===================== HES POSTING ================== 
 
I'm not quite sure where Mary Schweitzer got the notion that "Marxists  
and other socialists believed that if workers made a "living wage"  
then...women could stay at home where they belonged" -- and it is this  
last clause that I contest here. 
 
Granted, Marx's (so we don't confuse him with "other socialists")  
analysis of the wage does bring into account the costs of reproduction,  
child-raising, etc., and within the context of a patriarchal family  
arrangement, this would indicate that one partner (and that would be the  
woman in the 19th C) would be generally confined to household activity  
(and, with luck and successful organizing, the family wage would be  
sufficiently high to allow a decent standard of life - or value of labor  
power if one prefers. But such remarks were confined to the analysis of  
the wage, etc. under capitalism. Marx's argument, as I understand it, is  
that women's liberation can only come through economic and social  
independence. And this is stated forthrightly by Bebel in Women Under  
Socialism and Lenin in various writings (there's a collection entitled  
Lenin on the Woman Question - yeah, i don't like the title either, but  
it's not my choice). 
 
So, presumably, woman's proper place is not "in the home" but in larger  
society, occupying the same roles, etc. as men in an independent and  
equal relationship.  
 
John Henry 
 
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