14.02.2013
Women and capitalism: Double burden of oppression
Is womens inequality endemic to capitalism? Yassamine Mather spoke to socialist feminist Bridget Fowler
The crisis in the Socialist Workers Party has, among other things, highlighted the question of power relations between men and women. How would you characterise such inequality?
Recent events have indeed made us aware of how widespread are sexual harassment, indecent assault and rape. Pierre Bourdieu wrote: “I say that the idea of masculinity is one of the last refuges of the identity of the dominated classes ... characteristic of people who have little to fall back on except their labour-power and sometimes their fighting strength.”
Yet, as we have seen from the SWP instance and from the tragic suicide of Frances Andrade, taking sexual advantage of women is still ever-present and occurs across classes. Women on good wages can protect themselves better: you are much safer when you can drive yourself round in a car or can afford taxis: you are then more able to ‘reclaim the night’. Despite this, every woman I meet has had some experience of unwanted sexual encounters forced on them.
But these are questions of oppression rather than inequality (and especially not as Christine Delphy’s ‘feminist materialism’ defines it, as a class inequality: with women as the proletariat, and men as capital). Women have not yet become fully ‘bourgeois individuals’ in families: they are not yet seen as equal heads of households with men, in marriage; they do not have an uncriticised right to remain childless. In fact I think the new reproductive technology may make this more problematic. If there is any difficulty at all about women’s reproductive capacity, they are now being pushed much more into having in-vitro fertilisation or other measures to make sure that they have children; I would like to see very much more decision-making on a free-choice basis, rather than a pressurised form of coercion.
In personal relations I think that women are still seen as ‘slags’ or ‘whores’ if they choose to have more than one partner. Even in cases of statutory rape, where girls are the objects of underage sexual interaction, defence lawyers can, and habitually do, ruin girls’ characters in the legal process of questioning their conduct. So we find then that lawyers will raise questions about the woman having seduced the defendant in various ways, even though she is by definition under-aged: that is, under 16.
The assumptions about what a woman deserves in terms of her ‘purity’ are still in place, and we can still quite easily tap into a type of patriarchal collective consciousness, where this has serious implications for people’s actions. It was only a few years ago that the Yorkshire Ripper killed many women, beginning with prostitutes, and we can see that police inactivity did seem to relate to their considered ‘lower value’.
So women’s assumed purity still becomes important in advanced capitalism. I have no doubt that at certain critical junctures in private relations between men and women, allegations of ‘Whore!’ still continue where women have not been totally faithful. I think most women, particularly when they are young, find this very damaging, very upsetting. In my view, classifications of that sort can still have an enormous power.
The commodification of women’s bodies in capitalism makes some forms of oppression more marked than in earlier periods. We now have a greater regulation through body image than occurred in pre-capitalist societies. Yes, it is applicable to young men in increasing numbers as well, but, given that women are more often socialised to be highly-sensitive to public opinion, I think it is more damaging for them.
I see anorexia nervosa as a response to this form of cultural discipline, these modes of regulation and oppression working particularly via the ‘beauty myth’, made more intense by the individuation of modern western society: that is, the decline of communal meals and meal times, which makes it easier for people to disguise the initial stages of anorexia. So I think we are seeing new controls on women through images of desire in magazines and advertising and indeed it has been suggested by Naomi Wolf that perhaps two thirds of young women in colleges and universities in the United States are suffering from some form of depleted energy or depression - slight or major - as a result of the regulation by ‘beauty image’ - in other words, as a result of dieting.
We can also see distinctive new patterns of control emerging in late capitalism which may well at this stage be impacting more strongly on girls than boys. I am thinking here of the demands for success in schools - and exam success in particular - and the prolongation of school and college existence well into adulthood. One’s poor fate in the labour market, often (but not always) due to a lack of educational success, is determined in large part by social position, especially the type of cultural knowledge the family provides, and how far that family culture is compatible with the cultural presuppositions of the curriculum. Yet this is not widely acknowledged.
In my opinion this does make an important change in the nature of youth in our society: increasingly, youth is prolonged a very long time and we are now seeing people trying to juggle work and study at the same time. This is problematic, perhaps particularly for young women. It is particularly difficult for them to express their sexuality, to control their fertility. This applies perhaps more to young women in the lower middle class and middle class than in the working class. Also, we are now seeing very large numbers of young immigrant women to whom these kinds of new discipline are applied.
Given that ‘personal rights’ and civil rights are born in capitalist societies, given that labour becomes a commodity and therefore should be divorced from gender, religion, race and nationality, one could have expected an end to legal, formal inequality between men and women.
