Fortunes of Feminism (20 page)

23
Gwendolyn S. Hughes,
Mothers in Industry
, New York: New Republic, 1925; Sophonisba P. Breckinridge, “The Home Responsibilities of Women Workers and the ‘Equal Wage',”
Journal of Political Economy
31, 1928, 521–43;
Women Workers Through the Depression: A Study of White Collar Employment Made by the American Woman's Association
, ed. Lorine Pruette, New York: Macmillan, 1934; and Linda Gordon, “Social Insurance and Public Assistance.”

24
Joan R. Gundersen, “Independence, Citizenship, and the American Revolution.”

25
Nancy Folbre, “The Unproductive Housewife: Her Evolution in Nineteenth-Century Economic Thought,“
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
16:3, 1991, 463–84.

26
For example, Amos Griswold Warner uses “dependent” only for children in
American Charities and Social Work
, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1894 through 1930. The same is true of Edith Abbott and Sophonisba P. Breckinridge,
The Administration of the Aid-to-Mothers Law in Illinois
, Washington: U.S. Children's Bureau, Publication no. 82, 1921, 7; and the
Proceedings
of the National Conference of Charities and Correction (1890s through 1920s). This usage produced some curious effects because of its intersection with the dependency produced by the normative family. For example, charity experts debated the propriety of “keeping dependent children in their own homes.“ The children in question were considered dependent because their parent(s) could not support them; yet other children were deemed dependent precisely because their parents did support them.

27
Studies of welfare done in the 1940s still used the word “dependents” only in the sense of those supported by family heads; see, for example, Josephine Chapin Brown,
Public Relief 1929–1939
, New York: Henry Holt, 1940; Donald S. Howard,
The WPA and Federal Relief Policy
, New York: Russell Sage, 1943; and Frank J. Bruno,
Trends in Social Work
, New York: Columbia University Press, 1948.

28
Lilian Brandt,
An Impressionistic View of the Winter of 1930–31 in New York City
, New York: Welfare Council of New York City, 1932, 23–4. See also Gertrude Vaile, untitled, in
College Women and the Social Sciences
, ed. Herbert Elmer Mills, New York: John Day, 1934, 26; and Mary L. Gibbons, “Family Life Today and Tomorrow,“
Proceedings
, National Conference of Catholic Charities, 19, 1933, 133–68.

29
E. Wight Bakke,
Citizens Without Work: A Study of the Effects of Unemployment Upon Workers' Social Relations and Practices
, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940, and
The Unemployed Worker: A Study of the Task of Making a Living Without a Job
, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940.

30
Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, “Contract Versus Charity: Why Is There No Social Citizenship in the United States?''

31
Nancy Fraser, “Women, Welfare, and the Politics of Need Interpretation,” in Fraser,
Unruly Practices
; Linda Gordon, “The New Feminist Scholarship on the Welfare State,” in
Women, the State, and Welfare
, ed. Linda Gordon, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990, 9–35; and Barbara J. Nelson, “The Origins of the Two-Channel Welfare State: Workmen's Compensation and Mothers' Aid,” in
Women, the State, and Welfare
, ed. Linda Gordon, 123–51. Starting in the 1960s, increasing numbers of Black women were able to claim AFDC, but prior to that they were largely excluded. At first, the language of the New Deal followed the precedent of earlier programs in applying the term “dependent” to children. De facto, however, the recipients of ADC were virtually exclusively solo mothers. Between the 1940s and 1960s the term's reference gradually shifted from the children to their mothers.

32
Jill Quadagno, “From Old-Age Assistance to Supplemental Social Security Income: The Political Economy of Relief in the South, 1935–1972,” in
The Politics of Social Policy in the United States
, ed. Margaret Weir, Ann Shola Orloff, and Theda Skocpol, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988, 235–63.

33
Jerry R. Cates,
Insuring Inequality: Administrative Leadership in Social Security, 1935–54
, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983.

