Few scholars would contest that material culture and the myriad social relations associated with it constitute the substrate from which individual and collective identities are constructed. Marxist literature has long stressed that production and the relations of production are the primary mode for the making of social identity--we shall leave aside the for the moment a distinction between objective and subjective notions of social classes--but many of us have stressed that consumption and consumerism are equally modes of identity construction. However, this distinction between production and consumption, when taken as describing a reality that is transhistorical and out there rather than a historically contingent or ideological construction can be highly misleading. In this paper I will argue that while making this distinction (and a further one between consumption and consumerism) might be useful for analytical purposes, we have to recognize that it is, for the most part, a historical and rhetorical product of industrial capitalism. If we were to accept the categorical distinction between production and consumption, we would not only obliterate several key aspects in the making of industrial culture and gender meaning, we would, in a more profound fashion accept modernism's discourse and de-problematize key aspects of our own history. In short, in certain respects we need to annihilate the distinction between production and consumption, then revive it as a conceptual tool.

In this paper I will not offer a tight, highly focused analysis of a specific historical case. On the contrary, my remarks are intended to provoke reflection and discussion on the ways we analyze contemporary consumerism. To accomplish this task, I shall first address theoretical ways of linking production with consumption, ultimately arguing against post-modernist and post-structuralist approaches in favor of more materialist approaches. I will then use my theoretical observations to show their analytical virtues for doing the history of labor and gender. I will then close with a discussion of how my simultaneous affirmation and denial of a link between production and consumption can help us to understand the role of design in shaping material objects. By that strategy, I hope to show how the complicated relationship between production and consumption can be used to understand social, material, and cultural lives.

Production and consumption can be joined by a conceptual fashion in the ways suggested by Baudrillard or Michel de Certeau.[1] For both of these authors, consumption is actually the production of identities--an "economic" act is simultaneously a "cultural" one. In Baudrillard's postmodernist analysis, the specific juxtaposition of image-artifacts, a meaningful conglomeration of meanings, constructs individualized meanings. By this token, the bien pensant bourgeoise of the 1920s would construct her identity by her tea sets or cafetières, her heavy velour curtains, her subservient Breton servant girls, and her late-aristocratic gestures. Similarly, the modernist woman would identify herself by her appliances, her job, her education, her cloche hat, and her drop-waist shift-dress. This mode of analysis is unsatisfying, for not only is it conceptually a bit flat, it places consumption after the fact of production, as if the latter happened in a universe separate from the former. Moreover, it suffers from a basic ahistoricism: we have no way of analyzing change or of knowing really how such a system of objects and meanings came to be. There is, as it were, no motor.

Nonetheless, thanks to the observations of Baudrillard, de Certeau, and some social anthropologists[2], we can easily dispose of moral discourses about frivolous consumption, false consciousness, and diatribes against the creation of needs by advertising. The notion of frivolity in consumption, often tacked on disparagingly a basis for defining consumerism, has been constructed by an implicit inversion of its opposite, virtuous functionality. Behind this there is a Spartan asceticism that refuses to recognize the symbolic aspects of consumption--the use of goods to make socially vital statements about status, deference, and the like--and the psycho-social need for humans to live beyond the classic necessities of food, shelter, clothing, intimacy, and sex. Moreover, the symbolic aspects of gift-giving (among other forms of "frivolity") may be highly functional with respect to attaining and maintaining necessities; gifts of baubles to lovers come to mind, as do paternalistic grants of welfare to employees by their bosses. In addition, arguing the certain consumption activities reflect or construct a false consciousness places the critic on a plane of moral superiority and objectivist absolutism that no longer seem credible in the post-modern age. "False" consciousness assumes "true" consciousness, yet a credible measure of that truth remains tortuously elusive. Marx was among the first to recognize, albeit with a morally condemnatory tone, that a distinction between wants and needs carries little analytical value, as the wants of one era become the needs of the next. Electricity was a bourgeois luxury in 1900 (and the French state taxed it as such), but contemporary lives would be difficult without it. Finally, the wants/needs distinction, when cast in a non-materialist way, reproduces the same sort of pointless moralist discourse as does the notion of frivolity. In order to develop an analytically useful grasp on consumption, we need to get less abstract, less moralistic, and more materialist.

