Political Emancipation
THE DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTIONS of the eighteenth century are often cited as the dawn of the secular age, or at least of the opening of the possibility for gender equality, even though neither the American (1776) nor the French (1789) Revolutions extended the right to vote to women. Once the individual (shorn of its social markers) became the unit of political identification, it is said, it was only a matter of time before citizenship was extended to the female sex. Moreover, this line of argument continues, the promise of equality for all became the ground on which women could aspire to inclusion, claiming the irrelevance of their sex for the exercise of civil and political rights.
Certainly, the ideal of equality inspired women’s movements in the wake of those revolutions, but winning the vote took more than a century of struggle. And even when the vote was won, the question of women’s suitability for politics remained; sex never became irrelevant for the exercise of citizenship. The sexual division of labor at the heart of the secularism discourse framed the arguments pro and con. Although Abigail Adams urged her husband, John, one of the architects of the American Constitution, to “remember the ladies,” it wasn’t until 1919 that the Constitution was amended to enfranchise those ladies. Adams’s reply to his wife sums up the determination of the Founding Fathers: “Depend upon it,” he wrote, “we know better than to repeal our Masculine systems.”1 In France, despite Olympe de Gouges’s 1791 Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the [Female] Citizen, which, in the name of “the sex superior in beauty as in courage during childbirth,” proclaimed “the following rights of woman and citizen,” French women voted for the first time only in 1945.2 Historian Eliane Viennot notes a long history of determined exclusion: “Whatever the regime or the electoral system,” men in positions of power from the eighteenth to the twentieth century “were massively opposed to equality of the sexes and they worked hard to be sure that inequality endured.”3 Revolutionary ideology and democratic practice were disseminated widely in Western Europe (especially in the countries brought under Napoleonic influence or control), and as a consequence nowhere did women vote in national elections until the twentieth century.4 (Switzerland was the last democratic nation to extend the vote to women—in 1971.)
The resistance to women’s citizenship had less to do with the necessarily slow but inevitable progress of liberal democratic ideas than it did with a contradiction at the very heart of the political thinking that articulated them—a political thinking integral to the discourse of secularism. Liberal political theory postulated the sameness of all individuals as the key to their formal equality—abstracted from their circumstances there was no discernable difference among them, they stood as equals before the law. At the same time there were differences that were thought to refuse abstraction—people in a state of dependency (propertyless peasants, wage laborers, women, children, slaves) could not be counted as autonomous individuals—autonomy, after all, was at the heart of the very definition of individuality. There was, however, an additional reason for the exclusion of women, and that had to do with the presumed natural difference of their sex. Was the sameness of individuals an effect of the law’s abstraction or a prerequisite for it? Could the law’s abstraction override the dictates of nature? These questions troubled political theorists as they constructed the rules of secular government; over and over we find them assuring their publics that (in the words of a French minister of education in 1880) “equality is not identity.” Granting women access to education, Paul Bert argued, would not make men and women the same.5 But when it came to politics, the lack of the sameness of women with men ruled out equal access to the rights of citizens.
On the question of race, for reasons both principled and political, the French enfranchised slaves in 1794 and granted men of color the status of citizen. (Free men of color had been enfranchised in 1792. Napoleon reinstituted slavery in the colonies in 1802 and then abolished the slave trade—but not slavery—in 1815. Slavery was finally abolished in 1848.) But women were a different story. If a small minority of representatives argued for extending the vote to them, the majority thought they didn’t belong in the political sphere. The Jacobin leaders put it starkly in 1793 when they outlawed women’s political clubs. Invoking the biological difference of sex, upon which secularism’s discourse rested, André Amar, a member of the Committee on General Security, explained why women should not be allowed “to exercise political rights and meddle in the affairs of government”:
Because they would be obliged to sacrifice the more important cares to which nature calls them. The private functions for which women are destined by their very nature are related to the general order of society; this social order results from the differences between man and woman. Each sex is called to the kind of occupation which is fitting for it; its action is circumscribed within this circle which it cannot break through, because nature, which has imposed these limits on man, commands imperiously and receives no law.6
Thomas Jefferson, whose views on the inferiority (in “beauty and intelligence”) of blacks justified their enslavement, thought white women too sensitive for politics. He lauded American women “who have the good sense to value domestic happiness above all other…. Our good ladies, I trust, have been too wise to wrinkle their foreheads with politics. They are contented to soothe and calm the minds of their husbands returning from political debate.”7 In the early American republic, women were defined as Republican Mothers, charged with preparing their sons to be citizens of the future. If this meant encouraging women’s education and granting them certain prerogatives in relation to the care of their children, it did not mean recognizing them as public figures with a right to vote.8
The disqualification of women from politics antedated the democratic revolutions; it was embedded in the political theory upon which those revolutions were based. In a 1988 book, the political theorist Wendy Brown tracked the association of manhood and politics from the Greeks to the twentieth century. In different variations, the theme is the same: men’s ability to reason and contemplate distinguishes them from women, whose bodies interfere with access to higher thought.9 “The internal influence continually recalls women to their sex,” wrote a French scientist echoing Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “the male is male only at certain moments, but the female is female throughout her life.”10 Woman, in other words, was synonymous with her body, and since, as Brown writes, “political freedom was freedom from bodily necessity,” women were, by definition, politically (and irremediably) unfree.11
Historians have suggested that despite its long history, this distinction between the sexes intensified with the advent of secular modernity. Isabel Hull’s monumental work on late eighteenth-century Germany documents the increasing emphasis on the distinction between the sexes as secularization redefined the public sphere. “It was in the context of civil and criminal codes that the central bureaucratic reformers discussed how sexual behavior fit into the new world they were creating.”12 This thinking relegated marriage and family—and men’s control of both—to a private sphere in which the father/husband’s power was exercised outside the purview of state intervention. State law placed the family beyond public scrutiny, while civil codes ensured men’s right to rule in that domain. Writes Hull of the relation between husband and wife, “her unfreedom created his freedom, his position as private dominator qualified him to participate in the wider public sphere of equals…. The key relation that qualified a citizen was therefore a sexual relation of domination, for … the family was the product of a publicly defined and privately consummated sexual relation. The civil and the sexual mutually constituted each other.”13 This mutual constitution became “archetypical,” she concludes. “To the end of the nineteenth century and beyond [it] continued to permeate official and unofficial institutions and ideologies (liberal, conservative, even socialist and national-socialist), as well as the everyday expectations of the people who inhabited the new order.”14
