The Context of Feminist Economics
The process of exclusion suffered by women throughout history has been put into academic evidence by the emergence of forms of social organization that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. The avalanche of social movements would cause old paradigms to be rethought, influencing the processes of production of knowledge. The profound differences between men and women are the reason for the existence of feminist theory, in their discussions, the central theme is the submission of women and male domination that is explicitly inherent in patriarchy (PAIVA, 1997).
The 19th-century feminist movement, according to Pinto (2010), sought the equality of civil, political, and educational rights. The first organized groups appeared in Europe and then in the United States. Feminist thinking comes from the philosophical current of existentialism and has the great names of the time Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986), Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), and Gertrude Stein (1874–1946). The desire of women who represented the genesis of feminist thought was one: the recognition that women were, in fact, rational beings and that they could be much more than caregivers and domestic servants.
Feminist thinking has evolved through several reformulations and broken down into aspects that became known as “waves”. The First Wave of Feminism (19th and 20th centuries) is characterized by the struggle for the right to vote and work, in the Second Wave of Feminism (1950–1990) studies on the condition of women begin, and the most recent, the Third Wave do Feminismo is dated from the 1990s to the present and was characterized by female empowerment (PINTO, 2010).
In Brazil, the first wave of feminism was led by Bertha Lutz, an important scientist who studied abroad and brought in 1910 the feminist libertarian ideal. Lutz fought for the right to vote and was one of the founders of the Brazilian Federation of Female Progress (1927), since then the Brazilian feminist movement has been growing and increasing the effervescence for the conquest of women’s rights (PINTO, 2010).
Although the road taken in the search for equality is longer for women, authors like Simone de Beauvoir believed that such segregation was not something innate to the human species. In the book The Second Sex — Life Experience, Beauvoir (1967) argues that until the age of four boys and girls have practically no difference in the way of being, this difference would be imposed by the regime where the families are inserted.
The “regime” would be patriarchy, in which men, from an early age, would be prepared to assume the leadership role, which for them would be innate to the male sex. This burden of responsibility would require the boy to be removed from maternal strokes before the girl, for example. But, on the other hand, he would be rewarded with other privileges, which would be present throughout his life (BEAUVOIR, 1967).
When analyzing the power of male supremacy in all aspects of the public and private life of families, Beauvoir (1967) demonstrates that gender inequality is an intrinsic problem in the formation of societies. Thus, gender inequality has been perpetuated and affirmed as correct through several pillars of influence, such as the family, religion, and the common thinking of society.
Most women are not aware of their inferiority condition, live “well” and believe they are performing their duties, so the debate on the subject — with a non-male perspective — is necessary and allows for the politicization of women encouraging them to break the socially imposed barriers to gender. From the politicization of women, it is possible to redefine relations between the public and the private. For Biroli (2017) feminist theories take a new look at the sexual division of labor, domestic violence, the differentiation of state control over bodies, and the notion of freedom and subordination applied to women.
On the change that the politicization of women would cause, Beauvoir (1967) comments that:
Today’s women are about to destroy the myth of the “eternal feminine”: the naive maiden, the professional virgin, the woman who values the price of the coquette, the hunter of husbands, the absorbing mother, the fragility raised as a shield against male aggression. They begin to assert their independence from man; not without difficulties and anguish because educated by women in a socially accepted gynecium, their normal destiny would be a marriage that would make them the object of male supremacy. (BEAUVOIR, 1967 p. 1).
In her perceptions Beauvoir (1967) seeks to demystify femininity, elevating to women the condition of an individual human being who does not necessarily need a man to recognize himself as a being. Other great European authors have debated the issues of gender inequality in society, however, when European women talk about the domination of patriarchy this discourse differs from the reality of other societies, especially when talking about underdeveloped countries, where besides gender inequality social inequalities are evident. Following the historiography of Latin American women, other forms of domination unknown to Europeans are perceived until then, as Lopes (2017) points out:
White feminism has often taken an authoritarian stance by excluding more contextualized reflections from women on a continent such as Latin America, who are largely black, Indian, poor, and who are lesbians, of various religions … Furthermore, a characteristic of white and hegemonic feminism is its historical denial of dialogue with black, indigenous, lesbian women, as well as with men, thereby echoing the supposed natural and biological binarism in the social and historical power relations of race, class, gender, and sexuality. (LOPES, 2017 p. 122).
