The patriarchal project of modernity i) Modern history – a history of patriarchy i) Modern history – a history of patriarchy

In Irene Iversen’s comments on the project of modernity (5.0), defenders of modernity are depicted as defenders of the institutional and cultural outcomes of modern Western history:

They regard modernity as a real sociological configuration, as a progressive configuration;

they tend to believe that there has in fact been enlightenment. In her article “Refleksjoner over kjønn og stat”³⁸² professor in history, Ida Blom, not only questions this optimistic view. She also suggests that the thinking of modernity has influenced the actual historical development in Europe: Its proponents got more or less what they wanted in this part of the world. Thus, their diagnosis about progress should not surprise us. The diagnosis is, however, partial and inaccurate, Blom argues. Modern history is in fact a darker one, especially if we approach it from the point of view of women.

The argument is made in the section of the article where Blom takes a closer look at “the meaning of gender” in the development of “the democratic welfare states” in Europe (1998:

25). Her focus is on “the institutional basis” for “citizenship”, i.e. for the development of individual rights (ibid.). Gender inequalities in the granting of rights can, she notes, be linked

377 But some do, like Nina Karin Monsen (2000). Her self-consciously conservative positioning is, however, exceptional.

378 Cf. Jensen (1990b), Øvrelid (1996a), Valestrand and Gerrard (1999a), Bolsø (2002).

379 Cf. Gullvåg Holter (1991, 1997), Gulli (1992), Ericsson (1992b).

380 Cf. Martinsen (1997, 1999).

381 Cf. Mühleisen (1999, 2000, 2003).

382 “Reflections on gender and state”.

partly to the fact that military duties have been considered the duties of men. Women have not had these duties, and thus have not been considered legitimate right-holders. However, this state of affairs should not be considered inevitable or “logical”, Blom insists (op.cit.: 26). For one thing, there are several examples of women serving as soldiers. More importantly, women have played a crucial role “behind the lines”, even if they have not participated in combat (ibid.). Moreover, there is no clear connection between men’s participation in combat and their rights as citizens. There are many examples of soldiers who have not been granted full citizenship. Thus, other factors must be added to explain women’s subordinate status in the state.

The most crucial other factor, Blom argues, is the division between “private and public” on which the “democratization of the state” in Europe has depended (op.cit.: 29).³⁸³ Previous to democratization, some women, at least in the elites, had considerable “family based power”, power acquired through marriage and motherhood (op.cit.: 27). Democratization meant

“moving […] the basis of power” away from the family, “from the private to the public”

(op.cit.: 29). This moving away is prescribed by the philosophers of modernity; they consider it a basic prerequisite for Enlightenment. Blom refers in this connection to Locke’s Two Treaties of Government. Politics should be practiced in the public sphere, Locke argued.

However, Blom notes, the public was not a domain for women. Locke considered individuals to have different rights as “public and private persons” (ibid.). Only men, however, were granted rights as public persons. Blom goes on to present Rousseau’s Le Contract Social (1762), and his claim, parallel to Locke’s, that only men are citizens or legitimate

“contractors” (ibid.). Rousseau developed this idea in Émile, where he argued that boys were to be educated into “free, independent, responsible individuals”, equipped for citizenship, whereas girls were to be made into “women whose main aim in life was to serve their husband and raise his children” (op.cit.: 29, 30). This idea of gendered characters was later adopted by Kant. Men denoted “the active, strong, extrovert, rational and instrumental”, women “the passive, weak, submissive, adaptive, emotional and intuitive” (op.cit.: 30). This idea of gendered characters was old, but it was strengthened by the institutionalization of the public-private-distinction, as Locke, Rousseau and Kant prescribed it. To be sure, democratization did not leave women completely powerless. They still had, for example, significant influence in the private sphere, in particular as mothers. Their power was,

383 See also 5.4.10.

however, inevitably limited, as issues of most significance were deliberated and decided upon in the public sphere, where women were excluded.

