The Sex Factor

by Victoria Bateman

  Source: Ortiz-Ospina and Roser (2018); Mauro et al. (2015)

  However, that does not mean that the ideological battles of the past are dead and buried. The events of the last decade – a global financial crisis that rivals that of 1929, together with increasing concern about inequality – have caused popular dissatisfaction with the status quo. Something has happened that has never been seen before: people have lost faith in both capitalism and the state. Politics is in the process of being remade.

  We might like to think that the state versus market question is rather old hat ‒ that we have a much less polarized and more pragmatic view today than we did during the Cold War ‒ but economists on both the left and the right are digging in their heels. On the left, they increasingly point to the failures of markets, highlighting new points of focus for the state, whether in the form of ‘nudges’, regulation or tax and spend.4 On the right, by contrast, contemporary economic problems, including the global financial crisis and rising inequality, have been re-spun, not as a result of too much capitalism but of too little.5 On one side, the focus is on criticizing the market and trumpeting the virtues of the state. On the other, we find the exact opposite.6 Blinkers are back in fashion, to the distaste of anyone in the centre.

  It's time to remove our blinkers, and, in the process of doing so, it's vital that we listen to what feminist thinking can offer. Feminist economists and thinkers have been pivotal in offering critiques of capitalism.7 Being on the edge of the economy, all too often in the vulnerable position of needing to feed their families with few financial resources and the burden of unpaid care, women have also often borne the brunt of its most exploitative elements. In the same way that Marxists argue that capitalism leads to the exploitation of the poor, Marxist feminists have argued that capitalism leads to the exploitation of women. According to this line of thinking, capitalism keeps women in their place; it is not in the interest of the system to promote equality when it can instead be taking advantage of women. For these thinkers, feminism is about more than the pursuit of equality of opportunity within the current system; it involves overthrowing the system. Capitalism and feminism are, we are told, inherently incompatible.

  For libertarian feminists, by contrast, the idea of replacing capitalism with an opposite kind of system could not be more terrifying.8 On the face of it, alternative systems might look appealing. The bright red revolutionary posters of the Soviet Union depicting healthy and strong factory women certainly give that impression. They promise equality and freedom, putting what's good for society ahead of any single individual. In practice, however, alternatives to capitalism place greater power in the hands of the two bodies that history has shown to provide no guarantee of women's freedom: the state and society.

  Given its rather diverse thoughts on capitalism, feminist thinking provides the perfect backdrop against which to reflect critically on both the state and the market. In what follows, we will begin with Marxist feminism, which provides a critique of the market, before moving on to highlight the often overlooked social benefits of the market. Along the way, we will, however, acknowledge that not every market is the same, meaning that the market can be made to work better, the two limiting factors being the degree of progressiveness of society and the capabilities of the state. In the second chapter, I will consider the role of the state in greater detail and, as with markets, will note that not every state is the same; some are much better than others. I will look at the formation of the modern-day state, explaining how countries such as Britain managed to build their relatively capable states, pointing to the essential role played by women's freedom. Along the way, two questions should be in the back of our minds: how have women affected the development of the state, and what has the state done for women in return? And, more generally, can the market and state work together to deliver more equitable and sustainable prosperity?

  Notes

  1 Cudd and Holmstrom (2011).

  2 Mauro et al. (2015).

  3 Data from OECD (figures for 2008).

  4 Mazzucato (2011); Stiglitz (2016); Thaler and Sunstein (2008).

  5 Allison (2018); Kleiner and Krueger (2013); Furman (2016).

  6 Bateman (2016a).

  7 The literature is extensive. For a start, see Mies (1986); Fraser (2013b); Federici (2004); McClintock (1995).

  8 McElroy (1991); Taylor (1992); Abbey (2014); Nussbaum (2013). For a feminist interpretation of Ayn Rand, see Gladstein and Sciabarra (1999).

  6

  Marx Versus Markets

  Marxism has had a strong influence on feminist thinking, leading many feminists to be highly sceptical of markets. In this chapter, I therefore want to take a fresh look at the market, considering not only its downside, as told with the help of Marxist feminism, but also its upside, an upside that differs substantially from those more commonly emphasized by economists and which, according to Stiglitz, looks increasingly slippery.1 We will see that rather than being the enemy of radicals, bohemians and non-conformists, the market can help to undermine the social norms and state-imposed restrictions that keep people ‒ including women ‒ where society would like to see them: ‘in their place’. But, as we will also see, not all markets perform this task in an equally effective way. That's because markets do not exist independently of the state or society. Wherever an economy lies on the political continuum, society ‒ not the state or the market ‒ is always the key obstacle where women's freedom is concerned.

  Marx: The Secret Sexist

  Karl Marx isn't known for his feminism. In fact, if you read Das Kapital, you get the distinct impression that he was a secret (or not so secret) sexist. In a section titled ‘Labour of Women and Children’, he notes that women's entry into the labour force hurt male wages and meant that wives were unable to undertake their ‘free labour’ duties within the home. Marx's friend, Friedrich Engels, did, however, take gender inequality seriously. His explanation for it was, however, simple: the birth of private property. Like other forms of inequality, gender inequality was reduced to class. Overthrowing capitalism was the panacea.

