Degradation of women
The combination of land privatization, colonial expansion and misogyny were to blame for degradation of women. The expropriation of land occurred because of war or religion, people wanted power and once conquered, killed off majority of civilization, they moved in and took over land controlling whoever remained. Once a land was conquered by a greater force it was rare that people retaliated and succeeded. However in 1549 Robert Kett rebelled against the privatization of the land and successfully overcome an anti-enclosure fight. Kett demanded equal rights for the people, the enclosures were taken down, “The first was that ‘from hence forth no man shall enclose any more’. Other articles demanded that rents should be reduced to the rates that had prevailed sixty five years before , that ‘all freeholders and copy holders may take the profits of all common, and that ‘all bond-men may be made free, for god made all free with precious blood shedding”. Kett’s was later captured and killed. Women also fought for their rights, and tried to end enclosures, also to be seen more than property of their husbands, and reproduction machines. “And these were just a few instances of confrontation in which women holding pitchforks and scythes resisted the fencing of the land or draining of fens when their livelihood was threatened”. Women suffered terribly when the land was enclosed, most became vagabonds which in theory might have worked out for them but with the man being violent and not seeing them as equal, misogyny was on the rise. also women who became pregnant couldn’t travel from place to place as easily. In the reading there is a engraving of ‘Women and Knaves”, which is quite disturbing as t he women are following the soldiers and are muzzled like wild animals. any women who attempted to fight back or against these terrible conditions was killed. As stated, “women suffered a unique process of social degradation that was fundamental to the accumulation of capital and has remained so ever since”. Capitalism and feudalism had a negative affect on women and children; women’s bodies were seen as commodities something to profit off of, man capitalized off of their offspring. A women’s role was in the home, to maintain the house and to reproduce, this division of labor only made it worse for women they depended solely on a man to survive, and this increased the power shift that men had over women and children.
