Damnation
Where some historians have seen liberation, others, like the English historian and Christian socialist R. H. Tawney, have seen damnation. Tawney argued that concern for the welfare of others was the basis of social cohesion.
The rhetoric of free choice, in his view, obscured the weakening of social obligation: capitalism delivered greater benefits to the strong than to the weak and social divisions further reduced solidarity. The search for personal pleasure, in Tawney's view, was a source of energy that should be confined to its proper sphere, harnessed and controlled. Economic ambitions might serve as ‘‘good servants'', but they were ‘‘bad masters''.14 He feared that the decline of religious influence would unleash a sorcerer's apprentice.Alice Clark prefigured many of Tawney's concerns in her classic account of the lives of seventeenth-century English women. 15 She singled out the effects of the transition to capitalism on women. In her view, the shift from family-based production to an individual wage system reduced social recognition of those aspects of women's work that took place outside the market, such as the care of children and other dependent family members.16 Families in which men and women once combined productive and reproductive effort were divided—men moved into the new market economy leaving women behind with responsibilities for work that was inevitably less empowering.
Clark was among the first of many to describe the growth of wage employment as a wedge driven between the production of things and the reproduction of people. 17 Joseph Schumpeter, an historian of economic ideas, warned that the transition to capitalism would undermine family life:
As soon as men and women learn the utilitarian lesson and refuse to take for granted the traditional arrangements that their social environment makes for them, as soon as they acquire the habit of weighing the individual advantages and disadvantages of any prospective course of action-or, as we might also put it, as soon as they introduce into their private life a sort of inarticulate system of cost accounting—they cannot fail to become aware of the heavy personal sacrifices that family ties and especially parenthood entail under modern conditions.1
The economic historian Karl Polanyi drew from both Tawney and Clark to argue that what he called the ‘‘great transformation” could weaken values, norms, and preferences central to the functioning of the families and communities on which market-based societies depend.19 More recently, Marxist feminist scholar Sylvia Federici has argued that capitalist development increased the incentives for male control over women's reproductive capacities, including the persecution of women as witches.20 All these arguments imply that the ideology of individual self-interest undermines forms of social solidarity beneficial to women in their roles as caregivers.