3.3 - Jones, Kathleen B. - Socialist-Feminist Theories of the Family (en)

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Socialist-Feminist Theories of the Family

Socialist-Feminist Theories of the Family

by Kathleen B. Jones

Source:

PRAXIS International (PRAXIS International), issue: 3 / 1988, pages: 284-300, on www.ceeol.com.
http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.dibido.eu/bookdetails.aspx?bookID=0a3d3f96-8ad3-4089-b110-89e4753b2d5chttp://www.ceeol.com/


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THE FAMILY AND POWER IN SOCIALIST-FEMINIST THEORY

Kathleen JonesContemporary theorists have attempted to explain the relationship between thefamily and social change. Feminists, in particular, have addressed themselves tothis task. Because of their contention that women have been defined in terms of

their functions in the family, and that such definitions represent the persistenceof patriarchalism in modern society, it was logical for them to explore the relationship between the family and the political system. 1 Feminist theorists exploredthe critical role of the family as a political institution. Within the family the sexualdivision of labor was reproduced, the ideology of acquisitive individualism wascultivated, differently for men than for women, and needs were structured in orderto maintain the existing social order.In the course of these explorations, most feminists concluded that neither of thetwo major contemporary epistemologies of consciousness-formation - Marxismand Freudian psychoanalysis - was adequate to the task of explaining the politicsof gender identificationand family dynamics. That both orthodox materialist theoriesand classical psychoanalysis tended to remain silent to the woman question seemedto be the unanimous conclusion of feminist social theorists." The work of thesetheorists represented an important attempt to account for women's position inmodern society in terms of the combined effects of the double determination byan hierarchical sexual order (gender identity) and the class system, where eachof these two systems was defined as relatively autonomous of the other.The efforts of these theorists to move beyond the methodological strait-jacketof specific ideologies is laudable. Their works try to situate the family, and women'splace within it, within the context of the mutually supportive though, they insist,discrete systems of gender identification and class relations. Yet these accountsof the ideological and economic "functions" of the family do not suffice as anexplanatory model of the relationship between the family and the political economyof modern society. On the basis of the organizing concepts of feminist socialtheory, we have neither an adequate description of the dynamics of contemporaryfamilies, nor a coherent explanation of the material and ideological location ofthe family within the structure of late industrial capitalism.This paper will demonstrate that these problems are rooted in epistemologicaland methodological errors. Its central hypothesis is that there is a chronic confusionin feminist social theory between different levels of analysis. The critique of theideology of patriarchy is confused with analysis of the actual structure ofmaterialreality which that ideology both obscures and partially legitimates. This meansthat evidence about social definitions of roles that women should perform and thefunctions that families ought to fulfill is confused with evidence that describes theactual roles of women and the empirical life of families. 3 Further errors are a


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Praxis International 285function of the essentialistic treatments of the family as a concept that pervademuch feminist work on the topic. Rayna Rapp expressed this as the "acceptanceof the distinction between the family itself, and the larger world, " as either a preexisting enclave or survival of earlier productive modes, or as an effect of changesin the mode of production." In either case, the family is "naturalized," ratherthan being treated as an essentially contested historical and analytic concept."This essay will be divided into the following parts. The first section will review

the account of the family offered by major feminist theorists. Particular attentionwill be paid to the concept of patriarchy as employed by these writers. The secondsection will describe the broad outlines of a methodology that can account for thehistorical forces altering definitions of the family. The extent to which heightenedexpectations regarding family life were inculcated universally and resulted in thereconstruction of everyday reality in the life of families of different classes, races,ethnic groups and regional locations will be the focus of section three. The fourthsection will consider the way in which psychoanalysis might be employed to addresssome of the problems raised in earlier sections. Finally, the concluding sectionwill suggest ways that contemporary capitalism produces contradictory effects whichare expressed in the changing meaning and practice of personal life.

IRadical feminist social theory seems unanimous in its conclusion that orthodoxMarxist thought is defective when it is applied to the history ofwomen's oppression.

Marxism is wedded to an ontology of production, and women, Lorenne Clarkcontended, are not determined primarily by their relationships to the sphere ofproduction, but by their relationships to the sphere of reproduction. Because thedynamics of reproduction were excluded methodologically from Marxist analysis,Marxism projected the problems of gender inequality onto its image of the socialistfuture."Socialist feminists have argued for the need to supplement traditional Marxistanalysis. The operation of patriarchy, they argued, was a relatively autonomoussystem of male domination and was analogous to the structural reproduction of classrelations under capitalism. Zillah Eisenstein proposed a social theory which wouldaccount for women's exploitation in terms of the integrated operation of the systemof ''"capitalist patriarchy." The structures of capitalism and of patriarchy weredistinct, but still in symbiotic relationship to one another. According to Eisenstein,patriarchal gender relations and the class system of capitalism were mutuallysupportive. Class relations were built upon the' 'sexual ordering of society, " andthus patriarchy operated within the parameters of a class system. The patriarchalordering of sex roles, along with their legitimating ideologies, provided capitalismwith a form of "political control" stabilizing the ' 'economic class system."7The charge that Marxist analysis was inadequate came to rest on the critiqueof the "primacy of production. ' '8 Because gender identity remained at least partially hidden by this paradigm, it was argued that no systematic theory of the family

could be derived from a methodology which underscored "class exploitation asthe primary contradiction. " Eisenstein contended that Marx reduced oppressionto exploitation, thereby seriously limiting the explanatory power of his theory


