Women and Functionalism, Past and Present
Alfred North Whitehead once said that “the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists in a series of footnotes to Plato.”1 We have seen that as far as the philosophical treatment of women is concerned, Whitehead’s statement is clearly untenable. The legacy of Aristotelian thought, while repudiated in many other areas, has continued in modern times to pervade discussions of the subject of women, their nature, and their proper position and rights in society. The predominant mode of thought about women has been a functionalist one, based on the assumption of the necessity of the male-headed nuclear family, and of women’s role within it. Now, after reviewing the course of the argument so far, we shall see how the mode of perceiving women that has been so predominant throughout the history of ideas persists in the writings of influential thinkers of our own time.
Socrates and Plato, having broken away from the prevailing Greek multiple standard of values, were predisposed to view women from a different perspective from their predecessors. In the Republic, moreover, Plato’s abolition of the family necessitated his taking a radically new look at the subject of women and their nature. Since they were no longer to be “private wives,” or to be defined by the functions of motherhood and housekeeping, he was obliged, despite his generally deprecating attitude toward the female sex, to consider their potential as individual citizens—as persons without a preordained and all-encompassing function in life. Book V of the Republic contains a more remarkable discussion of the socially and politically relevant differences between the sexes than was to appear for more than two thousand years thereafter. As a consequence of the conclusions he came to, Plato dispensed, in an extremely hierarchical society, with the usual hierarchy of the sexes. He argued for the total equality, in education and role, of the female guardians.
Having once thought about the potential of women, and concluded that societies which confined them all indiscriminately to domestic seclusion were being extremely wasteful of human resources, Plato found himself in a difficult position when, in the Laws, he reinstated the family, together with other forms of private property. Whereas the theoretical argument for the equal potential, and therefore the equal education and employment of the two sexes, was carried further here than in the Republic, when it comes to applying these precepts, Plato backed away. Clearly the reason is that private wives could not be permitted to lead the same kind of public lives as the female guardians and philosophers of the ideal city. Consequently, women are relegated to their traditional domestic functions and status. They are conspicuously absent from the activities of citizenship. Moreover, in spite of having argued in the Republic that men’s and women’s natures are the same apart from their respective roles in procreation, Plato asserted in the Laws that women must be sedate and pure in their natures, whereas their husbands are to be noble and courageous. Thus the nature of women, no less than their role, is prescribed by the presence or absence of the family.
Plato’s treatment of women in the Republic is clearly unparalleled in the history of Western thought. The essential difference between his discussion of women in the Laws, moreover, and the later philosophical treatment of them, is that Plato was aware of what he was doing to the female sex, whereas subsequent philosophers give no indication of being so aware. Since Plato explicitly held that the innate qualities of women could not be known, so long as the socialization and education of the sexes was so different, the “nature” he gave to women in the Laws is unambiguously prescriptive, rather than descriptive. It is the way women must be socialized, in order to perform their prescribed functions within the patriarchal and traditional structure of his proposed society.
What Plato did, consciously, to women and their “nature” in the Laws, has been done unconsciously by many of those political philosophers since Plato who have concerned themselves with the subject. To the extent that Plato advanced the rational discussion of women and their potential, Aristotle set it back again, and the history of political thought about women has unfortunately up to the present time consisted predominantly of footnotes to this Aristotelian legacy. In contrast to Plato, philosophers who have regarded the family as beyond question—a natural and indispensable part of the human order—have tended to view women entirely in terms of their sexual and procreative functions. Women’s interests are not perceived as discrete, but as subsumed within those of the family; women’s purpose is seen to be the reproduction and rearing of men, and their nature is prescriptively defined in terms of the optimal characteristics for the performance of these functions.
In the case of Aristotle himself, the treatment of women is consistent with the entire structure of his political philosophy. Because of his fundamental teleology and functionalist treatment of the world as a whole, he relegated the vast majority of people, both male and female, to the status of means, whose purpose was to enable the few to pursue their truly human ends.
