Three patterns of social life in the Old Order stand out and give it consistency: the Old Order is unitary. There is of course always a minority of people whose lives—acted out on a plane above dull necessity and the routines of labor—are complex and surprising. But life, for the great majority of people, has a unity and simplicity which will never cease to fascinate the “industrial man” who comes later. This life is not marked off into different “spheres” or “realms” of experience: “work” and “home,” “public” and “private,” “sacred” and “secular.” Production (of food, clothing, tools) takes place in the same rooms or outdoor spaces where children grow up, babies are born, couples come together. The family relation is not secluded in the realm of emotion; it is a working relation. Biological life—sexual desire, childbirth, sickness, the progressive infirmity of age—impinges directly on the group activities of production and play. Ritual and superstition affirm the unity of body and earth, biology and labor: menstruating women must not bake bread; conception is most favored at the time of the spring planting; sexual transgressions will bring blight and ruin to the crops; and so on.
The human relations of family and village, knit by common labor as well as sex and affection, are paramount. There is not yet an external “economy” connecting the fortunes of the peasant with the decisions of a merchant in a remote city. If people go hungry, it is not because the price of their crops fell, but because the rain did not. There are marketplaces, but there is not yet a market to dictate the opportunities and activities of ordinary people.
The Old Order is patriarchal: authority over the family is vested in the elder males, or male. He, the father, makes the decisions which control the family’s work, purchases, marriages. Under the rule of the father, women have no complex choices to make, no questions as to their nature or destiny: the rule is simply obedience. An early-nineteenth-century American minister counseled brides:
Bear always in mind your true situation and have the words of the apostle perpetually engraven on your heart. Your duty is submission—“Submission and obedience are the lessons of your life and peace and happiness will be your reward.” Your husband is, by the laws of God and of man, your superior; do not ever give him cause to remind you of it.4
The patriarchal order of the household is magnified in the governance of village, church, nation. At home was the father, in church was the priest or minister, at the top were the “town fathers,” the local nobility, or, as they put it in Puritan society, “the nursing fathers of the Commonwealth,” and above all was “God the Father.”
Thus the patriarchy of the Old Order was reinforced at every level of social organization and belief. For women, it was total, inescapable. Rebellious women might be beaten privately (with official approval) or punished publicly by the village “fathers,” and any woman who tried to survive on her own would be at the mercy of random male violence.
But the rule of the fathers is not based on mere coercion. Patriarchal authority seeks to justify itself in the minds of each of its children, and thus justification takes the form of a father-centered religion. Religion projects the rule of the father into the firmament where it becomes the supreme law of nature—and then reflects this majesty back on each earthly father in his household.
He was her superior, the head of the family, and she owed him an obedience founded on reverence. He stood before her in the place of God: he exercised the authority of God over her, and he furnished her with the fruits of the earth that God had provided.5
And yet, to a degree that is almost unimaginable from our vantage point within industrial society, the Old Order is gynocentric: the skills and work of women are indispensable to survival. Woman is always subordinate, but she is far from being a helpless dependent. Women of the industrial world would later look back enviously on the full, productive lives of their fore-mothers. Consider the work of a woman in colonial America:
It was the wife’s duty, with the assistance of daughters and women servants, to plant the vegetable garden, breed the poultry, and care for the dairy cattle. She transformed milk into cream, butter and cheese, and butchered livestock as well as cooked the meals. Along with her daily chores the husbandwoman slated, pickled, preserved, and manufactured enough beer and cider to see the family through the winter.
Still, the woman’s work was hardly done. To clothe the colonial population, women not only plied the needle, but operated wool carders and spinning wheels—participated in the manufacture of thread, yarn and cloth as well as apparel. Her handwrought candles lit the house; medicines of her manufacture restored the family to health; her homemade soap cleansed her home and family.…6
It was not only woman’s productive skills which gave her importance in the Old Order. She knew the herbs that healed, the songs to soothe a feverish child, the precautions to be taken during pregnancy. If she was exceptionally skilled, she became a midwife, herbal healer or “wise woman,” whose fame might spread from house to house and village to village. And all women were expected to have learned, from their mothers and grandmothers, the skills of raising children, healing common illnesses, nursing the sick.
So there could be no Woman Question in the Old Order. Woman’s work was cut out for her; the lines of authority that she was to follow were clear. She could hardly think of herself as a “misfit” in a world which depended so heavily on her skills and her work. Nor could she imagine making painful decisions about the direction of her life, for, within the patriarchal order, all decisions of consequence would be made for her by father or husband, if they were not already determined by tradition. The Woman Question awaits the arrival of the industrial epoch which, in the space of a few generations, will overthrow all the “fixed, fast-frozen relations” of the Old Order. The unity of biological and economic, private and public, life will be shattered; the old patriarchs will be shaken from their thrones; and—at the same time—the ancient powers of women will be expropriated.
