Sexual Division Of Labor Research Articles

The persistent workforce: female day labour on capitalist farms in eighteenth-century Flanders

AbstractFemale day labourers regularly appear in the accounts of capitalist Flemish farmers throughout the eighteenth century. Their persistent employment challenges the dominant view that female day labour was marginalised in areas of agrarian capitalism across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The hitherto unexplored accounts of nine capitalist farms reveal the seasonal employment patterns, sexual division of labour and wages of those female day labourers in Flanders. While spring weeding was an important source of employment, women also continued to be hired during the harvest and for the cultivation of labour-intensive crops. Throughout the century, female day wages amounted to 0.4–0.73 of male wages. Women were excluded from well-paid tasks, but equal rates for equal work do not suggest wage discrimination in the strictest sense. The Flemish accounts thus reinforce the idea that female day labour persisted in areas with labour-intensive agriculture and alternative employment opportunities.

Love of Empire by Dissociations

Love of Empire by Dissociations Chien-ting Lin (bio) In the past two years, as the whole world has been deeply mired in the COVID-19 pandemic, we may have observed neoliberal capitalism's crisis of care: exposed and exacerbated by the global pandemic, made explicit alongside examples such as the collapsing of health systems, the shortage of care labor and overwork of nurses, the serious outbreaks in aged care facilities, the increased burden of domestic labor and care work due to school closures, and the worldwide rise of domestic abuse. In this short essay, I situate neoliberalism's care problems as a displaced process of imperial racialization in long-standing feminist debates over the "labor of love," returned to us by COVID in the form of crisis. Specifically, I reflect on the political discourses of love vis-à-vis war and militarism during the pandemic. The goal is to consider the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic mediates our relationship to geohistorical formations of laboring for love, while understanding this labor as care and sex work embedded in the racial structures of nation and empire. It is through this critical reflection on the questions of love, militarism, and geopolitics that I juxtapose the stigmatization of sexual laborers due to community spread in Taiwan's Wanhua teahouses with the Atlanta shooting that killed eight people, including six Asian women. As articulated and debated since second-wave feminism, the labor of love could be expansively understood in relation to the social conditions under which unpaid care services provided primarily by women within the household are utilized to resolve the contradictions of capitalist world order.1 Following the lead of Micki McGee's discussion about capitalism's care problem, a gender-only feminist perspective sees the unpaid labor of love within the household as the patriarchal exploitation of women. Feminist calls for economic independence for (mostly middle-class) women to work for equal pay as men certainly do not resolve the care problem but, instead, further obscure colonial divisions of labor under which the racialized labor mostly from formerly colonized nations is made to fill up the gap.2 I consider the discursive formations of love as a point of departure to review how the global pandemic bears on our everyday practices of intimacy. Pandemic-mediated effects on domestic intimacy, for [End Page 700] example, are often mistaken as simply a social problem about gender divisions of labor within individualized households when it is deeply implicated in the global imperial process. I argue that the impacts on domestic care during the pandemic are intimately connected with colonial divisions of labor when outsourced surrogate intimacies are vicariously performed by racialized third world labor. The historical effects of racialized displacement can be seen as consisting of three sets of often-dissociated social relations during the pandemic crisis: archetypical angel-heroines in white (nurses), angels in the house (housewife and mother), and fallen angels (prostitutes).3 During the pandemic, many of us constantly experience fears about the health systems being overwhelmed, even while we express growing appreciation for the essential care provided by health workers. In the meantime, we have come to witness a political discourse of love that occupies a space of primary importance in the popular glorification of professional care providers such as doctors and nurses on the frontline of the anti-epidemic battle. In Taiwan's context, the creation of these new heroines comes at the expense of racialized and devalued, if not entirely demonized, migrant sexual laborers now perceived as "the breach of infection control."4 After having kept the pandemic at bay for quite some time, Taiwan experienced a COVID-19 spike in April 2021. The drastic surge in locally transmitted cases was linked to the China Airlines and Novotel quarantine hotel at Taoyuan International Airport. The virus eventually spread to the teahouses of Taipei's Wanhua neighborhood—also known as an adult entertainment red-light district in Taipei. Since Wanhua was reported as the center of a major cluster, the workers in the sexual venues, in particular, became a singularized target of public criticism. Not only were the hostesses held accountable for the worst outbreak in Taiwan since the...

