Die verleugneten Voraussetzungen des "Normalarbeitsverhältnisses" und ihre Wiederkehr in weiblichen Berufsbiographien

Abstract: The standardization of what is considered the "normal labor relation" has become an institution of the modern welfare state, which implicitly devalues all other forms of work, especially the reproductive work of women in the family. It thus reenforces gender differences in the access to social and economic subsistence. Critical analyses of women's work biographies expose a process of repression, both material and psychological, in society. What seems to be individual conflicts of women in combining a family and a payed job actually points at a socially denied dependency behind the "normal wages labor" and the "normal worker". For those rely on private reproductive work of housewifes and mothers, on caring relations and moral orientations which are consumed in the context of waged labor like natural ressources and cannot be restored in that context. Conflicts and contradictions in women's work biographies are considered a basis for an empirical critique of the masculinist standards of waged labor relations. It is argued that these have to be changed with respect to democratic social conditions of reproduction based on reliable reciprocal relations in a society of increasing division of labor and ever more densly elaborated webs of interdependence.;