Most family firms are dependent on family labour, particularly 'on the sweat of v^ves and children' (Bechhofer and Elliot 1981:194). Thus, no study of small enterprises is complete without looking at 'the family' and its relations to the economy. The analysis of family enterprises is problematic for many Marxists because political economy and domestic economy are seen to be in opposition, counterpoising economy and family; production and reproduction. While Marx acknowledges the necessity of the reproduction and maintenance of labour to capital, it is left to the natural instincts of labour as the following comment shows:
The maintenance and reproduction of the working class is, and must ever be, a necessary condition of the reproduction of capital. But the
capitalist may safely leave its fulfilment to the labourer's instincts of self- preservation and of propagation (Marx 1977 [1887]:537).
The site of this reproduction and maintenance, 'the family', appears to fall outside the scope of Marx's analysis in Capital (Kuhn 1979:47). This approach assumes that in capitalist societies family and the economy occupy separate realms (Zaretsky
1976:23).
Although early women's movements and writings (Millet 1971; Firestone 1970), acknowledged the dichotomy between family and economy, they did not challenge the Marxist assumption (Zaretsky 1976), nor did the feminists engaged in what was termed the 'domestic labour debate' (Close 1989; Himmelweit and Mohun
1974; Smith 1979). This debate focused on the exploration of the significance of domestic labour as a special form of work which centres on the productive or non- productive character of household work, and the extent of its autonomy from the capitalist mode of production (Redclift 1985). Another area of discussion by
feminists which has contributed to this debate is concerned with the issue of women in the paid work force, the sexual segregation of labour and equal employment opportunities (see for example Acker 1991, 1992; Amsden 1980; Anthias 1980; Beechey 1979; Bradley 1989; Bruegel 1979; Cavendish 1982; Gannage 1986; National Women's Consultative Council 1990; Game and Pringle 1983; Mumford
1989; Pringle 1988; Poiner and Wills 1991; Phizacklea 1990; O'Donnell and Hall 1988; Sharpe and Broomhill 1988; Walby 1988). The central issues of this debate have been concerned with occupational stereotyping, low wages, dual labour markets and deskilling. There has also been considerable debate on the historical role of gender in the development of specific aspects of the labour process, mostly in relation to advanced capitalist societies (Redclift 1985). Although all three of these areas of research have challenged the many assumptions made about family, and in particular about women and work, they have had little to say about women in small family businesses. The problem with much of this analysis in advanced capitalist societies is that women's labour and the processes of reproduction are often analysed within the dualistic framework, where work and home are considered separate sites of production (Molyneaux 1979). This is not the case in family enterprises, such as logging firms.
While the feminist analysis of women's work in advanced economies has tended to treat domestic and wage-work separately (Molyneaux 1979), literature on gender and development in less advanced countries has been more fiiiitflil in
revealing the number of ways in which household and economy intersect (Agarwal 1988; Beneria and Sen 1981, 1982; Beneria and Roldan 1987; Bennholdt-Thomsen 1984; Boserup 1970; Deere and de Janvry 1979; Deere and Leon de Leal 1981; Harris and Young 1981; Heyzer 1992; Hobley 1990; Ireson 1991; Jain and Banerjee
1985; Mies 1986; Morvaridi 1992; Redclift and Mingione 1985; Rao 1991). Much of this literature argues that 'an analysis of the relationship between the family and the labour process must be central to any account of the mode of production as a whole' (Redclift 1985:94). I argue that this approach, which places the family at the centre of production, is not only applicable in developing countries but is also useful to understand family firms in more developed societies.
