The Class Analysis of Households Extended: Children, Fathers, and Family Budgets

Abstract

Following the publication of Bringing It All Back Home in 1994, applications and extensions of its conceptualizations raised new issues and questions. Some of these had not been foreseen when its authors first developed their class theory of households (Cameron 1996/97, 2001; Gibson 1992; Gibson-Graham 1996; Fraad 2000; Safri 2005). We propose here to address three of those issues: parents’ rearing of children, the value connection between feudal households and capitalist wages, and husbands’ household labor. Our overriding concern is to extend and deepen the class analysis of households and further elaborate the insights it makes possible. To this end we also make grateful use of research on household labor, even though not undertaken with our class focus (Shelton and John 1996).¹