Thus, Blom’s argument in this passage rests basically on two claims. First, that the thinking of Locke, Rousseau and Kant³⁸⁴ have contributed to the shaping of modern European history;

there are interconnections between theory and practice, even if we cannot talk of a simple, one-way causal relationship. Second, that this history is less progressive than assumed in this thinking – where it is talked optimistically about ‘democratization’ – especially, if we look at it from within a feminist horizon.³⁸⁵ Several contributors consider there to be interconnections of this sort. The historian Elisabeth Gulbrandsen recommends feminists to take a closer look at postmodern thinkers such as Rosi Braidotti and Donna Haraway in their approach to

“science and politics”, when confronted by the “global environment and development crisis”(1998a: 56),³⁸⁶ because it is, among others things, the conceptualizations and prescriptions of the modern imaginary that have led to this crisis. Another example is sociologist Øystein Gullvåg Holter, who argues that there are interconnections between “real socialism”, as it existed in “the state capitalist countries”, for example in Eastern Europe and

“ideological”, dogmatic “Marxism” (1991: 68).³⁸⁷ This is a kind of Marxism that considers Marx’ theses to be “universally valid”, based on “a-historical and non-sociological categories”, and is, in an “extreme” way, Gullvåg Holter says, faithful to the prescriptions of the “great narrators” of “bourgeois Enlightenment”, who thought that the enlightened,

“modern individual” had a “monopoly on truth”, that he could “without prejudices […] view, understand and conceptualize other epochs and other societies”, thinking “the light from theory” would “shine” on the “masses still in the dark” (op.cit.: 68, 69).³⁸⁸

Gullvåg Holter’s sarcastic comment on the optimism of the Enlightenment thinkers is somewhat different from, but nevertheless related to, the second claim put forward by Blom:

He emphasizes their optimistic view on what their universalistic philosophy could achieve in history, and its paternalistic and authoritarian subtext. Blom questions the modern optimistic

384 Blom recognizes that these are very different thinkers. Their emphasis and elaboration of the public-private-distinction is, however, similar.

385 For conceptualizations of this point, very similar to Blom’s, see for example Melby (1997a, 1997b), Telste (1999), Hagemann (1997, 1999, 2003) and Nagel (1998).

386 Gulbrandsen’s article is on different ways of thinking about science policy.

387 In contradistinction to “critical Marxism” based on “historical and sociological method” (Gullvåg Holter 1991: 69).

388 For more variants of this argument, see for example Martinsen (1997), Fyhn (1999), Hellum (1999), von der Lippe (1999), Meyer (1999), Ve (1999a) and Annfelt (2000).

diagnosis of what has in fact happened during the past century, i.e. that we can simply talk about it in terms of democratization.³⁸⁹ That the thinkers of modernity underscore the darker side of modernity, is also accentuated by other commentators. One example is social anthropologist, Elisabeth L’orange Fürst, who in a discussion of “poststructuralism and French feminism”, focused on Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray and Helen Cixous,³⁹⁰ stresses the limited results of living up to “bourgeois-egalitarian demands” (1998: 176, 178). “Equality feminists”, by equating these demands with “feminist” demands, and applauding their fulfillment as “progressive”, have contributed, she says (with Cixous), to an unfortunate

“legitimation” of “the existing system” and modern “hierarchies of power”, instead of encouraging women to explore and emancipate “otherness”, i.e. “the suppressed and marginalized femininity”, outside “the dominant conceptual scheme” of “phallogocentrism”

(op.cit.: 178, 179).³⁹¹

Another example is Tordis Borchgrevink who indicates the limits of rights as a normative notion. When defenders of modernity enthusiastically sum up the spreading of rights, they tend to exaggerate what rights actually give us:

Complete membership in a culture is not given to anyone, it goes without saying, but, fortunately, we have equality and tolerance as a court of appeal for the unworthy. In this court what is offered, however, are only rights, and rights make no-one a cultural insider. One is not made equal by the right to be different (Borchgrevink 1999: 13).

