Resisting Citizenship

Feminist Essays on Politics, Community, and Democracy

Martha A. Ackelsberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135775230
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

Political participation in America—supposedly the world's strongest democracy—is startlingly low, and many of the civil rights and economic equity initiatives that were instituted in the 1960s and '70s have been abandoned, as significant proportions of the populace seem to believe that the civil rights battle has been won. However, rates of collective engagement, like community activism, are surprisingly high. In Resisting Citizenship, renowned feminist political scientist Martha Ackelsberg argues that community activism may hold important clues to reviving democracy in this time of growing bureaucratization and inequality.

This book brings together many of Ackelsberg's writings over the past 25 years, combining her own field work and interviews with cutting edge research and theory on democracy and activism. She explores these efforts in order to draw lessons—and attempt to incorporate knowledge—about current notions of democracy from those who engage in "non-traditional" participation, those who have, in many respects, been relegated to the margins of political life in the United States.

I

RETHINKING POLITICS/RETHINKING COMMUNITY

1
WOMEN’S COLLABORATIVE ACTIVITIES AND CITY LIFE

Politics and Policy

What would it mean for women to be fully participatory citizens of a truly democratic urban political community? What changes in urban policy would follow from the integration of women’s activities and behaviors into our understanding of the practice of urban politics?

A number of studies have explored the depoliticization of economic life in the United States over the past 200 years, and the development of a split between “economics” and “politics” in the American political consciousness.¹ Others have examined the implications of that split for urban politics and “the patterning of class” in particular.² But despite the sensitivity of these works to issues of class, race, and ethnicity, and their implications for the potential of integrating work life and community life in a democratic polity, all are strangely silent about women, whose concerns have been largely absent from the American political agenda and whose actions have gone virtually unnoticed by students of urban political struggles.

Studies of women’s lives and activities—especially those focusing on urban contexts—suggest that women experience their environment in ways that may differ significantly from the ways most men do. Recent research, for example, has documented the prominent, if not predominant, role of women in urban struggles over what have been termed “quality of life” issues (i.e., housing, cost of living, and so on).³ Similarly, both historians and analysts of the contemporary social scene have noted the significance of social networks, or webs of relationships, in the lives of (urban) women.⁴

This chapter explores the implications of those differences both for our understanding of urban policy and, more broadly, for our notions of democratic citizenship. On one hand, it examines what it might mean to integrate economics and politics, work and community, in a democratic polity which took into account the concerns and behaviors of women, as well as of men. On the other, and more generally, it begins to develop an analysis of the significance of relationships—not only in and for the lives of women, but also as a crucial (if as yet inadequately explored) aspect of democratic citizenship itself.

Avoiding the Workplace–Community Split

Social historians and contemporary urbanologists alike have highlighted one significant characteristic of city spatial structure in the United States: the physical/geographical separation of workplace and residence. Some have focused on patterns of urban growth and their implications for urban political community; others on the consequences of the separation for the class- and race-based segregation of metropolitan areas.⁵ Some of the most provocative and suggestive work in this area, however, is that of Ira Katznelson, who explores in detail the connections between the separation of work and community and the development of industrial capitalism, and the specific implications of that separation for the structuring of urban political consciousness in the United States.

Katznelson’s focus is on the specifically American response to that separation (characteristic of the development of industrial capitalism)—namely, a “split consciousness” among urban residents who see a “stark division …between the politics of work and the politics of community.”⁶ In his view, American workers look to unions, focused at the workplace, to resolve what they see as economic issues; and they look to urban political parties, oriented around ethnicity and territoriality, rather than class, to resolve what they take to be political concerns, and they never really join the two sets of issues. This perspective permeates all aspects of workers’ lives, resulting in “a stark split between the ways workers in major industrial cities think, talk, and act when they are at work and when they are away from work in their communities.”⁷ The political and strategic message of Katznelson’s analysis is clear:

Community-based strategies for social change in the United States cannot succeed unless they pay attention to the country’s special pattern of class formation; to the split in the practical consciousness of American workers between the language and practice of a politics of work and those of a politics of community.⁸

Only when urban activists succeed in linking what are perceived as two independent sets of concerns, making clear the dependence of communities on the context set by capitalist relations, can there be significant, transformative, change in urban areas.

