Living With Contradictions

Controversies In Feminist Social Ethics

Alison M Jaggar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429978777
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores some of the moral and public policy issues that divide Western, especially North American, feminists as the twentieth century ends and the twenty-first century begins. It represents an in-house discussion among feminists and their social ethics.

PART ONE

EQUALITY

Because feminism is often defined as a commitment to social equality between men and women, equality immediately suggests itself as a natural standard for resolving controversies that arise within feminism. Unfortunately, equality’s ability to fulfill this function is undermined by the fact that the concept of equality is itself a focus of feminist controversy.

Even outside the context of feminist concerns, the main traditions in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western politics may be characterized by reference to competing conceptions of equality. Political conservatives, for instance, construe equality simply as equality before the law, a position known as formal equality. Political radicals, by contrast, advocate more substantive conceptions of equality according to which people’s living standards should be roughly the same. Between these extremes lies the liberal conception of equality, which interprets the ideal in terms of equality of opportunity. These various conceptions of equality as well as the relations between them are in turn open to a variety of competing interpretations. Some would argue, for instance, that genuine equality of opportunity cannot be achieved in a society that includes gross inequalities in standards of living.

Western feminists have drawn on the nonfeminist tradition of thinking about equality in our reflections on sex equality. In the nineteenth century, feminists fought hard for the then radical goal of sex equality before the law, but in the twentieth century formal sex equality has come to be regarded by most feminists as inadequate for guaranteeing full social equality between men and women. In the twentieth century, liberal feminists, who advocate construing sex equality in terms of equality of opportunity, contend with socialist feminists, who argue that full equality between men and women requires the abolition of class inequalities.

Although Western feminists have inevitably drawn on nonfeminist thinking about equality, many have found that nonfeminist conceptions of equality are inadequate to comprehend the variety of ways in which male privilege over women is expressed. In consequence, some feminists have worked to develop new conceptions of equality that are more sensitive to feminist concerns; others have rejected equality itself as a characteristically masculine ideal.

The readings in this first part of the book offer a brief overview of the main issues at stake in the contemporary feminist debate over the meaning and even the desirability of sex equality. These selections have been chosen partly because they are comprehensive and partly because they include some distinctively feminist insights about the nature of equality.

The first article, “Sexual Difference and Sexual Equality,” which I wrote in the mid-1980s, explains the unfortunate consequences that result from consistent policies of treating men and women either identically or differently. When women are treated identically to men, as some feminists have recommended, we are penalized for our differences because we are measured against a male norm. When we are treated differently from men, as recommended by other feminists, even the provision of so-called special benefits, rights, or protections may often have damaging consequences insofar as it reifies currently perceived sex differences, confirms stereotypes, obliterates differences between women, and reinforces the status quo. In opposing ways, therefore, both strategies seem doomed to perpetuate women’s subordination.

To avoid these consequences, I argue that it is necessary to rethink prevailing understandings of the differences between men and women. Feminists must challenge both the assumption that sex differences are universal, given, and unchangeable and the assumption that men’s lives constitute the norms according to which women’s differences are counted as deficiencies.

My article suggests that recognizing current differences between the sexes as a consequence as well as a cause of male dominance encourages feminists to develop flexible policies designed to change as women and men succeed in changing themselves. Viewed over time, such flexibility could be construed as inconsistency—but new social circumstances require creativity in institutionalizing justice and equality. In the meantime, feminists must live with the contradictions resulting from divergent and sometimes incompatible strategies for gaining equality.

In conclusion, I assert that refusing to accept men’s lives as the norm encourages us to envision alternatives to contemporary ways of organizing social life. There is, of course, no single blueprint for a feminist utopia; feminists have experimented and continue to experiment with a variety of alternatives. These alternatives could be construed as moving toward a more substantive or finer-grained conception of equality or even as moving beyond that ideal.

