Conclusions
This study has aimed to answer two questions, posed at the outset. The first of these asked whether the existing tradition of political philosophy could sustain the inclusion of women in its subject matter, on the same terms as men. The second asked what could be learned from an analysis of the treatment of women in political philosophy about the fact that the formal, political enfranchisement of women has not led to substantive economic, social or political equality between the sexes. In this final chapter, the findings of the study will be used to formulate answers to these two questions in turn.
The only place in political philosophy where women are already included on the same terms as men is Plato’s guardian class in the Republic. There, the abolition of the private sphere of life, the control of reproduction, and the socialization of child-rearing and all domestic functions, result in the male and female guardians being both similarly educated and similarly employed. The natural differences between the sexes are narrowly conceived, and women’s traditional functions are reduced to the physiological ones of pregnancy and lactation. Thus, while it makes no sense to talk of individual “rights” in the context of the Republic, the women of the guardian class are in a position of equality with the men.
In the works of all the other philosophers discussed, as well as in Plato’s Laws, the existence of a distinct sphere of private, family life, separated off from the realm of public life, leads to the exaggeration of women’s biological differences from men, to the perception of women as primarily suited to fulfill special “female” functions within the home, and consequently to the justification of the monopoly by men of the whole outside world. Let us now see what happens when we hypothesize the inclusion of women as complete equals, in all the theories we have examined. Will such an hypothesis alter the theories significantly? Will it thrust them out of shape, or reveal inconsistencies that are not apparent so long as women are assumed to be excluded from the major theoretical premises and conclusions? After this hypothesis has been applied to each of the political philosophers in turn, some general indications will be made concerning the adaptations necessary in any political theory if it is to treat women as the equals of men.
In the societies described in Plato’s Laws and Aristotle’s Politics, the practical problems caused by the transformation of women into citizens participating as fully as men in public life would be to some extent alleviated by the institution of slavery. This “solution,” however, could be only a partial one; neither Plato nor Aristotle is happy with the prospect of prolonged contact between free children and slaves, and it is very doubtful that the management of the household could be expected to be carried out as closely in accordance with the best interests of the family if it were left entirely in the hands of slaves unsupervised by the mistress of the family. It is undeniable that the maintenance of each citizen’s private household in these societies in which civic life is so important and time-consuming depends to a very large extent on the fact that women in Aristotle’s case are totally excluded from the public sphere of life, and in Plato’s Laws play a very secondary role.
There are deeper problems, however, involved in hypothesizing the complete equality of women within Plato’s second-best and Aristotle’s preferred polities. For both perceive the family as an aspect of private property, of which the wife herself is a major component. Male citizens in these two societies own their wives, and this is obviously untenable if men and women are to be equal. As is made clear in Chapter 3, Plato could not envisage the degree of participation in civic life that the female guardians enjoyed in the Republic as at all proper for the private wives of the Laws, in spite of the fact that his convictions about women’s potential had become stronger by the time he wrote the Laws. In the second-best society, woman’s “nature” must be prescribed for her, so as to befit her role as a wife. In the Politics, the life of the family is explicitly defined out of the realm of the political, which includes only its patriarch. Clearly, immense changes in both these conceptions of the family would have to be made in order to allow women to become equal family members, and equal citizens. Rather than an object of property, or a necessary condition for the provision of heirs and of daily requirements, the family would have to appear as an institution initiated and supported by its adult members as complete equals. This is a radical break from contemporary Greek notions, with which neither Aristotle’s convention-based Politics nor Plato’s traditional Laws is well equipped to cope.
In the case of the Politics, moreover, a still more serious problem arises when we hypothesize the equal treatment of male and female citizens. The teleological conception of the world on which Aristotle’s entire political philosophy is founded depends on the premise that all the other members of the population—slaves and artisans as well as women—exist in order to perform their respective functions for the few free males who participate fully in citizenship. The “natures” of all these groups of people are defined in terms of their satisfactory performance of their conventional functions. If women were to be given status equal to men within the citizen class, the entire basis of Aristotle’s functionalism would be undermined. If he were to deny the natural inferiority of women, the argument for which is based on the functions they performed in contemporary Athenian life, his parallel argument for the natural inferiority of slaves would also be placed in jeopardy. Once it is no longer agreed that women are by nature inferior and deficient in rationality, and exist only for the purpose of maintaining the household and bearing and rearing heirs, how can it be consistently maintained that the class of slaves exists only to perform its function of service, or that the class of artisans, because of the work it happens to do, is thereby unfitted for political life? Aristotle’s identification of the hierarchical status quo with the natural, the necessary, and the good, cannot withstand the emancipation of women into political life. His system of politics is so extensively based on inequalities that to deny any aspect of the inequality jeopardizes the entire structure. How fragile the basis of that structure is becomes clear when the functional treatment of women is recognized as having no validity.
The introduction of women as equal citizens in Rousseau’s ideal democratic republic would have, by contrast, the effect of resolving the obvious inconsistencies of his theory as it stands. It would resolve the considerable discrepancy between the egalitarianism and consensual basis of his ideas about government, and the extreme inegalitarianism of the patriarchal family that he upholds as natural and indispensable. His striking pronouncements about equality and freedom would no longer be contradicted by everything he says about relations between the sexes. Another problem the inclusion of women in public life would resolve is that dangerous conflict of loyalties discussed in Chapter 8 above. If women were no longer exclusively privately and personally oriented, they would be no more likely than men to be a danger to those wider loyalties that Rousseau valued so highly.