The American and French Revolutions clarified these changes—in Europe often through the Napoleonic Code, which remained in force for decades and was widely disseminated. A “consequence of revolution,” Geneviève Fraisse and Michelle Perrot concluded, “was that the separation between public and private space became more pronounced: a careful distinction was drawn between private life and public life, between civil society and political society. Ultimately, it was through this distinction that women were kept out of politics and reduced to dependence in civil society.”15
Writing in 1988, the feminist political theorist Carole Pateman maintained that the social contract, understood to be the ground on which the new republics were founded, was, in fact, a sexual contract. “Civil individuals form a fraternity because they are bound together by a bond as men. They share a common interest in upholding the original contract which legitimizes masculine right and allows them to gain material and psychological benefit from women’s subjection…. The civil sphere gains its universal meaning in opposition to the private sphere of natural subjection and womanly capacities. The ‘civil individual’ is constituted within the sexual division of social life created through the original contract.”16 Pateman notes the exceptional quality of the sexual contract in the general world of contracts; it is understood not to be the result of equal parties agreeing to cooperate, but instead this contract is the confirmation of a relationship of unequals. Women, following the order of nature, consent to their subordination. “A woman agrees to obey her husband when she becomes a wife; what better way of giving public affirmation that men are sexual masters, exercising the law of male sex-right, in their private lives?”17
In his account of his travels in America, Alexis de Tocqueville referred to this supposedly natural subordination in a chapter called “How the Americans Understand the Equality of Man and Woman.” In it he provided an example of the way in which the contrast between a claim for the equality of the sexes, on the one hand, and the hierarchical and unequal divisions of labor between them, on the other, were resolved by the liberal notion of individual consent. The division of labor, he said, followed “the great principle of political economy that dominates today’s industry.”18 “Democratic equality” between men and women required adherence to “natural” divisions of labor between them. American women’s “superiority,” he suggested, was based on their willing and wise subordination to a husband’s authority. An asymmetrical complementarity was the rule. “They believed that every association needs a leader in order to be effective and that the natural leader of the conjugal association was the man. Hence they did not deny him the right to direct his helpmate, and they believed that in the small society consisting of husband and wife, as in the larger political society, the purpose of democracy is to regulate and legitimate necessary powers and not to destroy all power.”19
As in Tocqueville’s comment, in the discourse and practice of modern Western secular nations, the justification for denying women citizenship rested on the marriage relationship, the ultimate embodiment of the private/public distinction, which in turn rested on, and confirmed, the naturalness of the difference of sex. Since the destiny of all women was thought to be marriage, no distinction was made between women who might by choice or circumstance remain single and those who became wives. The elimination of religion as the ground for politics required a new institutional foundation. Wrote one commentator, “the citizen is tied by marriage to the state, as the clergyman is by celibacy to the church.”20 Marriage provided for the state the children upon whom the future depended, and it confirmed the maleness required for the exercise of political power. It also embodied a natural hierarchy upon which other social distinctions could be based. “The family image came to figure hierarchy within unity,” Anne McClintock writes. “Because the subordination of woman to man and child to adult were deemed natural facts, other forms of social hierarchy could be depicted in familial terms to guarantee social difference as a category of nature.”21 This was often the case in slaveholding and colonial discourses where “slaves” or “natives” were represented as childlike subjects at once dependent upon and in need of the rule provided by their masters.
Origin Stories
The relationship of marriage to the state was central for rethinking the bases of secular political rule. For Locke, Rousseau, and others, the alternative to absolutism rested on the consent of those who were subjected to patriarchal rule, sons to fathers, wives to husbands. Locke imagined that “twas easie, and almost natural for Children by a tacit and scarce avoidable consent to make way for the Father’s Authority and Government.”22 Rousseau took the family to be the initial step out of the state of nature: “the first difference was established in the ways of life of the two Sexes, which until then had had but one.”23 The origin of secular politics, its very possibility, rested on monogamy. In Pateman’s terms, the sexual contract made possible the social contract.
In Totem and Taboo, Freud offered a theory to account for these origin stories from a psychoanalytic perspective. In his interpretation (which I find most helpful for thinking about these questions of gender and politics), the primal father’s power lay in his monopoly of all pleasure; lesser men eventually kill (and in Freud’s version eat) him in order to gain the access that they have been consistently denied. By devouring the father figure, the men retrospectively become brothers. Freud says that in this way they “accomplished their identification with him, and each of them acquired a portion of his strength.”24 Coming into their own as adults required the sexual initiation that the father had forbidden them: an appropriate woman of their own. The brothers instituted a prohibition of incest to ensure that this woman would not be a mother or sister, all of whom had been game for the primal father’s seductions. The rule of the sons then replaced the absolutism of the father, some form of fraternity overthrew the reign of the king, and modernity was born. In Freud’s terms an “ideal father” replaced the primal father; it is he (or they—the sons acting collectively to achieve this ideal) whose actions must protect society from a return of excess. “In thus guaranteeing one another’s lives, the brothers were declaring that no one of them must be treated by another as their father was treated by them all. They were precluding the possibility of a repetition of their father’s fate.”25 There were nonetheless continuing rivalries among the brothers, and these were managed by assigning to each a smaller, tamer version of what they rebelled against: “The family was a restoration of the former primal horde and it gave back to fathers a large portion of their former rights. There were once more fathers, but the social achievements of the fraternal clan had not been abandoned.”26 The new regime stands for (in Joan Copjec’s words) “the evacuation, or drying up, of excess enjoyment and thus for the possibility of pleasure’s even apportionment.”27 The laws of marriage, in this vision, guarantee “pleasure’s even apportionment,” ensuring that each brother has his own woman and that no brother has more than one. In the realm of the psyche, shared political power depends on the disciplining of sexuality by marriage, the containment of desire within a socially beneficial familial unit. In the political realm, the idea of abstract individualism rests on a presumed sameness, whatever the social differences among men (and not all men, only those—usually white—whose higher rationality defined them as autonomous individuals). We might characterize this with the formula: one man, one woman; one man, one vote.
