Feminist Challenges

Social and Political Theory

Carole Pateman, Elizabeth Grosz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138000681
• eBook ISBN: 9781136195594
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In Feminist Challenges, new and established scholars demonstrate the application of feminism in a range of academic disciplines including history, philosophy, politics, and sociology. As Carole Pateman notes in her introduction, 'all the contributors raise some extremely far-reaching questions about the conventional assumptions and methods of contemporary social and political inquiry.'

CAIROLE PATEMAN

1 Introduction

The theoretical subversiveness of feminism

Over the past decade an impressive and original body of feminist criticism of social and political theory has been created. The essays in the present volume illustrate the work of Australian feminist scholars in this field, and they have been specially written for Feminist Challenges.^* The contributors come from various academic disciplines—philosophy, politics, sociology, and history—and both young and established scholars are represented. Not all have tenured positions, and a glance at the biographical sketches reveals a pattern of institutional affiliation typical of women’s relationship to academia. The essays provide an excellent illustration of some of the major issues and approaches in feminist theory in the past few years. The editors issued only the most general guidelines, so that it is striking how common themes and concerns have surfaced, notably the very difficult and complex questions of the theoretical and practical significance of sexual difference, and what it means to be a woman and a feminist engaged in theoretical inquiry.

The most important feature of the book is that all the contributors raise some extremely far-reaching questions about the conventional assumptions and methods of contemporary social and political theory. They show very clearly how feminist theorists are now challenging the most fundamental presuppositions and categories of what Mary O’Brien (1981) has aptly called male-stream theory. Virtually all the social and political theory that is enshrined in the classic works and contemporary textbooks, radical as well as conservative, is male-stream thought. This means that feminist theorists are in an exposed position. Their arguments are as potentially subversive of conventionally radical theory, including marxism, as of other theories, and those radicals who might be expected to be the allies of feminist scholars are as often as not hostile or, at best, indifferent. To ask embarrassing questions about the relation between women and men, and to argue that sexual domination is central to, though unacknowledged in, modern social and political theory, is to touch on some emotions, interests, and privileges very different from those disturbed by arguments about class.

Feminist theory has taken a variety of forms during its long history, and there are many continuities in the arguments of present-day feminists and their predecessors of the past three centuries. The new development in feminism is that contemporary work is distinguished by a radical challenge to the most fundamental aspects of existing social and political theory. One of the first undertakings of the present generation of feminist theorists was to reread and reinterpret the classic texts (largely political theory texts) to establish what the great writers had said about women, and what place was allotted to them in their theories (see especially Moller-Okin, 1979b; Clark and Lange, 1979; Elshtain, 1981; Pitkin, 1984; Lloyd, 1984). Such work is essential because the standard commentaries and textbooks usually either pass over the (often very lengthy) discussions of women and the relation between the sexes in the classic texts as peripheral to the real concerns of the authors, or offer an exposition of patriarchal arguments that assumes their validity is self-evident. Nor do the standard works show any awareness of the way in which classic theories are bound up with a defence of masculinity against the dangers of femininity (Pitkin, 1984). Feminist scholars have succeeded in throwing a great deal of new light onto the theoretical fathers and the manner in which their theories are constructed, and have thus illuminated the basic presuppositions of the conventional understanding of ‘political’, ‘social’ and ‘historical’ inquiry. For many of us at least, the classics can no longer be read as we were taught to read them.

The manner in which the theorists and the works included in the ‘Western Tradition’ of social and political thought are chosen has also been questioned: why do standard discussions ignore J.S. Mill’s ‘The Subjection of Women’? Why is Paine’s reply to Burke’s polemic against the French revolution studied, but not Mary Wollstonecraft’s earlier reply? Why have the early socialists, who were concerned with relations between the sexes and new modes of household organisation, been dismissed as ‘utopian’? why, more generally, are none of the feminist theorists’ writing from the seventeenth century onward discussed, when the most minor male figures are given their due? Classic writers are discussed in this book in the chapters by Genevieve Lloyd, Merle Thornton, Lenore Coltheart, and Janna Thompson, and Beverly Thiele analyses the strategies by which women have been rendered invisible in social and political theory.

