by Anne Summers
An exploration of women’s family experiences is a major theme of this book and, as well as being begun here, is dealt with in detail in Chapters Six and Thirteen. The present chapter is concerned mainly with outlining what I see to be the differences. The later chapters will analyse these in more detail and suggest various reasons for these differences. The present discussion is also necessarily fairly abstract: in order to establish its main point it generalises about ‘men’ and ‘women’ and minimises differing experiences resulting from factors such as age, class, race, religion and so on. To subsume individuals into these overriding categories is by definition sexist and, in the long run, not very elucidating. But as a starting point I need to establish that such sexist categorisations are imposed by society anyway and that they have discernible effects. Once that is recognised it is meaningful to pursue the varieties of human experience within each categorisation.
Everyday life involves home and work, relationships with friends, neighbours and kin, and contact with institutions such as churches, schools and welfare bodies. This fourth ‘level’ of culture is the foundation on which the three other ‘levels’ rest, but to view it as a ‘cornerstone of community stability’ is to emphasise idealised notions about what everyday life should be like and to overlook the many social processes actually at work within it. These processes include not only the maintenance of life, this entailing the constant maintenance of ‘self ’ or personal identity, but also its acquisition. ‘Self ’ is a social entity – it is socially constructed and socially maintained. If it is unable to be maintained, if a person experiences partial or total breakdown, then we need to examine the social processes that have contributed to this.
I want to examine three areas of everyday life that I consider to be the most crucial components of existence, and to see how women’s experience of these differs from men’s. The three areas are the acquisition of ‘self ’, or socialisation; and two areas of adult ‘self ’-maintenance: home and work.
I am using ‘self ’ to describe one’s being-in-the-world, the way in which a person sees themself, the society in which they live and their relationship to that society. ‘Self ’ is not a fixed and totally determined category. People can have several different ‘selves’ for different areas of their lives and although each of these ‘selves’ will be derived to a large extent from the imperatives of social existence in each area, people interact with and impose on that social existence. The resulting ‘self ’ will be a product of this dialectic. But the social foundations of ‘self ’ are acquired in infancy while the young person is physically vulnerable and totally dependent upon its carers and, as yet, unable to interact independently with the world. So much of the ‘self ’ that is constructed in the very early years of life is indelibly imprinted on the psyche, and if it is able to be altered at all, it is only with considerable struggle. This struggle will itself be extremely threatening to the existing ‘self ’: such an ‘identity crisis’ can seem to totally obliterate all existing conceptions and to leave a person devoid of workable ‘self ’-conceptions with which to even cope with the crisis. So while human beings always retain the power to change their social environment and, within it, their conception of ‘self ’ – this, indeed, being a distinct and distinguishing attribute of humanity – this power is not easily exercised and, in fact, many people’s socialisation consists precisely in preventing them from realising that they possess it.
Most children in Australia are raised by at least one of their biological parents. Because our society has strong notions of ‘love’ as a duty between parents and children, socialisation of children by their biological parents is seen as being the most desirable form since it is the most efficient. Parental ‘love’ becomes an oppressive tool in the socialisation process: the threat to withdraw it induces conformity to parental prescriptions. The child begins life as totally dependent on their parent(s) or whatever person has undertaken responsibility for the child’s early development. While the child becomes aware very early of the social environment in which they exist, this awareness is preceded or obscured by its absolute dependence. The child hardly has a separate existence and, therefore, only the most embryonic ‘self ’. The ‘self ’ is acquired as that dependence is broken and as the infant learns to repress their instinctual drives to the demands of society as communicated by the parents.
The child learns to conform to a whole range of things that are ‘good’, for example, obeying parents, eating food at prescribed times, using a toilet or pot; and must desist from other things that are ‘bad’. As John Maze has pointed out, the aim of socialisation is always the suppression of certain instinctual drives, usually sexuality and aggression, but the process of suppression involves exhorting the child to act in certain ways not just because the parents have demanded it, but because these actions are meant to be good and desirable in themselves.3
This means that children will find that very wounding epithets (‘dirty’, ‘greedy’, ‘rude’, ‘cruel’) are being applied to their behaviour or indeed to their own nature (‘You dirty boy!’) by persons whom they love, and whose respect, affection and protection they urgently need. This is an instance of psychological stress of the very first rank. The child then feels in danger of being rejected as a worthless person. This is very different from just ordinary threats of punishment. One of the conditions of being worthwhile, as conventional parents set them up, is that the child is supposed to come to see that certain actions and wishes are wrong in themselves.4
These moral values will often (or usually) seem quite incomprehensible to the child who will submit to them in an effort to retain parental affection. And such submissions will be rewarded by affection: the child is rewarded for being worthwhile, as parents have defined this. Thus there will be confusion in the child’s mind between the apparent arbitrariness of the acts in question and the contingent nature of the parents’ affection. The child will calculate that, in order to survive in the social world of the family, they must become a good person who will be rewarded by love. This love or, rather, social approval will enhance the child’s feelings of security, just as they will feel insecure if the social approval is withheld. The ‘self ’ acquired in this process will be a more or less calculated combination of partly or fully repressed instinctual desires and actions and a morality acquired in order to gain social approval. The infant ‘self ’ is a survival mechanism and is also a measure of the extent of its repression by externally imposed values. This pattern of submission and conformity is established as an integral component of a person’s being in the world.
