Vale Maria Mies (1931-2023)

Renate Klein, Maria Mies and Susan Hawthorne in Köln in 2014.

Maria Mies was a friend of Spinifex and of Renate and Susan. Below they write about their connection with Maria.

Renate Klein writes

I became acquainted with Maria Mies’ work in the early 1980s. At that time, I was studying and teaching Women’s Studies at the University of California’s Berkeley campus. The co-ordinator of Women’s Studies, Gloria Bowles, and I had taught a seminar called Theories of Women’s Studies which we began transforming into a book of the same title (published in 1983). I was grappling with my own chapter on feminist research methodology, when I came across Maria Mies’ paper about seven methodological postulates for feminist research. It had been published in 1978 in the first issue of the new feminist journal, Beiträge zur Feministischen Theorie und Praxis of which Maria was a co-founder. I was mesmerised by Maria’s ideas which had come out of her involvement with battered women in Cologne. Together with other women, she had opened a women’s shelter to provide a home for these women who had all fled from male violence in their lives. As the women were getting back on their feet, they joined Maria and her colleagues in a joint action research project (published 1980 as a book, Nachrichten aus dem Ghetto Liebe).

The seven methodological postulates centre around doing research from the bottom up (rather than from the top down), involving the women in the projects as subjects (rather than being objects in non-feminist research), dissolving hierarchies and creating research for women rather than research on women. Maria’s article is truly brilliant and should be required reading for anyone who is attempting to become a feminist researcher. I have tried to apply her postulates in all the research I have done during my life.

I contacted Maria who was then teaching at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, Holland, asking her if we could include her paper in our edited book, Theories of Women’s Studies. Maria agreed and at some point, I visited her in The Hague. I remember being incredibly impressed, but also a bit intimidated by this small woman who spoke truth with such conviction and an absolute belief that the world can be changed for the better. I mustn’t have made too bad an impression also, because this meeting was the beginning of our life-long friendship which involved working together on a number of issues.

Maria and I worked closely together as feminist critics of reproductive technologies and genetic engineering. In 1985, German feminists organised an important International Congress Women against Gene and Reproductive Technologies in Bonn where more than 2000 women from all walks of life including feminists, trade unionists, church women and members of the Green Party, condemned the intrusion of reproductive technologies in women’s lives (the first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, had been born in 1978). Maria and I were both speakers (me because the anthology Test-Tube Women. What Future for Motherhood? which I had edited with Rita Arditti and Shelley Minden had been rapidly translated into German as Retortenmütter).

Later that year, Maria joined us at the Emergency Conference in Sweden, that some of us started organising in 1984 when we spoke at a feminist conference in Groningen on this topic and also received rapturous applause and support for further action from the audience. The Network we had founded was called FNNRET, but in Sweden, Maria convinced us (and rightly so) that we absolutely needed to include genetic engineering in our criticism. Hence FINRRAGE was born: The Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering. (We joked that with a name like that we were not likely to get many grants. And, as expected, we did not.) It was crucial that FINRRAGE members consisted of both women from the Global North where new reproductive technologies were pushed on infertile women, and the Global South, where women were coerced into having fewer children through dangerous new contraceptive implants such as Norplant, and forced abortions.

FINRRAGE prospered and we had thousands of members in close to 50 countries. Maria and I often met at international conferences, for example in Spain, Australia, Brazil and, most notably, twice in Bangladesh at conferences organised by Farida Akhter of UBINIG-FINRRAGE. Maria was a prolific activist and writer. Two of her most notable papers were called: ‘Why do we need all this’? and ‘From the individual to the dividual: in the supermarket of reproductive alternatives’. Maria held a profound belief – which I share – that reprogenetic technologies whether applied to women, other animals or plants, were not in humanity’s best interest, but instead filled the coffers of a myriad of newly established biotech companies and research laboratories.

Together with FINRRAGE core members Janice Raymond, Farida Akhter, Jalna Hanmer, Robyn Rowland and me, Maria became a regular contributor to the journal Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International Feminist Analysis which spread our words (archived at <http://finrrage.org>)

Maria brought to her vast interdisciplinary knowledge a deep-rooted understanding of truth, honesty and straight talking which she said had originated in her childhood in a small farming village in Germany (in the Eifel), and her research with poor women labourers in India where she lived for many years. Maria did not suffer fools gladly and could be quite abrupt with liberals/libertarians who pushed for ‘regulation’, rather than abolition. With friends she was warm and supportive. She also had a wicked sense of humour and even wrote songs, e.g. a song about putting patents on all living things – performed at a street action in Cologne in 1996.

We are fortunate that Maria Mies has penned her autobiography The Village and the World: My Life Our Times (2010) where we can read about her multifaceted life and courageous involvement in many action research projects as well as fabulous street protest actions, e.g. in demonstrations against the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) and FAO (the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. Maria was also a much-loved member of Diverse Women for Diversity.

Maria leaves behind a multitude of friends from all corners of the globe who will miss her dearly. But her many books and papers constitute a formidable legacy, especially for young feminists. I am very glad that I could call her a good friend for 40 years.