While Katznelson’s analysis hints at a new understanding of democratic citizenship, others have drawn the links somewhat more directly. Wolin, Piven and Cloward, and Bender all explore the development of the ideological split between economics and politics (or “private” and “public”) in American consciousness, although they focus more directly on the consequences of the split for our understandings of democracy. Specifically, Wolin bemoans the shift from a participatory, democratic, and decentralist model of politics and citizenship (in which economic issues were thoroughly integrated), central to the structure and practice of US democracy in the early years of the Republic, to a more passive, remote, inegalitarian, and representative notion of citizenship (which excluded the economy from democratic control), which has come to characterize US politics since the early nineteenth century. His point is that it is not just that the economy has been depoliticized and removed from the realm of meaningful popular control, but that citizenship, as such, has been limited. People have come to develop passive and deferential dispositions toward politics.⁹

Along the same lines, Piven and Cloward argued that the insulation of property and economic policy from popular political control that structured late nineteenth-century politics in the United States “persuaded Americans that the most pressing issues of their daily lives had nothing to do with the democratic rights for which they had fought, and of which they were so proud.”¹⁰ Yet Piven and Cloward are far from convinced that the battle has been lost: welfare state policies have undermined that division, even as they represented attempts to protect the context upholding it. In fact, Piven and Cloward later argued, the welfare state has had a “transforming effect on popular understandings of what politics is about. It brought economic issues to the very center of democratic politics.”¹¹ The separation between economics and politics has already been undermined in practice, and we are beginning to see the ideological implications: in American popular consciousness, they argue, there is an increasing recognition of the necessity for greater economic democracy if political democracy is to be a reality.¹² Clearly, in their view, the promise of overcoming the separation (in both ideology and in practice) is the promise of a more democratic political community.

Finally, an article by Thomas Bender argues in yet another vein for the necessity of integrating economic issues into the agenda of politics. He calls for us to reclaim, in a democratic context, the notion of a “moral economy”—to envision a city whose “moral, political, and economic universes of discourse [are] continuous.”¹³

These analyses recognize the significance of class and race in structuring the dimensions of American political consciousness and action. And each makes a powerful case for integrating economic and political issues, workplace and community concerns, and for the fundamental significance of such integration for the development of a truly democratic politics. Nevertheless, they read as if all workers—and virtually all urban citizens!—were male.

Since it is the most detailed—and the most suggestive—I focus, here, on Katznelson’s analysis. Significantly, he devotes no attention at all to the specific experience of women, either as workers or as city dwellers. Thus, in his discussion of the relationship between suffrage and worker militancy in the nineteenth century, he states,

Modern industrial society in the United States, with its distinctive patterns of class interaction, was forged in the crucible of democracy. Workers as citizens did not feel they needed to battle the state, for they were included in its embrace.¹⁴

Surely, however, the workers he refers to were exclusively male (and white). In a more contemporary vein, he notes (in a passage cited above) that “workers in the major industrial cities think, talk, and act,” differently, “when they are at work and when they are away from work in their communities.”¹⁵ Again, one has the sense that he is talking about male workers. As more than one feminist critic has pointed out,

Men see a relatively clear divide between problems of home and problems of work, so this unwritten rule [that workplace issues are separate from “home” issues] seems to be adequate for them. Bills, household budgets, baby-sitters, and another baby on the way are all “individual problems.” … But for women workers, especially for those with children (and whether single or married) that kind of separation is rarely possible.¹⁶

His analysis, in short, gives no indication either that women workers exist, or that female workers’ attitudes, approaches, or experiences might differ from those of men.

