- ‘The Women’s Liberation Movement is perhaps the most controversial, as well as the most far-reaching of the new social movements: the ecology movement, the alternative movement, the peace movement, and others. By its very existence it provokes people. Whereas one can lead a dispassionate intellectual or political discourse on the ‘ecology question,’ the ‘peace issue,’ the issue of Third World dependency, the ‘women question’ inevitably leads to highly emotional reactions from men, and from many women. It is a sensitive issue for each person. The reason for this is that the women’s movement does not address its demands mainly to some external agency or enemy, such as the state, the capitalists, as the other movements do, but addresses itself to people in their most intimate relations, the relationship between women and men, with a view to changing these relations.’ (6)
- ‘Feminists are those who dare to break the conspiracy of silence about the oppressive, unequal man-woman relationship and who want to change it.’ (6)
- ‘By defining the man-woman problem as a question of social role stereotyping and of socialization it was immediately put on an ideological plane; it became a cultural affair. The structural roots of this problem remained invisible, and thus its connection with capital accumulation remained invisible.’ (13)
- ‘The immediate effect of these new economic policies has been a rapid process of pauperization of women in the Western economies. Women constitute the largest section among the ‘new poor’ in the USA France England West Germany
- ‘The strategy of dividing the economy up into ‘visible’ and ‘invisible’ sectors is not at all new. It has been the method of the capitalist accumulation process right from its beginning. The invisible parts were per definition excluded from the ‘real’ economy. But they constituted in fact the very foundations for the visible economy.’ (17)
- ‘Women in the USA and in Europe, and also in Third World countries, realized that in spite of equality of the sexes, proclaimed by all democratic constitutions, they were still treated as a sociological minority; they were discriminated against everywhere – in politics, employment, education, in the family, and by the institution of the family.’ (21)
- ‘The belief in education, cultural action, or even cultural revolution as agents of social change is a typical belief of the urban middle classes. With regard to the woman’s question it is based on the assumption that women’s oppression has nothing to do with the basic material production relations or the economic system. This assumption is found more among Western, particularly American, feminists, who usually do not talk of capitalism. For many Western feminists women’s oppression is rooted in the culture of patriarchal civilization. For them feminism is, therefore, largely a cultural movement, a new ideology, or a new consciousness.’ (22)
- ‘The belief in education, cultural action, or even cultural revolution as agents of social change is a typical belief of the urban middle classes. With regard to the woman’s question it is based on the assumption that women’s oppression has nothing to do with the basic material production relations or the economic system. This assumption is found more among Western, particularly American, feminists, who usually do not talk of capitalism. For many Western feminists women’s oppression is rooted in the culture of patriarchal civilization. For them feminism is, therefore, largely a cultural movement, a new ideology, or a new consciousness.’ (22)
- ‘These discussions brought finally to the surface that the most intimate sexual relationship between women and men was experienced by many women as characterized by violence, humiliation and coercion. Violence and coercion seemed to be the main mechanisms by which the unequal power relation in the area of body politics was maintained. Women discovered more and more that their own bodies had been alienated from them and had been turned into objects for others, had become ‘occupied territory.’ Many began to understand that male dominance, or patriarchy as it then began to be called, had its origin not in the realm of public politics only but in men’s control over women’s bodies, particularly their sexuality and their generative capacities.’ (25)
- ‘In [her] essay the classical Marxist position that housework is ‘non-productive’ is challenged for the first time. Dalla Costa points out that what the housewife produces in the family are not simply use-values but the commodity ‘labor power’ which the husband then can sell as a ‘free’ wage laborer in the labor market. She clearly states that the productivity of the housewife is the precondition for the productivity of the (male) wage laborer. The nuclear family, organized and protected by the state, is the social factory where this commodity ‘labor power’ is produced. Hence, the housewife and her labor are not outside the process of surplus value production, but constitute the very foundation upon which this process can get started. The housewife and her labor are, in other words, the basis of the process of capital accumulation. With the help of the state and its legal machinery women have been shut up in the isolated nuclear family, whereby their work there was made socially invisible, and was hence defined – by Marxist and non-Marxist theoreticians – as ‘non-productive.’ It appeared under the form of love, care, emotionality, motherhood and wifehood. Dalla Costa challenged the orthodox notion, first spelt out by Engels, but then dogmatized and codified by all communist parties, and still upheld today, that women had to leave the ‘private’ household and enter ‘social production’ as wage-workers along with the men if they wanted to create the preconditions for their emancipation.’ (31)
- ‘I speak of exploitation of women in the triple sense: they are exploited (not only economically, but as human beings) by men and they are exploited as housewives by capital. If they are wage-workers they are also exploited as wage-workers. But even this exploitation is determined and aggravated by the other two interlinked forms of exploitation.’ (37)
- ‘I speak of exploitation of women in the triple sense: they are exploited (not only economically, but as human beings) by men and they are exploited as housewives by capital. If they are wage-workers they are also exploited as wage-workers. But even this exploitation is determined and aggravated by the other two interlinked forms of exploitation.’ (37)
- ‘It is, therefore, wrong, as many men fear, that the feminists only want to replace male dominance by female dominance, because that is what ‘equality’ means for most of them: equality of privileges. But the feminist movement is basically an anarchist movement which does not want to replace one (male) power elite by another (female) power elite, but which wants to build up a non-hierarchical, non-centralized society where no elite lives on exploitation and dominance over others.’ (37)
- ‘It is my thesis that capitalism cannot function without patriarchy, that the goal of this system, namely the never-ending process of capital accumulation, cannot be achieved unless patriarchal man-women relations are maintained or newly created.’ (38)
