emmanuel reynaud holy virility the social construction of masculinity

The means and the arguments used, individually as well as
collectively, to keep women out of the labour market, are many
and varied. One of the principal methods of dissuasion is, of
course, to limit the salary that a woman can hope to earn by
working, so that man can declare 'It's not worth a woman's while
to go out to work!' What is more, he generally backs up his
reasoning with the traditional 'Woman's place is in the home' or
the trendier 'Wage-earning's a load of shit, you're not going to
fall for it, are you?' And when these arguments are on the wane
their supporters in government resort to chanting the old adage
about woman returning to the home.
Authority
Ιt is as a class that men, in order to maintain woman's financial
dependence, attempt to restrict her access to the labour market.
In 'Capitalism, Patriarchy and Job Segregation by Sex', [1] Heidi
Hartman shows, for example, how male workers in England and
America coped with the threat the development of capitalism
represented to male workers' power over women. She traces the
crucial role they played, through their unions, in restricting
women's participadon in wage labour which could have
provided them a base for material independence. Since then, in
the West, the situation has settled down. Capitalism is so well
integrated into patriarchy that it sometimes manages to
disguise its existence; and the contradiction between the
interests of men in general and those of capitalists in particular
have mostly been resolved by giving women lower salaries, a
double working-day and barring them from or allowing them
only limited access to many professions.
[74 / Holy virility]
At present, in the middle of the economic crisis, two opposing
tendencies are developing: on the one hand, women are worse
hit by unemployment, and exhortations to keep them at home or
send them back there are becoming increasingly strident; but
on the other, their underpaid work is an incitement to employ
them in order to keep the cost of wages down. And so many
traditionally masculine professions are being feminised as soon
as the wages offered become 'feminine' ―on condition, of
course, that the prestige attached to the job is not too high. The
most recent and striking example comes from the United States
where the rate of pay for an ordinary soldier in the armed forces