Whose sexuality is at issue in the wake of the parricide? There are two possibilities and they are related. The first, suggested by the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, is that the danger of excess lies with the brothers, who compete among themselves in order that one of them will be able to exercise the slain father’s power. Freud noted that the rivalry among the brothers continued after the father’s death. “Each of them would have wished, like his father, to have all the women to himself.”28 This fantasy, the notion that his likeness to the father exempts one of the brothers from castration and so gives him access to all the women—Lacan calls it the “phallic exception”—is ever-present. The apparent claim to an individual man’s uniqueness is actually a collective male fantasy—and therein, of course, lies the trouble. Since there is no single body that can act as the concrete referent for power—as the king’s did when he was considered the divinely ordained occupant of the throne—the question of how to discern possession is an open and anxious one.29 The emphasis on reason and (some) men’s brains as the sign of this power, I suggest, is a displacement of that anxious question to the lofty heights of abstraction, a recognition that the penis is a poor substitute, though it remains the distinguishing feature of masculinity.30 Indeed, masculinity (referring concretely to the sex of the primal father and symbolically to the phallus he wielded) remained the criterion that the founding brothers insisted upon. The French socialist-feminist Jeanne Deroin, who was prevented on the grounds of her sex from running for office during the Revolution of 1848, exposed the dilemma that men faced as they at once avowed and denied their bodies as justification for their exclusive power. Responding to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s comment that women legislators made as much sense as male wet nurses, she asked, “and what organs are necessary for becoming a legislator?” Proudhon offered no response to her exposure of the phallic underpinnings of politics.31
The other possibility, the one seized on by early political theorists, is that women represent the danger of excess that the brothers now have to guard against. In this scenario, the appetites of the primal father are, in effect, attributed to women’s provocation. She is Eve, the seductress, the initiator of the Fall. It is women who threaten to subvert men’s rationality, to lure them off course. Rousseau warned in Emile that, unlike men, women could not control their “unlimited desires.” It was only the imposition of modesty that prevented “the ruin of both [sexes],” otherwise women’s lust would lead mankind to “perish by the means established for preserving it.”32 Hegel thought that women were driven by intrigue and particular interests, unfit for the universal mission of government. He warned that if “women hold the helm of government, the state is at once in jeopardy.”33 Marriage, for these authors, is not only the channeling by modesty of women’s sexuality into restrained displays of affection but the institutionalization of the separation of spheres—the literal containment of women’s unruly desire within the walls of the home.
The two possibilities are, of course, linked. Lacan points out that, in the realm of the unconscious, women’s desire serves to confirm men’s fantasy of possession of the phallus, both personally and politically. Without her, there is no proof of his potency. But the proof must remain indirect, at least at the level of public representation, where men’s claim to equality rests on abstraction (on the presumed sameness of the brothers) and all sexuality is located concretely in women’s bodies. Women’s desire confirms men’s possession of the phallus; that so-called private relation of familial sexual intimacy, in turn, establishes men’s potency and so their right to political power.34
Judith Surkis shows how these ideas were implemented during France’s July Monarchy (1830–48). In that moment of constitutional limits on the king, the new rulers wrestled with questions about how to ground the abstractions of law and sovereignty. For them, men’s actual bodies represented “an obstacle to their accession to universality,” as can be seen in political caricature and police enforcement of public “decency.” While “administrative regulation of female prostitution [was] increasingly streamlined and rationalized in the 1830s,” similar male behavior was deemed more “obscene.” It was taken to violate a norm of discretion, applicable solely to the public display of male bodies. “In a simultaneously symbolic and practical sense, men’s bodies were not supposed to be seen. In order to accede to the privileges of citizenship on the eve of the Revolution of 1848, men’s bodies needed to become publicly invisible and in a sense, private.”35 At the same time, women’s bodies were on public display, their explicit sexuality evidence of their incapacity for exercising the rights of citizens, and so for the need to keep them at home. Man’s public legitimacy rested on the confinement of sexuality to the marital bed, where the desire of a woman awaited him. That desire, publicly understood to be femininity’s defining trait and psychically the confirmation of men’s unique possession of the phallus, disqualified her from membership in the body politic.
Indeterminacy
For many philosophers and political theorists, the translation of these psychic processes identified by Freud and Lacan took modern marriage to be a relationship of “ethical responsibility,” not only between husband and wife but among men. It signaled a bounded relationship, legally protected from trespass: one man/one wife was a golden, unbreakable rule. Coveting a neighbor’s wife was taboo. Divorce was rarely permitted (and if it was, the terms of the settlement gave greater advantage to men than to women); infidelity was both a moral and a legal crime. These were not mere remnants of religious teachings (as some of the language implies), but doctrines central to the conceptualization of the modern secular state and to which discourses of secularism implicitly and explicitly referred.