However, the problems arising from the transformation of women into equals are as great in the case of Rousseau as in the Laws and the Politics, and in a practical sense they are even more severe. For Rousseau’s ideal republic requires at least as much civic participation as Aristotle’s, and yet the private sphere of family life is crucial for him—not only as an economic base, as it was for the Greeks—but as a highly important aspect of affective life. Rousseau himself acknowledged political freedom to be so demanding that it might well be impossible to achieve without the institution of slavery to provide for the needs of daily life. Since he could not conceive of such a practice as legitimate, the issue is left unresolved. However, what is regarded as legitimate—since it follows from his premise that the patriarchal family is natural—is the exclusion from civic life, confinement to the private sphere, and functional definition of women.
Let us try to envisage equality of the sexes in a Rousseauian republic. First, the entire structure of the family would have to be radically altered, so as to be consistent with the equal rights and responsibilities of its adult members. Rousseau’s entire conception of the relations between men and women, stemming from his great fear of dependency, except on a person one can control, would be overturned. Above all, husbands and wives would have to be able to trust one another—something Rousseau appears unable to envisage. Again, the woman’s “nature” and entire mode of life could no more be defined in terms of the man’s needs than he is defined in terms of hers. These requirements take us a long way from Emile and Sophie and from the chaste wives of Geneva whom Rousseau idealized.
Second, if women were to be politically equal, they, too, would have to spend a considerable amount of time in political meetings and other public activities. But Rousseau’s republic is based on the institutions of the family, private property, and inheritance, and both private families and private holdings require a considerable amount of individual nurturance. While Rousseau says that the formal education of citizens is to be public, it is clear that he conceives of early child-rearing as a private activity, and sees the household as a place of refuge, for the man, from the tiring demands of the world outside. If all the adults of both sexes were to be as much preoccupied with civic activity as citizenship in a direct democracy requires, who would maintain this private sphere of life which Rousseau perceives as crucially important? It is clear that considerable inroads would need to be made into the privacy and exclusiveness of the family, in order to allow women to participate fully as citizens.
Thus it would appear that, at least in an egalitarian society, one cannot achieve both the great intensity of civic life and the wholly private realm of family life without dichotomizing the spheres of operation of the sexes. Something has to give way, in Rousseau’s world, if women are to be equal—either the extent of civic participation required of a citizen, or the eschewal of a class that exists to serve others, or the exclusiveness and total privacy of family life and property. The otherwise admirable egalitarian and participatory aspects of Rousseau’s republic are, unfortunately, firmly founded on the exclusion of women.
As for John Stuart Mill, the inclusion of women is no longer merely hypothetical, for he made a determined effort to emancipate them into citizenship. However, in spite of his argument—so radical in its time—that political, educational and career opportunties should be open to women, he assumed that the exigencies of family life would restrict the full use of these opportunities to single women, whom he acknowledged would remain a small minority. To overcome these limitations and hypothesize substantive equality for married as well as single women would necessitate the radical alteration of Mill’s conception of the family and its relations with the outside world. His assumptions that housework and child-care are functions which must necessarily be performed within the individual family, and that they are inevitably women’s work, and unpaid work, would all have to be abandoned if the majority of women were to achieve anything approaching real equality with their husbands.
In Mill’s liberal state, since he accepted representative as a practicable substitute for direct democracy, it is not so much the time-consuming nature of political participation which creates problems when we postulate the equality of women, though it certainly creates some. Jury service, for example, was regarded by Mill as an important and educative aspect of citizenship, and yet it is inconceivable that he would have dissented from the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1961 decision that women, as “the center of the home and family life,” should not be subject to compulsory jury service. Likewise, the political education that Mill supposed would result from the democratization of the workplace and from direct participation in local government would be by and large inaccessible to married women.1 For only after she has discharged what he perceives as “her” domestic responsibilities, Mill states clearly, should a wife assume outside activities or obligations. The more critical problem, however, is that by the time Mill wrote, family and economic life had become completely separated from each other by the development of the capitalist market economy, and the only way that women (other than heiresses) could achieve economic equality with men was by having the freedom and flexibility, as well as the training, to enable them to compete equally in selling their labor. There is, of course, no way that any married woman, however well qualified, who assumed the obligations Mill places on her, could compete in the occupational sphere with men.
There is no doubt that Mill—especially given the time at which he wrote—was a brave and far-thinking feminist. He refused to subscribe to many of the assumptions of previous political theory about the exclusion of women from the political realm and the representative nature of the family’s male head for all legal and political purposes. However, with Mill too, the strict separation of the private from the public realm, of the family from economic life, and the assumption that the day-to-day care of the family is woman’s unpaid work, would all be undermined by the inclusion of women in his theory as the complete equals of men.
Though to varying degrees, all four political theories we have tested against the hypothetical inclusion of women on the same terms as men are considerably affected by this added requirement. In Plato’s second-best polis and Aristotle’s preferred one, in Rousseau’s close-knit democratic republic and even to a large extent in Mill’s liberal state, the sphere of public life is in many important respects premised on the existence of the private sphere of a family whose demands define woman’s function and life style, and exclude her from equal participation and status in the world of economic and public life. It is clear that the structure of the family and the distribution of roles and responsibilities within it must be significantly altered in any theory in which women are to be equal human beings and equal participants in the public realm.
