I am now in a position to present an alternative to Habermas’s interpretation of the dualistic logic of contemporary feminist movements. I have argued that
the primary targets of the new social movements are the institutions of civil society. These movements create new associations and new publics, try to render existing institutions more egalitarian, enrich and expand public discussion in civil society and influence the existing public spaces of political society, potentially expanding these and supplementing them with additional forms of citizen participation. In the case of feminism, the focus on overturning concrete forms of life based on male dominance and reinterpreting gender identities complements attempts to secure the influence of new, more egalitarian gender identities within the public spaces of civil and political society and to attain political inclusion on these terms.50
Given the dualistic institutional structure of the public and private spheres of modern civil society, there is no reason to view the first orientation as a retreat. To construe the defensive politics of feminism simply as a reaction to colonization, aimed only at stemming the tide of the formally organized systems of action, is quite misleading. So, too, is the pejorative tone of the label “particularist” for the concern with identities, conceptions of gender, new need-interpretations, and the like. These ought not be taken as a sign of a withdrawal into communities organized around naturalistic categories of biology and sex. Quite the contrary. Nor are they simply reactive. Rather, these concerns focus on the normative presuppositions and institutional articulation of civil society. The feminist intervention constitutes a challenge to the particularist sexist norms and practices that dominate in both public and private spheres. It attempts to initiate and influence discourses on norms and identities throughout society. Such projects are universalist insofar as they challenge restrictions and inequalities in the communicative processes (in public and in private) that generate norms, interpret traditions, and construct identities. To be sure, the content of new identities that emerge from such challenges are particular. No identity, collective or individual, can be universal. But some identities involve a greater degree of self-reflection and ego autonomy than others, and it is this condition that distinguishes those particular gender identities that are based on hierarchical sexist norms from those that are not.
Given the obvious permeability of political and economic institutions to societal norms, there is also no reason to foreclose the possibility of the development of egalitarian and democratic institutions capable of influencing and controlling the polity and the economy. Feminist movements contest the norms and structures of male dominance pervading civil society, but they also challenge the ways in which these inform the structuration of the subsystems in general and social policy in particular. The “offensive” dimension of feminist politics does indeed target the state and the economy, pressuring for inclusion on equal terms.51 It is “emancipatory and universalist” as Habermas rightly argues, but universalism and the egalitarian inclusion of
women in the world of work and politics involve a challenge to the male standards behind the allegedly neutral structures of these domains. Once the “typical worker” is no longer construed as the male breadwinner, the structure of labor time, the length of the working day, the nature of benefits, and the worth of jobs must be suitably revised. And once the “responsible citizen” is no longer construed as the male soldier the inclusion of women in the political and state spheres must entail significant changes in these domains as well. In short, the offensive politics of “inclusion,” if it is really to be universalist, entails institutional reform. The dual logic of feminist politics thus involves a communicative, discursive politics of identity and influence that targets civil and political society and an organized, strategically rational politics of inclusion and reform that is aimed at political and economic institutions.
Indeed, almost all major analyses of the feminist movement (in the United States and Europe) have shown the existence and importance of dualistic politics.52 A brief look at the trajectory of the American movement will make this point.
Resource mobilization and political opportunity theorists argue that organization, networks, allies, the presence of a cycle of protest, and a reform atmosphere are central to the emergence and success of movements. The availability of these factors in the late 1960s and early 1970s has been well documented by analysts of the “second wave” of feminism.55 So, too, has the impact on women of structural changes that facilitated their massive entry into the paid work force, the university, and the polity.54 But neither structural change, nor the growth in the membership and political expertise of women’s organizations, nor the existence of powerful allies sufficed to further women’s rights or feminist agendas.55 The resources, organization, and leadership for a women’s movement had existed since the turn of the century; what had been missing was a mass constituency willing to support demands for women’s rights that is, a feminist consciousness.56
Movement analysts also include the emergence of group consciousness, solidarity, and a sense of unjust discrimination among the preconditions to collective political action, although the form that such action takes varies with the structure of the state and the political institutions (unions, parties) in the country.57 In the case of women, attaining group consciousness involved an explicit challenge to traditional norms that identified women primarily in terms of the roles of mother and wife and justified inequalities, exclusion, and discrimination. In short, the traditional understanding of women’s place and identity had to be changed and new identities constructed, before challenges to sex discrimination could appear as a legitimate issue and women could be mobilized around them. Indeed, it quickly became evident to key sectors of the women’s movement that there was a deeper problem underlying the otherwise inexplicable resistance to equal rights: Socially constructed conventional gender identities preserved male privilege and worked against women’s autonomy and women’s self-determination. Thus, before any standard offensive politics of reform and inclusion could be fruitful, a feminist consciousness and ideology had to be developed on the part of movement women and then communicated to others through a different politics of identity, one aimed at the public and private spheres of civil society.58 Hence the focus on precisely those institutional arrangements and processes involved in the construction of gender identity and the slogan that “the personal is political.”
