#janega

"As we've seen, Medieval women worked hard. But we're often told that women's presence in the workplace is a product of the post-war twentieth century, when women emerged from the domestic sphere to take up a place in the work world... Yet, Medieval women worked, and indeed expected to work. Why then do we treat the 'working woman' as a modern invention? Modern ways of thinking about both gender and work color the way we look at the past. Medieval women and their work were considered unimportant for the theological and philosophical reasons I've spoken of before. Women were inferior to men, and their work was viewed similarly. In Enlightenment thought, for women to participate in challenging careers, or the public sphere, was to go against 'nature.' Rousseau argued that women were better at domestic tasks that required details, while men were more intellectual, which created a mutual dependence that benefited social relationships. The best way for these social relationships to thrive was for women to retreat entirely from the public sphere, and into domestic life, that limited their own intellectual pursuits to whatever made life easiest for men. These arguments weren't revolutionary, but their effect was. As they took hold, women in the upper and middle classes retreated from the workshop, the storefront, and the political realm, into the back of their home with their children... As the modern period wore on, and a nebulous concept of science was increasingly used to validate the way the world was organized, more arguments like these followed. This is how a psychologist like Baron-Cohen is able to tell us that women are inherently nurturers, so human society assigned them to the responsibility to make the home the way it assigned men to make money. But the house-bound domestic mother was never, even in the modern period, common. Domesticity was a privilege accorded to those who could get by on a husband's wage, or who inherited wealth. Working class women have always worked. The hint is in the name."

"When women's brains are not being cited as theoretical proof of their inevitable status as mothers, their hormones are blamed as likely culprits. Teams of hormonal researchers have identified that women who have higher levels of estrogen have 'higher maternal tendencies.' They apparently reached this conclusion by asking a group of women how many children they wanted and when, then measuring the levels of estrogen in their urine. Such studies back up received psychological wisdom about 'the ticking biological clock' that urges women into motherhood, and that some researchers have linked to the pituitary gland, or simply to 'the essential natures of women.' Although scientists and the general public alike assure themselves that women's hormones mean they're destined to be mothers, many more studies have found that no such link exists. As the sociologist Nancy J. Chodorow noted, as far back as 1987, 'There is, as yet, no evidence to show that female hormones or chromosomes make a difference in human maternalness,' and 'There is substantial evidence that nonbiological mothers, children, and men, can parent just as adequately as biological mothers, and can feel just as nurturant.' This remains the case. Overall there is no real problem with the idea that women's hormones are a help if they become mothers. Motherhood, after all, should be a neutral state that women do, or do not, enter. However, the fact of motherhood is often enough to make people consider women as less competent than their male or childless female peers. The sociologists Shelly Correll, Stephen Bernard, and In Paik recently found that working mothers were seen as 10% less competent than their childless peers. They were also seen as 12% less committed to their jobs than women with no children. Maddeningly, fathers, in contrast, were seen as being 5% more committed to their jobs than men with no children. These same working mothers were also paid less, and were more heavily scrutinized by their peers, especially for perceived problems with punctuality. In all, the average working mother in America loses about $16,000 USD in wages due to the 'motherhood penalty.' Women's theoretical hormonal destiny as mothers, is thus an active impediment to their participation and advancement in the workforce. You will note that regardless of whether the modern concept of sexual differences rests on a social or a scientific explanation, neither disputes the 'unassailable fact' that women are in their current societal place due to an irresistible force. If we keep women from public life for social reasons it is because we are compelled to do so. Who will raise the children, if not women?"

"We are complicit in this erasure of pre-20th century working women for a number of complex reasons. Chief among these is our desire to think about history as one constant march towards progress. Women must have entered the workforce only recently, because now must be the best time ever to be a woman. We celebrate that women can now enter professions and have careers, but we slight the fact that women have worked over the centuries at jobs that they were supposed, and not supposed, to do. We don't like to admit that even if women are not working outside the home, doing the tasks of a home--cleaning and repairing the interior, making and mending clothing, raising a family, tending to children's education--is work. Medieval people had no doubt that being a mother was difficult and took time, in a way that we simply do not. To be fair, we have begun to acknowledge this domestic labor. In 1989, Arlie Hochschild coined the term 'the second shift' for all the work that women do when they get home from their paying jobs. And, much like medieval people, if we have money and the option, we almost immediately attempt to hand household chores off to other people--and by people, I mean poorer women. The armies of caregivers, nannies, and house cleaners are testimony to the fact that domestic labor is work. But because a negative assessment is attached to this home-work, the mostly women workers are paid low wages. Still, we push women toward these roles by insisting it is 'natural' for them to do these tasks. And we start teaching domestic responsibilities to girls at very young ages. Yet, it goes beyond these domestic tasks to whatever work women do. When women take over a field previously dominated by men, the pay for that profession drops. Conversely, in fields where women were the majority, but men eventually out placed them, such as computing, the pay increases. Meanwhile, women in any profession are routinely paid less than their male counterparts for the same job, a phenomenon referred to as the 'gender pay gap.' And women are regularly underrepresented at the higher levels of these same professions. The same proclivities were on display in the Medieval period. However, Medieval people were honest about why they did it: they just didn't like women. To tell ourselves that we are the newly liberated, women-respecting heroes is to ignore millennia of women who got up, did their jobs, took care of their kids, and were every bit as engaged in, and integral to, society as men were. We obfuscate these women and their history if we tell a story about ourselves rather than the past. The stories that we tell about the histories and women and work... show us in the best possible light, but often have very little to do with history. If we are to confront these false narratives, we first have to make room in our minds for the factual story of women and work. Only then can we begin to understand why our narrative differs so much from the reality, and what we are avoiding when we write it."

"If [beauty] standards are based on evolutionary processes, why do our current preferences differ from older ones? And why have ours changed even during different decades? There is no single and consistent beauty ideal that has existed over time, even within Europe. Beauty is a social construct, and has different characteristics in different ages. Justifying social beauty norms through scientific means is as much a social construction as Matthew of Vendôme's effort was, and we can pay them exactly as much heed. Maybe less, because at least Matthew was giving us some poetry to read as well. So while women must meet mostly impossible requirements of beauty, Medieval and modern societies also prefer that the women should simply 'be' beautiful, and unaware of the fact, fitting in with a modesty that helps to keep them in inferior positions. We no longer threaten women with ghastly tortures in hell if they take an interest in make up, but we still want them to be effortlessly beautiful, and creating that effect requires a lot of money, and sometimes surgery... The other thing our society has carried over from the Medieval period, is that it is easier for rich women to be considered 'beautiful'... Similarly pristine fashionable clothing is hardly achievable to women who work in agriculture, or who wear uniforms to blue-collar jobs, or who run after children upon their return home. Fashion thus reinforces ideas about luxury and beauty. Now that fashion is its own industry, those messages are perhaps even more heightened than they were in the Medieval period, when society actively fought to stop others from emulating the styles of the ruling class. Everyone is now encouraged to buy luxury brands, though the vast majority of people will never be able to.

"Bolstered by the allegedly progressive spirit of enlightenment, we are reevaluating our concepts of sex-related behavior through scientific understanding. Now the 'fact' that women and men have certain 'biological differences' is used to explain why women are inferior to men in all the ways that society privileges. Who would have thought!"