the Female Body GOVERNING

The Feminization of Labor
Productive Bodies 139
Jessica Weiss (2000) explains that the decrease in the labor force
preceding World War II is the condition that permitted older and
married women to enter into wage labor. The low birthrates during
the Great Depression resulted in a decreased labor supply in the 1950s.
The labor force was further affected as women began to marry earlier
and left paid labor for unpaid labor. In response, employers, in need of
workers, relaxed their policy of hiring single women only and began to
employ married women. Employers were willing to make part-time work
available, accommodating married women with school-aged children.
As women entered the paid labor force and as the need for laborers
increased after World War II, hiring requirements altered to include
the female worker and capital accommodated the lifestyles of married
women to benefit the ends of production.
Capitalism accommodated life to meet the needs of production
by subsuming human relations into its fold. In this sense, employers
“cooperated” with the lives of married women in the form of part-time
labor, allowing women to continue their social roles as mother and
spouse. “In every moment of the development of the capitalist mode
of production,” argues Negri (1992), “capital has always proposed the
form of cooperation” (p. 154). However to produce productive labor,
Negri continues, “this form had to be functional with the form of
exploitation” (p. 154). Hiring married women as part-time workers
exploited their labor with substandard pay and an absence of benefits.
Corporations cooperated with the existing social relations of women’s
primary roles as mothers and wives by offering the flexibility of parttime
labor to accommodate labor needs while maintaining traditional
forms of exploitation. Capital does not only respond to collective social
movements; but more important, capital is always responding to the
real social experiences of living labor.
Jane Jenson, Elisabeth Hagen, and Ceallaigh Reddy (1988) explain
that as the services sector increased in economic importance along with
the availability of part-time work, more employment opportunities were
available for women and many middle-class married women became
active participants in wage labor (pp. 5–6). Women’s participation in
the labor force and their relation to work was different from that of the
traditional male worker. Women entered into and out of the paid labor
force throughout their life cycle because most middle-class women quit
work when they wed and reentered the workforce when their children
were school-age or when the family desired additional income to purchase