We’ll put Maria Mies (Professor Sociology at Cologne University) in conversation with Beauvoir. I ask that you start by reading an interview with Mies in Naked Punch.

PATRIARCHY AND ACCUMULATION

Mies. 1986. Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale. (pp. 6, 36-40, 53-127, 142-3, 145-6, 168-71, 205-33)

Mies argues that patriarchy constitutes a form of predatory accumulation, and one that is fundamentally connected to other exploitive systems. For her, masculine domination really solidified when men began to use destructive tools against their more productive counterparts in agricultural and pastoral societies. Female productivity then continued to precondition male productivity during feudalism and early capitalism. Mies argues that “European big men” (e.g., lords and capitalists) did not simply emerge on the surplus of “European small men” (e.g., serfs and wage labor). There was in fact a critical “underground” that made the exploitation of small men possible and it included the triple exploitation of nature (via science and technology), European women (via witch hunts and housewifization), and others/foreigners (via colonization and slavery). To help illustrate how these systems of accumulation were connected, Mies shows how the housewifization of European women depended on colonialism and vice versa. These historical details help explain the role that patriarchy plays in the “new international division of labor.” Like the early European housewives, women in today’s Global North serve capital via consumption. They consume a massive amount of goods produced by women in the Global South. Mies closes her analysis by considering how an international feminist struggle for autonomy could threaten global capitalist patriarchy.