The most incisive recent contributions to the feminist equality debate have come from legal theorists, who are struggling to translate feminist moral and political insights into workable legal terms. In “Reconstructing Sexual Equality,” Christine A. Littleton provides a more detailed analysis of the various strategies developed by feminist legal theorists, categorizing them as versions of either symmetrical or asymmetrical models. Whereas symmetrical models emphasize similarities between men and women and urge that both sexes be treated the same in law, asymmetrical models recommend the legal recognition of various differences between the sexes.

Littleton herself proposes a model of sex equality as “acceptance.” This asymmetrical model accepts existing differences between the sexes and seeks to make them socially “costless.” By this, Littleton means that the life decisions often made by women, such as taking up historically female occupations or accepting less demanding jobs so as to be able to fulfill family responsibilities, should not be more socially “expensive” than conventionally masculine life decisions. Implementing this proposal obviously would lead to the radical restructuring of social institutions, including rethinking the nature of work and how varying social contributions might be recognized and rewarded. Littleton refuses to predict the long-term outcome of reducing the costs of being a social woman—people’s present imaginations, she says, are too constrained by the experience of growing up male or female in circumstances of male domination.

Catharine A. MacKinnon is certainly the best-known contemporary feminist legal theorist because she has authored or coauthored a number of highly publicized legal initiatives. The most innovative feature of her approach is to conceptualize various issues involving women’s sexuality in terms of sex discrimination, a concept obviously dependent on the notion of sex equality. MacKinnon was successful in getting sexual harassment recognized in the United States as a form of sex discrimination, but her point of view has not so far prevailed in the United States with respect to pornography. In Canada, however, her arguments influenced the adoption in 1992 of legislation banning violent pornography.

In the present selection, “Toward Feminist Jurisprudence,” MacKinnon provides a sweeping challenge to what she calls mainstream—that is, nonfeminist—legal conceptions of sex equality. These conceptions, she argues, have been incapable of comprehending women’s experience of forms of inequality that are distinctively sexualized. These include incest, rape, domestic battery, prostitution, and pornography. Because contemporary sexuality is constructed so that male dominance and female subordination are sexually arousing for both men and women, the sexual abuse of women by men is perceived as natural, an expression of sex difference rather than of sex dominance or inequality. Even though inequality between men and women is institutionalized throughout daily life, male forms of power over women are embodied in law as individual rights. In particular, the sexual power of men is protected by rights to claim privacy or freedom of speech and to make mistakes about whether women consent to sexual relations.

MacKinnon advocates a feminist jurisprudence that assumes that men dominate women unless shown otherwise and that recognizes a variety of issues involving sexuality as issues of sex equality. These issues, in MacKinnon’s view, include rape, abortion, pornography, prostitution, so-called surrogate motherhood, and gay and lesbian rights. Until these are recognized in the law as forms of sex inequality, she argues, law is not neutral between men and women but instead mystifies and legitimates male dominance.

In “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” Kimberle Crenshaw examines a number of court rulings involving discrimination against Black women. Some of these rulings denied Black women the right to represent all women on the grounds that Black women’s experience was different from white women’s; others insisted that white women could represent all women on the assumption that the experience of Black and white women was similar in the relevant respects. In an interesting analogy to white feminist findings that women have been harmed sometimes by being treated identically to men and sometimes by being treated differently, Crenshaw shows that Black women have been harmed sometimes by being treated identically to white women and sometimes by being treated differently.

Crenshaw asserts that Black women in the United States are multiply burdened, subject not only to discrimination on the grounds of either race or sex but also to discrimination on grounds of both race and sex simultaneously. She argues that attention to sex discrimination alone is insufficient to protect Black women, especially when sex discrimination is understood in terms of white experience. Such an understanding of sex discrimination takes race privilege as given and assumes that only minor adjustments are necessary in employment systems. It also means that antidiscrimination law is likely to help primarily those who are already relatively privileged and, by perpetuating existing privilege, to discourage employees from banding together to challenge broader inequities.

