The advent of capitalism created “the economy” as a seperate sphere, disconnected from other aspects of life. In a massive wave of expropriation, millions of peasants were forced off their lands and made to work in factories that were located somewhere other than where they lives, thereby creating the now common distinction between the workplace and the home. The new system created a new form of gender relationships – while it was the men who went to earn the wage, women were supposed to stay in the home, look after the kids and provide the necessary regeneration for the working male so he could turn up for work the next day. 

Of course this gendered allocation was always a more ideological than actually existing one – just as today women still have to flock into the factories by the thousands. As an ideology, however, it was powerful enough to create the binary, heterosexual gender system as we know it today: the world of wage labor required individuals who were rational, calculating, aggressive and competitive. The world of the home needed to be populated by people who would be gentle, managable, emotionally supportive and nurturing.

Nurturing that is necessary to continually reproduce labor power, can not be organized in market relations. Consequently all that can not be expressed in terms of ‘value’ becomes literally ‘devalued’ and feminized. 

Some feminists saw the exclusion of women from the “male” sphere of wage labor and commodity exchange as the core problem. Others condemned capitalism as an inherently male project and called for a a revaluing of female emotional labor. Both traditions, while offering important insights into the gendered nature of economic practice, do not challenge the very distinction between ‘male’ commodity exchange and ‘female’ economies of giving and the persistent hierarchy between the two.

The heterosexual binary is built into the capitalist ecomony to such a degree that it is impossible to overcome without overcoming capitalism itself. The gendered division of labor is not so much an extension of patriarchy into capitalism but rather a genuine product of it. Capitalism creates the modern notion of ‘masculine’ and ’ feminine’.