Some of the central concepts of social and political theory have come under feminist scrutiny too, and a wide range of traditional problems have been discussed, such as consent, power, equality of opportunity, and justice. The revival of the organised feminist movement has also led to the appearance of new problems on the theoretical agenda, such as sexuality, abortion, motherhood and housework. Some of these new problems, notably abortion, have been much discussed in conventional theoretical circles, and the way in which certain problems, but not others, have been carried into the male-stream, together with the manner in which they have been defined and discussed, raises a larger and difficult question. The question is also highlighted by recent attempts by some scholars to look at the history of political thought from a specifically feminist perspective (see especially O’Brien, 1981; Hartsock, 1983; Eisenstein, 1981), and is suggested by the phrase ‘male-stream’ thought. The question is: what is, and should be, the relationship of feminist theorists to the classics and to conventional theoretical methods?

When contemporary feminists first began to discover the full extent and the outspokenness of the misogyny in many of the texts, and began to appreciate fully that the classic theorists were patriarchalists, almost to a man, one immediate response was to declare that the whole tainted heritage must be rejected and that feminist theorists must make a new start. Similarly, when faced with numerous recent philosophical examples of methodologically impeccable discussions of abortion that conspicuously fail to acknowledge that only women can become pregnant, there is a strong temptation to insist that feminism and philosophy should go their separate ways. However, it is impossible completely to turn our backs on the classics or on contemporary methodology, because all modes of discourse reflect and are implicated in the past to a greater or lesser degree. Moreover, there are valuable insights to be gained and lessons to be learned from male-stream theory. This is not to say that the task is to put women on an equal theoretical footing with men in existing theory. Okin’s pathbreaking study showed that such a goal was illusory. More recent investigations have been uncovering further how the understanding of ‘theory’ is dependent on an opposition to women and all that is symbolised by the feminine and women’s bodies, and why, traditionally, women’s intuition and deficiency in rationality have been presented as the antithesis of the logic, order and reason required of theorists. The question, then, is not how feminists are to create theory ab initio, but how we are to develop the most appropriate forms of criticism and our own, distinctive approaches, in order to dismantle and transform social and political theory.

A variety of responses to the problem of the relationship of feminism to theory are presented below, and various suggestions are made about the ways in which feminists can make (cautious) use of the theories and methods carried along in the male-stream. The opening chapter by Moira Gatens presents a clear, general discussion of three major approaches to the relationship of feminism to orthodox philosophical theory, and Rosi Braidotti looks at the relationship of feminists to ethical theory. Catriona Mackenzie’s analysis of Simone de Beauvoir provides a specific case study of the problems arising when a feminist makes direct use of a male-stream theory, in this instance, existentialism. The chapter by Elizabeth Gross shows how two French feminists, Kristeva and Irigaray working in a very different tradition from the Anglo-American theory familiar to most Australian students of social and political theory, are confronting the problem. ‘History’, too, rests on the same dichotomies and divisons as the ‘social’ and the ‘political’, and so feminist historians, as Judith Allen demonstrates, are faced with many of the same theoretical problems. In the final chapter, Elizabeth Gross tackles the question head-on: what is feminist theory?

More generally, the discussions also show that although feminist scholarship deals with the social position of women, not all theoretical work that discusses women and women’s problems is feminist. This is not to say that feminist theorists all argue in the same way or agree with each other; quite the contrary, as the contributions to this book illustrate. To appreciate the difference between discussions of ‘women’s issues’ and distinctively feminist argument, it is necessary to distinguish two forms of inquiry. On the one hand, there is work which draws on the rich source of new topics for theoretical discussion provided by the women’s movement, but which treats these merely as additional problems to be investigated through existing analytical techniques and theoretical perspectives. On the other hand, there is work which proceeds from a distinctive feminist theoretical standpoint, and so asks specific kinds of questions and uses particular forms of argument.

It is perhaps an indication of the impact that feminism—and work falling into the second category—has already made on social and political theory, that several recent discussions have insisted that feminist theory is nothing more than the inclusion of women and the relation between the sexes into existing theories. Feminist criticism is thus blunted and feminism made safe for academic theory. Two recent examples of such domestication of feminism can be found in Richards (1982) and Charvet (1982). Richards incorporates feminism into individualist liberalism and argues that feminism is not a movement of women or for women, but is about a type of injustice, the injustice suffered by women because of their sex. Thus, there is nothing distinctive about feminism; it is merely one type of response to injustice that, in this case, happens to concern women. This allows Richards to bring feminism within the boundaries of John Rawls’s influential, and patriarchal, theory of justice (see Kearns, 1983; Moller-Okin, 1984). Similarly, Charvet claims that feminism is the application of a general theory of freedom to relations between men and women, and he incorporates feminism into a conservative theory that is little more than a restatement of Hegel’s claim that the subordination of women within the family is rational.