In the case of Rousseau, however, the prescriptive, functionalist treatment of women stands out as a curious anomaly, in the context of a philosophy based on the ideals of human equality and freedom. Ignoring in this instance his own speculations about the original state of nature, Rousseau proceeded on the assumption that the patriarchal family was natural and necessary, and that woman’s nature must therefore be defined according to its needs. Setting aside the entire environmentalist account of human development which he applied to men, he argued that women are naturally passive, subservient and chaste. They must be educated in such a way as to reinforce these natural qualities, for only thus can they be happy in a world in which they exist in order to please men. Strongly opposed though he was to Aristotle’s conclusion that some men are by nature slaves and intended to serve others, Rousseau failed to perceive the applicability of his objections to his own arguments about the female sex. In spite of his preoccupation with the male individual and his rights and freedom, Rousseau continued to apply Aristotelian arguments about the nature and purpose of women. Her role in the bourgeois family was thereby rationalized: that she should propagate and nurture undisputed heirs to the family property, that she should provide for her husband a pleasant solace from the harsh realities of the competitive world outside, that she should obey him without question, be totally dependent on him and value her chaste reputation as her most prized possession—all these were merely the dictates of nature. While his ultimate prognosis for men is that they can be educated to be either individuals or citizens, but not both, his tragic conclusion for women is that they can be neither.
John Stuart Mill tried to integrate women as persons in their own right into his liberal political philosophy. He came to recognize the absurdity of claiming that the contemporary characteristics of that sex which had always been subordinated to the other, constituted female “nature.” No one could presume to know the nature of women until women were free to develop it. Mill’s conviction of the importance for human happiness of individual freedom and just treatment became the basis of his case for the emancipation of women. However, to the extent that his vision of the liberated woman falls short of complete equality of op portunity or of power, it bears witness to the thesis that it is the philosophers’ attitude to the family, above all else, which has determined their conclusions about the rights and the social role of women.
On the one hand, Mill certainly rejected many of the legal and customary inequalities of the patriarchal family. He did not assume, as have so many others, that the best interests of all the members of the family are included in those of its male head. Thus he concluded that women must have equal civil and political rights, and the same education and opportunities to earn their own livings as men. On the other hand, however, Mill never questioned or objected to the maintenance of traditional sex roles within the family, but expressly considered them to be suitable and desirable. In spite of his explicit recognition of the extent to which domestic preoccupations hamper women’s progress in other areas of life, he gave no consideration to even the eventual possibility of the sharing of domestic and child-rearing tasks between the sexes. The assumption that married women should not earn their own livings or pursue careers, except insofar as the onerous obligations of the household leaves them free to do so, means that Mill’s feminism is severely constrained. He in effect condoned the continuation of considerable differences in power and in opportunity, for men and married women. Thus, though he argued that women must be admitted to citizenship, there is no way that the realities of the lives he envisaged for them could allow them to be equal citizens. While Mill, exceptionally among political philosophers, tried to treat women as individuals whose happiness and freedom were as important as those of men, his reluctance to question traditional family structure and its intrinsic sex roles prevented him from fully succeeding in his aim.
The importance of the preceding analysis is heightened by the fact that the functionalist mode of thinking about women, their rights and needs and their position in society, is by no means dead. Functionalism as a whole has under gone a considerable revival in recent decades, especially in the fields of social psychology and sociology. Two examples—the works of psychoanalyst Erik Erikson and of sociologist Talcott Parsons—will suffice to demonstrate current lines of argument on the subjects of women and the family that parallel those of Rousseau and Aristotle. It is important to understand how this type of thought, as applied to women and the family, retains such appeal.
Freud posed the curious question “What does a woman want?”2 A number of well-respected psychologists and psychiatrists have not hesitated to provide answers which support the ancient idea that woman and her wants and needs are determined by her sexual and reproductive characteristics.3 Bruno Bettelheim, for example, addressing the subject of women in the scientific professions, asserts:
We must start with the realization that, as much as women want to be good scientists or engineers, they want first and foremost to be womanly companions of men and to be mothers.4
Some male scholars have felt in no way impelled to disguise the fact that they are defining women functionally in relation to society’s needs. Psychiatrist Joseph Rheingold, for example, writes:
Woman is nurturance … anatomy decrees the life of a woman…. When women grow up without dread of their biological functions and without subversion by feminist doctrine, and therefore enter upon motherhood with a sense of fulfillment and altruistic sentiment, we shall attain the goal of a good life and a secure world in which to live it.5
It is only, apparently, when women are successfully socialized into believing that their anatomy is their destiny, that “we” (who?) shall be able to live the good life.
