Patriarchal Structures and Ethnicity in the Italian Community in Britain

Azadeh Medaglia

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138711051
• eBook ISBN: 9781351777636
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 2001, this book retraces the chronological history of the Italian Diaspora community in Britain from its inception in the eighteenth century to the present. The author describes the immigrants' way of life, patterns of occupation, gender relations and modes of integration in the host country. In addition, the book focuses on the role of religion, an institution which has traditionally reinforced both Italian cultural identity and unequal gender relations. Until now, most ethnic studies have been carried out on racialized minorities - those with physical differences - and they have generally failed to emphasize the gender relations within minority communities.

1
Theories of Gender Relations

Part I: Feminist Theorization of Women’s Subordination

Liberal Feminism

Liberal feminist theory explains women’s subordination in terms of gender stereotyping and confinement of women to gender specific roles in the market place and society in general. In other words, unequal access to voting, legal representation, education, job-training programs and paid employment are at the root of unequal gender relations. More recently, lack of access to pregnancy benefits, maternity leave and childcare centres have been theorized as gender subordinating.

Already in the 18th century, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1799) identified unequal access to education as the main cause for women’s subordination. In the 19th century, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill theorized that unequal gender relations are the consequence of unequal access to civil liberties, economic and educational opportunities. The quintessential contemporary liberal feminist, Betty Friedan (1965), argued that women’s subordination was a result of their confinement to the home. However, she did not contest the minor role men play in the private sphere. Moreover, she did not address issues of race, class and sexual orientation and concentrated instead on white, middle-class, suburban, heterosexual housewives. She failed to consider the difficulties of the double day without the introduction of major structural changes. Nearly twenty five years later however, in her book ‘Second Stage’ (1981), she recognized that the structural configuration of institutions and public values which favour men and impede women’s progress, play an instrumental role in women’s subordination.

Liberal feminists have been criticized for emphasizing gender-neutral humanism over gender-specific feminism. Elshtain (1981) argues that not all differences between men and women can be attributed to cultural gender stereotyping, ignoring nature completely. Furthermore, it has been claimed that liberal feminists overestimate the number of women who want to be like men and relinquish their roles as wives and mothers:

There is little evidence that the family and the feminine role within it has lost any of its appeal as the central, prime and overwhelming attraction and responsibility for women. Whether women have successful careers or not, they remain just as committed to finding and keeping a man and to upholding the traditional divisions between the sexes (Coward, 1992, p. 9).

The liberalism paradigm has been criticized as being male biased:

• Normative dualism overvalues mental activities at the expense of bodily functions. Throughout the western philosophical tradition men have tended to become the ones closely associated to the world of the mind and ‘culture1 whereas women have become connected to the world of bodily functions and reproduction.
• Political solipsism is the belief that the rational, autonomous individual is essentially isolated, with interests different and sometimes in opposition to those of other individuals in the community; this concept is alien to female life experience of interdependence and nurturing.
• Abstract individualism is a conception of reality according to which every rational individual is entitled to equal rights regardless of sex, race or class. Women’s reproductive functions however, generate different needs such as pregnancy leave, maternity and other related services (Jaggar, 1988).

I believe criticising normative dualism on the basis of its excessive overvaluing of mental activities is contradictory: if feminists truly believe that bodily functions are as important and valuable as mental functions, why do they struggle to gain access to positions where ‘mental’ activity counts (e.g. in public life)? Why are they not satisfied with childbearing which is the ultimate bodily function?

Marxist Feminism

In contrast to liberal feminism, Marxist feminism emphasizes the material and the social structure, when theorizing unequal gender relations. In ‘The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State’ (1845), Engels argues that from the earliest pre-capitalist times, human societies have been characterized by a ‘natural’ sexual division of labour which itself probably originated from the division of labour in the sexual act. Thus in primitive societies, men specialized in controlling the tribe’s animals and providing food, while women occupied a strong position within the household as the main centre of subsistence production (bedding, clothing, simple tools). Why did men end up going out hunting while women stayed home? One answer is that women became pregnant and their lack of mobility dictated they should stay at home. However, this is not convincing because women were not pregnant all the time, all their life. They could have stayed home for the last few months of their pregnancy when their mobility was drastically reduced and the rest of the time go out doing what men did. Another answer is that most women are physically weaker than men and thus the physically more demanding job of hunting and gathering food was left to men. With the invention of agriculture and the domestication of animals, men succeeded to expand production, raise a surplus and accumulate wealth. It became profitable to own slaves and the first form of class society came into existence. At the same time, this process led to the devaluation of women’s work, production and status within society. With their wealth increasing, men exerted pressure to convert the hitherto matrilineal and matrilocal societies into patriarchal ones and this constituted what Engels calls ‘the world-historic defeat of the female sex’ (cited in Tong, 1993, p. 48).