With the end of the ‘marriage bar’ which I grew up with, there has been improvement on that front. Many of my teachers at school had to leave if they married. Indeed I experienced this institutionalised prejudice myself, in my own university. Bizarre as it might seem now, in the 1960s this university had a policy of demoting women to assistant lecturers, even if they were senior lecturers, when they became married. Furthermore, for many years it was possible for a married employed man to get tax relief for his non-working wife, but it did not apply the other way round.
With the end of such open disparities and with women’s entitlement to half the house on divorce - which is very important - many legal disabilities of women in the west have been removed. I think we now have a structure of feeling in which the ideal is perceived clearly as removing all existing legal inequalities.
So I would agree with you that this is the main area of progress in the west. But I would still like to say there are significant areas where inequality or women’s oppression does still emerge. For example, it is not yet illegal for a woman to lose her job on becoming pregnant if she has been in it less than a year, rather than being given maternity leave (and even if they do have maternity leave, many employers subtly - but not illegally - harass them with the aim of pushing them into leaving when they return). Moreover women, but not men, have their children removed from their custody in divorce cases, if they can be shown to have had an affair. I think here we should move towards a more equitable treatment of both genders, in principle giving split custody to the man and the woman.
Nevertheless, whilst there are still significant exceptions, the trend is certainly in the direction of formal equivalence.
If we leave aside legal rights, what are the factors that stop equality of men and women in the labour market? Is it, for example, housework or is it cultural? Or both?
I believe it does relate particularly to the continuity of a gender division of labour over family responsibilities, physical and emotional. This will be particularly difficult to uproot. To a lesser extent, it can impact on the ‘new man’, who is conscientious at home, just as it impacts on women, especially those with children under five. It does cut both ways.
However, my feeling is that the discrimination is of a complex nature, including such factors as women’s feeling that, because they have much more of the life-and-death responsibilities for their children, they therefore should not risk applying for promoted positions with the highest level of power and responsibility. But this inequality also has simple elements: we know, for example, that female professors are paid less in aggregate than male professors. That may simply be due to a big organisation like a university knowing that it can get away with offering women less pay for the same job.
There is also still a culture in which people perceive essential biological differences between the genders, a culture which inaugurates, right from the point of a girl’s birth, a difference in her education, a separation of the spheres in which she moves, so that she has less access to the techniques of public speaking, and inequality in assumptions about her capabilities and her duties. I would see that as being fundamentally dislodged at the moment: it is now much more accepted that the differences between men and women have very little in the way of a genetic base, and are much more importantly acquired through socialisation.
Little facts have come out which indicate, for example, that when the 11 plus exam to enter grammar school was a widespread national institution, more girls passed it than boys. But they were kept back because of the 50% quota reserved for boys. The changes in beliefs in a biologically based sexual difference has to be seen as linked with the movement for legal equality. But the actual relations between men and women change much more slowly.
Women find themselves facing that contrast particularly when they have their first child. Men seem to remain more at the level of culture. I felt this very strongly when I had my first baby; it was as though I and other women were having to wrestle with the interminable and multiple forces of dirt. I sometimes think that dirt, and its recurrence, is the source of our idea of ‘original sin’ in religion! Waves of chaos can very easily swamp the household that women, in particular, are brought up to be responsible for and have to control.
I see it in that relationship in which men are often privileged to be able to sit and read a newspaper, while women have to absorb themselves with what is often very menial, very repetitive housework. To get a joint division of labour in that respect is quite difficult. It does require an unusual concern on the part of the man as well as the woman; and the pressures which he is under at work can very easily destroy his good will in that area. The rigidity and expense of much socialised childcare - and here I am talking of nurseries and creches - make it very difficult to eradicate the material inequality between the genders in this respect. It makes it unfeasible for women to be high-flyers when their children are young.
They are expected very much to adhere to rigid hours of picking up their children (in my day, it was as early as noon) and this is not conducive to the more demanding intellectual tasks. Moreover, private nurseries, which are now blooming, are extremely expensive, so that they are restricted to young professional or young businesswomen particularly. Eric Olin Wright, in Class counts (Cambridge 1997), points out how nurseries are the fastest-growing petty bourgeois business in the US and I have no doubt that these are in the process of giving way to large corporations with chains.
More importantly, drawing on what I have just said, there is a major class divide in women’s experiences in advanced capitalism. Johanna Brenner has put it very well when she describes it as the “best of times and the worst of times for women”. I think for working class women in some respects it must be the worst of times. For middle class women, particularly those in very well paid careers, it is the best of times. The working class married woman’s double burden is particularly acute. It has eradicated large tracts of what previously was a leisure existence for them. In fact you could say that capitalism has now achieved what 19th century industrialists wanted in the first place, which was the proletarianisation of the whole family.
