6
Class, Gender, and Culture
A Discussion of Marxism, Feminism, and Postmodernism
Ann Davis
In the development of recent feminist thought, conceptualization of the economic role of women remains elusive. Among early contributions, the exchange of women was seen as a structural element of all societies (Rubin 1975) and the foundation of solidarity among disparate kinship groups. For Hartmann (1981), gender systems and the economy are separate institutions, connected in a “partnership” between “patriarchy” and capitalism. For example, she outlines the ways in which patriarchy modified capitalism, such as with the exclusion of women and children from the wage labor force in the early years of industrialization (19–25). This analysis gave rise to the term “dual systems theory,” for the way in which patriarchy and capitalism remained conceptually distinct systems (Benería and Roldán 1987, 10–11; Pateman 1988, 38, 133–35; Fine 1992, 36–39; Nicholson 1986, 40–41). Lemer (1986) sees gender as the foundation of power relations, and integrally related to class. She writes: “For women, class is mediated through their sexual ties to a man. It is through the man that women have access to or are denied access to the means of production and O resources. It is through their sexual behavior that they gain access to class. ‘Respectable women’ gain access to class through their fathers and husbands, but breaking the sexual rules can at once declass them” (Lemer 1986, 215).
Marxist concepts have been suggestive for some feminist formulations. For example, in an early discussion of the still-hyphenated Marxist-Feminism, Petchesky (1979) stated that “reproduction and kinship are themselves integrally related to the social relations of production and the state,” (377) and “control over the means of reproduction is indeed a class issue” (382). More recent work by feminist theorists, such as MacKinnon (1989) and Pateman (1988), explicitly builds on Marxian concepts, including “consciousness” and “objectification” for MacKinnon and “property in the person” for Pateman. Even a critic of meta-narratives like the postmodern thinker Michel Foucault discusses sexuality in terms of the large aggregates of class, such as the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy (1978, 124). He depicts “sex as a political issue” (145), and an “indispensable element in the development of capitalism” (140–41). “The ‘conventional’ family came to be regarded, sometime around the eighteen-thirties, as an indispensable instrument of political control and economic representation for the subjugation of the urban proletariat …” (Foucault 1978, 122). Yet recent contributions by feminists trained in the Marxian tradition, such as Folbre (1994) and Barrett (1991), question whether Marxist concepts like “value” and “class” are compatible with a feminist and postmodern analysis.
This chapter will argue that rigid dichotomies in Marx’s thought can be overcome with the contributions of feminist method (Di Stefano 1991). For example, the split between the “material” base and the ideological “superstructure” can be integrated with a view of economic actors, including women, as “embodied,” material beings who also conform to (and resist) images and norms of proper behavior that are formulated in historically variable ideology and culture. The idea that there are “separate spheres”—the domestic, which is women’s realm, and the market, which is a male preserve—can be replaced by an institutional perspective that reveals the formation of separate spheres as a historical phenomenon (Nicholson 1986; Polanyi 1944) that is integrally related to the formation of the wage labor force and the concentration of production in capitalist firms. Even as the economy apparently “structures” behavior in market settings, economics is itself an ideology and an institution, historically situated, subject to critical methods and textual critique. Rather than seeing economics as “determining” other spheres, economic institutions are the product of unique historical agents acting to resolve tensions and divisions in their own lives, just like other institutions. In this light, “domestic ideology,” that apparently most noneconomic of subjects of feminist historians, can be seen as an “economic” variable with important implications for the determination of “class,” “work,” and the expansion of “value.”
This chapter will suggest an integration of the insights of Marxist and feminist thought into a coherent method for a comprehensive analysis of gender relations. The argument will proceed first by drawing upon Marx’s formulation of economic forces, highlighting which “imperatives” are heavily structured within the economic institutions of capitalism and which vary historically. Second, the role of domestic ideology in the formation of the working class is discussed, drawing upon recent contributions of women’s historians. Third, the historical variation of domestic ideology by economic periods is illustrated. Fourth, the implications for methodology in the analysis of gender are explored.
Marx’s Methodology
Materialism
The ambiguity of Marx’s method has left him open to charges of economic determinism (Nicholson 1986). At the same time, he provides the example of the critique of political economy that faults “vulgar” economists for lack of sufficient historicity. Bordo (1987, 117) states that Marx is “the single most important philosophical figure in the development of modem historicism, with his emphasis on the historical nature of all human activity and thought. … It was Marx who turned the tables on the Enlightenment, encouraging suspicion of all ideas that claim to represent universal, fundamental, ‘inherent,’ or ‘natural’ features of reality.” Further, Marx is vulnerable for the relative absence of attention to the institutions of the family and gender, although references can be found in his writings (see, for example, Marx 1978, 156–57). On the other hand, one strength of his approach to the theory of wages is its explicit basis in the costs of reproduction of the labor force on both a daily and generational basis, a glaring omission in mainstream economics.
