Fortunes of Feminism (15 page)

11
Linda Gordon,
Woman's Body, Woman's Right
, New York: Viking, 1976.

12
Throughout this chapter, I refer to paid workplaces, markets, credit systems, etc., as “
official
-economic system institutions” so as to avoid the androcentric implication that domestic institutions are not also “economic.” For a discussion of this issue, see Chapter 1 of this volume, “What's Critical About Critical Theory?

13
The difficulty in specifying theoretically the conditions under which processes of depoliticization are disrupted stems from the difficulty of relating what are usually considered “economic” and “cultural” “factors.” In my view, rational choice models err in overweighting “economic” at the expense of “cultural” determinants, as in the (not always accurate) prediction that culturally dominant but ultimately disadvantageous need interpretations lose their hold when economic prosperity heralds reduced inequality and promotes “rising expectations.” See Jon Elster, “Sour Grapes,” in
Utilitarianism and Beyond
, ed. Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. An alternative model developed by Jane Jenson emphasizes the cultural-ideological lens through which “economic” effects are filtered. Jenson relates “crises in the mode of regulation” to shifts in cultural “paradigms” that cast into relief previously present but non-emphasized elements of people's social identities. See her “Paradigms and Political Discourse: Labor and Social Policy in the USA and France before 1914,” Working Paper Series, Center for European Studies, Harvard University, Winter 1989.

14
See Sonya Michel, “American Women and the Discourse of the Democratic Family in World War II,” in
Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars,
ed. Margaret Higonnet, Jane Jenson, and Sonya Michel, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987, and “Children's Interests/Mothers' Rights: A History of Public Child Care in the United States” (unpublished typescript).

15
Hannah Arendt,
The Human Condition
, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, especially Chapter 2, 22–78. However, it should be noted that my view of “the social” differs significantly from Arendt's. Whereas she sees the social as a one-dimensional space wholly under the sway of administration and instrumental reason, I see it as multivalent and contested. Thus, my view incorporates some features of the Gramscian conception of “civil society.”

16
In some times and places, the idea of ‘‘the social” has been elaborated explicitly as an alternative to ‘‘the political.” For example, in nineteenth-century England, “the social” was understood as the sphere in which (middle-class) women's supposed distinctive domestic virtues could be diffused for the sake of the larger collective good without suffering the “degradation” of participation in the competitive world of “politics.” Thus, “social” work, figured as “municipal motherhood,” was heralded as an alternative to suffrage. See Denise Riley,
“Am I That Name?” Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History
, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Similarly, the invention of sociology required the conceptualization of an order of “social” interaction distinct from “politics.” See Jacques Donzelot,
The Policing of Families
, New York: Pantheon, 1979.

17
The social state is not a unitary entity but a multiform, differentiated complex of agencies and apparatuses. In the US it comprises the welter of agencies that make up especially the Departments of Labor and of Health and Human Services.

18
For an analysis of the gendered structure of the US social-welfare system, see Nancy Fraser, “Women, Welfare and the Politics of Need Interpretation,”
Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy
2:1, Winter 1987, 103–21; Barbara Nelson, “Women's Poverty and Women's Citizenship: Some Political Consequences of Economic Marginality,”
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
vol. 10, 1984, 209–31; and Diana Pearce, “Women, Work and Welfare: The Feminization of Poverty,” in Karen Wolk Feinstein, ed.,
Working Women and Families
, Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1979.

19
For an analysis of US social-welfare agencies as purveyors and enforcers of need interpretations, see Nancy Fraser, “Women, Welfare and the Politics of Need Interpretation.”

20
This picture is at odds with the one implicit in the writings of Foucault. From my perspective, Foucault focuses too single-mindedly on expert discourses at the expense of oppositional and reprivatization discourses. Thus, he misses contestation among competing discourses and the fact that any given outcome is a result of such contestation. For all his theoretical talk about power without a subject, then, Foucault's historical practice is surprisingly traditional in treating social service experts as the only historical subjects.

21
The point could be reformulated more skeptically as follows: feminists have shaped discourses embodying a claim to speak for “women.” In fact, this question of “speaking for ‘women'” has been a burning issue within the feminist movement. For an interesting take on it, see Riley, “
Am I That Name?
” For a thoughtful discussion of the general problem of the constitution and representation (in both senses) of social groups as sociological classes and as collective agents, see Pierre Bourdieu, “The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups,”
Social Science Information
24, 1985, 195–220.