None of this, of course, is very far removed from the ideas about women expressed by Rousseau. However, the modern archetype of his mode of thought is Erik Erikson. In an attempt to revise the negative Freudian concept that the development of the female personality derives largely from the little girl’s inevitable penis envy, Erikson instead structures that development around the possession of an “inner space” with great potential—the womb.6 Woman’s capacity to bear and nurse children is therefore not just one aspect of her nature; her entire identity and the life she lives must revolve around her “inner space” and its desire to be filled. Erikson tells us that “emptiness is the female form of perdition … standard experience for all women,”7 and that whatever sphere of life a woman enters into, she must take her peculiarly feminine personality—defined by its “inner space”—with her. In the political sphere, for example, Erikson says, “the influence of women will not be fully actualized until it reflects without apology the facts of the ‘inner space’ and the potentialities and needs of the feminine psyche.”8 Thus, women will always perform a different type of role in life from men; whatever they do, they can never forget the unique “groundplan” of their bodies. “Since a woman is never not-a-woman,” Erikson concludes, “she can see her long-range goals only in those modes of activity which include and integrate her natural dispositions.”9
Thus Erikson claims, no less positively than Rousseau, that he knows what women are really, and naturally, like. The reasoning he employs on the subject, however, is no more conclusive or convincing than Rousseau’s. His demonstration that women are essentially conscious of their “inner space” is the outcome of an experiment in which boys and girls in their early teens were asked to construct scenes from a number of given toys.10 Erikson uses the differences between the scenes created by the two sexes as evidence that their respective personalities are greatly affected by the differences in their genitalia and reproductive organs. Reminiscent of Rousseau’s neglect, in his discovery of the “natural” differences between the sexes, of environmental influences up to the age of six, Erikson dismisses “the purely ‘social’ interpretation” quite peremptorily, on account of the fact that it cannot explain all the differences that were observed. He refuses to consider as significant the influences on the scenes constructed by the girls and boys of either their total play experience in a culture in which many toys and activities are considered strictly sex related, or their identification with the socially conditioned behavior and aspirations of the parent and other adults of their own sex.
Later in the essay, Erikson argues that it is the biological necessities of human life which make child-rearing “woman’s unique job,” and that it is therefore biology which explains many of the observable differences in a little girl. Not only does she react to things with greater compassion than a little boy, but she “learns to be more easily content within a limited circle of activities and shows less resistance to control and less impulsivity of the kind that later leads boys and men to ‘delinquency.’ ”11 In the absence of any consideration of the socialization of the two sexes or the expectations placed on them by society, how can we be supposed to believe that such differences are the result of biology? Rousseau’s similar conclusions are not founded on much worse evidence.
Altogether, Erikson’s essay demonstrates well the extraordinary degree of muddled thinking that continues to impede rational discussion of the differences between the sexes. Just as in Rousseau’s treatment of the subject, descriptive and prescriptive statements are confusingly interwoven. Erikson tells us, for example, in a statement that is crucial to his argument, that women have “a biological, psychological, and ethical commitment to take care of human infancy.”12 It is difficult to see what could be meant by “a biological commitment”—a commitment, surely, is something that is undertaken by the person involved. That women have the ability to bear children is indisputable, but to call this, let alone the total care of the infant, her biological commitment, is meaningless. As for women’s psychological and ethical commitments to raise children, these are both, at least to a very large extent, culture related, and the first is to an unknown degree the result of sex-role conditioning. Erickson’s fusing together of a universal biological fact with culturally prescribed factors is a shrewd way of deriving his unwarranted conclusion that child-rearing is necessarily a task in which “years of specialized womanhours of work are involved.”13
The importance of Erikson’s work for the defense of the status quo is that it claims to give the sanction of twentieth-century science to an age-old myth. This myth claims that existing sex-role differentiation and the aspiration of girls and boys to very different future roles are due not to environmental influences or social sanctions, but to physical sexual differences. Thus the confinement of the vast majority of women to the home or to low-status positions in the sphere of employment is claimed to be in no way an anomaly in the modern world, or a state of affairs which any normal woman would find cause to challenge. This is, Erikson assures us, because their very biology ensures that women—in contrast to men, who have conquered space and disseminated ideas—“have found their identities in the care suggested in their bodies and in the needs of their issue, and seem to have taken it for granted that the outer world space belongs to the men.”14
