Feminism

In the works written over the last decade and a half, Fraser has elaborated upon this key insight. Building on classical Marxist feminism, she argues that capitalism is a social order that institutes a historically arbitrary divi­sion between paid labor and unpaid social-reproductive activities (such as childrearing and caregiving), with the latter being inherently gendered and assigned to women.

The capitalist economy depends on the free reproduction of labor power. At the symbolic level, however, such dependence cannot be acknowledged because it would mean admitting that reproductive labor is a highly valuable form of work and should be compensated. The capi­talist economy therefore has a systemic need to disavow its depend­ence on the sphere of social reproduction.

How is this disavowal achieved? Precisely through the culturally elaborated gender subtexts of key economic phenomena such as the “family wage” that rein­force and naturalize the gender division of labor, obscuring its arbi­trary character.