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Assignment 2 Federici

In Federici’s The Accumulation of Labor and Degradation of Women, we are given many examples of how women were looked at as second class citizens. They couldn’t make their own decisions, and even their own bodies didn’t truly belong to themselves because it was seen as property of the state for the sole purpose of reproduction. One of the events mentioned that played a part in women being devalued happened in 1624 in York. Women protested by rioting and destroying an enclosure which led to them going to prison. Women were so opposed to enclosures because they were even more negatively impacted by them than the men were at the time . For the women, it was even more difficult to work, get money, and help provide food and shelter for their families. Before this, women weren’t prosecuted for crimes because they were looked at as belonging to their husbands legally. This event helped change how they were treated by the law. We see how women eventually start to be prosecuted at alarming rates for complications with their pregnancies and their babies dying. Another contributor to the degradation of women during this time was the popular literature on the social aspects of the 17th century life which dealt with the power struggle between men and women. In this type of literature, female characters were depicted as aggressive and unruly often times physically hurting their husbands. This led men to want to exclude women from the work force even more out of fear that women will become too powerful. Women who went against the norm of working only in the home were given a bad reputation in regards to their sexuality. The men feared losing their jobs to women who would work for much less than they would. Federici shows us that women always had a specific set of expectations that were given to her by men. When mercantilism became the way of life, and the higher the population the more money the state could make, women were then seen as breeders. Then when the ideals on femininity began to change, women were expected to be passive and suppress their sexuality as a way of being more virtuous than their male counterparts. All of this related to the degradation of women because they were never given the freedom to just do what they wanted to do, and they weren’t treated equally under the law and in everyday interactions.