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Spring 2008
Volume 07, Number 2

Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy

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Problems with Inclusive Feminism and Rule by Women

Naomi Zack
University of Oregon

I think it is possible to provide a universal definition for women as a basis for political action (even given intersectionality). I think women should rule the world on the highest levels of government (although men might continue in other positions of power and authority). In presenting these ideas at philosophical conferences and considering responses to my 2005 book, Inclusive Feminism, two main problems have emerged: skepticism about reliability of women who rise to top leadership and a desire to change the existing gender system.[1] I appreciate this opportunity to present an informal overview of my positive claims and consider the problems.

A Definition of Women

In the United States, politically successful women have presented themselves as androgynes. This is not a matter of personal style, but of women’s interests that they have failed to effectively represent. In the third world there are many politically effective women’s groups that advocate for the well being of their families, precisely through their traditional roles as mothers and wives. And in Norway it has been a requirement since the 1970s that members of parliament be 40 percent female, a policy based on the belief that women’s political interests are inherently different from men’s. Major democratic nations other than the United States have had female heads of state in recent decades, while before 2005 or 2006, it was not considered feasible here.

Many American feminist theorists have successfully revealed the bias against women in actual rule by men and traditional political theory. Globally, plans for women to unite for common goals despite their differences have thus far been very tentative, due to economic and political disparity. Within the United States, differences in race and class seem to preclude a common feminism. Nonetheless, women can understand themselves in a general way as those human beings who are assigned to or identify with the category of female birth designees, or biological mothers, or primary sexual choices of men—Category FMP. To be a woman, it is not necessary to have an identity based on all or any of the FMP disjuncts but, rather, to identify as, or be identified with, FMP as a whole. That is, what women have in common is the relation of having been assigned to or identifying with Category FMP. This is a real relation and an essence. But it is not a substance in the sense of any thing, genetic, structural, functional, or behavioral, that is present in all women.

Women, History, and Politics

As critical theory, feminism not only describes the condition of women, socially and psychologically, but should generate an ethics and politics capable of changing human history, by balancing or overcoming the ruling power of men. It is not enough to create moral and political theories that can be enacted only within the lifeworld ruled by men. Women need an historical identity of their own. The modern Western political and economic technologizing project, or history as we know it, continues as though its most influential participants are simply the heirs of their colonialist forebears. We cannot know beforehand whether women would succeed in redirecting men’s trajectory if they became an historical force. But women are the last hope for such redirection at this time because the Western corporate juggernaut has little difficulty in defeating or co-opting men in other cultures, and it encounters no resistance from the natural environment, except for its accelerating morbidity.

We do not know what sexuality is, but we do know what heterosexuality has been, the sexual desire of human males for human females, sometimes reciprocal, which has the reproduction of the human species as its most general aim and value. But this does not happen on its own. Human beings require social systems and learned gender differentiation to reproduce. Human reproduction has two parts: first a new member of the species is created, and second that individual is encultured so as to contribute to its own acts of biological creation. However, human children are not automatic replicas of their parents, biologically, socially, or culturally. The social reproduction of culture through deliberate, albeit traditional, practices could result in different cultures in the future. That is, human beings create human beings and they could create them in different ways, as well as create different kinds of human beings.

Because Category FMP distinguishes women from men, via roles that are antithetical to political power as we know it, rule by women allows for a kind of rule without the aggression, violence, exploitation, and destruction that have attended rule by men. Feminists might view extant political power as the medium for that aspect or part of the construction of manhood, which individual men find it convenient to disavow in public, where “public” means not only “out of the house” but “known by all.” The task of a practical feminist politics is for women to evaluate the destructive gendered political constructions of men, and try to change them. Women are qualified to do this, not because they are more peace-loving, altruistic, or nurturing, but for two more superficial reasons: First, they are not men, and, understood as Category FMP, are not generally afflicted with the dark side of masculine gender constructions. Second, women now have suffrage on a worldwide basis. There could be an interlocking global system of women’s political parties, representing more than 50 percent of the electorate in democratic countries. Such a political shift along the axis of gender would be a fundamental historical change.

Written history has been an account of past events, peoples, nations, individuals, institutions, and ideas. As a discipline, history includes what is already presumed to be important in a specific regard. Regarding leadership and power, which are already important to men, historians, who have usually been men, have focused on men and their public and official achievements. This results in the history of women, as well as men. When women’s achievements are reclaimed, it still does not change the fact that men have ruled. From a feminist perspective, it is not sufficient to include women in history. Rather, they need to be relocated as the equals of men in those public and official achievements that women, as well as men, recognize to be world-shaping. No rewriting of the past can accomplish this. For that reason, a feminist history at this time must address the future.

And why not? History, generally, is an understanding of times different from our own, and one of its purposes is to improve our understanding of the present. But if feminists are to do more than speculate about the future, it is necessary to have a theory of history, which explicitly includes the future, in addition to, or even in place of, the past. One way to surpass mere speculation and get beyond crystal-ball type wish lists is to have a link between the past and the present, and a link between the present and the future. The link between the past and the present has already been constructed by second wave feminists in critical work about male dominance in the present, together with genealogical work about its ideological and material antecedents in the past. That historical project explains how and why women have thus far been omitted from history, not just as a matter of exclusion from the record, but as not having been permitted to do the kinds of things that have been considered important historically. This feminist historical project about the link between the past and the present is robust across many scholarly disciplines, and its paradigm continues to yield knowledge that is relevant, interesting, and instructive. But the feminist historical link between the present and the future has not yet been constructed. One possibility is a Sartrean existentialist approach, whereby imagining a better future becomes a springboard for changing the present.[2]

