The Variety Of Feminisms And Their Contributions To Gender Equality
Oldenburger Universitätsreden
Nr. 97
Judith Lorber
The Variety of Feminisms and their Contributions
to Gender Equality
Bibliotheks- und Informationssystem der Universität Oldenburg 1997
VORWORT
Frauen- und Geschlechterstudien können an der Carl von Os- sietzky Universität auf eine langjährige Tradition zurück- blicken. In Lehrveranstaltungen, Projekten und Forschungs- vorhaben wurde diese Tradition manifest. Interdisziplinarität und Internationalität sind unverzichtbare Kennzeichen dieser Studien, die einem feministisch orientierten und konzipierten Wissenschaftsverständnis zuzurechnen sind und deren beson- deres Anliegen u. a. die Entwicklung von Perspektiven für ei- ne verändernde gesellschaftliche Praxis ist. Mit dem Beginn des Wintersemesters 1997/98 hat dieser Lehr- und Forschungsbereich auch eine institutionelle Verankerung erfahren. Ein von einer Planungsgruppe entwickelter Magi- ster-Studiengang „Frauen- und Geschlechterstudien“, für den der Fachbereich 3 Sozialwissenschaften die Federführung übernahm, hat nicht nur die Zustimmung der universitären Gremien erfahren, sondern auch die Genehmigung durch das zuständige Wissenschaftsministerium in Hannover erhalten. Der Lehr- und Ausbildungsbetrieb kann somit jetzt beginnen. Zur Eröffnung des neuen Studienganges veröffentlichen wir in dieser Ausgabe der Oldenburger Universitätsreden einen Vor- trag, den die Professorin Dr. Judith Lorber im Juni 1997 auf Einladung des Insituts für Politikwissenschaft II an der Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg gehalten hat. Der Text gibt einen fundierten und kritischen Überblick über die viel- fältigen theoretischen Perspektiven, aus denen heraus femi- nistisches Denken das Thema „Gender Equality“ international untersucht. Dabei steht bei aller akademischen Brillanz jedoch nicht die abstrakte Analyse als Selbstzweck im Mittelpunkt, sondern die Frage, wie eine „Revolution“ der Geschlechter- verhältnisse erreicht werden kann und wie sie aussehen sollte.
Oldenburg, November 1997 Prof. Dr. Friedrich W. Busch
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JUDITH LORBER
The Variety of Feminisms and their Contribution to Gender Equality
Introduction
My focus is the continuities and discontinuities in recent feminist ideas and perspectives. I am going to discuss the development of feminist theories as to the sources of gender inequality and its pervasiveness, and the different feminist political solutions and remedies based on these theories. I will be combining ideas from different feminist writers, and usually will not be talking about any specific writers. A list of readings can be found at the end.
Each perspective has made important contributions to improving women’s status, but each also has limitations. Feminist ideas of the past 35 years changed as the limitations of one set of ideas were critiqued and addressed by what was felt to be a better set of ideas about why women and men were so unequal.
It has not been a clear progression by any means, because many of the debates went on at the same time. As a matter of fact, they are still going on. And because all of the feminist perspectives have insight into the problems of gender inequality, and all have come up with good strategies for remedying these problems, all the feminisms are still very much with us. Thus, there are continuities and convergences, as well as sharp debates, among the different feminisms.
Any one feminist may incorporate ideas from several perspec- tives, and many feminists have shifted their perspectives over the years. I myself was originally a liberal feminist, then a so-
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cialist feminist, and now consider myself to be primarily a so- cial construction feminist, with overtones of postmodernism and queer theory. Because I am not examining the ideas of particular feminists but speaking of perspectives that have emerged from many theorists, I will talk of feminisms. What I am looking at first, are feminist theories about why women and men are unequal, and second, feminist gender politics, the activities and strategies for remedying gender inequality.
