As mentioned, today's musing are brought on by this review of two new books about feminism and working women, a review that also does a nice job roping in pop culture in discussing the confluence of critiques of gender on the one hand and capitalism / consumer culture on the other.
The review is really about the different logical strands of the women's movement of the 60s and 70s, AKA third-wave feminism. Third-wave feminists fought hard for the right of women to work as equals to men, especially in lucrative and prestigious fields like medicine, academia, and law that had long been restricted to them. They certainly didn't succeed in slaying sexism outright, but there's no question that the efforts of the feminists of the baby boom generation did make enormous strides in allowing access for themselves and subsequent generations of women to the professional world. The problem at hand, though, is that many women of those younger generations have chosen to give up the high-powered jobs and become housewives, just as some of their contemporaries take the hard-fought gains of the third-wavers for granted and, rather than going for law degree, study art or feminist philosophy instead. Thus, the question is: should (female) feminists all try to become lawyers/doctors/professors/scientists or is the fact that they are choosing to be, say, part-time feminist bookstore shelf-stockers and part-time fire dancers perfectly okay because they're choosing it?
There's another, largely implicit, strand of logic going through this debate: even if women faced no sexual discrimination whatsoever in the workplace (which obviously isn't the case), shouldn't feminism have other goals than just the right for every girl to grow up to be a CEO? Historically, third-wave feminism was deeply embedded in the anti-capitalist critiques of the New Left. Many feminists at the time claimed that either, A., gender equality could only be achieved when capitalism was destroyed or that, B., gender equality itself would fundamentally restructure capitalism, hopefully making it less exploitative in the process. An example of the latter was the proposal that all domestic labor be paid; feminists claimed that since women did the vast majority of cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing, if those tasks required normal wages, millenia-old forms of sexual slavery would finally be eliminated.
For the sake of brevity, I have two comments about all of the above. First, the subject of my dissertation, Andre Gorz, had some brilliant stuff to say about the paid domestic labor issue. He pointed out that the logic of making all domestic labor paid gestured toward making all forms of labor paid, eliminating the spaces of autonomy in our societies that don't depend on the logic of capitalism (a kind of so-called instrumental rationality, in which everything is only done if it leads to profit.) His counter-argument was that a much better idea would be to fight gender discrimination in already-capitalistic forms of labor and in non-paid labor. In other words, guys should wash just as many dishes and change just as many diapers as girls, just as girls should fly just as many jets and lay off just as many workers as guys. To clarify, Gorz's work all centered around the pursuit of autonomy from capitalism, a position he refined a lot after abandoning any hope that capitalism could ever be eliminated completely. According to his reasoning, paying for traditionally-female labor would actually make things less autonomous; the better option was making all labor gender neutral.
Second comment: as much as I admire Gorz's work, one of the major points of the cultural studies thinkers that came out of Britain in the late 50s and 60s was that everything that happens in human society has to be looked at in terms of its history. It matters that women have only had semi-equal access to professional jobs in the last two or three generations, and that's only in a very limited number of countries. Every time an educated woman chooses not to work, it has a different cultural valence than it would if her husband or partner chose not to. We still sit up and take notice when we encounter a educated house-husband, but most people just think it's normal to encounter a woman who decided to stay at home. In other words, I think that all sides in the above debate have really valid logical points:
- One of the goals of feminism was and remains the right for women to make their own life decisions, including whether they want to be professionals, impoverished artists, housewives, or burlesque dancers. Thus, no one has a right to judge a woman who doesn't want to be a professional.
- That said, every woman who chooses not to assault the glass ceiling in her own life does, in a sense, betray what past generations of feminists were fighting for.*
- Simultaneously, the goal of total enfranchisement of women in work is a big win for capitalism, not for alternative concepts of work, leisure, and remuneration (the article that started all of this makes some great points about this one.) Any critique of capitalism within feminism has to be understood as existing apart from the main argument that gender discrimination should be eliminated. The latter does not imply the former.
* The way I phrased it here could piss some people off, so please take it in context.