34
Jacqueline Pope,
Biting the Hand that Feeds Them: Organizing Women on Welfare at the Grass Roots Level
, New York: Praeger, 1989, 73, 144; Guida West,
The National Welfare Rights Movement: The Social Protest of Poor Women
, New York: Praeger, 1981; and Milwaukee County Welfare Rights Organization,
Welfare Mothers Speak Out
, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1972.

35
Annie S. Barnes,
Single Parents in Black America: A Study in Culture and Legitimacy
, Bristol, Conn: Wyndham Hall Press, 1987, vi.

36
Linda Gordon, “Social Insurance and Public Assistance.”

37
Men on “general relief” are sometimes also included in that designation; their treatment by the welfare system is usually as bad or worse.

38
Joan Smith, “The Paradox of Women's Poverty: Wage-Earning Women and Economic Transformation,”
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
10:2, 1984, 291–310.

39
Judith Stacey, “Sexism By a Subtler Name? Postindustrial Conditions and Postfeminist Consciousness in the Silicon Valley,”
Socialist Review
96, 1987, 7–28; and Kath Weston,
Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship
, New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

40
M. Haynes, “Pharmacist Involvement in a Chemical-Dependency Rehabilitation Program,“
American Journal of Hospital Pharmacy
45:10, 1988, 2099–2101.

41
Leontine Young,
Out of Wedlock
, New York: McGraw Hill, 1954, 87.

42
Betty Friedan,
The Feminine Mystique
, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1963.

43
Colette Dowling,
The Cinderella Complex: Women's Hidden Fear of Independence
, New York: Summit Books, 1981.

44
Virginia Sapiro, “The Gender Basis of American Social Policy,” in
Women, the State, and Welfare
, ed. Linda Gordon, 36–54.

45
American Psychiatric Association,
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
, 3rd edition revised, Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1987, 353–4.

46
Ibid.

47
Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey,
The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy
, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967.

48
Dan Quayle, “Excerpts From Vice President's Speech on Cities and Poverty,“
New York Times
, May 20, 1992, A11.

49
George Gilder,
Wealth and Poverty
, New York: Basic Books, 1981; and Lawrence Mead,
Beyond Entitlement: The Social Obligations of Citizenship
, New York: Free Press, 1986.

50
William Julius Wilson,
The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy
, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987; and Christopher Jencks,
Rethinking Social Policy: Race, Poverty, and the Underclass
, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.

51
Charles Murray,
Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980
, New York: Basic Books, 1984.

52
Edward V. Sparer, “The Right to Welfare,” in
The Rights of Americans: What They Are—What They Should Be
, ed. Norman Dorsen, New York: Pantheon, 1971, 71.

53
Noel and Rita Timms,
Dictionary of Social Welfare
, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982, 55–6.

54
For a fuller discussion of the social control critique, see Linda Gordon, “The New Feminist Scholarship on the Welfare State.” On needs claims see Chapter 2 of this volume, “Struggle over Needs,” and Barbara J. Nelson, “The Origins of the Two-Channel Welfare State.”

55
M. Gates, “Institutionalizing Dependency: The Impact of Two Decades of Planned Agricultural Modernization,”
Journal of Developing Areas
22:3, 1988, 293–320.

56
For an account of the further individualization of dependency in subsequent neoliberal discourse, see Nancy Fraser, “Clintonism, Welfare and the Antisocial Wage: The Emergence of a Neoliberal Political Imaginary,”
Rethinking Marxism
6:1, 1993, 1–15.

57
Pat Gowens, “Welfare, Learnfare—Unfair! A Letter to My Governor,“
Ms. Magazine
, September–October 1991, 90–91.

4

After the Family Wage:
A Postindustrial Thought Experiment
^*

The crisis of the welfare state has many roots—global economic trends, massive movements of refugees and immigrants, popular hostility to taxes, the weakening of trade unions and labor parties, the rise of national and “racial”-ethnic antagonisms, the decline of solidaristic ideologies, and the collapse of state socialism. One absolutely crucial factor, however, is the crumbling of the old gender order. Existing welfare states are premised on assumptions about gender that are increasingly out of phase with many people's lives and self-understandings. As a result, they do not provide adequate social protections, especially for women and children.