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286 Praxis Internationalto account for the position of women and the importance of the family. The conceptof exploitation, she argued, is derived from Marx's analysis of the economicrelations of capitalism. Dependent as it is on the definition ofwage labor's producingsurplus value, it remains silent on the problem of labor in reproduction and household work, which produce no surplus value. Since these do not enter immediatelyinto the calculus of capitalist equations, we have no measure of the exploitationof these' 'producers, " much less the social significance of their' 'work," to themaintenance of the capitalist system. Having subsumed relations of reproductionunder the general rubric of relations of production, an account ofwomen's oppression is missing from Marx's analysis. Thus, only a theory which successfully exploresthe double determination of women's position by both the hierarchical sexual orderand the class structure ofmodern society would be acceptable. Given the institutionalization of patriarchy in the bourgeois family and the political economy sucha theory would have to clarify the relationship between the family and the politicaleconomy."These criticisms implied that an adequate theory of the family would, then, treatthe family as a complex totality of relations which represents in microcosm thediversity of the separate structures ofwomen's situation; i.e., production, reproduction, sexuality and the socialization of children. Rather than criticize the familyper se, and demand its abolition, socialist strategy would demand the diversification

of the socially acknowledged relationships that are today forcibly and rigidlycompressed into it. IDThe most recent attempts to develop a theory of women's exploitation employpsychoanalysis to argue that the origin of women's plight lay in the process ofgender differentiation. Going beyond an analysis of the political-economic functionsof sex roles they suggest that it is in the "very psychology of femininity that womenbear witness to the patriarchal definition of human society." 11 Nancy Chodorowoffers a detailed account ofwomen's mothering in an effort to locate those object

relational experiences that give rise to "the psychology and ideology of maledominance. " 12Socialist-feminist theory, therefore, situated the family, and women's place init, within the context of the mutually supportive, though discrete, systems ofpatriarchy and capitalism. Patriarchy, defined as male supremacy, "provides thesexual hierarchical ordering of society for political control." Since it operates asa political system, it cannot be understood when reduced to its economic structure. Capitalism was defined as an "economic class system" which "feeds off"patriarchal hierarchies. Like that of the shark and the pilot fish, the relationshipbetween capitalism and patriarchy could best be described as an ecological one.Although socialist feminist theory rejects the assumption that patriarchy is a purelybiological system in favor of the position that gender roles are culturally determined,it remains inadequate in accounting for the centrality of the historically specificsexual division of labor under capitalism. Despite the assertion that patriarchy isintegral to the capitalist system, socialist feminists only have suggested its paralleloperation. 13This "dual systems approach" 14 unjustifiably limits the scope of Marxist

analysis to the explanation of economic' 'facts. " The theory of patriarchy appearsas an ad hoc device used to explain the residual structural and ideological elements


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Praxis International 287of gender relations for which Marxist analysis allegedly has not accounted. Themost recent psychoanalytic efforts to account for gender divisions tend to substituteuseful descriptions of the psychodynamics of gender differentiation for explanationsof the functional and metaphoric significance of gender differentiation in advancedcapitalism. 15At best what we have is the juxtaposition of two sets of dynamics whose relationship is never adequately explored. Granted that the sexual division of laborstabilizes society through the family, while it organizes the realm of domestic work,the question remains why this particular form of political control endured undercapitalism. Explaining this as a vestige of pre-capitalist patriarchy operating ina capitalist context only obscures the issue by making patriarchy a "transhistoricaland autonomous system" instead of a "set of relations in a particular society. " 16The allegation that male power is rooted either in a vague prehistoric psychologyor derives from male domination of such institutions regulating reproductiveprocesses as law or medicine is not a sufficient explanation for the existence ofpatriarchy. Moreover the more universally patriarchy is defmed, the more obscuredthe relations between biology and society become." The social organization ofgender identity must be viewed as an historical problem, and subjected to amaterialist analysis.

Materialist analysis should not be defmed narrowly as "economic" methodology.Rather, it grants priority to "concrete social institutions and practices, along withthe material conditions in which they take place." 18 The complexity of Marxistanalysis of the development of social relations under capitalism is worth carefulconsideration. The issue is not whether Marx himself offered a complete pictureof women's condition, but whether his methodology is broad enough to enablecontemporary scholars to accomplish this task.Understanding how society organizes its productive activities is fundamentalto understanding the nature of society itself in any historical period. 19This is notbecause there is some crude correspondence between economics and culture, butbecause human productive activity, or social activity as Marx calls it, expressesa relation between the producer and external nature, while it simultaneouslyrepresents the ways that an individual develops specific capacities and needs.Production is a "definite form of (individuals') activity, a defmite way of expressingtheir life, a definite mode of life' , .20 The development of specific social relationsis conditioned by the unfolding of productive forces in any historical period.The importance of production is not that identity is reduced to a mere reflectionof it, but that the life-process of individuals is how' 'they work, produce materially,and act under defmite material limitations, presuppositions, and conditions independent of their will" .21 Marx's emphasis on production is the attempt to provide amethod of analysis that is historical and concrete, as opposed to speculative andidealist. The narrowing of the meaning of productive activity to its definition aswage labor is an historical premise of the development of capitalism. For Marx,the distinguishing feature of capitalist productive activity is that property relationsbecome completely independent of the community. 22 In a market system, exchange