The task embarked on by psychologists is completed in the works of sociologists, particularly those of the “structural-functionalist” school. Talcott Parsons and colleagues, in Family, Socialization and Interaction Process, and in a number of articles, undertake to demonstrate that it is the essential functions which the nuclear family performs for society that necessitate the conventional differentiation between male and female sex roles. If Erikson, with respect to his treatment of women, is this century’s Rousseau, Talcott Parsons’s functionalist analysis of the family and woman’s role within it reveals him to be the modern Aristotle. Parsons, unlike Erikson, does not appear to believe that the conventional roles of the sexes are a biologically determined extension of their distinct roles in procreation. Rather, the fact that pregnancy and lactation become the basis of an entirely different role and life style for women has to be explained by the mediating factor of the family. “Indeed,” Parsons writes, “we argue that probably the importance of the family and its functions for society constitutes the primary set of reasons why there is a social, as distinguished from purely reproductive, differentiation of sex roles.”15 Thus it is the indispensable functions of the modern nuclear family that necessitate “woman’s place.”
Parsons’s work has been criticized by recent feminist sociologists.16 However, there are several issues that warrant discussion in the present context. First, like Aristotle with regard to the polis and the Greek household, Parsons takes American society of the 1940s and 1950s and its conventional nuclear family as the basis of his theory. He takes it as given that the adult members of a “normal” family consist of a man who has a job and a woman who either stays home or if employed tends to have a job which does not compete for status with that of her husband.17 He defines the status of married women as the status derived from their husbands’ levels of employment. On the issue of the status of women as compared with that of men, however, he acknowledges the inequalities due to the “assymetrical relation of the sexes to the occupational structure.”18
Parsons is not unaware that there are problems, especially for women, which result from the sex-role structure of the nuclear family he takes as a given. The rigid modern separation of the outside world of “work” from the household, he says, “deprives the wife of her role as a partner in a common enterprise.” She is left with “a set of utilitarian functions in the management of the household which may be considered a kind of ‘pseudo’-occupation.”19 He points out that, in spite of American high tolerance for drudgery, middle class women tend to employ domestic servants whenever financially able, to dissociate themselves as persons from the performance of household tasks, and to take on roles in community activity in order to avoid “the stigma of being ‘just a housewife’ ”20 He also acknowledges that problems arise from the fact that women’s child-rearing role is usually ending just as their husbands are at the height of their careers. The confined nature of women’s life in the home and the narrow specialization of men’s lives at work are not entirely good for either sex, he admits. But whereas the man is likely to be compensated by the achievement and responsibility of his job, it is for the woman, Parsons acknowledges, that the rigid sex-role differentiation of our society is most damaging. “It is quite clear,” he writes, “that in the adult feminine role there is quite sufficient strain and insecurity so that widespread manifestations are to be expected in the form of neurotic behavior.”21
It is particularly striking, given this perception of some of the effects of the conventional structuring of sex roles, that Parsons refuses to consider the possibilities of change. He asserts without comment that sex roles are becoming more rather than less well defined. (He was writing, of course, before the beginning of the current women’s movement.) The general movement of women into the “masculine” pattern of behavior, he believes, “would only be possible with profound alterations in the structure of the family,” and he regards the traditional structure of the family as more essential than ever before in terms of its vital social functions.22 The implication is that such profound alteration, whatever its repercussions for the mental health of half of the population, is not an open issue.
From an analysis which takes the contemporary social structure as given, Parsons slides very easily into the role of predicting, or rather prescribing, the future. His tendency to start from the basis of the American family of his time, and then to claim that the conclusions he reaches are not “culture bound” is extremely reminiscent of Aristotle’s sanctifying the status quo by proving it to be the natural order of things. Having justified male dominance within the family as a result of the husband’s standing in the occupational realm, Parsons goes on to assert:
Even if, as seems possible, it should come to pass that the average woman had some kind of a job, it seems most unlikely that this relative balance would be upset; that either the roles would be reversed, or their qualitative differentiation in these respects completely erased.23
As confirmation of this view, Parsons cites the existing distribution of women in the labor force—the fact that they hold predominantly “expressive” roles,“ ‘supportive’ to masculine roles … analogous to the wife-mother role in the family.” While he recognizes, then, that there is a connection between the supportive and subordinate roles that women are assigned both inside and outside the family, Parsons is not at all disposed to consider that there may be little rational basis for this role assignment in either case. The fact that even in the world of work women play nurturing roles supposedly reinforces the conviction that this is their proper role within the home.