In advanced societies, the intersection of household and work has been studied mostly in relation to family farming in North America (Boulding 1980; Colman and
Elbert 1984; Elbert 1987; Ghorayshi 1989; Godwin and Marlowe 1990; Haney and Knowles 1988; Reimer 1986; Rosenfeld 1985; Sachs 1983; Stover, Clarke and Janssen 1991), the United Kingdom and Europe (Bouquet 1984; Gasson 1980,
1988, 1992; Marsden, Munton and Ward 1992; Shortall 1992; Whatmore 1991) and in Australia and New Zealand (Alston 1990a, 1990b, 1991a, 1991b, 1995; James
1982, 1990; Williams 1992). It seeks not only to examine women's activities on the farm and in the household, but also to relate them to broader issues in rural society (Gasson 1988; Whatmore 1993). There is a growing recognition of the importance of women's issues in rural society as sociologists and feminists have begun to
penetrate the 'invisibility surrounding rural women' (Alston 1990a). In Australia, for example, gender issues have been raised in regards to the power relationships and public decision-making in rural communities (Dempsey 1992; Gray 1991; Poiner
1990; Rew 1989); rural work (Baxter et al. 1988; Clarke 1989; Dempsey 1992; Gibson, Baxter and Kingston 1990); in community organisations and leisure (Dempsey 1989, 1992; James 1989; Clarke 1989); and domestic violence (Coorey 1990). This study draws most heavily on the literature on women in family farms in its attempt to integrate family and work into a cohesive framework for the analysis of logging firms.
The family
Before attempting to integrate the spheres of work and family it is necessary to define what is meant by 'the family'. Even though it is a popular ideology with vast amounts of historical and intellectual work written about it (Barrett 1988), the term 'the family' still remains a 'slippery phenomenon' (Barrett and Mcintosh 1991:7). For many feminists 'the family' is:
an ideological construct, since the structure of the household, definition and meaning of kinship, and the ideology o f ' t h e family' itself have varied enormously in different types of society (Barrett 1988:199)
To use the term 'family' without qualification reinforces the familial ideology that the nuclear family is a timeless and universal unit of social organisation. Feminists have long challenged the ideology o f ' t h e monolithic family' which has elevated the nuclear family, with a breadwinning husband and a housewife, as the only legitimate family form (Barrett and Mcintosh 1991). This ideology has also been criticised for reflecting white middle-class assumptions, while ignoring other experiences of family life by other races, ethnic groups, and by gay and lesbian couples (Thome and Yalom
Harrison (1977:335) argues that to challenge the patriarchal relations which 'sustain the frozen apathy of village life' it is necessary to challenge the essential nature of the family, and disaggregate its basis. Connell (1993:121) also advocates that it is necessary 'to unpack the family' in order to understand gender and family relations. Given the naturalistic assumptions of 'the family', Barrett (1988) even argues that it may be better to cease using the term 'the family', and focus instead on household, kinship and familial ideology. Whatmore (1993) also suggests breaking the concept o f ' t h e family' into these three component elements. Rapp, Ross and Bridenthal (1979) suggest that it is useful to distinguish between 'households' and 'families'; households are residential units sharing resources, consumption and housework, whereas 'families' refer to the ideologies and meanings of kinship. Kinship refers to basically two types of social organisation, ties of blood (filial relations) and ties of marriage (affinal relations). There are, however,
methodological problems with using the household as an unit of analysis as a number of studies on household economies in developing countries point out (Agarwal 1988; Jain and Baneijee 1985; Heyzer 1992). In using the household as a unit, the
asymmetrical gender roles, and the domination reflected in those roles tend to be ignored (Roldan 1985), rendering the subordination of women in household units invisible. The specific realities and situations faced by women are neglected by focusing on the household (Rao 1991). This study disaggregates the household by focusing on the patriarchal gender relations between men and women in their social roles as husband and wife. In the following section, gender inequalities and
patriarchy are be discussed.
Patriarchal gender relations
Patriarchy is a useful concept to understand the invisibility of women in logging firms. Patriarchy has been used as a central concept of analysis by which the nature of women's oppression in society may be understood. Many feminists argue that there can be no understanding of the nature of contemporary capitalist society
without placing the oppression of women at its centre. Walby (1990) argues that the concept of patriarchy is indispensable for analysing gender inequality. However, debates on patriarchy and gender inequality show that there is no consensus about the meaning or status of this term. Walby (1986:5) has usefully categorised theories into five main groupings in which gender inequality is theoretically insignificant or non-existent; is a derivative from capitalist relations; results from an autonomous system of patriarchy, which is the primary form of social inequality; results from patriarchal relations so intertwined with capitalist relations that they form one system
of capitalist patriarchy; and is a consequence of the interaction of autonomous systems of patriarchy and capitalism. These are discussed in turn.
