(p.95) do not say that women who have children are 'mothers' and therefore liable to be exploited. I say rather that because their work is appropriated women must raise children for nothing. I do not say that 'motherhood explains the appropriation of women's labour} but on the contrary that the appropriation of their labour, affected among other things through unpaid childcare, constitutes women as mothers. Thus motherhood, far from being a natural fact giving birth to exploitation, is a social construct created by exploitation

(p.74) The traditional Marxist categories were not designed to capture the essential features of the sexual division of labor, and it is doubtful whether they are capable of doing the job. Within the public economy, for instance, there is in fact a sharp separation between jobs that are considered appropriate for men and those that are considered suitable for women; men and women rarely work side by side at the same job. The gender-blind categories of Marxist theory, however, obscure rather than reveal this fact. Even more seriously, the central Marxist categories hardly apply at all to the household, which is...

(p.78) By obscuring women's oppression, Marxist theory provides a rationale for its perpetuation. The biologistic conception of procreation legitimates women's continuing responsibility for procreative labor. This responsibility, in turn, hinders women's full participation in nonprocreative labor and legitimates sexsegregation in that sphere. At the same time, the biologistic conception of procreation leads to the devaluation of procreative labor: women's work may be socially necessary, but it is not fully historical and hence not fully human work.

(p.155) The sexual division of labor in different societies has varied so widely that it is notoriously difficult to construct general economic categories for understanding women's work cross-culturally, but one might suppose that it would be easier to develop categories explaining the sexual division of labor within a given society. Even in the case of contemporary industrial society, however, it is far from obvious how to provide a general and illuminating characterization of women's work that goes beyond the tautology that it is done by women.

Woolf’s materialist feminism, envisioned in Three Guineas, can be summed up as follows: the material basis is indispensable for women not only to survive but also to voice their independent political opinions. She proposes three strategies for women to take. First, women should assert their right to have access to independent income, and for this purpose should demand that the state pay for their reproductive work that often limits their opportunity to do waged work. Second, they must object to the very wage system – the system of ‘profession’ in Woolf’s terms – which is indeed in complicity with patriarchy,...