. In spite of economic prob¬

lems, Sweden and many European countries have successful capitalist

economies.

Recent history is full of continuing corporate efforts to protect and

98 Chapter 4

restore nonresponsibility, with considerable success. U.S. corporations

seem to have acted on the famous statement of Milton Friedman: "Few

trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free

society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility

other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible"

(1982,133; quoted in Nelson 2003, 82). The restoration of neoliberalism as

the dominating economic discourse has provided legitimacy for reducing

welfare state programs and restoring corporate nonresponsibility that

was somewhat modified in the post-World War II period. (I discuss the

cuts in welfare state programs in chapter 6.) While both corporate and

state support for reproduction have decreased, some parts of reproduc¬

tive services have moved into the capitalist economy, becoming available

only to those able to pay, as well as becoming a source of profit. From opposition to worker efforts to raise wages to failure to support paid

parental leave legislation, public day care, or universal medical care, cor¬

porations escalate their denial of responsibility for anything but the bot¬

tom line. Caring and nurturing, unless a source of profit, are not

important, in spite of rhetoric to the contrary. As caring work is devalued,

so are those who primarily do that work. The transnational organization of production builds nonresponsibility

into the structure of capitalist processes. As corporations such as Nike or

Liz Claiborne contract production to firms in other countries, the corpora¬

tion often has relatively few workers of its own, thus few who might

demand responsibility. As Appelbaum and Gereffi (1990, 44) say, "Con¬

tracting means that the so-called manufacturer need not employ any pro¬

duction workers, run the risk of unionization or wages pressures, or be

concerned with layoffs resulting from changes in product demand." Thus,

nonresponsibility in the interest of accumulation underlies corporate

decisions to continually move production to the location with the cheap¬

est labor. Nonresponsibility is built into globalizing processes; indeed, the

opportunities for production and gain without challenges to nonresponsi¬

bility probably constitute a major incentive for moving production from

rich, capitalist countries to poorer, low-wage locations. At the same time,

back in corporate headquarters in the United States or other rich coun¬

tries, where design, marketing, and production decisions are made, a sig¬

nificant degree of gender and racial/ethnic equality may emerge as

skilled professionals are hired to do this work.

Capitalist organizations have power and privileges that often result in

victories in struggles over nonresponsibility for reproduction. The privi¬

leging of capitalist organizations is nothing new, but with the dominance

of neoliberal market policies, it seems more obvious today than it was

during the post-World War II years of building welfare states. For indi¬

viduals, privileging of organizations means that the demands of work

Is Capitalism Gendered and Racialized? 99

organizations usually must come first in the daily round of activities, as I

argued above. Obviously, most of us have to go to work if we want to

eat. Thus, we enter employing organizations, but not on our own terms.

Privileging also means that large capitalist, state, and voluntary organiza¬

tions, in pursuing their own ends, have disproportionate influence in

defining the society as a whole, with the largest corporations in a deter¬

mining position in the United States. While business organizations do not

necessarily agree with each other on a range of issues, there is probably

consensus among them on the proposition that what's good for capital in

general is good for the country and the world. In this sense, economic

organizations are privileged; they come first over the needs of women

and men and their families and communities. Privilege is maintained by

effective monopoly over the ways that production is created and coordi¬

nated and by the control of the bulk of the economic and political

resources of the society, including the media. Thus, privilege is main¬

tained and extended through concrete organizational practices, such as

making political contributions and opposing organized labor. Many of

these activities promote organizations' claims to nonresponsibility. In this

process, the gender division of labor between caring and providing (Leira

1994) is continually recreated as the most powerful organizations, either

by default or through intentional policy, create caring needs as periph¬

eral, invisible, and someone else's (women's) responsibilities.

CONCLUSION

I have tried to demonstrate in this discussion that "A capitalist economy

that operates through a gender division of labour is, necessarily, a gen¬

dered accumulation process" (Connell 2000, 25). I would add that an

economy that operates through a racial division of labor is necessarily a

racialized accumulation process. I have argued that the fundamental

organization of capitalist production, including the transformation of

human labor into a commodity, separates production and reproduction,

creating tensions, even contradictions, between these two necessary social

activities. These are gendered tensions, as women are historically

assigned to caring work and subordinated in the world of paid work. This

organization of production undergirds: 1) the devaluation of unpaid

work and caring, 2) abstract conceptual practices that obscure unpaid

work and caring, 3) a lack of fit between paid work and the rest of life, 4)

corporate claims to nonresponsibility for human needs, and 5) efforts to

create new forms of distribution to ordinary people. In the United States,

this organization of production emerges within systems of slavery and

100 Chapter 4 *

racial/ethnic subordination, building in racial exclusion and discrimina¬

tion from the beginning. ' This sets the stage for more detailed examination of gendered and

racialized class practices and relations in the next two chapters. I intend

to leave open the question of whether or not fundamental changes can

occur without basically altering capitalist practices. Certainly, tremen¬

dous positive changes have occurred in United States society in the last

thirty to forty years in patterns of subordination and exclusion based on

gender and race, while gendered and racialized class-linked increases in

income and wealth inequality have soared. Gendered and racialized prac¬

tices are not erased and new configurations of exploitation, domination,

and inequality seem to be continually produced in the ongoing processes

of global corporate expansion and organizational restructuring.

