Engendering Modernity E-Book

Barbara L. Marshall

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 341

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

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

Leseprobe

ENGENDERING MODERNITY

Feminism, Social Theory and Social Change

Barbara L. Marshall

Polity Press

Copyright © Barbara L. Marshall 1994

The right of Barbara L. Marshall to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1994 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers

Reprinted 2005, 2007

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1   Gender and Modernity: Classical Issues, Contemporary Debates

1.1 Modernity and Social Theory: The Classical Connection

1.2 Contemporary Theories of Modernity: Giddens and Habermas

1.3 The End of Modernity? Feminism and Postmodernism

1.4 Conclusions: Capitalism, Modernity and the Theorization of Gender

2   Rethinking the Gendered Division of Labour

2.1 The Gendered Division of Labour

2.1.1 Divisions between waged and unwaged labour

2.1.2 Divisions within waged labour

2.1.3 Divisions within unwaged labour

2.1.4 Summary

2.2 Theoretical Perspectives

2.2.1 Extra-market forces

2.2.2 Forces within the labour market

2.2.3 Interplay of market and non-market forces

2.2.4 Summary

2.3 Gender, Work and Class

2.3.1 Debates within class analysis

2.3.2 Capitalism or patriarchy?

2.4 Rethinking ‘Public’ and ‘Private’

3   Social Reproduction and Socialist Feminist Theory

3.1 The Reproduction Problematic in Socialist Theory

3.1.1 Marx and Engels

3.1.2 The fragmentation of Western Marxism

3.1.3 Abandoning the reproduction problematic: poststructuralism

3.2 The Reproduction Problematic in Socialist Feminist Theory

3.2.1 The domestic labour debates

3.2.2 The Althusserian legacy

3.2.3 Psychoanalysis and feminism

3.2.4 Poststructuralism and feminism

3.3 Dilemmas in Socialist Feminist Theory

3.4 Towards Reconstruction

4   Gendered Identities

4.1 Beyond the Production Paradigm

4.2 The Autonomous Ego?

4.2.1 The early Frankfurt School

4.2.2 Habermas

4.2.3 The feminist critique of the autonomous ego

4.3 Feminist Theories of the Subject: Essentialism versus Nominalism

4.3.1 Feminist essentialism: biology, philosophy and history

4.3.2 Deconstructing ‘woman’: poststructuralist feminism

4.3.3 What is a woman? Essentialism versus nominalism reconsidered

4.4 Gendered Identities as Interpreted Identities

4.5 The Politics of Gender Polarity

5   Gender Politics: Regulation and Resistance

5.1 Perspectives on the State

5.2 Policy as Interpretation and Regulation

5.3 Gender and the Welfare State

5.4 Revitalizing the Public Sphere?

6   Feminist Theory as Critical Theory

6.1 The Failure of the Classical Project

6.2 Agendas for Theory

Notes

References

Index

For my mother, Maeve Marshall

Acknowledgements

This book has taken shape over a long period of time, during which many teachers, colleagues and students assisted me in developing my analysis. In particular I wish to thank Graham Lowe, Harvey Krahn, Derek Sayer, Susan Jackel, Marg Hobbs, Joan Sangster, Sedef Arat-Koç, Susan Lang, Robyn Diner, David Brown and Marie Carlson for stimulating many of the ideas developed here. My greatest intellectual debt is to Ray Morrow, who as both teacher and friend has always pushed me to think things through and, while we have not always agreed on the answers, has suggested many of the questions that I have tackled.

I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for financial support in the form of a doctoral fellowship, as well as to Trent University for a Research Fellowship and a grant from the Sub-committee on Research in the Arts.

Friends and family deserve much of the credit for seeing this book through to fruition. Special thanks to Frances Adams, for always being there, and to Judy Pinto, for keeping my life organized. Love and thanks go especially to my husband, Yiannis Kiparissis, who has borne more than his fair share of both domestic labour and the frustrations of writer’s block. Our daughter Lucy, born during the preparation of the manuscript, has made it all worthwhile.

Finally, the people at Polity Press have been a delight to work with, from start to finish.

Permission to use previously published material was generously granted as follows:

Some of the material in Chapter 3 was published in my ‘Critical Theory and Feminist Theory’, Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, 25 (2), 1988, and is used here by permission of that journal.

An earlier version of Chapter 4 was previously published as ‘Reproducing the Gendered Subject’, in Current Perspectives in Social Theory, 11 (1991), and is used here by permission of JAI Press.

