ABSTRACT
In chapters one and two, I attempted to show how in explaining the resurgence of homework, one needed to look at the sexual division of labor, and specifically women’s unpaid household labor, to see how and why wageearning work increasingly finds its way into the home-and how this is typically a many-sided strategy. As writers such as Johanna Brenner (2000) have indicated, it is theoretically insufficient and politically mistaken to argue that women’s domination and domestication are primarily the effects of ideology. Or rather, that “ideology,” if understood only in the domain of consciousness, is insufficient. On the contrary, Brenner argues that sexual “inequality” as measured by pay and hours of work, domestic labor, economic “status,” and property ownership, rather than an ideological effect, is an effect of ongoing divisions of labor which practically and materially link women, as sexually divided labor, with biological and social reproduction. One would have to take note of the thousands of popular women’s magazine articles on so-called “supermoms,” i.e. those with fulltime caregiving and income-earning practices, to see how the time and
value dilemmas of simultaneous production and reproduction typically get resolved with powerful truisms like, “you don’t have to choose between work and family, you can do it all!” Analysis of contemporary women’s magazines leads to the unmistakable conclusion that there is no more powerful ideology around than what is “in practice”: in the beginning there were women working sixty to seventy hours a week, then there were “supermoms.”
