Gender in Political Theory

Judith Squires

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745668574
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

This wide-ranging and accessible book provides a thorough overview of the key debates in gender and political theory.

PART I

Fractious Feminist Frames

1

Framing Politics

Introduction

Conventional conceptions of politics, whether instrumental or institutional, have presumed that politics is distinguishable from, and stands in opposition to, the personal. The feminist assertion that ‘the personal is political’ issued a direct challenge to this presumption. It questioned two of the central features of most conventional articulations of the political: the nature of political power and the correlation between politics and the public sphere. The force of the claim lay in the implication that politics needed a more adequate theory of power and a less patriarchal division between public and private spheres.

Both instrumental and institutional conceptions of the political were claimed to be wrongly conceived and overly restrictive. The claim that ‘the personal is political’ destabilized all that had previously been presumed. Indeed, Phillips reflects, ‘“politics” was subjected to such devastating criticism that it threatened to dissolve as a distinct category of analysis’ (Phillips 1998: 4). Feminists rejected the conception of the political as located only within the institutional arena of government. They adopted the instrumentalist conception of politics as power and proceeded to extend the definition of power such that power was ubiquitous and politics all-encompassing.

The idea that politics is power, coupled with the adoption of an extensive heterogeneous conception of power, encouraged many feminist theorists to consider politics as largely indistinguishable from anything else. This has generated a huge series of reflections on ‘the politics of . . .’ (sexuality, reproduction, identity, housework, fashion . . .) but does little to define the nature of the political itself. Politics, Fuss states, ‘represents the aporia in much of our current political theorizing; that which signifies activism is least actively interrogated’ (Fuss 1989: 105).

At its most extreme the feminist challenge threatens to eliminate the boundaries of the political altogether: the public/private distinction is collapsed and power is extended to all social relations. But more recent reflections by feminist political theorists on the boundaries to the political have been more restrained. While drawing on the insights of the early challenges, feminist political theorists are increasingly concerned to reconstruct the boundaries of the political, entailing rethinking the public/private dichotomy such that it no longer marginalizes women, and distinguishing between democratic power and undemocratic domination such that the constraints provided by a democratic form of power might allow individual empowerment. ‘Minimally’, says Elshtain, ‘a political perspective requires that some activity called “politics” be differentiated from other activities, relationships and patterns of action. If all conceptual boundaries are blurred and all distinctions between public and private are eliminated no politics can exist by definition’ (Elshtain 1981: 201). There have been three different approaches to reconstructing the political within recent feminist theorizing. The first seeks to modify the institutional conception of politics; the second to develop the norms of the private sphere into an ethical conception of politics; and the third to move beyond the dichotomy between these two and develop a more critical conception of politics.

In order to get a sense of what is meant by politics, and the ways in which taking gender as the first question of political theory rather than its first premise alters these meanings, let us first consider why and in what ways feminists have challenged the distinction between the public and the private spheres and proposed to replace a public institutional conception of the political with an extensive power-based conception. Let us then look at the notions of power adopted within the mainstream politics literature and at the ways in which these are reworked within feminist theory. Taken together, these debates provide an account of how and why the feminist claim that ‘the personal is political’ eroded the conventional boundaries of the political. We can then go on to consider the ways in which feminist political theorists are now proposing to reconstruct the boundaries of the political, institutional, ethical and critical.

Public and Private

Liberalism has been constructed around a distinction between the public and private realms. The key significance of this distinction lies, for its liberal advocates, in its perceived role in securing individual freedom. As Judith Shklar notes, liberalism ‘has only one overriding aim: to secure the political conditions that are necessary for the exercise of personal freedom’ (Shklar 1991: 21). These conditions are held to require the clear demarcation of the spheres of the personal and the public. ‘The limits of coercion begin’, argues Shklar, ‘. . . with a prohibition upon invading the private realm’ (Shklar 1991: 24). Freedom is secured by limiting the constraints placed upon the individual. Given this, the line between the public and the private has to be drawn, and ‘must under no circumstances be ignored or forgotten’ (Shklar 1991: 24).

What is meant by the public and the private here is the distinction between the state and civil society. Politics is equated with the public power of the state. Freedom is equated with the absence of constraint imposed by the state – freedom from political power. Civil society is therefore cast as that sphere of life in which individuals are allowed to pursue their own conception of the good in free association with others. Civil society is ‘private’ in the sense that it is not governed by the public power of the state.

Private does not here imply the personal, intimate or familial. As Nancy Rosenblum notes: ‘Private life means life in civil society, not some presocial state of nature or antisocial condition of isolation and detachment’ (Rosenblum 1987: 61). A social sphere freed from the constraints of the political will be more vibrant and allow for greater autonomy than will one in which the power of the state extends to all aspects of life. As politics is conceived as the state-based exertion of power over individuals, it becomes a necessary evil, to be limited and constrained such that it guarantees the framework for civil society without eroding its vitality.