Specialization, Comparative Advantage, and the Sexual Division of Labor

Recent work situates gender norms as a key driver of the sexual division of labor. But the explanatory power of Becker’s comparative advantage explanation is still not well understood. Drawing on unique data, we test the predictions of a formal Beckerian model. We complement this by proposing and analyzing new measures of specialization. We show that comparative advantage plays little or no role in the sexual division of labor within couple households. Absolute advantage also plays no role in specialization for same-sex couples, and this is not explained by having fewer children.

Intersections of caste, class, and gender in healthcare sanitation work in India: Social work imperatives for restructuring marginalized women's care work

AbstractHousekeeping and sanitary workers are crucial for the functional efficiency and hygiene of healthcare facilities. In India, women from oppressed castes and backward classes are predominantly recruited in these occupations. The work, regarded as “polluting,” is stigmatized, devalued, and lies at the historical and sociocultural intersections of caste, class, and gender. In the context of the COVID‐19 pandemic, this paper utilizes the concepts of “feminization of labor” and “care ethics” to read caste into an intersectional theoretical analysis of the organization of marginalized women's labor in such essential, yet invisibilized healthcare work. An exploratory narrative review of literature focusing exclusively on marginalized healthcare housekeepers and sanitation workers in India is undertaken and supplemented with a critical analysis of labor laws and policies to trace the sustained reproduction of the caste‐based sexual division of labor in these occupations. I propose that their exploitative terms and conditions are sustained by what I refer to as the “feminine caste contract” – a complex sociopolitical and legal arrangement of precarious, casteist, and gendered work conditions. Recognizing the exploitation inherent in this contract, recommendations are made for social work education and practice to play a key role in restructuring marginalized women's labor in essential care work.

A bioarcheological contribution to the social history of Roman Macedonia: The Pontokomi‐Vrysi site in Kozani Prefecture, Greece

AbstractRoman Macedonia has been largely neglected by bioarcheological research. As a result, little is known about the imprint of living conditions of that time on the skeletons of its inhabitants, especially those of the lower classes. This paper presents the paleopathological study conducted on a Roman period (1st–4th c. CE) skeletal assemblage from Pontokomi‐Vrysi, a site in the semi‐mountainous region of Eordaea in Upper Macedonia (now in Kozani Prefecture, Greece). The aim is to investigate differences in the frequency of multiple paleopathological conditions in the buried population and to assess whether these are linked to sex‐ or age‐related differences. The study examines cribra orbitalia (CO), porotic hyperostosis (PH), enamel hypoplasia (EH), osteoarthritis (OA), vertebral osteoarthritis (VOA), intervertebral disk disease (IDD), Schmorl's nodes (SNs), trauma (Tr), and lower limb periostitis/periostosis (PO). The results show higher frequencies of OA, IDD, PO, and Tr among males compared with those among females. These results suggest increased male physical hardship, pointing to a possible gender division of labor with the men of the community being mostly responsible for the physically demanding agricultural and animal husbandry activities. Additionally, comparisons of the CO, PH, and EH patterns in adults and nonadults support that, in general, the Pontokomi‐Vrysi community was resilient enough to overcome stress. Overall, these findings make an important contribution to both the bioarcheology and social history of Roman Macedonia and stress the need for more studies that combine historical, archeological (cultural), and bioarcheological data.