These doctrines addressed the transformation that “disenchantment” brought to the legitimation for political power. The loss of preeminent religious authority meant the loss of a transcendent affirmation for this power. Possession of the phallus, the symbol of the ruler’s power, was no longer the prerogative of God’s representative on earth. And, as the reign of kings (and the occasional queen) gave way to representative systems of government (parliaments, constitutional monarchies, republics, democracies), the physical body of the ruler as the incarnation of sovereignty was replaced by a set of disembodied abstractions: state, nation, citizen, representative, individual. Claude Lefort puts it this way: “the locus of power becomes an empty place … it is such that no individual and no group can be consubstantial with it—and it cannot be represented.”36 The impossibility of representation, he continues, leads to a permanent state of uncertainty: “The important point is that democracy is instituted and sustained by the dissolution of the markers of certainty. It inaugurates a history in which people experience a fundamental indeterminacy as to the basis of power, law and knowledge and as to the relations between self and other at every level of social life.”37
The exercise of power, shorn of its external authorization, became self-legitimating. In Weber’s terms, “Bureaucratic rule was not and is not the only variety of legal authority, but it is the purest … [T]he ‘jurisdictional competency’ … is fixed by rationally established norms, by enactments and decrees, and regulations, in such a manner that the legitimacy of the authority becomes the legality of the general rule, which is purposely thought out, enacted, and announced with formal correctness.”38 (This abstract, calculating force is what I take Foucault to mean by power.) There is, then, no outside affirmation of the laws men create. The circularity of the system is apparent: “modern power is immanent in the very relations that structure the social order.”39 Or, as Lefort puts it, “only the mechanisms of the exercise of power are visible, or only the men, the mere mortals, who hold political authority.”40 In the abstract, the impossibility of power’s representation is clear. But for those who implemented the system, the question of who was charged with articulating and enforcing the decrees remained. For them, the very impossibility of representation called for decisive resolution.
The resolution chosen—an appeal to a natural sexual division of labor—rested on another uncertainty, that of the ultimate meaning of the difference of sex. Psychoanalytic theory has taught us that the conundrum of gendered identity revolves around the difference of sex. There is no clear fit between cultural explanations and phantasmatic theories of this difference, even in the face of normative regulation; no neat correlation in the course of a lifetime between individual perceptions and social laws. The meanings of our bodies and our desires cannot be restrained or pinned down, even as they are submitted to various forms of discipline and social regulation. Gender—the attribution of meaning to sexed bodies—is the implementation of the always imperfect attempt at discipline; it is the way cultures seek to bridge the relationship between the psychic and the social. Gender consists of historically specific articulations defining the male and female that aim to settle the indeterminacy associated with sexual difference by directing fantasy to some political or social end.41 The more challenges there were to these articulations, the more adamant was the insistence on their immutability.
The emergence of modern nations brought with it a new insistence on the immutability of gender roles and the policing of sexual activity to keep them in place. On the one hand, the natural difference of sex was the referent that provided legitimation for men’s political authority; on the other, men’s political authority was evidence for nature’s mandate. The difference of sex, in other words, is the key to the seeming resolution of the impossibility of representation that Lefort theorizes; without it, the illusion of certainty cannot be sustained. But it is not a definitive resolution since there is no stable meaning for the difference of sex—hence the repeated expressions of anxiety about whether the extension to women of education and various civil rights (divorce, inheritance of property, guardianship of children) would obliterate the lines of sexual difference and make women and men “the same.”
This confusion of the sexes, according to one medical commentator, posed to the nation the terrifying danger of “moral anarchy.”42 In the wake of World War I, historian Mary Louise Roberts writes, “the blurring of the boundary between ‘male’ and ‘female’—a civilization without sexes—served as a primary referent for the ruin of civilization itself.”43
Suffrage: For and Against
In the struggles over the right to vote, the discursive frame of the separation of spheres operated to limit the kinds of arguments that were possible. Since the vote was at once a recognition and a confirmation of male public authority, women’s suffrage movements were seen as particularly threatening. They were taken to deny women’s childbearing function, the guarantee of the future of the family, the race, and the nation. But above all, they seemed to call into question men’s dominant position in the family, as well as the very qualities that defined masculinity, especially those that equated access to political power with possession of the phallus. The French revolutionary Condorcet had, as early as 1791, refuted the logic that denied women the vote on the grounds of their maternity. “Why should individuals exposed to pregnancies and other passing indispositions be unable to exercise rights which no one has dreamed of withholding from persons who have the gout all winter or catch cold quickly?” he asked.44 Condorcet saw no problem in extending formal equality to women—it would not affect either their physical or social roles, he thought. But his arguments went unheeded. The power of the secularist discourse prevailed; citizenship and femininity were taken to be antithetical, a violation not only of the gendered division of labor but also of the necessary identification of masculinity with power.
In France one could hear these arguments throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Olympe de Gouges was guillotined by the revolutionaries in 1793 “for having forgotten the virtues that belong to her sex.”45 When the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women was outlawed in 1793, they were deemed “impudent women who want to become men.”46 “To summon women concurrently with men in the virile functions would be only to annihilate feminine genius…. They must do things that men don’t do,” opined Ernest Legouvé in 1849, an advocate of women’s education, but not of granting them the vote.47 Another commentator in this period warned of the “hermaphrodism” that would result when women left the home for the public forum. Tocqueville granted that democracy meant equality for all people, but insisted that it did not require sameness: “There are people in Europe who, confounding together the different characteristics of the sexes, would make man and woman into beings not only equal but alike.”48 Labor leaders predicted that women who engaged in men’s work (in the printing trades in this instance) “will be deformed by taking on the look, the voice, and the gross mannerisms of the men she associates with in the shop.”49 And confronted by two feminists who entered a polling place on election day in 1908 intending to vote, an official reported to the court that the scene produced in him an awful stillness, as if he had seen the Medusa—in a Freudian reading, an expression of the fear of castration. In this scenario, sharing the right to vote with women is taken as the loss of a defining characteristic of masculinity. A journalist commenting on the invasion of the voting place by Hubertine Auclert, one of the feminists, asked, “Is it our resignation as men that dame Hubertine asks of us? Let her say it frankly.”50
In Belgium, political parties tended to agree on the woman question, even as they fought over the enfranchisement of workers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Eliane Gubin and her colleagues write of the debates about who should vote: “The conquest of political power symbolized, in the mentality of working class as in the bourgeois mentality, the appropriation of a virile space which would certainly have lost its prestige if citizenship had been shared with women.”51 (In Belgium, women were admitted to vote in local elections in 1920, but did not vote on the national level until 1948.)
