Raise your hand if this is the first time you’ve heard that the division of labor between home/work is mirrored in the division of power between culture/society.
Women were the first targets of chattel culture. The marriage contract as an item of state and church authority over the petitioners was a provision giving the husband chattel ownership of his wife by law…. the outcomes of which women around the world continue to fight to rectify.
The term “Chattel Slavery” as applied in historical accounts of slavery was coined from “chattel contracts”, which expanded the context of “moveable personal property” from things like marriage and livestock to slaves.
To be clear, those embracing slavery saw the opportunity to position “owning” slaves as being “no different” than how a man “owns livestock” and “owns his wife”.
This is why chattel culture as a concept needs focus before the rest; chattel culture underlies the combined history of women, indigenous, people of color, and children all over the world, regardless of “race”, religion or cultural definition, or societal order.
Go read the current loan agreements for chattel loans and you will see very quickly how and why the politicos of the time were happy to “borrow” this position – it allowed them to borrow against the valuation of the chattel as well.
This is why the current polarization happening between the BLIPOC communities and the larger community of women on matters of chattel in history are splintering our ability to unite and organize and be unstoppable.
Attacking “white” women for demanding center when that’s all they’ve ever had until the 1970’s is talk over and erase their place in the chattel culture struggle. Yes, I hear you saying that you feel that is what happened to you. But are you not, even now, fighting to stop it happening to anyone else? “Anyone” still includes anyone.
“White” women do not want to ‘be your savior’, they want to be your ally. But “White” women are ignorant as babies on understanding any role or position but their own. Most humans are like this, even if we all seem to prefer acting like that’s “everyone else”; but “White” women especially so as they were literally set up as the “White” man’s cultural and societal management and power machine and are still trying to break down, extract, and unpack what and who we are without the pre-fixed “chattel” involved.
Just like every other group affected. Which is damn hard in a culture and society that is splintering and creating new arguments within itself faster than any public discourse has hope of solving them.
And yes, trying to compete in the same lanes as you were placed is a losing proposition. Don’t play by their rules. Don’t stay in your lane. Remove the lanes and discover the common ground over which this culture and society painted.
We must stay on track; the chattel target is not well understood and easily overlooked in the great race for “first cause” and “righteous blame” (neither of which fix anything, recall).
Any cultural or societal position that posits one human as chattel to another is a target.
That sentence, on its own, upends over 80% of what we know as “culture and society” on the planet.
Focus on the vestigial remnants of chattel culture. Everything a human living under oppression wants starts here.