Women, Eggs, and Wages in Denmark: Industrial Marginalization

Abstract

Women have received extensive civil rights in industrial countries in this century, but this fact has overlain an economic reality which increasingly marginalizes them. In Denmark, whose economy has traditionally been grounded in farm cornmodities produced on family farms, women's work was an integral part of production for consumption and for exchange. In this paper I deal with egg production and its decline as a synecdoche for the loss of women's economic niche as they moved into wage labor. The setting of the study is M0n, a rural island located one hundred kilometers south of Copenhagen. M0n is a kommune, a local government unit, with a population of 11,512. M0n has never been an isolated farming community. For the past 200 years it has been enmeshed in the world trade in farm cornmodities; and women as well as men produced and channeled their products into these markets. Nor has M0n been isolated from the process of industrialization. Producing cornmodities, consuming industrial products, and exporting labor, it has been part of European and American industrialization. But since 1960, economic planning has drawn M0n away from an economy based on family farms into a mixed economy relying on wages and salaries from non-local corporate and government sources. While both men and women went from farm to non-farm work, the greatest movement into wage labor occurred among farm women. Indeed, many M0n persons saw the absence of women in the farm work force as the most significant social change on M0n in their lifetimes. Smallholder and landless women had done extensive wage labor before, but most farm women had been kept busy in profitable farming operations before the changes ofthe 1960s. The model I present here involves a shift from a family division of labor involving complex inter-dependency toward a wage labor system in which women, as the lowest paid, most vulnerable workers, were subordinate. It is crucial to the exposition of this model that women's farm work input be made clear. They were workers whose status shifted; if they were not working they were unemployed workers. I support the view that women's position as worker depends on the organization of production and argue against the view that cultural traditions or family-job conflicts are at the root of women's subordination in the industrial economy.