In a final chapter, Harriet Fraad uses feminist and psychoanalytic theories as well as the Marxist Feminist framework outlined earlier in the book to explain the significance of eating disorders among women, focusing on anorexia and the determinants of its current prevalence among career and achievement-oriented women. In light of the above, the authors' claims would seem to replicate earlier feminist attempts to theorize marriage, domestic labor, and their implications for gender inequality. Their goal, however, is not the explanation of gender inequality but the development of a new theoretical analysis of the household and its interrelations with other institutions. They have conceptualized the household as a site where a set of feudal class processes obtain, qualitatively different from those between capital and labor. Class is defined as the set of economic processes involved in the production, appropriation and distribution of surplus labor.
Class analyses are possible in any site where surplus is produced.
It therefore follows that the relations between husbands and wives and, more generally, between men and women in households, are exploitative class relations. The relationship between gender and class posited by the authors is one of interaction and mutual dependence and transformation. Class and gender processes are conditions of existence of each other and are partially determined by each other. There are political, economic and cultural conditions of existence of the feudal household. The relationship between the feudal household and its conditions of existence is not always harmonious.