As they used to say in our grammar-school workbooks, one of these things is not like the others: “And at the great festival they gave away canoes, whale oil, stone ax blades, women, blankets, and food.” Margaret Mead records an Arapesh aphorism with the same disconcerting note: “Your own mother, your own sister, your own pigs, your own yams that you have piled up, you may not eat. Other people’s mothers, other people’s sisters, other people’s pigs, other people’s yams that they have piled up, you may eat.” And in the Old Testament we read how one tribe hopes to make peace with another: “Let us take their daughters to us for wives and let us give them our daughters.”
Of all of the cases in which women are treated as gifts, this last, the woman given in marriage, is primary. We still preserve the custom in the Protestant wedding ceremony, the minister asking the gathered families, “Who giveth this woman to be married?” and the father of the bride replying, “I do.” The ceremony is a vestige of the more ancient institution in which marriage is an exchange between tribes or clans, the one giving the bride and the other giving wealth (or service, or a different bride) in return. Typically the initial wedding gifts—the “bridewealth”—are not the end of the matter. The marriage marks only the first of a long series of exchanges that have, as usual, no apparent “economic” function but from which emerges an active and coherent network of cooperating kin.
We have seen enough of gift exchange to know that it would be too simple to say that the woman given in marriage is treated as property. Or, rather, she is a kind of property, but the “property rights” involved are not those to which the phrase usually refers. She is not a chattel, she is not a commodity; her father may be able to give her away, but he may not sell her.
This distinction hardly quiets our modern sense of justice, however. If a person can be transferred from one man to another, why is being a gift any better than being a commodity? How did the father get the right to give his daughter away in the first place? Can a mother give her son away? Is the mother consulted in the matter at all? If a marriage must be a gift exchange, why could the couple not give themselves away?
To answer we shall have to begin at the beginning, not with the day of the daughter’s wedding, but with the day of her birth. And we shall have to clarify our terms a little.
“Property,” by one old definition, is a “right of action.” To possess, to enjoy, to use, to destroy, to sell, to rent, to give or bequeath, to improve, to pollute—all of these are actions, and a thing (or a person) becomes a “property” whenever someone has “in it” the right of any such action. There is no property without an actor, then, and in this sense property is an expression of the human will in things (and in other people).
The definition is a broad one, but it allows us to make the distinctions necessary to a discussion of cases in which human beings become property of one kind or another. A rather odd problem that arose with the advent of organ transplants will illustrate the particular distinction we need at the moment. It used to be the case that when a person died the law recognized no property rights in the body. Growing out of a religious sense of the sacredness of the body, this legal formula was intended to make it clear that the executors of an estate could not make the body of the deceased into an item of commerce to be bought, sold, or used to pay debts. It even used to be the case that a man could not direct the manner of his own burial and expect the courts to back him up, because his body, not being property, was not a part of his estate. As soon as it became possible to transplant an organ from the dead to the living, however, it became clear that the sense of “property rights” being used here was too vague. The law justly restrained the right to sell, but what of the right to bestow?
In response to just this question, every state in the Union has recently adopted what is known as the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, a law that recognizes the right of an adult to bequeath all or part of his body in the event of his death. It vests that right primarily in the person himself, of course, but in special cases it extends the right of bestowal to other people. In the case of minor children the right of bestowal lies with the parents, who may now legally donate the body of a child who has died or been killed.
Our ability to transplant body organs raises ethical questions—and has therefore required legal clarification—because with it comes the understanding that while the body from which an organ is removed may be dead, the organ itself is not. Transactions that involve life itself seem to constitute the primary case in which we feel called upon to distinguish the right of bestowal from the right of sale. The rules of gift exchange are such that what is treated as a gift retains or even increases its liveliness, and most cultures, when forced to decide, therefore classify human life as a gift (which explains why the most significant work on gift exchange outside of anthropology has focused on matters of medical policy and ethics). If human life itself must become an item of commerce, transferred from person to person or house to house, then it must be gift property and the “rights of action” must be those that appertain to gifts, not to commodities.
