WOMEN, Production and Reproduction!

Women are in the process of developing a strong consciousness of themselves as producers.  As women now outnumber men in the Canadian and US work force they are using their capacity as producers to gain better pay, working conditions, and safer employment, not only for themselves, but for men, too.  However I believe that the world will not make any kind of dramatic shift towards peace and equality until women recognize their power as reproducers as well as producers and act upon this recognition.

Why do I say this?  Women reproduce the work force.  In fact,  women reproduce all human endeavor… the soldiers, mine workers,  cab drivers, nurses and school teachers, doctors; government bureaucrats,  priests, military generals and heads of state.  And while women are paid, however poorly, for their production work, women do the long, often painful and disappointing as well as rewarding, always expensive reproduction work for free ( I do acknowledge father’s roles in rearing children but they do not grow the babies inside their own bodies or nurse them after).  And ironically, it is the reproduction work that in the past have made women the scapegoats of a male dominated society.

If we look at the world’s most lucrative money markets, we see that it is drugs, guns and the arms trade, prostitution, sports, gambling and banking, alcohol, pornography, war, entertainment and human trafficking that head the list.  None of these help women trying to raise children in a healthy way, in fact, these activities are killing children.  When any animal’s habitat is destroyed so is the animal.  Women know this, but feel helpless before the knowledge because these most lucrative markets are so attractive to men in general.  Women as reproducers, are swamped with trying to keep our own canoes afloat, our own children out of harms’ way, while feeding and clothing them with as much love and care as time and money will allow to try to strengthen them against the uncaring of an increasingly militaristic, religious fundamentalist and violent world.

Eric Fromm, the renowned philosopher, in his book THE ART OF LOVING said that the opposite of love isn’t hate, but indifference.  He pointed out that actual hate implies a connection of some sort, a kind of recognition.  Fromm believed that Indifference was the most lethal killer of the human spirit.  Robert Frost, famous American poet echoed this theme in his poem FIRE AND ICE. Robert Frost warns us in his famous poem that “Some say the world will end in fire… (but) to say that for destruction, ice is also great, and would suffice”. 

 The ice of indifference is what women in general are up against in recreating the next work force.  There’s a crying need, not for cheap day care centers, but for free day care centres.  Women need societal acknowledgement that the treating of females as sex entertainment for men is evil, that not only the sexual health of females but the sexual health of men (fifty percent drop in male sperm count in the last fifty years) is serious business, that cancer is epidemic, and that women as reproducers are just bloody tired of GMO foods shoved down our children’s throats as well as our own without even a warning label.

 Significant numbers of young women understand very well that they will bear the blame if things go poorly in the tricky business of child rearing, and that they will reap no share of corporate profits for reproducing workers even if things turn out well.  Some western and European women, although there is in most women the desire to cuddle a baby at one time or another, are seeing through what can only be described as a financial scam and saying no to motherhood.  Enough so that Canada and European countries have to start depending on immigration for their work force along with all the clashes of culture that immigration implies. Many of the immigrants from countries where women’s needs are given less attention than those of livestock tend to set about trying to recreate a culture much like the one they just left.

 According to accounts of first contact in the Americas, when the Europeans arrived they found a high degree of respect for women among the aboriginals.  Women were acknowledged as the givers and providers of life. Johann Jakob Bachofen in the 1800’s wrote a three volume work on the early matriarchy called MOTHER RIGHT.  Bachofen postulated that all early human organizations were matriarchal.  Many other modern day scholars agree.  I agree.  Why? Because if patriarchy had prevailed in those early days the children would not have survived.  Had the mean, uncaring, bottom line spirit of capitalism prevailed then as it does today with the emphasis on wars, male one up man ship, contempt for women, and indifference to children, the children would not have survived.  It was women who brought the human race forward and women have a right to demand the right to rear children in peace with an equal distribution of the wealth of this country. Yes, let us stand up and demand MOTHER RIGHT!