- ‘As the capitalist commodity market creates the illusion that he individual is free to fulfill all her/his desires and needs, that individual freedom is identical with the choice of this or that commodity, the self-activity and subjectivity of the person is replaced by individual consumerism.’ (40)
- ‘As the capitalist commodity market creates the illusion that he individual is free to fulfill all her/his desires and needs, that individual freedom is identical with the choice of this or that commodity, the self-activity and subjectivity of the person is replaced by individual consumerism.’ (40)
- ‘Covert or overt biological determinism, paraphrased in Freud’s statement that anatomy is destiny, is perhaps the most deep-rooted obstacle to the analysis of the causes of women’s oppression and exploitation.’ (45)
- ‘Not only are men and women differently defined in their interaction with nature, but the human body itself is divided into truly ‘human’ parts (head and hand), and ‘natural’ or purely ‘animal’ parts (genitalia, womb, etc.). This division cannot be attributed to some universal sexism or men as such, but is a consequence of the capitalist mode of production which is only interested in those parts of the human body which can be directly used as instruments of labor or which can become an extension of the machine.’ (46)
- ‘The same hidden asymmetry and biologistic bias, which we could observe in the concept of labor, also prevails in the concept of sexual division of labor itself. Though overtly this concept seems to suggest that men and women simply divide different tasks between themselves, it hides the fact that men’s tasks are usually considered as truly human ones (that is, conscious, rational, planned, productive, etc.), whereas women’s tasks are again seen as basically determined by their ‘nature.’ The sexual division of labor, according to this definition, could be paraphrased as one between ‘human labor’ and ‘natural activity.’ (46)
- ‘The same hidden asymmetry and biologistic bias, which we could observe in the concept of labor, also prevails in the concept of sexual division of labor itself. Though overtly this concept seems to suggest that men and women simply divide different tasks between themselves, it hides the fact that men’s tasks are usually considered as truly human ones (that is, conscious, rational, planned, productive, etc.), whereas women’s tasks are again seen as basically determined by their ‘nature.’ The sexual division of labor, according to this definition, could be paraphrased as one between ‘human labor’ and ‘natural activity.’ (46)
- ‘The same obfuscating biologistic logic prevails with regard to the concept of family. Not only is this concept used and universalized in a rather Euro-centric and ahistoric way, presenting the nuclear family as the basic and timeless structure and all institutionalization of men-women relations, it also hides the fact that the structure of this institution is a hierarchical, inegalitarian one. Phrases like ‘partnership or democracy within the family’ only serve to veil the true nature of this institution.’ (46)
- ‘Our question is rather: What are the reasons why this division of labor became a relationship of dominance and exploitation, an asymmetric, hierarchical relationship?’ (47)
- ‘The basic concepts we use in our analysis have already been ‘occupied’ – like territories or colonies – by dominant sexist ideology.’ (47)
- ‘Only that laborer is productive who produces surplus for the realization of capital.’ Marx (47)
- ‘I consider this narrow, capitalist concept of ‘productive labor’ the most formidable hurdle in our struggle to come to understanding of women’s labor both under capitalism and actually existing socialism.’ (48)
- ‘It is my thesis that this general production of life, or subsistence production – mainly performed through the non-wage labor of women and other non-wage laborers as slaves, contract workers and peasants in the colonies – constitutes the perennial basis upon which ‘capitalist productive labor’ can be built up and exploited.’ (48)
- ‘I define their exploitation as super-exploitation because it is not based on the appropriation (by the capitalist) of the time and labor over and above the ‘necessary’ labor time, the surplus labor but of the time and labor necessary for people’s own survival or subsistence production.’ (48)
- ‘The demand to ‘integrate women into development,’ first voiced at the International Women’s Conference in Mexico (1975), is largely used in Third World countries to recruit women as the cheapest, most docile and manipulable as well as in the unorganized sector.’ (49)
- ‘Women appropriated their own nature, their capacity to give birth and to produce milk in the same way as men appropriated their own bodily nature, in the sense that their hands and head, etc., acquired skills through work and reflection to make and handle tools. In this sense, the activity of women in bearing and rearing children has to be understood as work. It is one of the greatest obstacles to women’s liberation, that is, humanization, that these activities are still interpreted as purely physiological functions.’ (53)
- ‘It is assumed that the necessity to provide for the daily food and the long experience with plants and plant life eventually led to the invention of regular cultivation of grains and tubers. According to Gordon Childe, this invention took place in the Neolithic Age, particularly inEurasia , where wild grains were first cultivated. He and many other scholars attribute this invention to women, who were also the inventors of the first tools necessary for this new mode of production: the digging stick – which was already in use for digging out wild roots and tubers – and the hoe.’ (55)
- ‘Women appropriated their own nature, their capacity to give birth and to produce milk in the same way as men appropriated their own bodily nature, in the sense that their hands and head, etc., acquired skills through work and reflection to make and handle tools. In this sense, the activity of women in bearing and rearing children has to be understood as work. It is one of the greatest obstacles to women’s liberation, that is, humanization, that these activities are still interpreted as purely physiological functions.’ (53)
- ‘It is assumed that the necessity to provide for the daily food and the long experience with plants and plant life eventually led to the invention of regular cultivation of grains and tubers. According to Gordon Childe, this invention took place in the Neolithic Age, particularly in
- ‘Female productivity consisted, above all, in the ability to provide the daily subsistence, the guarantee of survival, for the members of the clan or band. Women necessarily had to secure the ‘daily bread,’ not only for themselves and their children, but also for the men if they had no luck on their hunting expeditions, because hunting is an ‘economy of risk.’ It has been proved conclusively, particularly by the critical research of feminist scholars, that the survival of mankind has been due much more to ‘woman-the-gatherer’ than to ‘man-the-hunter,’ in contrast to what social-Darwinists of old or of new preach. Even among existing hunters and gatherers, women provide up to 80 percent of the daily food, whereas men contribute only a small portion by hunting.’ (58)
