The book “Domestic Revolution: How the Introduction of Coal Changed Everything” Ruth Goodman gives some excellent examples of the changes in gender roles, especially just before and after the Victorian era. Goodman lists the traditional chores of a woman before coal came to the hearth, and those chores were varied, interesting, and there were more outdoor activities to be done around other women. Her point is that coal made absolutely everything filthy in the home (and on the person!) So the role of the wife and even the domestic servant moved from varied, tough-yet-satisfying chores to… wiping soot 24/7. Cleaning became women’s core task. Of course cleaning was always part of life, but the level of soot was so problematic that it changed domestic life entirely. It started more of the “cleaning drudgery” image we now associate with homemakers and housekeepers. Goodman has another book about Tudor England that looks interesting and may prove useful to those wanting to dive further into life before wage labor, or life during the transition after the Middle Ages.
Hey guys, really great discussion. I think you may have been missing something really crucial at the end though. It may be the case that because men don't need to be "manly" in any socially constructed sense to succeed (you mentioned the nerd just playing the stock market and artificially working out), but men and women BOTH need the non-socially constructed quality of INTELLIGENCE to succeed in the modern era. Our starvation of identity via sex is primed to be eclipsed by our starvation of identity via reason itself, and this is why AI is such an existential threat, and I don't think we'll be talking about gender without also discussing AI in the same breath for long. Of course some "intelligence" *is* socially constructed, but ability to solve problems, to calculate quickly and efficiently (even you mentioned a male "nerd" who played the stock market, which requires relatively high intelligence barring sheer dumb luck), is becoming one of those "given human" attributes that may not be viewed as given for very long, and in fact isn't viewed as distinctly human by many already. So we see both the outsourcing of labor and distinct gender roles to poorer countries, and we are and will be seeing more of the outsourcing of *reason itself* to machines. If the former inflames transgenderism, what does the latter?
Oh, that's a great point. I assume it will heighten our existential identity crisis, when even our "smarts" no longer provide the same use value they once did.
@@mariabrandell8519 Interestingly though, it may force us to look deeper into what makes humans valuable. Right now we value intelligence so highly because there is a direct correlation between IQ and monetary success. If this starts to degrade, or is even outsourced, we're going to need to know why we're valuable even when robots can do our most high-paying work better than we can.
@@mariabrandell8519 I mean imagining training an AI on your conversations and having it do them more thoroughly and thoughtfully than you two! That's a huge inflection point. What makes the human conversation more valuable, even though it may be less "insightful"? We can only really value it because it's more *human*. And the same goes for gender: What makes maleness or femaleness valuable even when the other gender apparently does it "better"? It's the given-ness itself that has the value: the receiving of it and the sharing of it. But *why* is a really important question that seems to necessitate theology.
@@wierdpocketI think that feeling worthless if none of your qualities can be translated into monetary value is part of the problem why AI seems so threatening. I think it's closely related to the problem that some see motherhood as lesser because it cannot be easily translated into monetary value.
It's good to have complex nuanced discussions about the potential causes of any given phenomena. But to always end the conversation with the conclusion that there are uncountably many sources of a phenomena is not satisfactory. The goal of such inquiry is to determine the main cause or if there are multiple causes, to determine their relative impact. For example, many things contribute to cancer. But we need to know how much each contributes in order to effectively prevent cancer. Otherwise, telling people they aren't smart or nuanced enough because they don't consider all the complex factors involved, is ultimately meaningless. We might as well say "everything is caused by everything."
I think that’s a fair critique. But I have noticed that the modern mind is especially susceptible to needing the “fix” and needing it in a concrete way. I noticed this with motherhood, lemme splain: When tragedy strikes, we must know the details. Were they wearing their seatbelt? Did they neglect their annual check up? Was the car seat defective? I believe we want to know these details because they tell us what we can do or not do to ensure that fate does not befall us. They were in a car without side airbags? “Ok I’ve got a Volvo, that won’t happen to me.” They looked away from their kid for a minute? “Ok I’ve got a leash that looks like a backpack, I’ll keep my kid attached to me and that won’t happen to us.” More gay women play X sport? Ok, we’ll do cross country instead.” I think our minds just ache for a clear answer and “history stew” just makes us feel helpless, so we put statistics together to help us, even though most of the numbers are incorrect. Know what I mean?
