Kleiner Ausflug in die historische Realität (Allgemein)

Michael , Thursday, 29.08.2013, 14:19 (vor 4115 Tagen) @ Lausemädchen

Hier ein kleiner Text zur "Unterdrückung" von Frauen im "langen 18. Jahrhundert", den ich vor einigen Jahren geschrieben habe:

The story of the domesticity of women in the long 18th century goes as follows: As a result of the changes in the wake of agrarian and industrial revolutions women have been excluded from the public life and the world of work. The transfer of work traditionally done at home to the production plant, where most of the once hand-work was done mechanically, is suspected to having reduced the job opportunities of women and – as a consequence – their degree of responsibility for and contribution to family incomes. Hence, the argument goes that capitalism narrowed the sphere of responsibility for women. This conjectural effect of capitalism was supposedly strengthened by men of the middling sort: “The wives and daughters of prosperous farmers, merchants and artisans became ‘physically isolated’ from the sphere of public business”. Consequently, they lost the prestige that came from contributing to family finances. This circumscribes what Vickery called the orthodoxy of women’s history, i.e., the assumption that women were forced into a “passive, feminine role in a secluded domestic private sphere, helpless and deprived of any public place”. The orthodoxy of women’s domesticity is triggered by the observation that a number of middle-class women did stay at home and were exempt from work. Furthermore, the rational for this exemption has a particular social touch, i.e. the “domesticity of their women enabled the “middling sort” to claim “a share in the culture of their social superiors in the gentry, whose women of course had never worked”. Thus, the domesticity of middle class women happens to be a means of distinction, it enables the middling sort to distance themselves from lower classes. If the domesticity of women is a means of differentiation this does not necessarily imply that this means has been introduced against the will of middle-class women. However, one line of argument claims exactly that and it does so by referring to “coverture”. Legally, husband and wife were assumed being one person under coverture, i.e. women did not have a separate legal existence: “a wife could not technically enter into economic contracts in her own right and in order to make basic purchases on credit had to do so in her husband’s name”. While at the first glance, coverture imposed restrictions upon women, it imposed obligations on men as well: Husbands had to cover the expenses made by their wives and while women could not be punished for theft, men could end-up in the gaol for debts piled-up by their respective wife. However, legal texts, while they kick-start certain ideological historical interpretations, did not receive the same treatment during their time of existence. By contrast, “it is becoming apparent… that in practice, coverture was often ignored or bypassed” or as Johnson states: “However, as we shall see in this and other matters, the notional position in law did not correspond to the reality by the early 19th century. The system of male dominance was beginning to break down and women entered into favourable marriage contracts, which made nonsense of Blackstone’s dicta; they ran businesses and acted as administrators and executives of estates”. Bailey assembles an impressing account of men, advertising that they do not intend to cover future expenses made by their wives (because their financial reputation had already been damaged), of married women having a particular sense of “their” property and of legal arrangements introduced to secure the dowry of married women or to separate their property from the property of their husband.

Hence, the story of women reduced to domestic duties and left without rights and without money of their own, can be seen as a (n ideological) myth : “Despite their superior position in law and economic autonomy, men’s credit, in both its financial and social meanings, was contingent upon their wives’ economic credit and trading reputation, as well as their good will. … There is evidence that wives expected to have control over household resources and retained some sense of possession over moveable goods during marriage, at the same time as willingly putting these goods to familial and household use”.