There has been a long-standing critique of Marx’s value theory by feminists as omitting reference to women’s contribution to the household (see summaries of the domestic labor debate in Fine 1992; Seccombe 1993; Folbre 1982). They argue that women’s work in the household is more important than implied by Marx’s label of “unproductive.” Yet production of “value” and profit in a capitalist system is not the only standard of merit, especially when understood from a historical point of view. It is argued here that the role of the household can be highlighted by Marx’s value circuits, with a slight modification. Further, Marx’s focus on analyzing value-creating activities in the capitalist system is an accurate rendition of that system, even if not necessarily characteristic of other past or conceivable economic systems in other periods of history. The feminist critique of Marx can be more appropriately aimed at the capitalist system itself. In fact, Marx’s critique of political economy provides the tools with which to see beyond that system to other possible economic and social arrangements.
Circuits
Marx’s abstract circuits of money and commodities provide a conceptual scheme for understanding the systemic requirements of the reproduction of capital. By contrast, his own analysis of concrete historical institutions also illustrates the historical character of many aspects of that system.
To begin his initial analysis of commodities in Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 1, Marx identifies two characteristics, use value and exchange value. Use value is related to the concrete physical characteristics of a commodity, by which pleasure or particular effects can be obtained—a qualitative, incommensurate aspect. Use value, or the utility from objects of consumption, can be observed in many different economic systems. On the other hand, exchange value expresses a common element among many different physical commodities, as long as they are present in proper proportion. Exchange value is abstract and quantitative, and is unique to capitalism.
Labor power is similarly characterized by two aspects: use value, the unique skill appropriate in a given context, and exchange value, the amount of general abstract human labor power that is expended, usually measured in units of time. The fact that abstract human labor takes on the appearance of the “value” of commodities is unique to capitalism.
Similarly, there are two circuits that represent the circulation of commodities and the expansion of capital. One circuit illustrates the institution of wage labor, by which workers sell themselves as commodities for a wage (Marx 1967, Ch. 3, Section 2, v. 1). This circuit is represented as
where Clp is the value of the worker as the commodity labor power, M is the amount of the money wage, and Cwg is the value of the wage goods purchased with the money wage. For the worker, the circuit is an exchange of equivalent values by which the means of subsistence are obtained.
Marx’s second circuit, which illustrates the expansion of capital, is
where M is an amount of money initially invested by the firm, Clp represents the value of (materials and) labor inputs that are purchased as commodities in the market, and M′ is the expanded amount of money for which the finished products are sold. The expansion of value, whereby M′ is greater than M, is based on the capitalist’s ability to purchase labor power as a commodity for a wage (Marx 1967, Chs. 4 and 5, and pp. 193–94, v. 1). This wage, based on the costs of the worker’s reproduction, is less than the value that is produced by that labor in the workplace, embodied in the commodity, which can then be sold for M′.
A third circuit reflecting the role of the household can complement these first two circuits mentioned earlier as developed by Marx. This third circuit is necessary for the completion of the other two, even if it is not visible in the circulation of commodities (1) or the expansion of value (2). This third circuit is the reproduction of the labor force on a daily (and generational) basis, as follows,
where L is the “capacity for labour” (Marx 1967, v. 1, 171–73) at the beginning of the working day, L′ is the diminished workers’ value after a day’s work, and L is the potential value of the worker restored with rest, recognition, and recreation (as well as procreation, education, and training). This circuit also represents the contradiction of the special commodity labor power, which is a person (L), but also an “object” for sale and “consumed” by the capitalist at the workplace (L′).
This third circuit is invisible since it takes place in two private spheres, the firm and the household, where different forms of “consumption” take place: “The consumption of labour-power is completed, as in the case of every other commodity, outside the limits of the market or of the sphere of circulation” (Marx 1967, 176). The consumption of labor power takes place in the private sphere of the capitalist workplace, along with the “productive” consumption of equipment and materials. The restoration of labor power takes place in the private household, facilitated by the consumption of home-produced use values and wage goods.
The institutional context for the restoration of the commodity labor power, from L′ back to L, is not specified in the abstract circuits. Marx himself mentions variations such as workers’ barracks and agricultural gangs of women in Capital Historically, the restoration of labor power has included households with servants, borders, or apprentices; orphanages; as well as proper middle-class homes with a yard guarded by the “angel in the house.”
The role of women is also not necessarily confined to the private home. For example, Marx describes how the use of machinery enables the employment of less-skilled women and children in the factory, and disturbs the work of women in the household:
Compulsory work for the capitalist usurped the place, not only of children’s play, but also of free labour at home within moderate limits for the support of the family…. We see how capital, for the purposes of its self-expansion, has usurped the labour necessary in the home of the family…. (Marx 1967,394–95)
The authority in the household is typically male, but is also affected by institutional change. When describing factory legislation, Marx mentions the initial political resistance to any incursion into the traditional family, “patria potestas … parental authority …” (489).
The Economics of the Cult of Domesticity
It is clear that the capitalist system requires a commodity—“labor power”— that is owned by the person, “free” for sale in the labor market, whose reproduction takes place in a private sphere separate from the workplace. The particular form of the private household staffed by a female “wife” is a historical development, as is the definition of the working class as male.