In the United States John Adams confided to a male correspondent in 1776 that he thought women lacked the capacity for politics, saying, “their delicacy renders them unfit for practice and experience in the great businesses of life.”52 Faced with a renewed campaign for women’s suffrage in the early twentieth century, former president Grover Cleveland said that female voting would overturn “a natural equilibrium so nicely adjusted to the attributes and limitations of both [women and men] that it cannot be disturbed without social confusion and peril.”53 Antisuffragists in 1918 charged feminists with advocating “non-motherhood, free love, easy divorce, economic independence for all women, and other demoralizing and destructive theories.”54
In England, Tories and Liberals were of the same mind in reaction to John Stuart Mill’s unsuccessful call for women’s enfranchisement in 1867. The natural difference of the sexes “made men more capable of direct government and women more fitted for private influence,” said one.55 “The physical dependence of women on men, combined with their difference of organization is the justification of government by men,” proclaimed another.56 Allowing women to vote would result in their becoming more masculine, these opponents of suffrage insisted, thus blurring the natural boundaries between the sexes. In 1884, William Gladstone, then prime minister, urged the House of Commons not to endorse a bill extending suffrage to women on the grounds that “a permanent and vast difference of type has been impressed upon women and men respectively by the Maker of both…. I am not without the fear lest beginning with the State, we should eventually be found to have intruded into what is yet more fundamental and more sacred, the precinct of the family, and should dislocate, or injuriously modify, the relations of domestic life.”57 Others warned that a “sex war” would follow passage of such a bill, introducing “hysterical and spasmodic features,” more characteristic of French and American politics than of the English parliamentary system. Scottish biologist Patrick Geddes summed up these objections when he argued in 1889 against extending voting rights to women by pointing to the different economies of cell metabolism: “the hungry, active cell becomes flagellate sperm, while the quiescent, well-fed one becomes an ovum.”58 It followed that women belonged in the private/domestic sphere, men in the public/political realm: “what was decided among the prehistoric Protoza can not be annulled by act of parliament.”59
Suffragists replied to these objections in a variety of ways, but (as I have shown elsewhere) had difficulty separating the demand for equality from the matter of the difference of sex.60 Equality was a human right, some argued, and women were as human as men. But if equality either required or created sameness, then how could women qualify as citizens? How could they at once acknowledge the difference of their sex and yet refuse the idea that it mattered for their deportment and for their ability to engage in politics?61
Some insisted that the requirements for voting and engaging in politics had nothing to do with their bodies. Invoking Descartes’s mind/body distinction, they claimed that there was “no sex in mind.”62 Others welcomed the masculine label, seeing it as merely a label and not in any way a danger to physical differences between women and men: “if to have a warm interest in great national and public concerns, and to wish to help in them with our own best work, is to be masculine, then let us be masculine, and be proud of being so. No virtue ought to be monopolised by either sex.”63 (Here “either sex” suggests that anatomical difference is not abolished, but that it is irrelevant for participation in politics.) Still others invoked the need for women’s specific interests (children, family, health) to have national representation. In England, Millicent Fawcett replied to opponents of suffrage, “We do not want women to be bad imitations of men; we neither deny nor minimize the differences between men and women. The claim of women to representation depends to a large extent on those differences. Women bring something to the service of the state different from that which can be brought by men. Let this fact be frankly recognised and let due weight be given to it in the representative system of the country.”64 In the United States some suffragists distinguished themselves from the “perverse theories” of feminists (who began to organize as such early in the twentieth century). “The right to vote is not based on contrasts between the sexes nor on animosity of one sex against the other.” Unlike feminists, these suffragists did not “wish to force womanly attributes on the man.” Rather they sought “willing cooperation on the common ground—the Public Welfare.”65
Some feminists took the notion of the complementarity of the sexes further, modeling their notion of the government of the state on the domestic household. The French socialist Jeanne Deroin thought women could bring a sense of order to “this large, badly administered household called the State.”66 She, and Hubertine Auclert a generation later, equated the “social” (family, children, welfare, hygiene) with women’s interests—their experience qualified them to speak and act on these matters—matters for which men were considered to have little expertise and even less interest in pursuing. The problem was that the invocation of the social, even as it expanded the possibilities for women’s action, reinscribed the notion of separate and unequal—masculine and feminine—spheres.
The emergence of the idea of the “social” in the nineteenth century provided, writes Denise Riley, “an arena for domesticated intervention.”67 It was “a blurred ground between the old public and private, voiced as a field for intervention, love, and reform” by people of all political stripes, but particularly by women. It opened the way for “some women to enter upon the work of restoring other, more damaged women, to a newly conceived sphere of grace.”68 These middle- and upper-class women became social workers, factory inspectors, philanthropists, and reformers engaged in the moral and physical uplift of the women of the working class and their families; some took up the cause of reform in the colonies as well. The social was a feminized sphere, distinctly separate from the political. As one opponent of the vote for women argued, representing the social in Parliament would compromise the “broader” view of politics that men must attend to. “The character of the legislation of a woman-chosen Parliament would be the increased importance which would be given to questions of a quasi social or philanthropic character (viewed with regard to the supposed interests, or the partisan bias of special classes, rather than to broader considerations of the public weal) in excess of the great constitutional and international issues which the legislature was empanelled to try.”69 Women would reduce the universal reach of politics, introducing disparate and divisive particularities that didn’t represent the general interest.