The reason for much of the change in feminist theories is that with deeper probing into the pervasiveness of gender inequality, feminists have developed more complex views about gender, sex, and sexuality. Gender is now understood to be a social status, a personal identity, and a set of relationships between women and men, and among women and men. Sex is no longer seen as a one-way input or basic material for social arrange- ments, but a complex interplay of genes, hormones, physiology, environment, and behavior, with loop-back effects. Sexuality is understood to be socially constructed as well as physiologically based and emotionally expressed.
The main point feminists have stressed about gender inequality is that it is not an individual matter, but is deeply ingrained in the structure of societies. Gender inequality is built into the organization of marriage and families, work and the economy, politics, religions, the arts and other cultural productions, and the very language we speak. Making women and men equal, therefore, necessitates social and not individual solutions. I have grouped the feminist perspectives of the last 35 years into three broad categories that reflect their theories and political strategies with regard to the gendered social order. These are gender reform feminisms, gender resistant feminisms, and gender revolution feminisms.
THE VARIETY OF FEMINISMS … 9
Gender Reform Feminisms
The feminisms of the 1960s and 1970s were the beginning of the second wave of feminism. They are liberal feminism, marxist and socialist feminisms, and development feminism. Their roots were, respectively, 18th and 19th century liberal political philosophy that developed the idea of individual rights, Marx’s 19th century critique of capitalism and his concept of class consciousness, and 20th century anti-colonial politics and ideas of national development. Gender reform feminisms put women into these perspectives.
Liberal Feminism
Theoretically, liberal feminism claims that gender differences are not based in biology, and therefore that women and men are not all that different — their common humanity supersedes their procreative differentiation. If women and men are not different, then they should not be treated differently under the law. Women should have the same rights as men and the same educational and work opportunities. The goal of liberal feminism in the United States was embodies in the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which was never ratified. (It said, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex.”) Politically, liberal feminists formed somewhat bureaucratic organizations, which invited men members. Their activist focus has been concerned with visible sources of gender discrimination, such as gendered job markets and inequitable wage scales, and with getting women into positions of authority in the professions, government, and cultural institutions. Liberal feminist politics took important weapons of the civil rights movement — anti- discrimination legislation and affirmative action — and used them to fight gender inequality, especially in the job market.
Affirmative action calls for aggressively seeking out qualified people to redress the gender and ethnic imbalance in work-
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places. That means encouraging men to train for such jobs as nursing, teaching, and secretary, and women for fields like engi- neering, construction, and police work. With a diverse pool of qualified applicants, employers can be legally mandated to hire enough different workers to achieve a reasonable balance in their workforce, and to pay them the same and also give an equal chance to advance in their careers.
The main contribution of liberal feminism is showing how much modern society discriminates against women. In the United States, it was successful in breaking down many barriers to women’s entry into formerly male-dominated jobs and professions, helped to equalize wage scales, and got abortion and other reproductive rights legalized. But liberal feminism could not overcome the prevailing belief that women and men are intrinsically different. It was somewhat more successful in proving that even if women are different from men, they are not inferior.
Marxist and Socialist Feminisms
Marx’s analysis of the social structure of capitalism was suppo- sed to apply to people of any social characteristics. If you owned the means of production, you were a member of the capi- talist class; if you sold your labor for a wage, you were a member of the proletariat. That would be true of women as well, except that until the end of the 19th century, married women in capitalist countries were not allowed to own property in their own name; their profits from any businesses they ran and their wages belonged to their husband. Although Marx recognized that workers and capitalists had wives who worked in the home and took care of the children, he had no place for housewives in his analysis of capitalism.
It was marxist feminism that put housewives into the structure of capitalism. Housewives are vital to capitalism, indeed to any industrial economy, because their unpaid work in the home
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maintains bosses and workers and reproduces the next gene- ration of bosses and workers (and their future wives). Further- more, if a bourgeois husband falls on hard times, his wife can do genteel work in the home, such as dressmaking, to earn extra money, or take a temporary or part-time job, usually white- collar. And when a worker’s wages fall below the level needed to feed his family, as it often does, his wife can go out to work for wages in factories or shops or other people’s homes, or turn the home into a small factory and put everyone, sometimes including the children, to work. The housewife’s labor, paid and unpaid, is for her family.
