Poems on Gender
MAKING BABIES
Imagine you’re back in the Middle Ages in a room where a peasant woman is giving birth. She’d be in good company: the midwives, her mother, sisters, other women from the village…
Notice what’s missing?
Capitalism, to keep on ticking, requires two things:
One, making profits
Two, making babies
No profits without workers
No workers without babies
No babies without mothers
You can’t make babies in a factory, yet
So to control the rate of reproduction
You have to control women’s bodies
This is an old trick, an ancient trick
Goes way back as the beginning of class society
Capitalism didn’t invent patriarchy
It took it over
And intensified it
It drove women out of the birthing room
Put men in charge
Brought in the death penalty
Not just for abortion – for contraception
A hundred thousand or more were burned as witches
Midwives were a big target
But mostly it was the aged, the homeless, the poor
The old feudal order was collapsing
Jacquerie, peasant rebellions
Were ripping across Europe
Heresy was a crime
You could die for it
But it kept rising up
Challenging the power of the Catholic church
Daring to dream of a heaven on earth
And ready to fight for it
Gunpowder was bad news for castle walls
Muskets were bad news for knightly armour
And the plague was bad news for everybody
Especially for the peasants, for the working poor
But as their numbers diminished, their power grew
Because they were necessary
Not just the work they did but the land they occupied
They didn’t own it, yet
But they’d worked it for hundreds of years
And kind of thought they should
Things were getting tough for the hard charging robber baron
There were banquets to be catered, wars to be fought
And even more wars as time went on
Because the slimmer the pickings, the more they scrapped over it
Meanwhile, trade was increasing
Manufacture had become a thing
Cities were getting richer, gaining independence
And they were hungry for bodies
But it was a new kind of body that was needed
Not tied to the land
Rootless
Something you could buy and sell
Move it around as necessary
Teach it to tell time by the clock not the sun
Discard when not needed
This was the rise of the nation state
The Kings, the Lords, the Church
All fighting against each other
But united against the poor
It was a match made in hell
Cities needed wool for the textile industry
The wool needed sheep, the sheep needed land
And the robber barons needed a new source of income
So the sheep ate the farms
The peasants were forced off the land
The Bloody Laws
– that’s what they were called –
Made vagrancy a crime
Repeated vagrants got deportation or death
Men, women and children were driven into the factories
Into a poverty and degradation that made village life
With all its injustice and cruelty, look almost like paradise
And women were the biggest losers
Because only a woman could give birth
But it took a whole village to raise a child
Cooking, washing, spinning
These were all communal jobs
There was a power in this
But it was broken, when the people of the field
Were driven out of the commons and into a world
Where bodies on the job were paid by the hour
But making new bodies was a private affair
Hidden away, unpaid, disrespected
And right from the start, capitalism was a global disease
Witch burning was a pandemic on both sides of the ocean
Genocide in the Americas went hand in hand with the African slave trade
Welcome to the Industrial Revolution, where human life is just another commodity
Where they dump slaves into the ocean at the first sign of storm or disease
Lloyds of London will cover the loss
And if you’re a woman – and you survive the crossing
They don’t just work you to death – they breed you like an animal
Making babies
From the hard cold point of view of evolution
Making babies is what life is all about
Love, this god-like emotion that binds us together
Grows up out of a simple biology
It’s rooted in the core of what we are
In every gender, in every sexuality
The milk of human kindness
Imagine
To be a mother, to nurture
To carry a tiny bit of tissue
That grows, that multiplies, that complexifies
Until it comes out into the world as a new creation
A human individual
My god, what a gift, what a blessing it should be
And what a curse it is
The female body carries a double load
No matter how cruel we are to our fellow humans
Women get that little bit extra
Because they are nailed into their bodies
Not by any law of nature, but by man-made laws
In a capitalist world, witch-burning
Is the other side of motherhood
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This poem was greatly informed by Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch