The Double Register of HistoryWilma Dunaway

FOCUS:

To Engender World-System Analysis

And

“Overlay the ‘double register’ of history”

Presentation by Adam Sgrenci

Summary

• W-S Theory essential to analyze capitalism’s exploitation of women:Failed to do so (mech/material input)

• Engender Wallerstein’s concepts of the semiproletarianized household and commodity chain networks

• Identify Hidden Inputs:(a) the bearing and raising of children

(b) ‘shadow work’ that generates the family’s survival requirements (c) inter-node subsidies • Identify Externalized Costs:

(a) ecological/health risks(b) cultural disruption(c) unpaid labor (of which the woman is doubly exploited)(d) feminization of poverty

*Questions will focus on these externalized costs of capitalism, those concepts remaining unexposed through W-S models

Questions

Supporting Argument

Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale

Maria Mies

Explains the externalized costs of capitalism to women

V.

Alternate Argument

Women in the Family and the Economy

Ratna Ghosh and George Kurian

Notion of capitalism as sole system of the exploitation of women will be opposed

1. Is the first subsidy to capitalism made by women?

WD: Y. The biological reality of women’s lives is sexual and reproductive; thus, mothers make their first subsidy to capitalism through the bearing and raising of successive generations of laborers.

(14)

SA: Y. If we keep in mind that ‘productivity’ means the specific capacity of human beings to produce and reproduce life in an historic process, then we can formulate for our further analysis the thesis that female productivity is the precondition of male productivity and of all further world-historic development. (58)

2. Does capitalism use the housewife in order to externalize costs?

WD: Y. The household is the site in which women undertake unpaid labor for those members who are waged laborers…Women’s hidden inputs subsidize the production process throughout the commodity chain, thereby keeping consumer prices lower and profits higher. To generate family survival requirements, women engage in “shadow work” outside those formal capitalist structures in which labor is remunerated.

(14)

SA: Y. “Housewifization” Not only was the housewife called on to reduce the labour power costs, she was also mobilized to use her energies to create new needs. A virtual war for cleanliness and hygiene – a war against dirt, germs, bacteria, and so on – was started in order to create a market for the new products of the chemical industry. Scientific home making was also advocated as a means of lowering the men’s wage, because the wage would last longer if the housewife used it economically. (106)

3. Does capital accumulation cause mistreatment to women?

WD: Y. Capitalism externalizes to women, the negative side-effects of cultural change and disruption. Domestic violence increases dramatically as manufacturing and extractive industries enter new zones, and females are almost always the victim. [In addition], Malnutrition [in the 3rd World] is the most fundamental act of environmental sexism that is inflicted by the capitalist world-system upon women and girls [as] poor families allocate more of their scarce food resources and safe water to boys. (20)

SA: Y. Violence against women and extracting women’s labour through coercive labour relations are part and parcel of capitalism. They are necessary for the capitalist accumulation process and not peripheral to it. In other words, capitalism has to use, to strengthen, or even to invent, patriarchal men-women relations if it wants to maintain its accumulation model. (170)

4. Does integration into capitalist commodity chains bring destructive economic results for women?

WD:Y. Historically and currently, women have been targeted for the dirtiest, most back breaking aspects of the capitalist production process while higher-skilled, higher-paying artisan jobs have been reserved for males. (21)

Y. On the Silk Industry in Paterson, NJ: By 1892, more men were employed in the city than women... During the last ten years of the century, male employment in Paterson rose overall by about seventy percent, while female employment rose only forty percent. The core sector of skilled-male workers thus became concentrated in Paterson while in surrounding towns of Northern Pennsylvania, semi-skilled female workers labored in the numerous scattered annex operations.

Data

Source: Boles, Elson E. 2002. “Critiques of World-Systems Analysis and Alternatives: Unequal Exchange and Three Forms of Class Struggle in the Japan–US Silk Network, 1880–1890.” Journal of World-System Research http://jwsr.ucr.edu 8 (2): 180.

5. Does the capitalist process fail to remunerate women’s labor more so than men’s labor?

WD: Y. As it incorporates new zones of the globe, capitalism embraces two dialectical labor recruitment mechanisms. Some household members are proletarianized into wage laborers who produce capitalist commodities, but women’s labor is concentrated into semiproletarianized activities that are only partially remunerated…It is beyond this portal that we find the forgotten woman, and we will find her working longer hours than men to contribute surpluses that do not appear in the account books of the capitalist enterprise or in the government’s tally of the GNP. (11,13)

Data

Women work longer hours than men in nearly every country (figure 4.1). Of the total burden of work, women carry on average 53% in developing countries and 51% in industrial countries.