Finally, Hanne Haavind emphasizes the ideological features of the thinking of “modern society” in which “the concept of person is broadened to include women and [to] promote their [women’s] access to individual rights, to political representation, to work, to money, to education” (Haavind 1998: 247).³⁹² This optimistic perspective of “societal change […]

make[s] every new cohort of women capable of seeing themselves as progressing along a pathway of greater access to social arenas” (op.cit.: 248). However, Haavind argues:

389 This diagnosis is related to the optimism Gullvåg Holter talks about: Modern history is an outcome of the fact that the bourgeois-liberal philosophers’ idealist thinking has in fact influenced real practice.

390 And their relationship to Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan.

391 For variants of this argument, more or less inspired by French feminism, more or less critical of ‘bourgeois-liberal’ normative ambitions and optimistic history-writing, see for example Widerberg (1990), Rudberg (1996), Andersen (1997), Birkeland (1997), Songe-Møller (1999c), Flemmen (1999, 2000), Bolsø (2002), Brandser (2002), Mortensen (1994, 1999, 2002), Findal (2002), Sangholt (2002), Gressgård (2003). The article by L’orange Fürst to which I refer is a rather descriptive account of poststructuralism and French feminism. The author emphasizes, however, her sympathy for such ‘difference-feminist’ reflections in her conclusion (L’orange Fürst 1998: 198, and elaborates and deliberates further on her position in other works, for example in L’orange Fürst 1995).

392 For similar reflections, where she answers her critics, see Haavind (2002b).

Power is rendered invisible when men and women acknowledge each other. In cultural contexts where integration is idealized and male dominance is made less legitimate,³⁹³ gender as a reason for social arrangements is concealed. The results are still gendered, but without a cause. A woman increases the probability that she will be valued positively as a woman if she herself co-operates, so that her subordination looks like something else – something she desires. Mutual confirmation of identity cannot be achieved be realizing gender stereotypes, but through being individual and unique. The reciprocal positive message between the male and the female is a double bind: both are dependent on having the other co-operate in having her submissiveness and her dominance appear to be something else (op.cit.: 265).³⁹⁴

Many contributors point out or assume Blom’s two concerns. However, Blom’s first concern is a modest one. She does not consider history to be blueprint of philosophy: History is influenced by a complex web of different social, cultural and ideological factors, Enlightenment philosophy is only one.³⁹⁵ This is indeed the common way to look at it. Blom’s second concern is nuanced, moreover, by her recognition of the modern regime of universal rights as progressive, also from a feminist point of view, even if this is only part of the story, and blown out of proportion by modern observers. Having analyzed the history of gender and state in modern Europe, she concludes that the state has shown a potential to “care for the individual and support the individual’s opportunities for autonomy” through the expansion of political citizenship and the development of the welfare state (1998: 43). Thus, the state has what Blom refers to as a “feminine side” from an “instrumental” point of view (ibid).³⁹⁶ In addition there is its “feminine” side from an “institutional” point of view: Despite the private-public-distinction prescribed by the thinking of modernity, issues of “the family/private sphere” have been turned into issues of “the state/the public”(ibid.).³⁹⁷ The outcome, at least in Scandinavia, has been “state feminism, an alliance between women inside and outside the political system, and between women and the state” (ibid.).

Several contributors portray, like Blom, the Scandinavian experience as modifying the dark image of modern history assumed in much feminist analysis: Scandinavian social democracy

393 Here she is referring to the Nordic countries.

394 For very similar ideological demasking see Ericsson (1992b), Prieur and Taksdal (1993), Johannessen (1994), Holter (1996b), Ellingsæter and Solheim (2002).

395 See also Blom (1999), and Melby’s (1996, 1997) historiographic comments on Blom’s work.

396 A basic question in her article is: “Is it possible that masculine values, defined as physical strength, power and control are the basis of the notion of the state, or has the notion also feminine characteristics, defined as care and peaceful development?” (Blom 1998: 24).