Industrialists had to give up that ambition to have men and women in the factory in the mid-19th century because of the pressure of predominantly male trade unions. The experience in work of many women doing deskilled and monotonous labour is that they would undoubtedly prefer in some respects to have at least a period of time off when their children are young. Yet this for many of them is now totally unfeasible. To survive they must go back to work very soon after giving birth. Work has become a burdensome necessity for many working class women and indeed many of them in areas of high male unemployment are the sole breadwinners for the whole family.
Their often low-paid jobs are supporting their unemployed men, and indeed their unemployed sons too. Having said this, I am still not with those men in Pakistan who demonstrate against women being able to have jobs in factories. Their control over women in the home can be very oppressive and women are expected to put themselves second at all times - to be powerless, to be subservient. I do not think that their long-run interests are served by listening to their menfolk telling them to stay at home.
In 19th century Britain, the issue was more difficult. I am prepared to accept the argument that for the sake of a level of civilisation then, for the working class as a class, it was perhaps important during that early industrial immersion of both sexes into the factory for this to change. Women then retreated to the home to look after the whole family. It is understandable that women in the mid-19th century did withdraw from labour to look after their children, given the much lower level of labour-saving devices, the much lower level of socialised childcare and indeed the terrible fear that people had of the workhouse, and especially of what the parish guardians might set up in the way of social care. They probably did ensure that there was a level of refinement and individuation for their children that would not have been achieved otherwise.
But that period of early capitalism was a particularly debilitating period for women. It is interesting that even feminist socialists in the mid-19th century, like Flora Tristan in France, could not imagine married women choosing to work. We had a very brief period in the French Revolution, where women were emancipated as citizens - creches were set up and they were entitled to divorce and abortion rights. Almost as soon as the Jacobins came to power, however, there were pressures to end these rights. By 1804 the Napoleonic code had put in place a whole series of restrictions on women working and then it became unimaginable for large numbers of people to think of those earlier rights. You can see the situation in Britain where the most influential early feminist book is Mary Wollstonecraft’s A vindication of the rights of women (1792), which does not discuss the need for women to work at all.
We have seen an interesting debate about sex and class in the 19th century, and in my view what happened was that the working class, in order to advance itself vis-à-vis capital, and achieve a modicum of civilisation, had to do so, tragically, by subordinating women and restricting them to the home. But I don’t believe that this is the choice that now faces women in developing countries. They must heroically insist on their right to labour.
How do we explain capitalism’s failure to eliminate inequality? In your opinion is it possible to achieve private and social equality between men and women within the framework of capitalist relations?
I do think that in the west there have been important gains. The decline of religion and its ‘enchantment’ of the sexual difference through preaching is an important development in this respect. All world religions have been highly patriarchal. But ultimately I cannot see capitalism providing the infrastructure in which every single woman can realise herself, in particular given the expensive provision of nurseries and the need for carers of the old and the sick. Affording these costs is, of course, a possibility for businesswomen and higher professionals in the west, but it is only available on a privatised, commodified basis. Keynesian-fuelled state policies never provided the economic base for both partners to have a career.
To go back to a point I was going to make earlier on, what developed out of the emancipation struggles in the 1960s, and which flowered into women’s liberation in the 1970s as second-wave feminism, was a concern to reform the nature of the two sexes and the emergence of an ideal of a ‘new man’ (‘non-hegemonic masculinity’). I see the ‘new man’ ideal fitting very badly with the nature of capitalist competition. When the market place struggle becomes intense, as we have seen in Britain, the number of hours that people spend at work lengthens; the primacy of work over all other concerns becomes more and more intense, so these cannot fit with a leisurely and dedicated response to your family’s needs.
Increasingly pressure is put upon men to act in an egoistic, ambitious fashion, for the sake of the material survival of their companies or public sector departments, if not for their own advancement. This totally impedes the reform of domestic relations that we have been talking about, yet, until men do it, how can women be free? In particular, there has been a very scanty provision of state nurseries, largely for working class single mothers in the past. They have not been providing care of the sort that most people would regard as adequate for themselves, in terms of stimulation of children. It has to be said that it is largely middle class women who have been able to afford any other alternative.
Sadly this is not seen in terms of class at all. Work that feminists such as Beverley Skeggs have done amongst Yorkshire working class women (Formations of class and gender London 1997) shows that such women no longer now call themselves working class. The class affiliation had by then become stigmatising, so they called themselves something else (‘ordinary people’, etc). They are therefore removing one of the weapons that might allow them to improve their situation.
