Yep! Great point. Women were (and are) used for unpaid domestic labor, but this labor is absolutely socially necessary. In this way, the nuclear family arose as a way for capitalists to avoid paying for domestic labor, where the wage of the man was essentially the social cost of reproducing a family. Women were made dependent, and entire families created in such a fashion as to be the most profitable for capitalists.
Even before the advent of the nuclear family or even modern capitalism the idea of women’s autonomy was viciously purged from European society over the course of a couple hundred years. I
In the early 1300s there were women becoming physicians, owning their own land, and beginning to to accumulate personal wealth. By the end of the 1300s they were being persecuted and hunted as witches, and France had functionally legalized the rape of proletariat women.
Caliban and the Witch by Federici, is a really neat book exploring gender and family structures during the primitive accumulation of capital. It’s a little dated, but still a really interesting read.
Yep, excellent expansion! I by no means meant to minimize the historical devastation of women’s rights, I was specifically meaning the context of the 19th and 20th centuries with that comment. Women’s history is far more complex than just that period.
Yep! Great point. Women were (and are) used for unpaid domestic labor, but this labor is absolutely socially necessary. In this way, the nuclear family arose as a way for capitalists to avoid paying for domestic labor, where the wage of the man was essentially the social cost of reproducing a family. Women were made dependent, and entire families created in such a fashion as to be the most profitable for capitalists.
Even before the advent of the nuclear family or even modern capitalism the idea of women’s autonomy was viciously purged from European society over the course of a couple hundred years. I
In the early 1300s there were women becoming physicians, owning their own land, and beginning to to accumulate personal wealth. By the end of the 1300s they were being persecuted and hunted as witches, and France had functionally legalized the rape of proletariat women.
Caliban and the Witch by Federici, is a really neat book exploring gender and family structures during the primitive accumulation of capital. It’s a little dated, but still a really interesting read.
Yep, excellent expansion! I by no means meant to minimize the historical devastation of women’s rights, I was specifically meaning the context of the 19th and 20th centuries with that comment. Women’s history is far more complex than just that period.
Didn’t mean to imply you minimized anything, just adding onto a good point.