Production occurs not only with preconceptions of consumption in mind, but in the context of implicit negotiations with putative consumers. This is a key aspect, I believe, of the modernist, market-economy era, marked historically by the end of craft-based production, which I will discuss later. Two factors have shaped the character of negotiated meanings and shapes for objects in the modern era. These are, first, the complex fashion through which cultural meanings and artifactual shapes and designs were negotiated between producers and consumers, and second, the historical emergence of not only divisions of labor, but division of spheres in the capitalist economy and the capitalist enterprise, and, ironically, the insufficiencies of the market to mediate effectively between producers and consumers. The first set of factors are approachable in part through techniques borrowed from cultural anthropology and marketing, the second, through political economy and labor studies. The former is largely approachable structurally, the latter historically. I shall address them in that order.

It is a flat and uninteresting truism to contend that production depends on consumption for evacuating a firm's output, and economists' uses of widgets in this respects only misleads us: people do not purchase generic, socially indifferent objects, but highly meaningful goods that carry specific social meanings. For this reason, substitutability, for example, is a far more complicated affair than economists would have us believe. The implicit functionalism and technological determinism behind these economistic notions would also lead one to believe in myths of better mousetraps creating paths to producers' doors. Leaving aside the fact that the content of what is defined as functional depends on what the maker or observer of an object intends to optimize toward--an SST airplane may be functional in terms of transit time but dysfunctional in terms of fuel consumption--we know that the functionally better object doesn't necessarily succeed. Historians of technology could easily catalog thousands of functionally superb devices that for reasons of material infrastructure and cultural practices have failed. Automobile culture in the postwar US has been demonstrably dysfunctional at least since 1973, but trillions of dollars in material infrastructure on the ground (and the social interests dependent on their perpetuation) as well as a cultural myth of automobile-based individual freedom. The material side of this issue is probably obvious here, but the cultural side is not.

Like any form of social interaction or communication, the successful connection between a producer and consumer requires that a dense set of cultural meanings, values and norms be implicitly acknowledged if anything substantial is going to be transferred. The communicative text, as it were, is integral to its social context. One is reminded here of Geertz' famous discussion of the meaning of a wink, and how it means vastly different things in different contexts. Placing a consumer good before an audience, be it the broad public or a carefully-researched target population, requires that the producer assert a set of cultural meanings through which he or she hopes to reach and seduce the consumer. It is within a structural range of the possible that wills to buy, sell, and create meanings occurs. If, indeed, in consumer society goods do make the person, they do so within the existing system of cultural meanings, the envelope of which cannot be stretched beyond each parties' set of available meanings. Pushing the envelope does make the set of cultural meanings shift--that's how they shift--but within relatively rigid constraints, depending on the degree of meaning-closure an object enjoys at a given time.[3] If the identity demands inscribed into an object by the producer lie beyond the consumer's own available set of meanings, the latter will simply resist or remain indifferent.

The consumer, indeed, begins a process of implicit negotiation as s/he contemplates a technological object. Wiebe Bijker and Bruno Latour have pointed out in their respective ways that there are battles among social forces over the shape and meaning of objects, and these conflicts are played out according to the resources each contestant can mobilize to impose his or her agenda.[4] We can extend this to characterize the shape and meaning of the object itself as the product of contention between producers and consumers. For example, in the US, the Bell System envisaged the telephone as essentially a messaging system, and this conception was based on experiences with the telegraph, where the time required to code and decode communications precluded a particularly interactive or synchronous mode of communication. Along these lines, the domestic telephone was conceived as a device for people at home to send messages to grocers, cabbies, spouses, and others, and the early systems were wired accordingly, presuming calls of short duration and thus envisioning a limited number of trunk lines. American housewives, ensconced in their middle-class, owner-occupied homes as they were, soon reappropriated the telephone as a way of maintaining social relationships while staying at home--implying longer communications and a need for more lines. AT&T initially resisted, seeing little interest in making new investments merely so housewives could "chatter", but it soon relented and redesigned the system to accommodate.[5] A closure of meaning, albeit transitory, occurred around a design that was more polyvalent, allowing conversations as well as messaging--and later, radio, data, and fax communication. In this case, the shape and meaning of the system was the product of implicit negotiation between promulgators and users. Successful objects are often constructively ambiguous in terms of their meanings, thus allowing the making of multiple consumer populations. As I have shown elsewhere, the French "home" appliances of the interwar era were inscribed with meanings of housewifery, yet found their major consumers among hotel maintenance staffs.[6] In that case, producers tried to present a set of social meaning about housewifery that were not really in the social lexicon of French women at the time. No negotiation of meaning was possible, and neither the new housewife nor the modern electric home emerged as a consequence.