There are several significant respects in which political theories in general must change if they are to accommodate women as equal members of the political community. Political theorists as a class (though here Mill is an interesting partial exception) have made a number of assumptions concerning the family and its relation to society that are not consistent with the recognition of women as individuals equal to men. First, they have, sometimes contrary to appearances, made the family, rather than the adult human individual, the basic unit of their theories. The interesting and revealing corollary to this is that intrafamilial relationships—no matter how much power or authority they involve—are perceived as being outside the sphere of the political. Second, they have perceived human relationships within families as totally and qualitatively different from relationships between actors in the “political” realm—that is to say, the heads of families. It is important to discern how these prevalent assumptions about what should be the basic subject matter of political theory, and about the difference between intrafamilial and extrafamilial relations, would have to change in order to deal with equality between the sexes.
It is clear that Plato in the Laws, Aristotle, and Rousseau, regarded the male head of each family as its sole political representative. This is also true, and more paradoxically so, in the liberal theories of Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Hegel, and James Mill—paradoxically, because of the fact that liberalism is supposedly based on individualism. As Brian Barry has recently captured it, the “essence of liberalism” is “the vision of society as made up of independent, autonomous units who co-operate only when the terms of co-operation are such as to make it further the ends of each of the parties.”2 In fact, however, behind the individualist rhetoric, it is clear that the family, and not the adult human individual, is the basic political unit of liberal as of non-liberal philosophers. In spite of the supposedly individualist premises of the liberal tradition, John Stuart Mill was the first of its members to assert that the interests of women were by no means automatically upheld by the male heads of the families to which they belonged, and that therefore women, as individuals, should have independent political and legal rights. That these proposals should have appeared so dangerously radical in the climate of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century opinion is ample testimony to the limitations of previous liberal individualism.
However, if the adult members of each family are to be regarded as equals, with lives of their own as well as the life they share as members of a family, the assumption that all their interests are common interests, which can be adequately represented by one of them alone and that one determined on grounds of sex, is clearly no longer tenable. No one would deny that, both because of the impotrant fact that they live together, and because of the strength of emotion that binds them, most families have far more interests in common than random groups of individuals would have. What must be recognized, however, but cannot be recognized by theorists who take as their basic unit for discussion not the individual but the family, is that there are many respects in which the interests of members of a family can either diverge from or clash with each other. This has become more clear as the old dichotomy of sex roles has been breaking down in recent years. When both husband and wife have independent lives, and particularly working lives, obviously they are far more likely to have opposing interests about such basic matters as where the family is to live. Whereas until recently, in the law as well as in political theory, the presumption has been that such matters must be decided by the family’s male head, this type of assumption will clearly have to give way if women are to be equal.
This does not mean, however, that people must be treated, by political theories or by laws, always as isolated individuals and never as members of families or other long-term groups in which they choose to live with each other and to share responsibilities. Society is becoming atomized enough, even without the complete denial of the groups in which people live their intimate lives and in which they depend on each other for economic, emotional, and other forms of support. But to treat someone as, in certain respects, an equal member of a specifically related group, such as a family, is not the same as to assume the various positions and functions of persons within that group, and to define their rights and dictate their very opportunities in life, in terms of these assumptions.
Even in the case of legislation that—assuming the family unit—discriminates against men, the effect is generally to reinforce women’s dependent position within that unit, and to restrict the choices of family members about how to order their lives.3 It is not political theorists’ and judges’ acknowledgment of the existence of the family, in itself, but rather their assumptions about its patriarchal structure that has reinforced it as an institution which constrains rather than enhances people’s opportunities to live free, creative and fulfilling lives.
At this point it is important to note that the fact that the family is the only socially recognized permanent relationship between people is discriminatory not only against women. The “normal” family, with dependent wife, is favored in many ways, both social and economic, at the expense of persons who are not part of such families.4 In order to correct this discrimination, a number of alternative living arrangements must be similarly recognized as constituting mutually supportive groups. These would consist of various numbers of people of either or both sexes, with or without children. Political theories and laws must be constructed in such a way as to recognize the dependence relationships and living arrangements that people choose for themselves, which will of course include families. However, they must also be constructed in such a way that they do not make assumptions about the various individuals’ positions, obligations, sex roles, or functions within such groups. Only if these changes are made, will the forms of discrimination presently perpetrated both against all women, and against men who choose to live in groups less orthodox than the family, have a chance of being reduced.
The second mode of thought about the family that must be reassessed in terms of female equality is most prevalent with liberal thinkers, though it is also found in Rousseau. As was noted earlier, the liberal tradition assumes that the behavior of its political actors will be based on self-interest. Men with certain natural rights, or at least with certain passions requiring satisfaction, come together in political societies in order to defend themselves from invasion or harassment, and to compete with one another in a market environment where they are secure under the protective arm of the law. Relations within families, on the other hand, are perceived very differently. Theorists who have assumed a high degree of egoism to determine relations between individuals in the sphere of the market, have assumed almost total altruism to govern intrafamilial relationships.
The clearest example of this contrast is seen in the philosophy of Hegel, for whom the family and civil society are the utterly contrasting entities from which the state dialectically emerges—as a combination of the altruism of the former and the universality of the latter. When we read the passages about the family in the Philosophy of Right carefully, however, we can see that the unity of the family is founded on the refusal to cede to women any independent existence at all. One of the Additions to the section on the family asserts that, whereas men are like animals, women are like plants. Since women are not perceived as having any distinct life or interests at all, it is not difficult for Hegel to perceive the family as a place from which all discord and conflict of interest is absent, and where love and altruism reign supreme. The loving unity of Hegel’s family is founded on the denial of a personality to its wife and mother.5
Similarly, Rousseau, in spite of his sequel about Emile and Sophie, in which the father’s interests and will so clearly conflict with the welfare of his family and cause its ruin, maintained that the family operated on entirely different principles from those on which the outside world was based. He too, relying on the altruism of intrafamilial relations, persisted in regarding the patriarch as properly the sole representative of its interests, whereas he regarded any other instance of representation as an abdication of freedom.
