One group of articles try to locate women's oppression in the center of the capitalist dynamic by pointing out the relationship between housework and reproduction of labor. So women's housework and their work in reproducing the working class plays a key role in the amount of surplus value that capitalists can squeeze out of the working class. Rubin seems to acknowledge that women are useful to capitalism in this manner, but she does not think that this usefulness explains women's oppression. She argues that it is at this point that analyses of capitalism fail to explain women's oppression. For one thing, women are oppressed in societies that cannot be described as capitalist.
Capitalism simply takes over ideas about gender that existed before it.
For ex., capitalism cannot explain why it is women who do domestic work rather than men. Marx noted that what is needed to reproduce to worker is determined by biological needs, the physical conditions of the environment, and the cultural tradition. It is this tradition that determined that wives who do housework were necessary to the reproduction process and that women fill that role rather than men. This cultural element was inherited, not invented, by capitalism. Engels Engels describes sex oppression as something capitalism inherited from earlier social forms.