‘Genderism vs. Humanism’: The Generational Shift and Push for Implementing Gender Equality within Soka Gakkai-Japan

This paper investigates how young Japanese women in contemporary Soka Gakkai (SG) navigate Japan’s continuous gender stratified society that remains culturally rooted in the ‘salaryman-housewife’ ideology. How are young SG members reproducing or contesting these hegemonic gender norms that few seek to emulate? While SG has long proclaimed that it stands for gender equality, its employment structure and organization in Japan until recently reflected the typical male breadwinner ideology that came to underpin the post-war Japanese nation-state and systemic gender division of labor. As shown here, this did not mean that SG women were without power; in fact, in many ways they drove organizational developments in the Japanese context. The recent imposition of the global framework for Sustainable Development Goals of 2015 has enabled SG to more substantially challenge its own patriarchal public front. Based on long-term fieldwork, in-depth interviews and multiple group discussions with SG members in their 20s, this article explores how SG-Japan is being challenged to follow its own discourse of ‘globalism’ and ‘Buddhist humanism’, promoted by Daisaku Ikeda since the 1990s. Using Bourdieu’s analysis of symbolic power, the research shows how Japan’s powerful doxa of ‘genderism’ that held sway over earlier generations is currently being challenged by a glocalized Buddhist discourse that identifies Nichiren Buddhism as ‘humanism’ rather than Japanese ‘genderism’.

Social relations of gender in contexts of precarious water supply and their impacts on women in rural areas

A significant portion of the Brazilian population is excluded from easy access to water, especially in rural areas. Women play a fundamental role in terms of water resources in this context. Given the theoretical gaps on this subject, this study aims to analyse the social construction that determines the unequal division of domestic demands related to water supply between women and men in three rural areas studied for the development of the National Rural Sanitation Programme of Brazil: Barreiro Amarelo and Nova Esperança in the State of Bahia and Pontal do Buriti Settlement in the State of Goiás. The qualitative methodology, based on the principles of grounded theory, applies semi-structured interviews, direct observation, and thematic-categorical content analysis. The results indicate that the unequal dedication to water demands is based on sexist logic, determined by the sexual division of labour and influenced by the patriarchal culture. Thus, activities with less social prestige demanding daily dedication are women’s responsibility. There is evidence that improvements in water supply positively impact women’s lives, especially their health. Moreover, water policies should be interrelated with social and gender policies, reducing inequalities and improving women's quality of life.

Empowerment through Femvertising: Reality or Myth?

This article studied female empowerment and stereotypes through femvertising. Empowerment and stereotypes were characterized by the roles generated by the sexual division of labor, developing a qualitative analysis through the perception of young Mexican women. The challenges of this advertising strategy were identified as the role of messages and content. The results suggested the construction of new stereotypes without modifying the patriarchal structure.

Empowerment through Femvertising: Reality or Myth?

This article studied female empowerment and stereotypes through femvertising. Empowerment and stereotypes were characterized by the roles generated by the sexual division of labor, developing a qualitative analysis through the perception of young Mexican women. The challenges of this advertising strategy were identified as the role of messages and content. The results suggested the construction of new stereotypes without modifying the patriarchal structure.

Supply of labour during early industrialisation: Agricultural systems, textile factory work and gender in Japan and India, ca. 1880–1940

This article explores the reasons behind the marked differences in the gender division of labour in the emerging textile factories in Japan and India in the first half of the twentieth century. In Japan, the overwhelming majority of the workers in spinning mills were young, unmarried women, while in India men—married as well as unmarried—formed the bulk of the factory textile workforce. We argue that variations in agrarian systems and labour regimes constitute an important set of factors explaining some of these differences in gender patterns. The structural differences in the productivity, intensity and the social organisation of labour in agricultural economies in both countries led to notable variances in the gender composition of the supply of (rural) labour for the factories. Differential deployment of rural farm and non-farm labour, in combination with distinct labour recruitment practices in the countryside, caused rural households to adopt radically different income-generating strategies.