Once one recognizes the existence of women as individuals in their own right, this assumption of the total unity of the family’s interests becomes exposed for the myth that it always was. The clear contrast that has been pointed to by many philosophers between the altruistic, loving sphere of the family and the harsh, competitive world outside, is no longer as distinct. Perhaps this realization will result in a questioning of both sides of the exaggerated dichotomy—of the atomistic assumptions about the outside realm as well as the unrealistic degree of altruism that has been supposed to characterize family relationships. If, as seems likely, the assumed love and altruism of the family, founded as it is upon the radical inequality of women, has served to soften the full impact of a world of self-interested individuals, maybe one of the results of treating women as beings with their own personalities and interests will be to expose the full implications of a theory in which self-interest is assumed to be the norm for economic and political life. Without the total selflessness that was supposed to exist within families, the total self-interestedness that liberalism assumes exists outside of them may seem more in need of reconsideration.
It should by now be clear that it is by no means a simple matter to integrate the female half of the human race into a tradition of political theory which has been based, almost without exception, upon the belief that women must be defined exclusively by their role within the family, and which has thus defined them, and intrafamilial relationships, as outside the scope of the political. There is no way in which we can include women, formerly minor characters, as major ones within the political drama without challenging basic and age-old assumptions about the family, its traditional sex roles, and its relation to the wider world of political society.
Before we leave the subject of the adaptations to political theory that would be made necessary by the absolutely equal treatment of women, we should note one respect in which democratic theories would thereby be rendered more internally consistent. For any theorist who aims at genuine political equality, the transformation of the family into a more egalitarian group should be welcome for reasons affecting the health of the political community as a whole. If the family is to lose the last vestiges of its patriarchal character, and to become a democratically run institution in which the only differential in terms of authority is the temporary one of age, this will surely affect the potential of the family as a socializing agency for the wider political community. The patriarchalism of the seventeenth century is the clearest parallel that has been drawn by political theorists between familial and governmental structures of authority and obedience.6 Clearly, in the view of such theorists, the hierarchical nature of the family made it an exemplary socializing agent for the hierarchical world of king and subjects. For democratic or egalitarian political theorists, however, it would seem that a family structure that is as democratic and egalitarian as possible would best serve the function of preparing future citizens for a life of political patricipation and equality.
It is now a generally accepted proposition that, as sociologist T. B. Bottomore recently wrote, “the institutions which exist in the differing spheres of society are not merely co-existent but are connected with each other by relations of concordance or contradiction and mutually affect each other.”7 This means, of course, that we cannot ignore the significant relationship that exists between the structure of the family and the structure of the wider political society of which it is a part. This idea has been developed more explicitly by Harry Eckstein, who argues that the stability of any political order is dependent upon the “congruence” between governmental authority structures and other such structures in the society, including those of work places, pressure groups, schools, and, most significantly, in the present context, the family.8 Eckstein concludes that, since democratization of some of these, including the family, is unfeasible, without “seriously dysfunctional consequences,” the need for congruence requires that stable governments must not be “extremely, i.e. purely, democratic,” but rather should include “a healthy element of authoritarianism.”9 The odd thing about this conclusion, especially considering Eckstein’s perception of “manifest egalitarianism” between the sexes in his study of Norway10 (to which the “congruence” theory forms part of the Appendix), is that he does not distinguish clearly between the respects in which families can be democratic—i.e. in relations between their adult members, including the children as they become mature—and the respects in which democratic decisions would be absurd—such as whether a three-year-old should go to nursery school. No one, surely, would disagree with Eckstein’s statement that “an infant cannot be cared for democratically.”11 However, this does not mean that, in many respects, families cannot differ greatly in their authority structures. Surely the degree of equality that exists between the parents, and the degree to which the children themselves are respected as human beings and consulted about family decisions as they grow older, will make a very strong impression on them, which they will take with them as part of their personality structure into other areas of life, including their relationships to their fellow citizens and their government.
The direct opposite of congruence—the paradox of a patriarchal family in a highly democratic society—is seen most clearly in Rousseau. At the beginning of Emile, he asserts that the family is the principal socializing unit for the preservation of society, that good mothering is the key to the revival of republican consciousness, and that the natural feeling of love for the “little fatherland” is the essential basis for the love that its citizens owe the state. Significantly, he also subscribes to a general proposition very similar to the theory of congruence as described above. In the Letter to d’Alembert, justifying the existence of civic clubs, he asserts, “There is no well-constituted state in which practices are not to be found which are linked to the form of government and which help to preserve it.”12 Clearly, however, Rousseau’s family, governed as it is by its patriarchal head, on whom it is entirely dependent for its welfare, is no fit environment for the development of democratic sentiments or an egalitarian consciousness in those who are the state’s future citizens. The family is the one place in Rousseau’s ideal republic where the idea of the general will is given no application at all, and it is impossible to see how the young citizens could grow up with any notion of the equal dignity of their fellow human beings in an institution in which the notion of equality even between adults is totally absent and one adult member exerts absolute rule over the other. As a socializing agent for his democratic republic, Rousseau’s patriarchal family is a disaster.
We have already concluded that the equality of women cannot be achieved in any political theory without the radical restructuring of the family. Now, in turn, we can see that such a transformation of the family cannot occur, either within a theory or in the actual world, without having considerable effect on the related political order. If our aim is a truly democratic society, or a thoroughly democratic theory, we must acknowledge that anything but a democratic family, with complete equality and mutual interdependence between the sexes, will be a severe impediment to this aim.
