> Well, when I said that life expectancies in most of the world had
> risen over every interval you'd like to choose - 10, 20, 40, 100
> years - she dismissed this, saying that life expectancies have fallen
> in Africa and Russia. Well yes they have, and these are symptoms of
> great economic and social crisis, but they've risen in Latin America,
> East and South Asia, and in the Middle East and North Africa - and
> the averages for all the World Bank's major income groupings (low,
> middle, lower middle, upper middle) have all risen. When I said that
> it was just wrong to say that capitalism has been an unmitigated
> disaster for women - that many women find having a job preferable to
> being utterly dependent on men, even in conditions of exploitation -
> she dismissed this too, and cited the example of recent trips to
> Italy, where women from Eastern Europe are held in sexual slavery.
> Which is indeed horrific, but really not the whole story of women
> under capitalism.
>
Some years ago Edward Shorter wrote a pretty good book with the interesting title: A HISTORY OF WOMEN'S BODIES. It is mostly a medical history, and provides graphic and quite disgusting accounts of the reasons women had a shorter life expectancy until modernity -- obviously an aspect of capitalism -- brought very great changes. There were many components to the changes, ranging from improved diet, less strenuous work, medical knowledge and in particular, the germ theory of illness, which, though somewhat limited has, at least, meant a drastic decline in infections resulting from childbearing. He calculated, if I recall, that before about a hundred years ago, in Europe and North America, a childbearing woman had a 25% chance of contracting a bacterial infection in the course of labor and delivery that would either kill or cripple her.
On a more mundane level, when I encounter people who celebrate the arcadian simplicity of pre modern life, I like to ask if they'd like to go back to the absence of warm running water, daily bathing, and would like to depend on the pre modern versions of toilet paper. There's a nice chapter in Rabelais' GARGANTUA ET PANTAGRUEL, on this subject. I also ask women to consider the pre modern equivalents of sanitary napkins. (I'm old enough to remember my mother and sister's enthusiasm when tampons were invented about fifty years ago.) These bits of reality tend to cool antiquarian ardor.
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema