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Justice at Home: Okin's Justice, Gender, and the Family
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 December 2018
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- Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 1991
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1 With an Introduction by Carl N. Degler (Boston: Small, Maynard &. Co., 1899; reprint ed., New York: Harper & Row, 1966). For a short biography of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, see Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland, with an Introduction by Ann J. Lane (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979); The Yellow Wallpaper, with an Afterword by Elaine R. Hedges (New York: Feminist Press, 1973).Google Scholar
2 For an excellent discussion of Gilman's influence on the early 20th-century movement of material feminists, see Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution 183–205 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981).Google Scholar
3 Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979.Google Scholar
4 For an excellent analysis of cultural feminism, see Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).Google Scholar
5 Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971.Google Scholar
6 This is the statement of Rawls's second principle of justice. The first is that “[e]ach person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all.”Id. at 302.Google Scholar
7 Rawls also leaves out children, but then, Okin explains, “makes an argument from paternalism for their temporary inequality and restricted liberty” (at 94).Google Scholar
8 Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983).Google Scholar
9 Lenore J. Weitzman, The Divorce Revolution: The Unexpected Social and Economic Consequences for Women and Children in America (New York: Free Press, 1985).Google Scholar
10 Okin defines gender as institutionalized “sexual difference,” but it is clear from her analysis that she is attacking the socially constructed meaning of difference, which is inequality. This tendency to conflate “difference” with “inequality,” most apparent in Okin's exhortations for gender-balanced child rearing, limits her analysis. See infra at 847–48.Google Scholar
11 Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).Google Scholar
12 Id. at 47.Google Scholar
13 For Chodorow's conclusions to this effect, see id. at 207.Google Scholar
14 Here Okin asserts that a distinct woman's point of view, rooted in female psychological development, affects a woman's moral development and thus her stance in the “original position.” Earlier, she rejects as “misplaced” the argument most prominently developed by Carol Gilligan that men and women approach the resolution of moral issues differently. See Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). By contending that “it may well turn out that any differences can be readily explained in terms of roles, including female primary parenting, that are socially determined and therefore alterable” (at 15), Okin makes clear that she interprets Gilligan (or Gilligan's interpreters) as concluding that “women are somehow naturally more inclined toward contextuality and away from universalism” (at 15; emphasis added). She rejects such a conclusion for its essentialism and the consequent danger that essentialism poses to the elimination of gender inequality. Okin's warning against biological determinism seems warranted, but would have been strengthened by a willingness to concede that other forces (such as those of race and class) also shape gender and therefore make “gender” itself an often unstable category for analysis.Google Scholar
15 See Alcoff, Linda, “Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory,” 13 Signs 406 (1988).Google Scholar
16 See, e.g., Alcoff, 13 Signs at 432–33. The notion of a “self” prior to its social context, as reflected in that self's birth, family, and cultural and gender identity, is deeply at odds, moreover, with the social-historical conception of identity, in which all is seen as a social construct, including the subject's very sense of subjectivity. For a related point arguing that there is no “Archimedes point” outside of our embeddedness, see Flax, Jane, “Postmodernism and Gender Relations in Feminist Theory,” 12 Signs 633 (1987).Google Scholar
17 See Seyla Benhabib, “The Generalized and the Concrete Other: The Kohlberg-Gilligan Controversy and Feminist Theory” (“Benhabib, ‘The Generalized and the Concrete Other’“), in Seyla Benhabib &. Drucilla Cornell, eds., Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender 77 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) (“Benhabib & Cornell, Feminism as Critique”). Rawls's disembodied ego presumes a hierarchical split of the human self into halves that track exactly cultural associations of the “male” and the “female” (disembodied/male:embodied/female). Sherry Ortner was one of the first feminists of the Second Wave to point out the political significance of cultural associations of the “female” with “nature” and the “body.” See Sherry B. Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” in Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo & Louise Lamphere, eds., Woman, Culture, and Society 67 (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1974).Google Scholar
18 Benhabib, “The Generalized and the Concrete Other,” at 87.Google Scholar