We will turn now to the second question raised in the Introduction. Why is it that the formal, political enfranchisement of women has not led to substantial equality between the sexes, and what light can our study of the treatment of women in political theory shed on this inquiry? Here, of course, we shall be far more concerned than hitherto with the position of women in the real world of contemporary society.
The women who struggled for the vote, in the early twentieth century, were not unaware that its achievement would be only the beginning of a much broader struggle for equality. In 1923, the National Women’s Party explained why it was proposing an equal rights amendment, to overcome the limitations of the female suffrage amendment:
As we were working for the national suffrage amendment … it was borne very emphatically in upon us that we were not thereby going to gain full equality for the women of this country, but that we were merely taking a step, but a very important step, it seemed to us, toward gaining this equality.13
The persistence of sex discrimination in the legal field alone has Shown these women to have been absolutely right in their assumption that the vote was only a first step. Their attempts toward an equal rights amendment were, needless to say, unsuccessful.
As most present-day feminists agree, the political emancipation of women brought with it very little of substance with respect to their economic and social position, and their actual life experience. In spite of the prevalent assumption that women have it within their power to be the equals of men, simply by taking up the equal opportunities offered them, the status of women in this country, measured in terms of occupation, education and income, has been gradually but persistently declining over the last few decades.14
This finding must be considered in the light of the fact that an increasing number of women, married as well as single, have been entering the labor force. Whereas in 1940, only 26 percent of women were in the paid labor force, in 1977, 48 percent were, and they comprised over 40 percent of the total full-time active work force.15 Moreover, most women work primarily for reasons of economic necessity: in 1975, 42 percent of women in the labor force were unmarried, widowed, divorced or separated and an additional 14 percent had husbands who earned less than $7,000 per year.16 These facts about women’s participation in the labor force certainly belie the notion that women work either to while away the time or for “pin-money.”
In spite of the efforts of government—through the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—to improve the position of women workers, it has instead been declining. As the U.S. Supreme Court acknowledged in a 1974 opinion, “Whether from overt discrimination or from the socialization process of a male-dominated culture, the job market is inhospitable to the woman seeking any but the lowest paid jobs.”17 Calling attention to the lack of encouraging results of the Equal Pay Act and Title VII, the Justices stated that “firmly entrenched practices are resistant to such pressures,” and cited data to show that women working full time in 1972 had a median income of only 57.9 percent of the male median—six points below what women had achieved in 1955. In 1970, while 70 percent of men earned over $7,000, only 26.1 percent of women working full time earned this amount or more.18 Moreover, while part of this pay differential is doubtless due to differences in training or education, certainly much of it is not. In 1972, the median annual income of women with four years of college education was exactly $100 more than that of men who had not completed a year of high school. In spite of the Equal Pay Act, women are frequently paid far less than men for doing identical or almost identical work. Women in sales work, for example, in 1970, averaged less than half of what the average salesman was paid, and professionally and technically trained women have an income of 67.5 percent of that of their male counterparts.19
The disparity in remuneration that is due to training or educational differentials is, of course, itself indirectly attributable to sexism, as is evident both in admission policies for such training and educational institutions, and in the self-images and expectations that girls and boys absorb during the socialization process. Though the expectations and aspirations of women are changing, particularly in the middle class, they are still very different from those that men are encouraged to develop.
The continuing inequality of women, and not only of those within the work force, clearly performs important functions for the capitalist economy in which we live. Outside of the recognized work force, women perform the functions held to be natural to their sex—child-rearing and housework—which are given no economic recognition at all. As a number of feminists have pointed out, conventional notions of the family and its sex roles have facilitated the distinct separation of the public and private spheres, and of productive labor into two types.20 On the one hand, there is that recognized as productive labor, which is performed in work places outside of the home by both men and women, and is paid, though at rates which continue to correlate to a high degree with the sex of the worker. On the other hand, there is that, though in fact productive labor but not recognized as such, which is still performed largely by women within the home, and is unpaid—the labor involved in the reproduction, nurturance, health and welfare of the work force. There is no denying that what housewives and mothers do is work, nor that it is necessary. However, it is frequently not regarded as work: “working mothers” are mothers who work outside their homes, only. The bearing and rearing of children, particularly in this age of population consciousness, are all too frequently perceived as a luxury and indulgence of private life, rather than as a process of overwhelming social importance.
As for women’s growing participation in work outside the home, it has been an essential factor in the shaping of the contemporary labor force.21 With the convenient but largely mythical justification that as part of the family structure they are adequately supported by men, women are providing an increasingly vast amount of labor at very cheap rates compared with those at which men are paid. In addition to the vast influx of women into the expanding sales and service sectors, the proportion of women in what were previously regarded as “male” jobs is increasing rather than decreasing. In many important industries, women, with little specialized training, and with a socialization which makes them view their participation in the labor force as a less important aspect of their lives, are performing, for a fraction of the pay, jobs which before they were fragmented and highly mechanized were performed by highly skilled and well-paid workers, who were almost always men. The obvious advantages of this to the capitalist are that the cost of labor is far lower (the average full-time female worker’s wage would have to increase by 75 percent in order to equal the average male’s), and that his ability to control the labor force is greater. Since the women who now perform the work are far less highly trained and unionized than the men who used to do it, they are more easily disciplined, fired and replaced. In addition, the large-scale participation of women in the labor force is a crucial factor in maintaining a high unemployment rate, which also increases the control of employers over employees.
