46 Facts About Maria Mies

Maria Mies came from a rural background in the Volcanic Eifel, and initially trained to be a teacher.

Maria Mies's activism was in favour of women's liberation and pacifism and against the Vietnam War and nuclear armaments.

Maria Mies taught sociology at the Cologne University of Applied Sciences and University of Frankfurt Institute for Social Research in the 1970s.

Maria Mies coined the phrase "housewifisation" for the processes that devalue women's labour and make it invisible.

Maria Mies was one of the first scholars to recognise the similarities between the socio-politico-economic positions held by women and colonised people.

Maria Mies's 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.

Maria Mies was born in Hillesheim, Germany, on 6 February 1931 to Johann and Gertrud Maria Mies.

Maria Mies came from a rural background, growing up in a family of farmers in Auel, a village in the Vulkaneifel region of the Prussian Rhine Province.

Maria Mies was the seventh of twelve children, who all worked in the fields while they were pupils at the local school with only one classroom.

Maria Mies's mother's temperament was optimistic, but her father was a patriarchal figure and caused fear for the family members with his anger.

Maria Mies was the first student from her village to complete secondary school, which she attended in Gerolstein, while boarding with a family friend.

Maria Mies then started at the Regino-Gymnasium in Prum, but the school was closed in September 1944 because of the war.

In 1950, Maria Mies met a Pakistani Muslim tourist who was travelling in Germany.

Maria Mies chose to remain single for many years in order to maintain her independence.

Maria Mies passed her secondary teacher's examination in 1962 and was assigned to teach English and German in Morbach.

In 1963, Maria Mies was accepted by the Goethe Institute to lecture in Pune, India, on a five-year teaching engagement.

Maria Mies taught German classes and discovered that while her male students enrolled to enhance their ability to study engineering, the majority of women took her courses to prolong their independence, as middle-class women were not required to marry until they had completed a bachelor's degree.

In 1967, her mother became gravely ill and Maria Mies asked to be released early from her contract.

Maria Mies earned her doctorate in 1972, and her thesis was published the following year.

The late 1960s and early 1970s was a period of global protest and Maria Mies became involved in activism.

Maria Mies joined, a local women's group tied to the women's liberation movement, which protested patriarchal structures and the devaluation of women.

Maria Mies participated in the Politische Nachtgebete, organised by Dorothee Solle, which were aimed at questioning the status of women in the church.

Maria Mies taught at the newly founded Cologne University of Applied Sciences, before accepting a post in 1974 to teach at the University of Frankfurt Institute for Social Research.

Maria Mies lectured at the shelter, teaching women practical and political ways to combat violence.

Maria Mies returned to the University of Applied Sciences in 1977, but decided to conduct a research project in India the following year.

Maria Mies arrived in India in 1978 to analyze rural subsistence production, meaning how domestic and farm labour, as well as cottage industry, allowed families to survive, but led to the expansion of wealth for landlords and industries.

Maria Mies remained in India to the end of 1979 and spent time with her former pupil, Sarkar, who at the time was a lecturer at the Goethe Institute in Hyderabad.

Maria Mies returned to Europe after accepting a position at the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague.

Maria Mies 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.

Maria Mies 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.

Scholar Nancy Barnes, stated that Maria 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.

In 1981, Maria Mies decided to return to Cologne and the University of Applied Sciences and Sarkar, her husband, joined her there permanently in 1982.

Maria Mies became involved in the ecofeminist movement, as well as in activism against genetic engineering and reproductive technology, which she saw as an expropriation of a woman's right to give birth and a commercialization of human production.

Maria Mies was one of the founders of the Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering.

Maria Mies pointed out that to exercise decisions about their bodies, women are limited by systems designed, controlled, and administered by health providers and government officials.

Maria Mies became more active in pacifist activities, participating in a resistance camp protesting against a NATO plan to station nuclear warheads in Germany in 1983.

Maria Mies's 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.

Maria Mies was a founding member of Attac, formed in 1999, and organised feministAttac, in 2001 at the association's congress, held that year in Berlin.

Maria Mies sought to evaluate how women's labour became hidden and how the perception that women were reliant upon a husband's income emerged.

Maria Mies 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.

Maria Mies named the process which prevented women from being seen as producers or self-employed individuals and resulted in their exploitation, "housewifisation".

Maria Mies concluded that because of the "multiple contextual meanings" of the term housewife, exploitation more likely resulted from the political, rather than economic, spread of capitalism.

Maria Mies saw family violence, not as a remnant of ancient society, but as a part of the processes to modernise.

Maria Mies theorised that if consumers in overdeveloped places fulfilled their needs to sustain life from producers in underdeveloped countries, it would give worldwide relief from exploitation.

Maria Mies said that given the diversity of women's experiences and cultural contexts, the claim that subsistence activities would solve global distribution problems might be utopian.

Maria Mies was one of the first feminist scholars to analyze the similarities between the position of women and colonised people in socio-economic hierarchies.