Women, Power and Political Systems

Margherita Rendel

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138388239
• eBook ISBN: 9780429758706
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In their analyses of the role of women in politics, political scientists had tended to neglect the family and the labour market, thus ignoring a crucial aspect of women's political activity.

Originally published in 1981, this book shows that the family and the labour market are political institutions directly relevant to the distribution of power and to economic and social development. Because the political functions of these two institutions are ignored, political systems are misunderstood with serious consequences for the implementation of policy. The studies in the book, which relate to widely different political systems and which cross disciplinary boundaries, all concentrate on the crucial activities of women. They serve to increase our understanding of the political implications of the family, of the sexual divisions of both domestic and wage labour and of the role of education in these inequalities at the time. They show the fundamental comparability of the problems posed by patriarchy as well as the diversity of their manifestations in different political and economic systems. Further, the studies show an unexpected dependence of male-dominated institutions, such as the military and high technology, on women's traditional gender roles. Ways of empowering the powerless through law, political activity and employment are also discussed.

By extending the scope of discussion, this book is a valuable contribution to our understanding of politics and of the centrality of women to political structures.

1WOMEN, POWER AND POLITICAL SYSTEMS

Margherita Rendel

The most serious omission of political science in its treatment of women has been its failure to deal with women in the political system as a whole. By political system is meant, for the purposes of this discussion, the ways in which power and powerlessness are distributed (and legitimated) in society and all that flows from that distribution, as well as the institutions and processes traditionally thought of as forming the political system. The power of the powerful rests, after all, on the powerlessness of the powerless, and on the labour and resources that power can extract from them. It is a mistake to suppose that the powerless are always totally without power, but the price that the powerless have to pay for what little power they do sometimes exert is disproportionately high. Without an understanding of the role of the powerless, how is it possible to understand the power of the powerful? Or the nature of the political system? Among the powerless, women are disproportionately numerous.

In this chapter, I shall attempt to set out some of the ways in which the subject of women and politics could be examined and why such approaches are important. Then I shall review briefly how the subject has been treated by political scientists so far and the critiques that have been made of this work. I shall then show how the chapters in this book contribute to filling some of the gaps; it will be seen that their arguments are directly relevant to issues of public policy. Among the most serious and extensive omissions from political science are studies of the family and the labour market. These omissions distort the understanding both of women and politics, and of the political system as a whole. The misunderstandings are serious in their effects on the policies of governments both in developing countries and, in different ways, in developed countries.

The Political Importance of the Family

The neglect of the family by political scientists, apart from studies of political socialisation, has been commented on by various feminist writers, for example Boals (1975). It was not always the case. Political thinkers (admittedly not the same as political scientists) from Plato onwards have had plenty to say about the political importance and political role of the family. Historically, the political significance of the family is apparent. In many European countries, the state grew out of the household of the king,¹ whose household offices formed the original great offices of state.² The familial base of public power gave scope for the wives, mothers and daughters of men holding what we should now call public office to exercise the functions of such office as proxies. They were rarely able to hold office in their own right (Stopes, 1894; Stenton, 1957; McNamara and Wemple, 1974). At some periods, abbesses were at least a partial exception (Stenton, 1957; McNamara and Wemple, 1977). A few daughters, mothers, sisters and widows succeeded or were appointed to high political office. Something similar seems to happen at the present time in the succession of widows as ‘male equivalents’, for example in the House of Commons, House of Lords,³ US Congress, the second dáil of the Irish Free State (McCracken, 1958; Currell, 1974; Kirkpatrick, 1974), even occasionally to premiership.⁴ Although such women may accede to power through family connections, they have to promote their careers and maintain themselves in power through the same means open to others, both men and women. Rare is the woman who, like Eva Perchón, achieves and maintains her own political power on the basis of family connection but without ever holding elected or appointed office (Navarro, 1977).

Mistresses of powerful men have occasionally been potent political figures. At first sight they appear to be using another version of the familial base for access to politics. I would suggest instead that they are using their lovers as patrons. Perhaps the most important means of securing promotion in political life is through patronage. It is often suggested that the need for patronage causes particular difficulties for women when those who can be patrons are men; in some countries these difficulties can be overwhelming (Jahan, 1976). It can, of course, be argued that patronage is a kind of familial base. This is to confuse understanding by metaphor. Family has, and had more extensively in the past, a legal base of formal legal rights and obligations relating to control over property and persons.⁵ Patronage has no such legal base.

