Acknowledgements
id="acknowledgements">Acknowledgements#The break with the past, which has been described by others as the transition to a capitalist mode of production, I describe here as the transition from the aegis of gender to the regime of sex. In this book I sum up the position I reached in a conversation with Barbara Duden, and which grew out of a controversy between us. Originally, the issue was the economic and anthropological status of nineteenth-century housework. I have dealt with this in Shadow Work.1 I consider this present essay one more step toward a History of Scarcity I want to write. In the case of Barbara Duden, I cannot recall who led whom into a new insight while remaining critical of the other’s perspective. My collaboration with Lee Hoinacki was of a different kind. As at other times during the last two decades, we met to report to each other on what we had learned during the past year. We spent two weeks on his homestead and he reviewed my draft. While discussing and writing with him there and, later on, in Berlin, my text took on a new shape. Our conversations were frequently interrupted by laughter and the expressed desire that the reader come to share the pleasure we found in writing. I cannot say who finally turned any given phrase the way it now stands. Without his collaboration, I certainly would not have written this text.
In this book I have taken up the substance of several lectures that were part of my course on the social history of the twelfth century when I was a guest professor at the University of Kassel (1979–1981). I remember with gratitude Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker, Heinrich Dauber, and my students for their patient and courageous criticism.
I especially want to thank several people for what they have contributed through their conversations with me. Norma Swenson made me recognize the main weakness of Medical Nemesis, published in 1975: its unisex perspective. The reflections of Claudia von Werlhof on the blind angle of economic perception led me to distinguish its two faces, the shadow economy and the vernacular domain, both equally neglected but not equally denied. The distinction between vernacular and industrial topology on which I build I owe to Sigmar Groeneveld. Conversations with Ludolf Kuchenbuch have led me to new insights on the history of the conjugal couple. I have received invaluable encouragement from my old friends Ruth and Lenz Kriss-Rettenbeck (both ethnographers and art historians), with whom I share several teachers in the period between Hugo of St. Victor and Gustav Künstler. Part of my research was done while a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin. Susan Hunt worked with me on this manuscript while preparing her reader on gender and sex, now available from Rt. 3, Box 650, Dexter, ME 04930, USA.
I dedicate this book to Joseph Fitzpatrick, S.J., on his seventieth birthday. For thirty years he has tried to teach me sociology.
Cuernavaca, 1982
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
American Journal of Economics and Sociology: Excerpt from “The Monetary Value of a Housewife: A Replacement Cost Approach” by Harvey S. Rosen, January 1974. Copyright © 1974 by the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the American Journal of Economics and Sociology.
Catholic University of America Press: Excerpt from “The Postion of Women: Appearance and Reality” by Ernestine Friedl, Anthropological Quarterly 40:3 (July 1967). Reprinted by permission of Catholic University of America Press.
The University of Chicago Press: Excerpts from the A. Leibowitz section and the Frank Stafford section of Economics of the Family: Marriage, Children, Human Capital, T. N. Schultz, ed. Copyright © 1974 by the University of Chicago. Reprinted by permission of the University of Chicago Press.