===================== 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 ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]