Reviewed by Mary B. Mahowald
University of Chicago

If self-criticism is a sign of maturation, this book makes it abundantly clear that feminist theory has not only come of age, but has already given birth to new theoretical constructs. Donna Dickenson, formerly Research Associate in Politics at Yale and currently the Leverhulme Reader in Medical Ethics and Law at Imperial College, London, has mounted an impressive challenge to those who think that liberal, individualistic contractarianism is irretrievably riddled with inequities towards women, particularly through its emphasis on private property. As one of that number, I am impelled to reexamine my own views in light of Dickenson’s rigorous, well-informed and constructive critique. Although this work draws mainly on traditional and contemporary property theorists and their critics, I suspect her overall project is influenced also by her earlier book-length studies of George Sand, Emily Dickinson, and Margaret Fuller (Dickenson 1993) and by her more recent work in medical ethics (Dickenson 1991, Dickenson and Johnson 1993).

In a sense, Dickenson warns us not to "throw out the baby with the bath water" by rejecting those elements of traditional theories of property that may contribute to women’s liberation. Her book sifts through the writings of Aristotle, Locke, and Hegel as proponents of the right to private property, as well as some major nonfeminist (Marx/Engels) and feminist (Carole Pateman) critics, identifying elements that need to be retained rather than discarded. But Dickenson doesn’t stop there: in the course of her sifting, she develops a conception of property that, in her view, is not only compatible with, but necessary to women’s status as subjects.

Dickenson begins by analyzing the work of Stephen R. Munzer as a contemporary exemplar of traditional "canonical normative" theories of property (Munzer 1990). For Munzer, property rights in the workplace may be limited by contract or legislation, but property rights over personal, movable objects are essential to human society and conducive to the development of moral personality and agency. "What Munzer presents as empirical facts about human motivation," Dickenson claims, are in reality "liberal assumptions" (64). While using gender-neutral language, he ignores women’s experience of property, which is prevalently quite different from that of men. Munzer’s theory is thus particularist rather than universalist because it excludes half the human race from its scope of applicability.

Although gender particularism is also found in traditional theories of property, Munzer’s assertion of the tie between moral personality and property is more congenial to Aristotle’s than to others’ theories. Virtue requires autonomy on either account, and control over property is a means of expressing autonomy. On Aristotle’s model, however, property can only contribute to the development of character or virtue in men because women are virtually excluded from ownership. Their province is the home, but even there, they are subject to their husbands.

Dickenson views feminist criticisms of property rights in ancient Greece as tending to "ahistorical essentialism" by interpreting Athens, where women’s property rights were nonexistent, as paradigmatic. On this issue, she says, Athens was more like the odd one out in the ancient world. In Gortyn, for example, daughters could inherit in their own right, and each member of the family, regardless of sex, was a potential property holder. In Egypt, women could administer family estates as heiresses and grow and sell produce. Even in patriarchal, patrilineal Sparta, women were entitled to hold property. Although women’s property rights in all of these places were weaker than those of men, they did exist. Dickenson emphasizes the need to recognizes such differences, lest "we as feminists may be as guilty of false universalism as ‘malestream’ theorists have often been" (62). An emancipatory interpretation of Lockean liberal theory, according to Dickenson, draws on two crucial distinctions: property in the body vs. property in the person, and sexual vs. contractual aspects of the sexual contract. "The two distinctions," she says,

are linked: what is sexual about, and wrong with, the sexual contract, hinges on its assertion of male property in female bodies, as epitomized by the so-called marriage ‘contract’ in practice under the laws of coverture. What is right with contractarian theory is that it insists on women’s property in the person, thereby enhancing their moral and political agency (77).

"Coverture" refers to the Anglo-American practice by which "any personal property that the wife brought into the marriage became the property of the husband" (83). Dickenson maintains that the doctrine of coverture in effect negated the possibility of genuine contract, which requires the equality of the parties who agree to its terms.