This view of the social cordoned off women from the masculine worlds of politics and assumed further that public attention to welfare issues drew upon a natural inclination or sensibility of women. The difference of sex, still understood as an asymmetric relationship based upon inherent natural differences—men on top, women subordinate in some way to them—and necessarily organized in separate spheres remained, well into the twentieth century, the dominant model for representing gender in modern Western nation-states.
After the Vote
Despite suffragists’ hopes that equality in all realms would follow from the extension of the franchise, this was not the case. In most countries, women were admitted to citizenship not as individuals but as a collective social category. Abstraction from that category meant it might be irrelevant for purposes of voting—but the category itself remained a feature of civil society and social life. Although women were now entitled to vote, the perception of them as what Simone de Beauvoir called “the second sex” did not disappear. Indeed, it is significant that de Beauvoir wrote her book in 1949, some five years after women in France had won the political rights of citizens. “[A]bstract rights … have never sufficed to assure to woman a definite hold on the world,” she wrote, “true equality between the two sexes does not exist even today.”70 Instead, the granting of citizenship to women confirmed their status as a distinctive and definable natural social category. Women, de Beauvoir argued, even if they gained a measure of economic independence, could never achieve the status of fully autonomous individuals as long they as they continued to serve as “others” to men. While men could conceive of themselves as self-created individuals, women were doomed to a life of “immanence,” to the endless repetition of feminine functions—maternity, certainly, but the chief of which was the confirmation of men’s masculinity and with it their sovereignty. (Here we find a philosopher’s version of Freud and Lacan’s psychoanalytic insight.)
The advantage man enjoys … is that his vocation as a human being in no way runs counter to his destiny as a male. Through the identification of the phallus and transcendence, it turns out that his social and spiritual successes endow him with a virile presence. He is not divided. Whereas it is required of woman that in order to realize her femininity she must make herself object and prey, which is to say that she must renounce her claim as a sovereign subject.71
Even as they gained the right to vote, women were marginalized in political processes; for example, political parties rarely nominated women for elective office except in districts where they knew they would lose. In the United States a bitter editorial in the Woman Citizen in 1922 noted the lack of change since passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution: “It is clear that the barriers in the way of women being elected to any political office are almost insurmountable. The dominant political parties do not nominate women for political office if there is any real chance for winning. Political offices are the assets of the political machine. In general, they are too valuable to be given to women.”72 As late as 2000, even after passage of the French law on parity—which sought to ensure equal access for women and men to political office—the same kinds of subterfuge existed. The major parties paid fines rather than propose women for seats in winnable districts; they refused to put women at the head of lists in contests based on proportional representation; leaders professed not to be able to find suitable women candidates and suggested that although women might know something about local matters, they were not qualified to address the larger issues of national politics. If anything, the law—designed to eliminate sex as a serious consideration—made the issue all the more visible. One woman candidate for a seat in the National Assembly noted that she had been advised to run as a woman. Yet, she concluded, “if one has to be a woman, it’s at the risk of not being political.”73
The question of whether invoking womanhood or femininity was a disabling factor for politics haunted women’s advocates in the wake of successful suffrage campaigns. Denise Riley notes that there are always risks involved in calling attention to the situation of women: “the very iteration of the afflicted category serves, maliciously, not to undo it but to underwrite it.”74 Nancy Cott has provided detailed evidence for the extreme difficulty—if not the impossibility—of avoiding this risk in the United States in the 1920s and ’30s. (Her insights apply more generally across the nations of Europe, albeit with different timing and in different specific articulations.) Was there a woman’s vote to appeal to? Some argued it was unavoidable, others that it was a trap. Male politicians deemed such an appeal the onset of a sex war. Feminists on one side of the debate pointed out that divisions of class and race made any notion of a singular appeal to “women” both illusory and impractical; on the other side, some argued that a universal experience of womanhood (based on maternity) overrode other differences and gave women a common interest not only in children and health but in matters of war and peace.
On the issue of protective legislation, there was similar disaccord among feminists, some insisting that women’s vulnerability required legal protection from employers who would abuse it, others claiming that such legislation would simply reaffirm sex-segregated labor markets and the inequality they enshrined. The 1930s saw the rise of ideas of companionate marriage among sociologists and psychologists: women and men were depicted as (among other things) enjoying the same rights to sexual fulfillment (but always contained within heterosexual marriages—lesbianism was considered abnormal and unfeminine). Yet, Cott points out, whereas feminists had viewed sexual liberation as a triumph over the old unequal divisions of labor (in families, but also in sexual partnerships more generally), it was not the vision offered in the postsuffrage era. Rather, women continued to be assigned the burden of child-rearing and household management, even if they also earned wages outside the home. The courts ratified this view: even if working wives were legally on a par with single women, judges nonetheless continued to grant husbands “the common law right to his wife’s services in the home” well into the twentieth century.75 And it wasn’t until 1975 that the US Supreme Court struck down state laws that either exempted women from jury service entirely or required special training for them.
There were new branches of science and pedagogy that gave women new professional opportunities—home economics, maternal and child welfare—even as they reproduced stereotypical representations of separate spheres for women and men. If some of those spheres were now also public, they nonetheless were understood to follow from the inherent nature of womanhood. Maternalism could expand women’s sphere, but only within certain limits, as Seth Koven and Sonya Michel have shown. “Maternalist women put an unmistakable stamp on emerging welfare administrations,” they conclude in a survey of the United States, France, Germany, and Great Britain. “[B]y identifying and insisting on issues of gender-based needs, women challenged the male monopoly on public discourse and opened it up to discussions of private values and well-being.”76 Nevertheless, they conclude, “for female activists and clients alike, the political process that culminated in the passage of protective and welfare legislation for women and children functioned, in an exaggerated fashion, as a Weberian ‘iron cage’: they found dissonance between means and ends, their own motives and ultimate policy outcomes.”77 This led some feminists to condemn maternalism as a strategy for achieving equality. The French psychiatrist Madeleine Pelletier warned against celebrating maternity as a feminist strategy: “Never will childbirth give women a title of social importance. Future societies may build temples to maternity, but they will do so only to keep women locked inside.”78
In new depictions of the gendered division of labor, men were portrayed as producers, women as consumers. In the area of professional employment, the 1920s saw a brief increase and then a marked decline. “By the 1930s,” Cott notes, “professionally employed women were a declining proportion of all employed women, as well as a declining proportion of all professional workers.”79 This was, only in part, a result of the Great Depression; other factors included the employer practice of dismissing women who married or became pregnant, thus making the “home versus work” conflict particularly acute for white-collar and professional women.