With this distinction in mind we may return to the problem of the woman given in marriage, beginning, as I say, at the beginning. Not only do most cultures classify human life as a gift, but they take in particular the life of a newborn child to be a gift that has been bestowed upon its parents. (Bestowed by whom? By the gods, by the earth, by the spirits of the recently dead, by the tree near the water hole which is known to make women pregnant—however the local story has it.) The recipients of this gift are its custodians so long as the child is dependent upon them, and they may, under special circumstances, exercise their right of bestowal. The child whose body organs are given away when it dies is one instance, albeit an unusual one; the young woman whose father gives her in marriage is a second. A third example again distinguishes the right of sale from the right of bestowal: our laws prohibit parents from selling their children, but they grant them the right to give a child up for adoption. There are special restrictions and guidelines under which a child is given away, of course, but they only serve to emphasize once again our feeling that if a child’s life must be transferred from one family to another, it must be a gift.*1 There are many cultures in which all children are given away in the normal course of events, being raised by the family of a paternal aunt, for example, and not by their biological parents. In these cases a child is just one of many gifts that pass among kin.
At this point, if we are to make our way back to the woman given in marriage, we shall have to distinguish male life from female life, for even though both are taken to be a bestowal at birth, their paths invariably diverge, particularly in groups that figure descent through only one sex. In Africa they say, “Bridewealth is childwealth,” an aphorism that we may take as another response to the question, If the life of a child is a gift, who is the donor?—the answer in this case being that the mother’s clan has given the child to the father’s clan. In other words, the gifts given in marriage are not a return gift for the bride so much as for her eventual children. In patrilineal groups in particular (the primary case in Africa), a woman’s clan, when she marries, must give up its interest in her offspring and so receives the “childwealth” in return. The children then belong to their father’s clan (as, in a sense, they do in our own society, where they carry the father’s name). Looked at structurally, in a patrilineal group, males do not become gifts when they grow up because they do not circulate: a young man stays in his group when he marries, and so does his virility, his potential offspring. But a young woman moves when she marries, and the gifts given for her stand witness to the fact that both she and the rights of her fertility (rights in gentricem) have passed to her husband’s clan.
Again, if we look only at the structure of things, we could say that in a matrilineal group a husband (and his virility) is bestowed upon his wife’s lineage. Her family group receives his contribution to the creation of the children. No gift institution has arisen to recognize this, however (although matrilineal groups do treat bridewealth differently, a point to which I shall return). As far as I know, there are no groups in which the men are given in marriage.*2 As the anthropologist Jack Goody puts it, “The mirror opposite of bridewealth would be groomwealth; and of bride-service, groom-service. But there is little to put in these two boxes by way of actual cases, except perhaps the payments of ‘borrowed man’ of the Menangkabau of Sumatra.” But if a borrowed man is all we have, and only one at that, we may as well say that men are not given in marriage.
What does happen to male children, then? If the life of a child is a gift, does the right of bestowal in that gift pass automatically to a boy as he becomes a man? Can he just take the car keys and go as soon as he gets his license?*3
There is one general situation in which male children are given as gifts, or used to be. Our earlier discussion of the “rites of the first fruits” indicated that in the Old Testament all natural increase—the harvest, the calves, the lambs, and so forth—is treated as a gift from God, and its first fruits are consequently sacrificed as a return gift. Exodus records Yahweh’s clear statement as to the gender of these fruits: “All that opens the womb is mine, all your male cattle, the firstlings of cow and sheep.” The males are the gift from the Lord to the people, and the people pass the first one back.