- ‘The study of coprolites…reveals that groups that lived 200,000 years ago on the southern French coast mainly survived on a diet on [sic] shellfish, mussels and grains, not meat.’ (59)
- ‘…humanity would not have survived if man-the-hunter’s productivity had been the base for the daily subsistence of the early societies, the notion that man-the-hunter was the inventor of the first tools, the provider of food, inventor of human society and protector of women and children persists not only in popular literature and films, but also among serious social scientists, and even among Marxist scholars.’ (59)
- ‘The hunters’ main tools are not instruments to produce life but to destroy life. Their tools are not basically means of production, but means of destruction, and they can be used as means of coercion also against fellow human beings. This gives hunters a power over living beings, both animals and human beings, which does not arise out of their own productive work. They can appropriate not only fruits and plants (like the gatherers) and animals, but also other (female) producers by virtue of arms.’ (62)
- ‘Slavery, hence, obviously did not emerge out of trade, but out of the male monopoly over arms. Before slaves could be bought and sold, they had to be captured, they had to be appropriated by a master by force of arms.’ (64)
- ‘The establishment of classes, based on one-sided appropriation of ‘surplus’ (as I have defined it), is intrinsically interwoven with the establishment of patriarchal control over women, as the main ‘producers of life’ in its two aspects.’ (66)
- ‘The establishment of classes, based on one-sided appropriation of ‘surplus’ (as I have defined it), is intrinsically interwoven with the establishment of patriarchal control over women, as the main ‘producers of life’ in its two aspects.’ (66)
- ‘The division of the world which followed defined certain parts of the world as ‘nature,’ that is, as savage, uncontrolled and, therefore, open for exploitation and civilizing efforts, and others as ‘human,’ that is, already controlled and domesticated.’ (68)
- ‘The ‘pacification’ of the European workers, the establishment of a new form of labor control through the wage-nexus, the transformation of direct violence into structural violence, or of extra-economic coercion into economic coercion, needed, however, not only special economic concessions, but also political concessions. These political concessions are not, as most people think, the male worker’s participation in the democratic process, his rise to the status of a ‘citizen,’ but his sharing the social paradigm of the ruling class, that is, the hunter/warrior model.’ (69)
- ‘Millions of women, mostly of poor peasant or poor urban origin, were for centuries persecuted, tortured and finally burnt as witches because they tried to retain a certain autonomy over their bodies, particularly their generative forces. The attack of church and state against the witches was aimed not only at the subordination of female sexuality as such, although this played a major role, but against their practices as abortionists and midwives. The feminist literature which has appeared in recent years gives ample evidence of this policy. Not only were women artisans pushed out of their jobs and their property confiscated by the city authorities, the state and the church, but women’s control over the production f new life – that is, their decision to give birth to a child or to abort – had to be smashed. This war against women, raged throughout Europe for at least three centuries.’ (70)
- ‘At the end of this ‘civilizing process,’ we have the women disciplined enough to work as housewives for a man or as wage laborers for a capitalist, or as both. They have learned to turn the actual violence used against them for centuries against themselves, and to internalize it; they defined it as voluntariness, as ‘love,’ the necessary ideological mystification of their own self-repression.’ (70-71)
- ‘Though world-scale exploitation of human labor for profits has mainly taken the ‘rational’ form of so-called unequal exchange, the maintenance of the unequal relationship is guaranteed everywhere, is the last analysis, by means of direct coercion, by arms.’ (71)
- ‘Within such a predatory mode of production, which is intrinsically patriarchal warfare and conquest become the most ‘productive’ modes of production.’ (74)
- ‘The historical emergence of European science and technology, and its mastery over nature have to be linked to the persecution of the European witches.’ (77)
- ‘Among the Germanic tribes who occupied Europe , the house-father had power over everything and everybody in the house. This power implied that he could sell, bill, etc., wife children, slaves, etc. The power of the man over the woman was established through marriage. The relationship was one of property rights over things, which was founded on occupation (kidnapping of women), or purchase (sale of women). According to Germanic law, the marriage was a sales-contract between the two families. The woman was only the object in this transaction.’ (78)
- ‘In Church processions and public feasts [prostitutes] had their own banners and place – even a patron saint, St. Magdalene. This shows that up to the fourteenth century prostitution was not considered a bad thing.’ (81)
- ‘The witch-hunt which raged through Europe from the twelfth to the seventeenth century was one of the mechanisms to control and subordinate women, the peasant and artisan, women who in their economic and sexual independence constituted a threat for the emerging bourgeois order.’ (81)
- ‘The persecution and burning of the midwives and witches was directly connected with the emergence of modern society: the professionalization of medicine, the rise of medicine as a ‘natural science,’ the rise of science and of modern economy. The torture chambers of the witch-hunters were the laboratories where the texture, the anatomy, the resistance of the human body – mainly the female body – was studied. One may say that modern medicine and the male hegemony over this vital field were established on the base of millions of crushed, maimed, torn, disfigured and finally burnt, female bodies.’ (83)
- ‘The bulk of [executed witches’] confiscated property, never les than 50 percent, was appropriated by the government. In many cases, all that was left over after the deduction of the costs for the trial went to the state treasury…. The fact that the witch-hunt was such a lucrative source of money and wealth led in certain areas to the setting up of special commissions which had the task of denouncing ever more people as witches and sorcerers. When the accused were found guilty, they and their families had to bear all the costs of the trial, beginning with the bills for alcohol and food for the witch commission, and ending with the costs for the firewood for the stake.’ (85)
- ‘One of the legitimations forwarded by the lawyers of Cologne was that the witches had received a lot of money from the devil and that is was perfectly in order that this devil’s money be confiscated by the authorities to enable them to eradicate the evil breed of sorcerers and witches.’ (86)