Facinating illucidation! ... i have witnessed exceptions in other cutures to your thesis but it feels BANG ON to me. (In Ethiopia ((a kind of current medievil christian world(((with experiences of violent modernity induced meltdowns ratatatatatatat)) the 'building site' is a feminine domain... hmmm will ask my mate Anais about that who is accidently a professor of tge subject when i see her in c couple of weeks...errr)
There was a really good UK TV (BBC) show that was available in the US too, called "Michael Wood's Story of England" featuring one Village in England over 6 episodes. not far from where I used to live, charting it from roman times to present day. Absolutely fascinating and highlighted to me that we have always been slaves of different sorts and systems even today.
What do you mean that witch hunts didn't happen in medieval societies? What do you mean that women were commonly married in their late 20s in Europe during the middle ages? Both of these claims seem ludicrous to me, please provide a source.
Silvia Federici's "Caliban and the Witch" is the source we were using - and she has a lot of other references in the footnotes. This is a pretty well-established fact at this point. I think the reason why it feels ridiculous to us is because we tend to conflate the middle ages with the beginning of modernism (think post-reformation). It still feels "old" to us, and since it is religious and Christian, it must be from the middle ages! I'm not sure where Marc is drawing his source from, you should send him an email (if he responds!). I did recently learn that during first century Palestine, by thirty years old most people had only .8 living siblings (statistically of course) becuase surviving childhood was so rare. Again, another time period that I thought people were having tons and tons of children, but the mortality rate was just brutal. It's not the same as the statistic in question, I'm aware, but it was another instance where I myself was surprised by the reality of the historical facts. But you're right that Marc should provide a source for that!
@mariabrandell8519 thank you for your response first off. Is the idea that witch hunts didn't happen during the middle ages, didn't happen often, that they were inconsequential or something else? From a cursory Wikipedia read on the book, it seems like it was moreso analysis on why and what purpose witch hunts served which necessitates witch hunts taking place. I agree that we can have skewed perceptions of history. Wikipedia agrees with Marc on this one, and I have no further input. It seems like he's probably right on that one.
@@gabrielwilson8932 No - the idea is that witch hunts definitely did happen, but they did so during that shift from feudalism to capitalism, almost like a strange religious expression of the general strange social conditions at the time. I highly suggest Federrici's book. Although you have to read it with a grain of salt, she makes it clear that as women's roles shifted in this period, there was a heightened "fear" towards them that simply did not exist in the middle ages because the role of women was more clearly defined and not in turmoil.
Excuse me but why can a woman still not be useful in a capitalist society? Who stopped you from owning land and growing food for yourself? Who stopped your wife from working in the field? Who stopped her from knitting or sowing? Who stopped her from cooking? Just because you work for a wage does not mean that she cannot contribute in other ways.
Right, that's exactly the point - women who stay at home and contribute other ways *are* in fact working, but notice the fact that we have to say "contribute in other ways" instead of just saying, "they work." The point is that today we basically seem to think real work=getting paid a wage, instead of real work = real work, whether you are getting paid by someone else to do it, or you are just doing work on your own that generates real goods and wealth for your family.