Hartmann provides some insight into this development, explaining the exclusion of women from the wage labor force. For example, in Hartmann’s discussion, it is “patriarchy” and capitalism that have a “partnership.”
While the problem of cheap competition [from women and children] could have been solved by organizing the wage earning women and youths, the problem of disrupted family life could not be. Men reserved union protection for men and argued for protective labor laws for women and children…. Men sought to keep high wage jobs for themselves and to raise male wages generally…. [A] “family wage” system gradually came to be the norm for stable working class families at the end of the nineteenth century…. (Hartmann 1981, 21)
“The family wage cemented the partnership between patriarchy and capital,” writes Hartmann (1981, 25). What Hartmann’s discussion of “patriarchy” omits is that the exclusion of women from the labor force and the formulation of the “domestic ideal” was as much the work of women as men, and was integral to the formation of the bourgeoisie as a class, distinct from the aristocracy and the working class. This complex story is now much more clear due to recent contributions from women’s history and feminist theory involving the agency of women on both sides of the debate on the “woman question.”
Why did domestic ideology arise at the same time as capitalism? This question has been raised by recent scholars of this period (see Davidoff 1995, 8–9). It is argued here that such ideological developments like the domestic ideology are an integral part of the class relations, rather than some separate “superstructure” distinct from a “material” base. Just as domestic arrangements are part of the reproduction of the labor force, as in circuit (3) earlier, so also are the cultural forces that serve to discipline behavior in nonproduction spheres. This cultural “discipline,” in a Foucaultian sense, while not part of the capitalist workplace per se, is still part of the social arrangements that permit the system to operate.
Mary Poovey (1988) views domestic ideology and gender constructs as central to legitimating market relations:
One of the functions of the opposition between the private, feminized sphere and the masculine sphere of work outside the home was to mitigate the effects of the alienation of market relations…. The illusion that freedom and autonomy existed for the man within the home therefore depended on the illusion that within the home no one was alienated—and this depended on believing that the woman desired to be only what the man wanted her to be…. Only as long as her domestic labor was rhetorically distinguished from paid labor could the illusion persist that there were separate spheres, that there was an antidote to the alienation of the marketplace, and that men were fundamentally different from women…. (Poovey 1988, 77–78; emphasis in original)
Leonore Davidoff (1995) maintains that the shift of “morality” onto the family, and even onto women’s bodies, occurs as religion is separated from the economy, and as the “amoral” market becomes dominant (pp. 9, 11, 235, 244, 253; see also Valenze 1995, 143; Taylor 1983, 126–27). Separate spheres serves both as an explanation of women’s powerlessness and as an ideology that constructed this powerlessness.
The emergence of a wage labor force in England occurred in a cultural context in which traditional religious norms stressed the inferiority of women and the sinfulness of sex, based on the Bible (Pagels 1988) as well as the literary canon and political economy (Valenze 1995). Women were not able to control their own property and were considered to be the legal property of their husbands (Staves 1990; Shanley 1989). Evangelical preachers recruited middle-class women such as Hanna More and her sister to missionary work among the rural poor (Kowaleski-Wallace 1991). This work included training in proper norms of dress, behavior, and sexuality. In reaction to the French Revolution, there was a new stress on Evangelicalism (Hall 1970, 1992; Taylor 1983) as a means of avoiding similar widespread disruption in England.
In other words, in a patriarchal cultural context, some women in the emerging middle class took the opportunity to develop leadership positions by means of the extension and elaboration of dress, moral, and behavioral codes for women of other classes, even while other middle-class women applied the rhetoric of rights to their own “liberation.” These codes became embedded in administrative bureaucracies for implementation of the Poor Law of 1834 (Poovey 1995), for example, allocating material and behavioral rewards to enforce such norms.
This formation of distinct classes was integrally and contemporaneously involved with gender (Clark 1995; Rose 1992). The definition of “the working class” at one time included women and the entire community, for Owenites and Chartists in the 1820s and 1830s in the United Kingdom. Labor struggles gradually led to the acceptance of norms of domesticity for women and a narrowing of the definition of working class to men, in order to gain broad support for Parliamentary campaigns after workplace-based strikes had failed to adequately restrict the labor supply (Clark 1995). The appeal to the ideal of domesticity gave working-class males a claim to “respectability” and a common rhetorical strategy to gain cross-class allies for Parliamentary struggles for limitation of the working day, protection for women and children, and male suffrage. The course of “class struggle” was affected by the rhetorical strategies of the working class with respect to the “proper role for women,” enabling them to restrict the supply of labor and to protect their wages.
In the context of laissez-faire political economy, which denied the legitimacy of any regulation of the workplace; male suffrage, which was still subject to a property qualification; and a working day still as long as ten hours, the compromise strategy of excluding women from the labor force is more understandable. If not propertied, working-class men could at least aspire to middle-class norms of decency as a claim to suffrage, based on behavior. Appeals for working-class male suffrage were defensible on moral (if not economic) grounds when they could claim obeisance to the same norms of sexual decency (actually a “double standard”; Poovey 1988, 79) as were grounded in the Old Testament. This moral protection of women was presumably impossible as long as women were independently employed in the labor force (although, in actuality, women’s work continued to be necessary to supplement working-class male wages). In the context of continual pregnancies, domestic drudgery, and long working days, some women also supported this compromise. Working-class men and women could aspire to “leisure” and “privacy” in the home, designed along middle-class models (Taylor 1983, 262–64, 272–75). In the context of intense class struggle and a highly oppressive workplace, the formation of the separate sphere of the private family can be seen as a refuge for women and children (Humphries 1977a, 1977b; Seccombe 1993, 34–35, 116–17).