As in political life, so in economic activity and the public domain generally where women had access to crafts and trades through family connections. This is still true at the present time: a sizeable proportion of those few women who do achieve high positions in industry and commerce do so by reason of family relationship (Fogarty, Allen, Allen and Walters, 1971a, p. 142). For those without family connections, patronage is what matters (Kanter, 1977). But in politics at least, family may facilitate access to patronage. However by the end of the Middle Ages, gild rules in some crafts excluded widows and daughters from succeeding their husbands or fathers (O’Faolain and Martines, 1973, p. 170), and capitalist organisations which removed production for the market from the home prevented women from sharing in the economic activities of their husbands and fathers (Clark, 1919). The Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions replaced family with wage labour and separated the home from the place of production. By the first quarter of the nineteenth century, men’s trade unions had excluded women from many industrial trades and occupations (Lewenhak, 1977). The exclusion of women from education and the civil death imposed on married women meant that women lacked competence, in both senses, to act in the public domain, that is, in activities based outside the home. To summarise, women acceded to power in the past and still do so by reason of family relationship. This route was blocked by disqualification and changes in economic structure. Disqualification has now been removed. The need for patronage both in political life and in the public domain remains.

The family is politically important for other reasons too. It has been perceived as a miniature state. Thus in England the provisions of the Statute of Treasons of 1352 made the murder of her husband by a woman or his/her master by a servant,⁶ but not vice versa, petit treason for which the penalty was to be burned alive and the offender’s property to escheat to the victim’s heirs. Filmer (1949 edn) argued that not only the state but society as a whole was the family writ large. That family was a patriarchal family descended from Adam who had absolute power over all his descendants.⁷ Filmer’s arguments were important because they represented the views of the Jacobite Tories, and because patriarchialism was still strong in spite of the growth of liberal and constitutionalist ideas. The husband/father governed the family, disciplined its members, provided for them and represented them to the outside world. Such ideas have remained alive in the twentieth century. Many constitutional documents describe the family as the fundamental unit or group in society. Comparable provisions are to be found in a number of international documents, both of UN organisations and of regional organisations.⁸ This is not to suggest that the family is seen only as a political unit and clearly there are good reasons for safeguarding the rights of individuals to join together to found a family. I am concerned to establish that the family is also a political unit, and is in this century and at the present time recognised as such by those engaged in politics. That this is so is made abundantly clear in Chapters 7 and 8.

Universal suffrage has, in principle, made the adult individual the smallest political unit. However, legally and economically, the family, consisting of husband, wife and dependent children, tends in practice to remain the basic unit. This unit is in many ways made to replicate the hierarchical structure of the state. The husband/father is allocated the role of head of the family and of the household and is, in principle, responsible for the maintenance of its members.⁹ In practice, the state allows him the power to enforce his authority. The husband was and often still is entitled to obedience from wife and children, an obedience which can still be enforced through their economic and often also legal dependence on him. The husband/father, head of the family, has in the past been legally entitled to use ‘reasonable’ force to impose his wishes (including sexual demands) on his wife,¹⁰ and in practice is often still able to do so. The unwillingness of the state to interfere effectively or at all in the past and the difficulty of securing effective protection in the present¹¹ almost gives a de facto legitimation to the monopoly of force by the husband/father (Hanmer, 1978). Weber noted that the state had a monopoly of the legitimate use of force.

The family replicates the state in other ways as well as in having a system of authority backed ultimately by force. It has a system of stratification relating both to deference (Barker and Alien, 1976b, p. 10; Bell and Newby, 1976, pp. 156 and 166; Whitehead, 1976) and also to living standards. Stratification and the husband’s power are reinforced in various ways. Many women do not know how much their husbands earn and have no right to know. Even cost-of-living increases in the husband’s earnings are often not passed on to the wife for housekeeping, still less for personal expenditure. Wives seldom share in the luxurious expense-account living and travel of some business and professional men. The internal stratification of the family also reflects the division of labour within it. The wife’s function is to reproduce and service the family, and to service its head, all in exchange for her keep (Delphy, 1977 edn) and an occasional treat.