The gender order that is now disappearing descends from the industrial era of capitalism and reflects the social world of its origin. It was centered on the ideal of
the family wage
. In this world people were supposed to be organized into heterosexual, male-headed nuclear families, which lived principally from the man's labor market earnings. The male head of the household would be paid a family wage, sufficient to support children and a wife-and-mother, who performed domestic labor without pay. Of course, countless lives never fit this pattern. Still, it provided the normative picture of a proper family.

The family-wage ideal was inscribed in the structure of most industrial-era welfare states.
¹
That structure had three tiers, with social-insurance programs occupying the first rank. Designed to protect people from the vagaries of the labor market (and to protect the economy from shortages of demand), these programs replaced the breadwinner's wage in case of sickness, disability, unemployment, or old age. Many countries also featured a second tier of programs, providing direct support for full-time female homemaking and mothering. A third tier served the “residuum.” Largely a holdover from traditional poor relief, public assistance programs provided paltry, stigmatized, means-tested aid to needy people who had no claim to honorable support because they did not fit the family-wage scenario.
²

Today, however, the family-wage assumption is no longer tenable—either empirically or normatively. We are currently experiencing the death throes of the old, industrial gender order with the transition to a new,
postindustrial
phase of capitalism. The crisis of the welfare state is bound up with these epochal changes. It is rooted in part in the collapse of the world of the family wage, and of its central assumptions about labor markets and families.

In the labor markets of postindustrial capitalism, few jobs pay wages sufficient to support a family single-handedly; many, in fact, are temporary or part-time and do not carry standard benefits.
³
Women's employment is increasingly common, moreover—although far less well-paid than men's.
⁴
Postindustrial families, meanwhile, are less conventional and more diverse.
⁵
Heterosexuals are marrying less and later, and divorcing more and sooner, while gays and lesbians are pioneering new kinds of domestic arrangements.
⁶
Gender norms and family forms are highly contested. Thanks in part to the feminist and gay-and-lesbian liberation movements, many people no longer prefer the male breadwinner/female homemaker model. One result of these trends is a steep increase in solo-mother families: growing numbers of women, both divorced and never married, are struggling to support themselves and their families without access to a male breadwinner's wage. Their families have high rates of poverty.

In short, a new world of economic production and social reproduction is emerging—a world of less stable employment and more diverse families. Though no one can be certain about its ultimate shape, this much seems clear: the emerging world, no less than the world of the family wage, will require a welfare state that effectively insures people against uncertainties. It is clear, too, that the old forms of welfare state, built on assumptions of male-headed families and relatively stable jobs, are no longer suited to providing this protection. We need something new, a postindustrial welfare state suited to radically new conditions of employment and reproduction.

What, then, should a postindustrial welfare state look like? Conservatives have lately had a lot to say about “restructuring the welfare state,” but their vision is counterhistorical and contradictory; they seek to reinstate the male breadwinner/female homemaker family for the middle class, while demanding that poor single mothers “work.” Neoliberal proposals have recently emerged in the United States but they, too, are inadequate in the current context. Punitive, androcentric, and obsessed with employment despite the absence of good jobs, they are unable to provide security in a postindustrial world.
⁷
Both these approaches ignore one crucial thing: A postindustrial welfare state, like its industrial predecessor, must support a gender order. But the only kind of gender order that can be acceptable today is one premised on
gender justice
.

Feminists, therefore, are in a good position to generate an emancipatory vision for the coming period. They, more than anyone, appreciate the importance of gender relations to the current crisis of the industrial welfare state and the centrality of gender justice to any satisfactory resolution. Feminists also appreciate the importance of carework for human well-being and the effects of its social organization on women's standing. They are attuned, finally, to potential conflicts of interest within families and to the inadequacy of androcentric definitions of work.

