This is a nice quote from Ivan Illich, _Gender_.
" Under the reign of gender, men and women collectively depend on
eachother; their mutual dependence sets limits to struggle,
exploitation, defeat.  Vernacular culture is a truce between genders,
and sometimes a cruel one.  Where men mutilate women's bodies, the
gynaeceum often knows excrutiating ways to get back at men's feelings.
In contrast to this truce, the regime of [economic] scarcity imposes
continued war and ever new kinds of defeat on each woman.  While under
the reign of gender women might be subordinate, under ANY economic
regime they are ONLY the second sex.  They are forever handicapped in
games where you play for genderless stakes and either win or lose ...
The historical transition from gendered subsistence to dependence on
scarce products establishes my argument.  Scarcity is historical, as
historical as gender or sex.  The era of scarcity could come to be
only on assumption that "man" [meaning, humankind] is individual,
possessive, and, in the matter of material survival, genderless -- a
rapacious neutrum oeconomicum.  And this assumption, incarnate in
institutions from wedlock to schools, transforms the subject of
history.  That subject is no longer the gens, or the lares, which
designate the ambigous and asymmetric match of a self-limiting set of
women and men.  Rather, the subject becomes a construct of ideology
fashioned into a spurious 'we', a construct like class, nation,
corporation, or partnerly couple.  For a theory on the action
necessary for a recovery of the commons, I think it is important to
explore the etiology of this transmogrification of history's subject.
"
Gender = man with male-defined tools and activities and his role in
life; or woman with woman-defined tools and activities and her part
Sex =  man or woman with the same shared tools or activities, only
distinguished by mere physical difference, but in the eyes of the
industrial economy, are the same, genderless worker
commons = " Commons [as an old English word] referred to that part of
the environment that lay beyond a person's own threshold and outside
his own possession, but to which, however, that person had a
recognized claim of usage -- not to produce commodities but to provide
for the subsistence of kin. Neither wilderness nor home is commons,
but that part of the environment for which customary law exacts
specific forms of community respect ... A major intellectual obstacle
... is to confuse the commons with industrial age public utilities.  I
argue that the commons, which were protected by legal precedents prior
to industrialization, were in fact *gendered domains* "  [as opposed
to sexist domains]
In our rush to make men and women equal at work and at home, we have
stripped them of their masculinity and femininity, churning and
dulling the basic duality and symbols of the duality which make the home
life, the social life rich.  In the process, it wreaks more havoc to
the woman, it damages her more than it does the man, and so is quite
counterproductive to its intended goals and damaging to people, to the
home, to relationships, to the culture.  
-michael
--- Blue Wave/DOS v2.30 [NR]
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