Feminist theory and politics, according to Crenshaw, have often been as racist as legal theory insofar as they have assumed white women’s experience as paradigmatic. This assumption has marginalized or denied the experience of Black women, obscuring the ways in which their lives are shaped by distinctively racist forms of male dominance. Crenshaw offers the example of Black women’s experience of rape as a weapon of racialterror.

Crenshaw’s article demonstrates clearly that gender is not a simple or univocal concept. The social meanings of femininity incorporate norms of race, class, disability, and so on, with the result that women of different class and racial/ethnic identities may differ sharply in their senses of what it is to be a woman. Such differences complicate feminist evaluations of various social institutions and practices, but feminists cannot ignore them if our goal is to end the subordination of all women.

These four papers offer little more than an introduction to the contemporary feminist equality debate, but they demonstrate that the ideal of sex equality is itself so contested that it cannot provide a clear standard for resolving the practical dilemmas that feminists confront. For this reason, feminism is defined in this book, not as a commitment to sex equality, but as a commitment to ending women’s subordination. The notion of subordination is less encumbered with theoretical baggage than the notion of equality and so is easier to use as a standard in evaluating various social practices. In addition, because the notion of subordination generates fewer assumptions than that of equality, it is perceived to leave more questions open for debate.

Feminist discussions of equality provide a clear illustration of what feminists mean when we speak of living with contradictions. If we demand to be treated identically to men, we may often deepen our subordination—but our subordination may also be reinforced when we are treated differently from men. We seem to be in a classic double bind: damned if we do and damned if we don’t.

Despite these difficulties, feminist discussions of sex equality have been far from fruitless. Even though equality continues to be disputed among feminists, both as an ideal and a strategy, our debates nevertheless offer several distinctive contributions to prevailing understandings of equality. Of particular interest in the discussions included here are the challenge to the male norm, the attack on the gender bias implicit in the public/private distinction, and the recognition that generalizations about women are likely to obscure race and class privileges. Indeed, these insights illuminate a variety of moral issues. And other themes running through the equality debate, themes counterposing sameness and difference, masculinity and femininity, assimilation and transformation, emerge in feminist debates around many issues of moral practice.

Sexual Difference and Sexual Equality

Alison M. Jaggar

The persistence and intensity of the perennial interest in sexual difference is not sustained by simple curiosity. Instead, it derives from an urgent concern with issues of sexual justice. For almost two and a half millennia,... men and later women have debated the nature, extent, and even existence of the differences between the sexes and reflected on their relevance for the just organization of society.

...

Equality is a contested ideal notoriously open to a variety of interpretations. In the first part of this paper, I outline two ways in which some contemporary feminists have construed equality in legal contexts, identifying some of the problems that accompany each construal. In the second, I argue that both these conceptions of sexual equality presuppose unacceptable interpretations of sexual difference, and I go on to sketch an approach to understanding sexual difference that is more adequate to recent feminist insights. I suggest that this alternative approach to sexual difference casts the initial construals of sexual equality in a new light, pointing to the need for rethinking and perhaps even moving beyond the traditional ideal of western feminism.

Equality

Sexual Equality as Blindness to Sexual Difference

Western feminists have not always been unanimous in demanding sexual equality. Even though this ideal inspired not only some of the earliest English feminists but also participants in the U.S. Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, most nineteenthcentury feminists in the United States did not endorse such a radical demand, preferring instead to retain membership in women’s separate sphere.¹ Despite the ideology of separate spheres, however, feminist challenges to such inequities in the legal system as women’s inability to vote or to control their own property on marriage developed eventually into demands for identity of legal rights for men and women or, as it came to be called, equality before the law. By the end of the 1960s, mainstream fe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Credits
• Introduction: Living with Contradictions
• PART I: Equality
• PART II: Women Working
• PART III: Marketing Femininity
• PART IV: Women’s Fertility—Individual Choices and Social Constraints
• PART V: Family Values
• PART VI: The Personal as Political
• PART VII: Feminists Changing the World
• About the Book and Editor