During the era of primitive accumulation, a major problem facing the capitalist class was how to perfectly calibrate the relationship between the IMM and DMM spheres such that workers would, on the one hand, be forced to survive only by selling their labour-power, and on the other, be allotted only enough personal property to continue self-provisioning without bringing up the cost of labour-power. Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender

In the course of the transition from the 18th to the 19th century, the family — centred in the home as a unit of production — became *the* economic unit mediating between the IMM and DMM spheres of labour-power’s reproduction. Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender

[…] for the first part of the 19th century, as long as no retirement benefits existed and as long as it was also the case that children were expected to go to work before they even reached puberty, the family comprised several generations residing in one home. In addition, the activities of the IMM sphere were not carried out by married women alone; indeed they were done with the participation of children, grandmothers and other female relatives, even lodgers. If it was the case that only the “singly free” adult male members of the family could legally be owners of the wage, this did not mean that adult women and young children did not also work outside the home. Indeed, at the beginning of industrialisation, women represented one third of the workforce. Like children, they did not decide if or where they would take employment, or which job they would perform; they were more or less subcontracted by their husbands or fathers. (Marx even compared it with some forms of the slave trade: the male head of the family bargained the price of the labour-power of his wife and children and chose to accept or decline. And let us not forget that in some countries, such as France and Germany, women only got the right to work without the authorisation of their husbands in the 1960s or 70s). Far from being a sign of the emancipation of women, or of the modern views of the husband, women working outside the home was a blatant indicator of poverty. Even if married women were generally expected to stay at home when the family could afford it (where they often did home-based production, especially for the textile industry), many women never married — for it was an expensive business — and some were not supposed to become pregnant, forming their own family. Younger daughters were often sent to become servants or helpers in other families, remaining “officially” single. Therefore, even if those responsible for the IMM sphere were always women, and those responsible for the wage were always men (one could say, by definition), the two genders and the two spheres did not map one to one in that period. Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender