Gender by Illich Ivan 1926-

Author:Illich, Ivan, 1926- [Illich, Ivan, 1926-]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Women, Sexual division of labor, Sexism, Sex role, Femmes, Discrimination à l'égard des femmes, Rôle selon le sexe, Sekserol, Vrouwendiscriminatie
Publisher: New York : Pantheon Books
Published: 1982-04-11T19:00:00+00:00

Vernacular Culture

Medieval tenants and freeholders owed rent to a lord.^^ Since they ordinarily lived outside the money economy, their rent constituted the only significant surplus, the only exchangeable good they produced. Designating their other activities as "production" would be a mistake, since today this term implies some form of value transfer and consumption that, for the medieval peasant, applied only to rent. This lack of distinction between production and consumption functions is the clearest characteristic of the difference between subsistence and an economic existence.

Hundreds of contracts between peasants and their lords from the ninth to the twelfth centuries tell us what rents were: partly produce and partly servitude. And traditional rent was frequently paid in a gender-specific way. A large number of contracts carefully determined not only the amount of rent due for the land but also the gender from whom it was due. For instance, Ingmar paid the abbey fifteen days' labor, presenting himself each day with two draught animals, and also owed one sheep every second year; his wife—and in the case of her death, a maid—delivered five chickens each fall. The language makes it obvious that two irreconcilable competencies are involved in the payment of the rent and that there is no common denominator uniting them. "Women's products" and "men's products" are clearly distinct. Church law did not forbid any and all general "servile work" on feast days. Rather, it clearly specified that men were to abstain from the hunt, from tree-felling, from the building of stockades; and women, from hoeing, shearing lambs, and pruning trees. The two could not

72 THE ELITE AND GENDER

Production—that is, the creation of surplus for others—remained a matter of gender into the nineteenth century. And the consumption of its surplus also remained overwhelmingly gendered. To live off rent did not usually imply an economic existence based on the satisfaction of the genderless needs typical of the modern consumer. High status did not blur the gender line. Status, if anything, made the divide even more visible and conscious because lords and ladies had the leisure to "show off" their gender. And sometimes it sanctioned specific transgressions (FN 106). Lofgren (FN 70) reports on noblewomen in the saddle in a society where usually only men rode.

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