However, the apparently binary division between public and private is complicated by the existence of a third sphere, also labelled private -that of personal life. This creates a tripartite, rather than a dual, division of social relations: the state, civil society and the personal. It is clear that the state is always cast as public. It is equally clear that the personal (when considered within political theory) is cast as private. Confusingly, civil society is cast as private when opposed to the state and public when opposed to the personal. This inevitably makes any discussion of a single public/private dichotomy either partial or confused, or both.

There are, Kymlicka helpfully notes, ‘in fact two different concepts of the public–private distinction in liberalism: the first, which originated in Locke, is the distinction between the political and the social; the second, which arose with Romantic-influenced liberals, is the distinction between the social and the personal’ (Kymlicka 1990: 250). The social/personal distinction arises later than the state/civil society distinction, and in some ways may be viewed as a response to the latter. It represents a modification of the classic liberal celebration of civil society in the light of the growing awareness of the constraints placed upon individual freedom by social and not just political manifestations of power.

Classic liberals had viewed society as the realm in which individuals could act freely. However, it has become increasingly evident that society itself places intense constraints upon individuals, and the pursuit of individual freedom may require the limitation of both state and civil society in order to create space for self-expression. The relations of power which might work to constrain the individual, it has become increasingly clear, are more extensive and pervasive than those captured by the institutional power of the state alone. Recognition of the pressures of social conformity led to a need to distinguish between the social and the personal in order that one might retreat from ordered social life into a sphere of intimacy.

Significantly, neither of these two public/private distinctions explicitly invokes the family: neither characterizes the family as paradigmatically private. Indeed the family is not necessarily private in the sense implied by either the term civil society or the personal, and the arguments for each could actually provide grounds to criticize the traditional family. Nonetheless, when the domestic or familial are considered within liberal theory, they are systematically represented as private (Okin 1998: 117). There is then a third form of the public/private distinction at work: that between the public and the domestic. Here the public comprises both the state and civil society and the private is defined institutionally as the relations and activities of domestic life, often assumed to embody the intimacy valued for self-development.

The intriguing, and politically significant, thing for feminists is the fact that contemporary liberal theory nowhere explicitly theorizes the relation between this third articulation of the public/private dichotomy in relation to either of the other two public/private dichotomies. Both civil society and the personal are highly valued conceptualizations of the private sphere: both are viewed (to differing extents in differing articulations of liberalism) as essential to the realization of individual freedom. The domestic, in striking contrast, has no place either within the accounts of the pursuit of freedom (the private) or within the necessary structural constraints which allow individual freedom to be pursued equally by all (the public). Liberals, Kymlicka notes, have ‘generally neglected the role of the family in structuring both public and private life’ (Kymlicka 1990: 250). For many feminist theorists this neglect renders the entire liberal project suspect.

As Pateman has argued, the separation of state and civil society is a distinction within the non-familial world. By labelling civil society private, the family remains forgotten in theoretical discussion (Pateman 1983: 286–7). Had the family been viewed as a part of civil society, liberal theorists would surely have been compelled to oppose its hierarchical form and argue for its organization on the basis of equality and consent, as they did with all other forms of civil co-operation.

Yet there were structural (historical and conceptual), rather than simply contingent, reasons why the family was not included within civil society. As Young has argued: ‘Extolling a public realm of manly virtue and citizenship as independence, generality, and dispassionate reason entailed creating the private sphere of the family as the place to which emotion, sentiment, and bodily needs must be confined. The generality of the public thus depends on excluding women’ (Young 1998: 405). In other words, although liberal theory does not theorize the place of the domestic, it relies upon (indeed serves to constitute and legitimize) a domestic realm which is quite distinct to those spheres that it does theorize.

Arguments vary as to why the domestic has been neglected in this way. Feminist critiques of the liberal characterization of the public/private distinction are numerous and qualitatively distinct in focus. Criticism is levelled at the premises of liberalism itself (especially its conception of the self), at liberalism’s historical origins in social contract theory, and at the historical practice of liberal regimes.

The first critique focuses on the question of subjectivity. Liberalism, it is frequently charged, works with a conception of the subject as an autonomous agent: it assumes people to be equal, unattached, rational individuals. Yet many critics view this claim as an account of a particular, socially specific type of identity formation rather than as a statement of universal human nature. If people are equal, unattached, rational individuals, it is because they have been constructed as that. This liberal discourse of individual autonomy is a prescriptive rather than a descriptive account, and one that works to structure or distort, rather than simply reflect, social relations (see Di Stefano 1996: 95–116).

Recognition of this fact leads to two further insights. The first is that very particular social structures and institutions are needed to shape individuals into this mould; the second is that this conception of subjectivity may not apply equally to everyone. The first insight leads to a concern with the processes of reproduction, nurturance and socialization, the second to an exploration of the extent to which women have been understood as subordinate, dependent and emotional, and so excluded from the category of ‘individuals’ within liberal theorizing.