- ‘One of the legitimations forwarded by the lawyers of Cologne was that the witches had received a lot of money from the devil and that is was perfectly in order that this devil’s money be confiscated by the authorities to enable them to eradicate the evil breed of sorcerers and witches.’ (86)
- ‘The capital accumulated in the process of the witch-hunt by the old ruling classes, as well as by the new rising bourgeois class is nowhere mentioned in the estimates and calculations of the economic historians of that epoch. The blood-money of the witch-hunt was used for the private enrichment of bankrupt princes, of lawyers, doctors, judges and professors, but also fro such public affairs as financing wars, building up a bureaucracy, infrastructural measures, and finally the new absolute state. This blood-money fed the original process of capital accumulation, perhaps not to the same extent as the plunder and robbery of the colonies, but certainly to a much greater extent than is known today.’ (87)
- ‘Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, English merchants went out to break the Venetian monopoly of the spice trade with the East. Most of the Spanish-Portuguese discoveries were inspired by the motive to find an independent sea-route to the Orient.’ (89)
- ‘Within a few years, the pirate expeditions against the Spanish fleet, all of which were organized in the form of joint stock companies, changed the situation…Drake’s first pirate undertaking in the years 1577-1580 was launched with a capital of £5000…it brought about £600,000 in profit, half of which went to the Queen. Beard estimates that the pirates introduced some £12 million into England Elizabeth
- ‘The whole brutal onslaught on the peoples of Africa , Asia and America
- ‘While African women were treated as ‘savages,’ the women of the white colonizers in their fatherlands ‘rose’ to the status of ‘ladies.’ These two processes did not happen side by side, are not simply historical parallels, but are intrinsically and causally linked within this patriarchal-capitalist mode of production. This creation of ‘savage’ and ‘civilized’ women, and the polarization between the two was, and still is, the organizing structural principle also in other parts of the world subjected to capitalist colonialism.’ (95)
- ‘Like the slave women in the Caribbean , [colonized African women] refused to produce forced labor power for the planters and estate owners. Between 1892 and 1909, the Herero population decreased from 80,000 to a mere 19,962. for the German farmers this was a severe problem. One of them wrote: ‘After the rebellion the native, particularly the Herero, often takes the stand not to produce children. He considers himself a prisoner, which he brings to your notice at every job which he does not like. He does not like to make new labor force for his oppressor, who has deprived him of his golden laziness…While the German farmers have been trying for years to remedy this sad state of affairs by offering a premium for each child born on the farm, for instance, a she-goat. But mostly in vain. A section of today’s native women has been engaged for too long in prostitution and are spoiled for motherhood. Another part does not want children and gets rid of them, when they are pregnant, through abortion. In such cases the authorities should interfere with all severity. Each case should be investigated thoroughly and severely punished by prison, and it that is not enough by putting the culprit in chains.’ ’ (99)
- ‘[European aristocratic women] created the new luxury ‘needs’ which gave the decisive impetus to capitalism because, with their access to the money accumulated by the absolutist state, they created the market for early capitalism.’ (101)
- ‘Even the concept ‘family’ became popular only towards the end of the eighteenth century in Europe, particularly in France and England, and it was not before the middle of the nineteenth century that this concept was also adopted for the households of the workers and peasants because, contrary to general opinion, ‘family’ had a distinct class connotation. Only classes with property could afford to have a ‘family.’ ’ (104)
- ‘Even the concept ‘family’ became popular only towards the end of the eighteenth century in Europe, particularly in France and England, and it was not before the middle of the nineteenth century that this concept was also adopted for the households of the workers and peasants because, contrary to general opinion, ‘family’ had a distinct class connotation. Only classes with property could afford to have a ‘family.’ ’ (104)
- ‘Capitalism did not, as Engels and Marx believed, destroy the family; on the contrary, with the help of the state and its police, it created the family first among the propertied classes, later in the working class, and with it the housewife as a social category.’ (105)
- ‘Women and children constituted the bulk of the early industrial proletariat. They were the cheapest and most manipulable labor force and could be exploited like no other worker. The capitalists understood well that a woman with children had to accept any wage if she wanted to survive. On the other hand, women were less of a problem for the capitalists than men. Their labor was also cheap because they were no longer organized, unlike the skilled men who had their associations as journeymen and a tradition of organizing from the guilds. Women had been thrown out of these organizations long ago, they had no new organizations and hence no bargaining power.’ (105)
- ‘The creation of housework and the housewife as an agent of consumption became a very important strategy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By that time not only had the household been discovered as an important market for a whole range of new gadgets and items, but also scientific home-management had become a new ideology for the further domestication of women. Not only was the housewife called on to reduce the labor power costs, she was also mobilized to use her energies to create new needs. A virtual war for cleanliness and hygiene – a war against dirt, germs, bacteria and so on – was started in order to create a market for the new products of the chemical industry.’ (106)
- ‘Women and children constituted the bulk of the early industrial proletariat. They were the cheapest and most manipulable labor force and could be exploited like no other worker. The capitalists understood well that a woman with children had to accept any wage if she wanted to survive. On the other hand, women were less of a problem for the capitalists than men. Their labor was also cheap because they were no longer organized, unlike the skilled men who had their associations as journeymen and a tradition of organizing from the guilds. Women had been thrown out of these organizations long ago, they had no new organizations and hence no bargaining power.’ (105)
- ‘The creation of housework and the housewife as an agent of consumption became a very important strategy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By that time not only had the household been discovered as an important market for a whole range of new gadgets and items, but also scientific home-management had become a new ideology for the further domestication of women. Not only was the housewife called on to reduce the labor power costs, she was also mobilized to use her energies to create new needs. A virtual war for cleanliness and hygiene – a war against dirt, germs, bacteria and so on – was started in order to create a market for the new products of the chemical industry.’ (106)
