Work seen as predominantly womens is devalued in fact because value in a capitalist economy comes through property snd money.
The womens movements emerges specifically at the point women start getting paid.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/help/lib.htm Lynn Beaton has analysed this process in some depth. Not only were women moving out of unpaid domestic service in marriage or other forms of bondage and servitude based on kinship, and into the labour market, but as wage-workers they were producing domestic appliances, foodstuffs and clothing and providing services such as hospitality, nursing and other forms of “women's work” which then supplanted the same work formerly performed outside the commodity market. That is, in the advanced industrial countries, on the basis of developments in manufacture and in technology and work-organisation generally, during this period women's work was socialised i.e commodified.
Putting it slightly differently, women transformed their labour from labour which took place outside of the exchange of commodities into labour which, like that of other workers — had value. It is no wonder then that this movement soon gave rise to the demand for Equal Pay and more fundamentally given the gender segmentation of the labour process, for “Equal Pay for work of Equal Value” and the struggle to prove in practice that women's work had value equal to men's work.
And what happens when such work is commodified? Its low pay but hard work.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/social.pdf Another strategy is to commercialise child-care, thus moving the job into the market and giving women the choice of doing the same work for a wage, or doing a different job while their own kids are cared for in a childcare centre. This is probably more effective in giving women a choice, but it runs into a couple of problems. So long as child-care is stigmatised as “women’s work,” then it remains low-paid and women move out of their homes into low- paid jobs doing “women’s work.” There is no way out of this trap until the gender division of labour is broken down. Once women are recognised capable of the same kind of work as men, then women can command wages equal to their male partners and make working for a wage worth putting the kids into child-care. Meanwhile, with child-care no longer stigmatised as “women’s work” she is more likely to be left a fair share of domestic duties and child-care centres are treated as seriously as other service. In other words, the “location” — “women’s work” — has to be deconstructed altogether, and “woman” no longer a socially constructed location.
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Making “women’s work” everyone’s responsibility, means getting men to take on that work and that generally means a fight for those stuck with “women’s work” not so much to change themselves or get better recognition for what they do (these too) but to get other people to accept their responsibility.
Men are doing more at home but its still women who primarily experience the tension between paid and unpaid work a ross their day to day life.
And one makes a mistake in assuming a gendered essence where what is manly is often a reflection of the characteristics entailed in positions where men are the majority as it meets some needs of society structurally.
https://pages.nyu.edu/jackson/future.of.gender/Readings/DownSoLong--WhyIsItSoHard.pdfC onsider another example showing how beliefs about sex differences cloud people's analytical vision. How often have we heard question like: will women who enter high-status jobs or political positions end up looking like men or will the result of their entry be a change in the way business and politics is conducted? Implicit in this question are a set of strong assumptions: men have essential personality characteristics and cultural orientations that have shaped the terrain of high status jobs and women have different essential personality characteristics and cultural orientations. The conclusion is that and women's entry into these positions unleashes a conflict between their feminine essence and the dominant masculine essence that has shaped the positions. Either the positions must change to adapt to women's distinctive characteristics or the women must become masculine. (It is perhaps telling that those who raise this issue usually seem concerned only with women entering high-status positions; it is unclear if women becoming factory workers are believed immune or unimportant.) The analytical flaw here i assuming that masculinity has shaped the character of jobs rather than that jobs have shaped masculinity. In her well-known book Men and Women of the Corporation, Rosabeth Kanter argued persuasively that the personality characteristics associated with male and female corporate employees really reflected the contours of their positions. The implication is simple and straightforward. Women who enter high-status positions will look about the same as men in those positions not because they are becoming masculine, but because they're adapting to the demands and opportunities of the position, just like men.
Basically one attributes the appearence of men commonly doing something as originate internally from their nature but abstract the social relations which inform their activity.
It goes down the path of not explaining what one observes but simply reifying those observations in an arbitrary association to something somehow meant to be specifically male but causal of behavior.
https://epistemicepistles.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/a-wittgensteinian-critique-of-conceptual-confusion-in-psychological-research/ Referentialist views of language treat words as standing for, or referring to, objects. While Wittgenstein’s Tractatus[9] espoused such a view, he later came to think one of the Tractatus crucial failings was that it ignored the difference between alternate kinds of words and uses of language.[10] Consider the words ‘table’, ‘blue’ and ‘hot’, these do not all signify objects, and understanding the words does not in each case involve knowing what objects they stand for. Rather, according to Wittgenstein, it involves knowing how the words are used.[11] Consequently treating reference as central to meaning gives a one sided and inaccurate view of language.
However in psychology this referentialist doctrine seems alive: In the misplaced reification of concepts as ‘concrete’ tangible things. As Gould[12] argues, there is a strong tendency to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own. However on a Wittgensteinian take, we can reasonably be sure that no such ‘concept-entities’ can be found among the neurons in a person’s skull, they are concepts not concrete things. Confusing the two is equivalent to confusing a “map with a territory.” [13] Essentially it involves taking a pattern of behaviour, naming it, then taking this named thing to be a physical entity, then viewing someone’s behaviour as caused by having this entity inside them. Confusing psychological concepts with inner entities, like so, leads to postulating metaphysical explanations which actuality explain nothing. It is equivalent to saying a volcano erupts because it has ‘eruptability’ inside, or to say someone’s nervous behaviour is caused by an inner ‘neuroses’. This is merely to repeat the observation that they tend to behave in a nervous manner. The explanation merely repeats the description of the initial behaviour, yet the vacuousness of the explanation is concealed by pointing to a mystified inner entity; ‘neurosis’. This form of referentialism survives in psychology and leads to much conceptual confusion, distorting our notion of causality and providing only vacuous explanations[J1] .[14]
Or to out it more crudely.
“ A Negro is a Negro. He only becomes a slave in certain relations.” - Karl Marx.
Abstract one from their real world relations and they still retain such influences in their being but you analytically cut off the ability to explain their being because you render them an idea without what is essential to them. I cannot explain a single action outside the wider context and activities that give meaning to my action.
Similiar what is considered masculine is but temporary norms based on present demographic trends and activity. Some which history has shown to not be true to an inner nature but of structural barriers.
Overall I am not sure what feminist theorists you’re speaking of as much as women you might be exposed to in media. Because it comes off too crude and lacking nuance that it seems an attack on a particular conception which is possible when one lacks specific examples. I can speak broadly about others yet no one by not using a specific exemplar that is representative of a trend which can be contested.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics
- By JohnRawls
- By skinster