Engendering Modernity

Feminism, Social Theory and Social Change

Barbara L. Marshall

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745667706
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

In this book Barbara Marshall argues that the debates around both modernity and postmodernity neglect the role of women and significance of gender in the formation of contemporary societies.

1

Gender and Modernity: Classical Issues, Contemporary Debates

1.1 Modernity and Social Theory: The Classical Connection

The connection between sociology and modernity is well rehearsed in the ‘history of theory’ texts.¹ While ‘modernization’ may be broadly understood as the transition from ‘simple’, homogenous societies to ‘complex’, highly differentiated ones, with the attendant questions about social order and social change, the discourse of ‘modernity’ includes the larger philosophical questions, dating back to the Enlightenment, surrounding rationalization as the underpinning of both modernization and the interpretations of progress in Western social and political thought.

Against the backdrop of the Enlightenment, modernity is associated with the release of the individual from the bonds of tradition, with the progressive differentiation of society, with the emergence of civil society, with political equality, with innovation and change. All of these accomplishments are associated with capitalism, industrialism, secularization, urbanization and rationalization. The changes associated with the advent of modernity were integral to the development of social theory.

Modern social and political theory took root in the Enlightenment abandonment of traditional religious authorities for a belief in human reason and progress. In sharp contrast to theological world views, Enlightenment thought promoted the radical view that the human condition could be understood scientifically, and that this understanding would promote progress and human emancipation. But, lest we get carried away with a celebration of modernity’s gains, remember that it is the ‘dark side’ of modernity that has provided most of the traditional subject matter for sociological theory. The major works by classical sociological theorists such as Comte, Marx, Durkheim, Weber and Simmel were centrally concerned with the reconstruction of order out of the decline of traditional authority, and sought to apply reason to the problem of integration given the change from simple to complex, traditional to modern, homogeneity to heterogeneity that they witnessed with the coming of a new industrial order. The growing social division of labour was a vital concern of classical theory, as was the shifting relationship between the individual and society. The dissolution of traditional communal bonds was perceived as a potential threat to interpersonal relations and social integration. Classical social theory was born out of a sense of social crisis. As Turner (1992: 185) notes, the transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, which defined the terrain of the classical project, stocked the conceptual toolkit that is still standard issue for social theorists – alienation, anomie, rationalization, disenchantment. The truth or falsity of the story of the birth of the modern is not the issue – what is significant is the self-understanding of the discipline in these terms: ‘In this respect we can analyse sociology as a primarily nostalgic discourse which recounts how authentic communities were destroyed by the ineluctable advance of industrial capitalism across urban space, leaving behind it the debris of egoistic individualism, other-directed personalities, anomic cultures and homeless minds’ (Turner, 1992: 185).

Less well rehearsed in the theory textbooks is a feminist understanding of the ‘project of modernity’.² The erasure of gender in the classical project is significant on two counts. First, it raises questions about the nostalgic story that modern social theory was born out of social upheaval – and is integral to the political and intellectual current of the post-Enlightenment. As Kandal (1988: 4) notes, ‘classical sociological theory originated in the same historical epoch as the long swell of modern feminism, flowing in pulses and lulls roughly from the eighteenth century to the present’. Writings by feminists such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Harriet Martineau, as well as feminist political movements which were in full swing by the end of the nineteenth century, were virtually ignored by classical social theorists. But perhaps more importantly, the exclusion of women from the heart of the classical project has resulted in a skewed picture of social life, of the very subject matter of sociology. The changes associated with modernity – such as the separation of the family from wider kinship groups, the separation of the household and economy (which entailed the radical transformation of both), and the emergence of the modern state – are all gendered processes. The roles which emerged alongside the differentiation of the economy and the state from the household – worker, citizen – were (are) gendered roles. As it was theoretically understood in the classical tradition, the social differentiation so central to sociological accounts of modernity was based on male experience. For example, both civil society and the state (the separation of these standing as a hallmark of modernity) were defined in terms of their distinction from the family. Treated as a central organizing principle in the old order, kinship as conceived of in modernity makes women and children disappear from the public world. The purpose of the family, and woman within it, becomes, depending on the theorist, a moral regulator of, a reproducer of, or a haven for, the male individual.

