Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism

capitalist construction
    Whilst researching this chapter I interviewed Western women of all ages and classes who were balancing domestic labour with paid, ‘real’ work, and my overwhelming impression was one of defeatism and paralysis. Women, whether or not they identify as feminists, feel guilt about the state of our homes in the same way that we feel guilt about the state of our bodies – we feel ashamed of being seen to have somehow lost control, to be insufficiently worthy of our womanhood as socially interpreted. “Not being able to keep one’s house clean still suggests complete breakdown,” says Lucy, 38, a full-time mother. “Every time a stranger comes to my door I worry that they are glancing past me at the grubby porch, and sofa covered in dog-fur and thinking, ‘that woman has lost control of her life.’ I feel like if my elderly neighbour looks in, she’ll think I’m a failure as a woman.” The feminization of domestic labour makes makes it seem at once trivial and an essential part of female identity. Housework and childcare are not real work, because women do them – and because they are done by women, whose bodies are marginalised to the point of unreality, they are not real work.
     
    In fact, domestic labour is not at all trivial. Without the work that women do for free, every western economy would collapse within days. In the United States, the money that women should in theory be owed for their unpaid caring and domestic work runs to some six 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