The exchange was not always confined to animals, apparently. There is some indication that in antiquity the first male child was also sacrificed to the Lord. The Old Testament implies the rite by making the exception: “All the first-born of your sons you shall redeem.” Thus it was permitted to substitute certain ritually pure animals for the male child. The story of Abraham and Isaac is a drama of such a substitution. The New Testament repeats the motif: the Lord gives His son and the life of that firstborn is sacrificed as a gift to reconnect man and God (the story being told in the Old Testament terms: “the blood of the lamb.”)*4
In Polynesian mythology we find men, gifts, and sacrifice brought together in a manner similar to that of the Old Testament. Polynesian tribal chiefs were equated with gods, and as such they received two gifts from their people: women in marriage and men as sacrifices. The people of Fiji saw the two as equivalent gifts, the woman who is “brought raw” to be married and the “cooked man” who is sacrificed to the god-king. In the mythology at least, “cooked men” were literally eaten. A Hawaiian myth in which a man manages to redeem his life with a substitute gift indicates that had he not done so he would have been killed and baked in an earth oven. Male life is an edible good to the gods, and among the polite greetings that a Fijian commoner can offer to his ruling chief is “Eat me”! In Polynesia the continued fertility of the land was taken to be a consequence of the women and men given to the god-king. Like the God of Abraham, the Polynesian gods remained the faithful genitors of the land so long as the gift of their increase was recognized by return gifts.
In aboriginal times, therefore—including those aborigines we take to be our own ancestors—male life was sometimes treated as a gift, and parents, kings, and gods were recognized as having the right of bestowal in that gift. The modern parallel may be what Wilfred Owen called “the old lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”—it is sweet and proper to die for one’s country. For when the state replaces the god-king, male life is no longer baked in earth ovens, it is sent to the trenches. And while no gift ceremony accompanies enlistment (no sergeant says, “Who giveth this man?”), in our popular mythology it is the mother (or the wife if the man is married) who gives a man to the army. When a man actually dies fighting for the state, the newspapers all say the mother “gave her son,” and she is the one who receives the flag of her country handed across the coffin.
In each of these cases the boy or man who is given as a gift assumes standard functions of the gift: in the aboriginal examples, male life bestowed upon the Lord or god-king renewed the bond between that deity and the group, and ensured the continued fertility of flock and field. And although the modern state began to lose its appeal as an object of sacrifice after the First World War, we still recognize that the power of a collectively held belief can be increased by the man who gives his life in its name.
The woman who is given in marriage similarly takes on typical functions of the gift. She, too, establishes a bond (between clans or families), and as part of an ongoing system of kinship, she, like any gift, becomes an agent of the community’s cohesion and stability. In fact, the institution of the woman given in marriage makes for a rather striking example of what I earlier called “the old lovers’ quarrel between liberty and community.” For the fact is that marriages established through massive gift exchanges are more stable and enduring than those that are not; but by the same token, the partners (both men and women, but women in particular when they are the gifts) have significantly less freedom. Where there is no gift exchange, on the other hand, marriages are less durable, the partners more independent. So the choice: where the desideratum is community we find some people trapped in bad marriages; where it is individual choice we find some people growing old in isolation.
The Uduk, the tribal group I introduced in chapter 1, make a fine example of the side of this dichotomy in which marriage is not a constraining institution.*5 The Uduk are matrilineal; neither in structure nor in ceremony is an Uduk bride (or her fertility) given in marriage. In fact, there are essentially no marriage gifts, and according to Wendy James, the anthropologist who has done the most work with the Uduk, marriage itself “is only meaningful as a sexual relationship, publicly acknowledged and accompanied by a few well-defined but short-term obligations.”
Uduk women are very independent; they readily quit an unsatisfying union. Marriages typically last only three or four years. Not being the property of the men, not even gift property, Uduk women are self-possessed, literally and figuratively. “In myth, anecdote and popular expectation,” James tells us, “women often take the initiative in sex and marriage…They may often ‘dominate’ their husbands…” In the course of her research, James discovered some manuscript notes on the Uduk which contained a telling comment: “Wife beating is far less common than it is among the [other local tribes]…Only among the Uduk is husband beating by the wife no cause for astonishment.” If an Uduk woman suspects that her husband has a lover, she “will take her special fighting stick (a six-foot bamboo pole) and challenge the other woman to a duel.”
