In a message dated 98-03-14 05:06:03 EST, Dennis writes:
<< Also, for a country were half the population in the early Fifties lived in
non-urban areas, and where women were largely confined to familial jobs
and brutalized by fearfully medieval gender ideologies, this expansion of
the low-wage workforce gave many women a ticket out of the prison-house of
the domestic sphere.
That said, it's true the power and glory of Sony and Mitsubishi was
(and is) built on the backs of rudely treated, miserably compensated and
frightfully overworked working women. Which is why, I suspect, that
the class politics of 21st century Japan are going to be the politics of
gender.
-- Dennis >>
You raise some interesting points. While I think there is SOME truth to the
fact that women leaving labor in the home for labor in the market does have
some psychological/social/political effects which promote the 'freeing' of
women in some senses, I think the double burden of two sites of exploitation
also wears women down as a group. This is primarily because women don't
really 'leave' the labor in the home, they keep the labor in the home and ADD
the market labor. So they are then responsible for two places -- home and
work, with the structure of responsibility inflexible in both locations.
Further, the fact that women are now earning some money tends to be used by
men and society to shift the entire burden of reproduction of the next
generation on to the shoulders of women. Hence the huge increase in single
headed households in most industrial countries. (I am not sure about the
increase in single households in Japan, but single headed households in the
Asian community are on the rise in the USA.) In short, the responsibility for
household labor does not become a shared one between men and women and, at the
same time, the fact that women now earn a wage is used as an excuse by many
men to off load their responsibilities as a parent.
maggie coleman [EMAIL PROTECTED]
