The Woman Question

For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts Advice to Women
By Barbara Ehrenreich, Deirdre English

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The Woman Question arose in the course of a historic transformation whose scale later generations have still barely grasped. It was the "industrial revolution," and even "revolution" is too pallid a word. From the Scottish highlands to the Appalachian hills, from the Rhineland to the Mississippi Valley, whole villages were emptied to feed the factory system with human labor. People were wrested from the land suddenly, by force; or more subtly, by the pressure of hunger and debt-uprooted from the ancient security of family, clan, parish. A settled, agrarian life which had persisted more or less for centuries was destroyed in one tenth the time it had taken for the Roman Empire to fall, and the old ways of thinking, the old myths and old rules, began to lift like the morning fog.

Marx and Engels-usually thought of as the instigators of disorder rather than the chroniclers of it-were the first to grasp the cataclysmic nature of these changes. An old world was dying and a new one was being born:

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.

Incredible, once unthinkable, possibilities opened up as all the "fixed, fast-frozen relations"-between man and woman, between parents and children, between the rich and the poor-were thrown into question. Over one hundred and fifty years later, the dust has still not settled.

On the far side of the industrial revolution is what we will call, for our purposes, the Old Order. Historians will mark off many "eras" within these centuries of agrarian life: royal lines, national boundaries, military technology, fashions, art and architecture-all evolve and change throughout the Old Order. History is made: there are conquests, explorations, new lines of trade. Nevertheless, for all the visible drama of history, the lives of ordinary people, doing ordinary things, change very little-and that only slowly.

Routine predominates at the level of everyday life: corn is sown as it was always sown, maize planted, rice fields levelled, ships sail the Red Sea as they have always sailed it.

Only here, at the level of everyday life, do we find the patterns that make this an "order." If these patterns are monotonous and repetitive compared to the spectacle of conventional history-with its brilliant personalities, military adventures and court intrigues-that is because these patterns are shaped by natural events which are also monotonous and repetitive-seasons, plantings, the cycle of human reproduction.

Three patterns of social life in the Old Order stand out and give it consistency: the Old Order is unitary. There is of course always a minority of people whose lives-acted out on a plane above dull necessity and the routines of labor-are complex and surprising. But life, for the great majority of people, has a unity and simplicity which will never cease to fascinate the "industrial man" who comes later. This life is not marked off into different "spheres" or "realms" of experience: "work" and "home," "public" and "private," "sacred" and "secular." Production (of food, clothing, tools) takes place in the same rooms or outdoor spaces where children grow up, babies are born, couples come together. The family relation is not secluded in the realm of emotion; it is a working relation. Biological life-sexual desire, childbirth, sickness, the progressive infirmity of age-impinges directly on the group activities of production and play. Ritual and superstition affirm the unity of body and earth, biology and labor: menstruating women must not bake bread; conception is most favored at the time of the spring planting; sexual transgressions will bring blight and ruin to the crops; and so on.

The human relations of family and village, knit by common labor as well as sex and affection, are paramount. There is not yet an external "economy" connecting the fortunes of the peasant with the decisions of a merchant in a remote city. If people go hungry, it is not because the price of their crops fell, but because the rain did not. There are marketplaces, but there is not yet a market to dictate the opportunities and activities of ordinary people.

The Old Order is patriarchal: authority over the family is vested in the elder males, or male. He, the father, makes the decisions which control the family's work, purchases, marriages. Under the rule of the father, women have no complex choices to make, no questions as to their nature or destiny: the rule is simply obedience. An early-nineteenth-century American minister counseled brides:

Bear always in mind your true situation and have the words of the apostle perpetually engraven on your heart. Your duty is submission-"Submission and obedience are the lessons of your life and peace and happiness will be your reward." Your husband is, by the laws of God and of man, your superior; do not ever give him cause to remind you of it.

The patriarchal order of the household is magnified in the governance of village, church, nation. At home was the father, in church was the priest or minister, at the top were the "town fathers," the local nobility, or, as they put it in Puritan society, "the nursing fathers of the Commonwealth," and above all was "God the Father."

Thus the patriarchy of the Old Order was reinforced at every level of social organization and belief. For women, it was total, inescapable. Rebellious women might be beaten privately (with official approval) or punished publicly by the village "fathers," and any woman who tried to survive on her own would be at the mercy of random male violence.

Copyright © 2005 by Barbara Ehrenreich.