A similar development of norms of domesticity took place in the United States (Kerber 1980; Cott 1972, 1977). In the nineteenth-century United States, such literary women as Sarah Hale and Catherine Beecher gained access to professional positions as writers and editors, ironically by using the norms of domesticity as their discourse (Sklar 1973; Okker 1995). The emerging magazine and book publishing industries gave them an outlet for literary talents, and aspiring middle-class women became a “leisured” audience with time in the home for reading. The sentimental ideal led to what Ann Douglas called the “feminization” of American popular culture.
In the early-twentieth-century United States, women philanthropists and social workers such as Jane Addams and Florence Kelley also gained political power and professional privilege by advocating for the benefit of women in the lower classes, but at the behavioral cost of imposed norms appropriate for the middle class (Koven and Michel 1993; L. Gordon 1994; Sklar 1995).
While women of the middle class were often active in the articulation and dissemination of the domestic ideal, there were also peers who challenged this ideology. For example, Mary Wollstonecraft was an eighteenthcentury English contemporary of Hannah More, arguing that the “rights of man” should be applied equally to women (Valenze 1995; Kowaleski-Wallace 1991). Alice Paul organized the Women’s Party and pushed for equal rights for women in the early-twentieth-century United States while other women’s advocates lobbied for protective legislation and against equal rights (Sklar 1991). In the late twentieth century, Phyllis Schlafly organized for traditional norms, challenging the appeal to a resurgent feminism led by Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinern (S.J. Douglas 1994).
Periodization
To support the argument that gender roles and domestic ideology are historically variable, one must demonstrate changing relationships of class and gender within different historical periods. Some scholars have proposed such periods (Seccombe 1992, 1993; Fine 1992; Fraad, Resnick, and Wolff 1994; L. Gordon 1996) with no clear consensus yet emerging as to methodology and criteria for differentiating one period from another.
For example, Fine differentiates periods primarily by economic criteria (116–17). The first period of early industrialization in which women are present in the wage labor force is characterized by absolute surplus value, the strategy of producing surplus by extending the number of workers (laissez-faire capitalism). The second phase is characterized by relative surplus value, whereby surplus is expanded by increasing productivity (monopoly capitalism). For this strategy to be effective, the labor force is constricted, withdrawing the labor of women and children in particular (134–40). The third stage, state monopoly capitalism, involves the expanding role of the state in the reproduction of the labor force, and increasing women’s labor force participation (although at times Fine locates this phenomenon in the second stage, p. 133). In the third stage women also are more present in the labor force to finance the growing “family consumer economy” (143).
Seccombe (1993) examines such factors as the age of first marriage (the “nuptiality valve”), fertility rates (the “demographic transition”), and shifting wage norms. For example, in early industrialization, a joint family wage is paid for family members who are collectively working as a team, often on a subcontracting basis. Subsequently, the “family wage” is paid to the individual male head of household; this is presumed sufficient to support a “nonworking” wife and children. Similar to Fine, Seccombe associates both the removal of women from “productive” work as well as the decline in the birthrate with the shift of production regimes from absolute to relative surplus value (182).
Foucault (1978) identifies periods by the diffusion of particular “technologies of control” like “schooling, … housing, public hygiene, institutions of relief and insurance, the general medicalization of the population … an entire administrative and technical machinery [which] made it possible to safely import the deployment of sexuality into the exploited class” (126) from its origin within the bourgeoisie (120). At still other points, he refers to the changing nature of the discipline required in the labor force, as more developed capitalism does not require “the same violent and physical constraints” for the exploitation of wage labor as in the nineteenth century (114).
The hypothesis here is that cultural norms for women vary by distinct periods and serve as a useful barometer to changes in the role women play in the economy. Building on the Social Structure of Accumulation (SSA) approach, an institutional Marxist framework (Gordon, Edwards, and Reich 1982), the following discussion emphasizes domestic ideology as occupying a central place among the normalizing institutions that facilitate periods of economic expansion.
Contrary to the recent contribution by O’Hara (1995) to the SSA literature, the approach here examines both concrete forms of housework and social meanings in a time perspective long enough to identify structural similarities and variations in the institution of the household in the capitalist economy. Rather than rely exclusively on what seems “functional for capital” (97–105), this approach also identifies the contribution of unique historical agents in concrete, historically verifiable contexts, and the struggles among conflicting norms and people in a given period. Rather than seeing a dualistic opposition between the market and social institutions (93), drawing on Polanyi’s work, this approach sees the “economic” and the “social” as integrally related institutions. Rather than seeing “private capital” as having “no control over household labor” (105–6), this approach sees social norms and ideologies as central to the integrity of both social and economic institutions. At the end of his discussion, O’Hara mentions alternate forms of the household, but without a concrete historical understanding of the development of those forms, there is less comprehensive understanding of the process of change.
