Read Online Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism by Laurie Penny - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Laurie Penny
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times the national defence budget, and the US defence budget is not small.
There is a word for what happens when you trap someone within the confines of a house and make them work for no reward for generations and tell them that they’re good for nothing else. There’s a word for what happens when generations of children of both sexes are raised in environments underpinned by resentment and the control dynamics essential to getting women’s work done for nothing. There’s a word for what happens when home and work in the home becomes indelibly associated with self-negation, abuse and stifled rage, and the word is trauma. The entirety of Western society is still traumatised by our complex relationship to the economics of domestic labour. No family truly escapes.
To understand why we are so dreadfully messed up when it comes to the entire sphere of life involving necessary care and self-care, it’s vital to comprehend that we are living in a culture that has been traumatised – emotionally, physically, sexually and psychologically traumatised. At the 2009 Compass Conference women’s seminar, speakers from the floor asked why housework is still so undervalued. It is undervalued because we have, slowly but surely, turned home itself into a locus of slavery, suffering and trauma. No wonder men are scared of scrubbing floors. Feminism did not do this.
The c-word: rewriting history.
Capitalism is the essential context for understanding the marginalisation of women’s bodies within the home. It was, after all, industrial capitalism which created and perpetuated the conditions for the degradation of housework and the degradation of women by association.
Historians such as Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall have described how separate spheres for men and women emerged between 1780 and 1850 as the workplace became separated from the home and a private, domestic sphere was created for women, formally and symbolically severing the processes of production and reproduction. 18 The simple work of creating and sustaining life does not fit within the profit-oriented, pay-and-target driven capitalist imagining of society, but that work still had to be done, and it had to be done away from the factory floor, which after child labour laws came into force over the first half of the 19th century was officially declared no place for children. Thus, in 1737 over 98 per cent of married women in England worked outside the home, but by 1911 over 90 per cent were employed solely as housewives. Ivan Illich calls this process “the enclosure of women”. 19
The divorce of the domestic front from the public world of profit-oriented work and citizenship was reaffirmed by important new legal sanctions: married women were officially forbidden from owning property or making contracts, shutting them out from the world of business, and the 1832 Reform Bill made women’s exclusion from political citizenship explicit for the first time, formally isolating women within the confines of the home.
In her editorial to New Internationalist’s issue on the politics of housework, Debbie Taylor explains that “though domestic work has existed ever since there was a domus in which to do it, the housewife role is a very recent one indeed – and confined to industrialized societies.” 20 As sociologist Anne Oakley put it, “other cultures may live in families but they do not necessarily have housewives. They have women, men and children whose labour is woven together like coloured thread in a tapestry, creating home, life and livelihood for the whole family.” 21 As it became necessary for domestic work to be shoehorned cheaply into the profit-margins of industrial society, history was rapidly rewritten to ensure the acceptance of housework as woman’s divinely decreed role.
Just as this brutal domestic binary was made concrete, Darwin careered into the ideological landscape, crushing amongst other things the old
There is a word for what happens when you trap someone within the confines of a house and make them work for no reward for generations and tell them that they’re good for nothing else. There’s a word for what happens when generations of children of both sexes are raised in environments underpinned by resentment and the control dynamics essential to getting women’s work done for nothing. There’s a word for what happens when home and work in the home becomes indelibly associated with self-negation, abuse and stifled rage, and the word is trauma. The entirety of Western society is still traumatised by our complex relationship to the economics of domestic labour. No family truly escapes.
To understand why we are so dreadfully messed up when it comes to the entire sphere of life involving necessary care and self-care, it’s vital to comprehend that we are living in a culture that has been traumatised – emotionally, physically, sexually and psychologically traumatised. At the 2009 Compass Conference women’s seminar, speakers from the floor asked why housework is still so undervalued. It is undervalued because we have, slowly but surely, turned home itself into a locus of slavery, suffering and trauma. No wonder men are scared of scrubbing floors. Feminism did not do this.
The c-word: rewriting history.
Capitalism is the essential context for understanding the marginalisation of women’s bodies within the home. It was, after all, industrial capitalism which created and perpetuated the conditions for the degradation of housework and the degradation of women by association.
Historians such as Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall have described how separate spheres for men and women emerged between 1780 and 1850 as the workplace became separated from the home and a private, domestic sphere was created for women, formally and symbolically severing the processes of production and reproduction. 18 The simple work of creating and sustaining life does not fit within the profit-oriented, pay-and-target driven capitalist imagining of society, but that work still had to be done, and it had to be done away from the factory floor, which after child labour laws came into force over the first half of the 19th century was officially declared no place for children. Thus, in 1737 over 98 per cent of married women in England worked outside the home, but by 1911 over 90 per cent were employed solely as housewives. Ivan Illich calls this process “the enclosure of women”. 19
The divorce of the domestic front from the public world of profit-oriented work and citizenship was reaffirmed by important new legal sanctions: married women were officially forbidden from owning property or making contracts, shutting them out from the world of business, and the 1832 Reform Bill made women’s exclusion from political citizenship explicit for the first time, formally isolating women within the confines of the home.
In her editorial to New Internationalist’s issue on the politics of housework, Debbie Taylor explains that “though domestic work has existed ever since there was a domus in which to do it, the housewife role is a very recent one indeed – and confined to industrialized societies.” 20 As sociologist Anne Oakley put it, “other cultures may live in families but they do not necessarily have housewives. They have women, men and children whose labour is woven together like coloured thread in a tapestry, creating home, life and livelihood for the whole family.” 21 As it became necessary for domestic work to be shoehorned cheaply into the profit-margins of industrial society, history was rapidly rewritten to ensure the acceptance of housework as woman’s divinely decreed role.
Just as this brutal domestic binary was made concrete, Darwin careered into the ideological landscape, crushing amongst other things the old
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