I understand what you are saying, but that was not the way it was presented in the video. The argument to my ear was that because the primary means of providing for oneself went from physically producing each needed good to working for a wage to buy those goods, that women somehow became reduced to only childbearers and had no meaningful work outside of that to contribute anymore. The point of my comment is to demonstrate that that just is not true. I suppose in the case of a very wealthy wage earner, that may have been the case, as he could just buy everything that he needed, but the common household was still producing things it needed, and the extra leisure time was spent hopefully doing something good like praying, reading, music, writing, teaching, etc. It just seems to me that when I listen to this podcast, capitalism is just given this blanket condemnation as being this liberal invention with no redeemable qualities when in reality it is neutral. Feudalism was not an ideal system and the Church has never said it was. Capitalism, while being condemned in its excesses, was never written off by the Church.@@mariabrandell8519
Well, if that is your point, then we are in agreement. Of course women still worked, and the transition from producing their own goods/wealth to simply buying commodities and using them (which is what we do now pretty exclusively) was not immediate. But the pattern is still true: the more work was transitioned into waged labor, the more women were barred from engaging in that labor. It is not as if they stopped doing "work," but that work was no longer recognized formally, economically speaking, as work. Housework doesn't show up in the GDP, wage labor does. So from the perspective of the economic system we use to calculate, measure, and value things, unpaid labor becomes invisible. Again, of course there are many benefits to capitalism, but the sort of wealth we have today comes at a high cost, and it is in looking into the past that we start to see that many of the problems we have today come from making those trade-offs. And maybe we want to rethink some of those.@@elcidcampeador9629
Look around today. You are going to make the argument that women have been barred from waged labor? The problem today is precisely the opposite. Women have left the home to pursue waged labor. And again, I am failing to see how women were barred from producing their own goods. My wife makes bread and all kinds of different foods, soap, creams, oils, etc. We are busier than ever. The problem for us is a lack of wage if anything. Disproportionate pay, confiscatory taxes, fake money, usury, and bad property law are the real issue, and none of those things are necessarily endemic to capitalism.
Of course not, this is a historical claim, as I said. "The transition" is referring to the past. This is what happened during the development of capitalism. The whole feminist movement was about the unbarring of women from things they had been barred from during the rise of capitalism. So naturally, the situation of women today is different from the past. I think it is helpful to note that the whole episode is taking a historical dive into capitalism. Again, we have to know the past to understand the present.@@elcidcampeador9629
The book “Domestic Revolution: How the Introduction of Coal Changed Everything” Ruth Goodman gives some excellent examples of the changes in gender roles, especially just before and after the Victorian era. Goodman lists the traditional chores of a woman before coal came to the hearth, and those chores were varied, interesting, and there were more outdoor activities to be done around other women. Her point is that coal made absolutely everything filthy in the home (and on the person!) So the role of the wife and even the domestic servant moved from varied, tough-yet-satisfying chores to… wiping soot 24/7. Cleaning became women’s core task. Of course cleaning was always part of life, but the level of soot was so problematic that it changed domestic life entirely. It started more of the “cleaning drudgery” image we now associate with homemakers and housekeepers.
Goodman has another book about Tudor England that looks interesting and may prove useful to those wanting to dive further into life before wage labor, or life during the transition after the Middle Ages.
Many women drowned in weirs in rivers while washing clothing as well in the Tudor age!
Great connection of the questions of gender, political economy and Catholic social teaching. Illich style. Greetings from Slovenia
I love Bratislava
@@serebii666, that is nice to hear, though Bratislava is in Slovakia. :) Slovenia is an Italia neighbouring country. Ljubljana :)
Hey Marc, stop breathing into the mic when Maria is talking 😂
Hey, stop telling other people how to breathe!
Hey guys, really great discussion. I think you may have been missing something really crucial at the end though. It may be the case that because men don't need to be "manly" in any socially constructed sense to succeed (you mentioned the nerd just playing the stock market and artificially working out), but men and women BOTH need the non-socially constructed quality of INTELLIGENCE to succeed in the modern era. Our starvation of identity via sex is primed to be eclipsed by our starvation of identity via reason itself, and this is why AI is such an existential threat, and I don't think we'll be talking about gender without also discussing AI in the same breath for long. Of course some "intelligence" *is* socially constructed, but ability to solve problems, to calculate quickly and efficiently (even you mentioned a male "nerd" who played the stock market, which requires relatively high intelligence barring sheer dumb luck), is becoming one of those "given human" attributes that may not be viewed as given for very long, and in fact isn't viewed as distinctly human by many already.
So we see both the outsourcing of labor and distinct gender roles to poorer countries, and we are and will be seeing more of the outsourcing of *reason itself* to machines. If the former inflames transgenderism, what does the latter?
Oh, that's a great point. I assume it will heighten our existential identity crisis, when even our "smarts" no longer provide the same use value they once did.
@@mariabrandell8519 Interestingly though, it may force us to look deeper into what makes humans valuable. Right now we value intelligence so highly because there is a direct correlation between IQ and monetary success. If this starts to degrade, or is even outsourced, we're going to need to know why we're valuable even when robots can do our most high-paying work better than we can.
