ed.: Sorry this is so damn longAs 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.
All of this hits pretty close to home for me. It's hard for a straight married guy to be taken seriously saying this, but I've been a dyed-in-the-wool feminist since I was about 14. The above issues are hard to reconcile, and I don't see any one viewpoint as inherently more logical or compelling than the others. To personalize it a little, the way B and I have always worked it is: I do half the cooking and half the cleaning and she does half the working (and the other way around.) If someone else shifts the percentages around, are they being worse feminists than we are? Or is it all okay as long as everyone involved has an equal say?
* The way I phrased it here could piss some people off, so please take it in context.