Domesticated feminism seems neither to be theoretically innovative nor to be raising questions that have not already been asked, albeit in different contexts, by conventional social and political theorists. This is inevitable, because domesticated feminism denies that sexual domination is at issue, or that feminism raises a problem, the problem of patriarchy, that is repressed in other theories. From ancient times, theorists have struggled over the question of how the rule of some people over others could be justified, but in all the long controversy over rule by slave-masters, by kings, by lords, by elites, by representatives, by the ruling class, by the vanguard party, sexual domination has remained virtually unquestioned. Men’s domination of women has formed the taken-for-granted natural basis for social and political life, even in the visions of the most revolutionary theorists. If domesticated versions of feminism recognise sexual power, it is taken to pose no special problems or to have no special status, since it is assumed that relations between men and women can be analysed in the same way, using the same categories, as relations between any other superiors and subordinates.

Feminists reject this assumption, and this not only sets them apart from theorists busily domesticating feminism, but also brings them into direct conflict with liberals and socialists. The conflict with liberalism began as soon as feminist arguments appeared in the seventeenth century, when the fundamental assumptions and categories of modern social and political theory were first developed. Strictly, it is anachronistic to refer to these early writings as feminist; the term ‘feminism’ (coined in France) did not come into general use until the end of the nineteenth century (Offen, 1985). However, the arguments of seventeenth- (see Goreau, 1985) and eighteenth-century writers, such as Mary Astell (1668–1731) and the much better known Mary Wollstonecraft, establish a long tradition of argument, still relevant and heard today, that is unequivocably ‘feminist’ (see Goreau, 1985). Moreover, anachronism notwithstanding, if this tradition is not named, it can all too easily disappear from view once again.

Feminist theory has always led a subterranean existence, never acknowledged by academic theorists (or by most of the theoretical leaders of social and political movements). Nor is the neglect mere oversight. If the full history of 300 years of feminist theory is ever written, it will reveal how feminists have persistently criticised a body of radical thought, liberal and socialist, that has not just happened to exclude women—an omission that could be remedied within the theories as they stand—but which is constructed from within a division between the public (the social, the political, history) and the private (the personal, the domestic, the familial), which is also a division between the sexes. The classic theorists, as Genevieve Lloyd’s chapter shows, are explicit enough about women’s lack of the capacities required by the free and equal ‘individuals’ who can take their place in the public realm (see also Brennan and Pateman, 1979; Pateman, 1980b; 1983b). The masculine, public world, the universal world of individualism, rights, contract, reason, freedom, equality, impartial law, and citizenship, is taken to be the proper concern of social and political theory. ‘Theory’ has been constructed within the sexual division between the private and public spheres, and theorists look to the latter sphere. But they cannot acknowledge that the public sphere gains its meaning and significance only in contrast with, and in opposition to, the private world of particularity, natural subjection, inequality, emotion, love, partiality—and women and femininity; if they did so, they would have to question their conception of theoretical inquiry. The patriarchal separation of the two spheres and the sexes is therefore repressed in contemporary theory, and the private sphere is treated as the natural foundation of civil life that requires no critical theoretical scrutiny. In this volume, Anna Yeatman shows how theoretical rejection of the private, womanly world has impoverished sociological theory, and Judith Allen shows how this has truncated the study of history. The ultimate irony is that feminists are now accused of introducing an irrelevant and harmful separation between women and men into theoretical inquiry.

There are few problems about the relationship of feminism and conservatism, which is a theory of inequality and subjection. The difficulties arise with liberalism and socialism. The latter, like feminism, are specifically modern doctrines, sharing common origins in the proclamation of the natural freedom and equality of individuals. Liberalism and socialism are presented as theories of individual freedom and equality—interpreted very differently, of course, by liberals and socialists—that are universal in their scope. It is all too easy to take the claim of universalism at face value, and so suppose that feminism is no more than a generalisation of liberal or socialist assumptions and arguments to women. Appearances are misleading here. Both theories are patriarchal, which means that their apparently universal categories, such as the ‘individual’, the ‘worker’, the ‘social’, or the ‘political’, are sexually particular, constructed on the basis of male attributes, capacities and modes of activity. Despite the long history of leftist criticism of liberalism, the critics rarely questioned its patriarchalism. It is therefore not surprising that the problem of men’s domination of women is absent from modern social and political theory; if it is admitted, fundamental theoretical principles are thrown into question.

