College of Business Administration

Article Reprints:

Mary Mellor

Ecofeminist Economics: Women, Work, and the Environment Women & Environments International Magazine 14991993, Spring2002, Issue 54/55

Introduction

Ecofeminism has a major contribution to make to our understanding of the current destructive relationship between humanity and nonhuman nature. As its name implies, ecofeminism brings together the insights of feminism and ecology:

FEMINISM is concerned with the way in which women in general have been subordinated to men in general.

ECOLOGY is concerned that human activity is destroying the viability of the global ecosystem.

ECOFEMINISM argues that the two are linked.

Women have been viewed as inferior to men in most human societies -- I would even go so far as to say all. However, not all women are subordinate to all men and many men are oppressed through class, caste, 'race' or ethnic discrimination. Women also dominate each other. Therefore, the key issue for ecological economics is not sex-gender difference but the gendering of human societies.

For ecofeminists the most important aspect of the present global economy is that it represents a value system that subordinates both women and nature and sees itself as superior to traditional subsistence economies. The modern economic system is based on a dualistic hierarchy of values mainly expressed through money/profit but also as prestige. External to these values are the unvalued or undervalued, the resilience of the ecosystem, the unpaid and unrecognized domestic work of women, and the social reciprocity in communal societies as represented in non-market economies.

The link between women's subordination and the degradation of the natural world lies in women's centrality to the support economies of reproduction, unpaid domestic work and social reciprocity -- i.e. the home and the community. The unvalued economy is the world of women, of women's experience -- a WE- economy. The valued economy, on the other hand, is male-dominated, representing men's experience -- a ME-economy.

Ecofeminist political economy offers an explanation of how destructive economic systems are constructed and sees the WE-economy as the basis of an alternative, non-exploiting, sustainable economy. Because the ME-economy has largely left women behind, in the lives and experience of women lies the possibility of an alternative path. Throughout history, women have formed the backbone of economic and social systems, although their work has been largely unacknowledged.

Women's Work

Women have always worked. In modern economies they are particularly exploited as low-wage labourers, while in the early industrial economies women and children filled the first factories. Women currently have lower pay and less job security than men, even as globalization mercilessly exploits women as cheap and expendable workers.

Women are also on the boundaries of economic systems, since they usually have two lives: one within the valued economy as workers, consumers, and professionals, and one without -- the world of women's work. It is generally accepted that women workers with families have two shifts, the first at paid work and the second at home with domestic work (unless their social position enables them to employ other women to do it).

Yet it is important to make a distinction between the work of women and women's work. The work of women is what they have done throughout history (including being Prime Minister of Britain), while women's work is a particular type of work that would be demeaning for a man to do on a regular basis (unless he was already demeaned on the basis of class, caste, "race," or ethnicity). Women's work is the basic work that makes other forms of activity possible. It is caring work done for others that secures the human body and the community, and is usually routine and repetitive, involves watching and waiting, is often emotionally stressful, and is embedded and embodied.

When women's work is taken into the valued economy, its pay rates and work conditions are poor (nursing, catering and cleaning). Thus an interesting question about women's work arises: why is it not valued? And why have women's economic activities been lost to history, so that there are no monuments to the woman weeder, grinder, spinner, and water-carrier? Though the modern economy idealizes man-the- breadwinner, a more accurate historical understanding would direct us to revere woman-the-breadmaker who has planted, harvested, and ground the grain.

Studies of women's activities in hunter-gatherer and early agricultural societies show that women's work was much more important than that of men in the provision of calories. Yet if this is the case, how have men come to dominate valued economic systems? The answer lies in the process by which economic systems are constructed, for economic systems do not relate to human labour directly. Rather, they relate to valued labour, and the processes of valuing and male-ness are connected: men do not obtain value because they work; they work because they obtain value. The more work is valued, the more male-dominated it becomes. The more necessary and unremitting it is, the more female-dominated work becomes.

Gendering Economies: Time, Space & Altruism

Valued economic systems are created through a distinction between human activities where some are counted while others are not. Furthermore, the more time an activity takes and the more spatially limited it is, the more likely it is to be excluded from economic value. Men have largely claimed social space and time, while women have been engaged in domestic responsibilities and the routine and necessary labours of life close to home.