The fundamental social transformation, of which even industrialization was a correlate and not a cause, was the triumph of the Market economy. In the Old Order production had been governed by natural factors—human needs for food and shelter, and the limits of the labor and resources available. Only the occasional surplus would be sold or bartered. But in the Market economy the laws of commercial exchange would dictate the employment of human labor and resources. The parochialism of household production would break down to make way for a vast network of economic interdependencies linking the livelihood of the farmer to the townsman, the Northerner to the Southerner. This network of dependencies—the Market—had been gaining ground inch by inch throughout the late Middle Ages. But it was for a long time a creature of the cities, this infant capitalism. Most people—over 95 percent—still lived on the land, in the “natural economy” of the Old Order. Only in the nineteenth century, with industrialization and the development of modern capitalism, did the Market come to replace nature as the controlling force in the lives of ordinary people: prices regulate existence as surely as rainfall and temperature once did—and seem just as arbitrary. Depressions are calamities on the scale of famines or epidemics, spilling over national boundaries and seeking out the most innocent, the most insignificant, victim.
With the triumph of the Market, the settled patterns of life which defined the Old Order were shattered irrevocably. The old unity of work and home, production and family life, was necessarily and decisively ruptured. Henceforth the household would no longer be a more or less self-contained unit, binding its members together in common work. When production entered the factory, the household was left with only the most personal biological activities—eating, sex, sleeping, the care of small children, and (until the rise of institutional medicine) birth and dying and the care of the sick and aged. Life would now be experienced as divided into two distinct spheres: a “public” sphere of endeavor governed ultimately by the Market; and a “private” sphere of intimate relationships and individual biological existence.
This new ordering of the world is not to be imagined as a mere compartmentalization, along some neutral dividing line. The two spheres stand, in respect to their basic values, opposed to each other, and the line between them is charged with moral tension. In its most fundamental operations the Market defies centuries of religious morality which (in principle, at least) exalted altruism and selflessness while it condemned covetousness and greed. In the Old Order commerce was tainted with dishonor, and lending money at interest was denounced as usury. But the Market, which dominates the new order, dismisses all moral categories with cold indifference. Profits can only be won by some at the price of poverty for others and there is no room for human affection, generosity, or loyalty. The greatest dramas of the marketplace—profits, losses, bankruptcies, investments, sales—can be recounted quite adequately as a series of numbers; the most brilliant moments are recorded in double-entry ledger books; and the human costs make no difference on the “bottom line.”
In the face of the Market, all that is “human” about people must crowd into the sphere of private life, and attach itself, as best it can, to the personal and biological activities which remain there. Only in the home, or private life generally, can one expect to find the love, spontaneity, nurturance, or playfulness which are denied in the marketplace. Sentiment may exaggerate the emotional nobility of the home, and gloss over its biological realities. But private life does, almost necessarily, invert the values of the Market: here what is produced, like the daily meals, is made for no other purpose than to meet immediate human needs; people are indeed valued “for themselves” rather than for their marketable qualities; services and affection are given freely, or at least given. For men, who must cross between the two spheres daily, private life now takes on a sentimental appeal in proportion to the coldness and impersonality of the “outside” world. They look to the home to fulfill both the bodily needs denied at the workplace, and the human solidarity forbidden in the Market.
At the same time, the forces which divide life into “public” and “private” spheres throw into question the place and the function of women. The iron rule of patriarchy has been shaken, opening up undreamed of possibilities. But at the same time the womanly skills which the economy of the Old Order had depended on have been torn away—removing what had been the source of woman’s dignity in even the most oppressive circumstances. Consider these changes, with their contradictory implications for women’s status: It was the end of the gynocentric order. The traditional productive skills of women—textile manufacture, garment manufacture, food processing—passed into the factory system. Women of the working class might follow their old labor into the new industrial world, but they would no longer command the productive process. They would forget the old skills. In time, as we shall see, even the quintessentially feminine activity of healing would be transformed into a commodity and swept into the Market. The homemade herbal tonic is replaced by the chemical products of multinational drug firms; midwives are replaced by obstetricians and surgeons.