- ‘Items which were formerly absolutely luxury items for a small elite…can now be bought the whole year round at a low price by ordinary workers. This means that, in spite of rising unemployment and a decrease in real wages, the new IDL guarantees a level of mass consumption in the rich countries which helps to prevent the outbreak of social unrest.’ (114)
- ‘Contrary to what is commonly accepted, women, not men, are the optimal labor force for the capitalist (and the socialist) accumulation process on a world scale.’ (116)
- ‘Contrary to what is commonly accepted, women, not men, are the optimal labor force for the capitalist (and the socialist) accumulation process on a world scale.’ (116)
- ‘Women are the optimal labor force because they are now being universally defined as ‘housewives,’ not as workers; this means their work, whether in use value or commodity production, is obscured, does not appear as ‘free wage labor,’ is defined as an ‘income-generating activity,’ and can hence be bought at a much cheaper price than male labor. Moreover, by defining women universally as housewives, it is possible not only to cheapen their labor, but also to gain political and ideological control over them. Housewives are atomized and isolated, their work organization makes the awareness of common interests, of the whole process of production, very difficult. Their horizon remains limited by the family. Trade unions have never taken interest in women as housewives.’ (116)
- ‘ ‘Integrating women into development’ means, in most cases, getting women to work in some so-called income-generating activities, that is, to enter market-oriented production. It does not mean that women should expand their subsistence production, that they should try to get more control over land and produce more for their own consumption.’ (118)
- ‘The tremendous expansion of TV and the introduction of cable TV have as their main purpose the expansion of advertising. Most of the advertising is directed towards women as consumers, or the advertisements themselves contain images of women as sex symbols as their most important ingredient.’ (120)
- ‘The tremendous expansion of TV and the introduction of cable TV have as their main purpose the expansion of advertising. Most of the advertising is directed towards women as consumers, or the advertisements themselves contain images of women as sex symbols as their most important ingredient.’ (120)
- ‘Not only have Third World women, particularly in India and Bangladesh, unhesitatingly been used as guinea pigs by the multinational pharmaceutical industries to test dangerous contraceptives and methods, like amniocentesis, but contraceptives like Depoprovera, which were banned in the USA because of their carcinogenic qualities, have been massively dumped in many Third World countries. The government of Bangladesh
- ‘First World women must by all means by made to breed more (white) children than they are doing at present, and they must be made by all means to buy more goods and commodities for their families, their children, the household, and for themselves as sex objects.’ (125)
- ‘Women who have ‘been pushed out of the productive sphere’ in factories and offices will find themselves in front of a home computer where they will be engaged in electronic homeworking, along the traditional lines of the putting out system, for the same firms or others which have pushed them out. Thus, more and more ‘free wage-labor’ is being transformed into non-free housewifized labor, and the ‘free’ consumer is increasingly forced into a coercive structure which makes her/him not only buy the commodities, but also do more consumption work than before if she/he wants to survive.’ (126)
- ‘First World women must by all means by made to breed more (white) children than they are doing at present, and they must be made by all means to buy more goods and commodities for their families, their children, the household, and for themselves as sex objects.’ (125)
- ‘Women who have ‘been pushed out of the productive sphere’ in factories and offices will find themselves in front of a home computer where they will be engaged in electronic homeworking, along the traditional lines of the putting out system, for the same firms or others which have pushed them out. Thus, more and more ‘free wage-labor’ is being transformed into non-free housewifized labor, and the ‘free’ consumer is increasingly forced into a coercive structure which makes her/him not only buy the commodities, but also do more consumption work than before if she/he wants to survive.’ (126)
- ‘The way in which Third World women are at present integrated into capitalist development is the model for the reorganization of labor in the centers of capitalism.’ (127)
- ‘The American and Japanese firms have worked out a subtle system of labor control which combines methods of direct compulsion with methods of psychological manipulation. It goes without saying that trade union activity is prohibited in these factories. InMalaysia Penang , Malaysia
- ‘The American and Japanese firms have worked out a subtle system of labor control which combines methods of direct compulsion with methods of psychological manipulation. It goes without saying that trade union activity is prohibited in these factories. In
- ‘In West Germany a recent TV discussion on the new video wave revealed that 40 percent of all video films are horror and war films, 30 percent are so-called action films, in which cars smash other cars, etc., 12 percent are pornographic films, and the rest is on education, culture, etc. If one adds the horror films to the pornographic films – because women, and increasingly ‘black,’ women are the victims of sexist and sadistic violence in both types – one can imagine the extent of violence against women which is already, and will increasingly be, the result of this integration of women into capitalist development. Violence against women itself becomes a new commodity.’ (137)
- ‘200,000 to 300,000 women are working in the sex industry in Bangkok Thailand Bangkok
- ‘South-East Asian women were first turned into prostitutes on a mass scale in the context of the Vietnam war and the establishment of American air and navy bases in the Pacific region.’ (138)
- ‘Of the two million tourists who visited Thailand
- ‘The most important, yet mostly invisible, role in this export industry is, however, played by multinational tourist enterprises, the hotel chains, airlines, and a whole range of related industries and services.’ (141)
- ‘The common feature of all the production and labor relations described above is the use of structural or direct violence and coercion by which women are exploited and superexploited.’ (145)
- ‘In a survey of 105 families in Bangalore
- ‘People are so used to anti-women attitudes that they take it for granted when women as mothers do not want to give birth to other women.’ (151)