There have been a variety of ideologies in different periods that circumscribe women’s behavior, norms, and identities, from the cult of the true woman of 1830 to 1890 (Crow 1971; Cott 1977; Welter 1966), to motherhood in the early 1900s (Fine 1992; Aries 1962; Katz 1986), to the consumer in the 1950s (Cowan 1983; Ewen 1976), and sexuality in the late twentieth century (Goffman 1976; Baty 1995; S.J. Douglas 1994; Ehrenreich 1983). Enforcement institutions have included the medical establishment (Showalter 1985), women’s magazines and other media (Okker 1995), educational institutions, and legal mandates. Although women participate in and shape these norms (Smith-Rosenberg 1985), their voices are joined by others, often with superior institutional resources, which shape their responses and constrain their feasible strategies. At times, ambitious women seize the leadership in defining and articulating these norms, as a way of gaining power in their own lives, even by contributions that constrain the lives of other women (Sklar 1973).
In fact, there seems to be a coincidence between major shifts in the social construction of gender and substantive economic dislocations. For example, from 1830 to 1890, the formation of the industrial male labor force was reinforced by the “cult of the true woman” in the home, an “angel in the house” and moral guardian. From 1890 to the 1930s, with radical movements in the United States and Europe and the Russian Revolution, the “flappers” and newly educated women leaders in the settlement house movement were “Red-baited” in their efforts at social reform and international peace movements (Lemons 1973; Sklar 1995). The construction of the abnormal category of “lesbian” also served to constrain the easy familiarity of independent, educated women (Smith-Rosenberg 1985; Simmons 1991). Mothers’ pensions were preferred to poorhouses because of the newly discovered need to keep women home to raise their own children in the early twentieth century (Katz 1986; Fine 1992, 135–38).
The post–World War II period, with its macroeconomic concerns with underconsumption and defense conversion, was also characterized by McCarthyism, marriage bars (Goldin 1990), consumerism (Ewen 1996; Cowan 1983), and sex, as in the transformation of Norma Jean Baker from “Rosie the Riveter” to glamorous screen idol Marilyn Monroe (Baty 1995). Certainly, the auto/oil/housing/consumer finance/advertising complex associated with suburbanization has propelled the postwar economy into the present period.
The explicit public visibility of sexuality and the more relaxed norms of sexual behavior in the postwar period seem a distinct reversal of the appar ent “repression” and seclusion of sexuality in the Victorian ideal. With the nude centerfolds of Playboy, first published in 1953, and Sex and the Single Girl by Helen Gurley Brown published in 1962, followed by a reworking of Cosmopolitan magazine under her editorship, premarital sex was openly celebrated and incorporated into advertising campaigns and popular culture (S.J. Douglas 1994; Ehrenreich 1983). While the Victorian norms were focused on disciplining behavior both at home and at the workplace of the newly differentiated classes, the focus of twentieth-century codes may have been more related to norms of consumption. In an economy saturated with material goods and concerned with lack of effective demand after the world wars, the use of sexual imagery was designed to associate infinite bliss with consumer products, as part of a renewed sales effort. In the twentieth century, classes were more differentiated by conspicuous consumption of highly differentiated products than by behavior.
Yet the ubiquitous visual images of (largely female) sexuality present in late-twentieth-century popular and commercial culture may require even more control of the “body” than in the Victorian period, especially since norms of virtue are now more widely diffused through all classes, and “technologies of control” are more fully developed. With the increasing presence of women in the labor force, and public presentation of women as sexual objects, the control of the body at work requires more skill and discipline, as sexual harassment cases show. Contemporary norms of beauty combine thinness and fitness, indicating discipline, with voluptuousness, indicating comfort and complete gratification of desires. Norms for the contemporary female require accomplishment of both at once, leading to role conflicts and new forms of female disease, such as anorexia (Fraad, Resnick, and Wolff 1994; Bordo 1993), and health hazards from breast implants.
The images of the chaste angel in the nineteenth century and the sexy housewife/working girl in the twentieth seem like opposites in many ways, primarily with respect to protected versus overtly displayed sexuality. Yet both images accomplish some similar “functions.” Both provide highly differentiated roles for women, which serve to separate their behavioral norms or areas of activity from those of men. Both norms serve to silence women, the first with respect to the rigid separation of spheres, the latter with respect to the objectification of women’s bodies (MacKinnon 1989). Both maintain the household as normatively “empty” of the production of use values, left for the exclusive preserve of capitalist firms (Boris 1994). Both reinforce the market and the separate importance of the cash nexus, either in terms of the expectation that men will provide for women in the nineteenth-century “family wage,” or in terms of the twentieth-century “commodity ensemble” of appropriate status and conspicuous consumption by which even the single man can purchase sexual access (Ehrenreich 1983).
