French peasant women bore crushing double labor yet remained socially respected

Evidence

Take, for example, the lot of peasant women. In France they make up the majority of the women involved in productive labor, and they are generally married. The single woman most often remains a servant in the father’s, brother’s, or sister’s household; she only becomes mistress of a home by accepting a husband’s domination; depending on the region, customs and traditions impose various roles on her: the Norman peasant woman presides over the meal, while the Corsican woman does not sit at the same table as the men; but in any case, as she plays one of the most important roles in the domestic economy, she shares the man’s responsibilities, his interests, and his property; she is respected, and it is often she who really governs: her situation is reminiscent of the place she held in ancient agricultural communities. She often has as much moral prestige as her husband, and sometimes even more; but her concrete condition is much harsher. The care of the garden, barnyard, sheepfold, and pigpen falls on her alone; she takes part in the heavy work: cleaning the cowshed, spreading the manure, sowing, plowing, hoeing, and hay making; she digs, weeds, harvests, picks grapes, and sometimes helps load and unload wagons of straw, hay, wood and sticks, litter, and so on. In addition, she prepares the meals and manages the household: washing, mending, and such. She assumes the heavy burdens of pregnancies and child care. She rises at dawn, feeds the barnyard and small animals, serves the first meal to the men, takes care of the children, and goes out to the fields or the woods or the kitchen garden; she draws water from the well, serves the second meal, washes the dishes, works in the fields again until dinner, and after the last meal occupies her evening by mending, cleaning, husking the corn, and so forth. As she has no time to take care of her health, even during her pregnancies, she loses her shape quickly and is prematurely withered and worn out, sapped by illnesses. She is denied the few occasional compensations man finds in his social life: he goes to the city on Sundays and fair days, meets other men, goes to the café, drinks, plays cards, hunts, and fishes. She stays on the farm and has no leisure. Only the rich peasant women helped by servants or dispensed from field work lead a pleasantly balanced life: they are socially honored and enjoy greater authority in the home without being crushed by labor. But most of the time rural work reduces woman to the condition of a beast of burden. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 294

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing how 1949 French agrarian realities map onto Beauvoir’s broader claim that economic productivity alone does not liberate women.
• XREF: connects to: Enslaved women bore dual production and reproduction burdens in Saint-Domingue — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 172; Frontier women’s days were consumed by relentless domestic labor — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 227; Colonial labour displacement devalued African women’s social position. — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 934
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Enslaved women bore dual production and reproduction burdens in Saint-Domingue — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 172; Frontier women’s days were consumed by relentless domestic labor — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 227; Colonial labour displacement devalued African women’s social position. — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 934

Broader Connections

• Colonial labour displacement devalued African women’s social position. #complicates (0.78) — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 934