Just like the last two weeks, we have one last history text this week. Don't worry - we still don't see ourselves as a history channel (although that would of course be exciting!) and will be publishing more everyday, more personal and less historical texts in the coming weeks. However, we still find the last story we want to tell important in order to explain key aspects of today's image of women and the devaluation of femininity.
At the same time as the two previous stories, another landmark change in gender relations took place with the rise of capitalism. The development of capitalism meant a move away from an economy geared towards subsistence, as had previously prevailed in the Middle Ages. Previously, there was no clear distinction between 'productive' work, such as producing goods or food, and 'reproductive' work, which included, for example, running a household, giving birth, raising children, cooking, cleaning and washing.
These two forms of work were separated from each other, with the former becoming the public sphere and the latter the private sphere. At the same time, women¹ were confined to performing precisely this reproductive work. By mystifying this work as 'women's work', its economic significance was rendered invisible and it was no longer referred to as work, but as the natural task of women's lives. Women's reproductive work was increasingly understood as a natural resource that was freely available. Women were there to reproduce men's labor. Although there was already a gendered division of labor in the Middle Ages, women still had access to communally used land. With the separation from paid work, however, women often became completely dependent on their husbands. During this time, the family also took on a new meaning as a place of reproduction that was hidden from the public eye. Being a woman became being a wife and mother.
In reality, however, men's wages were often not sufficient, meaning that women were still forced to work for wages in addition to their reproductive work. They were excluded from many professions and were paid much less than men in the jobs they were allowed to do. Women's paid work was also not seen as productive, but devalued as domestic care. This created a new social class: that of women workers. Like the workers, they were propertyless, but had no or much poorer access to wages, which is why they lived in hopeless poverty and economic dependence.
According to Federici, this devaluation of women's work and the repression into the private sphere was only possible because the witch hunts and the images of women as the enemy legitimized the complete devaluation and the fight against women.
When the power of women was broken and the persecution of witches declined towards the end of the 17th century, when their work was no longer called work and the state had control over their bodies, Federici observed how the answer to the question of what a woman was changed. Federici observes how the answer to the question of what a woman is changed: instead of evil, mentally inferior, greedy and deceitful, the image of the ideal wife and woman became central, who was passive, thrifty, docile, taciturn and always busy, as well as chaste, asexual, more docile and moral than her husband.
The separation of paid production and unpaid reproduction became even more pronounced in the second wave of European industrialization. At the end of the 19th century, there was a shift from so-called light industry, i.e. textile and food production, to heavy industry, such as steel and mechanical engineering. Women, who mainly worked in light industry in spinning mills and weaving mills, lost their remaining paid jobs as a result, while men were exploited beyond their physical limits in the steelworks.
During this time, the ideal full-time housewife was finally created: loving, submissively devoted to her husband, completely fulfilled by caring for him and 'his' children and always busy producing cleanliness and delicious food. She took care of her exhausted husband and thus ensured his ability to work.
This gender order, in which men are better paid and female socialized people², as well as people who are expected to be female, take on the majority of the mostly unpaid care work, has persisted to this day - along with its justification based on 'female nature'. If a man then earns the money in heterosexual partnerships, this means that the female partner is highly financially dependent, which often means that those affected cannot escape domestic violence or experience poverty in old age when they separate. Institutions such as spousal splitting³ reinforce and harden these dependency relationships at a legal and state level. There has been a new culmination of these ideas among young people since last year: the "housewife trend" (short for "traditional wives") on Tik-Tok, in which girls and young women celebrate and glorify the fact that their lives are filled with cooking, cleaning and making themselves beautiful for their partners⁴.
However, there were also important resistance movements against this structural exploitation of women. First and foremost we want to mention "Wages for Housework", which emerged in the 1960s and campaigned for the recognition and remuneration of domestic work in order to ultimately fight against the attribution of this work to women as a whole.
““It is the demand [for a wage for housework] by which our nature ends and our struggle begins because just to want wages for housework means to refuse that work as the expression of our nature, and therefore to refuse precisely the female role that capital has invented for us.””
Silvia Federici, in “Wages Against Housework” 1975
ℹ️Explanation of terms:
¹Here, we are also writing about 'women' as a historical category. We would like to point out that many of the meanings that this gender category carries were first coined at the time we are writing about here. The meaning has also shifted since then. We should not try to project contemporary ideas of gender into history. And so while we want to name a historical category, we are aware that there have always been bodies, identities and practices that on a fundamental level have been resistant to gender classifications and binaries.
-female socialization – Society places certain demands on femininity that put all people who identify with femininity, or who are identified with femininity, under pressure to conform to them. We call this social process of repeated learning of femininity requirements 'female socialization'.
³'Ehegattensplitting' is an option for tax advantages for married couples in Germany, which is all the more effective the greater the difference in income between the partners. In heterosexual marriages, where the man still often earns more money (see gender pay gap), it is then hardly worthwhile for the person with the lower income to work at all, which financially favors couples in which one person takes care of the household while the other does paid work. One effect of this is that people with little or no income are financially dependent partners and find it difficult to overcome this dependency.