Fear of contraception offered vivid illustration of the gendered double standard of self-interest.

More profound evidence of the effect of patriarchal ideology on classical political economy lay in oversimplification of the relationship between production and reproduction. The two mechanisms emphasized by Malthus in his analysis of population growth—level of wages and age at marriage—represented a small subset of the factors affecting fertility decisions.

The blind spot lay squarely in the core of David Ricardo's labor theory of value. Ricardo correctly viewed labor as a direct or indirect input into the production of commodities. But he never recognized that labor itself was the output of a production process that did not rely on commodities alone. The wages that a worker earned never provided his or her subsistence, either in the long run or in the short. These wages were transformed into services—such as meals—and into replacement workers—namely children— by women's unpaid work, and were conditioned by children's own contribu­tions to the family economy, which helped defray the costs of raising them.

The relationship among individuals, families, and the economy under­went especially rapid transformation in the early nineteenth century. Some of its changing dimensions can be traced through the development of regular national censuses, which documented the expansion of individual wage employment. Appreciation of the significance of this change, however, must be situated in a clear understanding of the structure of patriarchal capitalism. Contrary to the assumptions of historians like Alice Clark, R. H. Tawney, and Karl Polanyi (described in Chapter ι) capitalism did not represent a ‘‘disembedded'' imposition of the pursuit of economic gain. The new institution of individual employment remained embedded in a distinctly patriarchal matrix.