Much of mainstream social stratification theory has in the past treated gender inequality as theoretically insignificant. Some sociologists, such as Beteille
(1977:21) ignore the inequality between men and women, seeing the situation only that: 'there are two major manifestations of inequality in contemporary societies ... property and social class and race.' Parkin (1972) argues that women's position in the stratification system is largely determined by their families and that the position
of the family is determined by its male head (Parkin 1972:14-15). Others such as Goldthorpe and his colleagues (1980) assume that the family and household is the unit of analysis of stratification, and that men largely determine the position of the family. Goldthorpe attempts to justify this view, that the class position of married women is determined by that of their husband's, because women's paid work is of such a limited significance that it is an inappropriate basis to identify women's class (Goldthorpe 1983). It is widely recognised that this treatment is inadequate because women are rendered invisible, significant numbers of people do not live within a nuclear family (Acker 1973; Allen 1982; Delphy 1984; Walby 1986), women's employment, and earnings within many households is indeed significant, and the inequality within the household is often overiooked (Walby 1990).
The literature that attempts to derive gender inequality from capital relations may be found within the domestic labour debate which attempts to specify the place of house-work or domestic labour within capitalism. Although it often raises the issue of gender inequality, it focuses on the relationship between domestic labour and capitalism. The major contribution of this debate has been to establish that domestic labour should be considered as work, and that-the relations under which this work is performed is central to the oppression of women (Walby 1986).
Secombe (1974) argues that domestic labour is unequivocally work, and the work is necessary to reproduce labour on a daily and generational basis. He contends that domestic labour creates value because it is eventually incorporated into capital through the husband's labour power.
When the housewife acts directly upon wage-purchased goods and necessarily alters their form, her labour becomes part of the congealed mass of past labour embodied in the labour power. The value she creates is realised as one part of the value labour power achieves as a commodity when it is sold. All this is merely a consistent application of the labour theory of reproduction of labour power itself, namely that all labour produces value when it produces any part of a commodity that achieves equivalence in the market place with other commodities (Secombe 1974:9) .
Most of the literature on the domestic labour debate agrees with this premise, but has differing views on the type of work that domestic labour is. Some, like Dalla Costa and James (1972), see domestic work as production. They argue that housework is work, that it is central to capitalism, and that it is productive of both value, and surplus value, because the product becomes incorporated in capital. Others, such as Himmelweit and Mohun (1977), contend that housework is not production, but is consumption, and is productive in the sense that it produces use- values for immediate use. While, Smith (1979) argues that while domestic labour is a necessary condition for the existence of capitalism, it is external to the capitalist mode of production. There are many problems with the 'domestic labour debate' (Harris 1983; Molyneaux 1979; Kaluzynska 1980). First, there is opposition to the premise that domestic labour is directly exchanged on the market with capital, and that it produces value. It is argued by some that the lack of market exchange means that it is impossible to ascertain the value of domestic labour, and that domestic labour is not exchanged directly with capital and therefore does not produce value for capital (Smith 1979). The most serious problem with much of the debate is that, as Harris (1983:194) points out, it does not 'throw light on why domestic labour is exclusively female . . .'; nor does it confront the real issue of the interests of men in the perpetuation of domestic labour.