19 Id. at 89 (emphasis in original).Google Scholar
20 Id.Google Scholar
21 Id. at 90. Joan Scott makes a related point when she notes that “[d]emands for equality have rested on implicit and usually unrecognized arguments from difference; if individuals were identical or the same there would be no need to ask for equality.” See Joan Scott, “Deconstructing Equality-Versus-Difference: Or, The Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism,” 14 Feminist Stud. 44 (1988). A good historical example of this point would be the civil rights legislation of the first period of Southern Reconstruction, which, although employing the rhetoric of “equality,” clearly did not mean by this that blacks would thereafter be identical to whites. In fact, “equality” to most whites meant civil (ability to form contracts, serve on juries) and perhaps political equality (right to vote), but not social equality (right to associate in clubs and schools).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
22 Alcoff, 13 Signs at 428–36. See also Flax, 12 Signs at 641–42; Bartlett, Katharine, “Feminist Legal Methods,” 103 Harv. L. Rev. 880 (1990). Cf. Alison M. Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature 369–89 (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld, 1983).Google Scholar
23 In Equal Employment Opportunity Comm'n v. Sears (EEOC v. Sears), 628 F. Supp. 1264 (N.D. 111. 1986), aff'd 839 F.2d 302 (7th Cir. 1988), two feminist historians, Alice-Kessler Harris and Rosalind Rosenberg, “debated” the meaning of gender difference in a setting wholly inhospitable to the subtlety and ambiguity that a serious consideration of the question entails. Rosenberg contended on behalf of Sears that women had not been promoted into commission sales positions because they had been socialized to avoid the intensely competitive (read masculine) nature of such jobs and thus did not want them. Kessler-Harris argued that the women's “choice” was itself socially constructed in part by the very employers (such as Sears) that by segregating women historically had defined“female” occupations. Sears won the lawsuit on the strength of Rosenberg's testimony, thereby confirming feminists' worst fears that, at least in the courtroom, the acknowledgment of “women's difference” leads directly to their subordination. For an excellent review of the Sears case and the roles Kessler-Harris and Rosenberg played in it, see Ruth Milkman, “Women's History and the Sears Case,” 12 Feminist Stud. 375 (1986).Google Scholar
The Supreme Court decision in California Federal Savings and Loan Association v. Guerra (CalFed), 479 U.S. 272 (1987), was a positive result, by contrast, for those arguing that the recognition of women's (socially constructed) difference is necessary to achieve gender equality. There, the Court upheld California's maternity leave legislation—which provides a short post-natal leave to women but not men—on the ground that equalizing employment opportunities for women means taking pregnancy's nonstereotypical aspects into account.Google Scholar
24 Minow, Martha, “The Supreme Court Forward: Justice Engendered,” 101 Harv. L. Rev. 76 (1987).Google Scholar
25 See Scott, 14 Feminist Stud, at 48; Zillah R. Eisenstein, The Female Body and the Law 222–24 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Gerda Lerner, “To Think Ourselves Free,” review of Elizabeth Kamarck Minnich, Transforming Knowledge in 8 Women's Rei'. Books at 10–11 (1990). In a related context, Jeffrey Weeks argues that a radical pluralist vision will lead to the acknowledgment of sexual diversities and a deemphasis on sexual deviance. See Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality and Its Discontents: Meanings, Myths and Modern Sexualities (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985).Google Scholar
26 Elizabeth V. Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988) (“Spelman, Inessential Woman”).Google Scholar
27 Other critics have questioned whether Chodorow's theory even adequately explains sexism, arguing that Chodorow conflates gender differentiation with male domination (or asymmetry with inequality), thereby omitting the crucial analytic step (or steps) that would explain how the masculine self that sees the “other” as distinct and opposite gets transformed into a self that dominates and subordinates that “other.” For a good discussion of this important point, see Iris Marion Young, “Is Male Gender Identity the Cause of Male Domination?” in Joyce Trebilcot, ed., Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory 129 (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman &L AUanheld, 1983). See also Joan Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” 19 Am. Hist. Rev. at 1062–63 (1986).Google Scholar
28 Spelman, Inessential Woman 80–113.Google Scholar
29 Id. at 100.Google Scholar
30 Tronto, Joan C., “Beyond Gender Difference to a Theory of Care,” 12 Signs 32 (1987).Google Scholar
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32 “Reply by Nancy Chodorow,” in Lorber, Judith et al., “On The Reproduction of Mothering: A Methodological Debate,” 6 Signs 502–3, 512 (1981).Google Scholar
33 Cheryl D. Hayes, John L. Palmer, St Martha J. Zaslow, eds., Who Cares for America's Chidren?: Child Care Policy for the 1990's at 22 (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1990) (“Hayes et al., Who Cares?”).Google Scholar