It should come as no surprise, then, that the feminist movement adopted a dualistic strategy targeting both the state (and economy) and civil society. Nor is it surprising that this duality found organizational expression in two distinct, unconnected branches of the movement. The “older” branch (older in terms of median age of activists and also temporally first) included a range of interest groups focusing on political and economic inclusion and attempting to exercise influence throughout the legal and political system to fight discrimination and attain equal rights.59 The “younger” branch, emerging from the New Left and the civil rights movement, formed into loosely connected autonomous “grass-roots” groups targeting the forms of male dominance within the private and public spheres of civil society. These were the groups that articulated the great mobilizing “gender” issues of abortion, contraception, rape, violence against women, and the like. Their focus on identity, self-help, consciousness raising, and proselytizing through the underground press, their own alternative publications, and the universities was aimed at spreading feminist consciousness and achieving institutional changes in social relations based on traditionalist, inegalitarian gender norms in civil society.60 By the end of the 1960s, the two branches of the movement started moving closer together. Political “insiders” took up many of the issues articulated by grass-roots feminists, while the latter began to enter en masse into the local chapters of the national political organizations.61 By the mid-1970s, “women’s movement organizations took up every political avenue to change policy. They approached political parties, Congress, the courts and the executive branch; they used constitutional amendment, legislative lobbying, and political protest.”62 At the same time, the organizations that had originally restricted their activity to standard tactics of political pressure began to take up the methods of protest and persuasion initiated by the more radical groups.63 As a result, despite its organizational diversity, one may speak of the contemporary feminist movement in the singular, composed of various associations and organizations engaged in a wide range of strategies all sharing a feminist consciousness.64
There can be no question that the dualistic strategy of the contemporary women’s movement has had successes in political, cultural, and institutional terms. In 1972 alone, the U. S. Congress passed more legislation to further women’s rights than had the previous ten legislatures combined.65 Women’s movement organizations helped trigger a wave of legislative action on feminist issues unequaled in U. S. history.66 Between 1970 and 1980, women’s access to and influence on political elites increased dramatically, and more women were elected and appointed to public office than ever before in American history.67 In addition, the courts became an important and productive target of the movement in both of its forms and on both of its fronts. The landmark decision in Reed v. Reed in 1971 initiated a line of cases using the equal-protection clause of the constitution to knock down sexually discriminatory statutes in the labor market. The decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973 used the right of privacy to make abortion legal, thereby registering and furthering changes in gender relations in general and in a key institution of civil society, the family, in particular.68 As most analysts stress, however, these political and legal successes had as their prerequisite and precondition success in the cultural sense—in the prior spread of feminist consciousness.69 The point here is not the obvious one that a mass movement can be strategically helpful to new groups seeking power and influence; rather; that without a politics of identity aimed at the norms, social relations, institutional arrangements, and practices constructed in civil society, and without a politics of influence aimed at political society, success in the first respect would be unlikely and limited.70
The spread of feminist consciousness has been documented. The 1980 Virginia Slims Poll found that 64% of women favored efforts to change and strengthen the status of women, in contrast to 40% in 1970.71 Moreover, by 1980 60% of the population believed that society, not nature, taught women to prefer homemaking to work outside the home.72 In addition, 51% preferred a marriage in which husband and wife shared home responsibilities, and 56% favored shared responsibility for child care.73 These statistics indicate cultural changes that go well beyond the acceptance of equal rights and inclusion of women in the political public sphere, although the latter is also accepted, at least in principle, by the majority of the population.74
A politics of influence informed by new conceptions of gender identity thus made it possible to turn access to political elites into the measures necessary to achieve feminist goals. And what was true for the United States has been true of Italy, Germany, England, and France as well.75 To cite one example, Jane Jenson has shown that the insertion of the needs and interests of women onto the policy agenda in France became possible only after the women’s movement took as its fundamental goal the specification of a new collective identity. She argues that “the fundamental contribution of the modern women’s movement was its ability to alter the ‘universe of political discourse’ and thus to press its goals in ways quite different from those of earlier mobilizations of women.”76
According to Jenson, the feminist movement changed the universe of political discourse that had excluded women by creating a new collective identity for them and by getting the political elites to accept this identity. Jenson also shows that reforms from above that extend women’s rights do not, in the absence of a feminist movement, entail a change in the universe of political discourse nor a change in the identity of women. After World War II, women in France acquired the right to vote and more liberal access to contraception, but the traditional universe of political discourse that defined women as wives, as appendages of men, and as mothers was not altered by these reforms.77 It was not until the feminist movement stepped into the cultural space opened up by the New Left in 1968, and began to take up in relation to women, critiques of everyday life and to demand the right to equality and autonomy, and redefined women’s collective identity in feminist terms that the traditional universe of political discourse began to alter and reforms that were feminist in both intent and impact occurred.