Marxist and socialist feminisms severely criticize the family as a source of women’s oppression and exploitation. If a woman works for her family in the home, she has to be supported, and so she is economically dependent on the “man of the house,” like her children. If she works outside the home, she is still expected to fulfill her domestic duties, and so she ends up working twice as hard as a man, and usually for a lot less pay.
This source of gender inequality has been somewhat redressed in countries that give all mothers paid leave before and after the birth of a child and that provide affordable child care. But that solution puts the burden of children totally on the mother, and encourages men to opt out of family responsibilities altogether. To counteract that trend, feminists in the government of Norway allocated a certain portion of paid child care leave to fathers specifically.
Women in the former communist countries had what liberal feminism in capitalist economies always wanted for women — full-time jobs with state-supported maternity leave and child- care services. But marxist and socialist feminists claim that the welfare state can be paternalistic, substituting public patriarchy for private patriarchy. They argue that male-dominated government policies put the state’s interests before those of women: When the economy needs workers, the state pays for
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child-care leave; with a down-turn in the economy, the state reduces the benefits. Similarly, when the state needs women to have more children, it cuts back on abortions and contraceptive services. Women’s status as a reserve army of labor and as a child producer is thus no different under socialism than under capitalism.
The solution of women’s economic dependence on men thus can- not simply be waged work, especially if jobs continue to be gen- der-segregated and women’s work is paid less than men’s. Socialist feminism had a different solution to the gendered workforce than liberal feminism’s program of affirmative action. It was comparable worth.
In examining the reasons why women and men workers’ salaries are so discrepant, proponents of comparable worth found that wage scales are not set by the market for labor, by what a worker is worth to an employer, or by the worker’s education or other credentials. Salaries are set by conventional “worth,” which is rooted in gender and ethnic and other forms of discri- mination. Comparable worth programs compare jobs in tradi- tional women’s occupations, such as secretary, with traditional men’s jobs, such as automobile mechanic. They give a point values for qualifications needed, skills used, extent of responsi- bility and authority over other workers, and dangerousness. Salaries are then equalized for jobs with a similar number of points (which represent the “worth” of the job). Although com- parable worth programs do not do away with gendered job se- gregation, feminist proponents argue that raising the salaries of women doing traditional women’s jobs could give the majority of women economic resources that would make them less dependent on marriage or state benefits as a means of survival.
Development Feminism
Addressing the economic exploitation of women in post-colo- nial countries on the way to industrialization, development
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feminism has done extensive gender analyses of the global economy. Women workers in developing countries in Central and Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa are paid less than men workers, whether they work in factories or do piece work at home. To survive in rural communities, women grow food, keep house, and earn money any way they can to supplement what their migrating husbands send them.
The gendered division of labor in developing countries is the outcome of a long history of colonialism. Under colonialism, women’s traditional contributions to food production were un- dermined in favor of exportable crops, such as coffee, and the extraction of raw materials, such as minerals. Men workers were favored in this work, but they were paid barely enough for their own subsistence. Women family members had to provide food for themselves and their children, but with good land confiscated for plantations, they also lived at a bare survival level.
Development feminism made an important theoretical contri- bution in equating women’s status with control of economic resources. In some societies, women control significant eco- nomic resources and so have a high status. In contrast, in so- cieties with patriarchal family structures where anything women produce, including children, belongs to the husband, women and girls have a low value. Development feminism’s theory is that in any society, if the food women produce is the main way the group is fed, and women also control the distribution of any surplus they produce, women have power and prestige. If men provide most of the food and distribute the surplus, women’s status is low. Whether women or men produce most of the food depends on the kind of technology used. Thus, the mode of production and the kinship rules that control the distribution of any surplus are the significant determinants of the relative status of women and men in any society.
