Resultado de las variables de estudio

Sayer ( 199 1) contends that Marxism developed as a means of explaining the social inequalities that existed in the production of wealth between two social classes of people - the owners of capital and means of production (the bourgeoisie who included owners of land and industrialists) and the workers (the proletariat). The relationship between these classes of people is argued as one of difference and labour exploitation (Sayer, 199 1 ). For example, when workers' production output is greater than the cost of labour, surplus value or profit results to the landowner or industrialist. Workers have little access to this profit except through their agreed wages, usually an insignificant proportion compared to the wealth produced by their sweat. By workers, Marx meant men in capitalist modes of production since women were not allowed to engage in paid employment. Paid labour for women was considered a threat to male workers by Marx who believed that women's labour was cheap and could be exploited by capitalists to replace male expensive labour thereby disenfranchising the male family wage earner. Capitalists working with labour unions in the nineteenth century aggressively lobbied governments to outlaw women paid labour to protect male labour, thus condemning women to the domestic sphere of home.

Engels, who was Marx's collaborator, analysed the family system in relation to capitalism. He argues that the bourgeois nuclear family came about because of the need to pass on inheritance to legitimate heirs in the family tree that exclude women. Engels argues that owners of wealth had to find ways of bypassing their wives by controlling them in the marriage system through a subtly devised male system of gender role socialisation and excluding them from paid labour. That way, women were rendered

Chapter Four: Difference in perspectives used to study girls and technology 74 without income of their own and resigned to socially assigned roles for their survival. However, capitalists saw a loophole in the system and began employing women as casual cheap labour bringing down labour costs and maximising their profits. Women's

oppression thus began to have a material basis where women could be used as cheap labour for the same job as men but earning less. In the Zimbabwean family situation, men oppress women, but in a capitalist society, women feel the double burden under both men as a class and capitalism as a system. While men in the Zimbabwean colonial

system were allowed to own land, women were prohibited. Whatever women produced in the fields did not belong to them even when the husbands were away in urban areas working. The husbands were free to spend the money they earned in waged labour and to dispose of the crop that the wives produced as they wished when they came back home (Made & Lagerstrom, 1 985).

Feminists' development of Marxist theory was to link women's subordination and exploitation by men to difference and the economic system of capitalism through the avenue of Engels' nuclear family (familialism). Marxist feminists argue that capitalism pervades all forms of contemporary society life producing inequalities between those in

positions of power and those who are ruled, between those who own the means of production and those who expend their labour for a reward in the production line, and between males and females (Barrett, 1980). Women as a class, in particular, are

considered in unequal terms to men and subjected to various forms of oppression. These forms of oppression are considered to have taken the form of exclusion from paid labour as in Engels' nuclear family and unpaid domestic labour caring for men (the labour force) and raising children, who are the future labour force. By socialising women in their perceived roles as mothers, the system is able to reproduce itself and keep women away from the public sphere of life.

According to Barrett (1980) and Hartman (1978), the root of all women's

exploitation begins in the home through the family structured system. To Barrett (1980), this family structure of the father as the economic provider of the family and the mother as the carer and provider of unpaid domestic labour appear naturally given but masks male tendencies for control. To Marxist feminists like Barret, gender inequalities will only be destroyed when difference and class divisions are destroyed.

Marx's work has been criticised by feminists for its muted stance concerning gender inequality and oppression. Barrett (1980) and Mannathoko (1999), for example, have argued that Marx assumed a male waged labourer in all his writings. Others have critiqued the masculinity of Marx's writing as symbolising male domination and part of the problem of a male knowledge system that pervades modem capitalist society today. Marx' s emphasis on social class division and capitalism in the oppression of women, and

Chapter Four: Difference in perspectives used to study girls and technology 75 its failure to give adequate or equal space to issues of patriarchy, has also been a target for feminist criticism. Another criticism has centred on the push for access and equality of opportunity. Research carried out in Zimbabwe and South Africa show that increasing access for girls to education does not necessarily guarantee significant life quality as culture and issues of socialisation have also been seen to limit girls' progress (Gwaunza & Nzira, 1997; Jassat & Mwalo, 1995).