Fortunes of Feminism (36 page)

The result was no mere laundry list of single issues. On the contrary, what connected the plethora of newly discovered injustices was the notion that women's subordination was systemic, grounded in the deep structures of society. Second-wave feminists argued, of course, about how best to characterize the social totality—whether as “patriarchy,” as a “dual-systems” amalgam of capitalism and patriarchy, as an imperialist world system, or, in my own preferred view, as a historically specific, androcentric form of state-organized capitalist society, structured by three interpenetrating orders of subordination: (mal)distribution, (mis)recognition, and (mis)representation. But despite such differences, most second-wave feminists (with the notable exception of liberal-feminists) concurred that overcoming women's subordination required radical transformation of the deep structures of the social totality. This shared commitment to systemic transformation bespoke the movement's origins in the broader emancipatory ferment of the times.

2)
Second-wave feminism contra androcentrism
: If second-wave feminism partook of the general aura of sixties radicalism, it nevertheless stood in a tense relation with other emancipatory movements. Its chief target, after all, was the
gender
injustice of state-organized capitalism, hardly a priority for non-feminist anti-imperialists and New Leftists. In subjecting state-organized capitalism's androcentrism to critique, moreover, second-wave feminists had also to confront sexism within the Left. For liberal and radical feminists, this posed no special problem; they could simply turn separatist and exit the Left. For socialist-feminists, anti-imperialist feminists, and feminists of color, in contrast, the difficulty was to confront sexism within the Left while remaining part of it.

For a time, at least, socialist-feminists succeeded in maintaining that difficult balance. They located the core of androcentrism in a gender division of labor that systematically devalued activities, both paid and unpaid, that were performed by or associated with women. Applying this analysis to state-organized capitalism, they uncovered the deep-structural connections between women's responsibility for the lion's share of unpaid caregiving, their subordination in marriage and personal life, the gender segmentation of labor markets, men's domination of the political system, and the androcentrism of welfare provision, industrial policy, and development schemes. In effect, they exposed the family wage as the point where gender maldistribution, misrecognition, and misrepresentation converged. The result was a critique that integrated economy, culture, and politics in a systematic account of women's subordination in state-organized capitalism. Far from aiming simply to promote women's full incorporation as wage-earners in capitalist society, socialist-feminists sought to transform the system's deep structures and animating values—in part by decentering wage work and valorizing unwaged activities, especially the socially necessary carework performed by women.

3)
Second-wave feminism contra étatism
: But feminists' objections to state-organized capitalism were as much concerned with process as with substance. Like their New Left allies, they rejected the bureaucratic-managerial ethos of state-organized capitalism. To the widespread 1960s critique of Fordist organization, they added a gender analysis, interpreting the culture of large-scale, top-down institutions as expressing the modernized masculinity of the professional-managerial stratum of state-organized capitalism. Developing a horizontal counter-ethos of sisterly connection, second-wave feminists created the entirely new organizational practice of consciousness-raising. Seeking to bridge the sharp étatist divide between theory and practice, they styled themselves as a countercultural democratizing movement—anti-hierarchical, participatory, and demotic. In an era when the acronym “NGO” did not yet exist, feminist academics, lawyers, and social workers identified more with the grassroots than with the reigning professional ethos of depoliticized expertise.

But unlike some of their countercultural comrades, most feminists did not reject state institutions
simpliciter
. Seeking, rather, to infuse the latter with feminist values, they envisioned a participatory-democratic state that empowered its citizens. Effectively reimagining the relation between state and society, they sought to transform those positioned as passive objects of welfare and development policy into active subjects, empowered to participate in democratic processes of need interpretation. The goal, accordingly, was less to dismantle state institutions than to transform them into agencies that would promote, and indeed express, gender justice.

4)
Second-wave feminism contra and pro Westphalianism
: More ambivalent, perhaps, was second-wave feminism's relation to the Westphalian dimension of state-organized capitalism. Given its origins in the global anti–Vietnam War ferment of the time, the movement was clearly disposed to be sensitive to transborder injustices. This was especially the case for feminists in the developing world, whose gender critique was interwoven with a critique of imperialism. But there, as elsewhere, most feminists viewed their respective states as the principal addressees of their demands. Thus, second-wave feminists tended to reinscribe the Westphalian frame at the level of practice, even when they criticized it at the level of theory. That frame, which divided the world into bounded territorial polities, remained the default option in an era when states still seemed to possess the requisite capacities for social steering and when the technology enabling real-time transnational networking was not yet available. In the context of state-organized capitalism, then, the slogan “sisterhood is global” (itself already contested as imperializing) functioned more as an abstract gesture than as a post-Westphalian political project that could be practically pursued.

In general, then, second-wave feminism remained ambivalently Westphalian, even as it rejected the economism, androcentrism, and étatism of state-organized capitalism. On all those issues, however, it manifested considerable nuance. In rejecting economism, the feminists of this period never doubted the centrality of distributive justice and the critique of political economy to the project of women's emancipation. Far from wanting to minimize the economic dimension of gender injustice, they sought, rather, to deepen it, by clarifying its relation with the two additional dimensions of culture and politics. Likewise, in rejecting the androcentrism of the family wage, second-wave feminists never sought simply to replace it with the two-earner family. For them, rather, overcoming gender injustice required ending the systematic devaluation of caregiving and the gender division of labor, both paid and unpaid. Finally, in rejecting the étatism of state-organized capitalism, second-wave feminists never doubted the need for strong political institutions capable of organizing economic life in the service of justice. Far from wanting to free markets from state control, they sought rather to democratize state power, to maximize citizen participation, to strengthen accountability, and to increase communicative flows between state and society.

