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This chapter considers the work of liberal feminists Christie Hartley and Lori Watson. Hartley and Watson argue that political liberalism can approve gender-egalitarian interventions on the grounds that gender inequality threatens citizenship. I agree with Hartley and Watson that the liberal concept of citizenship is the key to justifying progressive gender-egalitarian political interventions. I argue, however, that their argument establishes only that a hierarchal gendered division of labor threatens citizenship. This is problematic because the gendered division of labor is not essentially hierarchal, and morally objectionable harms inhere in its non-hierarchal components. Moreover, the policy initiatives licensed by a hierarchal diagnosis of the gendered division of labor could exacerbate the harms that inhere in its non-hierarchal features. Hartley and Watson’s argument may offer a partial reconciliation of liberalism and feminism, but on its own it could further entrench the injustice of the gendered division of labor.

Culture and gender are closely intertwined with biological factors creating predispositions for sex and gender development. However, sociocultural factors are critical determinants leading to gender differences in roles and behaviors that may be modest but culturally important. Culture has profound effects on gender-related behavior, values, identity, roles, and how these are regarded in various social contexts. Culture governs the socialization of children, the tasks children are taught, the roles adult men and women adopt, and the expectations that govern women’s and men’s attitudes and behaviors. Culture provides the context in which gender roles, identity, and stereotypes unfold as well as parameters regarding sexual behavior. Culture affects variation in gender-related behaviors between individuals within a cultural group as well as variation between cultures. Culture can maximize, minimize, or even eliminate gender differences in social behaviors and cognitions. Indeed, it is impossible to separate gender and culture.

This chapter explores how the economic difficulties of the 1970s and the early 1980s placed great pressures on the already weakened framework of support for women's household work, hastening its demise. It explains that rather than causing the breakdown of the male breadwinner family, the decline of the traditional manufacturing sector and the stagnation of men's wages simply accelerated a process that was well under way. It clarifies that financial pressures forced many men to accept their wives' employment. It discusses that new forms of home and work were emerging, though the foundations for such family life were denied to many, especially those at the bottom of the economic ladder. It concludes by showing how the old gender division of labor, in its different forms, broke down differently for black and white women by education.

Chapter 2 draws on theories of the body, gender performativity, and dress, to show how gender was inscribed on the body to create the appearance of difference, which, in turn, shaped all social relations. The chapter analyzes aspects of indigenous gender ideology and concepts of the body as expressed in life-cycle rituals, native-language metaphors and terminology, and beliefs pertaining to the calendar, tonalism, and nahualism. The chapter argues that concepts concerning the fluidity of the body and gender identity undermined essentializing ideologies. The work examines the construction of gender through labor, drawing on Nahua and Bènizàa rituals as two central case studies. The chapter also considers clothing and adornment and speech and behavior, which served as mechanisms to stabilize the body and impose identity. Chapter 2 concludes with a discussion of cross-gendering which occurred when individuals adopted the dress, labor roles, and mannerisms of the “opposite sex.”

This chapter argues that a liberal society cannot remain stable over time if its institutions are structured on the basis of an assumption that one’s sex will dictate the kind of work that one does. Stability in the relevant sense includes a moral dimension, and this chapter shows that moralized stability is threatened by arguing that the institutionalized assumption that sex will dictate the kind of work that one does is an affront to the political value of autonomy. When gender norms and social institutions built upon the assumption of breadwinner/homemaker specialization constitute formidable obstacles to the enactment of gender-egalitarian lifestyles, the citizenship interest in stability will license—and in fact demand—interventions to remove those obstacles. The criterion of reciprocity thus positively calls for gender-egalitarian political interventions under these circumstances. I go on to argue that the circumstances demanding those interventions obtain in the United States today.

This chapter examines the very earliest forms of oppositional activity that emerged in the wake of Fulgencio Batista’s coup. Focusing on the often-ignored period of 1952 to 1955, the chapter demonstrates that a vibrant, inclusive, and creative urban civic opposition movement was in the making. This movement developed a wide repertoire of public protest actions that included both women and men and often took place in consumer or leisure-oriented spaces such as movie theaters, department stores, and commercial thoroughfares. But the rise of state violence and the turn to armed opposition fostered a gendered division of labor in the anti-Batista movement. Many men henceforth sought to join the urban underground or the rebel army, while many women remained active in organizing, strategizing, or propaganda efforts.