The emergence of private property and the patriarchal society marked the shift to monogamous family structure which insured the secure and orderly transfer of the father’s patrimony to his children. Engels concludes that the domination of women by men within the monogamous family, where man controls the property, is simply the class division between the propertied and the propertyless and this ancient struggle continues into modern times. Only through the dissolution of the institution of private property and subsequently that of monogamy as a male supremacist economic institution, will the oppression of women ever cease. He goes on to argue that the working class woman does not experience oppression as much as the bourgeois woman, for entry into the labour market has rendered the proletarian woman less dependent on her husband for survival.

Alison Jaggar (1988) has criticized Engels for basing his explanation of the original sexual division of labour on the division of labour in the sexual act, a deterministic argument which implies that, apart from the institution of private property, the institution of heterosexuality is also instrumental in the oppression of women. I would add, why should the division of labour in the sexual act put women and not men at a disadvantage? Certainly women, with their capacity for reproduction, could have been in a privileged position.

Although early Marxist feminists have not directly addressed women’s sexual and reproductive concerns and have attempted to theorize gender oppression through the nature and function of women’s work, they go beyond Engels’ explanation of women’s oppression by trying to prove that the job of reproducing the labour force is not ‘unproductive’. With the advent of capitalism and the transfer of goods production from the private household to the public workplace, women became responsible for the unremunerated production of simple use-value, childcare and heavy domestic duties; even when they were engaged in paid employment in the public sphere, they still carried the burden of the double day. Other Marxist feminists such as Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James (1973) have made the claim that women’s domestic work is already a productive work which creates surplus value and leads to their direct and indirect exploitation: it is reproducing labour which in turn creates surplus value.

Marxist feminists have also drawn attention to the fact that even when women are engaged in paid employment, they usually end up doing women’s work such as nursing, cooking, clerking and teaching; since their work is undervalued, they also receive lower salaries than men, regardless of their knowledge and skill. Elshtain (1981) has criticized Marxist feminism on the grounds that it has overlooked the family as a haven which could provide love, security, comfort and diversity of life perspective. This criticism is especially valid in the case of racial and ethnic minorities for whom the family is a nucleus of solidarity and comfort in the face of hostility from the dominant cultural group.

Marxist feminists have condemned the family as an economic unit, not as an emotional one:

In truly socialist society, men marry women, but these women are their equals; heterosexual couples have their own biological children, but these children are regarded as everyone’s social children; and people set up individual households even though little in the way of cooking, cleaning, and/or child care goes on in them. Far from rejecting Elshtain’s family, then, many a Marxist feminist has actually embraced it as a description of the family under authentic socialism (Tong, 1993, p. 63). *

Michele Barrett counts among the theorists who have given a new direction to Marxist feminism. She criticizes Marxism for its economism and for not placing sufficient emphasis on the significance of ideological processes and culture. She stresses the considerable role of familial and domestic ideology in women’s oppression:

The oppression of women under capitalism is grounded in a set of relations between several elements. Of these perhaps the most crucial are the economic organization of households and its accompanying familial ideology, the division of labour and relations of production, the educational system and the operations of the state. Yet the continuance and the entrenched nature of this oppression cannot be understood without a consideration of the cultural processes in which men and women are represented differently -created and recreated as gendered human subjects-. Nor can it be understood without an analysis of sexuality and gender identity, and the complex question of the relationship between sexuality and biological reproduction as it affects both men and women (Barrett, 1988, pp. 40–41).

Alison Jaggar has criticized Marxist feminists because they have said too little about women’s oppression by men. They consider men to be secondary oppressors at best, the primary oppressor being Capital. She has further criticized Marxist feminists for having rarely discussed issues related to sex. She says that when they do take up such issues, it is only to apply the analogy of employer-employee to pimp/prostitute and husband/wife relations. According to Jaggar, they do this in order to

link the Marxist treatment of women’s sex-specific oppression with Marxism’s main theoretical system, incorporating domination both by class and by gender in the same explanatory framework (cited in Tong, 1993, pp. 63–64).

Despite its limitations, Marxist feminism has contributed to the understanding of the relation between the institutions of capitalism and family: capitalism needs the free reproduction work of women at home and it keeps them generally segregated in the most boring and low-paid jobs, once they enter into the labour market.

Radical Feminism

Radical feminism is a phenomenon generated by the 1960s women’s liberation movement. It maintains that ‘gender oppression is the oldest and most profound form of exploitation which predates and underlies all other forms including those of race and class’ (H. Eisenstein, 1983, p. xix).