This very brief description of how a child learns to behave in a social environment implies that the process is identical for both sexes. Maze talks only of male children, and most other writers either do the same or merely make passing reference to the sexual differentiation that occurs when the infant must renounce total dependence on their mother. Yet this rupture is where sex differentiation begins to become a crucial part of the ‘self ’ and therefore needs to be examined in some detail. The ‘self ’ acquired in childhood is a sex-differentiated ‘self ’ and the actual content of some of the morality imposed during the repression of instinctual drives differs for boys and girls. Within the general repression of aggression, for instance, current sex roles allow that boys may still display more aggression than girls.
The female child’s experience of becoming an independent person (and no longer remaining a dependent infant whose ‘self ’ is largely subsumed in that dependence) is different from a boy’s experience. The boy’s is often seen as being more traumatic because of the total renunciation and change of identification involved: the boy must learn to identify with his father as an agent of the male sex and in this way identify himself as a boy. But this change involves only one main process: the establishment of his own separateness. The girl can retain her identification with the female sex of her mother but her establishment of separateness involves another process as well. She learns at th
e same time that she is a female person and that she is also an inferior person. This is more than the temporary inferiority of children in a world governed by adults – something that children of both sexes must endure. The boy knows his inferiority is a function of age and will not obtain indefinitely. The girl knows she is inferior as a child but also as a woman and that, even when she is no longer a child, she will retain the low status her mother, in relation to men, has. She also learns that a further important part of being female is tending to the needs of others. The female child thus internalises a maternal role as part of acquiring her separateness. By contrast, a boy’s future is more open-ended: he learns that he will probably be a father but that fatherhood is not a full-time occupation. Nor does it require a structuring of the ‘self ’ in the way that the acquisition of the nurturing qualities of motherhood does.
The female child has this sex role and an awareness of its low status imposed upon her in the same way as the general morality described above is imposed, and she is threatened with the same kind of insecurity and feelings of worthlessness unless she submits to it. But she is immediately caught within a contradiction. The low status of women induces feelings of worthlessness anyhow. Compared to the high-status male sex, women are worthless. Yet, because she is born female, she must conform to female sex-role behaviour or she will be rejected as a worthless person and lose parental affection. The female child is made to feel worthless if she does not conform to her nurturant sex role, but conformity to it means accepting a low status that engenders feelings of worthlessness. The female ‘self ’ is, almost by definition, predicated on insecurity, anxiety and a proclivity to doubt one’s worth. The female child copes with this contradiction by becoming excessively dependent upon her father and upon men generally: her dependence disguises her insecurity. And society helps disguise the contradiction, and at the same time endeavours to make it palatable to women by purporting to endow motherhood – posited as the fulfilment of the female sex role – with a high and worthwhile status. By clinging to these two props, the female child can often escape having to confront the very precarious nature of the social foundations of her ‘self ’. Exactly how the female child attains her dependence upon her father and other men is unclear and existing psychological theories are not particularly helpful in explaining it. It is not possible here to speculate at length on the likely processes involved, but this is clearly an area in need of research. Obviously, the female child is imitating her mother’s sex-role behaviour and part of that requires dependence on her husband, especially if she has no income of her own. The child is also drawn to her father because of his high status: the only way she can share this status is to become dependent upon him and allow him to be protective towards her.*
The female child becomes even more submissive than a boy needs to because such submission removes the need to examine her own behaviour and question the contradictions involved. Such questioning would prove extremely threatening to her already fragile ‘self ’ since, in a society in which women have low status, there is no absolute resolution to the contradiction. Her dependence on men, and the protective stance men assume towards her, removes the need for self-examination. Her dependence on men is reinforced by her mother’s attitude towards her. Her mother withdraws total nurturance from her so that she can become a separate person, and with this withdrawal a woman is permanently deprived of a close, loving relationship with members of her own sex. Nor is she compensated even with the kind of camaraderie that exists between men. Women learn not to really like each other, for this would threaten both their dependence on men (and the status men derive from this) and their ability and willingness to nurture men.