The two basic points in Parsons’s argument about the importance of sex-role differentiation are that the family, like any small group, must have an “expressive” leader and an “instrumental” leader, and that the mother must assume the first of these roles and the father the second. The first claim has been well criticized by Ann Oakley, who points out that all the subjects of the experiment that Parsons relies upon were the products of socialization within nuclear families of the type he aims to draw conclusions about. The small groups they formed, then, were highly likely to take on the structure of the conventional family, and Parsons’s conclusion that the characteristics observed are those of “small groups everywhere” is unfounded.24
However, let us accept for the moment these conclusions about the leadership roles of the small group, and therefore the family. Why must the mother be assigned the “expressive” and the father the “instrumental” leadership of the family? Parsons argues that the mother’s expressive role derives from the two facts of pregnancy and lactation. It is by default that the father, since he cannot perform these functions, must go out to work and become the instrumental leader.25 However, since Parsons denies that the fetal stage has any relevance for the child’s socialization, and he was writing at a time when bottle feeding was at its height and nursing actively discouraged by the medical profession, there appears to be very little foundation to his assignment of life-long roles based on sex. Parsons seems to have been to some extent aware of this problem. Though in general he writes in terms of the “mother-child relationship” and calls the child-rearer the “mother,” during his discussion of the crucial stage of oral dependency he says that what is essential for the development of the child’s ego is” ‘attachment’ to one or a class of ‘social objects’ of which the mother is the prototype.” He is careful to note that “ ‘agent of care’ is the essential concept and that it need not be confined to one specific person; it is the function which is essential.”26 Each time, however, he immediately reverts to calling his agent of care “mother,” giving the reader the misleading general impression that it has been demonstrated to be necessarily a female role.
It is clearly during the oedipal stage that Parsons thinks the clear differentiation of the sex roles of parents is most essential for the child’s socialization. The reason it is essential, however, is that it is at this stage that the child, largely through identification with the parent of his or her own sex, must be directed successfully into the appropriate sex role. This is a crucial part of the child’s absorption of “the institutionalized patterns of the society.”27 In order for the daughter to become a “willing and ‘accommodating’ person” and the son to become an “adequate technical performer,”28 they must be socialized in a nuclear family in which this sex-role differentiation is clearly observed. But surely there is something rather circular about such reasoning. A large part of the explanation for the necessity of sex roles rests on the need to socialize the next generation into sex roles, so that they in turn will be able to socialize their children into sex roles, ad infinitum. Especially since Parsons was aware of some of the unhealthy consequences of conventional sex roles, one wonders why he was so concerned to preserve them.
Parsons, as a sociologist, is perfectly entitled to perform a theoretical analysis of the institutions of a sexist culture. However, he is no more justified than Aristotle in presenting a theory about a particular historical set of institutions as a dictum for human behavior throughout eternity. The supposedly neutral and academic nature of his study belies his reactionary conclusions about the necessity of maintaining strict sex roles in order to preserve a healthily functioning society.
Thus, in recent times, strong sanctions have been given to sexist mythology by scholars influential in the mainstream of their respective disciplines. Rousseauian reasoning about the nature of women presented by such thinkers as are exemplified here by Erik Erikson, and Aristotelian assumptions about the sacred immutability of the existing family structure such as are evident in the Parsonian school of sociology, have reinforced justification of the differential treatment of the sexes. Until the beginning of the women’s movement in the late 1960s began to break the monopoly, moreover, both men and women were fed throughout their socialization on the fallout from such views. Through textbooks, advertising, child-rearing manuals, and countless other channels, the prescriptive “nature” which was imposed on women by their reproductive biology, in combination with the assumption of the conventional family structure, was virtually unopposed by any alternative views.