Economic subsystems and the occupational structure: A comparison of Hungary and the United States

This article proposes a new way of looking at social inequality in socialist and nonsocialist societies. In the first section, a conceptual framework for recovering houseworkers for class analysis is introduced, and a historically-based argument for representing them in the occupational structure is advanced. The second section reviews the evolution of social cleavages from the preindustrial era to the present day and discusses the implications of using the same occupational classification scheme to describe both socialist and nonsocialist societies. This occupational classification is illustrated in the concluding section of the paper by reanalyzing data from Hungary and the United States. The results provide new insights into the structure of gender-based inequalities and the effects of socialism on the occupational division of labor.An earlier version of this article was presented at the 84th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in San Francisco, August 1989.