Lest one believe, however, that the negotiations occur on an equal basis, with all parties having equal power, we must recognize the power one side might have to impose its agenda. Were an producer to try to introduce yet another VCR format with only marginal operating advantages over the current system, consumers' past investments would make them indifferent to the new system. On the other side, despite a current consumer interest in electrically-powered commuter cars that is large enough now to make their production economic, few automakers would be willing to accept the small profit margins the public would expect on such items. In this context, indifference is also power: either side can ignore the other and render the object or the user irrelevant.[7] Hence, for successful negotiation to proceed toward closure, both sides must be active; incomplete or falsified negotiations over the meaning and design of objects can render the object misshapen, dysfunctional, or irrelevant. Closure requires these implicit negotiations.

So far, however, we have only tangentially recognized the social and cultural agendas over which negotiation might proceed. Some of this can be remedied simply by recognizing that many objects have dual material and social functions--the Mercedes-Benz 450 SL certainly provides transportation, along with a smooth ride and considerable horsepower, but it also tells observers that the owner is wealthy. Into this set of problems we can look at the gendered objects of domestic life, from the feminine machine used to sew fabric to the masculine machine used to cut grass. When a sewing machine is found in a commercial establishment, particularly a tailor-shop, it is generally masculine, but in the home, it is feminine. The overall set of cultural meanings and ways of constructing the world, as well as conventional social practices, prescribe the possible meanings of objects as well as the forms they might take. For example, most forms of birth control require intervention on the part of the woman (contemporary counsels to American women--assumed, of course, to be heterosexual--even urge them to have condoms on hand) not because it is somehow scientifically easier for women to be responsible for birth control, but because they have to assume that males are irresponsible. Research in new birth control methods has followed a similar path.

It has not always been thus, as the separation between production and consumption, like that between conceptualization and execution in production, is a historically contingent and structured fact and has not always had to be subject to such tortured and implicit negotiations. Without unduly mythologizing the artisanal mode of production--a definition of a productive mode which, contrary to Rancière's claims, carries considerable analytical power--we can see that the contemporary divergence between conceptualization and implementation so often discussed in the labor-process literature has its counterpart in a later divergence between production and marketing. Under the artisanal mode of closely integrated production and consumption, small-output craft entities (enterprises would be an anachronistic term) shaped their custom-made output as part of the negotiations over price, delivery dates, and the like with the consumer.[8] The shape and meaning of the item to be produced were, respectively, explicitly and implicitly negotiated, the former according to local custom, the latter within the structural constraints of social practice. In this fashion, the analytical and practical differences between producers and consumers were far different from those in the modern era. The market, as William Reddy has observed, was only one of many different ways of mediating social relations before capitalism established cultural hegemony.

In the gradual shift from artisanal to industrial production--the process so well documented in the 1970s and '80s by Charles Tilly and his students--, and as tasks became separated and more finely articulated, the social link between producer and consumer was rent asunder. Mediation between producer and consumer was increasingly performed only through the market and intermediate individuals, from owners to salespersons. As general mercantile retailing emerged as a separate activity, any hope of producer and consumer meeting, either to confront or collaborate, disappeared.[9] The rise of the specialized, divided firm has been amply discussed by Chandler, and we need only note here not only that the functionality of the managerial revolution was perhaps not as great as Chandler has claimed; but also that the restructuring of large enterprises in the last decades of the nineteenth century widened still more the vital link between production and consumption. A gospel of efficiently-produced goods creating their own markets became pervasive.[10] The ideologies of market and technical efficiency were so profoundly rooted that only in the first one-third of this century did industrial design begin to emerge as a distinct corporate function growing out of the marketing and advertising divisions of major firms.[11]

