Meg Luxton

The UN, women, and household labour: Measuring and valuing unpaid work

Abstract The United Nations and its member countries have committed to measuring and valuing unpaid work, especially womens family care giving. As ways of measuring and valuing are developed, social policies are beginning to take account of unpaid work. This paper argues that the ways in which unpaid work is measured and valued have significant implications for women and any social policies based on them.

Two Hands for the Clock: Changing Patterns in the Gendered Division of Labour in the Home

More and more married women with young dependent children are employed outside the home. Studies conducted in the early and mid-1970s suggested that when married women took on paid employment, their husbands did not respond by increasing the amount of time they spent on domestic labour. These studies reached the general conclusion that married women were bearing the burden of the double day of labour almost entirely by themselves.

Marxist Feminism and Anticapitalism: Reclaiming Our History, Reanimating Our Politics

These are hard times for those of us who loathe capitalism—with its inevitable exploitation, competition, and rewards for selfishness and greed, along with its hostility towards values of compassion, economic sharing, co-operation, and solidarity. The capitalist classes, especially their Rightwing advocates, have done a thorough job of smashing their opponents. One of their greatest victories has been the way they have almost made alternative visions and the movements supporting anticapitalism seem impossible. They have, with the help of many of the regimes of twentieth-century communist governments, even stolen our language and our history. So many activists talk about anticapitalism because the terms “communism” and “socialism” have been robbed of their earlier, positive meanings. But while the power of neoliberal capitalist and Right-wing attacks is clearly responsible for the current rout of anticapitalist movements worldwide, I suggest that those of us trying to remobilize anticapitalist politics might do well to re-examine our own iterations of our histories and what we can learn from them. As Sheila Rowbotham has noted, political movements have two major weaknesses that leave them vulnerable to misinterpretation and defeat.1 They have no way of handing down memory, so the history of their struggles is easily forgotten. When the social and political transformations they struggle for appear impossible, they are liable to revert to the reiteration of protest. In what follows, I argue that both Leftwing and feminist movements have either ignored or distorted the politics

Is the Everyday World the Problematic? Reflections on Smith's Method of Making Sense of Women's Experience

Our interest in doing a review of The Everyday World as Problematic stems in part from a desire to acknowledge (and make visible in the milieu of political economy) the important role that Dorothy Smith has played, and continues to play, in the development and defense of feminist scholarship. Working in the 1970s as one of the few feminists in Canada with a secure position in academia, Smith provided a whole generation of feminist students with the rare opportunity of doing their work free from the fetters of anti-feminist scholarship. In collaboration with her students she has contributed significantly to the development of feminist research and to the effort to transform male-stream academic practices and knowledge.

Overemancipation? Liberation?: Soviet Women in the Gorbachev Period

An air of excitement and optimism pervaded the USSR in the mid to late 1980s during the early days of glasnost. In this new climate, women increasingly spoke out about their dissatisfactions and the difficulties they faced. The question of womens position became a subject of serious public discussion, debated with a frankness rarely seen in the western media. There was widespread recognition that women have enormous difficulties juggling the demands of paid work and family responsibilities. There was also a conviction that the pressures women experience generate serious social problems and therefore, that social change must include improvements for women.