===================== 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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