The distinction between the ‘public’ and the ‘private’ is central to theories of modernity. Classical sociological theory developed, in part, as a response to and corrective of classical liberal theory. In both liberalism and in classical sociological theory, the relationship between public and private is basic to the theorization of the individual–society relationship. While in liberal theory the individual is conceived of as pre-existent to society, the starting point for classical sociological theory is the reverse of this ontological equation. That is, the individual is theorized as social – as constituted only within society. As classical sociological theory developed, it inverted the asociality of the individual as constructed in liberalism, and it is within the general problematic of the individual–society relationship that we can locate the public–private division. The social differentiation of modern societies creates modern individuals. This is the underpinning of the discipline. Given this, the sociological inversion of the individual– society relationship of liberalism should have been able to embrace the theorization of public and private spheres as both wholly social, yet it was not successful in this respect (Yeatman, 1986). To elaborate, I will first review briefly the liberal formulation of the individual–society relationship and the separation of public and private spheres, then outline the attempts of sociological theory to reconstruct this relationship. As we shall see, the result has largely been to set up a public–private dualism which is easily conflated with the dualism of male–female, and which constructs a sociological individual whose ostensibly universal cloak hides an implicitly gendered constitution.

For liberalism, the line is drawn between public and private to delineate the role of the state. Classical liberalism was founded on the doctrine of individual freedom, ‘whether defined as freedom from coercion, as moral self-determination, or as the right to individual happiness’ (Seidman, 1983: 15). Defence of these basic freedoms necessarily required clear limits on their restriction by the state. Individual freedoms are translated into individual ‘rights’, which the state is bound to administrate and uphold. The most fundamental right is the right to privacy and the public becomes necessary to secure the private – chiefly private property and the privacy of interpersonal associations. The classic distinction between public and private, then, is that between the public world of politics, and the private world of economic and familial relationships. Locke’s statement that ‘every Man has a Property in his own Person’ lays the basis for the idea that freedom equals the right to enter a contract regarding that property (Pateman, 1988: 13). ‘Civil society’ straddles the two realms of public and private as the locus of the contract, the state being the impartial (public) arbitrator of contracts between freely-acting (private) individuals. Liberal economic theory further presupposes ‘a distinction between the public, “economic” world of the market and the private “non-economic” sphere of the home’ (Jaggar, 1983: 144). There is a sharp distinction within the liberal tradition, then, between political philosophy and economic theory, each orientated to a particular set of questions, but similarly deriving their conception of the social, and hence the public and the private, from the level of the individual. There is no question that the individual of liberalism was male; women were excluded from the public in both its political and economic senses, being subsumed under the authority of their husbands and/or fathers. They could not own property or sign contracts in their own right, neither was the bulk of their labour undertaken in terms of a labour contract. The marriage contract provided their only articulation as individuals to the public realm. Liberalism is thus not only premised upon the distinction between public and private, but separates out the domestic, and hence women, as particularly private.

The distinction between the state (public) and the family (private) was made most clearly by Locke in Two Treatises of Government (1689) in terms of a distinction between political and paternal authority: ‘the Power of a Magistrate over a Subject, may be distinguished from that of a Father over his Children, a Master over his Servant, a Husband over his Wife, and a Lord over his Slave. . . . But these two Powers, Political and Paternal, are so perfectly distinct and separate; are built upon so different Foundations and given to so different Ends’ (cited in Nicholson, 1986: 152). The privatization of the family, and the legitimation of patriarchal authority in the private sphere, derive from the ontological priority granted to the individual in liberal theory. Thus, in classical liberal theory, the positioning of the individual as prior to and partially outside of society permitted the exclusion of women from society.