The Uduk are citizens of Ethiopia, and in 1963 the Ethiopian government added an interesting twist to this story. No social scientist pining for the controls of the physics laboratory could have asked for a better case study. Noting that Uduk marriages were unstable, the government decided to introduce a system of bridewealth payments. Bridewealth stabilizes marriages, they reasoned; why not simply graft it onto the Uduk kinship system? In consultation with tribal elders, the government decided upon a cash sum to be given by a man to his wife’s kin at the time of their marriage.
Problems sprang up immediately. As we saw when I first introduced the Uduk, any property transferred from one clan to another among these people must be treated as a gift. All transactions between clans are therefore accompanied by the need to clarify their nature and to make sure that the received wealth is consumed as a gift, not converted into capital. But bridewealth confounded the Uduk, and for the obvious reason: their brides are not in fact given. Therefore, the conundrum: if the bridewealth was a gift, then it was one that had not been reciprocated—and yet the name itself implied that it had. And if it was not a gift, then the bride had apparently been purchased, an even more onerous interpretation.
Some of the Uduk treated the bridewealth as a gift, inventing newfangled gift institutions to deal with the moral complexities that it raised. But most settled on the other side, deciding that bridewealth was really cash purchase, and refusing to pay it. They spoke of it in the language of the marketplace, says James, using “the ordinary word for buying and selling, an action which has no moral content and which only takes place between unrelated people.” Bridewealth payments did nothing to change the underlying structure of Uduk kinship and by that structure women are not gifts.*6 When asked why they refused to pay bridewealth, the standard cry became, “Are we to sell our girl as if she were a goat or something?”
If we take property to be a right of action and therefore an expression of the human will, then whenever a woman is treated as property, even if she is a gift, we know that she is not strictly her own person: her will is somewhere subject to someone else’s. I suspect we may make a general point here: in societies that confer some degree of power upon women—matrilineal groups like the Uduk being a primary, but not exclusive, example—women will tend not to be given in marriage or, if they are, the return gifts will tend to be tokens and not substantial wealth. The amount of self-will recognized for women is inversely proportional to the size of the return gift. Furthermore, in societies that confer property rights on women—where women may inherit and bequeath, where they may buy and sell, where they carry a dowry into marriage which is theirs alone to dispose of—any wealth exchanged for a woman at marriage will tend to be seen as an immoral purchase, not as a gift. The Uduk interpretation of bridewealth is one example; another may be found in India, where women have always had property rights (not equivalent to those of men, perhaps, but certainly those I have just outlined, the dowry in particular). In India the ancient Code of Manu says what the Uduk say: “No father…may take even the smallest gratuity for his daughter; for a man who, through avarice, takes a gratuity, is a seller of his offspring.”
Even in those societies where a child’s life is considered to be a gift bestowed upon its parents, it does not follow that the parents retain the right of bestowal in that life after the child matures. In societies that confer power upon women as well as men, the right of bestowal passes automatically to a woman as she becomes an adult, whereupon she, like her brothers, is free to bestow her own life where she chooses.*7 She may even carry a six-foot bamboo fighting stick if she wants. If, on the other hand, a woman does not receive the right of bestowal in herself, then she can never become an actor in her own right, and never an autonomous individual. This last is what is onerous to us in the idea that a woman may be given in marriage—not, I think, that people are sometimes treated as gifts, not even that there is such a thing as “the right of bestowal in persons,” but that that right passes to the son when he comes of age, but not to the daughter. For where men alone may give and receive, and where women alone are the gifts, men will be active and women passive, men self-possessed and women dependent, men worldly and women domestic, and so on, through all the clichés of gender in a patriarchy.
In a recent edition of Emily Post’s Etiquette, which I shall be treating as a sort of textbook of domestic ethnography, we find that in a modern, capitalist nation the father still gives away the bride. Before he does so, if he knows his etiquette, he will have played out that famous man-to-man scene in which the groom asks him for, and he agrees to deliver, his daughter’s “hand.” No parallel customs exist for the bride: no one gives the groom to her; she receives no hand from her future mother-in-law.
