Notes on the History of Women's Work in Western Society: from differences to gender labor inequalities.

Abstract

This article aims to reflect the light of feminist historiography on the place that the works of women occupied in the development of Western culture that far surpass the role that the capitalist mode of production has given it. Specifically, what is intended to be demonstrated by means of bibliographic review is that the capitalist production relations that favor patriarchy, in addition to imposing the nuclear family model, also provide narratives proper to history and, in this model, there is no room for explanation of women contribution to the material and symbolic formation of culture. Erased from memory, women work is treated as an exception to the rule and never as a constant. Not for nothing, we invariably come across texts indicating the entry of women into the world of work as something recent, when, in fact, since the news has been made, female work was decisive for the maintenance and development of family nuclei and their respective communities. In this sense, in order to understand the specificity of women work in capitalist society, it is necessary to make an analysis of the totality of this double structure that uses so-called natural explanations to relegate women to precarious conditions of existence and work in the process of constituting the capitalist mode of production.