Women’s political activism has often been shaped by reactions to these ideologies. Early movements for women’s control of property were coincident with the separation of the domestic sphere and drew upon the rhetoric of Enlightenment “rights of man” (Staves 1990; Shanley 1989; Poovey 1988). Women were active in abolition, temperance, moral reform, and Evangelical awakenings, and later for suffrage (Crow 1971; M. Ryan 1981; Sklar and Dublin 1991; Smith-Rosenberg 1985; Walkowitz 1980), drawing upon the special role of women as protectors of morality to address public concerns and conditions. Later, the “maternalism” of women’s social welfare reform movements in the early twentieth century was shaped by women’s identities as “mothers” (Koven and Michel 1993). The bourgeois feminism of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique was in reaction to the consumerism of postwar suburbs. The prolife movement of the later twentieth century can be seen as a reaction to the ideology of (hetero)sexual liberation of the 1960s (Luker 1984). While women have been active in opposing the definitions of themselves imposed from male-oriented perspectives, each of these reaction movements has itself been partial, and divided from the others.
Contemporary Ideological Formulations
As in the 1890s, 1920s, and 1950s, the capitalist economy in the 1990s can also be understood to be in the midst of a major structural transformation. During the most recent period of capitalist development since the mid 1970s, productivity growth in advanced countries has been stagnating, newly industrializing countries have become more competitive, and hypermobile capital has intensified international competition. The advanced capitalist countries have begun to reduce the provisions of their welfare states, seen as too costly and hampering “flexibility” in this new climate, as well as to attack unionization and erode institutional provisions of job security. The growing inequality of wealth and income is wider than it has been since World War II (Holmes 1996). As in the earlier periods, a resurgence of laissez-faire economic ideology is coupled with a reinforcement of norms of the traditional male control of women in the household (Ehrenreich 1983, 155–56). This coupling of free market ideology and “family values” is not accidental, but related to the ideological male/female poles of the class relations of the commodity “labor power.”
As an example of the use of gender and class ideology to legitimate economic policy, consider the Republican “Contract with America,” contin uing themes from the “Reagan revolution” of the 1980s. In the 1994 election campaign, “welfare” called to mind promiscuous inner-city black women who sponged off of tax-paying middle-class white men and their moral, church-going wives. This characterization helped de-legitimate any role of government in the economy and drew attention away from tax cuts for the rich and growing inequality and job insecurity for everyone else (Krugman 1990; Harrison and Bluestone 1988; Wolff 1995). The appeal to “family values” is a thinly veiled critique of middle-class women who work, and a bid to reinstate the man as the sole household head, at the same time that poor women are considered lazy if they do not work. Workingclass men are encouraged to aspire to become rich capitalist entrepreneurs, the true “creators of wealth,” whose taxes and burdens the contract’s authors will happily remove in order to buy an identification with the ultimate symbols of manhood—control of money, other men, and women. “The social power [of money] becomes the private power of private persons … the social wealth of its owner” (Marx 1967, 132–33). As contemporary commentator Barbara Ehrenreich paraphrases the Playboy philosophy, “the issue was money: Men made it; women wanted it” (Ehrenreich 1983,46).
Unlike the female leaders of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in the nineteenth century, the most prominent leaders of the Christian moralists in the 1990s are men who have media and/or political ambitions, including Pat Robertson, and Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition (DeParle 1996). As in the antisuffrage (Bendroth 1993) and anti-ERA (Ehrenreich 1983) backlash, religious conservatives form a powerful block of highly motivated activists, supporting “family values” and opposing abortion, using religious norms to reinforce women’s “proper place.” Twenty-three percent of registered Republicans currently identify with the religious right, and it dominates the party in eighteen states. Religious conservatives have been the base of the coalition that brought Republican victories for Reagan and Bush, and established the party dominance nationwide (DeParle 1996). According to Reed, the Christian Coalition now has 1.7 million members in 2,000 local chapters, and is the “best organized constituency in American politics” (Lemann 1996).
By blaming women’s uncontrolled sexuality, and by hampering any independence from marriage (with reductions in welfare as well as restriction on abortions and roll-backs in affirmative action), voters have been willing to acquiesce to the elimination of “entitlements” in the “welfare reform” bill of 1996. The symbolic nature of the welfare issue is highlighted by the fact that a program comprising only 1 percent of the federal budget continues to be a major issue in presidential campaigns (Cushman 1995). The focus is on reducing illegitimacy by punitive measures, when there is evidence that the rise in illegitimacy is in fact caused by a decline in the marriage rate due to economic insecurity rather than an increase in the birthrate due to more promiscuity (Wilson and Neckerman 1986; Lind 1996; Luker 1996).
The focus on wealthy (white) males as progenitors of the system is as completely inverted as the impression that “money can reproduce” as selfexpanding value. Completely masked in the circuits of money and commodities are the roles of household and wage labor in the expansion of value, and the role of the state in stabilizing and undergirding the capitalist economy. With some variation along a common theme, the current ascendancy of the right wing in other advanced capitalist countries provides an indication of how capitalist-class interests can be advanced by exploiting gender, race, and class divisions and identifications, in this case in the interests of reducing the tax burden on profits, lowering the floor under wages, reinforcing the discipline of the market on (male) labor, reinforcing male control of female sexuality, harnessing sexuality to reproduction of workers and consumers (as in “sex sells” [Goffman 1976]).
