For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts Advice to Women

by Barbara Ehrenreich

  Patronizing as this statement may sound, it is not an example of patriarchal thought. Freud projects his own age’s obsession with the Woman Question to a universal and timeless status. Yet the old patriarchs would never have raised such a question themselves. To them, the nature and purpose of women posed no riddle. But the old ways of thinking about things—which posited a static, hierarchical social order presided over by the Heavenly Father—were already losing their credibility when Freud wrote. The “miracles” of technology had outdone the feats of the saints several times over; the smokestacks of industrial towns had outgrown the church steeples. The new age needed a new way of explaining human society and human nature. That way, as it developed in the last three centuries, was not accepting but questioning; not religious but scientific. Freud’s riddle does not represent a tradition running back to patriarchal times. The mentality which framed the Woman Question and later drafted the significant answers to it, was born with the rise of the new order in the struggle against patriarchal authority.

  If the history of the West from sixteen hundred to the eighteen hundreds was condensed down to a single simple allegory, it would be the drama of the overthrow of the once all-powerful father.† In politics, in science, in philosophy, there was one dominant theme: the struggle against the old structures of patriarchal authority, represented by the king, the feudal lords, the Pope, and often, the father in the family. To put it another way, the Old Order did not simply collapse under the weight of impersonal forces, it was defeated in actual human confrontations. The Market itself was not an abstract “system” expanding as a result of mysterious internal pressures. It consisted, at any particular time, of real men, acting through a network of economic relationships. The expansion of this network required, at every step of the way, hostile confrontations over the constraints imposed by patriarchal authority—feudal restrictions on trade, guild restrictions on manufacturing, religious prohibitions against usury and profit-making. It was a time, remote from this age of corporate domination, when the members of the rising middle class—the “bourgeoisie”—were not yet “the establishment,” but the rebels. In the English, American, and French revolutions, they took up arms and led large numbers of ordinary people against the forces which would restrict trade and individual profit-making (“the pursuit of happiness”). The French Revolution featured the ultimate collective act of patricide: the murder of the king (and less dramatically, but no less significantly, the closing of the churches). The triumphant revolutionaries cast off the yoke of the father and declared themselves a fraternity of free citizens.

  While revolutionaries of the rising middle class slashed out against Old Order restrictions on business, letting crowned and tonsured heads fall where they might, thinkers and churchmen were working to develop systems of thought which would be congenial to the new age. Philosophy (especially in Britain and the United States) abandoned its search for the Good and the True and made a pragmatic peace with the materialism and individualism of the Market economy. Religion learned to turn an ethical blind spot toward the Market and confine itself to matters of private life. But the way of thinking which best suited the conditions of the Market and the inclinations of the men who dominated it did not come from philosophy or religion; it came from science.

  Science had led the intellectual assault on patriarchal ideology. Ever since Galileo, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, had faced the Inquisition over the issue of whether the earth was the center of the universe, science had set itself up as antagonistic, or at least disdainful, toward religious doctrine and traditional authority in all fields. Galileo, and the scientists who followed him, claimed the entire observable world—stars, tides, rocks, animals and “man” himself—as an area for unfettered investigation, just as businessmen were laying stake to the marketplace as a secular zone, free of religious or feudal interference. Newton’s physics, Lavoisier’s chemistry, and later, Darwin’s biology, had no need of gods or other incomprehensible forces to explain nature. (Except, perhaps, to get things started in the first place.) Science grew with the Market. It took the most revolutionary aspects of the business mentality—its loyalty to empirical fact, its hard-headed pragmatism, its penchant for numerical abstraction—and hammered them into a precision tool for the understanding and mastery of the material world.

  Science mocked the old patriarchal ideology, ripped through its pretensions, and left it as we know it today—a legacy of rituals, legends, and bedtime stories retold to children. Science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the sworn enemy of ghosts and mystery and mumbo jumbo—the traditional trappings of patriarchy—and an old friend to revolutionaries. Socialists like Karl Marx and feminists like Charlotte Perkins Gilman were devotees of science as a liberating force against injustice and domination. “Let us never forget that long before we did,” proclaimed a participant in the Paris Commune, “the sciences and philosophy fought against the tyrants.”10

  We are indebted, then, to the critical and scientific spirit which arose with the Market, for defeating the patriarchal ideology which had for centuries upheld the tyrants. But to be opposed to patriarchal structures of authority is not necessarily to be feminist in intent or sensibility. The emerging world view of the new age was, in fact, distinctly masculinist. It was a world view which proceeded from the Market, from the realm of economic, or “public” life. It was by its nature external to women, capable of seeing them only as “others” or aliens.

  Patriarchal ideology subordinated women too, of course. But it was not formed in some other realm than that inhabited by women, for life in the Old Order had not been fractured into separate realms. Masculinist opinion, however, is cast in a realm apart from women. It proceeds from the male half of what has become a sexually segregated world. It reflects not some innate male bias but the logic and assumptions of that realm, which are the logic and assumptions of the capitalist market.