Susan Hawthorne writes

I met Maria Mies in the late 1980s and one of the first strong memories I have is of sitting in Maria’s living room and watching the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. I had visited East Berlin a few weeks earlier, and as in other communist countries what struck me most was the lack of advertising. Maria knew a lot more than I did and we discussed what this meant for the future of Germany (and the world). We met a number of times after that, but I came to know her better at a feminist conference in Bangladesh organised by Farida Akhter and UBINIG in 1993. There were 65 women at this conference, and we broke into small groups to discuss global politics and feminist responses to it. The conference was called Peoples’ Perspectives on Population and Farida, Maria, Renate and many others were there as members of FINRRAGE.

The discussions in Maria’s group opened my eyes to a feminist way of speaking about economics as well as coming to know about Structural Adjustment Programs and Intellectual Property. There was much else besides, including about reproductive technologies, the ways in which neoliberal systems meant that women in Bangladesh were put on terrible contraceptive drugs.  The numbers of births – considered too many - were shown on a huge screen in Dhaka. In the west, women were being enticed into IVF programs – moving at speed towards incorporating surrogacy into their systems. We also discussed environmental issues and how we might create a more ecologically sustainable future. Towards the end of the conference, I wrote a three-page manifesto called Wild Politics. After reading it out, both Maria and Gena Corea told me that it should become a book. It became my PhD and later book, Wild Politics: Feminism, Globalisation and Biodiversity. I could not have written this book without those days of conversation in Bangladesh.

In 1998, Maria, along with Tony Clarke, Maude Barlow and others, was also involved in defeating the proposal for the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI). This agreement would have had devastating and far-reaching effects on ordinary people around the world. It is the only occasion in which a citizens’ movement has prevented such an agreement being ratified. As I wrote in Wild Politics “the MAI model allows transnational corporations to pursue business ventures anywhere, without any domestic regulations or restrictions” (p. 325).

In 2003, I attended an international conference organised by Maria and others on feminist strategies against GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services). Until that time, I had not realised what a pervasive agreement this would be. Almost every business provides services, whether it be in health (from cleaners through to nurses), accounting, publishing and everything else. The GATS agreement has a much more profound effect on women as it is women who drive the service economy. Services had become commodities privatised for sale. As always, Maria had ensured that the speakers ranged from those whose lives were directly affected to those who had been organising protests and developing arguments against this multilateral agreement. Once again, my world expanded.

My life was changed by Maria and her intellectual legacy sustains me. Her structural analysis of global systems and her insistence that theory must always be in conjunction with activism (and vice versa) is an important insight for all feminists.

Spinifex Press

Maria visited Australia in 1996 and gave a lecture at the University of Melbourne and attended the Women’s World Congress in Adelaide where we had much fun launching Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed. Her work is extremely well known around the world and translated into many languages. At Spinifex we published five of her books as well as a Festschrift called There is an Alternative: Subsistence and Worldwide Resistance to Corporate Globalization edited by Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, Nicholas Faraclas and Claudia von Werlhof in 2001. One of her early books, The Lace Makers of Narsapur (1982) was republished by Spinifex in 2012 as part of our Spinifex Feminist Classics series. It is a study of the precarious work that women do. Women are defined as ‘non-working housewives’ and their work as ‘leisure-time activity’. The result is that they are badly paid and not recognised as labourers.

In 1993, we published the joint book by Maria and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism. It is a series of essays by these two incredible thinkers. Unfortunately, we no longer hold the rights. It was re-released in 2014 by Bloomsbury.

In 1999, we published a new edition of Maria’s Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour. This extraordinary book sets out in detail the bedrock of Maria’s thinking, the consequences and where that might lead us as feminists. At the centre of her thinking are the ways in which colonisation of countries and peoples is analogous to the way in which women’s lives are colonised. She invented the term ‘housewifisation’ to describe this process. She writes about nature, capitalism, patriarchy, how women are forced to become breeders and about violence against women including dowry murders, femicide through amniocentesis and rape. She examines whether communist regimes such as the Soviet Union, China and Vietnam were any more successful in changing women’s lives. The answer turned out to be, No. She finishes the book with her vision for the future. In the Preface to the 1999 edition that Spinifex published she includes a critique of postmodernism and where it is likely to go, including the problem of identity. She clearly distinguishes the difference between sex and gender. She writes that, sex “… is dehistoricised and declared a matter of biology only … while ‘gender’ becomes the ‘higher’ affair where culture plays the determining role” (p. xvi). It was republished in 2014 by Bloomsbury.

Also in 1999, Spinifex published The Subsistence Perspective, jointly authored with Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen. In this book, the authors take up the urgent issue of ecological disaster and how the structure of the global economy contributes to this. They suggest that an approach that highlights subsistence would ensure the world was more sustainable. This is reminiscent of her ‘bottom up’ research methodology.

IN 2010, Madeleine Ferretti-Theilig translated into English for us Maria’s autobiography, The Village and the World: My Life, Our Times. Her autobiography is fascinating, taking us back to a small village in an area that would be occupied by the French after World War II. Maria was in her early teens but by luck managed to go back to school and become a teacher. Maria’s life is filled with twists and turns, including teaching German as a foreign language in Pune, India, in 1963. Her time in India made a deep impression on Maria and she would return in 1977 to do the research that would become The Lace Makers of Narsapur.

Maria Mies’ life and work have spanned the globe. Her insights have moved many to activism and her own thinking has always been deepened by a grounding in activism around work, reproductive technologies, ecology, and critiques of neoliberalist globalisation. I, for one, am glad that I have known Maria all these years. In the last decade or so, Renate and I have visited Maria in Köln almost every year, usually after the Frankfurt Book Fair.