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In addition to gendered economic analyses, development fe- minism addresses the political issue of women’s rights versus national and cultural traditions. At the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women Forum held in Beijing in 1995, the popular slogan was “human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights.” The Platform for Action document that came out of the UN Conference condemned particular cultural practices that are oppressive to women – in- fanticide, dowry, child marriage, female genital mutilation. The 187 governments that signed onto the Platform agreed to abolish these practices. However, since they are integral parts of cultural and tribal traditions, to give them up could be seen as kowtowing to Western ideas. The development feminist perspective, so critical of colonialism and yet so supportive of women’s rights, has found this issue difficult to resolve.
Western ideas of individualism and economic independence are double-faced. On the one hand, these ideas support the rights of girls and women to an education that will allow them to be economically independent. They are also the source of a concept of universal human rights that can be used to fight subordinating and sometimes physically hurtful tribal practices, such as genital mutilation. On the other hand, Western ideas undercut communal enterprises and traditional reciprocal food production and shared child care.
Indigenous women’s own solution to this dilemma is community organizing around their productive and reproductive roles as mothers — so that what benefits them economically and physically is in the service of their families, not themselves alone. However, this same community organizing and family service can support the continuance of cultural practices like female genital mutilation, which Western development feminists want to see eradicated. The decision to not interfere with traditional cultural practices that are physically harmful to girls and at the same time work for their education and better health
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care is a particularly problematic dilemma for development feminism.
Summary
Each of the gender reform feminisms face contradictions in their theories and their practical solutions. Liberal feminism argues that women and men are essentially similar, and therefore women should be equally represented in public arenas dominated by men — work, government, the pro- fessions, and the sciences. But if women and men are so inter- changeable, what difference does it make if a woman or a man does a particular job? Marxist and socialist feminisms argue that the source of wom- en’s oppression is their economic dependence on a husband. Their solution is full-time jobs for women, with the state pro- viding paid maternity leave and child-care. But, what the state gives, the state can take away. State policies reflect state inter- ests, not women’s. Women are worker-mothers or just mothers, depending on the state’s economic needs. For development feminism, the theoretical emphasis on uni- versal human rights is reflected in pressure for the education of girls, maternity and child health care, and economic resources for women who contribute heavily to the support of their families. However, when gender politics calls for marital rights and sexual autonomy, development feminism frequently has to confront traditional cultural values and practices that give men power over their daughters and wives.
Gender Resistant Feminisms
As gender reform feminisms made inroads into the public con- sciousness in the 1970s and women entered formerly all-men workplaces and schools, they became more and more aware of constant and everyday put-downs — from bosses and colleagues at work, professors and students in the classroom, fellow
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organizers in political movements, and worst of all, from boyfriends and husbands at home. These “microinequities” of everyday life — being ignored and interrupted, not getting credit for competence or good performance, being passed over for jobs that involve taking charge — crystallize into a pattern that insidiously wears women down.
The younger women working in the civil rights, anti-Vietnam War, and student new-left movements in the United States in the late 1960s had even earlier realized that they were nothing more than handmaidens, bed partners, and coffee-makers to their male co-workers. Despite the revolutionary rhetoric the young men were flinging in the face of Western civilization in many countries, when it came to women, they might as well have been living in the 18th century.
Out of this awareness that sisters had no place in any brother- hood came the gender resistant feminisms of the 1970’s. They are radical feminism, lesbian feminism, psychoanalytical feminism, and standpoint feminism.
Radical Feminism
Radical feminism had its start in small, leaderless, women-only consciousness-raising groups, where the topics of intense discussion came out of women’s daily lives — housework, serving men’s emotional and sexual needs, menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, menopause. From these discussions came a theory of gender inequality that went beyond discrimination, to oppression, and a gender politics of resistance to the dominant gender order. Radical feminism’s theoretical watchword is patriarchy, or men’s pervasive oppression and exploitation of women, which can be found wherever women and men are in contact with each other, in private as well as in public. Radical feminism argues that patriarchy is very hard to eradicate because its root — the belief that women are different and inferior — is deeply embedded in most men’s consciousness. It