However, the state’s attitude to the status of women in the family is ambivalent. The state both reinforces the authority of the husband and recognises the rights of the wife/mother as an individual citizen. The ambivalence to some degree corresponds with the separation of state and society. Women are recognised as citizens for the purposes of public life, but in society generally and by the state as wives/mothers who are subject to the authority of their husbands. Much effort is devoted to maintaining the family in being with the husband at its head through revenue law, social security legislation and practice and other social services (Wilson, 1977). Indeed in Britain the cohabitation rule¹² seeks to create a family where none exists and often where none is intended. In France, too, women and men are judged as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ citizens according to their compliance with these ‘family’ norms, so that the ‘goodness’ of a man as citizen and husband is determined by whether he is conscientious as an employee, and of a woman as citizen and wife by whether she takes care of her children and refrains from spending any money on even minimal pleasures for herself. If she does, then she is usually punished and discredited by being deprived of the custody of her children (Barker and Allen, 1976a; Dezalay, 1976a; Delphy, 1977 edn). Similar criteria are applied by the judiciary in Britain (O’Donovan, 1979).

The political system is a battlefield where women have gained some victories which help them to use the machinery of the state for their own advancement in society.¹³ Women’s emancipation can be seen as an attempt to break up the family as a political unit and to replace it with a direct relationship between the individual woman and the state (Stacey, 1980). In talking about the state we are in fact talking about a collection of institutions which are to a greater or lesser extent integrated with each other but which are also open to control by groups within society.¹⁴ Because these institutions exercise important powers, often monopoly powers, influence and control over the state or its institutions are attractive prizes. The state’s ‘attitude’ to women (or indeed to other groups or interests) therefore reflects at any one time the past and present strengths and institutionalised gains of the many contenders for power.

The state is also itself a political entity. In this capacity it has an interest in maintaining the patriarchal family. The reproduction of the population has always been of interest to states and a large and healthy population has been seen as a source of strength both for peace and war. Bacon (1922 edn) considered that ‘The principal part of greatness in any state is to have a race of military men.’ Population has been particularly important in relation to warfare in order to ensure a good supply of soldiers. It is men, not women, who constitute armies; some of the implications of this are explored in Chapter 2. Workers to man the fields, mines, factories and counting houses are no less necessary. Policy in relation to population has therefore always been important to governments, whether that policy has been pro-natalist or, as more recently in some cases, anti-natalist. The punishment of both suicide and abortion were justified on the grounds of depriving the state (king) of the direct and indirect services of an individual.¹⁵ Population policies take many forms; they can include grants for births, the availability or not of contraception and abortion, support for or hostility to employment and education for women. These policies have borne far more on women than on men as Chapter 8 shows, inevitably perhaps, because of the biological division of labour in reproduction.

The social division of labour for rearing the next generation is not inevitable; nor is the reason for the existing division quite as apparent as is commonly supposed. Population policies and the obligation placed on women to rear children have contributed to limiting women’s opportunities for political activity (Currell, 1974; Flora and Lynn, 1974, p. 38, Lynn, 1979, p. 407). The factors which make it possible to use almost exclusively women for rearing as well as reproduction deserve far more attention than they have so far received from political scientists.

The policy of enforcing the dependence of women on men and imposing on men the obligation to maintain women and children has the effect, outside subsistence economies, of reinforcing men’s dependence on paid employment. However, the majority of married ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Women, Power and Political Systems Margherita Rendel
• 2. Women and Citizenship: Mobilisation, Participation, Representation Judith Stiehm
• 3. Women’s Role in the Formulation of Public Policies in Brazil Fanny Tabak
• 4. Women’s Education and Participation in the Labour Force: The Case of Nigeria Keziah Awosika
• 5. Women in Government as Policy-makers and Bureaucrats: The Turkish Case Nermin Abadan-Unat
• 6. Creating Employment Opportunities for Rural Women: Some Issues Affecting Attitudes and Policy Najma Sachak
• 7. Demography, Political Reform and Women’s Issues in Czechoslovakia Sharon L. Wolchik
• 8. A Hard Day’s Night: Women, Reproduction and Service Society Ilona Kickbusch
• 9. Technology, ‘Women’s Work’ and the Social Control of Women Joan Rothschild
• 10. Women’s Employment Networks: Strategies for Development Jeanne Marie Col
• 11. The Impact of the Women’s Movement and Legislative Activity of Women MPs on Social Development Sirkka Sinkkonen and Elina Haavio-Mannila
• 12. Will Women Judges Make a Difference in Women’s Legal Rights? A Prediction from Attitudes and Simulated Behaviour Beverly B. Cook
• 13. Future Perspectives Margherita Rendel
• Appendix One: Papers Presented to the Round Table of the IPSA Study Group on Sex Roles and Politics held at the University of Essex, 6–8 August 1979
• Appendix Two: Papers Presented at the Formal and Informal Sessions of the Study Group on Sex Roles and Politics at the Moscow Congress of the IPSA, 12–18 August 1979
• Notes on Contributors
• Index