crifice the wage of the higher earner. In spite of the fact that more women work outside the home, and that they are now 54% of university students in a country like Australia, the gender stereotypes are being reinforced, not broken down. Even the conservative Institute of Family Affairs has commented that with women concentrated in part time work and men increasingly working longer hours, even with the best of intentions, individual families find it virtually impossible to challenge the stereotype of the woman taking major responsibility for children.
This very real inequality in the family, caused by inequalities in the workplace, is backed up by the derogatory way women are treated in advertising, popular film, and literature. Men are encouraged to see women as at best, passive objects of their desires, at worst, not worthy of any respect or control over their bodies. They are also encouraged to see their В«masculinityВ» as strong, aggressive, domineering, stoic, dismissive of sensitivity. Combine all of this with the tendency for capitalism to turn everything into a commodity, sex is something for sale, ie. prostitution, and so is something that can be taken by the strong from the weak. So instead of a haven of love and rest, the family is actually one of the most violent places for women to be. Most sexual violence against women is by men they know in the family.
The reality of the workplace backs up the inequalities and violence in the family. Women's low pay makes it difficult to leave a loveless home, making them dependent and emphasising men's authority in the family. The concentration of women in the lowest paid jobs means a lack of women who exercise authority, reinforcing men's sexist attitudes and reinforcing women's lack of confidence in their own worth. This affects every area of ​​our lives from the most public to the most intimate. Women who are public figures are subjected to endless discussion by the media of their dress sense and their appearance. Women who are aggressive and confident are ridiculed or treated as threatening and domineering for the same behaviour that is praised as «ambition» or «strength of character» in men. In personal relationships, most women find it difficult to assert their own desires. Research into women's sexual activity found that a majority of women in heterosexual relationships rarely experience orgasm, not because they are «frigid» as the myth makers would have us believe, but because they cannot bring themselves to tell their lovers what they enjoy and need. The reason women gave for denying their own pleasure is very revealing. Most instinctively knew that the man assumed his role to be the initiator in all things sexual. To take away his control would be to undermine his confidence, and threaten the whole basis of their relationship.
The inequalities between women and men, while based in the social situation of how capitalism organises work, are reflected in the way women and men are socialised from birth. Studies have found that mothers smile more at their male children when they're active, such as using building blocks, moving around, but smile more at their daughters when they are quiet and passive. Parents tend to interrupt their daughters more readily than their sons in conversation. Other studies show that adults respond in radically different ways to a child in the same circumstances, depending on whether they think they are male or female. The gender stereotypes so central to women's oppression are so much part of the way we are socialised from the earliest age, discriminatory behaviour towards women goes largely unnoticed. Research into the way people communicate revealed that men initiate most topics of discussion, interrupt others vastly more than women, and generally dominate social situations. These learned responses begin with our earliest communications with other human beings and are often treated as if they are purely psychological, or even accepted as representative of women and men's different В«NaturesВ». But they cannot be understood outside the social circumstances that produce the inequalities between women and men.
These studies, while important in understanding how our socialisation into the stereotypes works, and how women and men come to view themselves and others in gendered ways, do not explain why women's oppression cannot be rooted out under capitalism. One way to understand why is to look at who benefits from this state of affairs.
Who gains from women's oppression?
Some feminists agree with Marxists that women's oppression is centred in the family. However, we disagree about who benefits from the family. Heidi Hartmann, still widely read in universities, popularised the idea that the family was the result of co-operation between ruling class and working class me...
