One of the contributions brought to the table by an inherently capitalist societal and economic system is the practice of measuring the worth of one’s work and its significance in monetary terms. This practice also leaves the door open to exploitation in the form of challenging one’s authority by a constant propagation of their insignificance and inferiority. The large contributions of women in the labor force and income shares of households have more often than not fallen prey to this prejudice. In her piece ‘Dynamics of Sexual Division of Labour and Capital Accumulation’ Maria Mies brings to the fore the wage discrimination that is faced by women owing to a constant demeaning of the work that is done by them and promoting the stock image of a ‘housewife’ in a woman, which also leads to alteration of their own perception of the work they do as being something that is of less importance than that done by a man.
Another aspect that Mies seeks to highlight is that majority of the work put in by rural women is into the production of goods that are never to be consumed or used by them, most of which is produced and consumed by upper class individuals. It is here that Miles also ropes in the Marxist idea of Alienation from their product that these rural women are faced with. Mies ends off her piece showcasing the disparity that is brought on by the division of the sexes into the ‘housewife’ and the ‘breadwinner’ helps propagate the exploitation of working women, for their work is very simply labelled as insignificant and only worth a meagre remuneration.
No comments:
Post a Comment