In the society that Miss Post describes, not only is the bride given in marriage, but she is also the recipient of the marriage gifts. Miss Post is quite clear: “You seldom send a present to the bridegroom. Even if you are an old friend of his and have never met the bride, your present is sent to her…Rather often friends of the bridegroom do pick out things suitable for him, such as a decanter or a rather masculine-looking desk set, which are sent to her but are obviously intended for his use.” Finally, the bride not only receives the gifts but it is she, not her husband, who writes the thank-you notes.
The curious asymmetry of this institution suggests that while a man and a woman may be marrying each other, the woman alone is marrying a network of kin. If she receives the gifts and expresses the gratitude, then she is the one who is woven into the social fabric established by the commerce of marriage gifts. In a final note of advice, Miss Post tells her readers that once the wedding is over, the bride “must try to understand and accept the attitude of her future family (whatever it may be), and she must not stand inflexibly upon what she unwittingly considers to be her own family’s rights. The objective that she should keep in mind is the happiness of the relationship between her future in-laws and herself.” Again, no such suggestion appears for the groom.
A woman given in marriage in a modern, capitalist nation is not only a gift, then, she is actually expected to think and act in the spirit of the gift, to become the incarnation and voice of the hau. By attending to relationship and muting her individualism, she is supposed to become the active link that will unify the two families. The groom is asked to do none of this labor. In this particular ceremony, at least, to deal with gifts—to receive them, to express the gratitude, to intuit and act upon their spirit—is a mark of the female gender.
By “gender” I mean to indicate the cultural distinctions between male and female—not the physical signs of sex but that whole complex of activities, postures, speech patterns, attitudes, affects, acquisitions, and styles by virtue of which a woman becomes feminine (a man “effeminate”) and a man masculine (a woman “mannish”). Any system of gender will be connected to actual sexuality, of course, but that is only one of its possible connections. It may also support and affirm the local creation myth, perpetuate the exploitation of one sex by another, organize aggression and warfare, ensure the distribution of food from clan to clan—it may, in other words, serve any number of ends unrelated to actual sexuality.
Many writers have addressed themselves to divisions of labor based upon gender; I want to speak here of a similar “division of commerce,” one in which a “man” trades in one manner and a “woman” in another. I have opened with a description of the Protestant wedding not to raise again the issue of the woman given in marriage, but to show that—at least in the world that Emily Post describes for us—gift exchange is a “female” commerce and gifts a “female” property. There is no actual prohibition on the groom’s involving himself with the wedding gifts, of course; he may write thank-you notes if he wants to. But that activity will not make him masculine. Only the bride is able to affirm her gender, her social sexuality, by concerning herself with gift exchange.*8
In recent years as women have justly demanded an opportunity to become actors on a par with their brothers in the marketplace, a new genre of newspaper article has appeared on the women’s pages to articulate the silent assumptions of “male” commerce, assumptions that women will need to know about if they are to survive in a world where the spirit of the gift may be missing. As gifts are agents of relationship, so brides become relations, literally, by the form of commerce assigned to them; but in the market, in a male commerce, relationship is a secondary concern. Thus a woman executive offers a typical word of advice to the women who read the “style” pages of the New York Times: “Women on the way up should avoid associating with ‘unsuccessful turkeys,’ even if they happen to be friends. Leaving your friends behind isn’t disloyalty. You are going to be judged by the company you keep. Seek out the people who can help you. Men have known this for years, and we are playing in their arena.”
And playing by their rules, too, we gather. To succeed in the marketplace one must, it seems, be willing to sacrifice attachment to advancement, affection to calculation. This ability to act without regard to relationship has traditionally been a mark of the male gender. The man who wants to make money does not spend a lot of emotional time abandoning his—how did Miss Post put it?—unwitting attitudes in favor of those of his in-laws. He is self-possessed, not self-effacing. He is willing to shun the “turkeys” who were his pals in college, willing to evict deadbeats from his apartment buildings (and wary, therefore, of renting to friends and relations), willing to put people out of work if one of his ventures isn’t paying its way, willing to close the operation down completely if some other property needs a shot of capital, and so forth and so on.