34 Ann Bookman, “Parenting without Poverty: The Case for Funded Parental Leave,” in Janet S. Hyde & Marilyn J. Essex, eds., Parental Leave and Child Care: Setting a Research and Policy Agenda 66–89 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991) (“Hyde & Essex, Parental Leave”).Google Scholar
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36 Essex, Marilyn J. & Klein, Marjorie H., “The Wisconsin Parental Leave Study: The Roles of Fathers,” in Hyde & Essex, Parental Leave 280–92.Google Scholar
37 Id. at 284.Google Scholar
38 One of the first was that of Heidi Hartmann, who concluded that the “rather small, selective, and unresponsive contribution of the husband to housework raises the suspicion that the husband may be a net drain on the family resources of housework time—that is, husbands may require more housework than they contribute.” See Heidi Hartmann, “The Family as the Locus of Gender, Class, and Political Struggle: The Example of Housework,” 6 Signs 383 (1981); see also Sarah F. Berk, The Gender Factory: The Apportionment of Work in American Households (New York: Plenum Press, 1985).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
39 See Myra Marx Ferre, “The Struggles of Superwoman,” in Christine Rose, Roslyn Feldberg, & Natalie Sokoloff, eds., Hidden Aspects of Women's Work 161–80 (New York: Praeger, 1987) (“Rose et al., Hidden Aspects”); Berk, , The Gender Factory 209–10.Google Scholar
40 Who Cares? 22; David T. Ellwood, Poor Support: Poverty in the American Family 67 (New York: Basic Books, 1988); see also Suzanne M. Bianchi &L Daphne Spain, American Women in Transition 91 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1986).Google Scholar
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42 Mimi Abramovitz, Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present 354 (Boston: South End Press, 1988) (“Abramovitz, Regulating Lives“). One study found that the ratio of 70 employed civilian black men aged 20–24 for every 100 black women in 1960 had dropped by 1980 to 45 per 100. See Ellwood, Poor Support 70.Google Scholar
43 Black women in the United State? have always engaged in wage-earning activity in much greater percentages than white women. See Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985) (“Jones, Labor of Love”); Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “Racial Ethnic Women's Labor: The Intersection of Race, Gender, and Class Oppression,” in Rose et al., Hidden Aspects of Women's Work 46–73. Yet there have been times, such as during Southern Reconstruction, when black women withdrew from the paid labor force in order to care for their families. See Jones, Labor of Love 45–46.Google Scholar
44 Abramovitz, Regulating Lives 352 (quoting Domestic Policy Council, Low Income-Opportunity Working Group, Up From Dependency: A New National Public Assistance Strategy 40 (Washington, D.C., December 1986)).Google Scholar
45 Brown, Carol A., “The New Patriarchy,” in Rose et al, Hidden Aspects 151.Google Scholar
46 Nancy Fraser, “What's Critical about Critical Theory?: The Case of Habermas and Gender,” in Benhabib & Cornell, Feminism as Critique 42–43 (cited in note 17).Google Scholar
47 In her brilliant study of black kinship relationships in a midwestern urban area in the 1960s, Carol Stack found that marriage was actively discouraged by the network of female kin. One reason for this seemed to be that black women obtained relative economic security from their own interdependent relations of reciprocity and support, relations which would be undermined by the nuclear family building that marriage portended. Implicit in this “cost-benefit” analysis is the assumption that black men could not provide greater financial security than the alternative network of female kin. See Carol B. Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Harper Si Row, 1974). The view of marriage within the black community, however, is at odds with the racist and sexist but popular image of the lazy welfare mother who breeds children to obtain state money. See Roberts, Dorothy, “Punishing Drug Addicts Who Have Babies: Women of Color, Equality, and the Right of Privacy,” 104 Harv. L Rev. 1444 (1991).Google Scholar
48 Schultz, Vicki, “Telling Stories About Women and Work: Judicial Interpretations of Sex Segregation in the Workplace in Title VII Cases Raising the Lack of Interest Argument,” 103 Harv. L. Rev. 1749 (1990).Google Scholar
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51 For example, Chicana women interviewed by Patricia Zavella enjoyed (for the most part) the friendships and independence from family that their seasonal stints in the cannery factory offered, in spite of the often crippling double load of housework and wage earning that such stints imposed. See Patricia Zavella, Women's Work and Chicano Families: Cannery Workers of the Santa Clara Valley (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987).Google Scholar
52 Alice Kessler-Harris, “Still Segregated,” review of Christine L. Williams, Gender Differences at Work: Women and Men in Nontraditional Occupations, and Rosemary Pringle, Secretaries Talk: Sexuality, Power and Work, 7 Women's Rev. Books at 6 (November 1989).Google Scholar
53 Vicki Schultz, 103 Harv. L. Rev. at 1756.Google Scholar
54 Alice Kessler-Harris makes a similar point in assessing Christine Williams' book, Gender Differences at Work. See Kessler-Harris, 7 Women's Rev. Books at 6.Google Scholar