Lecture 16

Grimms’ Fairy Tales

  • A bunch of raw cotton started being available (slavery).
  • They shipped it to Manchester, England, where it was spun into cloth in factories.
  • Fredrick Engels wrote a book about how this wasn’t good for workers, and worked with Marx on the Communist Manifesto.
  • Engels realizes that women spinning and that cloth immediately becoming the property of factory owners, is kinda like women spinning at home and that cloth immediately belonging to their husband/father (women couldn’t own anything).
    • All the money that women earned in factories went straight to room and board.
  • People started thinking about who’s doing the working and who’s benefitting from the work.
  • In spinning Grimm fairy tales, you can hear two voices: women being like this is hard work, and Wilhelm being like industriousness is good and it can’t be that hard.