30 SOCIAL SCIENTIST capitalism depends on the labour of the woman in the home both to care for her husband and children and to turn exchange goods into use values-Women do the socially necessary production that capitalism finds unprofitable, as well as taking the blame for capitalism's failures. ^Bad cooking^ is blamed for poor meals, rather than low wages or adulterated foods. The transformation of women into household dependents, surviving entirely on the man's wages and depending on him for her livelihood^ was by no means peaceful or complete. To some extent in Europe, but especially in the U S which did not have a pre-existing feudal structure, women were from the beginning and continue to be engaged in non-family production and wage labour, often in competition and conflict with men. Women's labour was often exploited directly in production by slave-masters and capitalists rather than indirectly through household work and familial dependency.l ° Women in the U S in the nineteenth century struggled for their liberation from both patriarchal and capitalist exploitation and were active in the socialist and communist movements. 20th Century: Towards Industry'centredness Beginning in the twentieth century, and developed now to the point where the trend is clear, a major transformation took place in the structure of patriarchal capitalism. Rather than the idealized family of the nineteenth century with a husband-worker and a wife-home maker > we now find the majority of women, including married mothers, engaged directly in wage labour. We find women marrying less, bearing fewer children. We also find the growth of female-headed families, consisting of mother and children only caused by the voluntary departure of the father-husband.11 These women are not working for, or under, their male relatives. Although the growth of female-headed families through the voluntary departure of men might appear to be the result of a decline of patriarchy, we will show that it is in fact merely the transformation of the dialectic of sex within patriarchal capitalism from family-centered exploitation of women to industrial-centered exploitation of women. The benefits continue to flow both to individual men, who obtain the benefit of the cheap services of women, and to capitalist men who obtain both the surplus value and the services. Before detailing these changes, however, it is desirable to discuss the imperialist expansion of patriarchal capitalism. The transformation taking place in the U S may not reproduce itself elsewhere because of the different needs of capitalism in the Third World. In colonized countries the development of patriarchal capitalism did not grow naturally, but was imposed upon the societies. Just as the old economic, landholding class and productive relations had to be destroyed or altered to capitalism's benefit, so also did the family structure and dialectic of sex. If a pre-existing patriarchy enabled men to receive so much benefit from women and children's labour that the men had no incentive to labour themselves, then that patriarchy had to be broken.