I found Michele Barrett's essay "Capitalism and Women's Liberation" interesting, yet incomplete. Certainly, she presents a thoughtful statement on her perceived shortcomings of capitalism in terms of female equality, and she articulates rather clearly why she does not believe anything other than token progress can be achieved under a capitalistic system; however, her alternative--socialism--is little improvement, if any.
Capitalism, she argues, is not diametrically opposed to feminism; there is nothing inherently unequal about the implementation of capitalistic economic theory. Our historical record, however, leads her to believe that we have proven incapable of producing real equality under capitalism. In short, though capitalism is not responsible for current gender inequality, it is also not capable of challenging it.
Her solution is socialism, or at least a certain flavor of it. She argues that the "actual or assumed dependence of women on a male wage", the unequal distribution of domestic work and childcare, and the "ideology of gender" would all need to be seriously challenged and transformed before feminist equality is achieved--and, by extension, our commitment to capitalism needs to be revised. The fault in her argument--or, at the very least, a glaring non sequitur--is the jump she makes to socialism. The things she proposes need to be changed do not necessarily require a deviation from capitalist economic principles. Ending women's reliance upon a male wage, for example, can begin to be achieved by ending, by law, all forms of discrimination against women in the workforce and granting fair and equitable child-care leave to both parents, not necessarily by tearing down and restructuring the economic foundations of the Western world.
Of course, I have the benefit of hindsight, but the supposed Worker's Paradise (the USSR) was just as rife with unrest, gender inequality, fear, and oppression as any other country, if not significantly moreso. Is this not a sufficient counterexample?
The question, then, is this: Why can we not simply work to change the underlying ideologies of our society vis-á-vis women in the workforce, politics, and the family? Why does any "real" improvement in the system require abandoning capitalistic principles? What we need is not socialist equality; what we need is to completely rethink society's presumed and enforced gender roles.
What we need, in a sense, is a "feminist capitalism."
This is a good post but you need to post about week 2's readings which are concerned with revolution and/or Born in Flames. Please post on that topic and this will count toward week 3's post.
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