Rough Draft
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What makes labor value difficult to establish?
What makes labor value difficult to establish is the amount of effort given by an individual. Two texts which best explain the hardships of establishing labor value are The Lady’s Dressing Room by Jonathan Swift and Mary Collier’s The Woman’s Labour. Swift and Collier explain two different types of women’s labor- the type related to beauty, and the type related to agriculture work, or what is usually called “hard labor.” These two different perceptions of the authors about women and their hardships affect their role in inaugurating labor value.
The idealized image of women, promoted equally as strong in Swift’s day as in ours, causes problems for women because they become self-absorbed. Through sarcasm, Swift points out the problems with unrealistic expectations in his poem. Women are the primary consumers of these beauty products. Swift notes, through Strephon’s shocked eyes, those women spend an inordinate amount of time using beauty products when beneath it all they are normal, sweaty, stinky human beings. Women have somehow been socialized to expect to be perfect. Moreover, cosmetics are one of the biggest most booming industries in the world today. The industry shows no sign of lagging, Swift’s poem The Lady’s Dressing Room is an ironic poem. The topic of the poem is just what the title says: he’s describing what happens in a lady’s dressing room. However, the first lines signal the ironic approach: five hours to get ready? This is hammered home by the suggestion of a goddess, as if the women were divine, an image Swift then contrasts with both agricultural byproducts (dung, hard work, smell) and a kind of industrial production. This text is ironic because the male perception of beauty is natural and effortless, not something that involves work. He’s saying how much work it is to make women beautiful, and how disgusting the work behind the scenes is.
Collier’s poem describes the double shifts of wage labor, home- and field-work, and work in others’ homes that make up the lives of the rural working women. Because of their toil in the fields, as domestics, and as care-givers, they have little time for rest, she explains, and even less to reflect or to dream. Collier also criticizes the exploitation of domestic labor and the dangers of seasonal work. Mary Collier describes the variety of a woman’s work.
I think that the biggest thing that could be focused on is expanding on your answer to the overall question. What is it about the effort given by an individual that makes labor value difficult to establish? Could it be that often times it isn’t known how much work a person puts in? I think that is the route you are taking because both of these texts deal with that idea, but I think that connection could be made clearer as you continue along the writing process.
I like your thesis, but you could expand a little: yes, people apply a different amount of effort, but maybe the labor value is difficult to establish because they aren’t recognized as different amounts of effort? Especially in the latter part of your first paragraph and the beginning of the second, you focused on how different people disagreed over the value of the effort made. You could expand on those points.
Also, for your last paragraph, be careful of sinking into summaries of the papers.
I think that the texts you have chosen will support your answer nicely but like Theresa and Phillip have said, expansion of your answer will make it easier to understand how the texts support it. Also, I think that making some of your statements more specific will help to support your answer. Like at the beginning of your second paragraph when you say women become self-absorbed. Take a sentence or so to explain exactly what you mean by that, do they become narcissistic? Selfish? Uncaring? It would bring the reader exactly to what your point is without having to guess.
Notes from the meeting (sorry if they’re a little disjointed)
Focus on something more quantifiable. What measures effort? The amount of time spent? The money earned? The amount of product generated?
Instead of arguing between the female/male sides, perhaps just use them as different examples of labor. You can definitely look at both sides, but avoid arguing female>male because it’ll detract from the main point of your paper.