A Companion to Global Gender History. Группа авторов
Чтение книги онлайн.

Читать онлайн книгу A Companion to Global Gender History - Группа авторов страница 26

СКАЧАТЬ from invaders. In Western Europe, many Christian writers and thinkers, like their counterparts several centuries later, promulgated ideas about women’s weakness and vulnerability that promoted gender difference and division that lasted for centuries (Bitel, 1998: 108). But as influential as they were, they did not completely circumscribe women’s economic activities.

      Even in socially stratified, complex societies, women worked at the same tasks as men and enjoyed a relatively high status based on their productive activities. Ethnohistorical evidence suggests considerable fluidity in the relationship of gender and technical expertise among the Maya of Central America for example, where women were primarily responsible for skilled production of pottery, produced with clay dug by men. And research on the pre‐Hispanic Americas has also shown that women were responsible for the massive cloth production central to the Andean economy (Arden, 2008). These patterns of gender complementarity continued with the development of more centralized states, urbanization, and the emergence of new economic institutions and relations.

      Between the fourteenth and mid‐eighteenth centuries, new developments transformed the political and economic landscapes of Europe and Latin America: centralized states and new legal and religious discourses emerged, along with new economic institutions. Historians have argued that these developments led to growing gender divisions and the devaluation of women’s labor (Wiesner, 1986; Howell, 1986; Hanley, 1989). The emergence of centralized states ruled by strong leaders with coherent legal systems and structures, as in France and Britain, allowed kings and their bureaucrats to distinguish more carefully between men’s and women’s rights. After about the sixteenth century in many areas, women lost the ability to dispose freely of their property – with serious implications for their ability to run a business or ply a trade. Yet, as scholars have recently learned, these developments did not have the same consequences everywhere. For example, although German laws attempted to make it illegal for unmarried women to migrate to cities, the same was not true in France or England. New evidence suggests that in many places the opportunities for women’s work increased rather than declined (Crowston, 2008).

      Beginning in the middle of the fifteenth century, protoindustrial production began to threaten urban guild control over production, and guilds tightened regulations and access to trades. Gender divisions sharpened as guilds distinguished more carefully between highly paid skilled male labor and unskilled female labor, but with some geographical differences. Although in Germany and the Low Countries guilds progressively devalued the work of female domestic textile producers, in France the monarchy required urban women producers to organize in guilds. Women labored successfully in both guild and informal non‐guild urban occupations alongside rural, domestic producers in France, England, and Italy. Girls received training in garment‐making and tapestry through informal apprenticeships. Thus, the emergence of strong, centralized states like England or France did not automatically result in the decline of women’s productive activity, and in many locations their economic opportunities expanded (Crowston, 2008).

      Even where women and men labored at different tasks in different spatial settings, as in English rural society of the sixteenth century, women’s work –at spinning for example—made a critical contribution to the family economy and could be highly valued (Flather, 2008). At the same time, productive activity became progressively more differentiated by gender in both guild and non‐guild labor, and some forms of women’s labor lost value in market economies. Even in cases where women performed the same work as men, as in tailoring in eighteenth century America, independent (and successful) women earned less than men for producing the same articles of clothing (Miller). In many places, women’s home‐based production for the family as opposed to for the market– from making soap to sewing clothes – gradually fell under the rubric “housewifery” or “social reproduction.” These were activities designed to sustain and reproduce life but were no longer considered “work.” (Quataert, 1985; Wiesner‐Hanks, 1998: 226).

      With these developments, class differences emerged more visibly than ever. As middle‐class merchant capitalists prospered, whether in Europe, Asia, or in North America, their wives hired lower‐class women as servants, allowing middle‐class women the leisure to beautify their homes or engage in charitable activities rather than work for wages. Between roughly 1400 and 1750, the growth of merchant capitalism and protoindustrial production, new technologies, tools, and crops, and new ideologies praising women’s domestic non‐productive labor had negative consequences for women. Men took control of skilled labor, assuring that women performed less skilled work and earned less than they did. The mutually reinforcing effects of these new economic systems, ideology, and the emergence of centralized states and bodies of law continued to shape gender divisions and gender inequalities in labor for centuries to come.

      Elsewhere however, growing divisions of labor diminished women’s position. Historians and anthropologists’ observations of North American Native societies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries suggest that European contact and settlement, the appearance of new technologies, the growth of trade, as well as the development of the state, increased gender inequality. Among the Plains Indians of the West, the introduction of horses by the Spanish in the seventeenth century and the development of a market for buffalo hides in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were crucial factors: men’s acquisition of horses allowed them to hunt buffalo more effectively than previously. СКАЧАТЬ