Damned Whores and God's Police

by Anne Summers

  The next major development in ‘the family’ was again an innovation of the middle class, but this time was precipitated by its women. In the second half of the 19th century in England there was a vast surplus of women and it was simply demographically impossible that all could marry. Yet the ‘nuclear family’ creed denied them the opportunity to work. Women had not been educated for any accomplishment beyond the home and nor were there sufficient jobs for which they were equipped – such as needlework or governessing – to accommodate them. Many middle-class women, unable to work and unable to marry, could not obtain lifelong support from their fathers who, especially if they had large families or if they were impecunious, were quite unable to meet what had formerly been their responsibilities. So middle-class women demanded the right to work and the right to an education, which would give them the qualifications to obtain jobs.

  The initial refusal of these demands prompted women to begin consciously and critically to examine the roles patriarchal society expected them to fulfil, and to conclude that they were unjust. Soon the demands swelled to the right to vote in order to be able to influence society to take women’s needs into account. After a protracted struggle, these three demands – to vote, to learn and to work – were granted, but even then women were not afforded full equality with men: their maternal and family responsibilities had always to come first. It was only if they were unmarried, or in times of national emergency, that they were permitted to engage in paid work and then they were usually confined to jobs that were either especially menial or were seen to be compatible with women’s maternal destiny.

  A second mass questioning of their roles by women is underway at present and, again, it has been precipitated by middle-class women. It has been partly a reopening of some of the debates and demands of the earlier agitation and this has occurred because, once again. large numbers of women are under-employed. A greatly lowered birth rate has meant that women’s family responsibilities are largely fulfilled before they reach middle age and they are left with little to do. Economic motives have also been important as the male wage is today seldom sufficient to provide the commodities and services that an increasingly affluent society is beginning to decree are essential to family wellbeing. This new wave of women’s agitation is only a few years old and what it will accomplish remains to be seen. But unless it is directed at the sexist structure of family and society, rather than merely at some of its manifestations – as the first wave was – then it will not achieve fundamental changes. At the moment family practices and ideals are being questioned, but the institution itself is still functioning. It is against this brief background that we can consider the functions performed by the ‘nuclear family’ in Australia.

  Present functions of the ‘nuclear family’

  These are, as we have seen, production, reproduction, consumerism, privatisation, sexual repression and socialisation.

  1 Production: Housework, child care, emotional sustenance

  The huge amount of domestic work performed within each family is not usually thought of as production. It is not included in the calculations of the gross national product nor, if it is performed by a housewife, is it paid for – unless we can call the $364 taxation concession allowable to her husband a payment. This work is almost invariably done by women since it is viewed as part of the contractual obligation undertaken by a woman in return for the economic support of her husband. The actual amount of labour performed by women within the home, and the time they devote to it, are totally out of keeping with modern workforce practices. A survey on housework conducted by the National Council of Women in Britain found that a total of 85 hours per week was required to run a home and that even if a woman had family or paid help, she was likely to spend about 65 hours a week doing housework.20 A more detailed American analysis of housework took account of the number and ages of children and whether or not the wife also had a paid job outside the home.21 It found that a non-employed wife devoted the following time to housework:

  one child – under one year old

  56 hours

  one child – over two years old

  49 hours

  four children – any age

  58 hours

  four children – one under five

  64 hours

  six or more children

  63 hours

  eight or more children

  84 hours

  If a wife had employment as well, she generally spent about two hours less per week on housework, but she also had more help from her husband. This study calculated that if women were paid for each task on the basis of the cost of employing casual labour they would be entitled to an annual salary of between A$3940 and $6620. The British study estimated that women would earn A$8000 a year. The longer hours attributed to British housewives are perhaps due to the relative lack of modern labour-saving appliances in many British homes. The Australian times would be somewhere in between, but probably closer to the American ones.

  If we categorise as domestic production all those tasks that are necessary to maintain the individuals within families then there are clearly several different types of work involved. The most important of these are housework, child care and emotional sustenance. All of these are usually performed by women, but not all of them are seen as ‘work’. Many of the activities involved in child care, for instance, would not be regarded by women themselves as ‘work’, nor would the multitude of functions that come under the label of emotional sustenance. These tasks are performed, according to family ideology, from love, devotion and sense of duty. This might be true with many women, but does not alter the fact that the ideology masks the essential nature of these tasks. They are ‘work’ in the sense that effort and energy must be expended on them – they will not take care of themselves – and furthermore, their performance is essential to the maintenance of the ‘nuclear family’ in its present form. Given the current division of labour where men are required to work outside the home, this work could not be carried on within families unless women did it. (This is clear from the experiences of single, widowed or deserted fathers who attempt to do housework, raise children and provide emotional sustenance at the same time as holding a full-time job. They invariably must employ housekeepers or else give up their jobs. If they do the latter they are not entitled to receive either unemployment benefits or the equivalent to the supporting mothers’ pension.*)

  Need this work be performed within families – and must it be done by women? Of course, the staunch defenders of traditional family ideology (a tradition, it might be pointed out, less than a century old) are adamantly positive about both of these questions. They generally argue that women are intrinsically and even ‘naturally’ inclined towards this work and advance theories about maternal ‘instincts’ (as opposed to learned behaviour) to emphasise that this work, but especially child care, must be done by women.