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288 Praxis Internationalrelations, no longer limited by the kinship system of social organization, becomethe fundamental dynamic and organizing principle of society. Thus, the productionof material life becomes the purpose of social intercourse itself. All other relationships, including relations in the family, become subordinate to the determinantrelation to production. 23It is, in fact, more precise to argue that different structures or ideologies of thefamily emerge simultaneously with changes in the productive mode. The theorythat family forms reflect changes in the economy is inaccurate for two reasons.First, it arbitrarily and abstractly separates "the family" from the productive mode,i.e., fromthe historicallyspecific "life-process" that any epoch constructs. Second,it assumes "an essential family whose internal structure may vary and whoserelations to the system of production may vary, but which nevertheless persistsacross these historical transformations. " 24That "the family" has been an essentially contested concept is reflected bothin contemporary controversies about adoption rights of homosexuals as wellas the fact that, until the early eighteenth century, the word family was neithercoterminous with eo-residents in households, nor limited to kin relations who wereeo-residents." Rather, "family" has been used as a metaphor to express relationships that may include kin, but are not limited to relations among kin. Incontemporary capitalist culture, family seems to carry expressive force primarilyas a code that represents certain specific emotional bonds connected to "personallife". In early modern Europe, "family" signified all those joined together bytheir common subjection to a male head, or "pater-familias." The apparentdisjunction between authority patterns, work relationships and emotional tiesdistinguishes the modern bourgeois family ideal.With the rupturing of feudal ties to the land and to kin, the "free" individualis born. Individual talent and initiative seem to replace the accidents of birth asthe primary determinants of an individual's position in the division of labor. "Toeach according to his ability" becomes the credo of the day. A free market, freetrade, free exchangeand free labor facilitate the unlimited production and accumulation of wealth which characterizes the capitalist system.Nevertheless, the dependence of each individual on the market means that whilecertain arbitrary divisions of rank and status have been superseded, other equallyarbitary distinctions have replaced them. Individuals seem freer but, in reality,have become less free "because they are to a greater extent governed by materialforces. "26 The exigencies of exchange based on private appropriation of socialwealthlimit the abilityof individuals to escape from the "particular exclusive sphereof activity" which represents their position in the division of labor.The transformationof social relations effected by the development of commodityproduction is contradictory. On the one hand, the satisfactionof human needs is nowmore dependent than ever on the market system. At the same time that very marketsystemacts as a "barrier" to the fulfillment of different needs for specified classesof individuals. Thus, the bourgeois system of production creates new needs for' 'thedevelopment of a totality of (individual) capacities. " But, it can only sustain itselfas capital by fulfilling these needs within the terms set by private property.These insightscan be applied to the study of the family and the social organizationof gender. In precapitalist systems of production, the household itself was the


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Praxis International 289productive mode. Work within it was divided along gender lines, but the inequalityof status that existed resulted from the combined effects of prolonged child careand the primitive level of technology. 27 But as long as the household remainedthe primary locus of production, the restriction of tasks to one sex or the otherdid not contradict their reciprocal dependence. 28Even when, in urban cultures, some husbands began to work primarily awayfrom the home, wives were engaged either in home-centered labor, or in activitiesoutside the home which were parallel to their household chores. In either case,the economic contribution of women's work was so critical to the livelihood oflower-class families that married women within this strata could be characterizedbest as "working partners in the family enterprise. " 2 9 Equally important was thefact that personal life was rooted in the mutual labor of family members. 30The concept of the family, family relationships, and the definitions of women'splace in the family and in the economy were altered in major ways with thedevelopment of commodity production. The idea of the family as an aggregateof eo-residing kin came to be seen as the norm. Sexual polarity gradually replacedsexual complementarity as a feature of the division of labor. 31 Capitalist production was based on a disjunction between' 'material production organized as wagelabor and the forms of production taking place within the family. " Consequently,the family's economic functionwas obscured, as its moral purpose was emphasized,and its symbolic significance as an emblem of "ernbourgeoisement' - a cultural

norm distinguishable from both the aristocracy and the working class - washighlighted:The contradiction between, on the one hand, the disruption and squalor caused bymanufacture and urban development which were the bread and butter of the middleclass and, on the other, the intense desire for order and moral superiority, was bridgedby the romantic vision . . . the romantic imagination indelibly fixed the image of therose-covered cottage in a garden where womanhood waited and Manhood venturedabroad: to work, to war and to the Empire. So powerful was this dual conceptionthat even the radical fringe subscribed. 32

I I IThe effects of the separation between' 'work" and' 'personal life, " however,varied with class and ethnicity. Among merchant classes of the late eighteenthcentury, for instance, requirements of large capital sums for investmentnecessitatedthe "disengagement of capital from family firms." The evolution of exogamousforms of kin-marriage conducive to capital accumulation altered the nature and

structure of the family and authority patterns in critical ways:In the MoSiDa (mother-sister-ciaughter) marriage, the only link to a potential patriarchis through women. . . In the sibling exchange there is no direct line of authority atall. . .In both these patterns authority loses its generational depth . . . In such a situationthe nuclear family and the authority of the father as its head becomes far moreimportant than the authority of the kin-group and the grandfather. 33

Such families were clearly paternally controlled, because the husband was thelegal owner of the family's property. But, in the strictest sense, they were not


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290 Praxis International,'patriarchal" in terms of their relation to capital. Moreover, the exercise of paternalauthority shiftedto shaping the behavior of children to norms which were institutionally determined." As the socialization of the young began to define the femalesphere, themother's role in the inculcation ofvalues becamecritical. Despite the socialsignificance of childrearing, women, as individuals, remained legally and economically subordinate to their husbands." This, of course, varied by class and race.The rationalization of sexuality which accompanied the rise of industrializationwas represented in the ' 'Cult of TrueWomanhood. " Women, protected from thecorrupting influence of the masculine world of ' 'work," were viewed as the properguardiansof the moral sphere. True femininity was defmedby standards of behaviorand a set of activities that reflected bourgeois values. The ideal woman tendedto "home and hearth," while her husband occupied himself with business andpublic affairs. Though these ideals were unrealizeable for the majority of thepopulation, they nonetheless were universalized."Within the working class, the impact of industrialization had different effects. Inthe early stages of development of the British textile industry, for example, wholefamilies moved together into the mills." In the United States, too, recruitmentto the labor market initially was age and sex neutral. The subsequent developmentof industry intensified the specialization and differentiation of labor, therebyreducing traditional work opportunities for some women. Unions contributed tothe process of restricting most paid labor to men by arguing that female employmenthad a depressing effect on men's wages. 38Among skilled workers, increased wages decreased the necessity for the wivesof those male workers to work outside the home. At the same time, hazardousworking conditions led to the opposition of organized labor to married women'semployment on the grounds that it led to higher rates of infant mortality. 39Towardthe end of the nineteenth century in the U.S., both the increasing mechanization of industry and successive waves of immigration increased the competitionfor jobs. These forces, coupled with the enlargement of the sphere of consumption which the stability of capitalism required, widened the division of laborbetween men and women of the working class, both within industry and withinthe family.40Moreover, the alienating effects of work placed an increased burdenon the family to serve as a place of retreat and release. That women's positionin this case, even employed women, was defined largely in terms of their familialroles is not a reflection of the persistence of a patriarchal ideology, but of theparticular quality of the emergent needs of personal life which were structuredand/or restrained by market forces.One cannot rely on patriarchy to explain the centrality of gender differencesin a capitalist system of production. Market relations undermine the operation ofa patriarchally organized social system because the exchange of labor substitutesfor the exchangeofwomen as the basic social bond. Gender differentiation remainssignificantas a form of social control because the capitalist division of labor requiresa more dichotomized organization of gender identity as a necessary support. Despitethe fact that the rationalization of productive processes appears to undermine genderhierarchies, the differentiation of tasks and' 'spheres" of activity on the basis of

gender is built into the very definition of work and its purposes under capitalism.As Davidoff and Hall put it:


