George Gilder on the nanny state

(Actually, he calls it "the compassionate state.")

Man is “cuckolded by the compassionate state”; the government usurps his age-old role [as provider], which is why “welfare now erodes work and family and thus keeps poor people poor.” When women are less dependent on men, men no longer benefit from women’s civilizing powers, and all hell breaks loose: “Because female sexuality, as it evolved over the millennia, is psychologically rooted in the bearing and nurturing of children, women have long horizons within their very bodies, glimpses of eternity within their wombs.” 

From Gilder's Wealth and Poverty, published 1981, a Book of the Month Club pick, and widely influential. (As quoted in Jennifer Szalai, "Just Deserts," The Nation, December 9, 2013.)

Katha Pollitt on Ann Romney and Women's Work

Very smart piece from the 7 May 2012 issue of The Nation.

the difference between a stay-home mother and a welfare mother is money and a wedding ring. Unlike any other kind of labor I can think of, domestic labor is productive or not, depending on who performs it. For a college-educated married woman, it is the most valuable thing she could possibly do, totally off the scale of human endeavor...But for a low-income single woman, forgoing a job to raise children is an evasion of responsibility, which is to marry and/or support herself. For her children, staying home sets a bad example, breeding the next generation of criminals and layabouts. 

All of which goes to show that it is not really possible to disengage domestic work from its social, gendered context: the work is valuable if the woman is valuable, and what determines her value is whether a man has found her so and how much money he has. That is why discussions of domestic labor and its worth are inextricably bound up with ideas about class, race, respectability, morality and above all womanhood.