Here the world of private life and biological existence has become suffused with a holy radiance. Not a whisper from the marketplace must be allowed to penetrate this “temple,” where a woman lives out her days in innocence.§ Here will be preserved a quaint and domesticated version of patriarchy, as if nothing had ever happened in the world outside. There is in the romantic spirit a passionate and humanistic rejection of the Market, but it settles for only this furtive and half-hearted rebellion: not to overthrow the Market, but to escape from it—into the arms of woman. The deity who makes Ruskin’s ideal home sacred is no vengeful patriarch, capable of driving out money-lenders and idolators, but a mere “household god.”
The romantic imagination feverishly set out to construct a woman worthy of occupying Ruskin’s “vestal temple.” The guidelines were simple: woman should be, in every feature, a counterpoint to the Market; she should be the antithesis of economic man. Now, from our perspective, there is a real basis to this romantic construction: there is a strength in woman’s nurturance which does contradict the rules and assumptions of the Market, and which is potentially opposed to the Market. But the romantics have no interest in discovering the authentic strengths and impulses of women—any more than they had, in most cases, in an authentic attack on the inhumanity of the Market. The romantic construction of woman is as artificial as the sixteen-inch waists and three-foot-wide hooped skirts popular in the mid-nineteenth century. Economic man is rational; therefore romantic woman is intuitive, emotional, and incapable of quantitative reasoning. Economic man is competitive; she is tender and submissive. Economic man is self-interested; she is self-effacing, even masochistic. A popular Victorian poem depicts the result of all these negations: a creature who was supposed to be all that is “human” (as opposed to “economic”) and ends up being subhuman, more like a puppy than a priestess:
Her soul, that once with pleasure shook
Did any eyes her beauty own,
Now wonders how they dare to look
On what belongs to him alone;
The indignity of taking gifts
Exhilarates her loving breast;
A rapture of submission lifts
Her life into celestial rest;
There’s nothing left of what she was;
Back to the babe the woman dies,
And all the wisdom that she has
Is to love him for being wise.‖ 16
The feminist who does not gag on the foregoing lines can respond with a certain cynical impatience: the lovely wife of romantic yearnings is in fact her husband’s financial dependent and ward. Charlotte Perkins Gilman argued that she was a kind of combined housemaid-prostitute, earning her keep. And Olive Schreiner’s heroine Lyndall defiantly declares:
… a woman who has sold herself, even for a ring and a new name, need hold her skirt aside for no creature in the street. They both earn their bread in one way.17
To cover with “rapture” and “exhilaration” the acknowledged “indignity of taking gifts” is from a feminist—or simply a rationalist point of view—a perverse denial of economic reality. Feminism may suffer from being overly cynical about family relationships and overly accepting of the “free” interactions of the Market, but it has the courage to acknowledge the social world the Market has created; it does not turn coyly away from facts which happen to be unpleasant.
Romanticism, on the other hand, is by its nature committed to lies and evasion. The glorified home allows the sexual romantic to escape from the Market, and his intense need for that home—precisely as an escape—forces him to lie about the realities of the human relationships within it. Marx and Engels had rejoiced prematurely that the triumph of capitalism “at last compelled [man] to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.” Romanticism befogs the senses, draws lace curtains against the industrial landscape outside, and offers a cozy dream in which men are men and women are—mercifully—not men.
Science and the Triumph of Domesticity
Yet it was romanticism, in the form of the domestic solution, that triumphed, from the Victorian ideal of the nineteenth century to the feminist mystique of the mid-twentieth century. When the cataclysmic transition from the Old Order ended in the United States and Europe, when society began to re-form itself into something that could once again be called an “order,” a settled and reproducible way of life, that new “order” rested heavily on the romantic conception of woman and the home. The dominant ideology defined woman as a perpetual alien, and the home as an idyllic refuge from the unpleasant but “real” world of men. Domesticity triumphed not only because it was psychologically comforting to a majority of men (and many, many women) but also for a pragmatic reason that the sexual rationalists of the early industrial period could never have foreseen. Women’s domesticity, it turned out, meshed ideally with the needs of the maturing economy, which would increasingly depend on the economic pattern of individual domestic consumption to fuel its growth. And, once shaped by domestic ideology, woman makes a more convenient worker when she is needed by industry: she is supposed to work for low wages, typically in work which requires submissiveness and/or nurturance, and quickly goes back where she “belongs” when the jobs run out.