Sample: 31 countries on hours and min/day of possibly remunerated productive work

Data 1 (Q5)

United Nations Development Program. 1995. Gender and Human Development. Human Development Report (New York, United Nations) p. 88.

Data 2 (Q5)

Of men’s total work time in industrial countries, roughly two-thirds is spent in paid SNA* activities and one-third in unpaid non-SNA activities. For women, these shares are reversed. In developing countries, more than three-fourths of men’s work is in SNA activities. So, men receive the lion’s share of income and recognition for their economic contribution – while most of women’s work remains unpaid, unrecognized and undervalued” (figure 4.2)

United Nations Development Program. 1995. Gender and Human Development. Human Development Report (New York, United Nations) p. 89.

*SNA - purposes of economic analysis, decision-taking and policy-making

WD. Y. Domestic violence increases dramatically as manufacturing and extractive industries enter new zones, and females are almost always the victim. (20)

6. Does capital accumulation lead to the physical exploitation and punishment of women?

NUMBER OF REPORTS AT THE NATIONAL LEVEL PRESENTED TO THE CARABINEROS IN 1998

(Chilean Police) Assaulted

1995 1996 1997 1998

Women 25,335 34,094 38,671 39,394

Men 997 1,228 1,553 1,574

Children (less than 18 years old)

683 671 851 688

Seniors (over 65 years old)

181 220 181 190

Total 27,196 36,213 41,256 41,846

TOTAL NUMBER OF INDIVIDUALS APPREHENDED FOR INTRAFAMILIAR VIOLENCE BY THE CARABINEROS,

BROKEN DOWN BY THE YEAR, SEX, AGGRESOR AND THE VICTIM.(Numbers).

 1995 1996 1997

INTRAFAMILIAR VIOLENCE

Total Men Women Total Men Women Total Men Women

Against Women

4,762 4,440 322 4,813 4,484 329 4,965 4,636 329

Against Men 398 243 155 530 346 184 480 295 185

Against Children

266 178 88 208 133 75 183 110 73

Against Seniors

22 17 5 21 20 1 11 11 -

Others 126 94 32 94 71 23 60 47 13

Total 5,574 4,972 602 5,777 5,054 612 5,699 5,099 600

United Nations Development Program. Regional Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean Inter Agency Campaign on Women’s Human Rights in Latin America and the Caribbean. http://undp.org/rblac/gender/chile.htm 1998.

Data 1

Data 2 (Q6)

WD. Y. The world-system is currently structuring a vast international sex industry, and girls are targeted as the human resources to be exploited. (20)

Y. As the Thai economy developed and new communities of foreigners were established, prostitution also expanded. (130) More recently, there has been an expansion of “indirect” prostitution. Prostitutes now work as waitresses, as salesgirls in department stores, as golf caddies and in a variety of other sectors where they can meet potential customers. (138)

0

5000

10000

15000

20000

25000

30000

1979 1984 1990

Number of Commerical Sex Workers by Sector of Employment,

Thailand 1979-1990

Teahouses

Others

Brothels

Lim, Lin Lean. The Sex Sector: The Economic and Social Bases of Prostitution in Southeast Asia. Geneva, The International Labour Office, 1998. pp. 130,39.

Alternate Theory

Based on socialist model experience in China and Cuba

7. Is the capitalist process responsible for a gender-segregated division of labor?

WD: Y. Historically and currently, women

have been targeted for the dirtiest, most back breaking aspects of the capitalist production process while higher-skilled, higher-paying artisan jobs have been reserved for males…Third World women lose artisan jobs and local markets to imports and to commercialized agriculture. MNCs control the commodity chains that are initiating these economic changes. (21)

AA: No. There is a non-random assignment of work between heavy and light industries according to gender differences. Women by and large are concentrated in light industrial roles. Heavy industries allegedly require energies and skills which are regarded as not suitable for women. Furthermore, wage scales for light industries are considerably below that of the heavy industries. (365)

-and-Cuba’s political myth that women’s freedom has been achieved inhibits the development of an independent women’s movement. Castro states that women’s most important function is the procreation of new generations and they are not allowed to perform certain jobs which are seen as unsuited to their weaker nature. Moreover, perhaps in response to the ideological orthodoxy, it is only rarely in Cuba and then briefly, that an awareness is evinced of how cultural stereotypes of the relation between the sexes affect the life experience of Cuban women. (376,388)