22
See the chapter on “Fundamentalist Sex: Hitting Below the Bible Belt,” in Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs,
Re-making Love: The Feminization of Sex
, New York: Anchor Books, 1987. For a fascinating account of “postfeminist” women incorporating feminist motifs into born-again Christianity, see Judith Stacey, “Sexism by a Subtler Name? Postindustrial Conditions and Postfeminist Consciousness in the Silicon Valley,”
Socialist Review
no. 96, 1987, 7–28.

23
See Stuart Hall, “Moving Right,”
Socialist Review
no. 55, January–February 1981, 113–37. For an account of New Right reprivatization discourses in the US, see Barbara Ehrenreich, “The New Right Attack on Social Welfare” in Fred Block, Richard A. Cloward, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Frances Fox Piven,
The Mean Season: The Attack on the Welfare State
, New York: Pantheon Books, 1987, 161–95.

24
In
Discipline and Punish
, Foucault provides a useful account of some elements of the knowledge production apparatuses that contribute to administrative redefinitions of politicized needs. However, Foucault overlooks the role of social movements in politicizing needs and the conflicts of interpretation that arise between such movements and the social state. His account suggests, incorrectly, that policy discourses emanate unidirectionally from specialized, governmental, or quasi-governmental institutions; thus it misses the contestatory interplay among hegemonic and non-hegemonic, institutionally bound and institutionally unbound, interpretations.

25
Cf. the discussion of the administrative logic of need definition in Jürgen Habermas,
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns
, Band II,
Zur Kritik der funktionalistischen Vernunft
, Frankfurt am Main: Surhkamp Verlag, 1981, 522–47. And see my critique of Habermas in Chapter 1 of this volume, “What's Critical About Critical Theory?”

26
See Foucault,
Discipline and Punish
for an account of the normalizing dimensions of social science and of institutionalized social services.

27
Jürgen Habermas discusses the therapeutic dimension of welfare-state social services in
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns
, Band II,
Zur Kritik der funktionalistischen Vernunft
, 522–47. But again, see my critique in Chapter 1.

28
In
Discipline and Punish
, Foucault discusses the tendency of social-scientifically informed administrative procedures to posit a deep self. In his
The History of Sexuality
,
Vol. I
:
An Introduction
, trans. Robert Hurley, New York: Vintage, 1990, Foucault discusses the positing of a deep self by therapeutic psychiatric discourses.

29
For the sake of simplicity, I shall restrict the examples treated to cases of contestation between two forces only, where one of the contestants is an agency of the social state. Thus, I shall not consider examples of three-sided contestation, nor examples of two-sided contestation between competing social movements.

30
For an account of the history of battered women's shelters, see Susan Schechter,
Women and Male Violence: The Visions and Struggles of the Battered Women's Movement
, Boston: South End Press, 1982.

31
Linda Gordon,
Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence, Boston 1880–1960
, New York: Viking Press, 1988.

32
Carol B. Stack,
All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community
, New York: Harper & Row, 1974.

33
Prudence Mors Rains,
Becoming an Unwed Mother: A Sociological Account
, Chicago: Aldine Atherton, Inc., 1971. In what follows, all citations are to this edition, and page numbers appear in the text following quotations. I am indebted to Kathryn Pyne Addelson for bringing Rains's work to my attention.

34
Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward,
Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare
, New York: Vintage Books, 1971, 285–340, and
Poor People's Movements
, New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Unfortunately, Piven and Cloward's account is gender-blind and, as a consequence, androcentric. For a feminist critique, see Linda Gordon, “What Does Welfare Regulate?”
Social Research
55:4, Winter 1988, 609–30. For a more gender-sensitive account of the history of the NWRO, see Guida West,
The National Welfare Rights Movement: The Social Protest of Poor Women
, New York: Praeger Publishers, 1981.

35
Frances Fox Piven, “Women and the State: Ideology, Power and the Welfare State,”
Socialist Review
, no. 74, Mar–Apr 1984, 11–19.

