Work 8

Always spinning sheets of silk/We shall never be better dressed/But always naked and poor/And always suffering hunger and thirst.

Quote: Quoted in Bronislaw Geremek (1985): Poverty. A History. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, p. 65. Picture: Wikimedia

French song by women silk-spinning workers describing their poverty.

As Silvia Federici (2014: 52) writes, and as records from French city archives show, most of society tended to associate women wage earners with prostitution. Federici suspects that this was because of their independence: many weavers lived alone, often in great poverty. Today, the work of textile workers, especially in the Global South, is still characterised by extreme exploitation, and 80% of them are women (Clean Clothes Campaign 2020). According to a study by the Clean Clothes Campain and Fashionchecker, of the 108 companies they examined, 93% did not pay a living wage (Fashion Checker 2020). Some historical sources show that women workers were by no means a rarity. For example, between 1300 and 1500, women were represented in 200 professions in Frankfurt. In the 14th century the city of Frankfurt employed 16 women doctors, some of them even as surgeons. The banishment of women to domestic professions did not take place until centuries later (Federici 2014: 37).

*Silvia Federici (2014): Caliban and the Witch. Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia.

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