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Colonization And Housewifization Analysis

Decent Essays

Nowadays, in a growing number of housewives who came out of their family and became a worker, we unconsciously admitted the phenomenon that women and men are no gender differences. Under this recognition, we focused more on class equality instead of gender equality. However, in Maria Mies’s Colonization and Housewifization, she questioned about this dissertation by giving examples and facts. In fact, the exploitation of capitalism relies on the maintenance of labor divisions and inequality at all levels of the globe. Maria Mies used a metaphor of iceberg to explained the function of capitalism, which many invisible parts of the iceberg are under the water, and yet they constitute the base of whole. From my research, the iceberg of globe economic …show more content…

After the beginning of the patriarchal society, women become the object of oppression, which men tend to blame their mistakes and weaknesses to women. In the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, during the rise of the "witch hunting" wave, about one hundred thousand "witch" was executed. The whole wave is not only violent and cruel, but also reflects the inferior of female under the patriarchal system. In China, even though there’s no such event like that, but the social system was apparently patriarchal. Women were more like a maidservants in a family. For the emperor, his wives were more than three thousands. Women were clearly the lowest class of the society. As a result, the influence which patriarchal had was a tragedy of the …show more content…

Nevertheless, when you talking about capitalism, it has to be related to the patriarchal. In fact, capitalism requires patriarchy to maintain inequality and exploitation at all levels. Even though in the 19th century and 20th century, the housewifezation has been incorporated into the new range of working services, but it still under the control of patriarchal. As Maria Mies described in the page 18: “By that time not only had the household been discovered as an important market for a whole range of new gadgets and items, but also scientific home-management had become a new ideology for the further domestication of women.” Some feminists see this as a step forward in liberation of women from housewifezation. But if we look at it further, when a woman needs to achieve mobility in capitalist society by exploiting other women, this is absolutely not the meaning of any women's liberation. This is simply another type of “colonization”. Capitalism can not provide equality for all, and above all, it is impossible for all to enter the highest standard of living of capitalism. Thus, for women and men under the water in the iceberg model, new equality simply means that they are the cheapest laborers in the society of capitalism. All is nothing but a paternalistic means for further capital

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