To sum up, there is still a real clash between the broad social and cultural needs of the family and work imperatives. This, of course, emerges mainly at the level of the strain put on relationships. Juliet Mitchell once proposed that there would have to be a dual revolution: a revolution in terms of material relations of production and a revolution in terms of gender relations. I must say that I can only see one continuous revolution that has its effects throughout all the spheres of a society’s totality.
How do you see the influence of culture in reproducing inequality between men and women?
Women’s emancipation has been associated historically with bourgeois society. Capitalism has had a dual effect: it has been liberating for some in the sphere of consumption, while it has also been constraining in the sphere of production. I think that the emergence of cafes and cheap convenience foods are historic achievements of capitalism. That levelling of the public sphere and the removal of feudal status inequalities so as to open up to everyone, on a democratic basis, certain spaces is an achievement of the bourgeoisie, there is no doubt about it, and women’s independence has been linked to that.
On the other hand, one could also say that in movements like that of literary modernism, in many respects the great modernist writers defined themselves against women. They saw themselves as more rational, more educated. So the traditional communal forms of story-telling, for example, in which women had often been experts, were downgraded as merely popular forms. In particular the extension of education into certain high cultural areas, which were at one time were denied to women, meant that women suddenly discovered themselves to be the victims of a whole new series of oppressions. For example, until the mid-19th century the novel was seen as a lower form, especially when written by women - because they did not have the education in Latin and Greek that upper class men had.
To what extent can feminist movements play a role in improving the conditions of women and reducing existing inequalities? Can women’s movements become independent of capitalism?
To be brief, I see the women’s movement now as profoundly split between liberal feminism and socialist feminism. The movements of women earlier were often divided over the image of women as child-bearers and home-nurturers and the needs of working women. That occurred in the German movement. I think now our most significant split is probably between liberal feminism and socialist feminism.
Unfortunately, since the 1970s there has been a decline of socialist feminism. I think liberal feminism has persisted and indeed flourished - it has even been taken up by western governments - but it has swallowed up a lot of socialist feminism.
The feminist movement should not be seeking to make women in the image of men - not least because men’s character has had to be distorted in order to be the career-minded, egoistic, instrumentally concentrated beings that the world of even professional middle class work in capitalism requires. If women were just simply to take on the form of men, we would see the loss of the very important achievements of women for civilisation - for example, the questioning of militarism. The hostility towards militarism I see as the one clear achievement of women’s culture, although the questioning of egoistic, instrumental rationality in the name of careerism has also been a significant contribution on our part. But I am not in favour of what has sometimes been called ‘difference feminism’ either.
I am deeply suspicious of some French feminists who perceive women as having a privileged access to a pre- symbolic form of communication. They emphasise the non-verbal forms of communication, stress the pre-Oedipal babble of the child and see women as privileged to communicate with this. So women in my view should avoid being valued for their fluidity, their viscosity and the other traits that French post-structuralists like Irigaray and Cixous have seen as being distinctive to them. I am even very dubious about privileging women’s intuitiveness. I think this is a largely magical belief and, to the degree that it has emerged, it has actually impeded them in developing rationality. So women’s movements are analytically independent of capitalism, but materially they are profoundly affected by it.
What we have seen is the way in which, on the field of power, elements of feminism which have been best suited to the reproduction of the dominant class have been selected out. It seems to me that we should be capable of the flexibility of thinking in which we might in principle be in favour of women’s emancipation, but might also see it as a very dubious phenomenon in some respects, as it has actually been implemented on the ground. Perhaps I need to justify that, because people might think I am being treacherous. I think women’s emancipation ought to be seen now perhaps as something of a Trojan horse, in that it has broken down various buffers - communal and family buffers, for example - which had previously provided people with some protection from the austerity of the market.
The dominant class has used feminism, has used its privileged women’s labour-power to increase its economic capital, its cultural capital and its social capital. I think we have seen the use also of commercialised forms of popular literature and television, which women consume in large numbers, to break down an autonomous, anti-capitalist high culture. There was an elitist high culture which was very critical of aspects of capitalism, and I think the turn to privileging women’s form of expression, like the romance, may have quite often removed that critical edge culturally. These were forms that adjusted themselves to the market and did not question it. Such sub-genres did not take issue with the commercialisation of life in general.
I believe there is a danger now of a simplistic, populist aesthetic and a return to a view that things that sell best are better: a return to a mistaken common sense. Now I do not want to say that there are not valuable elements of popular women’s literature. I think they have a distinctive, moral and political understanding of how people should live their lives, which is important. That is a cultural achievement. We were right to say at a certain stage that it is not just high culture that should be preserved. There are elements from popular culture that are important and need saving. But we are in danger of shifting into a market-based aesthetic which is a populist one.
