Class filters all types of social distinctions, race, ethnicity, religion, gender etc., but what seems intimate to class is gender. Gender development and class development are believed to have a same process and same occurrences. The antagonists of the two systems (capitalism- class, patriarchy-gender), move in parallel grounds. The inequality of gender benefits the capitalist. Patriarchy benefits the capitalism. Richardson in Class and Sex: Two Power Systems stated that the existence of family and women’s unpaid work in the home benefits the Capitalist class economically. The sexually segmented labour market and sexually segregated labour force serve capital. She then added that all events and gendered events could be read from a class perspective. Institutions (school, government, family, factories, etc. ) are all involved and take part on the capitalist system. But they all are gendered too.
Feminism, like Marxism is a world view and its subject is the world itself: a totality. These two systems are 2 different phenomena, but our society needs both. Although Marxism recognizes that capitalism is a system of social relations backed by physical force, primacy is assigned to economic; the sex and gender system too, is material in the full sense of the world, with expression in economics among other things. Marxist agues that if capitalism will be abolished, it would melt away male supremacy. Feminism on the other hand, tries to challenge male supremacy themselves, and not count on communism.
Since the beginning of capitalism, women have always been tied to their domestic tasks, thus affecting their chances of working out side the domestic sphere. Women’s tasks of budgeting the money her husband earns doesn’t promote economic equality. Sympathy employs women, but it pays less than what women deserves. Rivalry and competition between men and women in the workplace always exist, but as usual me always win. Men’s class strategies against capital have been distorted by the fact that they took form of the maintenance of a patriarchal hierarchy. Skill differentials and unique right of men to a family wage have been justified by trade unionists. They demand that men must be paid higher because they the ones who are bringing the family up. The accepted arrangement for a free domestic labor hinder them to explore their potentials.
The patriarchal system of relations are at the level of our idea. Meaning ascribed to men andwomen expectations of way they behave are implicit definition of what is work and skill. These maleideologies and prejudices are all ideas, and the author suggested that it is impractical to changethese ideas, because ideas are all expressions of practices. What then can we do? How can wechallenge and deconstruct the socially constructed behaviour that affects every lives?
