Patriarchal Capitalism

Family-based farms and businesses were key to early capitalist development, active participants in trades that could make them better off. They were not, however, capitalist institutions.

The patriarchal family as a productive unit offered both advantages and disadvantages compared to a capitalist firm or corporation.¹ Family mem­bers often stood to gain from cooperation and mutual aid but enjoyed little flexibility. The head of the household could not hire or fire his basic labor force, and that labor force had even less scope for individual choice. Male household heads were obligated to provide for their dependents, and could not simply lay them off if they became sick or disabled. On the other hand, they were required to provide only subsistence, rather than a share of total family product. In terms of political economy, they maintained political and legal control over any surplus.²

Restricted economic opportunities outside the family put women and youth in a relatively weak bargaining position. Adult men could abandon their families more easily than their wives and children could abandon them. The subordination of men was typically a phase in their lifecycle, as sons short of the age of majority; the subordination of women changed only slightly when they left their fathers' households to become wives and mothers.

Family-based enterprises were typically integrated into a larger economic system shaped by inequalities based on class and race as well as gender. Feudal, slave, and tenant farming systems superimposed another layer of control over decentralized patriarchal authority. In France, feudal relations remained strong in the countryside until after the Revolution. In the Southern United States, slavery shaped the entire social order. In many areas of Britain and the northern United States, by contrast, family farms either paid rent or owned their own land, making their own decisions about what to produce and how. Even where property was unequally distributed, the opportunities for gain encouraged participation in the growing market economy.

Relations within both families and firms coevolved, and wage employ­ment did not initially create a strong disjuncture between the two. Factory employment was often preceded by a period of proto-industrialization in which family members worked side by side producing such commodities as cloth or clothing for sale.⁴ With the advent of factories, families sometimes continued to work as a group in new locations, with the father claiming the wages for his wife and children. Even when family members went to separate workplaces, men retained legal control over the earnings of their wife and minor children until the late nineteenth century in the United States and Britain, and until the early twentieth century in France.

With the expansion of wage employment to a larger percentage of individuals over a larger proportion of their lifecycle the implications of a new system of organizing labor were gradually realized. One of the earliest forms of wage employment was a paid version of the work that women and children typically performed—domestic service. By the early seventeenth century, a large percentage of English youth—about 60 percent of those between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four—worked as servants in other households.⁵ Such opportunities offered the young a modicum of independence. But as long as they hoped to inherit assets, whether in the form of access to land, ownership of land, or a family enterprise, their economic futures were tethered to their parents. And as long as women were assigned primary responsibility for reproductive work, their productive contributions and their collective bargaining power would remain quite limited.