But, at the same time, it was the end of the rule of the father. Patriarchal privilege, of course, allows men to claim the new public world of industry and commerce as their own. But the ancient network of patriarchal social relations had been irreversibly undermined by the new economy. As the production of necessary goods goes out of the home, the organic bonds holding together the family hierarchy are loosened. The father no longer commands the productive processes of the home; he is now a wage-earner, as might be his son, daughter, or even wife. He may demand submission, may tyrannize his wife and children, may invoke the still-potent sanctions of patriarchal religion, but no matter how he blusters, now it is the corporation which brings in “the fruits of the earth” and dictates the productive labor of the family. In the early twentieth century, historian Arthur Calhoun noted the rising rates of divorce (and desertion), the increased male absence from the home, the greater independence of wives and children, and concluded that “only in out-of-the-way places can the archaic patriarchism maintain itself.” The decline of patriarchal authority within the family was a constant theme of early-twentieth-century sociological writing.7
These changes—the division of life into public and private spheres, the decline of gynocentricity and patriarchy* —should not be thought of merely as results of the industrial revolution. They were, as much as smokestacks and steam power, railways and assembly lines, the definition of the cataclysmic reorganization of life which took place in northern Europe and North America in the nineteenth century. This was a total and revolutionary reorganization. To go from a society organized around household production to one organized around large-scale factory production, from a society ruled by seasons and climate to one ruled by the Market, is to reach into the heart of human social life and uproot the deepest assumptions. Everything that was “natural” is overturned. What had unquestionably been “human nature” suddenly appears archaic; what had been accepted for centuries as human destiny is no longer acceptable, and in most cases, is not even possible.
The lives of women—always much more confined by nature and social expectation than those of men—were thrown into confusion. In the Old Order, women had won their survival through participation in the shared labor of the household. Outside of the household there was simply no way to earn a livelihood and no life for a woman. Women could be, at different ages or in different classes, wives, mothers, daughters, servants, or “spinster” aunts, but these are only gradations of the domestic hierarchy. Women were born, grew up, and aged within the dense human enclosure of the family.
But with the collapse of the Old Order, there appeared a glimmer, however remote to most women, of something like a choice. It was now possible for a woman to enter the Market herself and exchange her labor for the means of survival (although at a lower rate than a man would). In Europe, in Russia, in America, wherever industry demanded more workers, there arose a new wave of “single women,” like those honored by Bolshevik leader Alexandra Kollontai:
They are girls and women who ceaselessly wage the grim struggle for existence, who spend their days sitting on the office chair, who bang away at telegraph apparatuses, who stand behind counters. Single women: they are the girls with fresh hearts and minds, full of bold fantasies and plans who pack the temples of science and art, who crowd the sidewalks, searching with vigorous and virile steps for cheap lessons and casual clerical jobs.8
Entering the Market as a working woman might mean low wages and miserable working conditions, loneliness and insecurity, but it also meant the possibility—unimaginable in the Old Order—of independence from the grip of the family.
But this atomized and independent existence hardly seemed “natural” to women whose own mothers had lived and died in the intimacy of the family. There was still the household of course, a life centered on husband and children. But the household had been much diminished by the removal of productive labor. Women like Charlotte Perkins Gilman questioned whether there could be any dignity in a domestic life which no longer centered on women’s distinctive skills, but on mere biological existence. The logic of the Market led a few outspoken feminist analysts of the nineteenth century to a cynical answer: that the relation between the unemployed wife and the bread-winning husband was not very different from prostitution. Could such a mode of existence, despite its superficial resemblance to women’s traditional way of life, be “natural”?
These were the ambiguous options which began to open up to women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In most cases, of course, the “choice” was immediately foreclosed by circumstances: some women were forced to seek paid work no matter how much their working disrupted the family, others were inescapably tied to family responsibilities no matter how much they needed or wanted to work outside. But the collapse of the Old Order had broken the pattern which had tied every woman to a single and unquestionable fate. The impact of the change was double-edged. It cannot simply be judged either as a
step forward or a step backward for women (even assuming that the judgment could be made in such a way as to cover all women—the black domestic, the manufacturer’s wife, the factory girl, etc.). The changes were, by their nature, contradictory. Industrial capitalism freed women from the endless round of household productive labor, and in one and the same gesture tore away the skills which had been the source of women’s unique dignity. It loosened the bonds of patriarchy, and at once imposed the chains of wage labor. It “freed” some women for a self-supporting spinsterhood, and conscripted others into sexual peonage. And so on.
It was these changes—the backward steps as well as the forward ones—which provided the material ground for the emergence of the Woman Question. For women generally, from the hardworking women of the poorer classes to the cushioned daughters of the upper classes, the Woman Question was a matter of immediate personal experience: the consciousness of possibilities counterpoised against prohibitions, opportunities against ancient obligations, instincts against external necessities. The Woman Question was nothing less than the question of how women would survive, and what would become of them, in the modern world. The women who lost years of their youth to nervous depression, the women who first tasted the “liberation” of grinding jobs and exploitative sex, the women who poured their hearts into diaries while their strength drained into childbearing and rearing—our great- and great-great-grandmothers—lived out the Woman Question with their lives.
The New Masculinism
At the same time that it arose as a subjective dilemma among women, the Woman Question entered the realm of public life as an “issue” subject to the deliberations of scholars, statesmen, and scientists. There can be no clearer acknowledgment of the problem than Freud’s:
Throughout history people have knocked their heads against the riddle of the nature of femininity.… Nor will you have escaped worrying over this problem—those of you who are men; to those of you who are women this will not apply—you are yourselves the problem.9
For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts Advice to Women Page 3