Vale a pena ler este ensaio de Judith Shulevitz sobre Anna Doyle Wheeler – autora que, além de uma vida heterodoxa, escreveu um tratado sobre feminismo, refletindo sobre a condição feminina dentro dos casamentos oitocentistas (a que chama ‘depotismo doméstico’). Refere já conceitos borbulhantes da atualidade como a penalidade salarial que a maternidade traz às mulheres (explicada neste meu texto no Observador).
Deixo um excerto.
‘The Appeal is so far ahead of its time that our own is just barely catching up to it. The insight that makes it feel most of our moment has to do with what we now call the “motherhood penalty,” which Thompson and Wheeler see as a—perhaps, the—primary cause of women’s social inferiority. They had a precocious critique of equality feminism. Even in a society in which women had access to all the same educational and professional opportunities as men—a society that had never existed when they were writing and is today only partially realized—women would still fall behind, they said. Mothers performing unremunerated reproductive labor would inevitably incur a pecuniary loss: “Were all partial restraints, were unequal laws and unequal morals removed, were all the means and careers of all species of knowledge and exertion equally open to both sexes; still the barriers of physical organization must, under the system of individual competition, keep depressed the average station of women beneath that of men.” (Here, “physical organization” means “reproductive capacity” and “competition” means “capitalism.”)’
