April 28, 2013

New Reader Alert – this blog is a sequential release of a longer written piece. Each segment works hard to ‘stand alone,’ but inevitably, they make more sense in context, which means reading from the beginning post through to the latest post, which is actually the current ‘end.’ Thank you for stopping by – please leave a comment; it would be great to hear what you think about these ideas.  With appreciation, Laurie

Serfdom in Modern America:

Forging Our Own Chains

On Feminism: From Equal to Angel to Workhorse

This all happened at the same time that the Artisan or Guild system, based on apprenticeships, began to negotiate its relationship with the new wage economy. Under the system which had traditionally determined wages male apprentices earned wages with the goal of buying tools and property for the time they became masters with their own apprentices; in contrast, female ‘apprentices’ (generally 'pink collar' type domestic workers) earned wages with the goal of earning dowries. To further complicate matters, at this point in time Europe had been battered by three centuries of death and destruction due to repeated incidences of the plague, of sweating sickness, of cholera, of small pox and finally, of syphilis, so that by the beginning of the Industrial Revolution the population of England had still not regained safe population levels. 

In one event known as the English sweating sickness in 1485, over 100,000 people in London died, along with half the populations of Oxford and Cambridge. Mass graves were filled with infectious victims in every city, and populations fell dramatically in all parts of the country, undoubtedly leaving survivors with tremendous collective ptsd, in addition weakened support systems. The sweating sickness would re-occur several more times into the early 1500's, ebbing and flowing over many frightening decades. Even without the waves of illness and catastrophic loss of life to disease, things would have been hard on a society that was trying to build its numbers: from 1350 to 1850 Europe suffered through a climate event known as the 'Little Ice Age,' which led to widespread famine and resultant population declines. 

The merging factors of the artisan system culture (the social group which traditionally set wages in pre-wage-economy times), the new wage economy, and the decimated population created a social dynamic which I believe was ground zero from which the original gender wage gap originated. Because population growth was such an important national goal it became accepted practice that wages for women’s work should be kept sufficiently high enough to build dowries (and justify their absence from the family endeavors), but not high enough so that they might remain single – by definition, women’s wages must be too low for them to be self-supporting, because it would negatively affect population growth if women were allowed to remain single; women’s wages must be too low for self-support, in order to ensure that they would marry and have the children which were so desperately needed to rebuild the decimated population. 

Additionally, because men had now become the primary wage earners in the family, it became necessary for women’s jobs to have a temporary character to them that allowed employers to prevent male unemployment and to adjust to changing patterns of demand. Women were kept ‘on call,’ as a work force, in order to afford the flexibility needed to keep men employed both in times of high or low labor needs. As a result of this lower wage, and temporary nature of their work, women’s voices in family economies began to decline, as their access to cash diminished and as their domestic contributions became increasing invisible not only to society but to their own families who were generally absent during the solitary hours they managed the home duties.

Further complicating matters and diminishing women’s voices were the doctrines of Coverture, developed in England in the High and Late Middle ages, originating in the Common Law legal reforms of Henry II (1133-1189), and subsequently enshrined in English and American law, until married women’s’ property acts began to be passed early in the 19^th c in both countries. Under the practice of Coverture married and single women existed as distinctly separate legal entities, with single women – femes sole (woman uncovered), and married women, feme coverture (woman under cover) having radically different amounts of control over their properties and assets. These laws, developed in England and transferred to all English speaking colonies, persisted until the 19^th century, forming the body of laws that would govern women in the United States after the American Revolution. 

Under Coverture, a single woman had the right to own and dispose of property and to make contracts on her own behalf. Conversely, a feme coverture, a woman under cover (of her husband because they became one legal entity at marriage as only one could be recognized under Common  law in legal issues), would have no legal right to dispose of her own property, or even her own wages. She could not make contracts, and was essentially at the mercy of a good or bad husband.. 

In the United States women were waging a war on coverture from before the American Revolution. Early feminism began here in the United States as equity feminist Abigail Adams penned Remember the Ladies to her husband before the Revolution and pointedly assured him that if they did  not remember the ladies the ladies would take up revolution, because their security should  not depend on whether or not they had a kind husband, but should be ensured by law. Equity Feminism is a doctrine of ideology rooted in classical liberalism that aims for full civil and legal equality for women based on a moral doctrine requiring equal treatment. The time was right and an avalanche of laws from 1809 (mere decades after the revolution) through 1920 would effectively destroy the institution of Coverture by ensuring women's rights to divorce, protection of personal property, child custody, alimony and admittance to professional schools. Women had won the equity war by the time they won the vote, in all practical, legal ways.

Prior to the Wage economy this would have had relatively little significance for femes coverture in terms of their real power within the family. Their work previously was visible and valued, genderized work did not automatically mean devalued work, and women had more access to cash in the previous barter and family economy. While women may not have had the right legally to buy or dispose of property or to make contracts, they had a voice in their family that was based on sound economic footing, and their goals would have likely been advanced more satisfactorily before the Wage economy than they would have been after, as their voices became harder and harder to hear without the hard cash necessary to back them up (as women began their long uncontrolled slide into institutionalized poverty - along with their children).