Barbelith Underground > Head Shop > Concept Interrogation: Family Values

... unfortunately some socialists and feminists, especially on the "eco" side of things, have made the mistake of seemingly treating patriarchy (and social hierarchy more generally) as a product of capitalism, usually linked to some nebulous idea of a pre-capitalist "golden age", which tends to uncritically laud "peasant" society due to its (percieved to be) sustainable economy, while glossing over power and politics in such non- or pre-capitalist societies...)

Straw man, sir, because (academic, or formal) feminism is precisely the analysis of power relations with respect to embodiment and situation.

But anyway, with regard to the different family values in times and places, I think it's clear that priority and boundary systems are going to vary with people's material situation. It's always struck me that removal of "nuclear family" units into cities to staff the industrial revolution did a huge favour for the cause of patriarchy, because if I understand correctly, peasant women have always at least gardened some fruit and veg, kept a pig, chickens or whatever when possible and foraged for abundant wild seasonal food in the UK. They were never entirely dependent on pay provided by others (was men's pay in factories always higher than women's? I know I've heard of one or two specific examples. I don't think there was maternity allowance in factory jobs, anyway.) until they moved to places where there were not necessarily any accessible gardens.

However incapacitated a woman might be by a particular pregnancy, it's on the lower end of probability that she wouldn't be able to plant, tend, and harvest from a garden or chickens in the backyard of the house she lived in, but a higher probability she wouldn't be able to keep the rigourous schedule of an early-industrial-revolution factory job. Hence the way I see it the societal trend towards the oppression of women by making them dependent on the charity of men during 19th and 20th centuries is directly linked at least to the industrial revolution.

Remember that the populations of cities died at a high rate really very late in British history: 1840ish is the date I have in my head, - perhaps a modern european historian can advise - when large numbers of ordinary people actually survived more than a generation in cities, so urban migration was a continuous flow from the hinterlands over the previous century as industrialisation began. That's relevant because the growing factory systems didn't necessarily require their labour force to survive at that point, they could rely on the influx.

However unfair and oppressive the power relations of peasant feudal economies are (Scotland's Highland Clearances I think perhaps only a particularly cruel example in the UK) - moving into cities did directly affect women's rights by depriving them of some means of food production - it could be argued, more than one means of production by also isolating them from the extended family network.

Without getting rose-tinted about peasant societies it's possible to notice that the rights of women particularly were eroded by industrial urbanisation because of women's genuine need for variable working schedules, especially in an era when if I understand correctly reliable contraception was not widely available. People are much easier to oppress when they have fewer resources with which to be independent, and I argue that the degree of disempowerment due to childbearing was on the whole less brutal in a rural peasant economy than in an early urban one.