ABSTRACT
This chapter examines both the contribution of women’s wages to the household economy and explores the control, disposal and conceptualization of women’s incomes within households across classes and income groups. Cultural practices which discriminate systematically against categories of persons, such as Indian widows and often against female members generally, in the distribution of familial resources are rendered invisible because the family is conceptualized as a voluntary contract, not a set of power relationships. The effect of women’s wages and incomes on family-based households outside the context of the advanced capitalist countries has only recently begun to receive attention. The redistributional ideology of the common fund does seem to have some ideological continuity with the concept of income as property-in-common to which all members have some customarily determined right of access, albeit differentially structured.