The historical relations of power demonstrate a constant struggle between the oppressed and the oppressor, in the process of colonization of nations, it is possible to classify these two agents as the colonizer and the colonized. In the colonist’s view, the colonized is a “wild” being who needs to be introduced to the modern activities of the society from which the colonizer comes. This racialization does not allow seeing the colonized as a human being, but only as an animal, without a soul and without gender. This process of human “objectification” justified a series of atrocities committed to native peoples, as comments by Lugones (2014):
Only civilized people are men or women. The indigenous peoples of the Americas and the enslaved Africans were classified as non-human species — as animals, uncontrollably sexual and wild. European, bourgeois, modern colonial man became a subject/agent, able to decide, for public life and government, a being of civilization, heterosexual, Christian, a being of mind and reason. The bourgeois European woman was not understood as her compliment, but as someone who reproduced race and capital through her sexual purity, her passivity, and for being tied to the home in the service of the bourgeois European white man. The imposition of these dichotomous categories was interwoven with the historicity of relationships, including intimate relationships. (LUGONES, 2014 p. 936).
When it comes to “intimate relationships” Lugones (2014) does not only refer to the sexual act but also the public and private relations of the daily life of a social organization. It is important to comment that the colonizers met with a society already formed, with its own conventions, laws, customs, economic and religious activities. Capitalist exploitation then transforms this society into savages who need to be initiated into the “good customs” of civilization and gives the colonizer authority to decide what to do with the female and male bodies that they then came to dominate (LUGONES, 2014).
Lopes (2017) comments that since 1980 the black feminist movement began to question statements made by white feminists, as they did not identify themselves in the discourse. The racialized gender oppression suffered by women in Latin America was named by Lugones (2014) as “gender coloniality”, the possibility of overcoming it would be Decolonial Feminism, which would go beyond Eurocentric feminism. According to Kempf and Wedig (2019), feminism is a form of resistance to colonial sexist oppression, but “white” feminism offers certain limitations:
In the face of the coloniality of power, especially with regard to gender, a series of forms of resistance and struggles took place for those who were subjected to the processes of oppression. Feminism can be considered as one of these struggles, but it presents limiting aspects in the consideration of the guidelines of non-white, non-Western, non-bourgeois women. Current feminism shows itself, to a large extent, as a descendant of the struggle for the demands of white, European, and bourgeois women, in relation to inequalities in relation to men. Thus, the struggle for the emancipation of European women is the basis of Eurocentric feminism exported to the colony and still in vogue today. In this sense, Lugones (2008, p. 94) criticizes the feminist movement, because the hegemonic reference was “female liberation”, in which “white women were concerned with theorizing the white meaning of being a woman as if all women were white ”, so there is no deeper concern with other women: black, indigenous, lesbian or peasant, for example. (KEMPF; WEDIG, 2019 p. 5).
Because of this, the decolonial vision aims to understand the hierarchy of gender and all its subjectivity, to provide all women with materials that allow them to understand their situation without surrendering to it. According to Lugones (2014), unlike colonization, gender coloniality remains in the constitution of the world capitalist power system today, its power structure based on the European way of life — essentially patriarchal — constitutes a powerful tool of oppression intrinsic to the social structure modern (LUGONES, 2014).
Considering the historical context of women in society, it is clear that within economic sciences gender segregation is also no different. In an attempt to equalize academic production and foster debate on the participation of women in the economy, a new area of research emerges, based on feminist criticism of the consolidated capitalist economy, configuring itself as the Feminist Economy.
Some authors claim that the feminist economy emerged from the twentieth century, and gained strength in the late 1990s, however, authors like Carrasco (2006), claim that the discussion of the issue of inequality between the sexes, the differentiation of activities developed, and its economic and social condition, goes back to the time of the emergence of the economy as an autonomous discipline, since the main analysis of the feminist economy is the work performed by women and their recognition in the society.
The feminist economy debate covers all spheres of activity for women — public and private -, something that traditional economics did not consider until then. Domestic work and care activities for others do not belong to the economic sphere, as they are not intended for exchange transactions in the market, becoming invisible.
All types of transforming activities traditionally carried out by women, that is, all goods and services that are produced, carried out and consumed within the family space, and for which a financial contribution is not charged, precisely for this reason they remain outside the focus of interest of the traditional economy. In this sense, the feminist economics perspective directs a criticism that proposes a strange look at the economic tradition since the establishment of economics as an autonomous scientific discipline in the 18th century. (FERNANDEZ, 2018 p. 560).
The sexual division of labor is something inherent to human evolution, this dichotomy between activities considered feminine and masculine is a hallmark of civilization. However, the workload available to women becomes greater when they also begin to participate in the public sphere, performing paid activities. The impact on the production of socially imposed domestic work directly affects women and not men, especially when there is a need to care for others. It is up to the feminist economy to infer the impacts that these obligations and the time spent on activities traditionally seen as “feminine”, generate on the labor market, and on the personal development of women.
Feminist Economics aims to measure the hours of work spent on the so-called “double shift” performed for women, in order to include the importance of domestic work in the calculation of economic variables. The work carried out on a private scale and of a reproductive nature is an agent that makes possible the work developed in the public sphere, of a productive nature. The search for the recognition of the importance of these activities and the universalization of tasks is one of the objectives of the theoretical current, the feminist perspective of reproductive work demonstrates its relevance in the development of the economy of society.
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