To date, however, feminists have tended to shy away from systematic reconstructive thinking about the welfare state. Nor have we yet developed a satisfactory account of gender justice that can inform an emancipatory vision. We need now to undertake such thinking. We should ask: What new, postindustrial gender order should replace the family wage? And what sort of welfare state can best support such a new gender order? What account of gender justice best captures our highest aspirations? And what vision of social welfare comes closest to embodying it?

Two different sorts of answers are presently conceivable, I think, both of which qualify as feminist. The first I call the
Universal Breadwinner
model. Implicit in the current political practice of most US feminists and liberals, this vision aims to foster gender justice by promoting women's employment; its centerpiece is state provision of employment-enabling services such as day care. The second possible answer I call the
Caregiver Parity
model. Implicit in the current political practice of most Western European feminists and social democrats, this approach aims to promote gender justice chiefly by supporting informal carework; its centerpiece is state provision of caregiver allowances.

Which of these two approaches should command our loyalties in the coming period? Which expresses the most attractive vision of a postindustrial gender order? Which best embodies the ideal of gender justice? In this chapter, I outline a framework for thinking systematically about these questions. I analyze highly idealized versions of Universal Breadwinner and Caregiver Parity in the manner of a thought experiment. I postulate, contrary to fact, a world in which both these models are feasible, in that their economic and political preconditions are in place. Assuming very favorable conditions, then, I assess the respective strengths and weaknesses of each.

The result is not a standard policy analysis, for neither Universal Breadwinner nor Caregiver Parity will in fact be realized in the near future, and my discussion is not directed primarily at policy-making elites. My intent, rather, is theoretical and political in a broader sense. I aim, first, to clarify some dilemmas surrounding “equality” and “difference” by reconsidering what is meant by gender justice. In so doing, I also aim to spur increased reflection on feminist strategies and goals by spelling out some assumptions that are implicit in current practice and subjecting them to critical scrutiny.

My discussion proceeds in four parts. In a first section, I propose an analysis of gender justice that generates a set of evaluative standards. Then, in the second and third sections, I apply those standards to Universal Breadwinner and Caregiver Parity, respectively. I conclude, in the fourth section, that neither of those approaches, even in an idealized form, can deliver full gender justice. To have a shot at
that
, I contend, we must develop a new vision of a postindustrial welfare state, which effectively dismantles the gender division of labor.

1. GENDER JUSTICE: A COMPLEX CONCEPTION

In order to evaluate alternative visions of a postindustrial welfare state, we need some normative criteria. Gender justice, I have said, is one indispensable standard. But in what precisely does it consist?

Feminists have so far associated gender justice with either equality or difference, where “equality” means treating women exactly like men, and where “difference” means treating women differently insofar as they differ from men. Theorists have debated the relative merits of these two approaches as if they represented two antithetical poles of an absolute dichotomy. These arguments have generally ended in stalemate. Proponents of “difference” have successfully shown that equality strategies typically presuppose “the male as norm,” thereby disadvantaging women and imposing a distorted standard on everyone. Egalitarians have argued just as cogently, however, that difference approaches typically rely on essentialist notions of femininity, thereby reinforcing existing stereotypes and confining women within existing gender divisions.
⁸
Neither equality nor difference, then, is a workable conception of gender justice.

Feminists have responded to this stalemate in several different ways. Some have tried to resolve the dilemma by reconceiving one or another of its horns; they have reinterpreted difference or equality in what they consider a more defensible form. Others have concluded “a plague on both your houses” and sought some third, wholly other, normative principle. Still others have tried to embrace the dilemma as an enabling paradox, a resource to be treasured, not an impasse to be gotten round. Many feminists, finally, have retreated altogether from normative theorizing—into cultural positivism, piecemeal reformism, or postmodern antinomianism.

None of these responses is satisfactory. Normative theorizing remains an indispensable intellectual enterprise for feminism, indeed for all emancipatory social movements. We need a vision or picture of where we are trying to go and a set of standards for evaluating various proposals as to how we might get there. The equality/difference impasse is real, moreover, and cannot be simply sidestepped or embraced. Nor is there any “wholly other” third term that can magically catapult us beyond it. What, then, should feminist theorists do?