  The masculinist view of human nature almost automatically excludes women and her nature. Whether expressed in popular opinion or learned science, it is not only biased toward biological man and his nature, but specifically toward capitalist man, the “economic man” described by Adam Smith. Economic man leads a profoundly lonely existence. Like the hard little atoms of eighteenth-century physics, he courses through space on his own trajectory, only incidentally interacting with the swarm of other atomized men, each bound to his own path. He is propelled by an urgent sense of self-interest, and guided by a purely rational and calculative intellect.

  To economic man, the inanimate things of the marketplace—money and the commodities which represent money—are alive and possessed of almost sacred significance. Conversely, things truly alive are, from a strictly “rational” point of view, worthless except as they impinge on the Market and affect one’s economic self-interest: employees are “production factors”; a good wife is an “asset”; etc. The successful economic man, the capitalist, ceaselessly transforms life—human labor and effort—into lifeless capital, an activity which is to him eminently rational, sane, and “human.” Ultimately the laws of the Market come to appear as the laws of human nature.

  From this vantage point, woman inevitably appears alien, mysterious. She inhabits (or is supposed to inhabit) the “other” realm, the realm of private life, which looks from the Market like a pre-industrial backwater, or a looking-glass land that inverts all that is normal in the “real” world of men. The limited functions now reserved for that realm attach to woman’s person and make her too appear to be an anachronism, or a curious inversion of normality. Biologically and psychologically, she seems to contradict the basic principles of the Market. The Market transforms human activities and needs into dead things—commodities—woman can, and does, create life. Economic man is an individual, a monad, connected to others only through a network of impersonal economic relationships; woman is embedded in the family, permitted no individual identity apart from her biological relationships to others. Economic man acts i
n perfect self-interest; a woman cannot base her relationships within the family on the principle of quid pro quo: she gives.

  It appears, from a masculinist perspective, that woman might be a more primitive version of man—not because there is prima facie evidence of her lower intelligence, but because of her loving and giving nature, which is itself taken as evidence of lower intelligence. Rousseau’s “noble savage” like his ideal woman was compassionate and nurturing. And Darwin found that:

  Woman seems to differ from man in mental disposition, chiefly in her greater tenderness and less selfishness.…

  It is generally admitted that with woman the power of intuition, of rapid perception, and perhaps of imitation, are more strongly marked than in man; but some, at least, of these faculties are characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilization.11

  Everything that seems uniquely female becomes a challenge to the rational scientific intellect. Woman’s body, with its autonomous rhythms and generative possibilities, appears to the masculinist vision as a “frontier,” another part of the natural world to be explored and mined. A new science—gynecology—arose in the nineteenth century to study this strange territory and concluded that the female body is not only primitive, but deeply pathological. (See Chapter 4.) Woman’s psyche, of course, becomes an acknowledged scientific enigma, like the inner substance of matter, or the shape of the universe. The American psychologist G. Stanley Hall calls it “terra incognita,” and when Freud wrote of the “riddle of the nature of femininity” he spoke for generations of scientists who puzzled over the strange asymmetry of nature which had made only one sex fully normal.

  The discovery of woman as an anomaly—a “question”—this was the essential masculinist perception. Patriarchal ideology had seen women as inferior, but always as organically linked to the entire hierarchy which extended from the household to the heavens. Now those links had been broken; patriarchal ideology, which had been the organizing principle of human society for centuries, lay tattered and demoralized, and yet woman had not been freed by its downfall, but had become a curiosity, a social issue which would somehow have to be resolved.

  Feminist and Domestic Solutions

  Within the framework of the new masculinist ideology there are only two possible answer to the Woman Question. We will call them “feminist” and “domestic.” Many people would call them, after a quick glance, “feminist” and “male chauvinist.” But it is not that simple. They are opposed to each other, but they emerge from the same ground and they grow together, back to back, in the development of masculinist culture. At any moment, each “solution” would have its proponents, and neither could be completely put to rest. But ultimately one would come to dominate Anglo-American and Western culture in general from the early nineteenth century until the rise of the women’s liberation movement in our own time. That choice would be overwhelmingly for the domestic solution—and it would be enforced in real life with all the weight of the economy and the persuasion of scientific authority.

  The feminist answer is, very simply, to admit women into modern society on an equal footing with men. If the problem is that women are in some sense “out,” then it can be solved by letting them “in.” Feminism shares the critical spirit of science: it mocks the patriarchal myths of female inferiority, denounces modern “sex roles” as arbitrary social inventions, and dreams of a social order in which women and men will be not only equal, but, insofar as possible, functionally interchangeable. Born in the exuberantly clear-headed days of the French Revolution and nurtured by every succeeding wave of social movement, feminism is a radical ideology. It takes the ideals of middle-class liberalism—individual freedom and political equality—to a conclusion which even the French and American revolutionaries of the eighteenth century found dangerously extremist.