Another approach to gender inequality taken by feminist scholars is that gender inequality cannot be reduced or derived from any other social system; patriarchy is seen as the primary form of social inequality. In this analysis, 'men as a group dominate women as a group and are the main beneficiaries of the subordination of women' (Walby 1990:3). One of the first comprehensive studies of the oppression of women using the concept of patriarchy was done by Millet (1971). Patriarchy for her means not the rule of the father, but the rule of men over women as a universal mode of power relationships and domination, which is all pervasive, penetrating class divisions, different societies and different historical eras.- McDonough and Harrison (1979) criticise Millet for simply replacing class determination with sex in the
theoretical analysis of the position and oppression of women; an approach they find inadequate in generating a theory of gender inequality. Firestone (1970) argues that the biology of reproduction is the basis for women's subordination to men, and that the material base of patriarchy is the work women do in reproducing the species. She believes that Freud grasped the crucial problem of life, sexuality. Hartmann (1981) acknowledges that the importance of Firestone's work lies in her assertion that there is a material base to patriarchy, but criticises her for placing too much emphasis on biology and reproduction. Beechey (1979) also criticises Firestone for being a biological reductionist and rejects those analyses that use the concept of
patriarchy as a universal social system autonomous from capitalism. Beechey (1979) sees patriarchy as a term applied to specific institutions within particular modes of production. She believes that a satisfactory theory should be historically specific and examine its form in particular modes of production. Barrett (1988) similarly sees the over-arching use of the term in an autonomous way as inherently problematic
because it is ahistoric and assumes that relations between men and women are
unchanging. As Williams and Thorpe (1992) notes in their work, the use of the term patriarchy must be confined to particular cultures at particular times.
Another category of theories of gender inequality is capitalist patriarchy (Walby 1986, 1990) . In capitalist patriarchy, gender relations and capitalist relations are so intertwined and interdependent that they form one system. Eisenstein (1979) argues that capitalism needs patriarchal relations in order to
survive and vice versa; they are neither autonomous nor identical systems, but should be regarded as being fused into one. Walby (1986) claims that capitalist patriarchy is an advance over a patriarchal or capitalist approach each taken alone because it acknowledges the impact of capitalist relations on patriarchy, without reducing gender inequality to capitalism. Walby (1986) acknowledges Eisenstein's (1979) work as important in that it reveals how patriarchy and capitalism are both important in the determination of gender relations, but criticises it for not going far enough to explain the conflicts between patriarchy and capital.
Rather than focusing exclusively on either capitalism or patriarchy, the dualist approach argues that both are important (Walby 1990). Dualist writings fall into two major groups; one group which allocates different spheres of society to the determination of either patriarchy or capitalist relations; and the second which sees patriarchal and capitalist relations articulating at all levels. Kuhn (1979) and Mitchell (1975) fit into the first group which confines patriarchy to the general area of
ideology, culture and sexuality. Hartmann (1981:18) fits into the latter group by defining patriarchy as a 'dual system' in which patriarchy and capitalism are treated as analytically independent:
set of social relations which has a material base and in which there are hierarchical relations between men and solidarity among them which enables them in turn to dominate women. The material base of
patriarchy is men's control over women's labor power. That control is maintained by excluding women from access to necessary economically productive resources and by restricting women's sexuality. .. Patriarchy is not simply hierarchical organisation, but hierarchy in which
This conception of gender inequality recognises that patriarchy and capitalism are analytically independent, but that they are interrelated. The major problem with this conceptualisation of patriarchy is that the division between the spheres of capitalism and patriarchy are usually too distinct (Walby 1986). Young (1981) argues that positing patriarchy as a distinct system of production almost invariably leads to a division between family and economy, with the specific relations of patriarchy
located in the family. Game and Pringle (1983) also see this dualism as problematic, arguing that it is the separation between patriarchy and capitalism that is in itself the problem. They argue, as do I, that 'sexual division of labour is not "functional" to capitalism, but, rather, is a defining feature of it, as central as wage labour or surplus value' (Game and Pringle 1983:14). Connell (1993:103-4) also supports this
position by seeing that gender relations are:
a deep-seated feature of production itself They are not confined to domestic work, or even the division between unpaid domestic-work and paid work in the industry. They are a central feature of industrial
organisation too.
He proposes a conceptual fi"amework that is able to examine the complexities of patriarchal gender relations by distinguishing between 'global' or macro-relationships of power, and 'local' or micro-situations. He adopts the term 'gender order' to refer to the macro-level of power in which women are subordinated to men in society as a whole; and 'gender regimes' which refers to the power relationships between men and women in particular households, workplaces and other settings (Connell
1993:111). The strength of this fi-amework is that the relations in the gender regimes of the family and the family firm can be examined as an integral part of a