The Double Register of History: Situating the Forgotten Woman and Her Household in Capitalist Commodity Chains

Abstract

By analyzing research and theoretical foci in its three major publication venues, we can judge how much attention the world-system perspective has been paying to women. After 25 years, women are only a faint ghost in the world-system perspective. In the ?rst twenty volumes of Review, less than 5 percent (16) of the articles deal with gendered exploitation, women, or households. In the ?rst ?ve volumes of the Journal of World-System Research, less than 4 percent of the articles address women’s issues.2 By 1999, PEWS had published 21 annual monographs; yet less than 5 percent of the articles in those volumes integrated women or gender inequities.