The connection of all the above data on the contemporary inequality of women with the treatment of women by political theory is that, as in the past, the continuing oppression of women is ideologically supported by the survival of functionalist modes of thought. Just as women have been defined functionally in relation to men, and therefore deprived of the education, rights and opportunity to participate in the political realm, so today, women, though enfranchised citizens, are handicapped by the fact that neither their socialization nor their training, neither the expectations placed on them nor the opportunities or rewards afforded to them in their adult lives are such as to enable them to achieve economic, social, or political equality with men. The traditional, supposedly indispensable, nuclear family is used as the connecting link by which the basic biological differences between the sexes are expanded into the entire set of ascribed characteristics and prescribed functions which make up the conventional female sex role. It is the definition of women in terms of their wife-mother role that continues to be used, as we have seen, by the courts, and by society at large, to justify many kinds of discrimination against them, particularly in the spheres of education and employment.
Though it is clear that the injustices suffered by women in the work force cannot end until those in the sphere of education are eradicated, women’s educational experience continues to be restricted by the expectation that they are essentially destined for “home-making.” This expectation, moreover, follows them into the work place. As one sociologist wrote recently, “Discrimination on the basis of sex undoubtedly does exist in the occupational market, often motivated by the presumed rational economic concern over the marriage-pregnancy-maternity cycle and its accompanying absenteeism, though evidence does not support this concern.”22 The exploitation of women in the labor force is accentuated by the fact that they are frequently relegated to low-paid “women’s work.” “By extension [from the family], in the larger society women are seen as predominantly fulfilling nurturing, expressive functions … [and] intellectually aggressive women are seen as deviants.”23 This mode of thought about women’s work is clearly identifiable in the work of Talcott Parsons and Erik Erikson, analyzed above. By means of consigning many women to functions allegedly related to their reproductive capacity, they are maintained in a permanently unequal position in the labor force. This in turn both discourages women from seeking promotion or, if they have the option, from seeking work at all, and reinforces the idea that they are not capable of performing the more demanding and prestigious jobs. That “woman’s place is in the home” is to a large extent a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In the light of all this, it is not surprising that a strong section of the contemporary feminist movement calls for the abolition of the family, as an institution which has in the past proved so oppressive to women. Ann Oakley, for example, attacks the family itself as well as Parsons’ analysis of it.24 She argues that the abolition of the housewife role and of the automatic assumption that women will rear children are necessary steps toward the equality of women, but that they are, in themselves, not sufficient. Marriage will have to be abolished also, as a “basic impediment to occupational sex-equality.” I would agree that, under present conditions, both of work and of marriage, it is undoubtedly true that marriage is such a “basic impediment.” This is testified to, for example, by the fact that in England female professional workers are between three and four times more likely to be unmarried than male professionals. However, this is not to say that, given radical changes in the structure and conditions of work, an altered family structure could not coexist with sexual equality in the occupational sphere.
Shulamith Firestone goes one large step further, and looks forward not only to the abolition of the family, but to the time when women will be completely freed from pregnancy and childbirth.25 As we have previously indicated, Firestone is, of course, correct in asserting that the family has “reinforce[d] biologically based sex class,” and that “the family structure is the source of psychological, economic, and political oppression.”26 But, again, this is not to acknowledge that any family structure would be incompatible with the equality of the sexes. Moreover, Firestone in fact commits the same error as many antifeminists in perceiving the entire nurturing and domestic female sex role as necessarily implied by women’s reproductive biology. “Nature produced the fundamental inequality,” she asserts, “… half the human race must bear and rear the children of all of them.”27 Unlike the antifeminists, who thereupon conclude that the whole female sex role is inevitable, Firestone concludes that the only way to liberate women is to replace natural with artificial reproduction.
It is essential to recognize, however, first, that without the connecting link of the division of sex roles in the family there is no reason why female child-bearing should entail child-rearing by women alone. Second, Firestone’s conviction that an artificial means of reproduction is an essential prerequisite to female equality is largely based on the fact that she perceives women’s reproductive function as “barbaric,” “clumsy [and] inefficient,” “tyrannical” and “fundamentally oppressive.”28 Surely, however, though the reproductive process may have oppressive and barbaric attributes for women in a sexist society where it is to a very large extent controlled by men, there is no justification for such harsh judgments regarding the experiences of pregnancy and childbirth in themselves. It is not the fact that women are the primary reproductive agents of society, in itself, that has led to their oppression, but rather that reproduction has taken place within a patriarchal power structure, has been considered a private rather than a social concern, and has been perceived as dictating women’s entire lives, and as defining their very nature.
Many other feminists have warned of the facile and misguided nature of demands for the abolition of the family. Though they regard the existing family structure as an institution which oppresses women in the process of serving important functions for capitalism, and the ideology of the family as an age-old reinforcement of women’s inequality, they do not consider that purely negative attacks against it are the answer to anything.29
The feminist struggle against the “dictates of Nature” is clearly exemplified by Juliet Mitchell’s work, as is the perception that the “lynchpin” of this line of argument is the idea of the family. “Like woman herself,” Mitchell explains,
the family appears as a natural object, but is actually a cultural creation. There is nothing inevitable about the form or role of the family, any more than there is about the character or role of women. It is the function of ideology to present these given social types as aspects of Nature itself…. The apparently natural condition can be made to appear more attractive than the arduous advance of human beings towards culture.30
Her aim is the equality of women as a result of the triumph of culture over nature. First in a brilliant pamphlet, later enlarged into a book, she argues that the root of the problem of women’s role is that their functions within the family have been regarded as intrinsically bound together.31 Only when it is recognized that reproduction, sexuality and the socialization of children, though fused in the traditional female sex role, are in fact separable from each other, can women be freed from the stereotypes and functionalist definitions of the past.
