Gender and Modernity Week 10 PDF

Gender and Modernity Week 10 Modernity and gender → Today, women make up half of the workforce and the span of the span of their lives contrasts with the greatly reduced time spent in caring for children in the home. → Women with dependents are less reliant on the male wage and more directly suppor...

Gender and Modernity Week 10 Modernity and gender → Today, women make up half of the workforce and the span of the span of their lives contrasts with the greatly reduced time spent in caring for children in the home. → Women with dependents are less reliant on the male wage and more directly supported by their own wages and state benefits. → Marriage and the family have been transformed by changes in the law, by women’s increased participation in the labor force, and by the extension of welfare labor provisions. → Relations between women and men are different in response to these changes and the emergence of women’s movement, which challenged women’s socially subordinated position within the domestic sphere and demanded women’s rights to independence and sexual equality. Modernity and gender However, despite these changes, the position of women within the domestic sphere remains, in many ways, unaltered. → women continue to be responsible for the primary care of children and the private care of vulnerable adults (e.g., the sick, the elderly, the mentally disabled). → women also continue to undertake the domestic servicing of able-bodied men, and most tasks associated with the domestic maintenance of families and family life. In sociology, the place of women as primary carers is understood as an offshoot of the sexual division of labor, which is seen as naturally allocating nurturance and children care to women. Modernity and gender → One of the dominant explanations for the positioning of women in the private sphere of the family and men in the public sphere of work and politics was, and remains, that women are naturally suited to mothering and caring. The idea of a “natural” sexual division of The idea that biology underwrites the labor is a very powerful one, not least ambiguous authenticity of womanliness and because we take the categories of women manliness is itself a sociohistorical one. Far and men as self-evident. They are seen as from being an absolute, biological difference biological categories, and biological is represented differently in different difference is accepted as the guarantee of cultures, and in different historical periods the naturalness of women and men. within a culture. Modernity and gender It is difficult the idea that women “naturally belong” to the private sphere with “modernity”, because the idea of raising children as purely natural activity sits uneasy with the Enlightenment claims of reason, progress, and scientific domination of nature. → This dissonance was downplayed by the division of social life into “public” and “private”, with all things intuitive and natural falling to women in the private sphere. Once these divisions were culturally consolidated, the link between gender (femininity) and sex (female) came to appear both indissoluble and natural. The “naturalness” of gender/sexual roles guaranteed the social order itself as natural. Modernity and gender The “natural” association between women and mothering and caring remained a stable assumption in classical sociological theory. Durkheim, for instance, noted that while “man is almost entirely the product of society”, woman is “to a far greater extent the product of nature”. (Durkheim, Suicide, p.345) → such an ideology makes women’s labor in the private sphere appear to be natural, it also strips it of its status as labor, because women’s work in the family is separated from the public domain of wage labor. This gives rise to a polarized division between women and men (non- work/work ; natural/social). Modernity and gender → Against naturalistic conceptions of the sexual division of labor, feminists have argued that the division between public and private domains is a gendered structure in which women and men become identified with different social places, different values, and different activities and characteristics. The “public” sphere The “private” sphere rationalization: rational calculation emotionality contract bonding egalitarianism difference productive work reproductive caring intuitive empathy Modernity and gender This polarization of women’s work in the home and men’s in the workforce has obscured the more complex parameters of the socio-sexual (gendered) division of labor. Women, as opposed to men, engage in two different kinds of labor: productive and reproductive (care of the young/dependent adults). The division of work of men and work of women is asymmetrical – women combine productive and reproductive labor across the public/private divide. → the engendered division of labor constitutes the position of women as economically subordinate and culturally inferior to that of men. Simone de Beauvoir The Second Sex The Second Sex is a critical interrogation of the present. It is a critique of “what we are”. Beauvoir described the Self- Other relationship of men and women in history. And women’s inability to become “Self” like men. Understood as externally enforced Otherness, oppression is the degradation of freedom. In many ways, The Second Sex is the study of the ways in which women suffer oppression through external forces that act to situate, define, and maintain them in an inessential, dependent, and negative position. Simone de Her central thesis is clearly expressed on p.xv. She Beauvoir writes, after having raised the question of “What is a woman?”: The “But if I wish to define myself, I must first of all say: “I am a woman”; on this truth must be based all further Second discussion. A man never begins by presenting himself as an individual of a certain sex; it goes without saying that Sex he is a man. The terms masculine and feminine are used symmetrically only as a matter of form, as on legal papers. In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that of two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the neutral, as indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whether woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity.” (SdB) Simone de For SdB, “womanhood” Beauvoir is not defined by her biology because being a The woman means having a social role. is not defined by an abstract idea of Second “feminine essence”; one is not born but Sex becomes a woman (this idea is developed later in the book, but we can see it in a fragmented form in the introduction). The notion of “woman”, in other words, is not mapped onto a “feminine human being” with an eternal feminine essence and yet women “exist”. Simone de To say that gender exists (male/female) without the For SdB, there is no “female nature” but rather a female situation. The Second Sex is her Beauvoir attribution of “essences” is for SdB to suggest that the attempt to understand the female situation in 1949. world is structured in a way that “gender shows up for us” For SdB, being a woman is The Second and has material effects on the real world. about your actions and social position in the world (rather, Sex again, than a biological essence). The world is structured on a gender binary (women/men; male/female). The binary that we find when we look around us is not neutral. Women are in a position of inferiority (otherness) vis-à-vis men.  Simone de Beauvoir The Second Sex Key ideas from the introduction 1) Women’s inferiority – Women are marked by their sex, whereas men are not. Men are the positive pole and the neutral center between two poles, but women are marked by the negative. The basic trait of women is that she is Other. Given their position (of What does that mean? Women are subject Other/subjugation), it is tempting to (free and autonomous) but are compelled to flee their freedom by taking up their assume the status of Other to conform to identity as Other; assuming it and society (to how society is structured). claiming that it is their choice to take up their status as unfree.  Simone de Beauvoir – The Second Sex “Indeed, along with the ethical urge of each individual to affirm his subjective existence, there is also the temptation to forgo liberty and become a thing. This is an inauspicious road, for he who takes it –passive, lost, ruined– becomes henceforth the creature of another’s will, frustrated in his transcendence and deprived of every value” (SdB) 2) There is a temptation for a woman to become a thing, rather than recognizing her subjectivity and freedom. For example, women were discouraged to take up wage labor and to define themselves by their husbands. Their “place” in the world was at home, and motherhood their role in society. For SdB, these are ways of fleeing one’s freedom. For SdB, there are three reasons women fail to become subjects, rather than objects (things): (1) lack of resources; (2) the bond between men and women, although it is not a matter of biology, appears “necessary” in the way other bonds/oppositions are not; (3) women are often pleased with their role as Other – because it is frightening to adopt their freedom, they are tempted to turn themselves into “things” (it feels good relinquish our freedom/freedom takes responsibility). Simone de It is their gender that defines women while men are not defined by their gender. Beauvoir Men are both the neutral (individuals, Man) and the positive (privileged gender). She is claiming the status of individuals for women. Humanity is not defined in terms of biological needs and functions The Second but, on the contrary, defined in terms of actions and deeds emancipated from given conditions (notably: gender). Now, Sex according to de Beauvoir, women occupy within humanity the natural dimension, and their life is centrally characterized the accomplishment of functions (biological) as opposed to other activities. Women tend to flee from their freedom because of how society is structured, which encourages women to see themselves as things. → We live in a society structured around a gender binary. Men as essential (“man” as the representative image of human beingness), while women are positioned as inessential, as Other relative to men.