Power and the Idea of Nature (1): The Appropriation of Women

How much work someone performs and who can demand her availability are different questions. Colette Guillaumin makes that distinction central to her analysis of women’s appropriation in this February 1978 Questions féministes article. It is the first part of Pratique du pouvoir et idée de Nature, subtitled L’appropriation des femmes. Her concern extends beyond women’s lower remuneration to the treatment of a category of people as continuously usable bodies and time.

Guillaumin calls this relation sexage. She distinguishes purchasing a delimited quantity of labor power from directly appropriating the person who produces it. A wage contract can at least specify the exchange through hours, tasks and payment; the domestic obligations she examines often lack a comparable endpoint. This does not make every paid job free, nor simply rename sexual violence. It asks how work, bodies, sexuality and care become combined into an apparently self-evident availability for use.

Unbounded time and obligations beyond marriage

The article’s discussion of time observes that marriage does not delimit a wife’s hours or monetary compensation like a conventional employment contract. More importantly, mothers, sisters, daughters and other female relatives may provide washing, cooking and childcare without having contracted a marriage with the husband. Private marriage alone cannot explain this supply of labor. A broader expectation that women provide services makes additional obligations appear natural.

She distinguishes private from collective appropriation. The first concerns a particular man’s control over a wife; the second concerns women being treated as a generally available category. Collective appropriation should not be confused with shared responsibility in public welfare. Beginning with a scene of a man publicly assaulting women in the street, the article moves through family, sexual obligation and bodily care. It connects intimate relations to public space: demands for unnegotiated service or bodily access exceed any single marriage.

Nature is not simply a mistaken idea added to material domination. When care for children, sick and older people, and healthy adult men is repeatedly assigned to women, that arrangement can subsequently be explained as a natural aptitude. The materialist approach reverses the direction of inquiry: what arrangements of labor and control produce the belief that a category of people is inherently suited to them? Bodily characteristics do not establish the inevitability of a social division.

This is a theoretical argument using everyday observations, institutions and language, not a representative survey estimating every woman’s circumstances. Its legal examples belong to the discussion of 1978, not a guide to current law. Comparisons with slavery and serfdom concern forms of appropriation; they should not erase distinct racial orders, histories and experiences of violence. Having identified a class relation, further analysis must still account for differences of class, race and migration among women.

Read with the study of housework and parenting time in France, the argument distinguishes theoretical questions about availability from recorded activities. Minutes measure some labor without automatically measuring the ability to refuse it. Hirata’s analysis of gender, class and race follows who delegates care and who performs it as an employee. The reading path moves beyond recognizing that housework is demanding toward asking who can set the boundaries of work.