  But if these emotive and largely unscientific arguments are rejected22, are there further reasons? Obviously much housework exists because families exist and because of the division of labour within them. If all family members took responsibility for their own cleaning and washing, or if these jobs were rostered among members, the woman’s workload would be considerably lightened. She would do some of this work as her turn came around, but she would no longer be solely responsible for it, nor would it occupy all her time. She could no longer claim the occupation ‘housewife’. Alternatively, outside labour could be employed: cleaning could be done by contractors, washing and ironing by laundries, meals could be eaten at cheap local restaurants such as exist in some European countries. Either of these, or a combination of them, would see the work done and women released from full-time devotion to it. There is nothing intrinsic about the work that dictates that women must do it, and it could be a matter of choice whether it was shared by family members or contracted to outside agencies.

  Child care could also be undertaken outside the family and need not necessarily be done by women. Man
y children are already cared for from infancy in private or government centres (although many more are deprived of this care because of the government’s tardiness in instituting a national child-care scheme). The concept of extra-familial child care is already largely accepted, although there is still much argument about the advisability of caring for very young children in this fashion, and there is also resistance to the notion of employing men in this job. There is no inherent reason why men cannot undertake child care. Several alternative child-care centres in Sydney include men on their rosters and these men are not necessarily the fathers of any of the children. Resistance to allowing men to care for young children is often based on fears of molestation; but while such fears may be realistic at the present time in a society whose repressive sexuality encourages the development of fetishes, it would be possible to take precautions against this. That a few men are child molesters is not a sufficient reason to prevent men from undertaking this work. We could just as easily argue that because some women batter their children, no woman should be allowed to care for children.

  More frequently, however, the insistence that women care for children, and the prejudice against very young children being placed in child-care centres, is based on notions of maternal instinct and maternal deprivation. Yet the idea that children who are cared for (as distinct from socialised, which is a different concept and will be discussed later) by people other than their mothers will grow up to be unstable adults is a cultural notion rather than a universal fact. ‘Child care arrangements which differ from the traditional intense mother–child relationships assumed as an ideal by many in our society do not produce “unhealthy” personalities – merely different ones, depending on the range and nature of the relationships the child encounters.’23

  The third area of work involved in production is the emotional sustenance of the members of families. Bound up in both housework and mothering is that nexus of action and reaction that is incorporated within the God’s Police stereotype. Within families, women engage in this function at its most particularised and most concrete level. They are rightly referred to as ‘the emotional hub of the family’, expected to act as a buffer zone between husband and his fractured ego when he has problems, moving to prevent squabbling children from engaging in open warfare, conciliating between rebellious children and outraged father. Women are expected to perform this kind of diplomacy outside as well as within the home: a top secretary is as much defined by her ability to shield her boss from the routine pestering of the rest of the world, by her skill at lying and manoeuvring for him – even against his wife – as she is by her prowess at the typewriter. But it is seen in its most essential form within families where it often emerges as the most important work a woman does. It is in the performance of this work that she enables ‘the family’ to perpetuate itself as an institution. She consoles the child who is bullied at school, the husband who has problems at work, the daughter who is in the throes of a teenage passion, the son who didn’t make the football team. The woman alleviates stress between family members and thus enables them to keep going at whatever work they are engaged in outside the home, and to the extent that she is successful in keeping them going they value ‘the family’. The institution itself is credited with the individual work of one of its members.

  We tend to confuse the emotional sustenance derived from ‘the family’ with that which is necessary to maintain ‘self ’. This confusion arises, as was pointed out in Chapter Four, because most of us have acquired ‘self ’ within a family and retain a strong association between that institution and individual emotional stability. We are thus socialised to expect to receive a great proportion of our emotional sustenance from our current family and from that family that we expect, as adults, to establish. We learn to expect our ‘self ’ to be maintained from a close relationship with one other person, coupled with relationships with the progeny produced by that union. We learn that friendships, acquaintances and other social interactions are less important than those with a chosen mate. We therefore expect that our emotional lives would disintegrate if we were to be deprived of coupling, marriage and family.