The term ‘patriarchy’ was first used to point out that in many parts of the world, men exert control over women (Millett, 1977). In traditional societies, this is done through the constraints of religious beliefs and social customs, and in modern, industrialized societies, by engineering consent among women themselves and conditioning them to accept a system of cultural sex-role stereotyping. However, not only in traditional societies do religious beliefs influence women’s social position: for example, Catholicism still plays an important role in controlling women in a highly industrialized country such as Italy or within the Italian Diaspora in Britain (see Chapters 4 and 5).

Another prominent radical feminist, Shulamith Firestone, regards romantic sexual love as a patriarchal structure that perpetuates the rule of man over woman with the latter’s full participation and consent. She argues:

Unless revolution uproots the basic social organization, the biological family -the vinculum through which the psychology of power can always be smuggled-the tapeworm of exploitation can never be annihilated. We shall need a sexual revolution much larger than -inclusive of- a socialist one to truly eradicate all class systems (cited in H. Eisenstein, 1983, p. 17).

According to Brownmiller (1977), the genital difference that gave men the phallic power to rape women is the secret of patriarchy. Rape, she argues, is a crime committed by a few men, with tacit acceptance of many. Both the possibility and the actuality of rape have been the principal mechanisms to force women into submission.

Although Brownmiller’s view of rape is a form of deterministic biological materialism (which would imply that the structure of human genitals must change in order for rape to stop), she contradicts herself by claiming optimistically that women ‘could deny rape a future’, through feminist organization and self-defence techniques. I argue that men can rape because, apart from their phallic power, most have a superior physical force. Sheer masculine force is applied in rape, domestic violence and battering. Both men and women become aware of their disparity in physical force, early in their life. Such awareness gives confidence to men and intimidates women. Confidence extends to all spheres of human life and helps men to materialize their ambitions. Intimidation poisons women’s consciousness, is present throughout their life cycle and impedes them from materializing their lives’ ‘projects’.

Radical feminism theorizes that regardless of class, race and education, women form an exploited and subordinated sex class. I argue that the idea of a sex class is a mirage:

They live dispersed among the males, attached through residence, housework, economic condition and social standing to certain men -fathers or husbands -more firmly than they are to other women (de Beauvoir, 1952, p. xxii).

By the mid 1970s, a group of feminists (Adrienne Rich, 1976, 1981; Susan Griffin, 1981) developed a perspective that came to be known as woman-centred analysis, advocating the possibility that femaleness was normative, while maleness was a deviation. One source of this new perspective was lesbian-feminism. Radical-lesbians put forward the concept of the primacy of women, of ‘woman identified woman’. They theorized that women are subordinated because they direct their primal commitments, including sexual love, towards men rather than women. According to radical-lesbians, heterosexuality is a patriarchal concept inculcated and enforced on women. I criticize this argument on the following grounds:

• The argument implies that, in the absence of patriarchy, all or most women would be lesbians; there is no reason to assume this.
• Why should compulsory heterosexuality apply only to women? In our present society where patriarchy does not oppress men, all or most men should be homosexuals, which is obviously not the case.

Radical feminists have thought that the system of sex-role stereotyping has severely damaged women’s psyche, to the point that not only men attribute all undesirable characters to women, women themselves internalize the denigrating values that men have about them. Radical feminism forwards the argument that the oppression of women is at the root of all other oppression, racial, economic and political. It often identifies psychology as a major locus of power, frequently at the expense of underlying social and economic factors which help to shape it. Moreover, radical feminism is characterized by a universalism that generalizes the experiences of women, ignoring the specificities of race, class and culture.

Some of the most important contributions of radical feminism have been towards the theorization of reproduction, mothering and sexuality. Shulamith Firestone (1974), argues that the relations of reproduction rather than those of production are the driving force in history; as long as biological reproduction remains the rule rather than the exception and the family prevails as the main economic unit, nothing will change fundamentally for women. However, once women are no more obliged to reproduce biologically, there would be no reason for them to stay at home: they would enter into public life, en masse and on a par with men.

According to many radical feminists, socially constructed sexual roles (male dominance and female submission) are as instrumental as socially constructed reproductive roles, in causing and perpetuating women’s subordination. In this context, there have been heated debates amongst feminists on the subjects of pornography, heterosexuality, lesbianism and sadomasochism: feminists such as Dworkin (1981) and Mckinnon (1987) have condemned pornography on the grounds that it is an especially pernicious factor in promoting male dominance. It intentionally degrades and subordinates women. Other feminists (mainly liberal feminists) have condemned the censorship of pornography on the grounds of preserving civil liberties. The opponents of sadomasochism claim that it reproduces patterns of domination and submission not only at the sexual level but also at the political level; the advocates of sadomasochism claim that it eroticizes pain which, w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Theories of Gender Relations
• 2 Interplay of Religion and Ethnicity
• 3 History of the Italian Community in Britain
• 4 Comparison of Italian and British Social Structures
• 5 Italian Institutions in Britain
• 6 Structural Changes in Italy
• 7 Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index