In fine, when anyone, male or female, sets out to make money in the marketplace, he reckons his actions by the calculus of comparative value and allows that value, rather than the home life of his clients and friends, to guide him. I say “male or female,” but of course this ability is still considered to be a mark of the masculine, a decade of advice columns notwithstanding. The men’s pages of the newspapers need no articles earnestly asserting that dumping your friends is not disloyalty. “Men have known this for years.” In a modern, industrial nation, the ability to act without relationship is still a mark of the masculine gender; boys can still become men, and men become more manly, by entering the marketplace and dealing in commodities. A woman can do the same thing if she wants to, of course, but it will not make her feminine.
These divisions of commerce by gender are most easily seen in those “boundary” situations in which a man or a woman is caught between two spheres—where, as in this last example, women would enter the market (and feel they must be “men” to do so), or where, in the examples that follow, men are denied access to the market and feel as a result that they are not manly. The great blues singer Big Bill Broonzy once wrote a song about the Jim Crow fact that white people call black men “boys,” regardless of their age (“I wonder when I’ll get to be called a man, / D’I have to wait’ll I be ninety-three?” goes the refrain). In a society in which black men cannot enter the market as equals with white men, and in which being an actor in the market is associated with masculinity, a black man is always a “boy” (unless he’s a thief: theft will make him a “bad man,” but a man nonetheless). Think back for a moment to Carol Stack’s story of the kinship network in the Flats, the black ghetto near Chicago. Magnolia Waters and her husband, Calvin, disburse an inheritance among their kin. But as anyone who reads the story cannot help noticing, Magnolia is the main actor. Why? Because she is able to respond to need and strengthen the ties of kinship through gifts without any challenge to her gender. So long as gift exchange is a “female” commerce, her activity actually affirms her gender; through it she becomes a Big Woman in her community.
Calvin has no such luxury. In tribal situations, in an extended family, even in the community of science, a man may become a Big Man through the bestowal of his gifts. But where exchange trade is the only male commerce, generosity makes no one manly. I recently heard a story about an American Indian living on a reservation in North Dakota who, in the late 1960s, received $10,000 from the government, a lot of money in a place where many people lived on $2,000 a year. What did the man do with his windfall? He threw a party for the whole tribe, a party that lasted for days. Now, the interesting thing is that on the reservation there are two distinct versions of this event: the “Indian version,” in which the party-giver appears as a hero, a true Indian; and the “white version,” which takes the “wasted” money as proof of the inherently infantile nature of the Indians, thus justifying the continued management of Indian wealth by the white-dominated Bureau of Indian Affairs. (The story is the same as the one about the Flats—the fate of an influx of capital into a gift community. So long as gifts carry female worth in the white culture, for a black man to emerge from the ghetto or for an Indian to leave the reservation involves a crisis of gender: to make the transition he must adopt what is at home an unmanly individualism.)
To close this discussion of gender and commerce, I want to return one last time to Emily Post. In the section of her Etiquette devoted to “showers,” a woman’s gift-giving institution if there ever was one, Miss Post lists three different persons for whom these “friendly gatherings” are given: a bride-to-be, an expectant mother, and the new clergyman. What is this solitary gentleman doing among nubile and pregnant ladies?
Miss Post suggests that the women of the town bring food to fill the cleric’s empty larder. It seems a sensible enough suggestion, but still, the ladies are not urged to give food to the new vice president for marketing at the local manufacturing plant. The clergyman is grouped with the pregnant and the betrothed as the object of a gift ceremony because he performs a “female” role in the community. I earlier distinguished between “labor” and “work,” saying that there are gift labors that cannot, by their nature, be undertaken in the willed, time-conscious, quantitative style of the market. A clergyman does such labors. Not only is he charged with the cure of souls, that interior task which cannot be accomplished in any market, but nowadays he must also be a social worker, visiting nurse, marriage counselor, and psychotherapist. And by our current notions of gender all these duties place him closer to Magnolia Waters than to any salesman.