It is telling that Jenson focuses on the debate around the legalization of abortion to demonstrate the impact of the women’s movement on the universe of discourse. Indeed, most analysts of feminism agree that what is new and specific to the contemporary women’s movement throughout the West, and what brought women into the public arena en masse, were the great mobilizing themes of abortion, violence against women (rape, wifebattering), sexual coercion, sexual harassment, and stereotyping.78 Feminists demanded that the standards of justice be applied to all spheres of civil society, including the family. After formal citizenship rights had been granted to women, and alongside efforts to gain equal political rights, to end economic discrimination in pay and opportunity, and to fight sexual discrimination in and segmentation of the labor force, every modern feminist movement has mobilized primarily around these formerly “private,” “nonpolitical,” “civil society” issues.79 And every modern feminist movement has explicitly attempted to reshape the universe of discourse so that women’s voices could be heard, women’s concerns perceived, women’s identities reconstructed, and the traditional conceptions of women’s roles, bodies, and identities, as well as the male dominance supported by it, undermined. To be feminist in character, new rights and institutional reforms had to reflect the changes in gender identity and in women’s aspirations.
The abortion issue encompassed all of these concerns. It quickly became apparent that this issue threw down the gauntlet to the traditional universe of discourse because it signified a fundamental change in the definition and status of women.80 The theme of freedom of choice and the demand for “control over our own bodies” expressed more than a desire for equal rights. They symbolized a demand for autonomy regarding self-formative processes, for self-determination, and for bodily integrity; in short, for the right for women to decide for themselves who they want to be including whether and when they choose to become mothers. Considered together with the thema — tization of violence against women, the demands for laws legalizing abortion and criminalizing marital violence and marital rape targeted a sphere of civil society that, under the guise of “privacy,” had previously been removed from such scrutiny. On the one side, privacy as autonomy was being claimed by and for women; on the other, the notion that a social institution could be private in the sense of being immune to the principles of justice was seriously challenged.81
Challenges to the traditional identity and roles assigned to women articulated in the debates around the abortion issue influenced and altered the universe of political discourse: “for the first time, women alone and outside a family frame of reference became the subject of political discourse… the new discourse on abortion reform came to symbolize nothing less than a change in women’s status and their relation to their own bodies and the state.”82 This discourse involved a conception of women as both autonomous and gendered (that is, with their own specific situation), as both different and yet worthy of equal concern and respect.83 This is why the abortion issue cannot be construed in terms of the politics of inclusion along the lines of “bourgeois emancipation movements” that bring the excluded into the polity or economy on equal terms. Rather, it is an issue tied to the “new” dimension of the feminist movement, for it poses a fundamental challenge to traditional gender identities, to traditional conceptions of the family to patriarchal power, and to the standard liberal conception of the public and private spheres of civil society.
I have argued that Habermas’s dualistic social theory has quite a lot to offer to feminist analyses of feminist politics. Thus, instead of focusing on its weaknesses, I have attempted to develop its strengths. According to the spirit if not the letter of his text, I have refined the theoretical framework such that it is able to encompass both the translation of the relevant dimensions of the lifeworld as civil society and the idea of “receptors” for the influence of civil society in the economic and political subsystems. My thesis is that this theoretical approach allows one to make sense of the double political task of the feminist movement: influencing publics, associations, and organizations in political society and the institutionalization of these gains (new identities, autonomous egalitarian associational forms, democratize institutions) within the lifeworld. Given the dearth of critical social theory today (it is no longer fashionable in the world of deconstruction), this, in my view, is no small achievement.