I propose we reconceptualize gender justice as a complex idea, not a simple one. This means breaking with the assumption that gender justice can be identified with any single value or norm, whether it be equality, difference, or something else. Instead, we should treat it as a complex notion comprising a plurality of distinct normative principles. The plurality will include some notions associated with the equality side of the debate, as well as some associated with the difference side. It will also encompass still other normative ideas that neither side has accorded due weight. Wherever they come from, however, the important point is this: each of several distinct norms must be respected simultaneously in order that gender justice be achieved. Failure to satisfy any one of them means failure to realize the full meaning of gender justice.

In what follows, I assume that gender justice is complex in this way. And I propose an account of it that is designed for the specific purpose of evaluating alternative pictures of a postindustrial welfare state. For issues other than welfare, a somewhat different package of norms might be called for. Nevertheless, I believe that the general idea of treating gender justice as a complex conception is widely applicable. The analysis here may serve as a paradigm case demonstrating the usefulness of this approach.

For this particular thought experiment, in any case, I unpack the idea of gender justice as a compound of seven distinct normative principles. Let me enumerate them one by one:

1.
The Anti-Poverty Principle
: The first and most obvious objective of social-welfare provision is to prevent poverty. Preventing poverty is crucial to achieving gender justice now, after the family wage, given the high rates of poverty in solo-mother families and the vastly increased likelihood that US women and children will live in such families.
⁹
If it accomplishes nothing else, a welfare state should at least relieve suffering by meeting otherwise unmet basic needs. Arrangements, such as those in the United States, that leave women, children, and men in poverty, are unacceptable according to this criterion. Any postindustrial welfare state that prevented such poverty would constitute a major advance. So far, however, this does not say enough. The anti-poverty principle might be satisfied in a variety of different ways, not all of which are acceptable. Some ways, such as the provision of targeted, isolating, and stigmatized poor relief for solo-mother families, fail to respect several of the following normative principles, which are also essential to gender justice in social welfare.

2.
The Anti-Exploitation Principle
: Anti-poverty measures are important not only in themselves but also as a means to another basic objective: preventing exploitation of vulnerable people.
¹⁰
This principle, too, is central to achieving gender justice after the family wage. Needy women with no other way to feed themselves and their children, for example, are liable to exploitation—by abusive husbands, by sweatshop foremen, and by pimps. In guaranteeing relief of poverty, then, welfare provision should also aim to mitigate exploitable dependency.
¹¹
The availability of an alternative source of income enhances the bargaining position of subordinates in unequal relationships. The non-employed wife who knows she can support herself and her children outside of her marriage has more leverage within it; her “voice” is enhanced as her possibilities of “exit” increase.
¹²
The same holds for the low-paid nursing-home attendant in relation to her boss.
¹³
For welfare measures to have this effect, however, support must be provided as a matter of right. When receipt of aid is highly stigmatized or discretionary, the anti-exploitation principle is not satisfied.
¹⁴
At best the claimant would trade exploitable dependence on a husband or a boss for exploitable dependence on a caseworker's whim.
¹⁵
The goal should be to prevent at least three kinds of exploitable dependencies: exploitable dependence on an individual family member, such as a husband or an adult child; exploitable dependence on employers and supervisors; and exploitable dependence on the personal whims of state officials. Rather than shuttle people back and forth among these exploitable dependencies, an adequate approach must prevent all three simultaneously.
¹⁶
This principle rules out arrangements that channel a homemaker's benefits through her husband. It is likewise incompatible with arrangements that provide essential goods, such as health insurance, only in forms linked conditionally to scarce employment. Any postindustrial welfare state that satisfied the anti-exploitation principle would represent a major improvement over current US arrangements. But even it might not be satisfactory. Some ways of satisfying this principle would fail to respect several of the following normative principles, which are also essential to gender justice in social welfare.