Fortunes of Feminism (19 page)

What all these oppositional discourses share is a rejection of the dominant emphasis on dependency as an individual trait. They seek to shift the focus back to the social relations of subordination. But they do not have much impact on mainstream talk about welfare in the United States today. On the contrary, with economic dependency now a synonym for poverty, and with moral/psychological dependency now a personality disorder, talk of dependency as a social relation of subordination has become increasingly rare. Power and domination tend to disappear.
⁵⁶

8. CONCLUSION

Dependency
, once a general-purpose term for all social relations of subordination, is now differentiated into several analytically distinct registers. In the economic register, its meaning has shifted from gaining one's livelihood by working for someone else to relying for support on charity or welfare; wage labor now confers independence. In the socio-legal register, the meaning of dependency as subsumption is unchanged, but its scope of reference and connotations have altered: once a socially approved majority condition, it first became a group-based status deemed proper for some classes of persons but not others and then shifted again to designate (except in the case of children) an anomalous, highly stigmatized status of deviant and incompetent individuals. Likewise, in the political register, dependency's meaning as subjection to an external governing power has remained relatively constant, but its evaluative connotations worsened as individual political rights and national sovereignty became normative. Meanwhile, with the emergence of a newer moral/psychological register, properties once ascribed to social relations came to be posited instead as inherent character traits of individuals or groups, and the connotations here, too, have worsened. This last register now claims an increasingly large proportion of the discourse, as if the social relations of dependency were being absorbed into personality. Symptomatically, erstwhile relational understandings have been hypostatized in a veritable portrait gallery of dependent personalities: initially housewives, paupers, natives, and slaves; then poor, solo, Black teenage mothers.

These shifts in the semantics of dependency reflect some major socio-historical developments. One is the progressive differentiation of the official economy—that which is counted in the domestic national product—as a seemingly autonomous system that dominates social life. Before the rise of capitalism, all forms of work were woven into a net of dependencies, which constituted a single, continuous fabric of social hierarchies. The whole set of relations was constrained by moral understandings, as in the preindustrial idea of a moral economy. In the patriarchal families and communities that characterized the preindustrial period, women were subordinated and their labor often controlled by others, but their labor was visible, understood, and valued. With the emergence of religious and secular individualism, on the one hand, and of industrial capitalism, on the other, a sharp, new dichotomy was constructed in which economic dependency and economic independence were unalterably opposed to one another. A crucial corollary of this dependence/independence dichotomy, and of the hegemony of wage labor in general, was the occlusion and devaluation of women's unwaged domestic and parenting labor.

The genealogy of dependency also expresses the modern emphasis on individual personality. This is the deepest meaning of the spectacular rise of the moral/psychological register, which constructs yet another version of the independence/dependence dichotomy. In the moral/psychological version, social relations are hypostatized as properties of individuals or groups. Fear of dependency, both explicit and implicit, posits an ideal, independent personality in contrast to which those considered dependent are deviant. This contrast bears traces of a sexual division of labor that assigns men primary responsibility as providers or breadwinners and women primary responsibility as caretakers and nurturers and then treats the derivative personality patterns as fundamental. It is as if male breadwinners absorbed into their personalities the independence associated with their ideologically interpreted economic role, whereas the persons of female nurturers became saturated with the dependency of those for whom they care. In this way, the opposition between the independent personality and the dependent personality maps onto a whole series of hierarchical oppositions and dichotomies that are central in modern capitalist culture: masculine/feminine, /files/03/18/96/f031896/public/private, work/care, success/love, individual/community, economy/family, and competitive/self-sacrificing.

A genealogy cannot tell us how to respond politically to today's discourse about welfare dependency. It does suggest, however, the limits of any response that presupposes rather than challenges the definition of the problem that is implicit in that expression. An adequate response would need to question our received valuations and definitions of dependence and independence in order to allow new, emancipatory social visions to emerge. Some contemporary welfare-rights activists adopt this strategy, continuing the NWRO tradition. Pat Gowens, for example, elaborates a feminist reinterpretation of dependency:

The vast majority of mothers of
all classes and all educational levels
“depends” on another income. It may come from child support . . . or from a husband who earns $20,000 while she averages $7,000. But “dependence” more accurately defines dads who count on women's unwaged labor to raise children and care for the home. Surely, “dependence” doesn't define the single mom who does it all: child-rearing, homemaking, and bringing in the money (one way or another). When caregiving is valued and paid, when dependence is not a dirty word, and interdependence is the norm—only then will we make a dent in poverty.
⁵⁷

^*
Nancy Fraser is grateful for research support from the Center for Urban Affairs, Northwestern University; the Newberry Library/National Endowment for the Humanities; and the American Council of Learned Societies. She also thanks Linda Gordon for permission to reprint this chapter in the present volume. Linda Gordon thanks the University of Wisconsin Graduate School, Vilas Trust, and the Institute for Research on Poverty. We both thank the Rockefeller Foundation Research and Study Center, Bellagio, Italy. We are also grateful for helpful comments from Lisa Brush, Robert Entman, Joel Handler, Dirk Hartog, Barbara Hobson, Allen Hunter, Eva Kittay, Felicia Kornbluh, Jenny Mansbridge, Linda Nicholson, Erik Wright, Eli Zaretsky, and the reviewers and editors of
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
.