But the legitimacy of this new sexual/economic order has only been secured through great effort. The domestic solution, by its very nature, cannot be justified by direct application of the laws and assumptions of the Market. There is nothing in the logic of the Market that can distinguish between male and female (or black and white) workers, consumers, owners, or investors. From a hard-headed capitalist point of view, the only distinctions that matter ultimately are those that can be measured in hard currency: variations in human anatomy or color make no difference in the ledger book. And the revolutionary new ideas of “rights” and “liberty” that the rising middle class had once hurled in the face of monarchs were implicitly oblivious to gender, as feminists have always been quick to point out. In fact, the tenets of the business world, and the political ideals of the class who dominated that world, had opened the ground for feminism. The domestic solution was forced to seek legitimacy outside the normal, workaday world of men—from some authority higher than either economic realism or political idealism.
That authority was science. For over a hundred and fifty years, the domestic answer to the Woman Question would be articulated not in political or aesthetic or moral terms but in the language of science. And herein lies a painful irony. Science had been a revolutionary force—opposed to prejudice, folly, and obfuscation whenever they arose. But as the Old Order faded into the past, and the “rising middle class” became the new ruling class, science made its peace with the social order. The science which arose to the defense of domesticity was a pale, and not wholly legitimate, descendant of the science which had once challenged the authority of kings and popes.
The scientific experts, who committed themselves to the defense of the domestic solution—professional physicians, psychologists, domestic scientists, parent educators, etc.—each claimed a specialized body of scientific knowledge. Their careers rested on this claim. Without a connection to science, they have no legitimacy, no audience for their ideas or market for their skills. But science, in their hands, is weirdly distorted and finally debased beyond recognition—as this book will illustrate.
Science had once attacked entrenched authority, but the new scientific expert became an authority himself. His business was not to seek out what is true, but to pronounce on what is appropriate.
The experts’ rise to power over the lives of women was neither swift nor easy. The old networks through which women had learned from each other had to be destroyed, or discredited. The power of great wealth had to be invoked against competing sources of information and skill. The authority of science had to be promoted as if science were not a critical method, but a new religion. Many women resisted, clinging to the old wisdom and customs, or, more radically, organizing new networks of mutual sup
port and study.
But the experts could not have triumphed had not so many women welcomed them, sought them out, and even (in the early twentieth century) organized to promote their influence. It was not only gullible women, or conservative women, who embraced the experts, but independent-minded and progressive women, even feminists. The experts were “scientific” and it seemed that only science could vanquish ignorance and injustice. Had not science opposed the patriarchal authorities of the Old Order, and, by implication, the entire web of constraints which had bound women for centuries? This was the basis of the “romance” between women and the new experts: science had been on the side of progress and freedom. To ignore the dictates of science was surely to remain in the “dark ages”; to follow them was to join the forward rush of history. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ellen Richards, Margaret Sanger, and, it could be argued, Jane Addams, were all, in their different ways, firm believers in the progressiveness of science and its representative experts. It would take another two generations for the “romance” to unravel itself, and for women to discover that the experts had, in fact, betrayed science, and betrayed them.
* The reader should be reminded that, unlike some feminist writers, we do not use the word “patriarchy” to mean male dominance in general. We use “patriarchy” to refer to a specific historical organization of family and social life (see p. 9). So when we talk about the “decline of patriarchy” we are by no means suggesting that male dominance has declined—only that it has taken a different historical form.
† In this light Freud’s theory of the Oedipus Complex takes on historical meaning. Freud lived in a time when the “sons” of the triumphant bourgeoisie were in the ascendency and the “fathers”—the traditional authorities of society—were in the decline. Freud could discern the marks of the struggle—envy, guilt, and the effort to become like the father—in the psychological makeup of the sons. Intellectually, Freud himself was among the most daring of the “sons.”
‡ Feminist movements themselves have oscillated between rationalist and romantic ideas: the first generation of American feminists (Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, etc.) were unswerving sexual rationalists, but the second generation, which came to maturity in the eighteen eighties and nineties, unhesitatingly embraced sexual romanticism, arguing that women should have the vote, not because it was their right, but because they were mothers, “the guardians of the race.” Late twentieth-century feminism was overwhelmingly rationalist, but was not without undercurrents of romanticism: feminists who rejected “integration” and aspired to resurrect a pretechnological matriarchy, or rule by women. Women have pinned their hopes on technological “progress,” or they have sought vindication in a remote and imagined past—all in the name of feminism.
§ The romantic nostalgia of the nineteenth century was not reserved for women. The primitive peoples uncovered by expanding Euro-American capitalism, lived, like women of the industrial countries, in the shadowy realm outside the Market. To the romantic imagination, they shared with women generally the human qualities denied by the Market, and gladdened the world with their pastoral simplicity. In the words of psychologist G. Stanley Hall: “Nearly all savages are in many respects children or youth of adult size.… They are naturally amiable, peaceful among themselves, affectionate, light-hearted, thoroughly good-natured, and the faults we see are those we have made. They live a life of feeling, emotion, and impulse, and scores of testimonials from those who know them intimately and who have no predilection for Rousseau-like views are to the effect that to know a typical savage is to love him.”15
Hall castigated imperialist attempts to “commercialize them and overwork them.” They must be allowed to remain outside the Market, “to linger in the paradise of childhood,” for without their refreshing charm “our earthly home would be left desolate indeed.”