Overall, Cott concludes that the suffragist and feminist dream of some kind of perfect equality—at work, at home, in politics—was unrealized in the course of the 1920s. “Advertising collapsed the emphasis on women’s range and choice to individual consumerism; the social-psychological professions domesticated Feminism’s assertion of sexual entitlement to the arena of marriage. Feminist defiance of the sexual division of labor was swept under the rug. Establishing new formalisms, these adaptations disarmed Feminism’s challenges in the guise of enacting them.”80 Hester Eisenstein’s work on the United States adds another dimension to this history. She suggests that in the 1960s women were often hired in some jobs (redefined as women’s jobs) in an effort to undercut white male unionizing efforts. They became an alternative, cheaper labor supply when men demanded higher wages. Here the motivation was not a liberal secular commitment to women’s rights but an attempt to defeat the labor movement and exploit women.81
Writing about Europe in the period 1945 to 1975, the French sociologist Rose-Marie Lagrave echoes Cott’s and Eisenstein’s conclusions. Even as the number of women professionals and wage earners increased, she points out, so did the sexual division of labor in the workplace. “The economic theory of the dual labor market (primary and secondary) legitimated the sexual division of labor by portraying it as a natural part of the economy.”82 Despite the fact that women gained access to education and jobs, and are protected by law, she concludes, they are “deceived by their own triumph[;] they rarely protest the hidden forms of inequality and the rampant sexism they face. The status quo has the appearance of legitimacy, all the more so in that its reality is covered by a cloak of rhetoric proclaiming equality between the sexes.”83
A Repeating Pattern
The persistence of gender asymmetry in the face of political transformation (revolution, constitutional amendments, laws enfranchising women) is a striking feature of modern nation-states—and not only in the West. As new nations embraced modernity in the wake of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, similar patterns emerged to those I have been describing, even in places where Western Protestant notions of religion as a matter of private individual conscience did not exist. In Turkey, the Kemalist revolution in the 1920s insisted on the visibility of women in public space. They were urged to shed their veils, recruited as teachers and public servants in the early years of the republic, and granted the right to vote in 1934. Modeled on the laïcité of the French republic, the Turkish nation imported civil and criminal codes from Italy and Switzerland, which, though they granted inheritance and other new rights to women, also included asymmetrical treatment of women and men in cases of divorce and adultery; rape was considered the violation of a male property-holder’s right. (It wasn’t until 2001 that those codes, which had punished women’s adultery more severely than men’s, were overturned—and then by critics of the secular party.) In its early years, the Kemalist regime endorsed an ideal of companionate marriage in which the sexes had complementary roles; while men participated in markets and politics, the primary duty of women was motherhood. Nilüfer Göle writes, “Women as modern housemakers, consumers of new hygienic products, and parents embodied the pedagogical civilizing mission in matters of modern living.”84 In this regard, anthropologist Jenny White notes that “the gendered division of labor in Turkey was comparable to that in Europe.”85 And sociologist Deniz Kandiyoti remarks that the “double standard of sexuality and a primarily domestic definition of the female role” left Turkish women “emancipated but unliberated.”86 They may have been granted voting rights, but this did not translate into social or economic equality.
In Iraq, according to Sara Pursley’s research, attention to women’s domestic role in securing the nation’s future led to a new emphasis on girls’ education, one that intensified the differences between the sexes. The policies elaborated bore the influence of Western teaching. In the 1930s, she notes that a group of US-trained Iraqi educators, “influenced by the pragmatist school of pedagogy associated with the philosopher John Dewey,” decided that “the Iraqi public school curriculum was not sufficiently attentive to preparing the future roles of women and men. They recommended that female students from the primary through the secondary levels, and in many cases at the college level, be required to take courses in home economics.”87 As a result, from 1932–58 the Iraqi public school experience was reshaped around gender difference. Pursley writes:
In what might seem a paradox, the differentiation of the public school curriculum by sex was paralleled by the expansion of coeducation in Iraq at the primary and postsecondary levels during this same period. A girl entering … school in 1926 was certain to study in a school populated only by other girls, but she was most equally certain to study the same material and follow the same course of schooling as a boy at her grade level. A girl entering the system in 1956 might or might not find herself in a coeducational … school, but either way she would follow a mandatory female-only curriculum for about 20% of her time there.88
As in Turkey, the mixing of the sexes in public space—on the streets or in the schools—did not signal the end of the hierarchical sexual division of labor and might even intensify it.
While Turkey became an independent nation with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, Lebanon and Syria were placed under French mandate at the end of World War I. Although the Syrian congress granted the vote to women in 1920, three months before the arrival of French occupying forces, neither its constitution nor Lebanon’s (negotiated under French tutelage) permitted women’s right to vote. Feminist appeals to republican principles fell on deaf ears; their impassioned arguments that local religious authorities were violating the teaching of the Qurʾan were ignored. The French High Commission preferred to leave the question of women’s status in the hands of religious leaders since, according to personal status law, matters of family, marriage, women, and children belonged in the hands of those leaders. The opposition of these religious figures to women’s political rights was not all that different from that of secular politicians in the metropole—they predicted that chaos would follow from any breach of the natural division of labor between the sexes. In this context, feminists sometimes tied their appeals to that division of labor, arguing that motherhood needed to be given political representation: “In motherhood a woman has the power to inspire manliness and strength in her sons to build a new nation,” a Lebanese (female) union leader reminded an audience of college women.89 The appeal to equal political rights thus rested not only on women’s difference, but on the notion that it was this difference that made women a collectivity—not a collection of autonomous (male) individuals who, by definition, embodied citizenship.