The abstract equality that women may have achieved in the workplace is now offset by reassertion of the ideological power of the concrete institutional norms of their subordinate role in the home. The coupling of these two strategies in the contemporary period again suggests that the presence of women in the home, at least ideologically, helps to manage the contradictory effects of the market hegemony. This ideological elaboration of gender norms is a necessary accompaniment to “economic” policies, in order to manage the contradictory roles of men and women in the capitalist system.
As in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the debate about welfare in contemporary United States can be seen as using gender to police and maintain class boundaries. The dual image of women in Christian tradition is divided by class. Middle-class “traditionalists” are dedicated homemakers and mothers, the daughters of the Victorian “angels in the house.” By contrast, welfare mothers are descendants of Eve the temptress, whose body represents sexuality and lack of control and discipline. The legitimacy of social provision is denied, since appropriate needs are contained either in the market or the household. Self-respecting men are employed; and proper, deserving women are supported by them. The needs of legitimate children of the bourgeoisie are met in these private households. The children of single women are illegitimate, and so must be disciplined by the market and by Christian morality, enforced by “welfare reform” and the coercive power of the state. As in the Contagious Disease Acts in England in the mid-nineteenth century (Walkowitz 1980, 3–4, 71, 246, 251), contemporary welfare reform has justified an enormous expansion of state surveillance power into the lives of private (low-income) individuals (Pear 1996), ironically by those adhering to laissez-faire ideology.
The contemporary popularity of such domestic experts as Martha Stewart attests to the continuing appeal and sway of norms of domesticity. Stewart’s “empire” includes a five-year-old magazine with a circulation of 1.5 million; a cable TV show; a dozen books on gardening, cooking, life style, and home decorating; a mail-order business; a nationally syndicated newspaper column; and (formerly) a weekly slot on the Today show, among other achievements (Talbot 1996). Despite flux and challenge, the resilience of the domestic ideology signifies its importance in managing the contradictory roles of the commodity “labor power” (a countervailing tendency noted in Kessler-Harris and Sacks as well (1987, 78).
Implications for Methodology
In conclusion, I would like to draw attention to several implications of this argument for methodology.
The “Economy” as “Structure”
The separate spheres of the economy and the household, by which gender and class appear to be “dual systems,” are historical constructs, although now appearing as “natural” in modem market economies (Nicholson 1988). The extreme polarities that developed in gender roles with the emergence of the wage labor force can be understood by using Marx’s concept of the contradictions in the commodity “labor power,” which both is and is not a “commodity.” The concrete role of women in the household reflects the polar opposite of concrete relations among men in the workplace. As the male worker is normatively an “object” that mechanically obeys rational rules at work, the ideal female in the household embodies humanity, emotion, morality (in the nineteenth century), and sexuality (in the twentieth). This polarity of gender roles was developed in the Victorian era in England, coincident with the ascendance of the capitalist labor market. This duality is integrated over time in the circuit of the working day, which includes both work and recreation at home (circuit (3) on page 96). This unity of disparate roles is maintained with difficulty, and is supported with ideological norms, which change over time in response to conflicts and challenges from people who resist the direction of their lives by the abstract principles of the expansion of capital.
Feminist economists have struggled to characterize women’s labor and its value to the capitalist system by cataloging its specific attributes. Undeniably, essential concrete use values are created and shared in the household, including sexual services, bearing and raising children, housework, shopping, and family and community relationships. They have focused on such issues as whether domestic labor produces value, and whether women are also exploited in the home (Folbre 1982, 1994).
The approach here would shift that focus to a broader understanding of the role of the household and gender. For example, additional dimensions include the historical specificity of the private sphere, varying forms of control, ideological underpinnings, and symbolic meanings, all of which change across historical periods with economic transformations. In addition to the importance of counting the hours of labor worked in the household, also important are the socially constructed, qualitative meanings attached to this work. For example, although working-class women historically performed very demanding physical labor in cooking, cleaning, and child rearing (Seccombe 1993, 46), the housewife is just as “essential” in upper-class homes with servants, or in modem economies in which much of her work has now been commodified. The “objectified,” symbolic value of the CEO’s wife is just as important in his home and in social settings as are the women in sex-segregated jobs, such as the CEO’s secretary in his office. Women themselves serve as class markers (Davidoff 1995, 252–55), their bodies representing, and their activities policing, class boundaries. The control of women by internalized institutional norms in capitalist economies assumes a distinct, particular form, warping and restricting opportunities for personal development (Gilman 1966) just as palpably as the female circumcision practiced in parts of Africa, although less overt and physically debilitating.