Introduction

This is a book about theory, written at a time when the very practice of theory has become increasingly suspect. I write as a feminist, and as a sociologist, who has been caught up in the debates about the status and purpose of theory, and who has had to confront some of the resulting questions about theory in both my teaching and my research. The practice of theory has been deeply affected by the debates about modernity versus postmodernity, and the attendant questions of the possibility of social theory which can foster human autonomy and emancipation. The assertions by certain theorists, such as Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard and Rorty, that such theoretical aspirations are tied irredeemably to the now passé modern épistème, suggest that theory as an emancipatory project is indeed at an end. My basic premise is that these assertions are far from neutral. I see them as emanating from the same position of false universalism as that of the theoretical tradition they criticize. In other words, they express, as Christine Di Stephano puts it, the ‘claims and needs of a constituency (white, privileged men of the industrialized West) that has already had an Enlightenment for itself and that is now ready and willing to subject that legacy to critical scrutiny’ (1990: 75). Just as feminist historians and social theorists begin to reconstruct the ambivalent relationship of women to modernity, and to breathe new life into its emancipatory project, this very project is deemed bankrupt. I want to argue that, flawed as it is, the modern project still contains considerable potential to ground an emancipatory practice, and that some recent feminist theory is paradigmatic of how such a project might be reconstructed – or engendered.

I first used the term ‘engender’, in the manner in which I use it here, several years ago as I was working on a conference paper on women and the welfare state. I was struggling for a term which recognized the crucial role gender played in the initial construction of the welfare state, and which captured the active way in which gender is continually embedded in the operation of, and our experience of, welfare states today. I chose the term engendering both for its dictionary meaning of ‘engender’ – to enable or bring about – and for etymological reasons. The prefix ‘en-’ is commonly used to make a transitive verb out of a noun, as in ‘endear’ or ‘encircle’. Thus it is in this dual sense that I want to speak of engendering modernity. I want to draw attention to the restructuring of gender relations as a fundamental characteristic of modernity, and to nurture a feminist vision of the emancipatory potential of social theory as a modern project.

To do this requires some major rethinking of the basic analytical categories of social theory, categories such as ‘the individual’, ‘society’, ‘class’, ‘citizenship’. The experience of women has always been peripheral to the construction of these categories, and as this experience is reclaimed and inserted into the heart of social theory, the inadequacy of these categories, as traditionally conceived, becomes painfully apparent. Singled out for particular critique is the relationship between the individual and society as this has been understood in both classical and contemporary theories of modernity. The ‘sociological individual’, while ostensibly the universal subject of modernity, obscures a deeply gendered analysis of social life. Such a conception of the individual is premised upon a set of dualistic categories, such as public versus private, economy versus family, universal versus particular, which are constructed on the experience of Western, white, heterosexual males, and which have been overly abstracted and reified in social theory. As we begin to deconstruct these dualisms to better account for wider experiences of social life, the potential for theorizing the individual–society relationship in new ways arises. New questions around the subject and political agency, and the emergence of distinctively modern contexts for identity formation rise to the top of the theoretical agenda. The central aim of this book, then, is to undertake the dual tasks of providing a revised account of modernity – one which includes the experience of women – and of considering what sort of a theoretical framework might be built on this revised account.

But do we need more theory? More specifically, do we need to take another stab at reconstructing ‘malestream’ theory? Some feminists view the sort of theoretical reconstruction I am proposing in a critical light. For example, as Stanley and Wise (1990: 43) characterize it, its aim is ‘to clean up theoretical inadequacies at the level of theory, then to turn to small, carefully presented snippets of life to exemplify the success of the theoretical project’. The concern here, they charge, is ‘with marking out a privileged role for feminist researchers in the production of “Theory” (with a decidedly capital T) as a transcendent and so privileged account of the realities of other women’s lives’. Obviously, I view this project differently. I think it is important to understand theory, even (or perhaps, especially) non-feminist theory. The traditions of Western intellectual thought have shaped the way in which we see ourselves, and the way in which we construct and see ‘others’. It is only by coming to terms with the way in which these theoretical traditions have been constructed to fracture our vision that we can begin to see things anew. As Lerner (1986: 13) suggests, the insight that ‘men are not the centre of the world, but men and women are . . . will transform consciousness as decisively as did Copernicus’s discovery that the earth is not the centre of the universe’. This transformation has continued as women of colour, unchilded women, poor women, lesbians and non-Western women, speaking from their experience, challenge the narrowness of the subject of earlier versions of feminist theories. These challenges have enriched and deepened our analytical perspectives. Yet a transcendental dimension is integral to the development of a critical social theory – direct experience does not exhaust the understanding of forces which shape our lives. An articulation of everyday experience to historically situated socioeconomic and cultural formations is necessary. To continue with the Copernican analogy, social theory can help make sense of and transform our experience, ‘just as our experience of the sun’s sinking below the horizon has been transformed by our knowledge that the world turns and that our location in the world turns away from the sun – even though from where we are it seems to sink’ (D. Smith, 1987: 89).

