not have a clear positive effect on the improvement of gender or family relations,

personal self-worth, or her decisional capacity within the family (Carr and Chen 2001).

 Since women's earnings from paid work allowed them some degree of well-being

and security, social researchers were convinced that women's access to independent

income could promote the rise in their status and a decrease in female/male disparities

(Safilios-Rothschild 1988 cited in Byron 1999). Marxist thinkers also thought that the

situation of women would improve by granting them access to paid work. Lenin was

aware that women are doubly oppressed: by the system and by men. To liberate women

from both forms of oppression, he thought that it was necessary to allow women to work

in conditions equal to those of men (Lenin cited by Zetkin 1971).

 In the capitalist system, the involvement of women in paid work is often explained

as a step on the path to full democratization in terms of declarative equality of rights

(Inter-Parliamentary Union 1997), but some authors like Beneria and Sen (1977) point

out that involving women in paid work was a process initiated to gain access to

inexpensive labor. If that is true, the massive influx of women into capitalist work

relations sustained after World War II in urban societies reveals only a case of the

"effectiveness" of the capitalistic system in maximizing profits, and not an advance in

work democratization.

 Other scholars offer additional perspectives on the nature of women's incorporation

into waged work. Diaz Mufioz, (1978 cited in Herrera 1999) explains that in rural areas

women likely to become paid workers are principally those whose families lack land for

agriculture. Under the assumption that women do not have alternatives, factories and

other businesses hire them at low wages (White 2000). Herrera (1999) asserts that