Conclusions

Abstract

The central concern of the book has been the reconstruction of the political economy of family-based production from a feminist perspective. The reconstruction I have proposed has a number of dimensions and implications for the meaning and practice of political economy. The most obvious is its incorporation of a theory of patriarchal gender relations. Just as important, it builds on two other themes already emerging in the literature on agrarian change, and well established on a wider canvass. The first is the development of a post-structuralist or humanistic, interpretation of Marxist political economy; an interpretation concerned with social relations as lived relations, actively constituted through the processes of subjective meaning and interaction (Sayer, 1984). The second is a broadening of horizons from a narrow focus on the process of production, as capital accumulation, to the processes of consumption and livelihood.