This has been true of capitalism from the very start
“The massive changes in the lives of women and girls are due in large part to the development of capitalism,” says Prof Cudd, “the main force in the advancement of society more generally.”
Too right. But saying that modern capitalism is not only not evil but actually the best thing to happen to women, ever, is the verbal equivalent of exploding a stink bomb in a packed theatre – at least if your audience is “feminist”, woke or green.
Quite so and it has been true right from the start.
It was Brad Delong who once pointed out to us that near universally when we meet a woman in pre-1700 or so literature there is spinning involved. OK, Penelope was weaving but much the same. We have added the observation that spinning - as in hand spinning - simply doesn’t exist in the novels of Jane Austen. For by that time it had all been mechanised, Spinning Jenny and so on, all done in the Dark Satanics.
We wholly agree that market working hours increased at the industrial revolution but we’d equally insist that total household working hours declined. As those hundreds a year of female working hours in spinning disappeared into the machines. The very start of the whole capitalism thing was a reduction in the demands upon unpaid female labour - the very thing that started that wholesome and welcome path to the economic liberation of women.
That whole bliss is was in that dawn to be alive but to be female was to be in very heaven is the truth of that early and first stage of capitalism. The alleviation of the greatest burden upon female labour - spinning.
Tim Worstall