As we have seen in the course of this study, what has been alleged to be women’s nature has been used throughout history and into the present to justify keeping the female sex in a position of political, social and economic inequality. It is evident, from arguments ranging from Aristotle to leading scholars and Supreme Court Justices of the twentieth century, that women’s nature has been prescriptively defined—defined, that is, in terms of the functions they have served in a male-dominated world, and, particularly, within the patriarchal family, which, with its distinct sex roles, has also been designated as in accord with the dictates of nature. Women’s significant but few and specific biological differences from men—the capacity to bear and suckle children, and lesser muscular strength—have been held to entail a whole range of “natural” differences—moral, intellectual, emotional—between the sexes. Because of the enforcement of such notions by political systems, laws, institutions, and socialization processes, women have been stunted and crippled as human beings, and persons of both sexes have been unable to develop freely their own personalities and potential.
Those who perceive the qualities approved in women today, or who perceived the characteristics of women in the fourth century B.C. or at any time since, as “women’s nature,” refuse to acknowledge that women have been produced, or at the least, very much shaped, by the societies in which they have lived—societies which have always been male-dominated. As both Plato and John Stuart Mill were well aware, no one knows what women’s nature is like, as distinct from men’s, and no one will know, until members of the two sexes are enabled to develop in the absence of differential treatment during the socialization process and throughout their lives. Even if we did know what women’s nature is like, moreover, it is worth pausing to ask what repercussions should follow from this, either in theory or in practice. In other words, what value does “nature” have as a standard by which to test human norms, institutions or practices?
As a number of feminists have pointed out, and as Marx clearly recognized when discussing relations between the sexes, modern civilization is a very long way from nature, and the process of human history has been to a large extent the conquest of nature and the superimposition onto it of culture. Thus human nature, when this is understood to mean the fundamental characteristics of human beings, is not something which has been fixed and will continue to be fixed for all time, but is rather an achievement, a result of thousands of years of history. Men and women, individually and in their relationships with each other, have the potential for becoming more and more specifically human and differentiated from the other animals, and, to a large extent, it is by being freed from the constraints of necessity imposed on them by nature that humans can achieve the fullness of their human potentiality.32
The demands of nature, moreover, have applied not only to the sphere of production, but also to the sphere of reproduction. Much of Marx’s writing, of course, is concerned with the historical process of humanity’s freeing itself from the constraints of arduously producing its means of subsistence, and the eventual achievement of that “realm of freedom” in which all human beings will be able to create, and to live lives that are no longer animal, but truly human, because for the first time truly social. Clearly, the nature of people must be affected considerably by whether they need to spend two or twelve hours a day toiling in order to feed and clothe themselves, and by the conditions under which this production takes place. But there is another side to the picture, and one of particular importance for women. This is the freeing of human beings—and primarily women, because of their biology—from the lifelong constraints of the need to reproduce. The scientific breakthroughs that have prolonged life, eradicated epidemies, and drastically reduced infant mortality, mean that there is now no need for women to spend more than a tiny fraction of their lives in bearing enough children to maintain the population level. Moreover, the provision by technology of increasingly reliable methods of birth control and increasingly safe methods of abortion means that each woman can choose both if and when she will bear children. Just as the characteristics of the means of production affect people’s development and their nature, so do the characteristics of the means of reproduction. It could surely not be claimed that the nature of a woman who knows that at any moment over a thirty-year period she may become pregnant, and that in order to raise two children she must bear twelve, is the same as the nature of a woman who can control her body to the extent of spending two planned years of her life engaged in the physical process of reproduction, with the same end result. By reasoning parallel to Marx’s concerning the realm of production, women can achieve freedom and a fully developed human nature only when the reproduction and rearing of children becomes a freely chosen activity, and when it no longer dictates the entire mode of life of the female sex.
For these conditions to come about, however, more than a revolution in technology is required; a revolution in conditions and ideas must occur with it, and although this has clearly begun, it is by no means completed. This latter revolution must accomplish two ends. First, it must make motherhood a freely chosen option for women. Contraception in itself, of course, does not make childbearing optional, if female socialization is overwhelmingly weighted toward motherhood, or if women are not reinforced or highly rewarded in other spheres of their lives. Second, the revolution must succeed in clearly separating out those aspects of reproduction which are biologically women’s—necessarily, pregnancy, and if it is opted for, lactation—from all those long-term aspects of child-rearing which are not necessarily women’s work, but have been made to seem so on account of the accepted structure of the family. As we have seen in the case of Firestone, some feminists as well as antifeminists have fallen into the trap of perceiving child-rearing as inseparable from childbearing, which means of course that as long as the latter is a female function, so must the former be.
Now that technology has given women the means of controlling reproduction (in principle, though by no means universally in practice), there is a far greater possibility of achieving a separation of functions. The fact that many women have now, and it is to be hoped all women will have in the future, complete freedom of choice as to whether to bear children at all, and when to bear those they choose to have, means that women’s lives need not be perceived, by either themselves or society, as dictated by the physical demands of maternity.