- ‘The cost of amniocentesis plus abortion of female fetuses is rather low. It ranges between Rs80 and Rs500. This means that it is not only well-to-do middle-class families who can afford to ‘breed male,’ but also poor families in the rural areas. Meanwhile, the money-minded medical professionals and clinics have also organized services for out-patients. Women living away from the big clinics where the test is conducted get the results by mail, which takes at least a week. ‘By the time they decide to abort the fetus it is over 18 weeks old. Abortion at such a late stage is quite harmful for the mother,’ writes Vibhuti Patel.’ (152)
- ‘ ‘Is not female feticide better than female infanticide or even the ill-treatment of little girls? What are the alternative policies of improving the treatment of women?’ I do not think that one can find a starker expression of the woman-hatred of patriarchal-capitalist society, internalized by women themselves and turned against their own sex, than this advice by Dharma Kumar.’ (153)
- ‘The clitoris is the active sexual organ of women which can produce a female orgasm without penetration of the vagina.’ (165)
- ‘The clitoris is the active sexual organ of women which can produce a female orgasm without penetration of the vagina.’ (165)
- ‘In the self-perception of most women are feelings that they are weak, that they need male protection, that they cannot fight back – or should not fight back.’ (165)
- ‘When we analyze concretely the reports on rape cases inIndia
- ‘When we analyze concretely the reports on rape cases in
- ‘Violence against women and extracting women’s labor through coercive labor relations are, therefore, part and parcel of capitalism. They are necessary for the capitalist accumulation process and not peripheral to it. In other words, capitalism has to use, to strengthen, or even to invent, patriarchal men-women relations if it wants to maintain its accumulation model. If all women in the world had become ‘free’ wage-earners, ‘free’ subjects, the extraction of surplus would, to say the least, be severely hampered. This is what women as housewives, workers, peasants, prostitutes, from Third World and First World countries, have in common.’ (170-171)
- ‘If we ask what has happened to women’s liberation after victory in a national liberation war, we are today faced with growing evidence of the persistence – or even a renewed introduction – of sexist and patriarchal attitudes and institutions in such countries.’ (175)
- ‘Women in the Soviet Union tried to lower their double or triple burden of work by refusing to bear more children. As the state treated them mainly as workers, without including housework and childrearing in the category of productive labor, without providing sufficient collective services because these appeared too costly, without any change in the sexual division of labor, the women answered with a kind of ‘birth-strike.’ This led to a downward trend in the birthrate which caused great concern to government circles who feared the negative effects of this trend on the economy as well as on political and military power. As is happening in capitalist industrialized countries, the government has offered financial incentives to married – and for a time also to unmarried – women to bear more children: ‘Motherhood has been extolled as a patriotic duty and those who had many children were honored accordingly.’ [Croll] ’ (181)
- ‘Mao Tse Tung had specifically included the patriarchal power of men over women into one of the four powers which held the Chinese people down and which had to be toppled by revolution.’ (181-182)
- ‘The efforts at collectivization of domestic services, however, did not last long. After 1960, most of the rural childcare facilities were closed down again because of the shortage of trained personnel and because ‘private’ grandmothers were cheaper. Also, community dining halls proved to be more expensive than private domestic labor performed by women free of cost. Since this experiment in the late 1950s there has been no particular effort to socialize housework.’ (183)
- ‘It can be expected that the shift towards modernization, rapid growth and industrialization will aggravate the dilemmas which Chinese women already had to face, namely, the contradiction of being ideologically mobilized to enter social production, but in fact being pushed back into the sphere of the privatized household and the informal sector. This is so because the maintenance or reconstitution of a patriarchal sexual division of labor with women responsible for household and subsistence production still provides the cheapest means not only for the reproduction of labor power, but also for lowering the production costs of marketable consumer commodities. Thus, a policy of rapid modernization will, of necessity, lead to the reconstitution of the housewife model, as we know it from the otherThird World and First World societies.’ (184)
- ‘The punitive economic sanctions used against [Chinese] families who do not, on their own, fulfill the patriotic duty of adhering to the one-child norm include an ‘excess child levy’ as economic compensation to the state for the cost another child means for the community. The total income of such couples is reduced from 5-10 percent over a period of 10-16 years after birth. Sometimes the levy for a third or fourth child is 15-20 percent of the couple’s income. ‘The wages of couples may be directly debited by their units of employment, or in the rural areas a production team may retain an equivalent portion of their distributed income’ [Croll]. The mother with more than one child is excluded from free maternity care. The couple has to bear all expenses for medical care and education of the extra child. The child gets no priority in admission to kindergarten, school or medical institutions. In the countryside, the grain ration for the ‘surplus’ child is either reduced or available at a higher price. In the cities, the families with more than one child do not get additional housing space.’ (185)
- ‘It can be expected that the shift towards modernization, rapid growth and industrialization will aggravate the dilemmas which Chinese women already had to face, namely, the contradiction of being ideologically mobilized to enter social production, but in fact being pushed back into the sphere of the privatized household and the informal sector. This is so because the maintenance or reconstitution of a patriarchal sexual division of labor with women responsible for household and subsistence production still provides the cheapest means not only for the reproduction of labor power, but also for lowering the production costs of marketable consumer commodities. Thus, a policy of rapid modernization will, of necessity, lead to the reconstitution of the housewife model, as we know it from the other
