| Abstract: | The paper addresses the question of the changing modes of women's subordination during the transition to capitalism, comparing experiences from Europe and Latin America. In spite of the historical differences between the two areas, it is possible to infer that capitalist development had some similar effects on the structure of the family and on family transactions. Social ideology equated the loss of productive functions of the family to the weakening of its economic role in the society. This approach ignored the new integration of the family in the reproductive cycle of the economy. The family unit became unilaterally symbolized as emotional and parent-child, husband-wife relationship were represented only as love relations. Effectivity became the medium through which oppression and power within the family were concealed. The family maintained the inequality of rights and duties between husbands and wives albeit in a new form. The essential feature of the new mode of women's subordination was the ambiguity of the position of the mother-wife. As she became more emotionally subordinated, the women gained more centrality in the family life. This centrality provided some women the alternative of defining themselves as subjects and gaining ideological control of children, a possibility that did not exist to the same degree before industrialization. |
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