NOTES

1. Omi and Winant (1994) develop the notion of project to discuss racial forma¬

tion. This is a helpful notion that I borrow to assist in thinking about capitalism

and class, but use in a somewhat different way. To think about the development

of capitalism as a project or as many projects brings actors' bodies and activities,

as well as the cultural representation of those bodies and activities of actors, into

a central place in "processes." 2. The male identity of the leaders of industrialization is obvious in every his¬

tory of the process. See, for example, Gutman (1976) or Perrow (2002).

3. Chris Middleton (1983) argued that, in Britain, male heads of households in

the emerging capitalist class appropriated the labor of members of the household,

including wives and daughters. In the process, patriarchal power was reorga¬

nized and women in this class actually saw the range of their contributions to

production shrink as they were excluded from various occupations and economic

sectors.

4. There is a huge literature on the working lives of women, their history, and

present configurations. See, for example, Kessler-Harris (1982), Amott and Mat-

thaei (1996), Glenn (2002) for histories and Padavic and Reskin (2002) for a con¬

temporary overview.

5. See Eric Williams (1944).

6. While race/ethnicity-based dominations of colonial peoples were built into

capitalist development in Britain and European countries, these patterns of racial

exploitation and oppression did not become integrated into gender and class

processes within national boundaries until after World War II. Each country had

a different history of colonialism, different labor force recruitment policies in the

postwar period, and different policies in regard to immigration. All of these pat¬

terns result in different racial patterns, different problems today.

7. For example, Dolores Janiewski (1996) shows how preexisting race and gen¬

der ideologies, along with employers' commitments to maintaining the existing

Is Capitalism Gendered and Racialized? 101

sexual and racial order, shaped Southern managerial strategies in the textile and tobacco industries.

8. Many histories of labor struggles exist. See, for example, Foner (1947), Tay¬

lor (1992), Milton (1982). For examples of women's participation in labor strug¬ gles, see Frankel (1984) and Kessler-Harris (1982).

9. For interpretations of the processes and policies resulting in hierarchical

segregation, horizontal segregation between occupations, and manual and non-

manual work and the pay gap, see Reskin, McBrier, and Kmec (1999) and Kil- bourne, England, and Beron (1994).

10. Connell (2000) defines masculinities as "configurations of practice within

gender relations, a structure that includes large-scale institutions and economic

relations as well as face-to-face relationships and sexuality" (29). The referent of

masculinities is often ambiguous (Connell 1995). "Configurations of practice

within gender relations" could refer to ideologies, images, ideals, myths, or

behaviors and emotions of actual men. Moreover, masculinities are often chang¬

ing, reproduced through organizational and institutional practices, social interac¬

tion, and through images, ideals, myths, or representations of behaviors and

emotions. Jbff Hearn (2004) reviews the problems with the concept "hegemonic

masculinity" and proposes that talking about "the hegemony of men" and drop¬

ping the notion of masculinity may solve some of these problems.

11. Although prescriptions for successful management have included in the

last few years human relations skills and softer, more emotional and supportive

approaches to supervision usually identified with femininity, these have not, it

seems to me, disturbed the images of hegemonic masculinities. See Wacjman (1998).

12. Violence is another ambiguous term. Jeff Hearn and Wendy Parkin (2001)

in Gender, Sexuality and Violence in Organizations, include sexual harassment and

bullying along with physical violence and expand the concept to include "viola¬

tion," which denotes a wide variety of actions that demean, coerce, and intimi¬

date within work organizations.

13. Linda McDowell's (1997) study of merchant bankers in London describes

another embodied hegemonic masculinity, a manly, heterosexual, class-based

masculinity that dominates and disempowers many "others."

14. See Sandra Morgen (1990) for a useful discussion and summary of the

debate on "reproduction" in socialist feminist theorizing.

15. Another recent retelling of this story is by Sue Ferguson (1999). Evelyn

Glenn (2002) discusses the separation of production and reproduction in the his¬

tory of U.S. industrial capitalism and the variations by gender and race in the

impact of the separation.

