Women and Work - Book Reviews
Marina LaPalma was born in Milan, Italy. She was a founder of Kelsey Street Press in Berkeley in the 1970s and a performance artist and art critic in Los Angeles in the 1980s. In the 1990s she was on the Board of The Children’s Book Project in San Francisco, a nonprofit dedicated to literacy-building in young children and served on the Menlo Park Arts Commission for five years. She was also a bookseller at Stanford University Bookstore. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. For her website.
By Marina LaPalma
Most thinkers who have reflected upon human fulfillment, on the finding of meaning in life, have told us that “work”, particularly creative, intellectual, world-shaping activity is integral to that. For centuries, while expected, as wives, helpers, housekeepers, and muses, to produce and reproduce the materials and the conditions for meaningful work, women were locked out of much of what was recognized as “meaningful”. The responsibility for the production and care of children, for household maintenance, for the cultivation of family networks, for the provision of daily sustenance fell on women pretty much everywhere, and in less developed societies that included the burden of agriculture and the hauling of fuel and water. The meaningful, “important” stuff – science, government, academia, the arts – was jealously guarded as the realm of men, who made sure that females were prohibited from accessing the education or self-definition necessary to carry out any such endeavors. What useful, necessary work they did perform – such as cooking and child-rearing – was systematically viewed as less valuable. In upper-class and even middle-class households it was relegated to servants, emphasizing its lower status. In developed nations, some of that has changed – but only incrementally and only in very recent decades. Now, in this shattering historical moment in which all the world’s economies are severely battered by a pandemic, the negative consequences bear down upon those at the bottom of the power pyramid: the poorest suffer most, and women are more affected than men. Women have lost their jobs at higher rates, while often continuing to have double duty at home as they manage households, childcare, taking on the burden of the educational system, and of course trying to carry on their own careers, should they be fortunate enough to have one.
I’d like to share some thoughts about certain books that have enriched and expanded my perspective on the question of women, work, and world-shaping.
To BEGIN with, there is Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years : Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times by Elizabeth Wayland Barber. I have loved this book ever since it first wittily called out to me from a bookshelf in the Getty Museum Bookstore over twenty years ago. Wayland Barber is an excellent scholar, weaving mythology, literature and field work into an engaging narrative. The title has a certain je ne sais quoi to it. Of course, I thought, women’s work is never done. Her point is that women were spinning fibers at least that long ago and she has studied the few surviving prehistoric artifacts that attest to this. Until the Industrial Revolution cloth was a crucial economic force, a necessity, an exchange medium; and it belonged primarily to females in the economy of extended households. Think of Penelope in the Odyssey, whose weaving (and unweaving in secret) is central to the plot, to the narrative, to the power dynamics. The omission of something so integral to pre-modern economies in general historic narratives is partly due to the perishability of the product. There are a very few extant examples of ancient textiles and Barber has been part of the development of new archeological methods to study them. Her deep engagement with the act of weaving included doing some weaving herself and imagining herself into the actual physical situation of someone weaving while, for example, watching small children – which most male textile scholars had not done, and which explained certain things that had until then remained unclear. Wayland Barber was one of the few western textile scholars briefly allowed into China in the 1990s to examine the cloth wrappings on the recently rediscovered mummies in Urumchi. Her book about this, The Mummies of Urumchi, was published in 1999. Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years not only re-situates textiles into history but allows us a detailed glimpse into the vanished worlds of our ancestors, and of females in particular, whose role in history is often rendered invisible by the prevailing patriarchal methods of History as a discipline.
Jane Addams’ book, 20 Years at Hull House, is a riveting account of the foundations of what we have come to call Social Work. The first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, Addams started the Settlement House in Chicago when Social Darwinism was dominant and the poor were seen as inferior, unsalvageable, and expendable, particularly in an America flooded with illiterate immigrants desperate for work. This book covers her startlingly caring and focused project from 1899 to 1909. From a well-to-do background, she had her eyes and heart opened during a trip to England in her late twenties, and thereafter simply charged right in. Addams was a tireless crusader for the rights of the poor, women, workers. The tragedy is that today, locally and globally, the same battles are still necessary on behalf of the oppressed. Globalization has afforded capitalism extreme mobility to move production to where wages can be kept lowest, driving wages down everywhere. Political realities in developed nations have permitted, over the past 45 years, the gutting of organized labor and the destruction of worker protections it took half a century to painstakingly build up.
For many decades of the 19th and 20th centuries, becoming a teacher was one of the few “respectable” and acceptable routes to financial self-sufficiency for women. I still remember my first mesmerized reading of Teacher by Sylvia Ashton Warner. Published in 1963, it is a diary of her first decade of teaching in the 1930s in her native New Zealand, work she continued for over 25 years. Discovering a way to unleash the power of expression in five-year-old’s, she writes: It’s a lovely flowing. I see the creative channel swelling and undulating like an artery with blood pumping through. Ashton Warner had a deep respect for Maori culture and a true love for young children, like that of Piaget or of Maria Montessori (a personal heroine of mine). Maxine Hong Kingston’s foreword praises her methods and reaffirms the need for such gritty dedication to the true unfolding of the souls of children.
An inspiring autobiographical narrative about a woman finding meaningful work is Songs of the Gorilla Nation: My Journey Through Autism by Dawn Prince-Hughes. An autistic woman who found herself struggling with homelessness and alcoholism, Prince-Hughes chanced upon the gorillas in a zoo. Her gripping narrative reveals how her encounter, in particular with a gorilla named Congo, lifted her soul out of deathly separateness and showed her what it can mean to be truly touched by another being. Gorillas also taught her what it meant to be human, such as grasping emotions like love, anger, concern and humor that she had never understood previously, having grown up with autism, an unrecognized disability, in a hardscrabble environment in Illinois. Prince-Hughes then went on to earn a Ph.D. in anthropology at the Universität Herisau in Switzerland and eventually made a career out of studying gorillas. This is a profound and spiritual book. We learn about gorilla culture in closely felt detail and a great deal about human resilience.