Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Divison of Labour page 53

Maleness and femaleness are not biological givens, but rather the results of a long historical process. In each historic epoch maleness and femaleness are differently defined. This definition depends on the principal mode of production in these epochs. This means the organic differences between women and men are differently interpreted and valued, according to the dominant form of appropriation of natural matter for the satisfaction of human needs. Therefore, throughout history, men and women have developed a qualitatively different relationship to their own bodies. In matristic societies femaleness was interpreted as the social paradigm of all productivity, as the main active principle in the production of life. All women were defined as 'mothers'. But 'mothers' meant something other than it does today. Under capitalist conditions all women are socially defined as housewives (all men as breadwinners), and motherhood has become part and parcel of this housewife syndrome. The distinction between the earlier, matristic definition of femaleness and the modern one is that the modern definition has been emptied of all active, creative (subjective), productive (that is, human) qualities.