Proudhon reduces wives’ role to reproduction that must then be discarded

Evidence

One of the problems arising from societies based on agnation is the fate of inheritance in the absence of any male descendants. The Greeks had instituted the custom of epiklerate: the female heir had to marry her oldest relative in the paternal family (genos); thus the property her father bequeathed to her would be transmitted to children belonging to the same group, and the estate remained the property of the paternal genos; the epikleros was not a female heir but only a machine to procreate a male heir; this custom placed her entirely at man’s mercy as she was automatically handed over to the firstborn of her family’s men, who most often turned out to be an old man. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 189 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Reproduction outside of marriage was also tied with rank and wealth. To an extraordinary degree, powerful lords sequestered young women inside the walls of their castles, plucking them from their homesteads to work as maids and attendants. There is abundant evidence that these lords mated prolifically with harems of these women, often siring dozens of illegitimate children. In some cases, they prevented these women from marrying other men; in others, they sequestered them as virgins, and then married them off after they had had a child with the castle lord. — Emlen, Douglas J, Animal Weapons_ The Evolution of Battle, 699 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

In this tradition and in modern ecology, there is potential to realize that work is not only industry, the productive action that transforms the world, but also reproduction, the work of remaking life with each year and generation. Seeing nature’s work in this light would align environmental politics with the key feminist insight that much socially necessary work is ignored or devalued as “caregiving,” a gendered afterthought to the real dynamos of the economy, when in reality no shared life could do without it. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 655 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Children do not compensate a wife for a loveless marriage; The epiklerate reduced female heirs to procreative tools preserving patrilineal property — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 189; Socially necessary reproductive work is devalued though no shared life can do without it — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 655 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• The epiklerate reduced female heirs to procreative tools preserving patrilineal property #exemplifies (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 189
• Medieval lords sequestered women to monopolize reproduction #exemplifies (0.78) — Emlen, Douglas J, Animal Weapons_ The Evolution of Battle, 699
• Socially necessary reproductive work is devalued though no shared life can do without it #expands (0.72) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 655