As for the socialization of young children, while it is clearly of immense significance, there is no reason why it should be done by one woman, the biological mother. There is, indeed, no reason why it should be done by one person alone, or by women only. In this area, the structure of the family that has predominated throughout history must change radically if women are to achieve equality with men. And yet there are clearly many people who still believe that the conventional division of roles between the sexes, and most particularly where child-rearing is concerned, is both of critical importance to the maintenance of civilization, and indispensable for the preservation of the family unit. Parsons and Erikson, as we have seen, clearly exemplify this mode of thinking. George Gilder’s recent and popular books, Sexual Suicide and Naked Nomads33 are based on the same assumptions, with the added belief of the author that men, being fundamentally less civilized, require to be continually “socialized” by women even throughout their adult lives. And when Richard Nixon vetoed the child-care bill of 1971-72, he did it on the grounds that it would lead to the “destruction of the American family”34 He was clearly including in his definition of “the American family” the arrangement whereby children are cared for completely within the individual family unit, with the mother devoting herself to this purpose while the father provides the family’s entire support. In fact, more than half of existing American families do not fit this prescriptive definition, and it is perfectly feasible to envisage and work toward a family structure in which none of these assumptions are made. It is clearly the historical inequality within the family that provokes the iconoclastic urge to destroy it. The inequalities of the past, however, need not preclude the achievement in the future of a family structure that is consistent with sexual equality.
We must aim toward a time when child-rearing will be equally shared between the sexes. This is essential, if women are to enjoy equality, for three reasons. First, the great majority of women, who are mothers, can never be men’s equals in the work force or in any realm of activity outside the home while only their working lives are subject over a period of years to the effects of the total responsibility for child-rearing. Women presently are handicapped in the realm of work and public activity not only by the fact that most, by far, still actually do take a disproportionate amount of responsibility for housework and child-care, but also because, even if they do not, this is the expectation of the world in general—of employers, courts, voters, and other persons and institutions who have power over what women will be able to do in the outside world, and who discriminate against them to the extent documented above.
Second, only when men share equally in such tasks as housework and child-rearing will they come to be valued equally with those “masculine” tasks which society presently acknowledges to be productive and rewards with money, and sometimes with prestige. There will be no such thing as an inferior class of “women’s work,” and no relegation of women alone, in the work force as in the home, to nurturing, “expressive,” supportive and under-or unpaid work.
Third, it is clearly by identification with the parents, as Parsons recognizes, that children learn traditional sex roles. Girls and boys will not grow up with open-minded ideas about themselves and the kinds of lives they want to lead until they perceive adults, and especially those closest to them—their parents—filling, and expressing themselves in, all types of roles. None of these three aims can be achieved until housework is shared and “parenting” takes the place of “mothering.”
For this to take place, there will have to be many changes involving the merging, to a considerable extent, of what have up till now been regarded as the private and unproductive functions of family life, and the public, productive work of the market economy. On the one hand, much of the work of the private household, and especially the most time-consuming part of it, child-care, can be done outside of the home. Good, accessible and subsidized day care facilities, staffed by both sexes, will be a partial solution. In addition, however, the structure and conditions of work outside the home will have to relinquish the inflexibility they have been able to develop on the assumption that women take responsibility for home and family. Employers and institutions will have to change their attitudes toward men and women. They must cease to consider women as dependents and adjuncts of their husbands, ready to move like part of the furniture whenever his job requires it, expected to give their time gratuitously for the furtherance of their men’s careers, to accept low pay and insecurity of tenure for the work they undertake outside the home because it is assumed that they are really supported by a man, and willing to assume total responsibility for the raising of children. Employers and institutions, as well as the law, must acknowledge that fathers have as much responsibility as mothers for the care of their children. Only when a new flexibility develops, and it is conceded that the eight-hour day is no more sacred than the ten-hour or twelve-hour day was once held to be, will we be able to achieve a society in which both men and women share in the pleasures and burdens of the tasks that are now so arbitrarily divided between them. Whether such changes can be accomplished within the structure of capitalism is a question which must be considered outside the scope of this work. Suffice it to say that, given the obvious advantages that capitalism derives from the present sex-role differentiation—particularly the cheap or gratuitous labor provided by women—changes such as are outlined above can be expected to be resisted strongly by those with economic power and an interest in maintaining the status quo.
We have reached a point in technological and economic development at which it should be possible to do away with sex roles entirely, except for the isolated case of woman’s freely chosen exercise of her procreative capacity. Women today (in principle though not yet in practice) are in a position which is in an important respect analogous to that of the female guardians of Plato’s Republic. While the reproductive processes of the guardians were to be controlled by the philosophic rulers of the ideal state, however, modern technology has given women for the first time control over their own bodies and freedom from the demand that they spend their adult lives in reproduction. While for Plato it was necessary to abolish the family in order to achieve such control, this is no longer a prerequisite for being able to plan the number and timing of pregnancies. In the modern age, then, as in Plato’s Republic, there is no rational basis for defining women’s nature and prescribing their entire lives in terms of their sexual and reproductive functions.
As we have seen, attempts are still being made to retain the ancient practice of defining women in terms of the functions they serve. Such attempts, however, can be refuted by means of rational analysis of the separate functions which women and the family presently serve, and by acknowledgment that practically all of these functions can be fulfilled by men and women, rather than divided along sex lines. The tendency to regard men as complete persons with potentials and rights, but to define women by the functions they serve in relation to men, is clearly unjustifiable. While fully consistent with a hierarchical conception of a good society such as Aristotle’s, in which only the few males at the top were regarded as fully human, it is jarringly out of place in a society which claims to be founded on the principle of human equality. In such a society, women must be treated in every respect—politically, socially, economically—as the equals of men. They must be set free from assumptions about the kinds of work they are suited for, and enabled to attain equal status with men in the work force and in all other parts of the economic and political realm. Women cannot become equal citizens, workers, or human beings—let alone philosopher queens—until the functionalist perception of their sex is dead.