  As feminism spread across the social sciences in the course of the 1970s, Marxists began to take it more seriously, with Heidi Hartmann pushing for a ‘progressive union’ between the two.2 In 1986, Maria Mies penned what was to become a classic work in the Marxist feminist literature. Entitled Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, she argued that capitalist production depends upon the exploitation of women, as both cheap labour within factories and the home. As she writes of the latter: ‘It is my thesis that this general production of life, or subsistence production ‒ mainly performed through the non-wage labour of women and other non-wage labourers as slaves, contract workers and peasants in the colonies ‒ constitutes the perennial basis upon which “capitalist productive labour” can be built up and exploited.’

  In her Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici went further, suggesting that capitalism relied on violence ‒ against women, the poor and ethnic minorities ‒ in order to create a class of landless labourers who were entirely dependent on capitalists.3

  This Marxist vein of feminist thinking continues to the present, though with more of an ecological and intersectional focus. Emma Dowling recently argued that:

  Capitalism as a system organises production and reproduction in such a way as to enable the private appropriation of the social wealth that is produced, relying on sources of unpaid labour and, as is becoming acutely obvious in the face of climate change, extensive ecological resources to do so … What is at stake then is the question of how the material relations of power and wealth that underpin the control over the reproduction of livelihood are organised, maintained and reinforced.4

  As the world has gone global, Marxist feminism has highlighted the way in which professional western women rely on the labour of poorer women elsewhere in the world, whether indirectly in the form of cheaply produced clothing and household goods or directly in the form of cleaners and nannies �
�� and even surrogate mothers.5

  According to Nancy Fraser, liberal-leaning feminists have engaged in a ‘dangerous liaison’ with capitalism.6 They have been fooled into believing that they could pursue equality of opportunity within the current system, rather than seeking to challenge the system. Marxist feminism suggests that the strategy of ‘lean in’ will never be enough, that women need to ‘lean out’. ‘Leaning in’, a term coined by Sheryl Sandberg, involves ‘fixing women’ ‒ making them more in tune with the workings of the market. Rather than fixing women, Marxists argue that we need to fix the world.

  The implication of Marxist feminism is that gender inequality is good for capitalist growth, and that capitalism is, therefore, bad for women. Feminists have, of course, regularly pointed out that globalization relies on cheap female ‘sweatshop’ labour, and the economist Stephanie Seguino has found evidence that a greater gender wage gap can boost economic growth by allowing the export-oriented manufacturing sector to take advantage of lower-paid women.7 Turning to history, Oxford economic historian Jane Humphries has argued that it was cheap female and child labour that fuelled the British Industrial Revolution.8

  But, just because cheap female (and child) labour existed, it does not mean that it was ultimately helpful to the process of industrialization or economic growth; it could have instead reduced the pressure on businesses to automate, thereby limiting the pace of productivity advance and economic growth. Low wages also make it more difficult for families to invest in their children's skills or to save for the future, thereby hurting growth.

  Evidence that cheap female and child labour was hurting as opposed to helping the Industrial Revolution can be found in the Factory Commission Report of 1833. At the time, there was a popular outcry about the working conditions facing women and children, and so one of the purposes of the report was to ascertain whether regulating female and child labour would hurt the expanding industrial sector. The Commissioners therefore sent inspectors to talk to factory owners, supervisors, workers, doctors and midwives in industrial towns. One of the questions asked of factory owners and managers was how they would respond to restrictions on the use of cheap labour, including of child labour. The answers were clear: they would have to adopt more automated machinery.9 In other words, the pockets of cheap labour that no doubt existed during the Industrial Revolution were not always helping the Industrial Revolution, they were limiting it. They were allowing businesses to get away with using cheap labour when they would have otherwise had to increase the rate at which they were developing and adopting new technology. Even though it makes life temporarily easier for businesses, cheap labour is not good for growth in the longer run. As Naila Kabeer writes: ‘Women's lower costs and lesser bargaining power in the market place have been the basis of export-oriented growth based on labour-intensive manufacturing … [but] there is … no trade-off between gender equality and economic growth once the focus moves from short-run gains to long-term, sustainable and pro-poor growth.’10

  In sum, Marxist feminism, is correct to alert us to the way in which power imbalances can distort women's wages, and how their unpaid reproductive and caring labour is made invisible, leaving women in a much more vulnerable position than would otherwise be the case ‒ such as with lower wages. However, this does not mean that markets and gender equality cannot coexist. Gender equality is, as we saw in part I, good for growth ‒ and it's also better for the planet, leading to growth that is more sustainable.11 And, importantly, that gender equality, as we will see more below, is often supported by the market. Furthermore, and as we will see in the next chapter, we cannot always rely on the state to do the same. Markets are a necessary ingredient. The question this will leave us with is how can we make sure that markets produce more equitable and sustainable outcomes?

