Gender in Nowhere
In News From Nowhere Morris describes women in the society as ‘respected as a child bearer and rearer of children desired as a woman, loved as a companion, un-anxious for the future of her children’ and hence possessed of an enhanced ‘instinct for maternity’. The sexual division of labor remains intact. Women are not exclusively confined to domestic labor, although the range of work they undertake is narrower than that of man; but domestic labor is seen as something for which women are particularly fitted. Moreover, ‘The men have no longer any opportunity of tyrannizing over the women, or the women over the men; both of those took place in old times. The women do what they can do best and what they like best, and the men are neither jealous nor injured by it.’ The practice of women waiting on men at meals is justified on the grounds that, ‘It is a great pleasure to a clever woman to manage a house skillfully, and to do so that all house-mates about her look pleased and are grateful to her. And then you know everybody likes to be ordered about by a pretty woman…’
Morris presents us with a society in which women are free from the oppression of men; yet domestic work, though it is respected, remains gender specific.
Read more about this topic: News From Nowhere
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“But there, where I have garnered up my heart,
Where either I must live or bear no life;
The fountain from the which my current runs
Or else dries up: to be discarded thence,
Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads
To knot and gender in!”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Anthropologists have found that around the world whatever is considered “men’s work” is almost universally given higher status than “women’s work.” If in one culture it is men who build houses and women who make baskets, then that culture will see house-building as more important. In another culture, perhaps right next door, the reverse may be true, and basket- weaving will have higher social status than house-building.”
—Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen. Excerpted from, Gender Grace: Love, Work, and Parenting in a Changing World (1990)