This basic model of submission, dependence and hostility between women – which leads to their social isolation from each other – is reflected in and reinforced by marriage and its supporting institutions. As Phyllis Chesler explains it:
Daughters don’t turn to their mothers for ‘sexual’ initiation, or, as Freud would have it … they specifically turn away from them, for a number of reasons. ‘Mothers’ are conditioned not to like women and/or the female body. They are phobic about lesbianism; they are jealous of their daughters’ youth – rendered so by their own increasing ‘expendability’. Also, ‘mothers’ must be harsh in training their daughters to be ‘feminine’ in order that they learn how to serve in order to survive. The way in which female children grow up – or learn how not to grow up – is initiated by the early withdrawal or relative absence of the female and/or nurturant body from their lives. Nurturance-deprivation, and the sexual abuse of female children are possibly the two most important factors involved in making female children receptive to ‘submission’ conditioning – at a very early age. Female children move from a childhood dominated or peopled by members of their own sex to a foreign ‘grown-up’ world dominated, quite literally, by members of the opposite sex. Male children graduate from a childhood dominated or peopled by members of the opposite sex (women) to a ‘grownup’ world dominated by members of their own sex. Unlike women, they can safely go home again by marrying ‘wives’, who will perform the rites of maternal domestic and emotional nurturance, but who are usually younger, economically poorer, and physically weaker than themselves. In patriarchal society, the basic incest taboo (between mother and son and father and daughter) is psychologically obeyed by men and disobeyed by women. Psychologically, women do not have initiation rites to help them break their incestuous ties. While most women do not commit incest with their biological fathers, patriarchal marriage, prostitution, and mass ‘romantic’ love are psychologically predicated on sexual union between Daughter and Father figures.5
Whatever else a woman may do with her life, this basic model of female behaviour will be part of her ‘self ’ and she will have to struggle to restructure this ‘self ’ in adulthood. A total restructuring would be virtually impossible within the patriarchal institutions that reinforce it and since most women do marry, conceptions they acquired in childhood will continually be reinforced during their adult lives. As we have already seen, women’s participation in other areas of cultural existence is either proscribed or has low status and would reinforce her ‘worthless’ status. Women are thus effectively imprisoned within family and marriage, dependent on men, and nurturing husbands and children, as their only means of psychic survival.
The world of work outside the home is an important part of men’s lives. As protectors and providers they are obliged to earn money. Even though many married women now have jobs outside the home, this is a recent development and is still not institutionalised as part of the female role. For women, family life is a primary means of ‘self ’-definition and their family responsibilities persist even if a woman decides, or is forced, to take on an additional job. As is shown in detail in Chapter Thirteen, women are still not socialised to expect to have jobs after they marry, and this expectation is not part of their conception of ‘self ’. Thus, if they do have jobs, these are likely to be seen as temporary and contingent and as peripheral to their primary identification as wives and mothers. For men, however, their jobs are an integral part of their ‘self ’-identification and have a definite relation and status to their family lives.
In a capitalist society, workers of both sexes are exploited. They are both subjected to the alienating effects of the division of labour: they both are forced to sell labour power for which they are inadequately paid, thus creating a surplus that enhances the wealth and power of the ruling class. Beyond that, however, the situation of each sex differs. Because men are providers for families, they expect rewards for their labours from their families. They want families to be retreats, places to forget the drudgery of the boredom of work. They expect to be cosseted, their meals prepared for them, their clothes washed and ironed, their problems listened to. (This may not always happen, but this is the expectation that is acquired as part of the male sex role.) At the level of everyday life, men have two distinct bases for ‘self ’-mainten
ance, two separate areas in which they can earn the approval of others by conforming to the roles required in each area. At present, few women have this. As pointed out above, women have not learned to see work outside the home as a means of ‘self ’-maintenance. This makes it easier for women to leave jobs, to be dilatory in their work performance (‘It doesn’t really matter for me, because I can always go back to being a housewife.’), to be less upset by difficulties with the work itself or the people they work with. In fact, a husband who wants to remain secure in his provider role might encourage such feelings. The requisites of the Australian economy are probably slowly changing this situation and the next generation of women may begin to learn to see jobs outside the home as being essential to their ‘self ’-identification. But this has not happened yet, and I am concerned with looking at what is happening with women in the present. And at present, their identities, their sense of ‘self ’ rest insecurely on one area: their family lives.
Women are culturally impotent; they acquire a conception of ‘self ’ that is based on a contradiction that they resolve by submitting to male dominance; they are not yet able to value work outside the home as a valid activity for their sex.* This means that their family lives and relationships are critical. If their expectations in this area cannot be fulfilled they have not the safety valve of an alternative area of ‘self ’-validation and the fragility of staking their psychological wellbeing on one area will rapidly become apparent. They have not the diversions open to men, nor are they likely to receive much sympathy, for the ideology of ‘the family’ is so strong. The extent to which this ideology requires the compliance, or in other words, the oppression of women is explored in Chapter Six. For the present, I want to look at what is happening with women in families, to see whether or not their ‘selves’ are secure.