Thematizing the Gender Subtext
The foregoing difficulties notwithstanding, Habermas offers an account of the interinstitutional relations among various spheres of public and private life in classical capitalism which has some genuine critical potential. But in order to realize this potential fully, we need to reconstruct the unthematized gender subtext of his material.
Let me return to his conception of the way in which the (official) economic and state systems are situated with respect to the lifeworld. Habermas holds that, with modernization, the (official) economic and state systems are not simply disengaged or detached from the lifeworld; they must also be related to and embedded in it. Concomitant with the beginnings of classical capitalism, then, is the development within the lifeworld of “institutional orders” that situate the systems in a context of everyday meanings and norms. The lifeworld, as we saw, gets differentiated into two spheres that provide appropriate complementary environments for the two systems. The “private sphere”—modern, restricted, nuclear family—is linked to the (official) economic system. The “public sphere”—or space of political participation, debate, and opinion formation—is linked to the state-administrative system. The family is linked to the (official) economy by means of a series of exchanges conducted in the medium of money. It supplies the (official) economy with appropriately socialized labor power in exchange for wages, and it provides appropriate, monetarily measured demand for commodified goods and services. Exchanges between family and (official) economy, then, are channeled through the “roles” of worker
and consumer. Parallel exchange processes link the public sphere and the state system. These, however, are conducted chiefly in the medium of power: loyalty, obedience, and tax revenues are exchanged for “organizational results” and “political decisions.” Exchanges between public sphere and state, then, are channeled through the “role” of citizen and, in late welfare — state capitalism, that of client.24
This account of interinstitutional relations in classical capitalism offers a number of important advantages. First, it treats the modern restricted nuclear family as a historically emergent institution with its own positive, determinate features. And it specifies that this type of family emerges concomitantly with, and in relation to, the emerging capitalist economy, administrative state and (eventually) the political public sphere. Moreover, it charts some of the dynamics of exchange among these institutions and indicates some ways in which they are fitted to the needs of one another so as to accommodate the exchanges among them.
Finally, Habermas’s account offers an important corrective to the standard dualistic approaches to the separation of public and private in capitalist societies. He conceptualizes the problem as a relation among four terms: family, (official) economy, state, and public sphere. His view suggests that in classical capitalism there are actually two distinct but interrelated public private separations. One public-private separation operates at the level of “systems,” namely, the separation of the state or public system from the (official) capitalist economy or private system. There is another public — private separation at the level of the “lifeworld,” namely, the separation of the family or private lifeworld sphere from the space of political opinion formation and participation of public lifeworld sphere. Moreover, each of these public-private separations is coordinated with the other. One axis of exchange runs between private system and private lifeworld sphere, that is, between (official) capitalist economy and modern, restricted, nuclear family. Another axis of exchange runs between public system and public lifeworld sphere, or between state administration and the organs of public opinion and will formation. In both cases, the exchanges can occur because of the institutionalization of specific roles that connect the domains in question. Hence, the roles of worker and consumer link the (official) private economy and the private family, while the roles of citizen and (later) client link the public state and the public opinion institutions.
Thus, Habermas provides an extremely sophisticated account of the relations between public and private institutions in classical capitalist societies. At the same time, however, his account has weaknesses. Many of these stem from his failure to thematize the gender subtext of the relations and arrangements he describes.25 Consider first, the relations between (official) private economy and private family as mediated by the roles of worker and
consumer. These roles, I submit, are gendered roles. And the links they forge between family and (official) economy are effected as much in the medium of gender identity as in the medium of money.
Take the role of the worker.26 In male-dominated, classical capitalist societies, this role is a masculine one and not just in the relatively superficial statistical sense. There is, rather, a very deep sense in which masculine identity in these societies is bound up with the breadwinner role. Masculinity is in large part a matter of leaving home each day for a place of paid work and returning with a wage that provides for one’s dependents. It is this internal relation between being a man and being a provider which explains why in capitalist societies unemployment is often not just economically but also psychologically devastating for men. It also sheds light on the centrality of the struggle for a “family wage” in the history of the workers’ and trade union movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This was a struggle for a wage conceived not as a payment to a genderless individual for the use of labor power, but rather as a payment to a man for the support of his economically dependent wife and children—a conception, of course, that legitimized the practice of paying women less for equal or comparable work.