36
For the view that objectivity is just the mask of domination
,
see Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory,”
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
7:3, Spring 1982, 515–44. For the view that relativism undermines feminism, see Nancy Hartsock, “Rethinking Modernism: Minority vs. Majority Theories,”
Cultural Critique
7, Fall 1987, 187–206. For a good discussion of the tensions among feminist theorists on this issue (which does not, however, offer a persuasive resolution), see Sandra Harding, “The Instability of the Analytical Categories of Feminist Theory,”
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
11:4, 1986, 645–64. For a discussion of related issues raised by the phenomenon of postmodernism, see Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, “Social Criticism without Philosophy: An Encounter between Feminism and Postmodernism,”
Theory, Culture & Society
5, 1988, 373–94.

37
For a critique of the correspondence model of truth, see Richard Rorty,
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.

38
The “standpoint” approach has been developed by Nancy Hartsock. See her
Money, Sex and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism
, New York: Longman, 1983. For a critique of Hartsock's position, see Harding, “The Instability of the Analytical Categories of Feminist Theory.”

39
In its first-order normative content, this formulation is Habermassian. However, I do not wish to follow Habermas in giving it a transcendental or quasi-transcendental meta-interpretation. Thus, while Habermas purports to ground “communicative ethics” in the conditions of possibility of speech understood universalistically and ahistorically, I consider it a contingently evolved, historically specific possibility. See Jürgen Habermas,
The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume One
,
Reason and the Rationalization of Society
, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1984;
Communication and the Evolution of Society
, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1979; and
Moralbewusstsein und kommunikatives Handeln
, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983.

40
Elizabeth M. Schneider, “The Dialectic of Rights and Politics: Perspectives from the Women's Movement,” in
Women, the State, and Welfare
, ed. Linda Gordon, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.

41
For arguments for and against this view, see the essays in
Women and Moral Theory
, eds. E. F. Kittay and Diana T. Meyers, Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1987.

42
In addition to Schneider, “The Dialectic of Rights and Politics,” see Martha Minow, “Interpreting Rights: An Essay for Robert Cover,”
The Yale Law Journal
96:8, July 1987, 860–915; and Patricia J. Williams, “Alchemical Notes: Reconstructed Ideals from Deconstructed Rights,”
Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review
22:2, Spring 1987, 401–33.

43
I owe this formulation to Martha Minow (personal communication).

3

A Genealogy of “Dependency”:
Tracing a Keyword of the US Welfare State
^*

(coauthored with Linda Gordon)

Dependency
has become a keyword of US politics. Politicians of diverse views regularly criticize what they term
welfare dependency
. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas spoke for many conservatives in 1980 when he vilified his sister: “She gets mad when the mailman is late with her welfare check. That's how dependent she is. What's worse is that now her kids feel entitled to the check, too. They have no motivation for doing better or getting out of that situation.”
¹
Liberals are usually less apt to blame the victim, but they, too, decry welfare dependency. Democratic Senator Daniel P. Moynihan prefigured today's discourse when he began his 1973 book by claiming that

the issue of welfare is the issue of dependency. It is different from poverty. To be poor is an objective condition; to be dependent, a subjective one as well . . . Being poor is often associated with considerable personal qualities; being dependent rarely so. [Dependency] is an incomplete state in life: normal in the child, abnormal in the adult. In a world where completed men and women stand on their own feet, persons who are dependent—as the buried imagery of the word denotes—hang.
²

Today, “policy experts” from both major parties agree “that [welfare] dependency is bad for people, that it undermines their motivation to support themselves, and isolates and stigmatizes welfare recipients in a way that over a long period feeds into and accentuates the underclass mindset and condition.”
³

If we step back from this discourse, however, we can interrogate some of its underlying presuppositions. Why are debates about poverty and inequality in the United States now being framed in terms of welfare dependency? How did the receipt of public assistance become associated with dependency, and why are the connotations of that word in this context so negative? What are the gender and racial subtexts of this discourse, and what tacit assumptions underlie it?

We propose to shed some light on these issues by examining welfare-related meanings of the word
dependency
.
⁴
We will analyze
dependency
as a keyword of the US welfare state and reconstruct its genealogy.
⁵
By charting some major historical shifts in the usage of this term, we will excavate some of the tacit assumptions and connotations that it still carries today but that usually go without saying.