The difference between theory as theory, which seeks explanation, prediction and/or understanding of a phenomenon, and theory as critique, which calls forth action in the world, is crucial. Theory as critique has a long theoretical pedigree,1 and those who endorse the project of critical theory today continue to find rich insights in Marx. As Fraser (1989: 113) suggests, Marx’s conceptualization of critical theory as ‘the self clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age’ has yet to be surpassed. Critical theory, in its late twentieth-century manifestations, has gone far beyond Marx’s critique of capitalism to attempt to clarify struggles which reach far beyond the realm of production. While the term ‘critical theory’ is most closely associated with the tradition of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, and with Jürgen Habermas, the best-known ‘heir’ of that tradition, I will use it to refer to a broader range of theories which embody some of the ideals of the Frankfurt tradition as described by Guess (1981: 2): ‘A critical theory. . . is a reflective theory which gives agents a kind of knowledge inherently productive of enlightenment and emancipation.’ Thus conceived, critical theory is, with all its problems, ‘the best of what is left of the Left’ (Poster, 1989: 3).

My aim is not so much to argue for the utility of critical theory for feminism – I believe that feminists have been doing critical theory better than many self-proclaimed critical theorists for a long time – as to argue for the centrality of feminist theory for the development of critical social theory. Feminist theories have shared the ambivalent relationship of critical theory to the modernist tradition, questioning the ontology of labour central to Marxism yet unwilling to abandon its emancipatory project, and eschewing the faith in science represented by positivism in favour of multiple and reflective methodological strategies grounded in a critical knowledge-interest. However, I prefer the term critical feminist theory to socialist feminist theory, not so much to identify it with any particular stream of ‘malestream’ critical theory, but to get away from the association of socialist feminist theories with productivist models of society, which tend to make ‘feminist’ a qualifier of ‘socialist’. A truly critical theory is indeed socialist, but it is equally feminist and anti-racist. It is committed to the critique of all forms of domination and distortion.

One of my motivations for writing this book has been my concern with the extent to which some of the most exciting developments in theoretical thinking have occurred in relative isolation from one another (due, in no small part, to the continued marginalization of feminism in the academy), and with the tendency to recycle this isolation in the manner in which we teach theory to our students. This concern has influenced the selection of theories and concepts that frame my analysis. I have attempted to provide some openings for readers without extensive grounding in the feminist literature to see the convergence of feminist critiques with problems in social theory more generally, but have tried to avoid simply presenting a ‘survey’ of that literature. Thus, what follows is just one way of mapping the theoretical terrain. I have focused on some theories to the neglect of others, and have made some broad generalizations from different national contexts. I have tried to identify some of the significant points of intersection between different theoretical traditions, which means that others are ignored or underdeveloped. Those more swayed than I by the postmodern turn in theory will no doubt find my analysis lacking. Similarly, given my concern to recount a particular history of ‘received’ theory in the social sciences, I have not given extensive coverage of some of the more recent advances in, for example, feminist philosophy and psychoanalysis.2 In spite of these limitations, I hope what follows will serve as a useful review and reconstruction of some important debates, while at the same time pushing those who embrace the goals of a critical social theory to become more explicitly feminist.

Chapter 1 will take modernity, and the relationship between modernity and capitalism, as the central problematic of classical social theory. I will look at how women have figured as a strategic absence in both classical and contemporary debates, resulting in a conception of the individual, and the individual–society relationship, which has profound implications for the manner in which we understand gender inequalities. Chapter 2 will re-examine the gendered division of labour as a fundamental concept in ‘explaining’ gender differences – in both feminist and non-feminist theories. Here, I will argue that prevailing theories of the division of labour have (a) rested on an overly narrow conception of labour, (b) neglected the degree to which gender divisions shape both the material and ideological forms that the social division of labour takes, and (c) reified both the public–private dualism and its coincidence with a gendered division of labour. Building on this critique, I will review, in chapter 3, the genesis of socialist feminist theory in terms of a ‘reproduction problematic’. After examining the manner in which feminist theory has challenged the Marxist conception of social reproduction, I will look at some current impasses in socialist feminist theory and suggest how we might begin to move beyond them. Chapter 4 takes the theorization of subjectivity as a central problematic for a critical social theory, and suggests that feminism has much to contribute to this project. Against both essentialist theories of gendered subjects and the poststructuralist dissolution of the subject, I will focus on the multiple and often contradictory nature of subjectivity, and on the active construction of gendered identities in terms of historically available modes of interpretation. Chapter 5 focuses on the role of the state and political discourse in the regulation of gendered identities, and looks at theories which suggest the possibility of emergent public spaces which might promote the contestation of identities. Finally, in chapter 6, I will suggest that social science cannot fully understand ‘modernity’ (nor, for that matter, postmodernity) until it comes to terms with the one-sided story it has constructed, and that the inherently political nature of feminist theory has the potential to revitalize the project of a critical social theory.