5 comments:
That is some interesting stuff. It made me think of a couple of things that are probably unrelated. First, what I think is lost on much of the third wave feminists is the second (first?) wave feminists of the early twentieth century. They fought for the end of gender discrimination in the workplace, but they also fought for maternity leave, different sets of hours for mothers, wives, etc., things that the next wave of feminists ingnored in lieu of teh idea of basic equality across the board. Historians interpret this as feminist independence and the recognition of difference, but as much as I like stretched interpretations, I tend to think that women during this period took for granted that their own role in the house was to play second fiddle to the father/husband, and they adjusted their needs in the workplace accordingly. But people will argue with me, and all I have is phallo-centric common sense as my defense.
Second (shortly, so my comment does not become longer than your post!), do you think that teh workplace was simply the battleground for gender equity because it was the most visible? In other words, could it have been simply the most visible symbol for basic gender equity outside of capitalism (so much as that is possible, I guess). I know so little about philosophy-- and so much less about Andres Gorz-- that I am sneakily trying to avoid confronting the nuts and bolts of his (and perhaps your) argument, but it makes me wonder how a battle for gender equity within the framework of household patriarchy can truly be waged in an effective, all encompassing way. Paid labor seems the only way to organize around the subject.
I'd appreciate any thoughts, since I am sure I butchered your argument in my interpretation of it.
Re: point one, good call. I know less about second-wave feminism than third (since the latter coincides nicely with the stuff I ostensibly study), so I don't know much about how legal stipulations like maternity leave fit in to third-wave demands.
Re: point two, there was a lot of stuff about breaking down gender / power roles at home during the third wave. Simone de Beauvoir devoted hundreds of pages of Second Sex to that specific issue. The thing is, there were (and remain) only two possible solutions: eliminate men from the picture entirely, which was the position of really radical gyno-centric feminists in the 70s and early 80s, or insist on a total parity of power between men and women in relationships, which may or may not entail the elimination of outdated things like marriage and monogamy.
I believe (without knowing very much about Andres Gorz, but having a smattering of feminist/women's studies courses under my belt), that yes, the workplace was chosen as a battleground for feminism (But, perhaps chosen is a strong word) because of it's visibility and ease of comparison. It's far easier for people to take numbers of workers, percentages of genders and dollars per hour and make that information into statistics, books and press clippings. The workplace generates data fairly easily, whereas opinions, emotions, values and mores take a lot more work to mine for data. To summarize; it's cheaper and faster to get your numbers, to make your headlines, to provide to the masses, from the workplace.
I would add that the workplace became a site of contestation because it mattered. This, after all, was the world of waged work and waged work had tangible "value" (in wages) and the fight to get women waged work imparted monetary value to their work (rather than trying to get men to take on domestic, unpaid work).
I want to add a couple of other points. First, I buy into only two waves of feminism. The first came to the US around 1910 and was an ideological break with the previous century's focus on how women were different and how this difference (when incorporated into the world of activism and politics) would reform society for the better. I see the second as a (large and, admittedly, unwieldy) post-WWII phenomenon.
The issue of women and waged work haunted American feminists (and "womanists") throughout the last century. This is clear in questions over protective labor legislation for women (In the Muller v Oregon case, one thing Brandeis demonstrated was that some women lost their reproductive abilities because of workplace hazards, something that won women certain workplace protections.) Feminists argued that this legislation was "special protection" and the laws enforced inequality and articulated the notion that women were different from men. Many early and post-war feminists who argued against protective legislation were middle-class and they wanted parity in middle-class professions (not equal wage work). Some feminists were willing to compromise on labor laws if it meant that women could get things like maternity leave, for example. The fatal flaw with most of these post-war feminists (who argued for workplace protections) was that their arguments remained rooted in women. Many didn't see how debilitating work was for men and they didn't make the leap to protective legislation for all workers.
Ok, one last thing: only 3.5% earn above $75,000!!! WTF!
One argument for the existence of another, third, wave of feminism as somehow distinct from that of the WWII and postwar era was the re-incorporation of arguments for women's difference as a positive thing - all of the so-called "gynocentric" radical feminisms of the 70s and 80s which argued that to be a woman was to be somehow distinct from and, usually, better than being a man. This was a huge point of contention in French feminism, since you had someone like Beauvoir who argued passionately that gynocentrism just reinscribed notions of female identity (i.e. women are closer to the earth, more compassionate, more in tune with emotional intelligence) that had been created originally to bind women to domestic labor. Not surprisingly, a lot of these arguments had to do with motherhood, something that Beauvoir, for one, had always been pretty hostile toward.
That said, word up on the labor stuff! I certainly didn't know about that in the American context...
Post a Comment