In this connection it is instructive to look at India, where British imperial rule intersected with local politicians and feminists in debates about women’s suffrage in the 1920s and ’30s. There, Mrinalini Sinha offers a compelling analysis of the tensions in these debates, arguing that they did not follow exactly the lines of equality and difference evident among British feminists (and elsewhere in the West as well). Instead, Sinha shows that women were identified with communal interests—whether those of religious minorities (mainly Muslims) and depressed classes, or of the unified national body as a whole. In 1932, she writes, the British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald saw “women only as a plurality of collectivities nestled safely within various discrete bodies politic. His plan was to confirm these supposedly discrete political units as naturally separate communal electorates, asserting once again that women belonged only to their communities.”90 Against this vision of a religiously and economically divided country was Gandhi’s nationalist vision of a unitary political community, epitomized in “the artificial transcendence of women over other social relations and identities.”91 They were the women of the nation, not representatives of Hindu or Muslim or other groupings, and in this identity they were evidence that unity was possible. “This, in effect, merely prioritized the collective contours of a reconstituted community—a unitary national community—over other political imaginations of community. Thus was the citizenship of women held hostage to competing conceptions of community.”92 In this instance, “women as a group did not lose in any simple way to men as a group. Sexual difference did not substitute for equality. The context of reinstated communal patriarchies rather than sexual difference per se, trumped the recognition of women’s autonomy.”93 Nonetheless, as Sinha herself demonstrates, women were not conceived as autonomous and instead increasingly identified with “the social”—that is with a realm of concern, interest, and expertise that was said to be theirs alone. “[B]y narrowing the scope of women’s collective agency to a circumscribed domain of the social, [the suffrage debate] also recast the collectivity constituted by women as ‘natural’ or pre-political.”94 With the ascendancy of the nationalist vision, this collective agency of women was “reoriented to usher in a unitary national political imagination whose abstract citizen was by default Hindu, upper caste, and male.”95
Sinha argues convincingly for the need to take historical specificity and political contingency into account when thinking about women’s claims for political rights. There is no question that her approach illuminates the Indian case in new and important ways. Still, it seems to me that the story I have been telling about gender asymmetry in modern nations resonates with her accounts: the identification of women with the social, even as it eventually won them the right to vote, did not dispute the naturalized explanation for their difference and the disqualifications and discriminations that followed from it.
The Political Effects of Gender Representation
It is important to note that the representation of the difference of women from men as an explanation for hierarchies of social and political organization is an idealized representation that doesn’t necessarily correspond to the actual practices and beliefs of all women and men. It was a representation, moreover, that was challenged by legions of feminists and their supporters, who dismissed its premises as ill-founded and unjust. Dozens of books and articles have been written insisting on the agency of those who refused to live by the discriminatory rules imposed by emergent nation-states and who—at least in their own lives—exemplified alternative conceptions of the ways differences of sex might or might not be relevant to the conduct of social and political life. The very existence of feminist movements testifies to the inability of those who upheld the normative view of things to enforce its premises and to impose it as an uncontested way of life.
Nonetheless, it is equally important to recognize that these idealized representations (these discourses) did provide the standards for behavior—the dominant cultural norms—for inhabitants of secularizing states. Along with laws that made religion a matter of private individual conscience, that made contracts between individuals the rule for market negotiations, and that made abstraction the ground for the theory of formal political equality, these notions of difference based on sex were fundamental to the conceptualization of political modernity, and so to the formation of secular subjects, whatever the local variations. They sought to resolve what Lefort referred to as the indeterminacy of democracy—its abstractions (the individual, rights, nations, representation)—by grounding them in a seemingly concrete referent: the visible, sexed bodies of women and men. That those bodies themselves inevitably bore indeterminate meanings posed a recurring interpretive and practical dilemma for the architects of nations. There could be no uncertainty about gender (the meanings attributed to those bodies) if the social order were to remain intact, hence the ferocity with which national leaders policed the boundaries of sexual difference and invoked Nature as a guarantee that those boundaries would remain in place. At the same time, in an argument that was entirely tautological, they claimed that social and political organization demonstrated the truth of Nature’s laws. The need for this double argument suggests that there was a double indeterminacy (of gender and politics) at the very heart of the discourse of secularism.
The indeterminacy of gender might be seen as doubling the value of Lefort’s vision of democracy, for it leaves space for debate about “what is legitimate and illegitimate—a debate which is necessarily without any guarantor and without any end.”96 The debate, of course, doesn’t take place in a vacuum but rather in the context of the pragmatic and changing demands of economy, demography, and politics—domestic and international. What is startling—and dismaying—for those of us whose goal is some form of equality (gender, racial, class) is the persistence of inequality despite changing contexts and decades of endless debate. So, for example, although those who opposed women’s suffrage sought to protect the equation of citizenship with masculinity, the extension of the vote to women did not entirely invalidate the equation. Instead, it simply moved the question of men’s power to another plane—as politicians, party leaders, officeholders, and guardians of the law in the political realm, as masters of markets, economies, and science elsewhere. It seems to matter less precisely where power is wielded than who wields it; the phallus (equated however mistakenly with the penis) entitles men to that right. Ultimately, Lacan reminds us, the guarantee of the phallus is the woman—de Beauvoir described her as “object and prey”—enabling man’s transcendence at the expense of her own. At the end of the long struggle for women’s citizenship, the dilemma captured in the title of de Beauvoir’s pathbreaking book remained: women continued to be “the second sex.”