The two issues are linked in women’s status as primary carers. Neither the process of caring and nurturing nor the status of carers and nurturers is theorized in liberal theory. The concern of feminist theorists is that, as a result of this omission, not only have women been denied the rights and privileges granted to the ‘rational individuals’ of liberal societies, but also a crucial aspect of life, associated with the caring performed by women, has been glossed over. As Okin argues, liberalism ‘pays remarkably little attention to how we become the adults who form the subject matter of political theories’ (Okin 1991: 41). If the acquisition of the characteristics deemed essential to the liberal individual occurs, not (or not solely) as a result of genetic and hormonal predetermination, but (also) as a result of parental practices (conscious or unconscious), then liberal theorists ought perhaps to pay more attention to the processes by which liberalism reproduces its subjects and secures its own future. ‘Liberal theorists’, argues Okin, ‘who take such arguments seriously cannot continue to regard the structure and practices of family life as separate from and irrelevant to “the political”’ (Okin 1991: 41). This insight has implications not only for the role of caring as a practice but also for its role as a perspective.

The sort of thinking and moral reasoning generated by and required within the social relations characteristic of familial life are quite distinct from those generated by and required within the social relations characteristic of public life. The emphasis here is on empathy, relationality and caring rather than on autonomy, individuality and justice. Many feminists explore the implications of recognizing the existence of these two distinct forms of moral reasoning, and there is an extensive literature proposing that the balance between the two should be reassessed (see Chapter 5).

This critique of the public/private distinction, which emerges from a focus on subjectivity, is complemented by a second, which focuses on contract. Here the object of concern is not the rational liberal individual, but liberalism’s origins in social contract theory. This contract-based critique places the subjectivity-based critique in historical context. It concentrates attention not on abstract debates concerning agency, but on concrete investigations of political relations. The focus here is the particular social and political forces that created the situation in which women were confined to a private, domestic, care-taking role while men were presumed to be able to move freely between the private (domestic) and the public (civil society and state) spheres.

The most influential theorist here is Pateman. She claims that the social contract that generates liberal politics and establishes the political freedom of individuals simultaneously entails the sexual subordination of women in marriage. The social contract that is required to create both civil society and the state requires a sexual contract to accommodate the patriarchalism that predates liberalism. The liberal social contact therefore represents the reorganization, but not the abolition, of patriarchy. The distinction between state and civil society established in the writings of Locke rests on the separation of political and paternal power such that the ‘masculine right over women is declared non-political’ (Pateman 1988: 90). Patriarchy was relocated into the private domain and reformulated as complementary to civil society. It was not rejected altogether: it was entrenched rather than eradicated. Classic liberal theory assumed the (male-headed) family to be a natural, biologically determined unit. As politics was assumed to apply only to that which was socially constituted, and so amenable to change, relations within the family were deemed apolitical (Pateman 1988).

Liberal states have been able to act in this apparently contradictory manner because of an essential tension within liberal theory. The original contract, upon which contemporary liberal theory still rests, was, Pateman has claimed, not only a social contract that established freedom, but also a sexual contract that perpetuated domination. The contract established men’s political right over women through conjugal right. While the contract theorists challenged the paternal rights of fathers, they incorporated into their theories the patriarchal rights of husbands over wives. As a result they created a division not only between the state and civil society, but also between the public sphere of civil freedom and the private sphere of the family.

This private sphere is then deemed politically irrelevant, and theorists focus exclusively on the relation between the state and the sphere of civil freedom. Indeed, public and private come to be understood as relating to the state and the sphere of civil freedom respectively, thereby rendering the ‘private’ sphere of the family invisible. Women, Pateman tells us, ‘are not party to the original contract through which men transform their natural freedom into the security of civil freedom. Women are the subject of the contract’ (Pateman 1988: 6). The public realm cannot be understood in isolation from the private realm, and yet there is now a refusal to admit that marital domination is politically significant.

This critique focuses on the way in which the historical origins of liberal theory rely on the incorporation of already existing patriarchal relations which, being excluded from the categories of both civil society and the state, are then rendered invisible. It then becomes possible for contemporary liberal theorists to forget (or overlook) the fact that the ‘liberal individual’ was explicitly argued to be the male head of household by the classic exponents of liberal theory. In this way gender is given a highly specific and structuring role within liberal theory at the same time as liberal theory presents itself as gender-neutral.

There is a third type of critique of the public/private dichotomy as articulated within liberal theory. This focuses on the historical practice of liberal regimes. The charge here is that, notwithstanding the abstract commitment to the importance of a prohibition on state intervention in the private sphere, liberal states have in practice regulated and controlled the family. Not only has this practice been contrary to the fundamental principle of liberalism, it has been adopted in pursuit of a profoundly illiberal end: the perpetuation of patriarchy. This tension, arising from the very formulation of liberalism itself (as discussed above), is the inevitable conclusion of the ambivalent role of the family in relation to the private sphere.

‘For hundreds of years in Britain and the United States’, notes Okin, ‘the Common Law notion of coverture deprived women of legal personhood upon marriage. The state enforced the rights of husbands to their wives’ property and persons and made it virtually impossible for women to divorce or even to live separately from their husbands’ (Okin 1991: 42). While the state adopted this directly non-neutral relation to personal and domestic life, it also upheld practices within the marketplace which presumed that those engaged in waged-work could rely on the support and care of someone at home (Okin...