All told, second-wave feminism espoused a transformative political project, premised on an expanded understanding of injustice and a systemic critique of capitalist society. The movement's most advanced currents saw their struggles as multidimensional, aimed simultaneously against economic exploitation, status hierarchy, and political subjection. To them, moreover, feminism appeared as part of a broader emancipatory project, in which struggles against gender injustices were necessarily linked to struggles against racism, imperialism, homophobia, and class domination, all of which required transformation of the deep structures of capitalist society.

2. FEMINISM AS THE “NEW SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM”:

NEOLIBERAL RESIGNIFICATIONS

As it turned out, that project remained largely stillborn, a casualty of deeper historical forces, which were not well understood at the time. With the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that the rise of second-wave feminism coincided with a historical shift in the character of capitalism, from the state-organized variant just discussed to neoliberalism. Reversing the previous formula, which sought to “use politics to tame markets,” proponents of this new form of capitalism proposed to use markets to tame politics. Dismantling key elements of the Bretton Woods framework, they eliminated the capital controls that had enabled Keynesian steering of national economies. In place of
dirigisme
, they promoted privatization and deregulation; in place of public provision and social citizenship, “trickle-down” and “personal responsibility”; in place of the welfare and developmental states, the lean, mean “competition state.” Road-tested in Latin America, this approach served to guide much of the transition to capitalism in East/Central Europe. Although publicly championed by Thatcher and Reagan, it was applied only gradually and unevenly in the First World. In the Third, by contrast, neoliberalization was imposed at the gunpoint of debt, as an enforced program of “structural adjustment,” which overturned all the central tenets of developmentalism and compelled postcolonial states to divest their assets, open their markets, and slash social spending.

Interestingly, second-wave feminism thrived in these new conditions. What had begun in the context of state-organized capitalism as a radical anti-systemic movement was now
en route
to becoming a broad-based mass social phenomenon. Attracting adherents of every class, ethnicity, nationality, and political ideology, feminist ideas found their way into every nook and cranny of social life and transformed the self-understandings of all whom they touched. The effect was not only vastly to expand the ranks of activists but also to reshape commonsense views of family, work, and dignity.

Was it mere coincidence that second-wave feminism and neoliberalism prospered in tandem? Or was there some perverse, subterranean elective affinity between them? That second possibility is heretical, to be sure, but we fail to investigate it at our own peril. Certainly, the rise of neoliberalism dramatically changed the terrain on which second-wave feminism operated. The effect, I shall argue here, was to resignify feminist ideals. Aspirations that had a clear emancipatory thrust in the context of state-organized capitalism assumed a far more ambiguous meaning in the neoliberal era. With welfare and developmental states under attack from free-marketeers, feminist critiques of economism, androcentrism, étatism, and Westphalianism took on a new valence. Let me clarify this dynamic of resignification by revisiting those four foci of feminist critique.
⁵

1)
Feminist anti-economism resignified
: Neoliberalism's rise coincided with a major alteration in the political culture of capitalist societies. In this period, claims for justice were increasingly couched as claims for the recognition of identity and difference.
⁶
With this shift “from redistribution to recognition” came powerful pressures to transform second-wave feminism into a variant of identity politics. A progressive variant, to be sure, but one that tended nevertheless to overextend the critique of culture, while downplaying the critique of political economy. In practice, the tendency was to subordinate social-economic struggles to struggles for recognition, while in the academy, feminist cultural theory began to eclipse feminist social theory. What had begun as a needed corrective to economism devolved in time into an equally one-sided culturalism. Thus, instead of arriving at a broader, richer paradigm that could encompass both redistribution and recognition, second-wave feminists effectively traded one truncated paradigm for another.

The timing, moreover, could not have been worse. The turn to recognition dovetailed all too neatly with a rising neoliberalism that wanted nothing more than to repress all memory of social egalitarianism. Thus, feminists absolutized the critique of culture at precisely the moment when circumstances required redoubled attention to the critique of political economy.
⁷
As the critique splintered, moreover, the cultural strand became decoupled not only from the economic strand, but also from the critique of capitalism that had previously integrated them. Unmoored from the critique of capitalism and made available for alternative articulations, these strands could be drawn into what Hester Eisenstein has called “a dangerous liaison” with neoliberalism.
⁸

2)
Feminist anti-androcentrism resignified
: It was only a matter of time, therefore, before neoliberalism resignified the feminist critique of androcentrism. To explain how, I propose to adapt an argument made by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello. In their important book
The New Spirit of Capitalism
, they contend that capitalism periodically remakes itself in moments of historical rupture, in part by recuperating strands of critique directed against it. In such moments, elements of anti-capitalist critique are resignified to legitimate an emergent new form of capitalism, which thereby becomes endowed with the higher, moral significance needed to motivate new generations to shoulder the inherently meaningless work of endless accumulation. For Boltanski and Chiapello, the “new spirit” that has served to legitimate the flexible neoliberal capitalism of our time was fashioned from the New Left's “artistic” critique of state-organized capitalism, which denounced the grey conformism of corporate culture. It was in the accents of May ‘68, they claim, that neoliberal management theorists propounded a new “connexionist,” “project” capitalism, in which rigid organizational hierarchies would give way to horizontal teams and flexible networks, thereby liberating individual creativity.
⁹
The result was a new romance of capitalism with real-world effects—a romance that enveloped the tech start-ups of Silicon Valley and that today finds its purest expression in the ethos of Google.