1

Gender and Modernity: Classical Issues, Contemporary Debates

1.1 Modernity and Social Theory: The Classical Connection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

rationalization results not only in increased autonomy but in the spread of impersonal domination through every sphere of life. The increased capacity for this-worldly calculation sustains individuation, it is true. But it simultaneously facilitates subjection and domination. Weber invented the concept of rationalization to explain the seemingly irreconcilable qualities of the twentieth century.

The ‘disenchantment of the world’ culminates in the retreat of ‘the ultimate and most sublime values’ from public life ‘either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations’ (Weber, 1946: 155). We are thus ‘placed into various life-spheres, each of which is governed by different laws’ (p. 123). The rational, calculating sphere of bureaucratic capitalism dominated; retreat into the ‘gentler’ spheres of emotion and religion was for those who couldn’t ‘bear the fate of the times like a man’ (p. 155). Weber’s modern world was thus characterized by a ‘public world of separate, unattached, competing and contending individuals’ which was served by a ‘depoliticized private world of personal bonds and attachments – sustained by women’s love and labour’ (Bologh, 1990: 18). Holding out little hope for socialism as an emancipatory force, Weber foresaw little relief from relentless rationalization of the world, and saw the ‘blush’ of the Enlightenment fading away (Weber, 1905/1958: 182).

Weber’s pessimism regarding societal rationalization was picked up in the work of the early Frankfurt School. Horkheimer and Adorno turned their attention to ‘the specific logic of such spheres as the family, the state and culture in order to develop a more comprehensive analysis of the relation between the economic substructure, the superstructure, and the individual psyche’ (Mills, 1987: 86–7). The central thrust of their work on the family was to demonstrate that ‘the family not only depends on the historically concrete social reality, but is socially mediated down to its innermost structure’ (Barrett and MacIntosh, 1982: 35). As Horkheimer and Adorno portrayed it, the increasing commodification of labour, spurred by capitalist accumulation processes, resulted in women being drawn into production and a weakening of traditional patriarchal family structures. Against Marx, who saw the entry of women into the productive realm and the decline of the bourgeois family as progressive, even as he railed against the transformation of women and children into economic instruments, Adorno and Horkheimer concentrated on the consequences of reduced ego autonomy and were forced to ‘mourn the passing of the authoritarian father’ (Whitebook, 1985: 147).3 In their hands, the ‘decline of subjectivity’ resulting from the erosion of the private sphere became central: human beings had become so totally dominated that there was no possibility of emancipatory struggle.

To summarize, in the wake of the upheavals of modernity, classical sociology tried to come to terms with the individual–society paradox. In opposition to utilitarian individualism, which sets up a clear opposition between individual and society, classical theory tries to resolve that opposition, reversing the ontological priority given to the individual in liberal theory (Yeatman, 1986). The sociological individual is born, created only through the social context. As Durkheim (1893/1933: 37) phrased his question ‘Why does the individual, while becoming more autonomous, depend more on society? How can he be at once more individual and more solitary?’. Marx perceived a similar paradox in the Grundrisse: ‘It is not until the eighteenth century, in bourgeois society, that the various forms of the social nexus confront the individual as merely a means towards his private ends, as external necessity. But the epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is precisely the epoch of the hitherto most highly developed social relations’ (Marx, 1857–8/1973: 83–4). For Weber, it is the modern individual caught inextricably in the ‘iron cage’4 who suggests the double-edged sword of individuation and domination. Modernity, then, gives sociology its subject – the individual who is at once autonomous and socially determined. Yet the classical project never realized the promise in this basic premise for the theorization of all aspects of social life. By consigning women to the ‘natural’, the ‘pre-social’, the ‘primary group’ or the ‘embryo of community’, gender itself was effectively written out of the purview of the ‘socially created’.

1.2 Contemporary Theories of Modernity: Giddens and Habermas

The disappearance of women from the realm of the social is not a quirk of Victorian classical theorists, but is replicated in even the most recent contributions to the discourse of modernity. For example, the two contemporary theorists who best represent the continuation of the classical project of modernist social theory – Anthony Giddens and Jürgen Habermas – have constructed ‘grand theories’ of society and social change in which gender is barely mentioned.

Bryant and Jary (1991: 1) remark that ‘sociology does not know