397 Blom describes this institutional development as a process of femininization.

is depicted as having a women-friendly potential.³⁹⁸ That modernity has brought progress is also pointed out by others, for example by contributors who stress the greater scope for personal freedom and reflexivity following cultural individualization and de-traditionalization.³⁹⁹ Thus, sometimes, the analyses of progress of the thinkers of modernity are in fact subscribed to.⁴⁰⁰ However, other kinds of perspectives are also drawn upon to conceptualize progress, for example in contributions where modern thought is positioned not as being too optimistic, but rather as being too pessimistic. The media scientist Wencke Mühleisen notes how Habermas’ reflection on the bourgeois public sphere represents “a perspective of decline”, a “melancholic historical narrative” (2000: 4, 24). Thus, to conceptualize what she considers to be the creative and liberating aspects of contemporary popular culture, Mühleisen relies instead on postmodern cultural theory.⁴⁰¹ Other contributors note the similar pessimistic character of Habermas’ theory of modernity, but stress instead the aptness of Habermas’ theory on this point.⁴⁰² Most often, however, critique of modernity as a sociological configuration is articulated without reference to the philosophers of modernity.⁴⁰³

ii) The modern canon of patriarchal thinkers

Ida Blom’s points; that the influence of the thinkers of modernity on state of affairs is unfortunate, and that these thinkers underscore the darker side of modernity, are connected with a widely held related assumption, namely that they are patriarchal thinkers: They actively defend patriarchal relations or indirectly contribute to reproducing such relations, or both. It is because the thinkers of modernity directly or indirectly accept patriarchy that their influence in history is so unfortunate. It is because they consider patriarchy compatible with enlightenment that they fail to recognize patriarchy as the dark side of modernity.

398 The terms ‘state feminism’ and ‘woman friendly’ are introduced by Helga Hernes. These notions will be more closely examined in Chapter 6. See also van der Ros (1996a, 1996b), Leira (1998), Morken and Selle (1998), Skjeie and Siim (2000), Hernes (2001), Skjeie and Teigen (2003).

399 Cf. Bjerrum Nielsen and Rudberg (1994), Bjerrum Nielsen (1996), Marhrdt (1996), Gentikow (1998), Hellesund (2002), Mühleisen (2003, 2004).

400 Cf. Raaum (1995), Solheim (1997), Hagemann (1997, 1999), Fjørtoft (1999, 2002), Bojer (2001).

401 For a similar concern see de Vibe (1993), Bjerrum Nielsen and Rudberg (1994). To be sure, the point of these contributors is not to replace pessimism with optimism, but rather to highlight the ambivalences and gendered character of modernity.

402 Cf. Jensen (1990a), L’orange Fürst (1995).

403 The alternative philosophical sources are numerous. It is noteworthy that from the philosophical canon figures such as Foucault (see for example Solli 1999, Songe-Møller 1999c, Bolsø 2002, Markussen 2002), Nietzsche (for example Mortensen 1994, Owesen 2000/2001, Brandser 2002, Sangholt 2002) and Arendt (for example Svenneby 1994, 1999a, 2002, Erichsen 2002, Nicolaysen 2002, Halvorsen 2002) get a far more constructive reception than Habermas, Rawls and Kant, who are rarely considered relevant for feminism.

The patriarchal character of “political liberalism” is elaborated as a main point in the article

“Mangfoldets problem: Om kvinner og menn i politisk liberalisme”⁴⁰⁴ by political scientist Ann Therese Lotherington (1999). Lotherington’s point of departure is an analysis of the works of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Kant. What “we find, despite great disagreements on other issues”, is, she says:

[…] a common understanding of gender […]: For them men were citizens/persons/individuals and were ranged above women, not considered citizens/persons/individuals. Status as person or individual was strongly connected to rights that only men had. Thus, the universal and gender neutral notions (individual, freedom, citizenship, rights and consent) were valid only for men (1999: 176-177).

Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Kant considered the legitimate state in terms of a social contract:

Their point was to introduce new principles for legitimate government: principles of freedom, equality and consent. The state should be governed by a political community (fraternity) of equal parties (men) that were naturally born free and equal. State legitimacy was to be based on agreement or consent (op.cit.: 177).

