Feudalism, Capitalism, and then Socialism. The dialectical materialist progression from one form to another that move forward with all of the power of historical necessity. What can we learn from the Hegelian dialectic in an age so far removed from Marx? In an age where contest and contingency are high in the analytical saddle, what remains of progress?

What is left of the analysis that blends Marxism and Feminism to allow us insights into industrialization? A great deal, I think. It still forms a major part of what remains of the grand narrative framework into which we fit our history. Chapter 3, "Capitalism and the Family," recounts the now classic formulation in detail. As a heuristic device, it still works. In the early modern period, capitalism had freed the family from feudal constraints. Here the Puritan family can be understood as a breaking with the feudal past. Under petty bourgeois capitalism of the yeoman form, workers own the "means of production." With the rise of industrial production, they work for wages instead. As industrialization proceeds, women are relegated to the home away from wage labor. Feminism is then seen as a reaction against this condition, this degradation of female work. Here is a problem with his analysis, however, since recent scholarship has shown that it was the ideal of domesticity that fueled much of the 19th Century's feminist movement. As Christine Stansell has shown us, under the guise of moral reform women were empowered to seek roles in public.

Affected by an overarching sense of presentism, he begins with an overview of feminist literature and theory in Chapter 1, "Feminism and Socialism," instead of covering the material in part 3. Assuming a prior knowledge of at least the outlines of Chapter 3, Zaretsky wrestles immediately with the relationship that class has to the family in the United States. He notes that feminists brought the concerns that were considered private into the public sphere in the 1960s. He considers the works of Kate Millett (Sexual Politics, 1970), Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex, 1970), and Juliet Mitchell (Women's Estate, 1971). They all point to a separation of the public and private (which we are supposedly supposed to know from current events), and feminists seek to overcome it, in much the same way as socialists of the same period did as well. His contends in Chapter 2,"The Family and the Economy," that in the 1960s and 70s both feminism and socialism called for the recognition of "socially necessary work." Housework is work as well, though devalued by capitalism. So long as women are relegated to the role of housewives and mothers, and men are kept in the workplace, there can be no socialism.

When we look at the sweep of the 19th century, we see tremendous diversity and uneven development. Yet, the transition from small shop production (closely tied at first to the home) to large scale manufacture did change the workforce in major ways. We exit the 19th Century a very different nation because of this process. In the 20th C we inhabited a nation where most people were working for wages -- selling their labor as a commodity. This was not the case in the first half of the 19th C. As with the earlier transition away from Feudalism, the family was intricately involved with capitalist production in providing the private support for workers who go out into the work force. Women's work in the home mad (and makes) men's work at the factory or office possible. The most telling comment in the book comes when he points out that the "yeoman" is really the collective labor of the household. (p. 34)

What does this transition to industrialism do to the family? In Zaretsky's words:

Since the rise of industry, however, proletairianization separated most people (or families) from the ownership of productive property. As a result 'work' and 'life' were separated; proletairianization split off the outer world of alienated labor from an inner world of personal feeling. Just as capitalist development gave rise to the idea of family as a separate realm from the economy, so it created a 'separate' sphere of personal life, seemingly divorced from the mode of production. (p. 30)

In a wage work world where it is difficult to find meaning in your job, the retreat to the "private" realm of the family or a personal life becomes possible.

It is not, however, until Chapter 6, that he returns to a consideration of "Proletairianization and the Rise of Subjectivity." Under the pressure of rising industrialism, "the transformation of bourgeois individualism" took place. As the 19th C progressed, society divided between workplace and the home. Home became the location of sentiment, subjectivity and individualism. Rugged individualism (in the Marxian phrase, petty bourgeois) resisted the impact of mechanization. The family's role was central to maintaining individualism against the loss of control over the means of production (apprenticeship, craft skills, etc.). As the artisans became wage workers, the family space assumed new meaning. "The proletarian family" now consisted of the proletarian worker, his "housewife," and the children. They met, not in the workspace, but in the family space of the home. In considering "personal life and subjectivity in the twentieth-century United States," Zaretsky points out that the idea of family issues being "personal matters" is one outcome of this separation. Objectivity belongs to the work of work. Freed of the personal, men can enter the 20th C workforce to sell their labor. 20th Century "Life" happens outside of work. And increasingly "Life" is a matter of consumption of the goods produced by industrial labor. Devoid of its role in production, the family becomes the center of consumption.