  But the feminist position has, ironically, something in common with masculinism. It looks out from the Market at the world of women, critical of that world but largely uncritical of the Market, except insofar as it has excluded women. Charlotte Perkins Gilman held that the home was “primitive” and that women, as a result of their confinement to it, suffered from “arrested development” to the point where they had become almost a separate species. Betty Friedan, one of the best-known feminists of our period, found the home a “trap” and housewives stunted in mind and spirit. But in recoiling, justifiably, from “woman’s sphere” (and not so justifiably, from the women in it), feminism rushes too eagerly into the public sphere as men have defined it. “We demand,” wrote South African feminist Olive Schreiner, a feminist in the spirit of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, that:

  … we also shall have our share of honored and socially useful human toil, our full half of the labor of the Children of Woman. We demand nothing more than this, and we will take nothing less. This is our “WOMAN’S RIGHT!”12

  Feminists seldom question the nature of that “toil” and whom it serves. Gilman, and to an even greater degree, Friedan, saw women entering “fulfilling” careers, presumably in business and the professions, with no evident concern about the availability of such jobs to all women, much less about the larger social purpose of the available occupations. The predominant feminist program is one of assimilation, with ancillary changes (day care, for example) as necessary to promote women’s rapid integration into what has been the world of men.

  If the ideological assault on patriarchal authority had made feminist goals thinkable, the industrial revolution made them seem achievable, even inevitable. The bulk of the labor that women had previously done was now done in factories; why shouldn’t the remaining domestic activities follow suit? Gilman urged that restaurants, kindergartens, housecleaners, be set up “on a business basis” to take over women’s chores. Freed of this “clumsy tangle of rudimentary industries,” the family would become a voluntary association of individuals. Women would no longer be identified by a mere sexual or biological connection to other people, but by their independent endeavors in the public world. From a nineteenth-century vantage point, these developments seemed likely to happen by themselves. The machine was eliminating the importance of the muscular difference between the sexes; and the factory was proving itself far more efficient than the home. The Market had taken over so many of women’s activities, from clothesmaking to food processing—what was to stop it from swallowing up the home and family and spitting out autonomous, genderless individuals?

  It was, in large part, the horror of such a prospect that inspired the other answer to the Woman Question: domesticity. In keeping with the masculinist spirit, proponents of the domestic solution see women as anomalous, half outside the world of men. The feminist rebelled against this situation; the celebrants of domesticity find comfort in it. They cherish the mystery that is woman and propose to keep her mysterious, by keeping her outside.

  Just as feminism is linked historically to a larger stream of rationalist thinking, the “cult of domesticity” emerged with the “romantic movement” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.‡ Rationalism welcomed the new age of industrial capitalism; romanticism shrank back from it in revulsion. The industrial revolution, as a walk through any major city reminds us, was an aesthetic tragedy. Green pastures gave way overnight to the “dark, satanic mills” which tormented Blake’s vision; rustic villages, forests, streams, vanished with the onslaught of industrial “progress.” Within the world of the industrial capitalist Market, human relationships never achieved the impersonal benevolence which Adam Smith had predicted. The “invisible hand” which Smith had invoked to keep the social order running smoothly and fairly did not reach down to soothe the bankrupt businessman, the starving worker, or the farmer driven from his land. It was a brutal world, not even tempered by the charitable paternalism and “noblesse oblige” of feudal times. Where middle-class revolutions had made men free, their freedom consisted in the solitary right to sink or swim, to “make it” or be crushed by those who were making it. The romantic spirit
reached with nostalgia for the Old Order, or for imaginary versions of it: a society not yet atomized, but linked organically in trust and mutual need; enlivened by the warmth of “irrational” passions, and enriched by the beauty of an untouched nature.

  Nothing could be more abhorrent from a romantic standpoint than the feminist program. To dissolve the home (by removing the last domestic chores and letting women out to work) would be to remove the last refuge from the horrors of industrial society. Communal dining halls, child care services, and housekeeping services would turn out to be outposts of the hated factory—or factories themselves, imposing their cold and regimented operations on the most intimate and personal details of life. And to liberate woman would be to take away the only thing which cushioned man from psychic destruction in the rough world of the Market. If she became a female version of “economic man,” an individual pursuing her own trajectory, then indeed it would be a world without love, without human warmth. The lonely prospect which stretched before economic man—“… a forbidding and frostbound wilderness to be subdued with aching limbs beneath solitary stars”13—would have to be accepted as inescapable reality.

  But this, of course, is what the romantic could not do. Man must have a refuge from the savage scramble of the Market, he must have consolation for his lonely quest as “economic man.” The home would be that refuge, woman would be that consolation. The English critic and author John Ruskin laid out exactly what the romanticist seeks in “women’s sphere”:

  This is the true nature of home—it is the place of peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt and division. In so far as it is not this, it is not home; so far as the anxieties of the outer life penetrate into it, and the inconsistently minded, unknown, unloved or hostile society of the outer world is allowed by either husband or wife to cross the threshold it ceases to be a home; it is then only a part of the outer world which you have roofed over and lighted fire in. But so far as it is a sacred place, a vestal temple, a temple of the hearth watched over by household gods.… so far it vindicates the name and fulfills the praise of home.14