Our approach is inspired in part by the English cultural-materialist critic Raymond Williams.
⁶
Following Williams and others, we assume that the terms used to describe social life are also active forces shaping it.
⁷
A crucial element of politics, then, is the struggle to define social reality and to interpret people's inchoate aspirations and needs.
⁸
Particular words and expressions often become focal in such struggles, functioning as keywords, sites where the meaning of social experience is negotiated and contested.
⁹
Keywords typically carry unspoken assumptions and connotations that can powerfully influence the discourses they permeate—in part by constituting a body of
doxa
, or taken-for-granted commonsense belief that escapes critical scrutiny.
¹⁰

We seek to dispel the doxa surrounding current US discussions of dependency by reconstructing that term's genealogy. Modifying an approach associated with Michel Foucault,
¹¹
we will excavate broad historical shifts in linguistic usage that can rarely be attributed to specific agents. We do
not
present a causal analysis. Rather, by contrasting present meanings of dependency with past meanings, we aim to defamiliarize taken-for-granted beliefs in order to render them susceptible to critique and to illuminate present-day conflicts.

Our approach differs from Foucault's, however, in two crucial respects: we seek to contextualize discursive shifts in relation to broad institutional and social-structural shifts, and we welcome normative political reflection.
¹²
Our article is a collaboration between a philosopher and a historian. We combine historical analysis of linguistic and social-structural changes with conceptual analysis of the discursive construction of social problems, and we leaven the mix with a feminist interest in envisioning emancipatory alternatives.

In what follows, then, we provide a genealogy of
dependency
. We sketch the history of this term and explicate the assumptions and connotations it carries today in US debates about welfare—especially assumptions about human nature, gender roles, the causes of poverty, the nature of citizenship, the sources of entitlement, and what counts as work and as a contribution to society. We contend that unreflective uses of this keyword serve to enshrine certain interpretations of social life as authoritative and to delegitimize or obscure others, generally to the advantage of dominant groups in society and to the disadvantage of subordinate ones. All told, we provide a critique of ideology in the form of a critical political semantics.

Dependency
, we argue, is an ideological term. In current US policy discourse, it usually refers to the condition of poor women with children who maintain their families with neither a male breadwinner nor an adequate wage and who rely for economic support on a stingy and politically unpopular government program called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Participation in this highly stigmatized program may be demoralizing in many cases, even though it may enable women to leave abusive or unsatisfying relationships without having to give up their children. Still, naming the problems of poor, solo-mother families as
dependency
tends to make them appear to be individual problems, as much moral or psychological as economic. The term carries strong emotive and visual associations and a powerful pejorative charge. In current debates, the expression
welfare dependency
evokes the image of “the welfare mother,” often figured as a young, unmarried Black woman (perhaps even a teenager) of uncontrolled sexuality. The power of this image is overdetermined, we contend, since it condenses multiple and often contradictory meanings of dependency. Only by disaggregating those different strands, by unpacking the tacit assumptions and evaluative connotations that underlie them, can we begin to understand, and to dislodge, the force of the stereotype.

1. REGISTERS OF MEANING

In its root meaning, the verb “to depend” refers to a physical relationship in which one thing hangs from another. The more abstract meanings—social, economic, psychological, and political—were originally metaphorical. In current usage, we find four registers in which the meanings of dependency reverberate. The first is an economic register, in which one depends on some other person(s) or institution for subsistence. In a second register, the term denotes a socio-legal status, the lack of a separate legal or public identity, as in the status of married women created by coverture. The third register is political: here dependency means subjection to an external ruling power and may be predicated of a colony or of a subject caste of noncitizen residents. The fourth register we call the moral/psychological; dependency in this sense is an individual character trait, like lack of willpower or excessive emotional neediness.

To be sure, not every use of
dependency
fits neatly into one and only one of these registers. Still, by distinguishing them analytically we present a matrix on which to plot the historical adventures of the term. In what follows, we shall trace the shift from a patriarchal preindustrial usage in which women, however subordinate, shared a condition of dependency with many men, to a modern, industrial, male-supremacist usage that constructed a specifically feminine sense of dependency. That usage is now giving way, we contend, to a postindustrial usage in which growing numbers of relatively prosperous women claim the same kind of independence that men do while a more stigmatized but still feminized sense of dependency attaches to groups considered deviant and superfluous. Not just gender but also racializing practices play a major role in these shifts, as do changes in the organization and meaning of labor.