"Ten Days a ’Grass Widow’ - Forty-eight Hours a Wife": Sexual Division of Labour in Trawlermen’s Households

A strict dichotomy of gender and work roles has long characterized the offshore trawler fishery. Men’s constantly varying work period, about ten days sea time to every forty-eight hours ashore, forces wives to become reluctant matriarchs, a role they must drop when their husbands land. Incongruity of expectations and behaviour is thus built in. Successful adjustment to sea-time roles by both is often dysfunctional to family stability, and to the health and recreation of the labour force. Women’s double-role strategies are described using ethnographic and interview data. These strategies vary with the historically changing structures of the industry, kinship and community; with their stage in the life cycle; with the expectations of husband and wife; and with the constraints imposed by vessel schedules and company policies.

As mudanças curriculares da Biblioteconomia brasileira e suas relações com a generificação da profissão bibliotecária

Introduction:It highlights how gender relations are inserted in the logic of power and are supported by the production of diffusion of discourses to penetrate people's daily lives and produce docile individuals. Objective: To present a theoretical discussion about howthe curricular changes of Librarianship courses in Brazil –sometimes more humanistic, sometimes more technical –influenced the process of feminization of the profession and the insertion of the profession in the list of professions notably marked by thesexual division of labor. Method:bibliographic review about the role of curricula as disseminators of discourses and power relations and in the gendering of professions; historical course of Librarianship curricula in Brazil and its insertion of gendered discourses in the librarian profession. Results:This work sought to show how the curriculum was used as a device for the dissemination of certain discourses in relation to the librarian profession and how it contributed to its feminization. Conclusion:It is proposed that the librarian profession has become feminized over time and changes in curricular focus have contributed to this movement, where the adoption of more technical curricula has contributed to the insertion of the profession in the list of professions notably marked by the sexual division of labor. Finally, it is pointed out that, from the 1980s, a timid approach of men to the area also led to a change in the curricular focus and in the discourse around the profession

Gender, agroecology and local markets at São José de Mipibu in Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil

ABSTRACT At the local market held in São José de Mipibu, peasant women are the principal protagonists, finding in it a strategy to meet their subsistence needs. Through their participation in agroecology and local markets, they achieve material, sociocultural and subjective improvements related to the provision of food and care for their families. However, the power relations underlying the sexual division of labor, which makes women responsible for household and care work remain, as women’s workloads increase with their involvement in the local market. For this reason, this case study demonstrates that gender equality is not automatically attained by implementing agroecological practices on farms or by participating in local markets.

Messages about the family in the press and media

Family is the most solid fulcrum and incomparable peace for every human being. It is always a place full of love to return to, so the message of marriage and family is mentioned often in the media in many different ways. This study explores which topics about marriage-family are mentioned the most, how male and female images appear in the family, specifically: the role in maintaining family happiness is assigned. Who are the perpetrators and causes of domestic violence, and how is the gender division of labor in the family reflected in the media? Through research to overcome and gradually eliminate gender stereotypes in media messages, contribute to promoting gender equality.

Women Caregivers Under the Spanish Autonomy and Dependence System: A New Social Underclass?

Long-term care in Spain has traditionally been provided by women as consequence of a family welfare system based historically on familism and sexual division of labour. The Autonomy and Dependence Law, passed in 2006, involved the regulation by the State of informal care. However, the economic crisis is maintaining and stressing gender differences in relation to care since a new profile of women is being built: poor caregivers, as a specific group responsible for the provision of care, becoming an ‘internal market’ linked to the application of the so called Dependence Law. This study presents an analysis of key secondary sources from the System of Autonomy and Attention to Dependency, the Unemployment System and the most relevant indicators of poverty and social exclusion. In addition, an ad hoc survey and semi-structured interviews were conducted. 55.2% of caregivers are poor women, inactive or unemployed and use the cash-for-care as basic income.

