"This book provides a radical critique of mainstream, Marxist and feminist economic theories, ranging from the classical liberal economics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the feminist debates about domestic labour and patriarchy in the late twentieth century. It offers a new feminist economic framework for understanding the interconnections between households, markets and states. Domestic labour, the unpaid work that is done by and for members of households, has remained highly gendered and more resistant to household technological innovation and to market substitution than predicted by neoclassical, Marxist and post-industrial theories. The book explores the increasing importance of household care relations, especially care of children, in shaping the domestic labour process in industrial economies. Trends in household gender relations and working patterns in Britain in the last quarter of the twentieth century are explored in the context of political ideas and policies regarding the state, the economy, gender and care."--BOOK JACKET.