The Reproduction of Job Segregation by Sex: A Study of the Changing Sexual Division of Labor in the Auto and Electrical Manufacturing Industries in the 1940's

摘要

The study seeks to account for the persistence of job segregation by sex and the process through which it is continually reproduced. The thesis is that the ideology of sexual division, which constructs male and female labor as noninterchangeable, imposes the collective interest of capital on individual capital, even though this conflicts with the short-term economic interest of individual capital in reducing wage costs by substituting the cheap labor of women for that of men whenever possible. Collective capital has an interest in sex segregation because it facilitates the reproduction of labor power through unpaid housework, because it maintains a supply of cheap female wage labor, and because it divides the labor force by sex in political terms. This framework is used to analyze the history of the sexual division of labor in the automobile and electrical manufacturing industries as it developed in the early twentieth century and was subsequently reproduced. The impact of the economic mobilization for World War II and the reasons for the reconstruction of the prewar sexual division of labor in both industries after the war are traced in detail.