This chapter examines how the increasing scale and degree of specialization of commercial farms and the trend toward combining off-farm labor with small-scale farming affected the gender division of labor on farms and power relations in farm families in the Nanticoke Valley during the early twentieth century. It shows that both of these economic shifts generated a new form of class stratification in rural society. To some degree, this divergence corresponded with ethnicity; many immigrant families who moved to run-down or abandoned farms kept some family members working in the factory while others labored on the land to build up the enterprise. The chapter first considers the complex gender and intergenerational relations within farm families and rural communities before discussing how fundamental changes in the rural economy took place. It also explores how farming families resisted capitalist transformation so successfully for so long and what roles rural women played in sustaining diversifed family farms as well as the community networks on which they relied.

This chapter addresses the legitimacy (roughly, the permissibility of using collective political power or force) of political interventions to change the gendered division of labor (of, for example, unpaid housework and childcare). Interventions such as work time regulation, subsidized dependent care provisions, and paid family leave initiatives are promising approaches, but they appear to violate a basic liberal requirement that exercises of political power be publicly defensible within the justificatory community of reasonable citizens. This in turn requires that the intervention must be neutral among the conceptions of the good that citizens may reasonably embrace. Although the author believes that gender egalitarian interventions can be so neutral and egitimate, the chapter argues against the view that they can be neutrally justified as a necessary means to remedy unjust distributions.

This chapter returns to the research questions posed in the introduction. The chapter concludes that norms of gender are changing; beautification is more important to gender socialization than ever, is more reliant on artifice, and is labor-intensive, diverse, and global. Beauty products, ideals, and images circulate through media and industry marketing, but also through the reproductive economy, where word of mouth, family, and friendship are as important as fashion magazines. Who benefits from the globalizing beauty economy is structured by the pronounced gendered division of labor within the beauty industry, and between it and other industries. As has been documented in other industries, and despite women’s overwhelming participation in beauty commercialization, masculinities are generally rewarded over femininities. Additionally, the most valued femininities are momentarily, if at all, achievable ideals of youth and beauty. The chapter concludes with suggestions for further research in Mexico, globally, on beauty, and with youth.

This chapter explores the working relationships between women and men on a range of family farms in the Nanticoke Valley. More specifically, it considers what shaped the gender division of labor in farming families and how their work affected and reflected intergenerational and marital partnerships. It shows that the composition of the household affected the work assigned to growing children. Persuading at least one child to remain on the farm and enabling him or her to take over the enterprise while supporting the older generation was a key goal of those who had inherited their land. Gender and intergenerational relations exemplify the shifts that occurred as a family enlarged its farm operation and became an intergenerational partnership. This chapter examines the factors that created substantial variations in families' working relationships over time, as well as discrepancies between the work rural women actually did and how others perceived their role in the family enterprise.

The foragers’ tiny-scale context has been largely overlooked in discussions of foragers’ gendered division of labor, child-care, and alloparenting. Ethnography spanning ritual, foraging pursuits, narratives of conjugal attachment, child-care practices, and notions of growing up reveals the cultural salience of conjugal bipresence and children orbiting conjugal nuclei. Cautioning against cross-scalar slippages, this chapter shows locals’ primary concern to be not with the parent-child attachment but with the spousal attachment, and it reveals a cultural register in which children’s departure from their parents at a young age does not index individual autonomy as the essence of growing up but, to the contrary, the development of budi (~ the skills of living with diverse others).

This chapter considers the role that political strategies based in household headship complementarian worldviews can play in transnational feminist praxis. The central contention is that such doctrines cannot furnish feminist ideals, because despite offering role-based reasons for men to promote individual women’s well-being and offering women opportunities for agency, they cannot ground moral criticisms of sexist oppression. However, the nonideal universalist position developed in this book cautions against dismissing headship-complementarian strategies altogether; in cases in which women’s well-being is very low or women only understand themselves in headship-complementarian terms, there may be provisional reasons for accepting such strategies. The argument is made partly through a discussion of whether headship complementarians can condemn norms and practices that support intrahousehold inequality.