Hegel acknowledges that the marriage relationship begins with a contract, but maintains, according to Dickenson, that the contract is thereafter transcended through its essential orientation toward unity between the parties rather than agreement between them as distinct individuals. Unlike Pateman (1988), who focuses on the initial contract, Dickenson sees Hegel’s developmental and relational view as potentially liberating for women. She insists, however, that its liberating impact can only be achieved by rejecting Hegel’s "separate spheres" doctrine, which, by excluding women from work outside the home, leads to economic inequality between the sexes.

Interestingly, and as an antidote to the inevitability of economic inequality in Hegel’s account, Marx and Locke both affirm the asset of labor power for both sexes. "Property in the person" arises from this mixing of labor with resources. While aligning herself with Marx’s concept and critique of alienation, Dickinson argues that he and Engels failed to extend it beyond production to reproduction. "To be consistent" she says, "Marx should also view women’s domestic work as alienated" (128).

Dickenson’s transformation of traditional liberal theory denies that either women or property are objects. Rather, property rights are "bundles of relations" and women as subjects hold those rights just as men do. She concludes her book with intriguing applications of her view. Gametes, she claims, should not be bought or sold by either sex because they involve relationships with future generations and our present partners. This position fails to account for the very discrepant contribution of men and women to the provision of gametes. I, for one, consider egg "donation" labor, while sperm "donation" surely is not. In contrast, contract motherhood, for Dickenson, is permissible because payment is not provided for potential or actual children but for women’s reproductive labor, that is, their pain and suffering through gestation and childbirth. Potential fathers need to be forewarned because, so long as "women’s labor is unequivocally theirs…it must be theirs to transfer, by gift or sale" (163). Thus women may in fact decline at birth to allow custody of the child to the genetic father. Moreover, the language of contract for the woman’s labor must eliminate the possibility of exploitation. Dickenson acknowledges that few men may want to accept the risk of buying woman’s labor without obtaining its product.

On the issue of fetal tissue, Dickenson develops two positions, one compatible with property in the body, the other with property in the person. On the first model, sale of fetal tissue is acceptable; on the second, it is not. Consistent with her view of property rights as bundles of relations, she emphasizes the relationship between the pregnant woman and the fetus. To think of fetal tissue simply as an object, she says, betrays that relationship. Her position here raises the question of whether rights are solely determined by the willingness of others to assign them. Dickenson maintains that the fetus "cannot enjoy rights until the pregnant woman elects to endow it with the status of an autonomous agent" (167).

Dickenson’s last example returns us to the marriage contract discussed earlier in the book. The "baby" she wants to keep is the contract part, construed in her emancipatory and egalitarian sense. This baby is necessarily wrapped in recognition of reproductive freedom and the labor of childbirth as women’s property, maintaining equal freedom throughout the tenure of the contract, allowing either party to make or break the agreement at any time. The "bathwater" Dickenson wants to throw out includes all of the components of classical property theory that have contributed to inequality between the sexes, for example, Aristotle’s insistence on women’s subordination to their husbands, Locke’s support of coverture, Hegel’s affirmation of unequal separate spheres for men and women, and Marx’s failure to acknowledge domestic labor and reproduction as property of women as persons.

Beautifully written, Dickenson’s attempt to rescue liberal contractarianism from the sexism in which it has been embedded for centuries is an impressive achievement. Although she does not apply her egalitarian interpretation of property to single women, lesbians, and widows, it is surely as applicable to these groups as to heterosexual marriage partners. Through the strength of its scholarship, analyses, and argumentation, Property, Women and Politics is likely to convince at least some anti-liberals that a correct account of liberal theory is compatible with feminism. Many, in fact, may agree with the author that women’s ownership of property is a necessary component of gender justice.

Works Cited

Dickenson, Donna. 1985. Emily Dickenson. Dover, NH : Berg.

______________. 1988. George Sand: A Brave man, the Most Womanly Woman. New York: Oxford University Press.

______________. 1991. Moral Luck in Medical Ethics and Practical Politics. Brookfield, VT: Avebury.

______________. 1993. Margaret Fuller: Writing a Woman’s Life.New York: St. Martin’s Press.

______________ and Malcolm Johnson, eds. 1993. Death, Dying, and Bereavement. London: Sage Publications.

Munzer, Stephen R. 1990. A Theory of Property. New York: Cambridge University Press.