We are familiar with how the division of labor shaped modern conflicts between labor and management, but we are far less astute to the ways that that conflict marginalized the consumer--who, of course, was usually the same person as the worker. The consumer was constructed by parties on each side of the class barrier as a neutral or indifferent party who would merely respond according to the price structure generated by the labor-management wars. By taking the language of markets at face value and not peeling open their internally dialectical character, Victorian analysts from Bentham to Marx consented to allowing or encouraging the possessing (or managing) class to shape not only the objects of necessity and desire, but to invent the consumer as well. By the 1920s, labor's consent to managerial prerogatives to shape consumers--half the consciousness of the worker--helped to create the socially schizophrenic modern industrial worker. Once the ruling class gained that power it invented a new social category, consumers, whose political aspirations were, in the hope of management, congruent with its own. In this fashion, nineteenth-century labor demands for a family wage were perverted in the twentieth to place labor's wage and salary demands at directs odds with the need of consumers for low prices. The unity of home and workplace, of community and factory that had so charged and unified labor's demands in the nineteenth century fractured into contradictions. Most significantly for the study of labor struggles, the lure of individually-acquired goods could form an effective wedge between and among workers. Henceforth, solidarity would be fleeting, rising usually only at times when doubts rose over the ability of capitalism to deliver the goods promised by the consumerist ideology. Moreover, once gender meanings were reinvented to define exclusively men as producers and married women as consumers, married live became even more enmeshed in a dynamic of conflict and promises.

However one might analyze the conflicts and complementarities between production and consumption, by the 1920s it is clear that a new social and cultural phenomenon, consumerism, had emerged. Many have debated how the onset of consumerism was timed, ranging from the fifteenth century to the twentieth[12], but Rosalind Williams' categories are well chosen, if wrongly defined in the end.[13] The mass consumption she sees emerging in the late nineteenth century was not for the masses at all, but for an emerging small retailing, professional, technical, and managerial middle class. These social milieux--the new middle class--emerged as the creations of the modern state and modern capitalist enterprise. As firms diversified and employed more and more white-collar employees, the retail sector grew as never before. While consumer goods were the key mark of distinction for this social stratum and the department store was its icon[14], the pattern of middle-class consumption remained largely emulative, purchasing mechanically-reproduced knock-offs of élite goods, from clothes to carriages, furniture to fantasies. While there were a few items specifically identified with the new middle class--the bicycle during the craze of the 1890s, the camera of the same era--, nonetheless, middle class consumption choices sought to imply that middle-class types had become the equals of their social superiors.[15] The new domesticity of the belle époque with its stress on home economics and consumer awareness lent a scientific patina to a largely derivative extension of élite social practices. Servants were as much icons of social standing as useful personnel in the home.[16]

The new discourse of consumerism used a rhetoric of nineteenth-century economic liberalism, replete with assertions of consumer sovereignty and free choice. Indeed, it is that same language which is used to legitimate the brutal free-market ideology of the present hour. When accepted at face value, those who succeeded were socially at one with the élite, while those who continued to live in poverty were there as a result of their own failures. This effectively linked the middle class politically to the employers, defining a new regime of haves and have-nots and marginalizing the working-class as an Other in an entirely new way. As far as appearances went, the visual chasm was not between those who owned the means of production and those who did not, but between the well-attired and the poor. Efforts of progressive engineers, technicians, and white-collar leaders to forge alliances between themselves and the working-class almost universally failed after 1920, as the lack of resonance to the works of Jules Moch in the 1920s and of André Gorz (in the 1960s) showed.[17]

Consumerism, on the contrary--defined here as an activity for the broad mass of the population--had its own icons, objects, brand names, and marketing campaigns. It had little to do with a spurious distinction between wants and needs, a purported creation of needs by advertising, or a moral discourse on frivolity, except from a few elitists such as Georges Duhamel.[18] On the contrary, it had everything to do with a reconfiguration of class politics in the contemporary era. While the cultural and social aspirations of its framers were to render it emulative, it tended often, especially in the US, to be self-referential, forming the basis for a specifically working-class consumer culture. Moreover, given the income distribution and total disposable incomes in the industrialized world at the time, mass consumerism required goods that could be cheapened through mass production techniques.

In the consciousness of French bourgeois and middle-class consumers, quality could not be mass-produced, so they tended to be uniquely inoculated against the seductions of popular consumerism. For those social groups, an anachronistic craft ethic of small-batch, artisanal-style production marked desirable goods, while mass-produced goods (with the exception of automobiles[19]) were by definition inherently inferior.[20] This did not mean, however, that the sort of construction of identity and difference accomplished through consumer goods, as described by Bourdieu, Baudrillard, and de Certeau did not operate on both sides of the divide between the middle and working classes. For the middle class, acquisition of relatively unique goods (albeit from department stores[21]) allowed for constructing social difference with individual items--an armoire, a dress, a set of drapes. Yet for the French working class in the 1920s, the discourse on consumerism implied that identity would come from an assemblage of goods. Middle-class consumption, like its élite forebears, stressed quality and low outputs; mass consumerism demanded quantity above all else.

