Negated women's experience and prostitution as synechdoche of the commodity

I was really interested in the way that certain sections of the Magna Carta were ignored or omitted during the sixteenth century. In particular, I was interested in the disregard for the rights of women. Linebaugh mentions that “as Adrienne Rich has written, women’s experience has been “wordless or negated experience” (57). He discusses that:

The expulsion from the common lands had huge and manifold consequences to the silencing and negation of subsequent experience. The “many sisters” who were put from their living and left at large suffered a double loss – of subsistence and of independence. It prepared the way for the terrorizing of the female body through the witch hunts. Burning faggots replaced estovers of common; the witch-hunter’s prick and the branks (a headpiece used for scolding women) silenced and degraded her)” (57).

Later, he describes the way women’s exclusion and degradation becomes associated with the meaning of the commodity:

“Thomas Deckker has a chapter on “the manner of undoing gentlemen by taking up commodities.” Robert Greene describes the persons who perform their “cozening commodity.” The husband who sells his wife into prostitution calls her a “commodity.” The prostitute is called “traffic.” The commodity retains sexual meaning at least in slang well into the eighteenth century, when its meaning expanded to become “the private parts of a modest woman and the public part of the prostitute.

“The devaluation of woman’s work and the degradation of her body relate directly to the enclosures of open fields, the loss of commons, and the depopulation of villages. Prostitution becomes the synechdoche for commodity production. She is a proletarian (she has “no external thing to lose”). She becomes prostituted and cheated simultaneously by the commodity” (65).

“The chronic poverty and the devaluation and extension of women;s work became widespread and invisible. In the economic changes of the sixteenth century women suffered the most, they lost the commons; and in the legal changes of the sixteenth century, their “reasonable estovers of common” was forgotten. What Shakespeare expresses is a third meaning of commodity: the anterior alienation and dehumanization of women’s body” (65).

Linebaugh makes a great observation and I think this relationship deserves further attention. Perhaps we can discuss this section further during class. I wonder if this has any relation to the present devaluation of women’s work in general, and not only prostitution.

I also apologize for having such an informal post. I wasn’t sure what questions to ask as I read the book, but this passage definitely caught my attention as I am really interested in women devaluation of women’s work overtime.