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Praxis International 291Manhood was to become part of the central claims to legitimate middle classleadership . . .Manhood also implied the ability and willingness to support and protectwomen and children. Men would enter the market as free agents but would thuspreserve the moral bonds of society in their private and philanthropic activity."

This connection of masculinity with the ability to support women and childrenwho were defined as dependent operated as a strong ideological support for thesharpening of a sexual division of labor even among the working classes where,class obstacles notwithstanding, masculinity came to be equated with having anoccupation. The flip side of this was the necessity to hold, or aspire to the holdingof, the "substance of domesticity. "42Any careful analysis of the transformation of family life under capitalism mustconsider the difference between prescriptive ideals of family life reflected in theliterature and public policies of the time, and the reality of everyday experience.Feminist theorists have not always heeded the warnings of social historians andthus they have mistaken ideological dicta about femininity and the family for theactual behavior and values of a specific time." In addition, they have madeideology an independent variable instead of considering cultural norms within theclass-specific context of changing, often contradictory, social relations.For instance, if mothering was viewed as ultimate fulfillment of woman's naturein the early nineteenth century, and if childrearing literature of the times affirmedthe mother's predominance, it is to the very real changes in the social context ofmothering that we should look for an explanation of this phenomenon, rather thanto an unalloyed patriarchalist mentality. For reasons that are rooted in the capitalistorganization of work and its gender coding, the development of industrializationtriggered a greater differentiation of parental roles. There was, in other words,a split between the punitive and the nurturing aspects of authority. Fathers weregenerally associated with the former, and mothers with the latter, although themother's role in the socialization of children along sex-differentiated lines into"proper" norms of behavior did not exempt her from some measured participationin the inculcation of disciplinary codes. The advice manuals of the time, properlyanalyzed, are records of this shift towards more exclusive and intense relationsbetween mothers and their children in a more discrete and specialized milieu."At the same time they should be read as attempts to legitimate the changingstatus of women in terms which essentially fit the demands of the burgeoningcapitalist order. Tracts on the "proper" methods of childrearing, like attemptsto instill "proper" work habits, should be understood as part of the process ofinculcating in whole classes of people the behavioral norm and values of industrialcivilization." Nevertheless, the extent to which these canons were internalizedand practiced by the audiences for whom they were intended cannot be ascertainedfrom the pronouncements themselves. For many, economic and cultural exigencies,as well as racial discrimination, proved insurmountable barriers to the realizationof ideal (bourgeois) family life. 46In order to understand the consequences of what has been called the "emotionalintensification of family life" on developing forms of gender identity, we mustexplore the impact of the changed relation between the family and the outside worldas this was mediated by class and race. This requires a methodology that moves


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292 Praxis Internationalbeyond the assumption that attitudes about' 'women's proper place" accuratelyreflect, in an uncontradictory way, universal behavior.Marx observed that the development of private property contributed to theevolution of a "separate domestic economy. ' '47 According to the law of capital,work performed within this "domestic economy" of the private household, thougheconomically significant, is not productive labor. Housework, falling outside thegeneral domain of social production defined by capitalist exchange relations, is"valueless." Nevertheless, women's work in the home remains determined bythe capitalist mode of production." Capitalist social relations of production,which derive from its ontology of work as wage labor, structure the economicdependenceof all who are wage-less workers, housewives included, on the marketsystem. The connection between housework and the economy of capital is obscuredby the fact that the labor time embodied in the goods and services produced athome is not sold in the marketplace. Also, the fact that the advent of moderntechnology seems to have diminished the amount of time and energy spent onhousework attenuates the relationship between housework and "work" itself. 49The dominance of this ontology of productive labor arbitrarily focuses on onemoment of what Marx called the circuit of production, which included not onlyproduction based on the appropriation by capital of surplus value created by labor,but also distribution and consumption. This dominance obscures the complexityof the way that production depends upon consumption for the realization of surplusvalue. It also ignores the way that capitalist consumption creates a very specificsubjectwho has a need for the "products" of capitalism; a subject whose particularneedfulness is mediated by a whole range of social relationships - the 'relational'element of class - and whose specific social identity comes to be defined by"particular desires and pleasures . . . [that are] represented as cultural products." 50Because of these relational dimensions of class, each of these moments has important,'gender boundaries" which represent the ontological distinctions of hierarchy and"otherness" that capitalism both requires and threatens to erode. In other words,gender, as a metaphor of difference and classification, and as the representationof the sociallocation and life experience of actual men and women, becomes centralto the way that class belonging is coded. It is in this sense that the importanceof the conceptual distinction of family life from economics per se can be appreciatedas one of the means of constructing class identity within a market society.Nevertheless, although the private household seemed isolated from the productivesphere, family life structured and was permeated by market relations. "Mostproduction for profit was through the family enterprise . . .The forms of propertyorganization, and authority within the enterprise framed gender relations throughmarriage, the division of labor and inheritance practices." 51 In addition, thedevelopment of the forces of production gradually displaced education, recreation,and a variety of "welfare" services onto the market directly, or onto socialinstitutions (hospitals, schools, social service agencies)." The paramount changewas the family's redefinition in terms of an ethos of "personal life." The familycame to be idealized as the "primary institution in which the search for personalhappiness, love and fulfillment takes place. " The growth ofwage labor intensifiedthe weight of meaning attached to personal relations in the family. 53 This wasmade more pronounced by the development of the family as an important market