This is dangerous and is antagonistic to the older idea of the autonomous writer and the autonomous artist. This relates perhaps to how I see sociology and art. I see sociology as being valuable, in that it does allow us to break with common sense - educated common sense as well as traditional. In that sense, it has a view of societies as constructivist, which is crucial. It repudiates the biological essentialisms of race and class, etc. That is important. I think art does the same. Indeed, we had the actual term of constructivist art taken up in the Russian Revolution.
There are general antagonism of class interest in capitalism - capital has needs which workers do not have. Nevertheless the ways in which these are instituted - how reification actually works - is different in the different capitalist societies. Essentialist ideas about class can very easily become mechanistic, determinist accounts or historicist accounts (to use Popper’s term). So I think we need to distinguish between the more deep-rooted structural necessities and the contingent relationships.
Yes, I think in a deep-rooted way capital has a consistent, enduring need for sources of cheap labour. That is an underlying imperative in whatever market society you live, but there are contingent solutions to that problem. The cheap labour may be immigrants or it may be women, and historically these are conditioned by the nature of struggles that take place. The workers’ culture enormously affects the outcome of typical conflicts and struggles over life chances. I find it difficult to think of a single model of an essentialist development of capitalism.
To that extent you could say that as I get older I have more doubts about how inevitable is the transition to socialism. I have hopes that we will make that transition. I see it as being civilisationally necessary, but how this occurs is more problematic than perhaps earlier generations imagined. In other words, it is difficult to read off the future from past trends. This is so, especially given the greater intensity of the neo-globalising aspects that have integrated world society more, operating immediately to the detriment of the western working class and to workers and peasants in the south.
Of course, this is an equalisation via the law of value, and it is a long delayed one. Imperialism delayed it. At present we can see in late capitalist society the real benefits of increased material levels for many of the working class - it has to be said, because of dual wage earning. Although I am not entirely against people like Marcuse when they talk about false needs, I think, for example, we in the west buy too many clothes. At the same time, people do not make sufficient demands for space: good housing space and green space in cities.
Working class ambitions need to get stronger in that respect rather than more reduced. In the west the improved consumption levels have been used to buy off discontent about deskilling and increased labour discipline. What is emerging now as a result of globalisation is deindustrialisation and unemployment, particularly for males. Some groups, like the second-generation immigrants, are much more likely to experience this than others. It seems to me that the experience of unemployment now is perhaps psychologically worse than it has ever been before.
Materially, maybe the unemployed are not suffering from the absolute poverty - indeed hunger - that led people in the 1930s to go out to the country and eat hawthorn berries. However, psychologically, in a society much more based on the cash nexus, where all relationships, except the immediate family, have become commodified, the unemployed experience much more sharply a sense of loss of dignity. It will be difficult to know what will be the outcome of all this. Will we just learn to stomach 11% or more of our workforces being unemployed over a long period?
Who would have thought in the 30s that the crisis of capitalism then, with its huge numbers of unemployed throughout the world, would lead to the form of class compromise of Keynesianism, with its relatively benevolent face of the 1960s? That, as we now know, was transitory, but I am somewhat pessimistic about the time which it will take to develop a better allocation mechanism than capitalism. I think we can do it. I think humans are clever enough to do it.
But nations used to have a little bit of space within which they could reform their own economy. Now it can only be done on a Europe-wide basis or globally. So it is going to need a lot more rationality of international planning than was ever necessary before.
It may take some time before we can develop new alternatives as a means of supplanting the allocation of labour to different areas that the market provides. At present I see a renewed ‘racism’ of class too and this is extremely worrying. The haute bourgeoisie (old money) seems to me to have become more dignified in its self- presentation, especially as it has acquired more education over the last couple of generations: capitalist rule seems to be more secure because of this. There has been, it has to be admitted, a decline of the left.
These changes have perhaps been accomplished parallel to some real improvements in the situation of bourgeois women, and a limited improvement in that of working class women: their refusal to be slaves to men any longer, for example. The full weight of the double burden now rests with working class women. But instead of understanding the situation that provokes ordinary men, in the face of the removal of craft skills and traditional security, to hang on to the last relics of their honour and power as males, there is a danger of their simplistic dismissal - a dismissal which treats them as bestial or barbarous.
This is an updated version of an interview Bridget Fowler gave to Yassamine Mather for Iran Bulletin
yassamine.mather@weeklyworker.org.uk