Not Your Father's Capitalism

"To bustle about in search of livelihood is merely another form of bustling about managing a home," noted anthropologists Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog in their classic 1952 study of the shtetl.¹ This observation captures the interconnection between generating income and maintaining a household that is central to political economies, capitalist no less than subsistence. But the new history of capitalism neglects such bustling. Looking at the economic role, unpaid as well as paid, of Jewish women is good to think about for the project of engendering the workings of capitalism as both an economic system and a set of social relations. For Jewish women in various times and places have always worked, though not necessarily for a wage and not always doing what we conventionally label as work.

Riv-Ellen Prell does much to unlock these relationships in her sweeping "The Economic Turn in American Jewish History: When Women (Mostly) Disappeared." She illuminates the limits of financialization and markets for seeing the agency of women, though regarded from a gendered angle we can deconstruct the ways that normative understandings of manhood and womanhood pervade discussions and practices of credit and trading as much as valuation of skill and the definition of work itself.² She illuminates the significance of kinship or the family as a network for economic transactions and capital formation, power within households and between households (based on gender, class, citizenship, and even congregation/religion), and global movements of capital, labor, and goods. She underscores the necessity to study masculinity. Most significantly, she reclassifies the historiography into two sets of binaries that prove actually to be interactive: production and consumption, structure and culture. A third component to these sets, however, is essential to fully capture the gender of capitalism and the necessary work of women: reproduction.

In the 1970s, with the spread of women's liberation, the shift to a service economy, and the rise of neoliberalism, feminist theorists in the US and Western Europe began a fresh discussion on the relation of reproduction to production and the place of family and domestic labor in economic life. The Marxist-derived domestic labor debates highlighted how reproductive labor consists of activities that produce labor power—activities that transform raw materials and commodities bought with a wage to maintain the worker daily and generate future workforces. Women have undertaken these tasks, often along with wage work.³ Some would claim that such labor generates use value, but not exchange value, and thus is valueless in the Marxist meaning of value associated with exploiting labor power. Others, notably Leopoldina Fortunati, would argue that reproductive work already is part of exchange, that the housewife (and the prostitute) both work for capital in reproducing the labor power of the male worker.⁴ Also referred to as social reproduction, such work is about the making of people through the tasks of daily life. These activities are both material (like feeding), emotional (like love), and assimilative (like transference of norms and values), whether occurring in the family, school, shul/temple/church/mosque, or community.⁵ In its commodified form, reproduction moves out of the home to institutional settings and returns to the home when workers, like domestic servants, perform such labor for a wage.

Reproduction, we might add, is essential for consumption as well as production, as usually understood. Not all forms of consumption function the same. Some purchasing of goods and services keep afloat the co-ethnic shopkeeper as well as the multinational corporation and all the links along the supply chain. Sartorial choices matter. Other consumption is for the making of people in two ways. It was, after all, the bread giver who transformed the wage into meals, as narratives whether imaginative or ethnographical, of the Jewish mother testify.⁶ Additionally, consuming the right clothing and other products signaled arrival: the assimilation that Prell so well flags as important work that Jewish women as modernizers in Europe and beyond performed by decorating bodies and homes and establishing acceptable community practices. Putting together objects for display as well as use is a form of reproductive labor that produces...