Under feudalism, women were more or less property of men. Under capitalism, women were liberated from being forced into marriage, only to be forced to compete in the marketplace with men to survive. What remains unpaid in a cash society however is domestic labour. Capitalism assumes this labour is "free."

When most men work and most women stay at home performing domestic labour, and if the man's salary can pay enough to pay for everything, then it more or less works out; domestic labour is informally acknowledged in the man's salary. (50+ years ago, many workplace promotions were reserved for married men.) But then women are more or less dependent on their husbands who pay for everything and hold the monopoly on workplace experience and value. Additionally, and maybe more importantly, the careers of gay men may be limited under this arrangement.

With a variety of modern, liberal compensations and penalties on men, women can more or less get by about as well as men, with or without a husband or kids. Gay and single men are free to climb the corporate ladder alongside their married-with-children colleagues. But the workplace now eliminates the notion of paying for a family through a single breadwinner's salary; now everyone is atomized into individuals, with individual survival salaries. The cost of domestic labour is now completely forgotten, and the overall pressure on women to remain childless will increase as they are now required to fill 50% of the workplace.

Domestic labour is then outsourced overseas, to produce replacement labour.