To make the wider point here, what we take to be the female professions—child care, social work, nursing, the creation and care of culture, the ministry, teaching (these last, when done by men, being done by effete men, as Vice President Spiro Agnew told us)—all contain a greater admixture of gift labor than male professions—banking, law, management, sales, and so on. Furthermore, the female professions do not pay as well as the male professions. The disparity is partly a consequence of a stratified gender system: women are still not paid on a par with men for equal work, a discrimination therefore clearly unrelated to the content of that work.
But if we could factor out the exploitation, something else would still remain: there are labors that do not pay because they, or the ends to which they are directed, require built-in constraints on profiteering, exploitation, and—more subtly—the application of comparative value with which the market is by nature at ease. There are two points here, one having to do with the nature of the work, the other with the commitment of the worker. “Female” tasks—social work and soul work—cannot be undertaken on a pure cost-benefit basis because their products are not commodities, not things we easily price or willingly alienate. Furthermore, those who assume these labors automatically inhibit their ability to “sell themselves” at the moment they answer their calling. Gift labor requires the kind of emotional or spiritual commitment that precludes its own marketing. Businessmen rightly point out that a man who cannot threaten to quit his job has no leverage when demanding a higher salary. But some tasks cannot be undertaken in such an adversarial spirit. Few jobs are pure gift labors, of course—although a nurse is committed to healing, she is also an actor in the marketplace—but any portion of gift labor in a job will tend to pull it out of the market and make it a less lucrative—and a “female”—profession.
But, you ask, if we really valued these gift labors, couldn’t we pay them well? Couldn’t we pay social workers as we pay doctors, pay poets as we do bankers, pay the cellist in the orchestra as we pay the advertising executive in the box seat? Yes, we could. We could—we should—reward gift labors where we value them. My point here is simply that where we do so we shall have to recognize that the pay they receive has not been “made” the way fortunes are made in the market, that it is a gift bestowed by the group. The costs and benefits of tasks whose procedures are adversarial and whose ends are easily quantified can be expressed through a market system. The costs and rewards of gift labors cannot. The cleric’s larder will always be filled with gifts; artists will never “make” money.
We must therefore distinguish the necessary feminist demand for “equal pay for equal work” from the equally important need to keep some parts of our social, cultural, and spiritual life out of the marketplace. We must not convert all gift labors into market work lest we wake one day to see that universal market in which all our actions earn a wage and all our goods and services bear a price. There is a place for volunteer labor, for mutual aid, for in-house work, for healings that require sympathetic contact or a cohesive support group, for strengthening the bonds of kinship, for intellectual community, for creative idleness, for the slow maturation of talent, for the creation and preservation and dissemination of culture, and so on. To quit the confines of our current system of gender means not to introduce market value into these labors but to recognize that they are not “female” but human tasks. And to break the system that oppresses women, we need not convert all gift labor to cash work; we need, rather, to admit women to the “male,” moneymaking jobs while at the same time including supposedly “female” tasks and forms of exchange in our sense of possible masculinity.
Let me close on a historical note. Ann Douglas has written an interesting book on the feminization of American culture during the nineteenth century. In 1838, she tells us, an American Unitarian minister, Charles Follen, had a vision in which he saw a band of singing Sunday school children enter his church and displace a group of stern Pilgrim Fathers. In the course of the nineteenth century, Douglas contends, an old association between masculinity and spiritual power was broken; spiritual life became the province of women, children, and an “unmanly” clergy, who, like the mothers of families, had essentially no social force beyond “influence.”