8. Is the capitalist world-system to blame for the “historically” overworked, unremunerated woman worker?

WD: Y. The commodity chain approach can demonstrate that every node of the production process – and every household that contributes labor and resources to that node - are microcosms of the structural inequities of the capitalist world-system. ‘Men are simultaneously agents for capital and for themselves, keeping women intimidated and pliable’. Consequently, women and girls contribute more labor power to household survival than males; but they receive an inequitable share of the total pool of resources. (12)

AA: N. Since the man must leave the house daily either for collective farm work or for the market, the woman is the one who frequently tends the private plot. The household thus remains a production unit for farm women. The attraction of household production economy in addition to the need for some women to stay home for child care and other supportive activities, have indeed kept a fairly sizable proportion of rural women at home. Regardless of this attraction, however, they must take part in collective work during the busy season of the farm or they are vulnerable to mass criticism for lack of collective interest. (363)

9. Is the capitalist world-system responsible for limitations on women’s basic needs?

WD: Y. Worldwide, resource scarcities impact women much more severely than men. Water scarcity, desertification, deforestation, land degradation, and coastal pollution are forms of resource depletion that pose special hardships for women. Malnutrition is the most fundamental act of environmental sexism that is inflicted by the capitalist world-system upon women and girls. Half of all Third World children die before ten. Females are disproportionately represented among those deaths because poor families allocate more of their scarce food resources and safe water to boys. (20)

AA: N. When the collectivization of farm land began, rural families became dependent on collective efforts for grain allotment. However, unlike the kibbutz organization, payment in China is not gauged according to needs but according to the total work points accumulated by family members. Since women are perceived as unable to compete with men in work output, their average annual work points (which affects their grain allotment) often fall to as little as one-half of the men’s work points. (362)

10. Is the capitalist process responsible for a gender-segregated division of labor?

WD: Q7

Data

No. Peking Embroidery and Applique Factory which has 85% women workers, has a salary range of only 30 to 80 yuan. The Peking Glassware Factory, which hires 60% women, has a salary range of 30 to 100 yuan. In contrast, the Peking Arts and Crafts Factory, an industry with only 45% of its workers who are women, offers a salary of up to 200 yuan per month.

(85%)

(60%) (50%)(45%)

0

50

100

150

200

Yuan

Embroidery Glassware Ivory Carving Arts andCrafts

Percentage of Women Earning Yuan in Chinese Factories 1974

* No size of factory given. Symbol of uneven dist.

Hsu-Balzer, Eileen, Richard Balzer and Francis Hsu. China Day by Day. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press) 1974. p.211

11. Is the capitalist world-system responsible for limitations on women’s basic needs?

WD: Q9

Tsai, Kellee S. The Andrew Wellington Cordier Essay: Women and the State in Post-1949 Rural China. Journal of International Affairs, Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. 49 (2): 6. http://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/Tsai.html

N. The employment of women in rural cooperatives posed a strain on their provision of domestic services. To a limited degree, older women were mobilized to handle childcare and other household responsibilities. But domestic services were not fully collectivized. Continued responsibility for housework and official employment meant that women were not able to earn as many work points as their male counterparts. The resulting dual burden was not only recognized, but justified by the Remin Ribao (Communist Daily Paper): "Participation in agricultural production is the inherent right and duty of rural women. Giving birth to children and raising them, as well as preoccupation with household chores are also the obligations of rural women. These things set women apart from men."

Data

12. Does commodity chain analysis fail to incorporate flows from the illegal sector?

WD: Y. […] it documents the construction or creation of a market product, overlooking far too many human and ecological aspects. In other words, it becomes an analysis that emphasizes things rather than human beings, exactly opposite to the historical approach urged by Braudel. […] a narrow emphasis upon those waged and nonwaged laborers who are involved directly in manufacture of the commodity can ignore three types of hidden laborer inputs. There can be direct and indirect flows into the production process from subsistence sectors, from the informal economy and from illegal sectors. (10)

Data

Data (Q12)

Source: Gereffi and Korzeniewicz. Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism. (London, Greenwood Press) 1994.p. 302

No. Coca constitutes an ideal cash crop for farmers in sparsely populated areas because: (1) unremunerated household labor used in coca cultivation fits closely with the preexisting, labor-intensive practices employed in other crops, and (2) it uses readily available indigenous technology, developed locally during coca’s longtime cultivation […] Tying the whole commodity chain in cocaine together at all levels is money laundering, the process by which drug-related profits are deposited in bank accounts or legitimate businesses and then withdrawn or transferred into other accounts as clean money.

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