2. PREINDUSTRIAL “DEPENDENCY”

In preindustrial English usage, the most common meaning of
dependency
was subordination. The economic, socio-legal, and political registers were relatively undifferentiated, reflecting the fusion of various forms of hierarchy in state and society, and the moral/psychological use of the term barely existed. The earliest social definition of the verb
to depend (on)
in the
Oxford English Dictionary
(OED) is “to be connected with in a relation of subordination.” A
dependent
, from at least 1588, was one “who depends on another for support, position, etc.; a retainer, attendant, subordinate, servant.” A
dependency
was either a retinue or body of servants or a foreign territorial possession or colony. This family of terms applied widely in a hierarchical social context in which nearly everyone was subordinate to someone else but did not incur any individual stigma as a result.
¹³

We can appreciate just how common dependency was in preindustrial society by examining its opposite. The term
independence
at first applied primarily to aggregate entities, not to individuals; thus in the seventeenth century a nation or a church congregation could be independent. By the eighteenth century, however, an individual could be said to have an
independency
, meaning an ownership of property, a fortune that made it possible to live without laboring. (This sense of the term, which we would today call economic, survives in our expressions
to be independently wealthy
and
a person of independent means
.) To be dependent, in contrast, was to gain one's livelihood by working for someone else. This of course was the condition of most people, of wage laborers as well as serfs and slaves, of most men as well as most women.
¹⁴

Dependency, therefore, was a normal as opposed to a deviant condition, a social relation as opposed to an individual trait. Thus, it did not carry any moral opprobrium. Neither English nor US dictionaries report any pejorative uses of the term before the early twentieth century. In fact, some leading preindustrial definitions were explicitly positive, implying trusting, relying on, counting on another—the predecessors of today's
dependable
.

Nevertheless,
dependency
did mean status inferiority and legal coverture, being a part of a unit headed by someone else who had legal standing. In a world of status hierarchies dominated by great landowners and their retainers, all members of a household other than its “head” were dependents, as were free or servile peasants on an estate. They were, as Peter Laslett put it, “caught up, so to speak, ‘subsumed' . . . into the personalities of their fathers and masters.”
¹⁵

Dependency also had what we would today call political consequences. While the term did not mean precisely
unfree
, its context was a social order in which subjection, not citizenship, was the norm.
Independence
connoted unusual privilege and superiority, as in freedom from labor. Thus, throughout most of the European development of representative government, independence in the sense of property ownership was a prerequisite for political rights. When dependents began to claim rights and liberty, they perforce became revolutionaries.

Dependency
was not then applied uniquely to characterize the relation of a wife to her husband. Women's dependency, like children's, meant being on a lower rung in a long social ladder; their husbands and fathers were above them but below others. For the agrarian majority, moreover, there was no implication of women's unilateral economic dependency, because their labor, like that of children, was recognized as essential to the family economy; the women were economic dependents only in the sense that the men of their class were as well. In general, women's dependency in preindustrial society was less gender-specific than it later became; it was similar in kind to that of subordinate men, only multiplied. But so too were the lives of children, servants, and the elderly overlaid with multiple layers of dependency.

In practice, of course, these preindustrial arrangements did not always provide satisfactorily for the poor. In the fourteenth century, new, stronger states began to limit the freedom of movement of the destitute and to codify older, informal distinctions between those worthy and unworthy of assistance. When the English Poor Law of 1601 confirmed this latter distinction, it was already shameful to ask for public help. But the culture neither disapproved of dependency nor valorized individual independence. Rather, the aim of the statutes was to return the mobile, uprooted, and excessively “independent” poor to their local parishes or communities, and hence to enforce their traditional dependencies.

Nevertheless, dependency was not universally approved or uncontested. It was subject, rather, to principled challenges from at least the seventeenth century on, when liberal-individualist political arguments became common. The terms
dependence
and
independence
often figured centrally in political debates in this period, as they did, for example, in the Putney Debates of the English Civil War. Sometimes they even became key signifiers of social crisis, as in the seventeenth-century English controversy about “out-of-doors” servants, hired help who did not reside in the homes of their masters and who were not bound by indentures or similar legal understandings. In the discourse of the time, the anomalous “independence” of these men served as a general figure for social disorder, a lightening rod focusing diffuse cultural anxieties—much as the anomalous “dependence” of “welfare mothers” does today.