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Praxis International 293for industrial commodities. The result was that women's isolation in the familywas reinforced. At the same time, of course, the subordination of women's own"personal needs" to their traditional role as maintainers of the family's stabilitywas submerged between the ideology of "personal life" and the constricted formsin which it was contained.In order to have a measure of the real impact of these changes on the qualityof family life it would be necessary to demonstrate the specific ways in whichsocialization expectations and behaviors were modified by alterations in the structure, the relation and the representation of the family to the larger social system.Without empirical evidence to verify the significance of changing forms of familylife, one is left with a model of social change that presumes the universality ofthe conjugal family and its congruence with the industrial capitalist order.54 Weneed to test the idealization of family life against the experience of real familiesin order to explore the ways that different classes and races adapted to or resistedthe demands of a changing world."Furthermore, if a sexual division of labor is institutionalized in capitalismbecauseof the specific impact of commodity production on family life, we need to accountfor why it is structured so that the division of roles between men and womenin the family seems at once paradoxical and more rationally compelling thanbefore. Psychoanalytic methodolgy offers a theoretical method for approachingthis problem. Psychoanalysis calls attention to the way that the asymmetricalorganization of parenting affects the development of the ideologyof male superiorityas well as submission to the requirements of production. Mothering in the isolatedcontext of the nuclear household creates a "sexual division of psychic organizationand orientation" and thereby underlies the personality structure which perpetuatesthe social organization of gender. 56

IVPsychoanalysis enables us to chart the course of character development and toobserve how changes in the process of identification alter personality. In otherwords, psychoanalysis allows us to observe how the internalizationof cultural normsreverberates in the psyche. In particular, it points to the significance of familialrelations to psychological processes of gender personality. But a psychodynamicaccount does not provide us with a complete enough account of the ways thatchanges in the social structure affect the organization of parenting and, in turn,

"create . . . differential relational needs and capacities in men and women thatcontribute to the reproduction of women as mothers." 57Although it is a commonplace assumptionof somepsychoanalysts that the child'sinternalization of object-relations has been altered significantly by the relativeexclusivity of its early attachments to the mother, there has been little evidenceoffered to suggest how the situation has changed over time. On the contrary, asLasch argued, most of the evidence seems to suggest that even in pre-bourgeoissociety, infants were left exclusively in the care of women. In some cases, thedegree of sexual segregation that existedwas greater than in contemporary bourgeoissociety." Nor does the father's absence alone explain the change, since fathershistorically oftenwere "absent" from nurturing functions. Rather, it is the gradual


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294 Praxis Internationalerosion of the material base for family authority, coincident with the growth ofindustry, which alters identification processes. Fathers not only participate lessin family life, but the quality of their interaction with their children is apt to beone-sided. The image of the father as the one meting out punishment is untemperedby any other practical everyday experience of the father. Consequently, childrengrowingup in such families lack an integrated ego, and remain dependent on externalauthority. Fragility of self-concept results from extended dependence on exclusivematernal involvement, so the argument goes.Even if this account of the impact of contemporary family structure on characterdevelopment is accurate, we need to know how typical it is of family life in allclasses and races. 59 But were we to have this information, it still would not enableus to conclude that the difficulty lies in the parenting relation itself. The claimthat the' 'social organization of parenting produces sexual inequality" or that the"social rootedness of mothering" helps explain the reproduction of a particularsex/gender system tends to lead implicitly to the demand for equal parenting withoutrecognizing the class, not to mention sexual preference, blindness of such proposals.Such a demand rests upon changes in the structure of production which wouldhave to be accomplished before the practice of shared parenting could extend beyondthe narrow sphere of professionals, with flexi-time schedules, who now practiceit.60 Ironically, shared parenting, in the absence of structural changes in theorganization of production, could exacerbate class conflicts even as it modifiessexual inequalities within the more affluent strata of society. If the earliest relationships between mothers and children are fraught with tension and conflict, whatneeds to be explored is the specific way that capitalism deforms personal life evenas it creates it as a possibility for more people.The transformation of the work process itself - the separation of "work" and"life" -led to the ideology of the family as an autonomous sphere which satisfiedthe laborer's needs for human comfort. If both sexes were degraded systematicallyat work, then it might be argued that the ability of the family to survive as a viableinstitution was undermined. Therefore, it became imperative to the stability ofcapitalismthat a sexual division of labor be enforced. "The apparently autonomousindividualman, celebrated in both political economy and evangelical religion, wasalmost always surrounded by family and kin who made possible his individualactions. "61 The retreat from paid employment of one sex or the other to attendto the domain of personal needs became integral to capital itself, both functionallyand ideologically. Women were identified as the chosen sex in ideological tractsof the 18th and 19th centuries which stressed the ways that women's "natural"reproductive and child rearing roles, enhanced by arguments about the "culturalcapital" that women were responsible for developing, limited both women's directparticipationin the economic enterprise and the labor force. Employers too, relyingon the assumption that women's paid employment was transient in nature, engagedin the common practice of paying women workers on a scale substantially belowmen's. Finally, the action of unionists who, fearing that the depressed wages ofwomen would threaten both the adequacy of wages paid to men, as well as thestrugglewithin the craft unions to maintain control of their trade, worked to excludewomen from the paid labor force. The combined effects of these variables dictatedwomen's place within the home. Though this pattern varied with class, race and


