Maria Mies (; 6 February 1931 – 15 May 2023) was a German professor of sociology, a Marxist feminist, an activist for women's rights, and an author. She came from a rural background in the Volcanic Eifel, and initially trained to be a teacher. After working for several years as a primary school teacher and qualifying as a high school instructor, she applied to the Goethe Institute, hoping to work in Africa or Asia. Assigned to a school in Pune, India, she discovered that while her male students took German courses to further their education, women for the most part took her classes to avoid marriage. Returning to study at the University of Cologne, she prepared her dissertation about contradictions of social expectations for women in India in 1971, earning her PhD the following year.
Mies was active in social movements from the late 1960s. Her activism was in favour of women's liberation and pacifism and against the Vietnam War and nuclear armaments. She taught sociology at the Cologne University of Applied Sciences and University of Frankfurt Institute for Social Research in the 1970s. Becoming aware of the lack of knowledge about women's history, she helped found and then gave lectures at the first women's shelter in Germany. In 1979, she began teaching women's studies at the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague and founded a master's degree programme for women from developing countries, based on feminist theory.
Returning to Germany and the University of Applied Sciences in 1981, Mies became involved in the ecofeminist movement and in activism against genetic engineering and reproductive technology. She coined the phrase "housewifisation" for the processes that devalue women's labour and make it invisible. From the 1980s, she wrote extensively about the intersection between capitalism, patriarchy and colonialism. Mies was one of the first scholars to recognise the similarities between the socio-politico-economic positions held by women and colonised people. Her works theorised that women and colonised people's labour was devalued and exploited under capitalism, and studied the links between women's struggles for liberation and their broader struggles for social and environmental justice. One of her main concerns was the development of an alternative, feminist and decolonial approach in methodology and in economics. Her work, which included writing textbooks on the history of women's movements, has garnered international analysis and been translated into several languages.
Early life and education
thumb|alt=Image of a village surrounded by pastures flanked by rows of trees|Auel, Germany
Mies was born in Hillesheim, Germany, on 6 February 1931 to Johann and Gertrud Mies. She came from a rural background, growing up in a family of farmers in Auel, a village in the Vulkaneifel region She was the seventh of twelve children, In 1967, her mother became gravely ill and Mies asked to be released early from her contract. Soon after her return to Germany her mother made a full recovery, Mies lectured at the shelter, teaching women practical and political ways to combat violence. She returned to the University of Applied Sciences in 1977,
The programme was based on ideas she had first developed about women's studies and feminist scholarship in a 1977 paper "Towards a Methodology for Feminist Research" delivered at a conference in Frankfurt. To combat what she saw as a disconnect between theory and practical application in the academic setting, Mies aimed to rewrite existing teaching methods. She did not believe that feminist research could use existing research models and proposed instead seven steps to completely re-imagine research with usefulness and respect for the subject in mind. She argued that research should be participatory, meaning that the researcher and the subject should collaborate in the processes and goals of the study, which should aim at empowering women and dismantling patriarchal systems. The paper was later published as a chapter of the book Theories of Women's Studies (1983), Scholar Nancy Barnes, stated that Mies's article was so compelling that "it alone makes the book worth buying", but noted that the chapter did not resolve the question of whether women's studies should be a stand-alone field, or integrated into other fields. Mies also pointed out that to exercise decisions about their bodies, women are limited by systems designed, controlled, and administered by health providers and government officials. She became more active in pacifist activities, participating in a resistance camp protesting against a NATO plan to station nuclear warheads in Germany in 1983. Her pacifism was reinforced by her opposition to the idea put forth by Alice Schwarzer that women could gain emancipation if they had the same violent means which were available to men. Opposed to war, Mies could not reconcile that simple equality with men would overcome hierarchical systems that devalued women.
Scholarly contributions
Mies's earliest works such as Indian Women in Patriarchy (1980) and The Lace Makers of Narsapur (1982), which evaluated her years in India, as well as later works like "Sexist and Racist Implications of New Reproductive Technology" (Alternatives, 1987) critiqued policies aimed at maintaining an uneven, stratified societal structure which encouraged domination and exploitation. She sought to evaluate how women's labour became hidden and how the perception that women were reliant upon a husband's income emerged. She theorised that by eliminating pay for the work women performed, making them available at all times for labour, alienating them from society by keeping them in the home, giving them no job security, and eliminating their ability to contract or unionise, women lost agency. She named the process which prevented women from being seen as producers or self-employed individuals and resulted in their exploitation, "housewifisation". The anthropologist Danielle Léveillé characterised Mies's works as both "masterful" and "astonishing" in that she was able to link variables from the anti-colonial, anti-racist, ecology, feminist, and non-violence movements to critique policies that established power relationships in society. Prügl tested Mies's theory that housewives were superexploited and confirmed that they were. Using data from the International Labour Organization, she found that housewives universally earned less than the legal minimum wage. anthropology professor, , noted that Mies argued that labour exploitation was a primary factor in developing both social classes and economic divisions. Mies and Shiva argued that women were linked internationally by their common experiences related to capitalist expansion. According to the environmental scholar Catriona Sandilands, unlike other ecofeminist works the book demonstrated that despite geographical differences and socio-economic variances "women's lives and bodies are being colonised" through capitalist mechanisms. which includes various forms of untaxed labour such as micro-entrepreneurs, child labourers and family members who work for other family members, and non-permanent workers. They argued in favour of a society in which, instead of delegating labour-intensive work to certain segments of the population, communities shared all tasks. The sharing model would give each person a basic income, some security, and a measure of power in decision-making. The book was called an "excellent feminist source on political economy" by the sociologist Ariel Salleh of Western Sydney University.
Later life, death, and legacy
Mies wrote an autobiography, (The Village and the World: My Life, Our Times, 2008). In her later years, Mies lived in a care facility, and at the end of her life was unable to recognise her husband, who visited her daily. is widely used by academics. Mies was one of the first feminist scholars to analyze the similarities between the position of women and colonised people in socio-economic hierarchies. Her book Ecofeminism has had international impact, and has been translated into several languages, including Spanish