Women, Work, Welfare, and the Preservation of Patriarchy

Abstract

Historically, women have been regarded as unemployable, both because they have been considered physically and morally unsuited for wagework and because law and custom limited their ability to do wage labor by demanding that they do the work of homemaking and of caring for the young and the old. Today, however, most women are in the wage labor market. The central thesis of this Article is that present federal labor and welfare policy "resolve" the conflict between the traditional assumption that women cannot and should not work outside the home and the reality that they do, in ways that are systematically injurious to women and families.