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Danielle Edwards Assignment #2

In “The Accumulation of Labor and the Degradation of Women,” Federici described how a new social hierarchy in Europe led to the degradation of women. One of the events that led to the degradation of women was the enclosure system. Under this system, land was fenced off and no longer available as communal agricultural fields, thus making it hard for people to support themselves and their families. Money became the means by which one could support their families. In this type of society where land was privatized, it would prove to be quite challenging for women, as they weren’t able to migrate like their male counterparts due to lifecycle events like pregnancies. They were also left with the task of child rearing and not many options were available to women to work for wages. Women had to continue doing domestic work which was becoming increasingly undervalued. In the new society of production and reproduction labor, only production labor was lauded and celebrated while domestic labor was deemed good- for- nothing from an economic standpoint. When women did work, their wages were far more inferior than the wages of their male equivalent. This gender pay gap is a prime example of how women were degraded so that they would have to depend on men to take care of them.
With the new society that was developing, the wages people got were so low that they couldn’t afford decent food. Their diets consisted of bread, since that was the most affordable thing. Since people, couldn’t even feed themselves, women didn’t reproduce as much. The logical reasoning being that they could not afford to feed another mouth. Since the population was decreasing, the state decided to adopt new rules that allowed them to control a woman’s reproductive rights. The government sought out to punish women who committed what they believed to be reproductive crimes. The state degraded women by conducting a witch hunt, in which they vilified forms of birth control like contraception and fined women for abortions. Pregnant women were observed to make sure they didn’t terminate their pregnancies. Marriage was given a premium while celibacy was punished according to the new laws put in place. The privatization of land led to the new social hierarchy that allowed the government to control a woman’s body. This newfound control that the government gained violated the rights of women and it shows how low on the social ladder women were. It also shows the misogynistic culture of Europe during this time period.