Marx developed his theory in sharp opposition to liberalism, seeing politics and economics as intimately related. For Marx, the distinction between public and private in liberal political philosophy is largely illusory, and he rejects ‘the conception of anything as private, as standing outside society or as prior to it, as unrelated to other people and of no concern to them, or as resting on the rights and claims of single persons’ (Kamenka, 1983: 274). The state is no impartial arbitrator, but an instrument of that class which controls the means of production. Politics becomes economic, and economics political. But what of the familial?

For Marx, abandoning Hegel’s conception of the distinction between family, civil society and state, civil society ‘is the true source and theatre of all history. . . . Civil society embraces the whole material intercourse of individuals within a definite stage of the development of productive forces. It embraces the whole commercial and industrial life of a given stage and, insofar, transcends the State and the nation’ (Marx and Engels, 1845–6/ 1970: 57). Placing this conception of civil society into his broader theoretical framework, Marx offers the following account of the relationship between spheres: ‘Assume a particular state of development in the productive forces of man and you will get a particular form of commerce and consumption. Assume particular stages of development in production, commerce and consumption and you will have a corresponding social constitution, a corresponding organization of the family, of orders or of classes, in a word, a corresponding civil society’ (Marx, 1847/1963: 180). Yet he is fairly clear that this is an historically emergent relationship, as ‘civil society as such only develops with the bourgeoisie’ (Marx and Engels, 1845–6/1970: 57). Civil society has, ‘as its basis and premises’, the family. It is in the family, and the ‘separation of society into families opposed to one another’ that we find the roots of the division of labour, property relations, and the contradictory relationship between individual and society:

The more deeply we go back into history, the more does the individual, and hence also the producing individual, appear as dependent, as belonging to a greater whole: in a still quite natural way in the family and in the family expanded into the clan. . . . Only in the eighteenth century, in ‘civil society’, do the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, as external necessity (Marx, 1973: 84).

Civil society, then, is based in the contradiction of individual and society, and it is out of this contradiction that the state emerges: ‘divorced from the real interests of individual and community, and at the same time as an illusory communal life, always based, however, on the real ties existing in every family and tribal conglomeration’ (Marx and Engels, 1845–6/1970: 53). It is the historical domination of relations of exchange over social relationships which ‘has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation’ (Marx and Engels, 1848/1948: 11). Marx appears to retain here an idealized notion of family relationships – one which has only been tainted by capitalist economic relationships.

Nicholson (1986) notes a contradiction within Marx’s formulation. That is, Marx recognized the historical and contingent nature of the capitalist mode of production, but retreated into a philosophical anthropology of kinship. By analytically subordinating the family to civil society and economic imperatives, ‘Marx denies the specific logic of the family’ (Mills, 1987: 81). As a result, classical Marxism cannot theorize the specificity of the domestic sphere, nor the sexual or psychodynamic politics within it.

Marxist theory does take a normative stance on the exclusion of women from public life, focusing on the private character of their labour. Women’s oppression becomes associated with the emergence of private property. Private property, essential to the liberal conception of individual freedoms, illustrates for Marx a central contradiction of capitalism – that is, the private control of socially produced goods. The experience of work is placed not in a network of atomistic individual relationships, but in a network of social relationships. In this way, the division between public and domestic as it accompanied the emergence of private property is central to Engels’ views (1884/1972: 137) on the oppression of women: ‘Household management lost its public character. It no longer concerned society. It became a private service; the wife became the head servant excluded from all participation in social production.’ As Dorothy Smith (1985: 5) notes, Engels oversimplifies, but nonetheless draws attention to an important distinction between the liberal and Marxist conceptions of women’s labour within the public–private dualism: ‘He did not see the division of labour simply as a distribution of work in work roles. Rather he saw the work process as articulated to social relations which defined its relation to others and hence defined how the doer of that work was related in society.’