  But these are learned expectations; had we grown up on kibbutzim or communes we might have acquired rather different perceptions of how to meet our need of social sustenance. If we recognise the degree of social conditioning involved in what are assumed by many people to be basic needs, then it is possible to realise that marriage and family are not the only means of obtaining emotional sustenance. We could derive similar sustenance from several close relationships and a number of friendships. Thus what has often been viewed as a function that can only be fulfilled within families is capable of being met by other people.

  Much of this work of emotional sustenance performed by women within families is generated by the intensities and inequalities of families themselves. In other words, if families did not exist there would be less need for such extensive sustaining. The very confining of four or five people of differing ages and aspirations within an institution that is circumscribed by notions of parental responsibility and filial respect is likely to cause conflicts. These will be more or less severe depending on the extent to which family members conform to the roles of their age and sex.

  The powerlessness of women can be expressed by self-destructive behaviour, as pointed out in Chapter Four, or it can be directed against other family members. Continual nagging, emotional blackmail and other retaliatory tactics are employed by many women who are bitter or resentful about their lives. In such cases, a woman may totally refuse, or be incapable of, providing emotional sustenance to her family and so what is seen as a necessary function, and one that ought to be fulfilled by women, is either undertaken by another family member or is not performed at all. In such families, conflicts are likely to be more naked and to be articulated; without the intervention and preventive tactics of a mediatrix, the tensions and clashes that attend every family group will be unleashed and are likely to lead either to resolution or to family breakdown. Either result illustrates the overburdening of women with this responsibility. If conflicts can be coped with without the woman’s mediations then her role is shown to be unnecessary; if her efforts are directed towards holding together a precarious and hostile group of people, then she is defeating her purpose since none will gain sustenance in the presence of these latent tensions.

  While women continue to shoulder this job, other family members can avoid the responsibility of managing their own emotional lives, of acquiring emotional maturity. This is why we have the phenomenon of so many men who are totally unable to relate to women, except to place them in a maternal role, or to other men. They have been mollycoddled and cosseted by women all their lives and have never learned to direct their own emotional lives. And for the women who spend a lifetime attending to other people’s emotional needs there can also be devastating effects. As long as this function is seen as being exclusively women’s preserve (and this idea is reinforced by such jobs as nursing and social work being mainly women’s jobs) and, as Chapter Four argued, women are taught early in life to be wary of other women and hence often find it difficult to form close friendships with each other, how are women to receive emotional sustenance? Who comforts the comforters? Many women have little recompense except the vicarious satisfaction of being able to sustain the lives of their husbands and children.

  2 Reproduction

  This is a function essential to species’ survival and hence cannot be dispensed with. It is also essential to ‘the family’. We have to distinguish between marriage and ‘the family’: a married couple does not constitute a family. A major purpose of ‘the family’ is to reproduce itself both physically and psychologically and there is considerable pressure applied to young married couples to start their families early. Similarly, young couples who live together without being married almost always decide to legalise their union once the birth of a child is imminent. Married women who delay having a baby for too long are criticise
d for being ‘selfish’. For instance, a doctor wrote in an Australian sociology book about ‘the family’:

  It is wise for a young couple to start a family as soon after marriage as possible. Perhaps three to six months can be used in which to ‘get to know’ one another under ideal conditions … A marriage is incomplete without children and yet the longer a pregnancy is postponed the greater the danger of selfishness developing.24

  Women are not yet in full control of their fertility while methods of contraception remain unreliable or a risk to health, and the uneasy legal status of abortion makes termination of pregnancy available only to women in capital cities who know where to go. Until women gain full control of their fertility they will still be subjected to unwanted pregnancies and, often, unanticipated and unwanted marriages. But whatever degree of fertility control is obtained, present methods of reproduction still require women to bear children. Some radical feminists have argued that only the development of artificial means of reproduction will totally free women25 but this view is neither widely accepted by women nor is yet technologically feasible. (Such a view also ties the liberation of women and the abolition of sexism rather determinedly to technological innovation, which would confine it to small sections of the world’s population. This view therefore is open to many objections on political as well as other grounds.)

  In our currently overpopulated world, there is no danger of species extinction so there is no justification for enforcing compulsory motherhood. Denying women access to facilities for contraception and abortion amounts to this. If women could control their fertility they would then have a real choice about whether or not they wish to bear children. But if vast numbers opted not to have any then ‘the family’ would be threatened. This is one reason why non-procreative forms of sexuality, such as homosexuality, are so abhorred by advocates of ‘the family’. ‘The family’ is dependent on women being prepared, if not forced, to bear children.