One of the most important and complex legacies of the past for feminism is the construction of the ostensibly universal ‘individual’ within the division between private and public. The sexually particular character of the individual is at the heart of the problem of equality and sexual difference, which is a major concern of contributors to this book. The ‘individual’ is masculine, but, because he appears universal and because the categories of liberalism and socialism appear to hold out a universal promise, it seems either (for liberals) that the task of feminism is to make good this promise and incorporate women into existing institutions as equals, or (for socialists) to carry out the class revolution which will bring true universalism into being. The difficulty, in both cases, is that feminism is seen as a matter of fitting women into a unitary, undifferentiated framework that assumes that there is only one—universal—sex. Or, to put this another way, it is easy to suppose, in the face of the long history of assertion that women’s capacities necessitate our exclusion from public life, that the only appropriate response is to insist that sexual difference is irrelevant. However, this line of argument leaves intact the sexually particular characterisation of the public world, the individual and his capacities.

Since the seventeenth century, one of the major feminist arguments has been that women possess the same capacities and abilities as men, and, if only educated properly, can do everything that men can do. The argument is admirable, as far as it goes. What it glosses over is that there is a womanly capacity that men do not possess, and thus it implicitly denies that birth, women’s bodies and the feminine passions inseparable from their bodies and bodily processes have any political relevance. Mary O’Brien (1981) has explored some of the reasons why our theoretical heritage lacks ‘a philosophy of birth’, and other feminist scholars have drawn attention to the manner in which the conventional understanding of the ‘political’ is built upon the rejection of physical birth in favour of the masculine creation of (giving birth to) social and political order (see also Hartsock, 1983; Pitkin, 1984; Pateman, 1984). It is thus hardly surprising that much current feminist theory, including that represented in this book, is concerned with women’s bodies.

When feminism is taken to be about nothing more than equality in the sense of women attaining the same status as individuals, workers or citizens as men, it is difficult to find a convincing defence against the longstanding anti-feminist charge that feminists want to turn women into men. The ‘universal’ standing that is to be won is that of a being with masculine characteristics engaging in masculine activities. Existing patriarchal theory has no place for women as women; at best, women can be incorporated as pale reflections of men. In this collection the problem of equality is addressed directly by Merle Thornton and Janna Thompson and, more indirectly, by several other contributors. In the final chapter, Elizabeth Gross sets out some reasons why feminists should be more concerned with autonomy than equality. The formal, liberal civil and political equalities are important, of course, and now that women have attained a large measure of formal equality with men, and legal reforms to promote equality of opportunity are being enacted, the contradictions in taking individualism and universalism at face value are being revealed; equality of opportunity and ‘gender-neutral’ laws, policies and language all too frequently result in absurdities, or work against women. In the USA, where these trends are most developed, maternity benefits, for example, have been defended as ‘provided to help the existence of the human race … If a man could bear children he would be under the same law’. On the other hand, the exclusion of pregnancy from California disability insurance was declared constitutional in 1974 because it was based on a disability, namely pregnancy, not upon sex; the programme, it was said, ‘divides potential recipients into two groups—pregnant women and non-pregnant persons … The fiscal and actuarial benefits thus accrue to members of both sexes’ (quotations are from Midgley and Hughes, 1983: 160–61). The very difficult question is where, theoretically, do we go from these kinds of absurdities?

There have been many famous critiques of the abstract character of liberal individualism, but none has ever questioned the most fundamental abstraction of all: the abstraction of the ‘individual’ from the body. In order for the individual to appear in liberal theory as a universal figure, who represents anyone and everyone, the individual must be disembodied. That is to say, a natural fact of human existence, that humankind has two bodies, female and male, must be disregarded. The theorists who recognised this fact, whether radical like Rousseau or conservative like Hegel, invariably assumed that women’s bodies had no place in the public world. The public ‘individual’ was masculine, yet, at the same time, this figure was presented as universal, which means that, for universalism to be maintained, the attributes of the individual are implicitly abstracted from the body. If they were not so abstracted it would become clear that ‘the’ individual has the body of one sex. Feminists are thus bringing women’s bodies to the centre of theoretical argument, but current discussions are very different from those of the classic writers. Nor should they be confused with the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction: The theoretical subversiveness of feminism
• Part I THE CHALLENGE TO THEORY
• Part II THE CHALLENGE TO LIBERALISM
• Part III THE CHALLENGE TO ACADEMIA
• Bibliography