Women's work in the unvalued economy is thus based on boundaries of space and time:

LIMITED SPACE: Women's work is close to home. Her duties mean that she cannot move far from her responsibilities.

UNLIMITED TIME: Women's work never ends. Its routine nature means that it recycles endlessly and it must be done when needed -- day or night.

UNREWARDED/ALTRUISTIC: Women do not get any tangible benefit from this work, although they may find it intrinsically rewarding. They usually put their own needs last in the family.

The valued economy is quite the opposite:

UNLIMITED SPACE: Mobility is all and goods fly around the world regardless of seasons or local availability. Companies make a fetish of moving their senior staff every few years, if not months or days.

LIMITED TIME: The working day has a beginning and end. There is a distinction between paid and unpaid time (leisure). In fact, many women take paid work to get time for themselves, even if the work is low paid.

REWARDED: Work is rewarded by pay and prestige.

Women's Work as Imposed Altruism

Why do women do women's work? Why throughout history have they not refused? Part of the reason is that if it is not done, suffering will ensue quite quickly. We can see the problem of street children in societies where women no longer have the resources to cope.

Women in this sense have been altruistic, for they have worked throughout history for little recognition. However, this is an imposed altruism. Most women feel they have little choice but to do this work, although it might be experienced as an expression of love and duty. Yet for many women this work is done out of fear of violence and/or lack of any other economic options.

Men have justified women's imposed altruism by claiming that women are naturally suited to women's work because they are naturally caring and nurturing. Many ecofeminists have sympathy with this view and speak of an ethics of care that can be extended to the natural world. However, I would argue that this ethic is related to women's work rather than to women themselves.

This is clear in prosperous economies, where many women are increasingly refusing to undertake women's work. Marriage and birth rates are falling dramatically where women have clear economic choices. For example, Italy's birth rate is 1.3 percent -- well below replacement level -- and women claim they won't have children because men do not help domestically. In Japan many women are refusing to marry, particularly when men behave in traditional ways.

Women are also challenging men's assumption that they have a natural right to socio-economic domination. Where professional positions depend on academic qualifications, women are competing very actively with men. However, for ecofeminists the future does not lie with women playing the male game even if that does have the side effect of reducing population rates. A country with a small or negative population growth at a high level of consumption is much more problematic ecologically than a country with a high population growth and low consumption. If women simply join men in the high production-consumption stakes, this will compound the ecological problems we face.

The ME-Economy: Externalizing Women and Nature

The case for linking women's work with the ecosystem is that they are both externalized by male-dominated economic value systems. Women's work is not valued because it is associated with the most basic needs of human existence, and the natural environment is also the basis for human existence. Why, then are these both externalized? The answer lies in the nature of the ME-economy, which is disembodied from the daily cycle, the life cycle and women's work. It is disembedded from the ecological framework.

In the ME-economy there is no space for the young, the old, the sick, the tired, or the unhappy, except as consumers. They are seen as a burden on the welfare state, which itself is seen as a burden on the so-called wealth-creating sector. Thus they disappear into the world of women, home, and community.

Furthermore, the ME-economy is unconcerned with the loss of resources for future generations; loss of habitat for other species; loss of biodiversity; loss of peace, quiet, and amenity -- unless it can be sold. The ME-economy is thus a DISEMBEDDED system, which bears no responsibility for the life cycle of its environment. It is disengaged from ECOLOGICAL TIME -- the time it takes to restore the effects of human activity, if there is even the possibility of renewal and replenishment within the ecosystem.

The valued economy can also be seen as disengaged from BIOLOGICAL TIME -- the time of replenishment and renewal for the human body in its daily cycle and life cycle. It is therefore not unexpected that such an economic system should disrupt biological and ecological systems. Destructiveness is central to its fundamental structure.

How then did such a disembodied and disembedded system emerge?

Women's Work as the Bridge Between the ME-Economy and the Ecosystem

Ecofeminists see women's work as the 'bridge' between unsustainable economic systems and the embedded nature of human existence.

The gendered nature of human society means that women in most societies throughout history have done the routine work of the body, whether as food growers or domestic workers. Dominant men have distanced themselves from these roles and taken roles with higher status, whether as ritual leaders, traders, or war-makers.