- ‘The punitive economic sanctions used against [Chinese] families who do not, on their own, fulfill the patriotic duty of adhering to the one-child norm include an ‘excess child levy’ as economic compensation to the state for the cost another child means for the community. The total income of such couples is reduced from 5-10 percent over a period of 10-16 years after birth. Sometimes the levy for a third or fourth child is 15-20 percent of the couple’s income. ‘The wages of couples may be directly debited by their units of employment, or in the rural areas a production team may retain an equivalent portion of their distributed income’ [Croll]. The mother with more than one child is excluded from free maternity care. The couple has to bear all expenses for medical care and education of the extra child. The child gets no priority in admission to kindergarten, school or medical institutions. In the countryside, the grain ration for the ‘surplus’ child is either reduced or available at a higher price. In the cities, the families with more than one child do not get additional housing space.’ (185)
- ‘Massive state control of women’s reproductive activity has met with resistance, particularly in the rural areas. There the percentage of one-child families is lower than in the cities and the birth-rate was, in 1981, even rising instead of falling.’ (186)
- ‘The [Chinese] single-child family constitutes a threat to the old-age security system in the rural areas. As old parents have to be looked after by their children in their old age, women in the countryside still prefer three or more children; and their preference is mainly for boys, because old parents usually live with their sons.’ (187)
- ‘In Vietnam
- ‘The heroic performance of women during the anti-colonial wars against French and American imperialism is well known. They made up 80 percent of the rural and 48 percent of the industrial labor force during the war against the USA
- ‘After the war, many women who had held leadership positions during the liberation struggle were despised by men.’ (189)
- ‘Handicrafts production is obviously seen in Vietnam
- ‘It is not surprising that men in general have an interest in tying women down to family labor and the family economy. This is not only profitable for the socialist state, but also for the men. It removes women’s competition for scarce and more lucrative jobs in the formal sector, it subsidizes men’s wages by securing a solid base of subsistence, it ties women down to a never-ending work-day, and thus frees the men for the political activity which is not only prestigious, but also gives economic privileges.’ (193)
- ‘The nuclear family is the institution par excellence through which women’s labor is exploited.’ (194)
- ‘The nuclear family is the institution par excellence through which women’s labor is exploited.’ (194)
- ‘Women’s contribution to such a people’s war is important for two main reasons: 1. As the producers of the next generation, they are the guarantors of the future of this nation. This is particularly important in liberation wars which often demand heavy sacrifices from the living for a better, happier future. 2. As the adult males are at the front, either as regular soldiers or in the guerilla force, the women at the ‘home front’ have to maintain the economy. Apart from their unpaid housework, they have to keep agricultural and industrial production going and thus provide the requirements of the people at home and the men at war. Without women’s responsibility for the continuation of the economy, no successful liberation war can be fought.’ (194-195)
- ‘After the war, people go back to what they consider the ‘normal’ state of affairs in man-woman relations.’ (196)
- ‘After the war, people go back to what they consider the ‘normal’ state of affairs in man-woman relations.’ (196)
- ‘It was precisely an independent anti-patriarchal struggle of this kind, however, that was prevented by the Marxist-Leninist parties which led the liberation wars, because all contradictions among the people, including the man-woman contradiction, were subordinated to the man contradiction between the nation and the imperialist power.’ (198)
- ‘I want to propose the thesis that such a change of consciousness could not take place because there was little change in the material production relations, of which the patriarchal man-woman relation is part and parcel.’ (198)
- ‘This process is also reflected in the shift that is taking place from emphasis on the nation to the state. Whereas during the liberation struggle the whole nation represented the psychological and historical commonality, after the liberation the state and its organs claim to represent the common good.’ (199)
- ‘Marx himself saw colonialism, in spite of all its brutality, as a kind of midwife that would ‘open up’ the hitherto closed, stagnating, ‘virgin’ lands of Asia and Africa and throw them into the capitalist modernization process. The great hopes with which he accompanied the ‘opening up’ of India
- ‘The Western feminist movement is often accused by leftists, particularly in Third World countries, of being only a movement of educated, middle-class women, and of having been unable to build up a base among working-class women.’ (205)
- ‘The reasoning behind this critique of so-called middle-class feminism is based on the assumption that women who have to fight to secure their survival from day to day cannot afford to indulge in such luxuries as fighting for ‘women’s liberation’ or for ‘human dignity.’ It is said that poor women need ‘bread’ first, before they can think of liberation. On the other hand, women who, due to their class status, have access to modern education and employment, are considered to be already emancipated, particularly if they live in a liberal family atmosphere.’ (205)
- ‘I consider a feminist middle-class movement, both in the over- and in the underdeveloped countries, as an absolute historical necessity. There are a number of reasons to support this position, the most obvious being the already-mentioned fact that patriarchal oppression and exploitation, that sexual harassment and violence are as rampant in the middle classes everywhere as they are among workers or peasants.’ (206)
- ‘They are ‘privileged’ housewives; that means they are isolated in their homes, have hardly any social network of other women or men around them to support them. They are so self-sufficient in everything that they do not have to borrow from friends and neighbors. All this makes them much more vulnerable to patriarchal oppression than working-class or rural women who usually still live and work within a collective context, at least in Third World countries.’ (206)
- ‘It is this class of women which, to a large extent, are the subjects and objects of consumerism. In the West it is a common phenomenon that women compensate for their many frustrations by going on a shopping spree. But also middle-class women in poor countries follow the same pattern. African, Asian or Latin-American urban middle-class women follow more or less the same lifestyle and model of consumption. A look at African or Indian women’s magazines suffices to show how middle-class women are mobilized as consumers. National and international capitalists have a keen interest in upholding and spreading this image of woman, and the model of consumption that goes along with it, as the symbol of progress.’ (207)
- ‘The new ‘needs,’ created by industry in its desperate effort to keep the growth model going are all of the type of addictions.’ (208)