LIVELIHOOD DIVERSIFICATION OF COASTAL COMMUNITIES THROUGH GENDERED LENS: A CASE STUDY ON KOVALAM VILLAGE, TAMIL NADU, INDIA

This study has assessed livelihood diversification occurred in Kovalam, which is a coastal village in Tamil Nadu state in India. Livelihood diversification is a strategy which enables people to surmount the vulnerability of conventional income-generating activities by diversifying and expanding the number of activities for an improvement in their standard of living. Participatory Rural Appraisal tools, which are focus group discussion, key-informant interview and semi-structured questionnaires, have been used to collect primary data. The result suggested that fishing and fishing allied activities are the major livelihood in Kovalam village, whereas nowadays, small business, services, day laborer, vendors and other different activities are also practiced as livelihood options on a smaller scale. The emerging issue of freshwater insecurity interlinks with the gender division of labor corresponding to livelihood strategies. Gender can be integrated in a better way to ensure sustainable livelihood which will safeguard the wellbeing of coastal communities.

Women and Children First: Appropriated Fiction in the Ten Hours’ Advocate

This article examines interclass strategies to bring about reform in mid-nineteenth century England. It specifically explores the way the Ten Hours’ Advocate, a paper written for the working classes, looked to present itself as a middle-class periodical in order to further the argument for factory reform. In reproducing fiction filched from middle-class periodicals, the Advocate performed its argument for the Factory Bill: that the Bill would ease social tensions, dissipate the Chartist or radical threat, and ensure a “return” to traditional gender roles. The appropriated fiction is mild, rather bland; the non-fictional argument for reform is direct and unapologetic. That the Advocate was opportunistic in the way it made the case for reform is an example of the advantages provided to reformers by the absence of strict copyright laws and by Victorian periodical culture in general. But it also contextualises the debate over the family-wage argument and the working-class role in hardening the Victorian sexual division of labour.

Гендерні дослідження та їх застосування у державному управлінні

У статті проаналізовано фемінізм, гендерні дослідження та їх роль в українському суспільстві. Розглянуто розвиток гендерних студій в Україні, формування образу жінки в суспільній свідомості, місце гендерної проблематики в теорії і практиці державного управління в Україні, підвищення його гуманітарної складової через залучення гендерного компоненту до гуманітарної парадигми. Зроблено декілька зауважень про патріархальну ідеологію в Україні та світі. Досліджено становлення гендерних стереотипів та спроби їх подолання шляхом активізації діяльності жіночих організацій. Проаналізовано становище жінок і його вплив на розвиток суспільної свідомості і вдосконалення механізмів державного управління. Розглянуто розвиток теорій, які аналізують становище жінок в історичному вимірі.

Tuna is women's business too: Applying a gender lens to four cases in the Western and Central Pacific

AbstractThe USD6 billion Western and Central Pacific Ocean (WCPO) tuna fisheries produce over half the world's tuna and are important for coastal countries. Tuna fisheries policy, management and research currently focus on fisheries resources and industrial fishing on offshore vessels with all male crews, although women, as much as men, are employed in tuna processing and trading in domestic, informal and export value chains. We apply a gender lens to four WCPO case‐study tuna industries: Suva and Levuka in Fiji, Bitung in Indonesia, General Santos City in the Philippines and Western Province including Noro in Solomon Islands. The gender divisions of labour, livelihood opportunities and social impacts vary greatly across the value chain nodes, depending on the size, quantity and quality of fish handled, and the scale of operations. The gender lens also reveals the social impacts of fishing when husbands/fathers/sons are killed or injured, absent for long periods and engage in sex, drugs and alcohol behaviours in port. Despite the centrality of women in tuna industries, and the gendered social impacts, regional and national policies largely omit gender. The tuna discourse should be broadened from that of male‐dominated industrial fishing to whole of value chains including domestic and informal enterprises in which women are equally involved. Progress on gender equity needs collaboration by multiple stakeholders including industrial firms employing people in factories, offices and on fishing vessels, regional bodies and national governments responsible for policy, monitoring and regulation, and research agencies to build knowledge.

Conceptual contours of migration studies in and from Asia

Conceptual contours of migration studies in and from Asia