If mass consumerism was therefore to play the role in allaying class conflict intended by its avatars, consumer-goods industries and their upstream machine-tool providers had to convert to mass production techniques. For the French working class, especially its Communist-led and anarchist elements, the promise of more goods for more output appeared merely as a propagandistic blather over the same old exploitative social relations.[22] Indeed, the working class received no more than thin promises of more goods and rising living standards in return for the draconian conversion of production to Fordist techniques. Non-Communist leaders of labor in interwar France seem, however, to have been entirely seduced by the Fordist promise of mass consumption linked to mass production, and their position seems to have held sway until the Depression.[23] The relative quiescence of the French working class until the Depression can thus be attributed certainly in part to the repression of the labor movement between 1917 and 1920, but one senses as well that many workers were willing to give employers a chance to deliver the goods. The rhetoric and incitements for increasing production and productivity, symbolized by new payment schemes that ranged from reinforced piece-rates to the Bedaux system[24], therefore made clear the link between mass production and mass consumption. Productivism and consumerism became inextricably linked.

The productivist promise, however, rested on dubious economic foundations. The language of professional economics and pop-business has always been more prescriptive than descriptive, and in linking mass production to mass consumption a constructive ambiguity emerged that powerfully served the interests of the employers. At the core of the logic rested a flaw: while it was in the interest of all employers to pay their workers well in order to have sufficient incomes to buy the mass-produced goods, it was explicitly not in the interest of any individual employer to do so. Each entrepreneur wanted all others of his class, save himself, to pay their workers well. From a financial-accounting perspective that used the firm itself as the frame of analysis, the strongest incentives were, of course, to pay employees as little as possible. Keynesian and proto-Keynesian demand-enhancement strategies in the 1930s and British Labor incomes policies after 1944 tried to address this problem through state intervention, but they only went far enough to stave off working-class demands for more thoroughgoing social and economic restructuring. In no way did they systematically challenge the basic ideological terrain set forth by the modernist ruling class in the 1910s and '20s, with its rhetorically powerful link between production and consumption. The divided consciousness of the worker-consumer could not be addressed by this approach, and what is more, a simultaneous commitment to raise living standards and the quantity of goods available to the working class still rested on a basically productivist strategy. A discourse on the need for higher consumer incomes could ironically turn (as it did most overtly in the French Fourth Republic and the Mitterrand era) into a set of austerity policies. From a policy perspective, the practical contradiction between consumerism and productionism could not be resolved, contributing to the political dead-end of reformist socialism.

In social-democratic and Keynesian economic prescriptions, managerial prerogatives to design both the labor process and the goods produced remained, and the language of choice and consumer sovereignty ironically turned, "greedy workers," as it were, into the enemies of the workers' other self, the acquisitive consumer of mass-produced goods. One could characterize the current binge of reverse-Robin Hood, supply-side policies practiced by political leaders ranging from Ronald Reagan to Laurent Fabius, from Margaret Thatcher to Mario Cuomo as the outcome of the impasse in reformist neo-Keynesian and social-democratic policies. By separating production and consumption into radically different analytical and purportedly real-world categories, reform programs screeched to a halt after 1973. The conundrum created by this flawed way of framing reform strategies was effectively obscured until then by the massive national-income increases arising from a technologically-based revolution in productivity in the immediate postwar era[25], and by the successful exploitation of captive economies in the Third World. Income gains were sufficient between 1945 and 1973 to give ample returns to capital and labor/consumers alike.

In the end, a seamless rhetoric of the complementarity between productionism and consumerism obscured a real-world disjuncture. We must play on this boundary for analytical purposes, but we should also remain clear that when the two are elided in élite rhetoric, a political trap lurks.

The historiography of gender has perhaps as much to gain by blurring the lines between production and consumption as does that of labor. By taking the discursive construction of this distinction for granted as establish power constructs it, historians risk recreating the separate, gendered spheres that have been the object of a considerable volume of scholarship. By posing this distinction, one can easily fall into the trap of defining "feminine" domestic and familial space as a consumer sphere and the workplace as a predominantly male space, as most notably do Scott and Tilly in their landmark work in women's history.[26] This systematically denigrates the productive and, over time, increasingly feminine[27] labor performed in the home.