The stern Pilgrim Fathers of Follen’s vision founded the nation. Serious religious dissenters from Europe, these men felt no necessary disjunction between their sex and attention to spiritual life. An early diarist like Samuel Sewell worried daily about his relationship to God, never about his manliness. But the nineteenth century saw a decline in faith coincide with the remarkable success of a secular, mercantile, and entrepreneurial spirit. The story has been told many times. By the end of the century, to be “self-made” in the market, or to have successfully exploited the natural gifts of the New World, were the marks of a Big Man, while attention to inner life and the community (and to their subtle fluids—religion, art, and culture) was consigned to the female sphere. This division of commerce by gender still holds. As a character in Saul Bellow’s novel Humboldt’s Gift remarks in regard to creative artists, “To be a poet is a school thing, a skirt thing, a church thing.” In a modern, capitalist nation, to labor with gifts (and to treat them as gifts, rather than exploit them) remains a mark of the female gender.
*1 In 1980 a New Jersey couple tried to exchange their baby for a secondhand Corvette worth $8,800. The used-car dealer (who had been tempted into the deal after the loss of his own family in a fire) later told the newspapers why he changed his mind: “My first impression was to swap the car for the kid. I knew moments later that it would be wrong—not so much wrong for me or the expense of it, but what would this baby do when he’s not a baby anymore? How could this boy cope with life knowing he was traded for a car?”
*2 I assume this historical asymmetry derives from the fact that while both parents contribute to conception, the mother must carry the child, give it birth, and suckle it. Even in a matriarchy her contribution is greater.
*3 In the modern world the rights that adults have in their children—male or female—normally pass slowly from parent to child during adolescence and become fully vested in the child when he or she is ready to leave home.
If our lives are gifts to begin with, however, in some sense they are not “ours” even when we become adults. Or perhaps they are, but only until such time as we find a way to bestow them. The belief that life is a gift carries with it the corollary feeling that the gift should not be hoarded. As we mature, and particularly as we come into the isolation of being “on our own,” we begin to feel the desire to give ourselves away—in love, in marriage, to our work, to the gods, to politics, to our children. And adolescence is marked by that restless, erotic, disturbing inquisition: Is this person, this nation, this work, worthy of the life I have to give?
*4 The examples of male life given as a gift are usually stories of sacrifice. It may be that so long as no gift institution recognizes the contribution to conception—and as the male body cannot in fact give birth—when male life is treated as a gift, the tendency is to give the body itself. In the chapter on the gift bond I spoke of compassionate deities who give their bodies to join man to a higher spiritual plane. These deities are generally male.
*5 For a case illustrating the “stability”side, see Wendy James’s article, “Sister-Exchange Marriage,”Scientific American (December 1975).
*6 It would have been interesting to see the results had the government instituted groomwealth or childwealth, for it is really the Uduk husband who gives children to the wife’s kin.
*7 Abandoning the bestowal of the bride in favor of her autonomy is one way to rearrange the pattern of this institution. Because the woman given in marriage does assume the functions of the gift, the group loses something even as the woman gains. When someone other than the couple being married is allowed to stand up at a wedding and say “I do,” then marriage is understood to be a social event; the ceremony recognizes that we sometimes have rights in the lives of our friends and relations, and that the union occurs within an “ego” wider than the couple’s “ego-of-two.” For the feminist wary of the father’s right to bestow his daughter, but wary as well of what I earlier called the perfect freedom of strangers—that pure individualism which is corrosive to social life—we might, rather than drop all sense of persons as gifts, extend a “female” submersion in the group to the groom, instead of a “male” indivudualism to the bride. We could, in other words, add the bestowal of the man to the ceremony and—a necessary corollary—recognize that mothers share in the donation of their offspring. In fact, if Freud is right that the most difficult attachment to resolve is the one we have to the parent of the opposite sex, it might be useful for the mother of the groom to stand and declare that she, too, is willing to allow her interest in the life of her son to pass to another woman; that she, like the father of the bride, is letting go of a gift.
*8 Gift exchange is not aboriginally, nor yet universally, a “female” commerce. There have always been times and there are still places where both men and women are sensitive to the functions of gift exchange, and where a man in particular may acquire his masculinity, or affirm it, through the bestowal of gifts. For a fascinating discussion of gender and exchange in a tribal group, see Annette Weiner’s recent book on the Trobriand Islands, Women of Value, Men of Renown.