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Praxis International 295ethnicity, nevertheless it grew to become both a pattern and a goal of the industrialcapitalist order. This dynamic was reinforced by mass consumption which spreadcapital to the sphere of personal life itself, though not without contradictory effects.In the early twentieth century the inordinate demands placed on the family andon women in it to meet the needs of personal fulfillment strained the institutionitself. Developments within the productive process, however, increased both thenecessity and the opportunity for women's paid employment. Married women'semployment increased between 1890 and 1920 in the U.S., especially in clericalfields. Nevertheless, the radical potential of these changes once again was containedby a gendered response to the exigencies of the productive mode. Social reformistsreacted to this situation with an array of legislative programs designed to savethe family. Social welfare services were extended and protective legislation waspassed. The net effect of these programs on the family was to undermine itsautonomy by integrating it more completely with the political-economic system.Protective legislation actually reinforced the segmentationof the labor market alongsex lines. For women who needed to or wanted to work outside the home, theregimentation of a gender division of labor within the home meant that paid workwas simply added on top of primary responsibility for maintaining the sphere ofdomesticity. The outpouring of expert advice to the housewife/mother concerningthe performance standards of her' 'natural" roles eroded the autonomous controlof women over the territory that had been ceded to them and heightened their senseof dependence, as well as increasing levels of guilt for "working"mother, atprecisely the moment when household chores were becoming less burdensome,at least for the more affluent classes.

vFrom this review of the history of the development of the modern ideology ofthe family it is evident that the creation of the bourgeois ideal of family life is

not attached merely to a pre-existing patriarchalism, but is rather the mode withinwhich modem ideas of gender are expressed. If women's roles are associated morenarrowly with nurturing activities, and if the sign of productive labor is associatedmore narrowly with market activity and wage labor, the question is not whethercare-giving activities are represented by the primacy of production, because clearlythey cannot be "seen" within this metaphor. The point is, rather, to understandhow the definition of women's work provides productive labor with its rationale,and its real contradiction.The contradiction between personal life and social production is crystallized inthe situation of women in modem capitalist society. The capitalist system requiresa sexual division of labor in part because, given the alienating effects of workitself, the main available arena within which personal needs can be met is defined,ideologically, as the family .A particular kind of family is the necessary complementto gendered definitions of class. For this family to be an effective retreat, withinthe limits set by capital, it is imperative that women in it, upon whom the nurturingresponsibilities have devolved, be untainted by the distortions of alienated labor.Hence, the division between what Parsons called "expressive" and "instrumental"functions within the family is rooted in the capitalist organization of work which


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296 Praxis Internationalcannot be understood apart from these gendered divisions. Moreover, as Rubinnotes, the more alienated the labor of the wage earner is, the more stark thesegregation of roles within the family may become. This separation serves toundermine the extent to which the family can offer any comfort at all.For the majority of families, the situation is made evenmore complexby the factthat the luxury ofdepending upon the wages of one earner is all but precluded by therealitiesofeconomics. This fact reverberates in the inner life ofworking class families.Tensions causedby the respective partner's inability to live up to cultural expectationsof appropriate gender roles are displaced from the social system onto each other, so

that' 'each blame[s] the other for failures to meet cultural fantasies." 62In middle class families this strain partly is mitigated by the fact that the wife'searnings constitute a much smaller percentage of family income, except amongprofessional couples. Within families of this class, however, affluence itself affectsthe woman's role. Housework becomes more routinized, less physically demanding.Even child care does not make up for the difference. The key to women's experiencein this class is the isolation of "women's work" itself from the social fabric andthe standards of value of the "outside" world. Though the woman expresses herselfin a wide range of roles, and hence, appears to have more latitude and freedomthan does the man, the freedom is constricted:From the outside she appears freer than a man working for someone else and withoutany affection in his job. But because this caring work goes on in a context of a societywhere work is predominantly divorced from care, because she is isolated in the home,bearing the load of all the sentiment which is out of place in the man's work, andbecause the division of labor which relegates caring to women and brands womenas inferior, distortion is inevitable. 63The contradictions behind all the factors, personal and "economic," contributingto the changing sex composition of the labor force are highlighted especially inthe increased labor force participation rates of the fastest growing sector of the

labor force: women with pre-school age children. The autonomy of the divisionof roles within the family is threatened most by this group of woman workers.To the extent that its autonomy is preserved, it is women who still bear the bruntof the responsibility: their work outside the home is simply added on top of theirwork within it. Even today, the percentage of time spent sharing household laborby husbands with employed wives is not different significantly from the amountof time contributed by husbands with wives who are full-time homemakers."In sum, the very separation between personal life and work which the capitalistsystem institutionalized, and which required a strict division of roles in the familyalong sexual lines, now appears to be in the process of being undermined by thedynamics of capitalist production itself. The marginality of the economic securityof the working class, the strains implicit in the housewife's work as it is increasinglycommodified, and the changing composition of the work force all threaten thefamily's ability, within its traditional form, to serve as a viable support systemwithin the market economy. The instability of the capitalist system makes thefamily's function to nurture personal needs all the more critical. At the same time,this very instability crystallizes the contradiction between personal life and workupon which capitalism is founded by altering the traditional sexual division of roles


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Praxis International 297within the family without, however, fundamentally restructuring the sphere ofproduction or the family itself. Because the system of production remains organizedessentially so that personal needs are met outside it, women continue to bear theresponsibility for meeting these needs. Yet capitalism demands that the familyfunction as a seemingly autonomous sphere of privatized personal life, capableofmaintaining itself on the withered ground that monopoly capital allows. Thus, thedemand for the recognition ofwomen's place in the family - for the acknowledgement of how the ontology of productive labor is constructed by its distance fromthe ontology of care-giving - challenges the ability of capitalism to humanize societywithin the limits of commodity exchange.