@@mariabrandell8519 I mean imagining training an AI on your conversations and having it do them more thoroughly and thoughtfully than you two! That's a huge inflection point. What makes the human conversation more valuable, even though it may be less "insightful"? We can only really value it because it's more *human*. And the same goes for gender: What makes maleness or femaleness valuable even when the other gender apparently does it "better"? It's the given-ness itself that has the value: the receiving of it and the sharing of it. But *why* is a really important question that seems to necessitate theology.
@@wierdpocketI think that feeling worthless if none of your qualities can be translated into monetary value is part of the problem why AI seems so threatening.
I think it's closely related to the problem that some see motherhood as lesser because it cannot be easily translated into monetary value.
It's good to have complex nuanced discussions about the potential causes of any given phenomena. But to always end the conversation with the conclusion that there are uncountably many sources of a phenomena is not satisfactory.
The goal of such inquiry is to determine the main cause or if there are multiple causes, to determine their relative impact.
For example, many things contribute to cancer. But we need to know how much each contributes in order to effectively prevent cancer.
Otherwise, telling people they aren't smart or nuanced enough because they don't consider all the complex factors involved, is ultimately meaningless. We might as well say "everything is caused by everything."
I think that’s a fair critique. But I have noticed that the modern mind is especially susceptible to needing the “fix” and needing it in a concrete way. I noticed this with motherhood, lemme splain: When tragedy strikes, we must know the details. Were they wearing their seatbelt? Did they neglect their annual check up? Was the car seat defective? I believe we want to know these details because they tell us what we can do or not do to ensure that fate does not befall us.
They were in a car without side airbags? “Ok I’ve got a Volvo, that won’t happen to me.” They looked away from their kid for a minute? “Ok I’ve got a leash that looks like a backpack, I’ll keep my kid attached to me and that won’t happen to us.” More gay women play X sport? Ok, we’ll do cross country instead.”
I think our minds just ache for a clear answer and “history stew” just makes us feel helpless, so we put statistics together to help us, even though most of the numbers are incorrect. Know what I mean?
@ChucksExotics, I think that our final episode in this season will help clarify the relative importance of some phenomena vs. others
New Polity! Yes!
Facinating illucidation! ... i have witnessed exceptions in other cutures to your thesis but it feels BANG ON to me. (In Ethiopia ((a kind of current medievil christian world(((with experiences of violent modernity induced meltdowns ratatatatatatat)) the 'building site' is a feminine domain... hmmm will ask my mate Anais about that who is accidently a professor of tge subject when i see her in c couple of weeks...errr)
There was a really good UK TV (BBC) show that was available in the US too, called "Michael Wood's Story of England" featuring one Village in England over 6 episodes. not far from where I used to live, charting it from roman times to present day. Absolutely fascinating and highlighted to me that we have always been slaves of different sorts and systems even today.
What do you mean that witch hunts didn't happen in medieval societies? What do you mean that women were commonly married in their late 20s in Europe during the middle ages? Both of these claims seem ludicrous to me, please provide a source.
Silvia Federici's "Caliban and the Witch" is the source we were using - and she has a lot of other references in the footnotes. This is a pretty well-established fact at this point. I think the reason why it feels ridiculous to us is because we tend to conflate the middle ages with the beginning of modernism (think post-reformation). It still feels "old" to us, and since it is religious and Christian, it must be from the middle ages!
I'm not sure where Marc is drawing his source from, you should send him an email (if he responds!). I did recently learn that during first century Palestine, by thirty years old most people had only .8 living siblings (statistically of course) becuase surviving childhood was so rare. Again, another time period that I thought people were having tons and tons of children, but the mortality rate was just brutal. It's not the same as the statistic in question, I'm aware, but it was another instance where I myself was surprised by the reality of the historical facts. But you're right that Marc should provide a source for that!
The first paragraph is about witch hunts, my bad!
@mariabrandell8519 thank you for your response first off.
Is the idea that witch hunts didn't happen during the middle ages, didn't happen often, that they were inconsequential or something else? From a cursory Wikipedia read on the book, it seems like it was moreso analysis on why and what purpose witch hunts served which necessitates witch hunts taking place.
I agree that we can have skewed perceptions of history. Wikipedia agrees with Marc on this one, and I have no further input. It seems like he's probably right on that one.
