Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Divison of Labour pages 15-16

As long as the Western economies were experiencing an ever-expanding growth of their GNPs they could afford to neutralize social dissent and social unrest like that of the women by throwing some crumbs to such disenchanted groups. Under the pressure of the women's movement, certain reforms were introduced like a certain liberalization of the abortion laws, reforms of divorce laws, etc. And in some countries, as in Holland, the state even created commissions for the emancipation of women, and women's action and consciousness-raising groups could demand state support for their activities. Also, in the USA departments of women's studies were established in most universities without great opposition. Although this all needed a lot of struggle from the women's movement, there was a certain paternalistic benevolence in granting 'the girls' a certain niche in the system. Already at this stage the various patriarchal establishments used their power to co-opt women and to integrate their rebellion into the system. But the deepening of the economic crisis at the beginning of the 1980s, and the rise of conservative governments and tendencies in most Western countries with their new policies of restructuring the economy also marked the end of fair-weather or welfare-state feminism. In several countries, particularly in the USA and West Germany, conservative governments launched a virtual attack on some of the half-hearted reforms achieved under the pressure of the new women's movement, above all on the liberalized abortion laws. This roll-back strategy with its renewed emphasis on the patriarchal family, on heterosexuality, on the ideology of motherhood, on women's 'biological' destiny, their responsibility for housework and childcare, and the overall attack on feminism had the effect that women who had hoped that women's liberation could come as a result of some legal reforms or consciousness-raising withdrew from the movement or or even became hostile to it....

This roll-back strategy, however, is only the political manifestation of more fundamental structural changes in the Western economies which are usually referred to as 'flexibilization of labour'. Women are the immediate targets of this strategy. The new strategy of rationalization, computerization and automation of production processes and jobs in the service sector has the effect that women are the first to be pushed out of well-paid, qualified and secure jobs in the 'formal sector'. But they are not just being sent back to home and hearth. They are in fact pushed into a whole range of unqualified, low-paid, insecure jobs which they have to do on top of their housework, which, more than ever, is considered their true vocation. And, contrary to the official conservative ideology on women and the family, the family is no longer a place where women can be sure to find their material existence secured. Man-the-breadwinner, though still the main ideological figure behind the new policies, is empirically disappearing from the stage. Not only does the rising unemployment of men make their role of breadwinner a precarious one, but marriage for women is also no longer an economic guarantee of their lifelong livelihood.