  Why we Need Markets

  Staring history in the face, it's easy to portray Karl Marx as the radical of his age. At a time when capitalism was in its early stages, he offered a seemingly devastating critique, suggesting not only that it oppressed the masses but that it would eat itself alive. According to Vladimir Lenin, only imperialism ‒ what he called the highest stage of capitalism ‒ could postpone its ultimate demise, a last ditch attempt to find additional buyers and, of course, additional labour to exploit. Although it might appear radical, such thinking was not, however, without precedent. For centuries, the Church had taught us that the pursuit of riches ‒ including profit ‒ was evil. It was immoral and corrupting. What was really radical in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was instead the work of free-market economists.

  When economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo were making their pro-market arguments, free markets were far from the ‘norm’. As the historian Laurence Fontaine has shown, whereas this pre-capitalist period is often presented in a romanticized way, whether in the work of authors such as E. P. Thompson and Karl Polanyi or in the numerous paintings which depict a happy peasant life in rural idylls, it was in fact no utopia.12 It was instead a time when politicians and the aristocracy (and there was, naturally, a lot of overlap between the two) had a stranglehold over all of our lives. According to Rubinstein, of all the British millionaires who died between 1809 and 1859, 179 were landed and only 10 were not.13As he writes, ‘an observer entering a room full of Britain's 200 wealthiest men in 1825 might be forgiven for thinking that the Industrial Revolution had not occurred.’14 Where government intervened it was often in the interests of privileged groups, including the landowning elite. When it came to business activity, the state wielded its power to grant licences to companies that were themselves, like the East India Company, the size of a small economy. The access of smaller traders and producers was regularly blocked by guilds or by government regulation. In the eighteenth century, even the production of beer was heavily regulated, requiring permission from a single local judge.15 Free markets were not supported by the wealthy or by ‘big business’; they were resisted by them. It was the working classes and the ‘new money’ ‒ the industrialists producing cotton and steel ‒ who could see the benefit in reduced government interference, a way out from under the thumbs of those in power. It placed power in the hands of individuals, allowing them to work for whoever they liked and to set up businesses producing whatever they liked. Markets had to be fought for. Concentrations of power in politics and society had to be confronted.

  Although economists have focused on the efficiency properties of the market, the social consequences are just as important. Markets can give the individual the power to escape societally imposed constraints. It is, here, notable just how many pro-market economists have themselves faced the wrath of society. Adam Smith is known for being something of a social ‘outsider’. He certainly was not a natural ‘social animal’. David Ricardo became estranged from his Jewish family after marrying a Quaker, and, as a non-conformist Christian, John Stuart Mill would have been unable to join the esteemed scholarly ranks of Oxford and Cambridge. Milton Friedman was from a Jewish immigrant family, meaning he was well aware of the way in which society in Europe had demonized the Jewish minority population, with disastrous consequences. To such thinkers, it could not have been more apparent that society does not always support our individual freedom. The state was not, therefore, the only target of free market supporters. In the words of J. S. Mill:

  Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent fr
om them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.16

  For those who see society as something other than a happy and harmonious place ‒ as something that can potentially constrain us and restrict our freedom ‒ the market provides an escape mechanism. That includes for women. It was a relatively small leap from Mill's idea that society could constrain our liberties to the idea that society was in fact constraining women's freedom. Mill became the first politician to demand votes for women and is often considered to be one of the first male supporters of feminism, publishing The Subjection of Women in 1869.

  Looking to history offers some support for the notion that markets can help to set women free. Economic historians Jan Luiten van Zanden and Tine de Moor point to the way in which women's involvement in the labour market in medieval Europe led to substantial changes in family life that empowered women, including providing them with the ability to escape early marriage, ultimately laying the foundations for economic growth.17 Amy Froide, in her recent book Silent Partners, points to the way in which early financial markets in Britain before and during the Industrial Revolution provided opportunities for women that had been denied by incumbent societal practices and institutions.18 Those included the guilds that locked women out of skilled work and the professions. Using the sex ratio at birth as a measure of preference for sons, Melanie Xue finds greater gender equality today in parts of China more historically associated with cotton production, which offered jobs to women.19 As Swedberg notes, ‘[m]any improvements in the household have incidentally come about when some of its actors ‒ young people and women ‒ were given access to the alternative of the market.’20 As anonymous markets developed, though they were by no means perfect, they often opened doors for women, as well as for other people who had been sidelined by ‘mainstream’ society. Indeed, one of the most noticeable aspects of the period in the twentieth century which was associated with a return to free-market thinking was a social revolution. Rapid social change culminated in dramatic changes in the laws affecting homosexuals, ethnic minorities and women. Individuals were fighting for their freedom against a backdrop of a heavy-handed state – one that represented a majority of citizens who were conservative with a small ‘c’. In the words of Jason Hickel and Arsalan Khan: