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Robert Walczak Assignment 2

In “The Accumulation of Labor and the Degradation of Women,” Federici explains the struggles that women were faced with during the emergence of capitalism. Land privatization led to many hardships such as evictions, increases to rent and taxes, which would lead into debt, left the people who had lived on the land before little options in how to live. As a result countless people turned into vagabonds with the threat of enslavement and death above them instead of working a wage job. Soon afterwards riots would begin and women played a part in many of them, sometimes even starting them. There were many reasons for the riots, such as the price of food rising with it not being sold or distributed to the citizens but exported to other countries. Large groups of women also took part in the riots and why they had such a strong role in the riots would be that they suffered the most from having their land taken from them. It was much harder for a woman to be a vagabond, it left them open to violence from other men and it was even more dangerous when a woman was pregnant or taking care of children. Federici stats that there were some women who would work as cooks or washers in armies but even those jobs didn’t last forever. Woman faced harder times then men due to land privatization and the jobs that were left for them weren’t valued enough for them to sustain themselves. The women of this time had no ability to gain wages and were stuck in poverty and dependence; those that did find jobs were treated worse than their male counterparts and were ignored. Working women’s wages were manipulated to further devalue their worth and labor and they had no power to stop it.