Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism

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 Judeo-Christian excuses for female domesticity. A new logical basis for housework was needed, and fast. So the ‘hunter-gatherer’ mythos of human prehistoric development as extricated from the Christian imagining of history began to be phrased explicitly as dichotomy: male hunters versus female gatherers. Even the importance to some academic schools of the idea of human society as matriarchal and goddess-worshipping in the Paleolithic era has not diminished the notion that early female ‘gathering’ involved childcare, cooking, sewing and cleaning and, in the case of Wilma Flintstone, wearing stone-cut stilettos and brandishing a mini-mammoth vacuum cleaner: occupations that actually endorse not prehistoric but post-industrial norms of ‘feminine’ behaviour. The separation of the world of work into the superior productive and inferior reproductive, domestic sphere is not inherent to human organisation: it is a new thing. Over the course of centuries, the mechanisms of industrial capitalism and associated urbanisation have narrowed the concept of home to the confines of a house, creating in the process a system of battery pens for forced female labour. No wonder nobody wants to do the dishes any more.
     
    Following the revolutionary feminism of the 1960s that began in the domestic prisons of the white middle-classes, the sheen has long since faded from the gilded cage of domesticity. Both men and women can now clearly see the trap into which ‘domestic’ labour has been fashioned. But our response to this as decent, thinking beings has been woefully lacking. Feminism has achieved a vital expansion in women’s labour outside the home – but it has not won the corresponding, equally vital expansion of men’s labour within it. Feminism has amended the old patriarchal deal, but it has not ended it.
     
Mutually assured dysfunction
    One of the most difficult things for feminists to acknowledge is the real harm done by women as well as by men in the domestic sphere. Partly as a consequence of hard-packed resentment at cultural isolation and forced drudgery, generations of women – mothers in particular – have handed down suffering, guilt and the expectation of patriarchal servitude to their children with a breathtaking ruthlessness borne of love and shame. Amanpreet Badyal, 21, told me how her childhood was blighted by her mother’s anguish:
     
My mother has tried repeatedly to break my spirit, claiming that she’s just preparing me for my mother-in-law. Alongside this, she harangued both my sisters to learn to cook; despite both successfully doing so, she subsequently tried to blame all marital problems, especially my eldest sister’s, on cooking. The thing is, my mum means well. She had seen what it is like for us Punjabi women, the sham of Sikh equality, and she wanted there to be no hope to so cruelly give way, treacherously feather-light, to betrayal and disappointment. I sincerely believed that I would never make it to 21, and that if I did, I would find myself in a marriage that would eventually drive me to suicide. How could I continue my mother’s cycle, and raise children that I resented? Why would I want to raise another child like myself, plagued by self-doubt and devoured by the family pack? I was hellishly afraid of this happening to me.
     
    A blunt instrument for undermining gender activism and feminist solidarity is the claim that such assaults on human dignity are ‘cultural’, and therefore sacrosanct. In