- ‘It is, therefore, necessary that urban middle-class women, particularly those who want to work among poor rural and urban women in Third World countries, begin to criticize the ideology and reality of middle-class womanhood. The existence of a strong middle-class feminist movement with a clear perspective is a safeguard against the further propagation of the false image of woman the housewife and consumer as a model for women’ liberation and progress.’ (208-209)
- ‘It is easier to know what one does not want than to know what one wants.’ (209)
- ‘Judaic and Christian theologies have given the necessary religious sanction to the idea of the right to dominate and subordinate nature and to unlimited expansion.’ (210-211)
- ‘A necessary consequence of non-exploitative relations with ourselves, nature, other human beings and other peoples or nations will be the regaining of autonomy over our bodies and our lives. This autonomy means, first and foremost, that we cannot be blackmailed, or forced to do things which are against human dignity in exchange for the means of our subsistence or our life.’ (212)
- ‘Autonomy understood as freedom from coercion and blackmail regarding our lives and bodies, can be brought about only by collective effort in a decentralized, non-hierarchical way.’ (212)
- ‘The colonies (nature, women, exotic peoples) are kept in bondage by Homo Oeconomicus and Homo Scientificus so that he is not totally cut off from nature, the earth, his sensuality, the ever-lasting condition of all human existence and happiness. As long as this base is secured, he can go on with his unlimited development of productive forces, for the unlimited satisfaction of his unlimited wants (or rather addictions).’ (216)
- ‘The development of a feminist concept of labor has to begin with a rejection of the distinction between socially necessary labor and leisure, and the Marxist view that self-realization, human happiness, freedom, autonomy – the realm of freedom – can be achieved only outside the sphere of necessity and of necessary labor, and by a reduction (or abolition) of the latter.’ (216)
- ‘The production of immediate life in all its aspects must be the core concept for the development of a feminist concept of work.’ (217)
- ‘Computer technology is, indeed, destroying all productive human powers, all understanding of nature and, in particular, all capacity for sensual enjoyment. I consider this one of the reasons why violence against women is increasing in industrialized societies. Men who no longer feel their body in the work process itself try to regain some bodily and emotional feeling by attacking women. This is also the reason why horror and hard porn films are among the best sellers of the video industry. Their main consumers are men, many of them unemployed, or in computerized or service jobs in industry.’ (218)
- ‘The first basic requirement of an alternative economy is a change over, both in the overdeveloped and in the underdeveloped societies, from dependency for their basic subsistence needs – food, clothing, shelter – from economies outside their national boundaries towards greater autarky. Only societies which are to a large extent self-sufficient in the production of these basic necessities can maintain themselves free from political blackmail and hunger. In this, self-sufficiency in food is the first requirement.’ (219)
- ‘If the protein food imported to Europe from Third World countries in the form of animal feed to produce milk seas, butter mountains, etc., was used to feed the local people, there would be no hunger in any of these regions.’ (220)
- ‘Autonomy over our bodies and lives is, therefore, the first and most fundamental demand of the international feminist movement. Any search for ecological, economic and political autarky must start with the respect for the autonomy of women’s bodies, their productive capacity to create new life, their productive capacity to maintain trough work, their sexuality.’ (222)
- ‘A change in the existing sexual division of labor would imply first and foremost that the violence that characterizes capitalist-patriarchal man-woman relations worldwide will be abolished not by women, but by men. Men have to refuse to define themselves any longer as Man-the-Hunter. Men have to start movements against violence against women if they want to preserve the essence of their own humanity.’ (222)
- ‘Many women and men in the West feel utterly helpless and tend to close their eyes and wait in a defeatist manner for the unavoidable holocaust.’ (224)
- ‘We should here and now begin to refuse our allegiance to and our complicity with this system.’ (224)
- ‘An area which has been almost totally left out for political struggle in the West has been the area of consumption….We may not be able to influence the whole marketing system. But a consumer liberation movement, started by feminists among women who, as housewives, are important agents of consumption and crucial pillars of the market, could go a long way towards undermining the capitalist-patriarchal system.’ (225)
- ‘Apart from a boycott of luxury commodities, feminists, if they want to be true to their political goals, must boycott all items which reinforce a sexist image of woman, or anti-woman tendencies in our society. Thus, the new wave of ‘beautifying women,’ created by the garment industries as a kind of counter-attack against the feminist refusal to shape their bodies and appearance according to the standardized model of an ‘attractive and sexy’ woman, can be successfully disturbed if women openly boycott cosmetics and new sexy fashion fads.’ (225-226)
- ‘The manipulation of women as housewives and mothers, carried out by the multinational food and pharmaceutical industries and others, can be thwarted if women consciously refuse, as far as possible, to buy certain items, like, for example, the chocolate milk products, fast foods, drugs, etc.’ (226)
- ‘A further essential criterion for the selection of commodities to be boycotted is the degree of exploitation of Third World producers, particularly of Third World women, incoporated [sic] and materialized in the commodities.’ (226)
- ‘The destruction of nature which is inherent in commodity production must also be a criterion for a refusing the purchase of certain commodities. This aspect has mobilized the friends of animals, for example, the animal protection associations, to campaign for a prohibition on experiments on living animals by the cosmetics industry.’ (226)
- ‘A consumer liberation movement would, therefore, also imply a new and fascinating learning process, a conscientization…’ (227)
- ‘Although it can and should be started by each individual woman in her immediate surroundings, where she has a certain amount of power and freedom of choice, it is clear that individual acts of renunciation or boycott will not have the desired impact on the big capitalist corporations. Only a social and political boycott movement could have a major effect. This means women’s groups or organizations must publicly announce their boycott campaign, accompany their actions with information and analysis about the exploitative relations in the product they have selected as target of their campaign and create as wide a publicity for this movement as is possible without betraying its basic principles.’ (227)
- ‘Control over the production decisions could become a goal for trade unions and other working-class organizations.’ (228)
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