16. Diane Elson (1994) describes the separation between production and repro¬

duction in economic terms as a division between the monetary "productive"

economy and the nonmonetary "reproductive" economy. "The ability of money

to mobilize labour power for 'productive work' depends on the operation of some

non-monetary set of social relations to mobilize labour power for 'reproductive

work.' These non-monetary social relations are subordinate to money in the sense

that they cannot function and sustain themselves without an input of money; and

102 Chapter 4

they are reshaped in response to the power of money. Nevertheless, neither can

the monetary economy sustain itself without an input of unpaid labour, an input

shaped by the structures of gender relations” (Elson 1994, 40).

17. This may be a too simplistic model of capitalism and capitalist firms, as

Julie Nelson (2003) argues. Nelson points out that arguments that shareholders

are not the only stakeholders in corporations are not new, and that research

shows that profit maximization is not the driving force in some of the most suc¬

cessful companies. Small businesses and large corporations are complex social

processes, embedded in the societies in which they exist, as Nelson also argues.

My argument is only that production is organized to achieve profit, not to support

such things as caregiving. In addition, as I argue below, there are particular condi¬

tions under which corporations pay attention to human needs, but these do not

always exist. 18. Efforts to reform the poor law in the early nineteenth-century United States

varied greatly between states and localities, although the arguments against aid

to the "able-bodied” were the same as those in Great Britain. See Coll (1969) and

Mencher (1967). 19. This is a persistent theme in much of the literature on the emergence of

the welfare state, such as Esping-Anderson's (1990) influential The Three Worlds

of Welfare Capitalism. 20. Carole Pateman (1989) discusses the complexities and ambiguities of the

distinctions between a public and private domain. She argues that the patriarchal

character of the separation between public and private was "forgotten," and the

separation between public and private became located within civil society, implic¬

itly the sphere of men. Thus, the fact that "patriarchalism is a constitutive part of

the theory and practice of liberalism" (123) becomes obscured and the domestic

arena is seen as irrelevant to social and economic theory.

21. As discussed in chapter 2, feminist theorizing in the 1970s and 1980s some¬

times suggested a functional relationship between production and reproduction:

Reproduction has the function of reproducing the labor power necessary for capi¬

talist production, or reproducing the ideology of hierarchy and subordination

that is also necessary for the economy (for example, Hartmann 1981; Eisenstein

1979). Thus, women's unpaid work and their subordination are functionally nec¬

essary for the economy. Christine Delphy (1984) located reproductive activities

within a family mode of production distinct from the capitalist mode of produc¬

tion, with women subordinated within both modes of production. The approach

I suggest here is different from both of these. In addition to general problems with

functional explanations, I see no functional necessity for unpaid work organized

in a particular way. The notion that unpaid work occurs within a domestic mode

of production may be useful for understanding some societies at particular histor¬

ical moments, but is much less useful for understanding societies such as the con¬

temporary United States in which a large majority of women are wage earners

and many families consist of a single mother and children.

22. Lynet Uttal and Mary Tuominen (1999) make the valuable point that child

care and housework are different forms of labor. Caregiving, when paid, is work

exchanged for wages, but it also has value and meaning based on commitment to

Is Capitalism Gendered and Racialized? 103

valuing other human beings. Uttal and Tuominen analyze the complicated and

often contradictory connections between these two principles in commodified caregiving.

23. Alice Kessler-Harris (1982, 270) reports that in 1940, one in every five female

wage earners were domestic servants. Half of these were African Americans. As

late as 1960, 39 percent of African-American women were working in domestic

service (Amott and Mattaei 1996, 327). This was a large labor force, working in

middle income as well as affluent households.

24. While feminists have extensively criticized many concepts that contain an

implicit male referent and thus make women invisible, such concepts do play a

part in organizing social life. Therefore, it seems to me that most feminists have

an ambivalent relationship to these concepts: They need them, but understand

their complicity in maintaining women's invisibility in so doing.

25. The following discussion is based, in part, on my 1998 article, "The Future of Gender and Organizations."

26. Nancy Folbre (2001) in The Invisible Heart has a similar analysis, arguing in

chapter 8 that corporations avoid paying the costs of reproducing their workers,

prefer childless workers, and search for the lowest paid labor regardless of the

consequences.

27. Charles Perrow (2002) describes the historical process through which the

particular U.S. corporate form was created in three Supreme Court decisions in

1819, removing much public control from private economic activities. As Perrow

says, "The consequences were immense. For example, the ruling encourages the

privatization of what, for other countries, was a public good under public control,

the railroads" (42). I believe that the consequences were immense in other areas too, as I discuss in this section.

28. See Lourdes Beneria (1999) for another analysis focusing on the develop¬

ment of market society.

29. See, for example Bremner (1956) and Piven and Cloward (1993).

30. Piven and Cloward (1993, 52-53) discuss a statement in 1932 by the U.S.

Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers opposing

federal aid to the unemployed and supporting private charity and state and local

assistance.

31. Piven and Cloward (1993, 443).