@@gabrielwilson8932 No - the idea is that witch hunts definitely did happen, but they did so during that shift from feudalism to capitalism, almost like a strange religious expression of the general strange social conditions at the time. I highly suggest Federrici's book. Although you have to read it with a grain of salt, she makes it clear that as women's roles shifted in this period, there was a heightened "fear" towards them that simply did not exist in the middle ages because the role of women was more clearly defined and not in turmoil.
amen!
Cool
This may sound strange, but this lady is my idea of what a medieval woman looks like.
Excuse me but why can a woman still not be useful in a capitalist society? Who stopped you from owning land and growing food for yourself? Who stopped your wife from working in the field? Who stopped her from knitting or sowing? Who stopped her from cooking? Just because you work for a wage does not mean that she cannot contribute in other ways.
Right, that's exactly the point - women who stay at home and contribute other ways *are* in fact working, but notice the fact that we have to say "contribute in other ways" instead of just saying, "they work." The point is that today we basically seem to think real work=getting paid a wage, instead of real work = real work, whether you are getting paid by someone else to do it, or you are just doing work on your own that generates real goods and wealth for your family.
I understand what you are saying, but that was not the way it was presented in the video. The argument to my ear was that because the primary means of providing for oneself went from physically producing each needed good to working for a wage to buy those goods, that women somehow became reduced to only childbearers and had no meaningful work outside of that to contribute anymore. The point of my comment is to demonstrate that that just is not true. I suppose in the case of a very wealthy wage earner, that may have been the case, as he could just buy everything that he needed, but the common household was still producing things it needed, and the extra leisure time was spent hopefully doing something good like praying, reading, music, writing, teaching, etc. It just seems to me that when I listen to this podcast, capitalism is just given this blanket condemnation as being this liberal invention with no redeemable qualities when in reality it is neutral. Feudalism was not an ideal system and the Church has never said it was. Capitalism, while being condemned in its excesses, was never written off by the Church.@@mariabrandell8519
Well, if that is your point, then we are in agreement. Of course women still worked, and the transition from producing their own goods/wealth to simply buying commodities and using them (which is what we do now pretty exclusively) was not immediate. But the pattern is still true: the more work was transitioned into waged labor, the more women were barred from engaging in that labor. It is not as if they stopped doing "work," but that work was no longer recognized formally, economically speaking, as work. Housework doesn't show up in the GDP, wage labor does. So from the perspective of the economic system we use to calculate, measure, and value things, unpaid labor becomes invisible. Again, of course there are many benefits to capitalism, but the sort of wealth we have today comes at a high cost, and it is in looking into the past that we start to see that many of the problems we have today come from making those trade-offs. And maybe we want to rethink some of those.@@elcidcampeador9629
Look around today. You are going to make the argument that women have been barred from waged labor? The problem today is precisely the opposite. Women have left the home to pursue waged labor. And again, I am failing to see how women were barred from producing their own goods. My wife makes bread and all kinds of different foods, soap, creams, oils, etc. We are busier than ever. The problem for us is a lack of wage if anything. Disproportionate pay, confiscatory taxes, fake money, usury, and bad property law are the real issue, and none of those things are necessarily endemic to capitalism.
Of course not, this is a historical claim, as I said. "The transition" is referring to the past. This is what happened during the development of capitalism. The whole feminist movement was about the unbarring of women from things they had been barred from during the rise of capitalism. So naturally, the situation of women today is different from the past. I think it is helpful to note that the whole episode is taking a historical dive into capitalism. Again, we have to know the past to understand the present.@@elcidcampeador9629
bump
Ah yes. The real problem is taxes!
Did you even watch the video?
@@urbrandnewstepdad what video?
@@Paul-A01 so no you didnt
CURSE YOU, IRS!!!!
Get lost. Immediately.
Do they actually read the comments? It feels like they already made up their mind they don't like trans people
It seems like maybe *you've* already made up your mind that they don't like trans people. But to answer your question, yes they do read comments
I think the first five minutes already disprove your assumption.
Brother, I am always up in these comments.
I think is recorded , this is just a preview with comments. "Dont like" are strong words in a world of weak words.
I mean to be fair they're insanely overrepresented in internet rhetoric lol