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Robert Walczak Assignment 4

The concept of a woman’s labor is brought up in both Federici’s and Morgan’s work and what their worth is. In Federici’s book he talks about the changes in the way land in handled led to a change in labor. Women suffered the most from the change because it was harder for them to become vagabonds and couldn’t support themselves. Federici states that as it became harder for women to find work they became limited to only reproduction labor. Not only were they limited to reproduction labor but they those who did work a wage job barely earned any money compared to men who worked the same job. This was purposely done to devalue a woman’s labor during a time of escalating misogyny. (Federici 83,84) In Morgan’s work, she goes into how African women were labeled and how that labeling had caused Europeans to see them as something monstrous and nonhuman. To provide context, Europeans believed  that the birth of a child was very laborious and that more difficult work followed with the tending and breast-feeding of the child, not to say that this isn’t correct because it is. In comparison to European women African women were said to have painless labor and could deal with breast feeding their child. This was used as a reassurance that they could work hard labor and not be bothered. (Morgan 36) To slave owners this was why African women were valued because they were seen as something that could produce both crops and more laborers. The concept of labor ties these works together because they show that regardless of what race a woman was or where they were from they still faced the same problem. European women were forced into reproductive labor because they didn’t have the chance to work and were exploited when they did; they were forced into a home life and to depend on men. African women were labeled by European travels as savage monsters and were taken advance of as both something that could work hard labor and produce more laborers. Both Federici and Morgan show that regardless of race women suffered from the actions men took against them.