Second, although he argues quite persuasively for the need to focus on the social relations of community (“people create a culture which in all its dimensions composes a set of resources for living in society and for affecting the contours of society,” p. 1), Katznelson is apparently ignorant of the role women play in developing and maintaining such community. In the absence of any suggestion to the contrary, we are left with the presumption that (like the workers) the actors in the community movements, political machines, and neighborhood associations he describes are all male.¹⁷

Finally, Katznelson and the others are remarkably oblivious to the growing feminist literature on urban spatial structure and on the significance of the split between workplace and residence for women’s experiences of the city. I shall argue that the assumptions about gender roles that apparently underlie these analyses mask the interplay between workplace and community that already exists. Furthermore, they limit our understandings of community itself, and thus have important implications for political action. A new look at the relationship between workplace and community that fully integrates women will lead to a fundamental reconceptualization both of the split and of the nature and possibilities of democratic politics.

Feminist Analyses of Urban Spatial Structure

Feminist attention to the increased numbers of female-headed families, and to the feminization of poverty (i.e., the increased proportion of the poverty-level population composed of women and their dependent children) has made it evident that women, and particularly poor women, are overrepresented in our older central cities.¹⁸ Feminist urbanologists have argued that such over-representation is both “cause and consequence” of the fiscal woes of those cities¹⁹ and is directly related to the separation of workplace and residence that characterizes American urban areas. Marxist-feminist critics, in particular, have argued that the separation needs to be understood not just as a consequence of the demands of capitalist production relations but also as a “product of the patriarchal organization of household production.”²⁰

Specifically, the overwhelming predominance of single-family detached dwellings in American housing stock; the assumption that a single, nuclear, family will occupy any unit (even within apartment complexes); and the separation of residential areas from workplaces both reflect the social norms of the heterosexually constructed nuclear family and have significant consequences for women within central cities.²¹ Sex segregation of the labor market relegates women to relatively low-paid, low-status work, thus reinforcing their dependence on men and/or on the state.²² The scarcity of affordable housing in suburbs—increasingly where employment opportunities are to be found—assures that even many low-paying jobs will be largely inaccessible to poor women, especially single heads of households.²³ The greater availability of public transportation in central cities has resulted in a growing concentration of women—again, particularly those who are poor heads of households and dependent on public transport—in those cities.²⁴

In short, the assumption that the “normal” family is one in which the husband/father is the breadwinner who “supports” a wife and children at home (a constellation that described only approximately 13 percent of “family” units in the United States in 1981) has been central to the development of the spatial and socioeconomic differentiation of urban areas. Yet that same assumption—and its manifestation in social and economic polity—effectively and often severely penalizes those whose lives do not conform to the norm.²⁵ Policies and practices deriving from this assumption are related to the feminization of poverty.²⁶ In addition, the operation of race- as well as sex-discrimination in the labor and housing markets assures that the situation of women of color, and, particularly, of those who are heads of households, is even more desperate.²⁷ In 1981, slightly more than one-third of all families headed by a single woman fell below official US poverty levels; but 52.9 percent of families headed by a black women were poor, and the corresponding figure is slightly higher for families headed by Hispanic women.²⁸

In the view of these feminist critics, then, the patterning of urban space—in particular, the physical separation of workplace and home—is a product both of capitalist industrial development and of heterosexual social norms. Beyond that, they make clear that the consequences of spatial segregation fall differently on women than on men. To ignore those consequences is inadequately to understand urban dynamics and to be in danger of developing policies that will contribute to the continued subordination of women. On a theoretical level, for example, it is essential to see residences as workplaces and to recognize the connection between urban spatial structure (including the separation of workplace and residence) and women’s exploitation both at home and at work. It means developing urban policies that will overcome women’s economic dependence by truly opening up to women the opportunity for equal labor force participation. And the provision of such opportunity, in turn, will require formidable support structures—including child care, housing, and urban spatial arrangements that take children into account—allowing women effective access to those employment possibilities. More generally, it will mean exploding the assumption that everyone lives—or ought to live—in a male-headed nuclear family with a second adult present for support, and then developing housing alternatives and child-care programs for people who do not live in such families.²⁹

These critics offer an important corrective to our understanding and analysis of the relationship between urban spatial patterns, intrafamily dynamics, and the treatment of women and men at the workplace. They insist that the spatial patterning of cities derives as much from...