Social Structures of Accumulation
This understanding of the role of women in capitalism goes beyond enumerating the concrete types of work actually performed in or related to the household. It examines the images that are widely “known” to describe women’s labor (Barrett 1988) and the methods by which these norms are spread, accepted, internalized, and enforced. This particular form of the control of women and their sexuality is posited as an integral part of the “class relation” of the commodity “labor power.” Consequently, the norms and ideologies by which their behavior is circumscribed are just as fundamental to understanding the economy in a given period as is a detailed analysis of the labor process, that method of control of labor in the workplace that occupies a prominent place in Capital Just as an entire body of work has examined the concrete institutional detail of managing the labor process in the face of alienated working conditions (Edwards 1979; Gordon, Edwards, and Reich 1982; Burawoy 1979; Shaiken 1984), so there is also developing a body of work that analyzes the norms and practices of women in the household and in the labor force in relation to the developments of the capitalist economy (M. Ryan 1981; Rose 1992; Clark 1995; Valenze 1995; Poovey 1988, 1995; Kowaleski-Wallace 1991).
A further implication is that such methodological approaches as the Social Structure of Accumulation (SSA) should also include attention to domestic ideology and the forms of the household. Given the centrality of the household for labor supply, labor discipline, and consumption, arguably this factor is appropriate to be included among the “core institutions” of the SSA (Kotz 1994b, 65–67; O’Hara 1995). In fact, the relative stability of domestic ideology may provide the underlying cohesion that allows other aspects of the SSA to vary and develop historically.
The above discussion suggests that there are dominant images of women in certain periods. For example, in the nineteenth century, the middle-class ideal is the chaste moral angel in the house, helping to legitimate the amoral market economy and the formation of the wage labor force; in the twentieth century, the image of the sexy housewife/supermom helps prop up domesticity in the face of increasing women’s labor force participation. Each image is gradually subject to a dynamic “expansionary logic” (Bowles and Gintis 1986, 29–32), which may then jeopardize the institutional bounds of capitalism. For example, in the early twentieth century, the increasingly educated matemalist moralist activists dared to challenge the legitimation of the First World War, privatized child care, and even monogamy, followed by a Red- and lesbian-baiting backlash. In the late twentieth century, women’s equal rights demands are being extended to equal wages, occupational integration, and the legitimation of gay marriage, amounting to a fundamental challenge to the “sexual contract” (Pateman 1988) and combated in turn by a national coalition of business and the Christian Right. Each challenge is met with attempts to reformulate a more powerful domestic ideology with the associated sanctions, engaging both men and women in a variety of class and institutional settings. Times of transition are characterized by dramatically opposing gender norms and justifications, as at present.
Ideology and Culture as “Transitional Space”
Just as humans are characterized by both mental activity and embodiment, an interaction of psyche and soma, so also culture represents the interaction of material processes of production with imaginative texts from history and myth (Flax 1990). The focus on culture, such as the ideology of domesticity, is not separate from material forces, and provides a way to move be yond such dichotomies as the material and ideal, subject and object, base and superstructure. “The capacity to play and the process of symbolization associated with it eventually expand ‘into creative living and into the whole cultural life of man.’ … Culture arises out of that … [transitional] space [in which] each relatively healthy individual carries on the lifelong process of creatively managing the strain of reconciling inner and outer realities” (Flax 1990, 119–20). A “turn to culture” (Barrett and Phillips 1992) does not necessarily require a renunciation of attention to material and production relations. Abstract economic forces come into play in a systematic fashion once the market economy becomes dominant. The “symbolization and representation—the field of culture” (Barrett and Phillips 1992, 204) of these economic forces are still part of the larger class relations. For this latter enterprise, Marx’s (critique of) value categories and historical methods of analysis are still provocative. A deeper understanding of the integration of class and gender can only enrich the analysis of the historical interconnections between culture and the economy, without necessarily assuming that one determines the other (Fraad, Resnick, and Wolff 1994; Nicholson 1986). The integration of class and gender that is symbolized in culture helps to mediate what are seemingly separate spheres, in dynamic interplay with the “economic.”
Agency
Under the influence of postmodern thought, which eschews “meta-narratives” and economic determinism, there is a certain hesitation among contemporary scholars to discuss the economy as having a distinct structural dimension. Yet it is clear that economic constructs such as “money” and “property” are heavily circumscribed by elaborated codes of meaning and behavior, enforced by law and the authority of the state. The “economy” has clear and distinct “rules of the game,” although always changing in the particulars. Yet it is also clear, from the contribution of feminist theory, that it is important to pay attention to the actions and choices of individual agents.
Marx’s distinction between abstract and concrete can help to mediate this apparent dilemma. The value circuits of money and commodities can help to identify the rules and requirements of the abstract self-expansion of capital. At the same time, the concrete struggles of historic agents, even women on opposing sides of an issue within the ongoing process of class struggle, influence the course of the economy within those relatively wide structural conditions. Women’s historians aid us immeasurably in this task by allowing us to study the character and context of those who articulated and disseminated the domestic ideology, for example, as well as those who organized and lobbied against it.
The analysis of both dimensions, the abstract as well as the concrete, enables us to gain a fuller understanding of the dynamics of the economy, as well as the historical agents who were actively involved in the construction of the norms and institutions that continue to condition our lives as well as to channel abstract economic forces.