1
Clarence Thomas, quoted by Karen Tumulty,
Los Angeles Times
, July 5, 1991, A4.

2
Daniel P. Moynihan,
The Politics of a Guaranteed Income: The Nixon Administration and the Family Assistance Plan
, New York: Random House, 1973, 17.

3
Richard P. Nathan, quoted by William Julius Wilson, “Social Policy and Minority Groups: What Might Have Been and What Might We See in the Future,” in
Divided Opportunities: Minorities, Poverty, and Social Policy
, eds. Gary D. Sandefur and Marta Tienda, New York: Plenum Press, 1986, 248.

4
Another part of the story, of course, concerns the word “welfare,” but we do not have space to consider it fully here. For a fuller discussion, see Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, “Contract Versus Charity: Why Is There No Social Citizenship in the United States?“
Socialist Review
22:3, 1992, 45–68.

5
Our focus is US political culture and thus North American English usage. Our findings should be of more general interest, however, as some other languages have similar meanings embedded in analogous words. In this essay we have of necessity used British sources for the early stages of our genealogy, which spans the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We assume that these meanings of “dependency” were brought to “the New World” and were formative for the early stages of US political culture.

6
Raymond Williams,
Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society
, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976.

7
This stress on the performative, as opposed to the representational, dimension of language is a hallmark of the pragmatics tradition in the philosophy of language. It has been fruitfully adapted for socio-cultural analysis by several writers in addition to Williams. See, for example, Pierre Bourdieu,
Outline of a Theory of Practice
, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977; Judith Butler,
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
, New York: Routledge, 1990; and Joan Wallach Scott,
Gender and the Politics of History
, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. For a fuller discussion of the advantages of the pragmatics approach, see Chapter 5 of this volume, “Against Symbolicism.”

8
See Chapter 2 of this volume, “Struggle over Needs.”

9
Raymond Williams,
Keywords
.

10
Pierre Bourdieu,
Outline of a Theory of Practice
.

11
Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in
The Foucault Reader
, ed. Paul Rabinow, New York: Pantheon, 1984, 76–100.

12
The critical literature on Foucault is enormous. For feminist assessments, see Linda Alcoff, “Feminist Politics and Foucault: The Limits to a Collaboration,“ in
Crisis in Continental Philosophy
, ed. Arlene Dallery and Charles Scott, Albany: SUNY Press, 1990; Judith Butler, “Variations on Sex and Gender: Beauvoir, Wittig and Foucault,“ in
Feminism as Critique
, eds. Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, 128–42; Nancy Hartsock, “Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women?” in
Feminism/Postmodernism
, ed. Linda J. Nicholson, New York: Routledge, 1990, 157–75; Chris Weedon,
Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory
, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987; and the essays in
Foucault and Feminism: Reflections on Resistance
, eds. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988. For balanced discussions of Foucault's strengths and weaknesses, see Nancy Fraser,
Unruly Practices
; Axel Honneth,
The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory
, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992; and Thomas McCarthy,
Ideals and Illusions: On Reconstruction and Deconstruction in Contemporary Critical Theory
, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.

13
Joan R. Gundersen, “Independence, Citizenship, and the American Revolution,“
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
13:1, 1987, 59–77.

14
In preindustrial society, moreover, the reverse dependence of the master upon his men was widely recognized. The historian Christopher Hill evoked that understanding when he characterized the “essence” of feudal society as “the bond of loyalty and dependence between lord and man.” Here “dependence” means interdependence. Hill,
The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution,
New York: Viking, 1972, 32.

15
Peter Laslett,
The World We Have Lost: England Before the Industrial Age
, New York: Charles Scribner, 1971, 21.

16
Christopher Hill,
The Century of Revolution 1603–1714
, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1961.

17
One might say that this redefinition foregrounded wage labor
as
a new form of property, namely, property in one's own labor power. This conception was premised on what C. B. Macpherson called “possessive individualism,” the assumption of an individual's property in his (sic) own person. (See Macpherson,
The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke
, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962.) Leading to the construction of wages as an entitlement, this approach was overwhelmingly male. Allen Hunter (personal communication) describes it as a loss of systemic critique, a sense of independence gained by narrowing the focus to the individual worker and leaving behind aspirations for collective independence from capital.

18
In the sixteenth century the term “pauper” had meant simply a poor person and, in law, one who was allowed to sue or defend in a court without paying costs (OED). Two centuries later, it took on a more restricted definition, denoting a new class of persons who subsisted on poor relief instead of wages and who were held to be deviant and blameworthy.

19
Linda Gordon, “Social Insurance and Public Assistance: The Influence of Gender in Welfare Thought in the United States, 1890–1935,”
American Historical Review
97:1, 1992, 19–54.

20
Actually, there are many variants within the family of images that personify political subjection in the industrial era. Among these are related but not identical stereotypes of the Russian serf, the Caribbean slave, the slave in the United States, and the American Indian. Moreover, there are distinct male and female stereotypes within each of those categories. We simplify here in order to highlight the features that are common to all these images, notably the idea of natural subjection rooted in race. We focus especially on stereotypes that portray African Americans as personifications of dependency because of their historic importance and contemporary resonance in the US language of social welfare.

21
The evolution of the term “native” neatly encapsulates this process. Its original meaning in English, dating from about 1450, was tied to dependency: “one born in bondage; a born thrall,” but without racial meaning. Two centuries later it carried the additional meaning of colored or Black (OED).

22
Hilary Land, “The Family Wage,”
Feminist Review
6, 1980, 57. Jeanne Boydston,
Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic
, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.