Without implying any cross-class male conspiracy, one can see that this separation of spheres well served men of both the ruling and working classes. From the seventeenth century forward, skilled male laborers systematically resisted the introduction of women into "their" workplaces. We know well their motive: to defend wage levels and their families' living standards against efforts to cheapen labor rates, and that sad history need not be recounted for this audience. We can, however, note that the modernist discourse, shared by modernist corporate officials and reformist labor, arising out of the First World War in Europe, based in a taylorist rhetoric of compensating for degrading working conditions by the production of cheap consumer goods, redefined working-class women as consumers in the home. The discursive invention of the working-class housewife (different in many respects from the invention of the middle-class housewife and domesticity several decades before) defused a long-standing conflict between labor and capital.

On the body of the passive, non-public consumer-housewife new strategies for class collaboration could be developed. Helen Harding Chenut has intriguingly shown how, in the knitting town of Troyes in the 1920s and 1930s, women were redefined away from being workers and toward being consumers. This was ritualized by the choices of who was to be the annual "Knitting Queen" in the local festival: in 1920, she was a knitter, but by 1935, she was a housewife.[28] No doubt, working women were not saddened by the promise that their husbands could earn enough that they themselves would not have to work. We needn't assume as we long did that the ejection of wives from their jobs was a loss of freedom or autonomy; few such jobs were particularly rewarding.[29] What is more, it is clear that on the margin, the small real income increases French workers received in the 1920s went first for better food, then for removing wives from the labor force.[30] Of course, this new definition of femininity exacerbated the long-marginalized position of unmarried working-class women.

The new arrangement also helped to allay tensions between bourgeois-republican and Catholic employers. The dearth of conflict within the interwar French élite--a social milieu which had spent the century up until the First World War fraught with internal conflicts--can in part be attributed to shared visions of women as passive, non-working, reproductive housewives. Indeed, in the interwar era, a new definition of women as consumers and reproducers--explicitly not as producers--formed a solid foundation for an implicit alliance between Catholic conservatives and industrial-bourgeois modernists. The bedrock of this alliance was, of course, natalism, which anchored women (assumed to be married and mothers) solidly to the home. Almost as if by magic, a half-century's worth of laic-Catholic conflict was laid to rest on the bodies of pregnant French woman-consumers.[31]

The radical separation of production from consumption in the first decades of this century also had a direct impact on the way that material objects were shaped. Having parcelized virtually every task within the enterprise, the modern firm relegated design tasks by default to engineers. Within the professional mentality of engineers, design was not an issue in and of itself--the function of the object and the demands of the production process would determine the materiality of the object. For engineers, consumers would be best served by "efficient" and efficiently produced goods, whose cost would be as low as possible.[32] For engineers and technocrats, decoration was decadence, a skin of lies placed to obscure the truths inhering within objects. Upon such principles was Bauhaus built. When design began to emerge as a profession in the 1920s, it was usually an arm of the marketing department, kept far from production, and an object of scorn for serious, no-nonsense engineers.

With the development of the design profession, as with the birth of any profession, non-professional practitioners had to be purged. One is reminded here of doctors facing midwives. As a professional purge is often a gender purge, the design profession evicted non-professional women from having any claim over the shape of material goods. The bourgeois women described by Deborah Silverman[33], those whose proper taste was encouraged to mold consumer goods and to help reinforce proper domestic feminine roles in the 1890s, were unceremoniously ousted by the new design and advertising firms of the 1920s. As design and advertising suddenly became "scientific" as opposed to "artistic" pursuits, femininity had no place in the shop. The break between consumption and production became total.

In this paper, I have tried to problematize the conceptual and, I believe, historiographically prescriptive distinction between production and consumption. While I would not deny by any means that the distinction is a useful one, I do insist that we see it as not only as social-historically contingent, but also as ideologically constructed. Established power has used a discourse about this sort of difference and it has, for the most part, succeeded in dividing the consciousness of workers in ways never anticipated by Marx and, of equal import, constructed a meaning of womanhood that has only recently been contested. It is only in contesting these categories constructed by power that we can challenge that power.