The masculine subtext of the worker role is confirmed by the vexed and strained character of women’s relation to paid work in male-dominated classical capitalism. As Carole Pateman puts it, it is not that women are absent from the paid workplace; it’s rather that they are present differently27—for example, as feminized and sometimes sexualized “service” workers (secretaries, domestic workers, salespersons, prostitutes, and, more recently, flight attendants); as members of the “helping professions” utilizing mothering skills (nurses, social workers, childcare workers, primary school teachers); as targets of sexual harassment; as low-waged, low-skilled, low-status workers in sex-segregated occupations; as part-time workers; as workers who work a double shift (both unpaid domestic labor and paid labor); as “working wives” and “working mothers,” that is as primarily wives and mothers who happen, secondarily, also to “go out to work”; as “supplemental earners.” These differences in the quality of women’s presence in the paid workplace testify to the conceptual dissonance between femininity and the worker role in classical capitalism. And this in turn confirms the masculine subtext of that role. It confirms that the role of the worker, which links the private (official) economy and the private family in male-dominated, capitalist societies, is a masculine role, and that, pace Habermas, the link it forges is elaborated as much in the medium of masculine gender identity as in the medium of gender-neutral money.
Conversely, the other role linking (official) economy and family in Habermas’s scheme has a feminine subtext. The consumer, after all, is the worker’s companion and helpmate in classical capitalism. The sexual division of domestic labor assigns to women the work—and it is indeed work, though unpaid and usually unrecognized work—of purchasing and preparing goods and services for domestic consumption. One may confirm this even today by visiting any supermarket or department store or by looking at the history of consumer-goods advertising. Such advertising has nearly always interpellated its subject, the consumer, as feminine.28 In fact, it has elaborated an entire phantasmatics of desire premised on the femininity of the subject of consumption. It is only relatively recently, and with some difficulty, that advertisers have devised ways of interpellating a masculine subject of consumption. The trick was to find means of positioning a male consumer which did not feminize, emasculate, or sissify him. In The Hearts of Men, Barbara Ehrenreich—quite shrewdly, I think—credits Playboy magazine with pioneering such means.29 But the difficulty and lateness of the project confirm the gendered character of the consumer role in classical capitalism. Men occupy it with conceptual strain and cognitive dissonance, much as women occupy the role of worker. Thus, the role of consumer linking official economy and family is a feminine role. Pace Habermas, it forges the link in the medium of feminine gender identity as much as in the apparently gender-neutral medium of money.
Moreover, Habermas’s account of the roles linking family and (official) economy contains a significant omission: there is no mention in his schema of any childrearer role, although the material clearly requires one. For who other than the childrearer is performing the unpaid work of overseeing the production of the “appropriately socialized labor power” that the family exchanges for wages? Of course, the childrearer role in classical capitalism (as elsewhere) is patently a feminine role. Its omission here is a mark of androcentrism, and it has some significant consequences. A consideration of the childrearer role in this context might well have pointed to the central relevance of gender to the institutional structure of classical capitalism. And this in turn could have led to the disclosure of the gender subtext of the other roles and of the importance of gender identity as an “exchange medium.”
What, then, of the other set of roles and linkages identified by Habermas? What of the citizen role which he claims connects the public system of the administrative state with the public lifeworld sphere of political opinion and will formation? This role, too, is a gendered role in classical capitalism, indeed, a masculine role30—and not simply in the sense that women did not win the vote in the United States (for example) and Britain until the twentieth century. Rather, the lateness and difficulty of that victory are symptomatic of deeper strains. As Habermas understands it, the citizen is centrally a participant in political debate and public opinion formation. This means that citizenship, in his view, depends crucially on the capacities for consent and speech, the ability to participate on a par with others in dialogue. But these are capacities connected with masculinity in male-dominated, classical capitalism; they are capacities that are in myriad ways denied to women and deemed at odds with femininity. I have already cited studies about the effects of male dominance and female subordination on the dynamics of dialogue. Now consider that even today in most jurisdictions there is no such thing as marital rape. That is, a wife is legally subject to her husband; she is not an individual who can give or withhold consent to his demands for sexual access. Consider also that even outside of marriage the legal test of rape often boils down to whether a “reasonable man” would have assumed that the woman had consented. Consider what that means when both popular and legal opinion widely holds that when a woman says “no” she means “yes.” It means, says Carole Pateman, that “women find their speech… persistently and systematically invalidated in the crucial matter of consent, a matter that is fundamental to democracy. [But] if women’s words about consent are consistently reinterpreted, how can they participate in the debate among citizens?”31
Thus, there is conceptual dissonance between femininity and the dialogical capacities central to Habermas’s conception of citizenship. And another aspect of citizenship not discussed by him that is even more obviously bound up with masculinity. I mean the soldiering aspect of citizenship, the conception of the citizen as the defender of the polity and protector of those—women, children, the elderly—who allegedly cannot protect themselves. As Judith Stiehm has argued, this division between male protectors and female protected introduces further dissonance into women’s relation to citizenship.32 It confirms the gender subtext of the citizen role. The view of women as in need of men’s protection “underlies access not just to the means of destruction, but also [to] the means of production—witness all the ‘protective’ legislation that has surrounded women’s access to the workplace—and [to] the means of reproduction, [—witness] women’s status as wives and sexual partners.”33
The citizen role in male-dominated classical capitalism is a masculine role. It links the state and the public sphere, as Habermas claims. But it also links these to the official economy and the family. And in every case the links are forged in the medium of masculine gender identity rather than, as Habermas has it, in the medium of a gender-neutral power. Or, if the medium of exchange here is power, then the power in question is masculine power. It is power as the expression of masculinity.
