ABSTRACT
In market-economy high-technology countries, the discounting of unpaid work, most of which is at present done by women, has left them primarily in the role of consumers concerned with prices in shops and with heat, light and other consumption costs. They have been further and further removed from the market for labour to the point where many oppose labour organisations which are presented to them as the chief reason for rising prices, although their own livelihoods and living standards may depend to a great extent on payments to some member of their family for work in transforming raw materials into consumable products. Nowhere has this divorce between the consumer- woman, on the one hand, and producers and service workers of both sexes on the other, been greater than in the greatest of all industrialised market economies, the United States of America.