NOTES* The author wishes to thank Jean Elshtain, Howard Kushner and Paul Thomas and the reviewersand co-editors of Praxis, for their critical comments and suggestions.1. Susan Okin, Women and Western Political Thought, (Princeton, 1979).2. For example, Shulamith Firestone rejected traditional Marxist analysis in favor of a "materialistview of history based on sex alone." The Dialectic of Sex, (New York, 1970), 5. Lorenne Clarkreached similar conclusions in her essay, "The Rights of Women: The Theory and Practice of theIdeology of Male Supremacy, " in Contemporary Issues in Political Philosophy, ed. Shea and King

Farlow (New York, 1976),55. Zillah Eisenstein contended that class was not an adequate categoryon the basis of which to explore the history of women's oppression. "Developing a Theory of CapitalistPatriarchy," in Capitalist Patriarchy and the Casefor Socialist Feminism, ed. Z. Eisenstein (NewYork, 1979), 24, 28. More recently, Catherine MacKinnon contended that Marxian categories wereof limited relevance for the development of feminist theory because they failed to explain the structuring of sexuality, the basic social process that defined, directed and expressed the production ofdesire. Since this process operated independently of the mode of production to exploit women as the continued exploitation of women under' 'socialist" systems demonstrated - class-based analysiswas inadequate to explain women's subordination. "Marxism, Method, Theory and the State," Signs7, no 3 (1982). As far as Freud was concerned, most feminists argued that his pronouncementson femininity were ideologically motivated. Firestone, TheDialecticsofSex, and Kate Millett, SexualPolitics, (New York, 1970) are typical of this school.3. I am not disputing the fact that ideology has a material component. Attempts to employpsychoanalysis in order to argue that origins of women's plight lie in the process of gender differentiation itself are at least partially successful at indicating the importance of the internalizationof an ideology of femininity to the analysis of the political stablization of capitalism. Nevertheless,as this paper will show, even the accounts of this psychoanalytic school have their mechanisticshortcomings. cf. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction ofMothering, (Berkeley, 1978).4. Rayna Rapp, Ellen Ross, and Renate Bridenthal, "Examining Family History," FeministStudies, 5, no. 1 (Spring, 1979).

5. Cf. Michelle Barrett, Women's Oppression Today: Problems in Marxist Feminist Analysis,(London: 1980), 188; and Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Womenof the English Middle Class, 1780-1850, (London, 1987).6. Clark, Contemporary Issue in Political Philosophy, 55.7. Eisenstein, Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, 24, 28.8. Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell, Feminism as Critique (Minneapolis, 1987,), 4.9. Eisenstein, Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, 23-27.10. Juliet Mitchell, Woman's Estate (New York, 1973), 151.11. Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (New York, 1975), 413.12. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction ofMothering (Berkeley, 1978), 208.13. Even the idea that patriarchy is an important ideological adjunct to the class systemof capitalismmay be incorrect, given the undermining of the patriarchal authority of the father by the process

ofwhat Lasch called the "socialization of reproduction," and what Marcuse had called "repressive


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298 Praxis Internationaldesublimation." Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World(New York, 1977); Herbert Marcuse,Eros and Civilization (Boston, 1955).14. Iris Young, "Socialist Feminism and the Limits of Dual Systems Theory, " Socialist Review,50-51, (March-June, 1980, 169.)15. EvenChodorow's argument that it is women's mothering which reproduces the social organizationof gender and links it with the social organization of production presupposes the gender-differentiatedsplit between affective and instrumental attributes of personality which it was supposed to explain.An important distinction between the materialist roots of the "social organizaton' of gender andthe familial context within which gender differences are internalized is missing from her analysis.16. Joseph Interrank and Carol Lassner, "Victims of the Very Songs They sing: A Critique ofRecentWork on Patriarchal Culture and the Social Construction of Gender, " RadicalHistoryReview,20 (Spring/Summer, 1979), 34.17. Interrank and Lassner, "Victims of the Very Songs They Sing," 36.18. Young, "Dual Systems Theory," 185.19. Karl Marx, The German Ideology (New York, 1970), 42.20. Marx, The German Ideology, 42.21. Marx, The German Ideology, 46-7 , (emphasis added).22. In all other societal forms "individuals are united by some other bond: family, tribe, theland itself, etc." Whereas in the bourgeois system individuals seem "independent of one anotherand are only held together by exchange." Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works V(London, 1973), 86-89.23. This does not mean that the family is irrelevant. The point is that the structure, function andmeaning of family relationships are qualitatively transformed with the extension of the division oflabor predicated on private property.24. Barrett, Women's Oppression Today, 195.25. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 31; cf. Barrett, Women's Oppression Today, 200.26. Marx and Engels, TheGerman Ideology, 73.27. In fact, as some anthropologists have demonstrated, the division of social tasks along genderlines and the extent of inequalityvaried considerably among "traditional" societies. See Ann Oakley' sdiscussion of this in Woman's Work (New York, 1973).28. EHZaretsky, Capitalism, theFamilyand Personal Life (New York, 1976), cf. Peter Laslett,TheWorld WeHaveLost (New York, 1965); Phillipe Aries, Centuriesof Childhood (New York,1962); loanW. Scott and Louise A. Tilly, "Woman'sWork and the Family in Nineteenth CenturyEurope," in The Family inHistory, 00. Rosenberg (Philadelphia, 1975); and Alice Clark, TheWorkingLife of Women in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1919).29. Scott and Tilly, "Woman's Work and the Family in Nineteenth Century Europe," 161.30. Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life, 29-30.31. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 181.32. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 27-28.33. Peter Dokin Hall, "Family Structure and Economic Organizations: Massachusetts Merchants,1700-1800," in Familyand Kin in Urban Communities: 1700-1800 ed. T. Haraven, (New York,1979), 45-46.34. Peter Dobkin Hall, "Family Structure and Economic Organization," 50.35. Passage of married women's property acts by the various states during the first half of thenineteenth century altered the state of dependence to some extent for women who had property oftheir own. However, these reforms, together with liberalization of divorce laws, actually representedthe permeation of marriage itself by contract relations.36. Ann D. Gordon and Mari 10 Buhle, "Sex and Class in Colonial and Nineteenth CenturyAmerica," in Liberating Women's History, ed. B. Carroll (Chicago, 1976),83-6. Though the "cultof domesticity" permeated the culture of the early nineteenth century, it was not without its contradictions. For a discussion of the impact of these ideals on middle class women's political activismsee El1enCarol Dubois, Feminism andSuffrage (Ithaca, 1979); Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "Beauty,the Beast and the Militant Woman: A Case Study of Sex Roles and Social Stress in Jacksonian

America," American Quarterly, xxiii, (Oct., 1971), 562-84.37. cf. Neal Smelser, SocialChange in the Industrial Revolution:An Applicationof Theory tothe British Cotton Industry (Chicago, 1959.)