Nearly two hundred volumes of physiology and hygiene textbooks, together with governmental and other materials, are investigated in this chapter to illuminate the intricacies in drawing the moral landscape pertinent to sex education in early republican China. Frequent revisions of official directives testify to the fast changing political and intellectual arena of China. Shifted emphases between reproductive functions and puberty sexuality exemplify the professionals’ uncertainties in getting to the early teens. Pedagogical publication boomed and writers experimented on both textual and visual materials. Bio-medicine was flagged as entrance to learning one’s own body, but a healthier nation promoted in the New Life Movement eventually relied on the individual’s self-discipline not necessarily required of scientific erudition. Some may have found secretion system more useful than anatomical information to integrate physiology, psychology and pathology into the mechanism of sexual differences, so much so that a gender division of labour was proposed to fulfill both personal responsibilities and to echo contemporary political rhetoric. Not all endorsed such elaboration, however, and the zigzag between sexual differences and gender equality became a noteworthy parallel to the tug-of-war between sexuality and reproduction.

Grey Osterud completed Putting the Barn before the House: Women and Family Farming in Early Twentieth-Century New York, which was supported by the Prelinger Award, twenty years after her first study of gender and generational relationships in a rural community. This chapter reflects on the constraints and opportunities of being a public historian, as well as the dynamic connections between feminist activism and grassroots-oriented research and education programs. It traces Osterud’s trajectory from Boston’s Bread and Roses through living-history museums and labor union workshops to her current vocation as a freelance editor helping authors in African American and women’s history reach wider audiences.

Chapter 8 provides a review of the many topics covered throughout the book and emphasizes how, notwithstanding some minor transformations, the organization of eldercare in Italy continues to rely heavily on the presence of im/migrant women workers. This presence is crucial not only for Italian families that without im/migrant women would be crushed by the growing demands of care placed upon them but also for the Italian welfare state that due to the work of these women is able to manage the current eldercare crisis without addressing the changes that have occurred and are occurring in Italian society. Instead of addressing the growing need of the Italian elders and their families with an appropriate discussion of the role of the welfare state and the restructuring of its services, the Italian state utilizes contradictory immigration policies to provide a market solution to the current eldercare crisis.

This chapter explores women’s contribution to parliamentary debates—how women access participatory time to contribute to debates through party mechanisms, which concerns they are likely to prioritize (for example party, constituency, issue-based), the extent to which they participate, whether if at all they foreground their identity as women (or other aspects of identity), and the ways in which their contributions are received and interpreted (promoted, lauded, acknowledged, prevented, ignored, silenced, or delegitimized) by others form the substance of this chapter. We argue that we should be concerned about the consequences of reproducing a gendered division of labour where only women MPs, and not men, are tasked to represent ‘women’s issues’, or where women MPs are only tasked to represent ‘women’s issues’ and not other issues.

Since the florescence of research on women in society, the gender division of labor has been viewed as a key to understanding women’s socioeconomic position. By the mid-1970s, the view held sway that women’s cross-cultural subordination could be explained by their universal or near-universal attachment to the domestic sphere of activity, while men enjoyed the higher prestige of the public sphere. A flurry of studies appeared, documenting the unequal and undervalued role of women in the family and household. By calling attention to the previously “invisible” activities carried out daily by women, analysts undertook to transform the androcentric social sciences. This chapter suggests that while the production/reproduction framework moved us forward to important new lines of inquiry, taking these conceptual categories as unproblematic may result in some confusion. The author considers the case of market women in Andean Peru to illustrate what she views as the strengths of the concepts discussed here, as well as some shortcomings, for an examination of these Latin American women workers.

Women never seem to have entered the thinking of those who developed and ran government work camps. After the Great War, rising unemployment among women workers led to a number of training programmes designed to produce domestic servants, and from the mid-1920s these increasingly included residential training centres. Initially, these were jointly developed with the Australian government, which sought to recruit white young women with domestic skills. After 1929, the training centres were redesigned to produce domestic servants for the British labour market. The centres were managed nationally by an arm's length non-governmental body, which provided a forum for female policy makers to develop their own labour market measures, but these were always constrained by the focus on domestic service.