Durkheim’s study of the division of labour (1893/1933) also constituted a critical attack on the utilitarian individualism of classical liberal political economy. Where for the latter collective identity was derived from order imposed by the state on individuals in civil society, Durkheim differentiated between ‘individuation’ and ‘individualism’. He set out to explain the paradox that the individual, while becoming more autonomous, also becomes more closely dependent on society. The answer, of course, lay in his analysis of the division of labour. As he summarized it:

The division of labour appears to us otherwise than it does to the economists. For them, it essentially consists in greater production. For us, this greater productivity is only a . . . repercussion of the phenomenon. If we specialize, it is not to produce more, but it is to enable us to live in new conditions of existence that have been made for us (Durkheim, 1893/1933: 275)

As the division of labour expands and mechanical solidarity declines, the individual no longer shares the same characteristics as all other individuals in society – the individual is more and more a particular, differentiated personality. At the same time that the individual becomes particularized via the division of labour, there is increasing awareness of the common properties which each particular individual shares with the rest of humanity. It is thus the generalized individual which is united through ‘moral individualism’, the content of the ‘conscience collective’. It is clear throughout Durkheim’s writings that the ‘generalized individual’ who provided the basis for social solidarity was male. For Durkheim, ‘society’ itself is ‘a code word for the interests and needs of men as opposed to those of women’ (Sydie, 1987: 46). While the structure of domestic life was indeed social, and the nurturing of individual personality essential to the individualism that underpinned the division of labour, it was only the male who became individuated outside the family, and thus it was males, and male activity, that constituted the public sphere of ‘society’. Durkheim thus ‘solves’ the individual–society paradox of modernity at the expense of women’s individuation, confining them to the private, or pre-social realm of the domestic sphere. In a striking departure from his insistence on sociological explanation, he asserts that while men are ‘almost entirely the product of society’, women remain ‘to a far greater extent the product of nature’ (Durkheim, 1897/1951: 385). While he expects that women will eventually become more social, it will be in such a way as to exacerbate their fundamental differences from men.

Key elements of Durkheim’s formulation – most notably the construction of the public sphere upon the generalized (male) individual, and the negation of women’s individuality by their consignment to privacy – have retained a tenacious hold in social theory. As in Marxism, the domestic is treated as an element incorporated into ‘modern’ society in its transition from previous social formations, and thus retains a distinctly pre-social tenor. Where Durkheim and Marx differ most sharply on the family is in the emphasis on its social versus economic character in relation to the public sphere. It is the difference between a material and a moral interpretation of modernity.

A number of later theories of modernity have drawn extensively on Weber’s writings on rationality as a means to understanding ‘the place of the individual in the modern world’ (Whimster and Lash, 1987: 1). Against the relfication of the ‘social’ or the ‘economic’ as independent entities, Weber returns to the individual as actor. Significant here is the introduction of individual subjectivity as the conduit through which collective influences act.

Rationality, specifically instrumental rationality, is the ‘hallmark of modernity’ (Benjamin, 1988: 184). In accordance with most of the classical project, Weber’s conception of history was largely built around the transition from traditional, personal forms of domination and authority to impersonal, economic forms. While Marx focused on the tyranny of the market, the ascendance of legal–rational authority was, for Weber, the defining characteristic of modernity. As Sydie (1987: 181) notes, women were ‘dealt out’ of the structure of authority and power from the beginning, through a thorough naturalization of the mother–child relationship and the rule of the father in the family. In Weber’s account of capitalist development, the spread of bureaucracy and the state illustrated the growth of the ‘iron cage’ of a totally administered society, where impersonal relationships replace personal relationships, and human action is geared to activities of exchange and control. Jeffrey Alexander (1987: 197) summarized Weber’s argument thus:

rationalization results not only in increased autonomy but in the spread of impersonal domination through every sphere of life....

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Gender and Modernity: Classical Issues, Contemporary Debates
• 2 Rethinking the Gendered Division of Labour
• 3 Social Reproduction and Socialist Feminist Theory
• 4 Gendered Identities
• 5 Gender Politics: Regulation and Resistance
• 6 Feminist Theory as Critical Theory
• Notes
• References
• Index