Thus, there are some major lacunae in Habermas’s otherwise powerful and sophisticated model of the relations between public and private institutions in classical capitalism. Because his model is blind to the significance and operation of gender, it is bound to miss important features of the arrangements he wants to understand. By omitting any mention of the childrearer role, and by failing to thematize the gender subtext underlying the roles of worker and consumer, Habermas fails to understand precisely how the capitalist workplace is linked to the modern, restricted maleheaded nuclear family. Similarly, by failing to thematize the masculine subtext of the citizen role, he misses the full meaning of the way the state is linked to the public sphere of political speech. Moreover, Habermas misses important cross-connections among the four elements of his two public private schemata. He misses, for example, the way the masculine citizen — soldier-protector role links the state and public sphere not only to one another but also to the family and to the paid workplace—that is, the way the assumptions of man’s capacity to protect and woman’s need of man’s protection run through all of them. He misses, too, the way the masculine citizen-speaker role links the state and public sphere not only to each other but also to the family and official economy—that is, the way the assumptions of man’s capacity to speak and consent and woman’s incapacity therein run through all of them. He misses, also, the way the masculine worker-breadwinner role links the family and official economy not only to one another but also to the state and the political public sphere—that is, the way the assumptions of man’s provider status and of woman’s dependent status run through all of them, so that even the coin in which classical capitalist wages and taxes are paid is not gender-neutral. And he misses, finally, the way the feminine childrearer role links all four institutions to one another by overseeing the construction of the masculine and feminine gendered subjects needed to fill every role in classical capitalism.
Once the gender-blindness of Habermas’s model is overcome, however, all these connections come into view. It then becomes clear that feminine and masculine gender identity run like pink and blue threads through the areas of paid work, state administration, and citizenship as well as through the domain of familial and sexual relations. This is to say that gender identity is lived out in all arenas of life. It is one (if not the) “medium of exchange” among them, a basic element of the social glue that binds them to one another.
Moreover, a gender-sensitive reading of these connections has some important theoretical and conceptual implications. It reveals that male dominance is intrinsic rather than accidental to classical capitalism, for the institutional structure of this social formation is actualized by means of gendered roles. It follows that the forms of male dominance at issue here are not properly understood as lingering forms of premodern status inequality. They are, rather, intrinsically modern in Habermas’s sense, since they are premised on the separation of waged labor and the state from childrearing and the household. It also follows that a critical social theory of capitalist societies needs gender-sensitive categories. The preceding analysis shows that, contrary to the usual androcentric understanding, the relevant concepts of worker, consumer, and wage are not, in fact, strictly economic concepts. Rather, they have an implicit gender subtext and thus are “gender-economic” concepts. Likewise, the relevant concept of citizenship is not strictly a political concept; it has an implicit gender subtext and so, rather, is a “gender-political” concept. Thus, this analysis reveals the inadequacy of those critical theories that treat gender as incidental to politics, and political-economy. It highlights the need for a critical theory with a categorical framework in which gender, politics, and political-economy are internally integrated.34
In addition, a gender-sensitive reading of these arrangements reveals the thoroughly multidirectional character of social motion and causal influence in classical capitalism. It reveals, that is, the inadequacy of the orthodox Marxist assumption that all or most significant causal influence runs from the (official) economy to the family and not vice versa. It shows that gender identity structures paid work, state administration, and political participation. Thus, it vindicates Habermas’s claim that in classical capitalism the (official) economy is not all-powerful but is, rather, in some significant measure inscribed within and subject to the norms and meanings of everyday life. Of course, Habermas assumed that in making this claim he was saying something more or less positive. The norms and meanings he had in mind were not the ones I have been discussing. Still, the point is a valid one. It remains to be seen, though, whether it holds also for late, welfare state capitalism, as I believe, or whether it ceases to hold, as Habermas claims.
Finally, this reconstruction of the gender subtext of Habermas’s model has normative political implications. It suggests that an emancipatory transformation of male-dominated, capitalist societies, early and late, requires a transformation of these gendered roles and of the institutions they mediate. As long as the worker and childrearer roles are such as fundamentally incompatible with one another, it will not be possible to universalize either of them to include both genders. Thus, some form of dedifferentiation of unpaid childrearing and other work is required. Similarly, as long as the citizen role is defined to encompass death-dealing soldiering but not life-fostering childrearing, as long as it is tied to male-dominated modes of dialogue, then it, too, will remain incapable of including women fully. Thus, changes in the very concepts of citizenship, childrearing, and paid work are necessary, as are changes in the relationships among the domestic, official economic, state, and political public spheres.