‖ It has become common today to confuse this kind of romanticist goo with patriarchal ideology. But the two views of women are fundamentally incompatible. Patriarchy’s women were not gushing, limp-wristed creatures; they were hard workers and stout partners. And patriarchal ideology never for a moment dreamed of ascribing to women moral superiority, as the romantics did in making women the custodians of the Sacred. Patriarchal ideology rested on the assumption of women’s moral inferiority and their utter dependency on males to mediate and interpret scripture. Romanticism draws heavily on archaic imagery, but this is only nostalgia—a product of the new epoch, not a continuation of the Old Order.
THE RISE OF THE EXPERTS
TWO
Witches, Healers, and Gentleman Doctors
The story of the rise of the psychomedical experts—the doctors, the psychologists, and sundry related professionals—has often been told as an allegory of science versus superstition: on one side, the clear-headed, masculine spirit of science; on the other side, a dark morass of female superstition, old wives’ tales, rumors preserved as fact. In this allegorical version, the triumph of science was as inevitable as human progress or natural evolution: the experts triumphed because they were right.
But the real story is not so simple, and the outcome not so clearly “progressive.” It is true that the experts represented a less parochial vision than that of the individual woman, submerged in her family and household routines: the experts had studied; they were in a position to draw on a wider range of human experience than any one woman could know. But too often the experts’ theories were grossly unscientific, while the traditional lore of the women contained wisdom based on centuries of observation and experience. The rise of the experts was not the inevitable triumph of right over wrong, fact over myth; it began with a bitter conflict which set women against men, class against class. Women did not learn to look to an external “science” for guidance until after their old skills had been ripped away, and the “wise women” who preserved them had been silenced, or killed.
The conflict between women’s traditional wisdom and male expertise centered on the right to heal. For all but the very rich, healing had traditionally been the prerogative of women. The art of healing was linked to the tasks and the spirit of motherhood; it combined wisdom and nurturance, tenderness and skill. All but the most privileged women were expected to be at least literate in the language of herbs and healing techniques; the most learned women traveled widely to share their skills. The women who distinguished themselves as healers were not only midwives caring for other women, but “general practitioners,” herbalists, and counselors serving men and women alike.
The historical antagonist of the female lay healer was the male medical professional. The notion of medicine as a profession was in some ways an advance over the unexamined tradition of female healing: a profession requires systematic training, and, at least in principle, some formal mechanisms of accountability. But a profession is also defined by its exclusiveness, and has been since the professions of medicine and law first took form in medieval Europe. While the female lay healer operated within a network of information-sharing and mutual support, the male professional hoarded up his knowledge as a kind of property, to be dispensed to wealthy patrons or sold on the market as a commodity. His goal was not to spread the skills of healing, but to concentrate them within the elite interest group which the profession came to represent. Thus the triumph of the male medical profession is of crucial significance for our story: it involved the destruction of women’s networks of mutual help—leaving women in a position of isolation and dependency—and it established a model of expertism as the prerogative of a social elite.
The conflict over healing in nineteenth-century America had its roots in the darkest ages of European history. The American female lay healer, like Anne Hutchinson, who was renowned as a midwife as well as a religious leader, represented a tradition which stretched back across the ocean and through countless generations of women. And the earliest American medical professionals, like the energetic Dr. Benjamin Rush, drew their aristocratic ideal for the profession from a tradition wh
ich went back to the medieval universities.
In Europe the conflict between female lay healing and the medical profession had taken a particularly savage form: the centuries-long witch hunts which scar the history of England, Germany, France, and Italy. The witch hunts themselves were linked to many broad historical developments: the reformation, the beginnings of commerce, and a period of peasant uprisings against the feudal aristocracy. But for our purposes the important point is that the targets of the witch hunts were, almost exclusively, peasant women, and among them female lay healers were singled out for persecution. It is to this aspect of the witch hunts that we now briefly turn.
The Witch Hunts
The extent of the witch craze is startling: in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries there were thousands upon thousands of executions—usually live burnings at the stake—in Germany, Italy, and other countries. In the mid-sixteenth century the terror spread to France, and finally to England. One writer has estimated the number of executions at an average of six hundred a year for certain German cities—or two a day, “leaving out Sundays.” Nine hundred witches were destroyed in a single year in the Würzburg area, and a thousand in and around Como. At Toulouse, four hundred were put to death in a day. In the Bishopric of Trier, in 1585, two villages were left with only one female inhabitant each. Many writers have estimated the total number killed to have been in the millions. Women made up some 85 percent of those executed—old women, young women, and children.1
For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts Advice to Women Page 5