What this social contract assumed, however, Lotherington notes, is what Carol Pateman has referred to elsewhere as “the sexual contract”: While “the idea of the social contract made it possible to understand men as free and equal, […] the thinking of the sexual contract implied men’s right to dominate women and women’s duty to submit to men” (op.cit.: 180).

Moreover, like Blom, Lotherington assumes that the patriarchal thinking of classical liberal philosophy has contributed to creating modern patriarchal society.⁴⁰⁵ She argues, furthermore, that “contemporary liberal/contract theoretical thinking” remains as patriarchal as the classical liberalism that has informed and inspired it: Even if “the sexual contract” is often made invisible, it is still very much of “relevance” (op.cit.: 185). Thus, its seemingly gender neutral notions are “based on men’s experiences” (op.cit.: 183),⁴⁰⁶ Lotherington says, referring to Ann Phillips. The notions of individual, freedom, citizenship, rights and consent are still not construed so that women, or others that are “different”, may be included:

404 “The problem of pluralism: Women and men in political liberalism considered”.

405 Up until today this thinking remains “the basis of contemporary liberal democracy and the dominant Western understanding of freedom, justice, and so on” (Lotherington 1999: 177).

406 See also 5.4.7.

Liberalism, as it has been delivered to us historically, has equipped us with a hierarchical way of thinking without tools for constructive treatment of pluralism and difference. In this way the same biases are reproduced in our contemporary theories (op.cit.: 188),

she goes on, referring to Seyla Benhabib. Lotherington’s conclusion is that we should ideally, from a feminist point of view, replace liberalism with something else, “better abstractions”, or even more preferable, we should stop looking for “better abstractions and rather admit that society consists of women and men with a manifold of wishes about their way of life” (op.cit.:

189). However, she consider this difficult, even impossible,

[…] both because we ourselves are bearers of this philosophical tradition, and because we need to communicate with others inside the same tradition. We talk about words and concepts that are part of the vocabulary of everyday life. We must, therefore, relate to them, but make sure not to forget their patriarchal history (op.cit.: 188).

Similar outlines of the patriarchal commitments and presuppositions of representatives of the project of modernity can be found in several contributions. Sociologist Lise Widding Isaksen criticizes the hierarchical, dichotomous thinking of the modern Western canon. Within this tradition, body, nature and passion, associated with femininity, are rated below mind, culture and reason, associated with masculinity. This has, she argues “contributed in legitimatizing patriarchal control over women” (Widding Isaksen 1994: 21).⁴⁰⁷ To lift this patriarchal control, Widding Isaksen argues for a positive reevaluation of the marginalized associated with the feminine.⁴⁰⁸

Cultural theorist Berit von der Lippe’s ambition is to “deconstruct” gender as “a significant organizing principle” and “an integral part” of “the deep structure” of society (1999: 52):

“Our culture’s understanding of morality and ethics, theory of science and notion of human being” is fundamentally “a patriarchal undertaking” (op.cit.: 111). In this connection, she elaborates and criticizes the patriarchal approach exposed in the works of Rousseau and Kant:

Even if neither Rousseau nor Kant can be accused of legitimitazing for example rape, they both move on a border-line with regard to violence, sex and oppression: Both regarded women’s submissiveness and obedience as evidently right. Not only are these great

407 For similar critiques of the hierarchical, gendered dualisms of the Western canon, in works inspired by French poststructuralism and psychoanalysis (see for example Songe-Møller 1990, 1995, von der Fehr 1991, Soleim 1994, Malterud 1996, 2002, Owesen 2000/2001, L’orange Fürst 1995, 1999, 2002, Findal 2002).

408 More specifically, she argues for a positive reevaluation of women’s care work.

philosophers, they are in a certain sense more: Rousseau received his breakthrough after the

philosophers, they are in a certain sense more: Rousseau received his breakthrough after the

In document Feminism, Epistemology & Morality (sider 167-178)