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Praxis International 29938. In 1836, the report of the National Trades Union Committee urged the exclusion of womenfrom the factories because it produced' 'ruinous competition . . . to male labor" resulting ultimatelyeither in the discharge of male workers or the reduction of their wages "to a corresponding rate

o f wages with the female operative." John R. Commons, et al., (eds.) A Documentary Historyo f American Industrial Society, vi, "The Labor Movement" (Cleveland, 1910), 195, cited inAlice Kessler Harris, "Women, Work and the Social Order," in B. Carroll, Liberating Women'sHistory, 335. Ruth Milkman argued that there is strong evidence to suggest that the skilled craftand trade union were particularly effective in structuring the labor market along gender lines.Categorizing certain occupations as "female" and others as "male" helped restrict the labor supply,thereby enhancing labor's bargaining position. "Organizing the SexualDivision of Labor" HistoricalPerspectives on 'Women's Work' and the American Labor Movement," Socialist Review, 49(Jan-Feb, 1980), 101-114.

39. cf. Margaret Hewlett, Wives and Mothers in Victorian Industry (London, 1958), esp. 99-122.40. It also widened the division of labor between women of different classes and races. In 1890,while only 5%of all married women were employed outside the home, one quarter of married blackwomen were employed, as were two-thirds of widowed black women. Married women immigrantsfollowed the blacks' pattern. But by the 1920's, changes in the compositionof the labor force increasedthe jobs available to native-born white women, at the expense of immigrant women and blacks,both because of the nature of the skills required for those jobs, and the cultural defmitionsof differentsorts of work. See Francine Blau, "Women in the Labor Force: An Overview, in Women:A FeministPerspective ed. J. Freeman (Palo Alto, 1979), 2nd edition, 269-70; Kessler-Harris, "Women, Workand the Social Order," 334, 336, 337.41. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 199.42. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 269.

43. cf. Jay Mechling, "Advice to Historians on Advice to Mothers," Journal ofSocial History,9 , (Fall, 1975),44-63; Howard Kushner, "Nineteenth Century Sexuality and the 'Sexual Revolut ion' of the Progressive era," The Canadian Review ofAmerican Studies, ix, no. 1 (Spring, 1978),34-49.44. Nancy Cott, "Notes Towards an Intpretationof Antebellum Childbearing," PsychohistoryReview, 6 (Spring, 1978), 9.45. For an excellent discussion of the extent to which traditional work habits and values had tobe supplanted see E. P. Thompson, "Time, Discipline, and IndustrialCapitalism," Past and Present,.38 (1967), 56-97.46. For a gooddiscussionof the situation of women of different classes in LatinAmerican cultures,see Ann M. Pescatillo, "Latina Liberation: Tradition, Ideology and Social Change in Iberian andLatin American Culture," in Liberating Women's History, ed. B. Carroll, 161-178.47. The German Ideology, 49. See also Grundrisse, (New York, 1973), 101.48. There is a considerable literature on the debate among feminists concerning the definitiono f housework as "unproductive labor. " For a review of this literature see Natalie Sokoloff, BetweenMoney and Love, (New York, 1980). .49. In a provocative article Ruth Swartz Cowan argued that the ironic impact of labor-savinghousehold technologywasto increase the burden of householdchores. "A CaseStudyofTeehnologicaland Social Change: TheWashing Machine and the Working Wife," in Clio's ConsciousnessRaised:New Perspectives on the History ofWomen, ed. M. Hartmann and L. Banner (New York, 1974),245-253. See alsoBatyaWeinbaum and Amy Bridges, "The Other Side of the Paycheck: MonopolyCapital and the Structure of Consumption," in Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for SocialistFeminism, ed. Eisenstein, 190-205.50. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 30. See also Rosalind Coward, Female Desire (London,1984).51. Davidoff and Hall, Famity Fortunes, 32.52. ef. Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World; Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost(New York, 1963).53. Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life, 65.54. This is the difficulty with William Goode's by now classic treatment of the relation betweenchanging economic systems and family patterns. See World Revolution and Family Patterns(New York, 1963).


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300 Praxis International55. Interesting examples of the kinds of evidence which could provide historical depth for suchan analysis is to be found in Diane Hughes, "Domestic Ideals and Social Behavior: Evidence fromMedieval Genoa," in The Family in History, ed. Rosenberg, 115-143; and Laura Owen, "TheWelfare of Women in Laboring Families: England, 1860-1950," in Clio's Consciousness Raised,

ed. Hartman and Banner, 226-244.56. Chodorow, The Reproduction ofMothering, 180-181.57. Chodorow herself acknowledges this. The question is whether her account of the socialstructuring of parenting is a successful reformulation of the psychodynamic account in sociologicalterms. What is altogether missing from her analysis is the exploration of gender as a metaphor forthe representation of specific activities, attributes and relationships.58. Christopher Lasch, "The Emotions of Family Life, New York Review of Books.59. cf. Claus Mueller, The Politics of Communication (Oxford, 1975).60. Diane Ehrensaft notes that' 'inadequate maternity [sic] policies at the workplace, income andjob inequalities between men and women, and lack of flexible job structures are among the reasonswhy the practice of shared parenting is not widespread, despite the fact that in some 28% of Americanhouseholds, both mother and father are employed." "When Women and Men Mother," SocialistReview, 49 (Jan-Feb, 1980),41. It should be mentioned that Chodorow acknowledges that the socialorganization of gender must be considered in its relation to an economic context. Nevertheless, heranalysis tends toward reductionist solutionsto complex political-economic problems. The Reproductionof Mothering, 34, 211-19.61. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 33.62. Lillian Rubin, Worlds of Pain: Life in the Working Class Family (New York, 1974), 178.63. SheilaRowbotham, Woman's Consciousness, Man's World (Middlesex, England, 1974), 178.64. Survey cited in MS, (Feb, 1988). For women who are single parents, the situation is evenmore burdensome.

3.3 - Jones, Kathleen B. - Socialist-Feminist Theories of the Family (en)

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