In most societies there is some version of the 'men's house,' a separate place or set of activities which are barred to women. Within this space men concoct the elaborate socio-political 'games' that maintain their dominance. In modern societies women have stormed these men's houses: law, business, medicine, politics, the military -- but only on male terms. As Audre Lorde and other feminists have argued, you cannot use men's tools to break down the men's house.

My basic argument is thus that male-dominated socio-economic systems have not accepted the embodied and embedded nature of human existence. Instead, this has been rejected and despised as women's work. Value systems have therefore been erected on a false base. The modern economy does meet many of our basic needs but that is not its primary purpose. It bases its value on profitable financial exchange or prestige occupations, not sustainable provisioning on an equitable basis. The command economy of the Soviet Union was little better even though it tried to meet basic needs, for it valued male militarism and monumentalism equally highly. Women continued to carry the double burden of work and the ecological consequences were appalling.

We cannot however, look to women or to nature for the answer. If women step in and sort out the ME-economy's mess they are again doing women's work and no wisdom will have been gained. Rather, it is the responsibility of dominant men and the few women who have joined them to recognize the false base upon which historic systems have rested. This understanding will be triggered by the instability and unsustainability of the ME-economy, for falsely grounded economic systems have built-in contradictions (as Marx has pointed out).

Men and women can then jointly construct new socio-economic structures that are egalitarian and sustainable. But where to begin? Though a number of greens suggest returning to a subsistence economy, I am not sure this is practicable for urbanized and industrialized societies. We should certainly support existing subsistence economies to retain their skills and resource base. However, I would envisage most people living in an economic system based on an equitable division of labour and mutually achieved sufficiency, rather than peasant-style self-sufficiency.

Ecofeminist Economics: Getting from There to Here

The central feature of the modern ME-economy is the fact that it is beyond the control of even those who benefit from it. In a very real sense it is always THERE, somewhere else (national, trans-national, global) and never HERE, where we live. Although most of us take the THERE economy for granted, very little of it is HERE within our control. This is fundamentally undemocratic and makes us behave in unsustainable ways to secure our livelihood.

What would an ecofeminist economy look like instead?

1. There would be a shift of focus from disembedded and disembodied structures to patterns of work and consumption that are sensitive to the human life cycle and to ecological sustainability.

2. Local production would be oriented to local needs using sustainable local resources with minimal waste.

3. Basic food provisioning would be local and seasonal. Food would be grown locally where possible, but direct purchasing arrangements could also be agreed upon with local farmers. Farmers' markets would be encouraged where they do not already exist.

4. Provisioning of necessary goods and services would be the main focus of economic systems, not money-making. It should be possible for people to live and work entirely within a provisioning system.

5. The emphasis would be on useful work rather than employment. That is, people would not need to do harmful work in order to have a livelihood. Any additional profit-based economic activity would be subject to stringent resource/pollution and labour exploitation rules.

6. Work and life would be integrated. The workplace and living base would be interactive. People of all ages and abilities would share activities. Households would vary from single person to multi-person.

7. Necessary work would be fulfilling and shared by both genders. Work and leisure would interact. Festivals and other celebratory activities would regularly punctuate productive work.

8. Inter-regional and international trade would be seen as a cultural as much as an economic exchange. Travel would be undertaken for education and communication rather than consumption.

9. Personal security would rest in the social reciprocity of a provisioning WE-economy rather than in money accumulation systems, particularly in old age.

Building an economic system which truly values women and nature requires clear vision and understanding, as well as much political work, beginning in the local communities where everyone lives.

This paper was presented in May, 1999 as part of a public lecture series on ecological economics sponsored by Fundacio Bancaixa in Valencia, Spain.

ILLUSTRATIONS (BLACK & WHITE)

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By Mary Mellor

Mary Mellor is a professor at Northumbria University in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, U.K., where she directs the Sustainable Cities Research Institute. She is the author of Breaking the Boundaries: Toward a Feminist Green Socialism (Virago, 1992), Feminism and Ecology (New York University Press, 1997), and The Politics of Money: Towards Sustainability and Economic Democracy (with Frances Hutchinson and Wendy Olsen), forthcoming from Pluto Press.

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Source: Women & Environments International Magazine, Spring2002 Issue 54/55, p7, 4p

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