Gospodynie domowe. Izolacja jako opresja [Przekład: Ewa Bodal i Nelly Strelau]

Abstract

This article is based on current research into the culture of young working class housewives at home with young children. The research is conducted by tape-recorded interviews in their homes and covers many aspects of women’spersonal experience both before they were married and in their present situa- tion. The article will concentrate on their present role as housewives and mothers and their understanding of this role in relation to their previous ex- perience as wage labourers. It focuses on the isolation of women within the privatized sphere of the home, and attempts to present isolation as one of the ways which these women experience oppression and to locate the experience within the structures of capitalism. Although it is recognized that there is no simple way of ‘reading’ accounts of subjective experience, I would hold thatthey do point to the sites of structural contradictions, however indirectly. I also think, as is argued by Sheila Rowbotham (1973), that women’s subjective experience reveals a ‘sense of oppression’, and this oppression I would see ashaving a material basis.