Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation page 98

[W]hile in the upper class it was property that gave the husband power over his wife and children, a similar power was granted to working-class men over women by means of women's exclusion from the wage...

This policy, making it impossible for women to have money of their own, created the material conditions for their subjection to men and the appropriation of their labor by male workers. It is in this sense that I speak of the patriarchy of the wage. We must also rethink the concept of "wage slavery." If it is true that male workers became only formally free under the new wage-labor regime, the group of workers who, in the transition to capitalism, most approached the condition of slaves was working-class women.