Political and Economic Implications

Although it is possible to provide a universal definition of women, based on their shared relations of identifying with or being assigned to Category FMP, this does not mean that women are a social class. In fact, women are only vaguely analogous to a social class because social classes, as understood within Marxist theory, are defined by their relation to the dominant means of production in a society. Each class owns different kinds of things or furnishes to the economy different kinds of labor, which have prices. Much of women’s labor, such as biological reproduction, domestic chores, child rearing, family work, and so forth, has not been priced. And, yet, it is an invisible asset for other workers who benefit from it when they return home, so that they can continually report to work outside the home. Because so much of this social reproductive labor is performed without pay, it is not part of the economy. Therefore, women cannot be an economic class in Marx’s sense. (There are paid house cleaners, social secretaries, baby sitters, sex workers, nannies, surrogate mothers and egg donors, clothes cleaners, and meal makers. But their “service work,” even when performed according to legal contracts, which is not always the case, is not considered an important part of contemporary post-industrial “First World” economies. Often, it is routinely purchased by the affluent only.)

Under capitalism, the ruling classes are those who own the most in a hierarchy of classes because ownership is directly related to political power and authority. Racial hierarchies intersect with class hierarchies, but within each race, class, class sector of a racial group, or racial sector of a class, women are the ones who identify with or are assigned to the FMP category, and there is a division of labor between men and women. Thus far, women have had the class status of the men in their race/class groups because for so long it was the men in such groups who had their work priced, or owned property or capital. Because so much of women’s work enters the economic system indirectly, their work does not qualify them to be leading participants in class, or race-class systems. The inclusion of women in professions and other priced sections of Western economies, has thus far been accompanied by an androgynization of women in the workplace, rather than economic power for women, as historically understood, which could be translated into political power for women. The workplace androgyny of women does not destabilize the power and authority of men. And despite their workplace androgyny, many women are still expected to perform unpaid women’s work in a “second shift.” In fact, many choose to do exactly that.

According to Marx (roughly speaking), because human beings have to produce the materials to sustain their existence, they are motivated to acquire and possess those things. In modern capitalistic society, material goods are economic goods that are represented by money. Those who have large amounts of money, or who can get it and use it to make more, have capital—they are capitalists. Capitalists require that individuals who do not have capital repetitively sell them their labor in exchange for wages that enable their physical and social survival. The wages allow the workers to live and “reproduce” their labor (or have it reproduced freely by others) so that they can continue to work. The ideological implication of the Marxist analysis is that the profits of owners should belong to the workers, or that the workers should be owners.

The feminist critique of the Marxist analysis has been that women have furnished domestic, social, and biological unpaid reproductive work to both male capitalists and workers. Its ideological implication is that women should be paid for their reproductive labor. Suppose they were. Women would still not be able to acquire wealth or become capitalists, as a basis for political power, because women’s work, per se, does not result in products that can be exchanged for stored capitalist wealth. Family social work, gestation, and child care are interactions between specific individuals, from which workers cannot be alienated without defeating the goals of such work. A woman who performed such work for high pay could not employ other women to perform the work for her, without radically changing the nature of her work. Women’s work, except for repetitive drudgery, is personal work. Generally, women’s work is supposed to be accompanied by commitments and emotional attitudes that have what Kant called “dignities” rather than “prices.” Women are expected to perform their women’s work out of love, or something that “no amount of money can buy.” More to the point, even fully autonomous women choose to do this work from such motives. In recognizing the value of some core of women’s work, which a feminist ethics of care does do, it seems morally wrong to put prices on parts of this core, such as the love of mothers for their children. Nevertheless, others might view women’s work as gender slavery that should be abolished, and still others might advocate its performance by trained professionals, such as teachers, counselors, mediators, and in the biological realm, sex workers, egg donors, and tenders of artificial wombs.

However, whether women’s work ought to be priced, or not, or should be abolished or replaced, or not, the political-economic implication is the same: Given our current system, the basis on which women could be a social class, with economic interests transferable into political power, would not likely be their work as women. To consider human rule on an axis of gender, rather than material production, requires thinking beyond a standard Marxist analysis of history and social class, beyond economics, and beyond how people contribute to a priced material system. There is nothing intrinsic to women, individually or en masse, that requires them to be a social class in a Marxist economic sense. If they are to be a distinctive social class in some other sense, it could be based on their external identification as human beings assigned to Category FMP, and the striking fact that they are at least half of the human population. That should be enough to ground women as an historical force, given a theoretical link between the present and the future.

We need to be aware that in post-industrial consumer societies, material objects have symbolic as well as direct utilitarian value, and they become signifiers of status according to race, class, gender, age, occupation, and myriad other social machines that maintain human hierarchies, and distribute power. As a result, it is virtually impossible to define what people need and what is in reality scarce on a global scale because many of the myriad economic machines of capitalist technology do not obey laws of distributive justice or fairness. Needs appear to be pre-emptive over desires, but the desires of some appear to determine what others need. For example, is state-of-the-art medical care a need, or are conditions of life that would render much of it unnecessary a need? Is animal protein a human need or do human beings just need generic protein that could be obtained from organisms lower in the food chain? And how much of the world should we consider in identifying scarcity? Does the fact that some populations experience famine establish that there is a scarcity of food, or is the real problem a failure to distribute available food equitably, or protect pre-industrial economies? Neither standard Marxism, nor its derivatives, is capable of providing grounds for judging what human needs are, and which of those needs cannot be fulfilled for everyone, owing to a final or absolute scarcity. If there is to be a significant alternative to rule by men as they have been historically constructed, and if women are the only group that could provide this alternative—because there are sufficient numbers of women and they are not men—then the alternative would have to be envisioned, if not implemented, before such judgments about need and scarcity could be made. Part of that alternative is a revaluation of the unpriced and perhaps unpriceable components of our material and psychic lifeworlds.

Problems with Category FMP and Rule by Women

Many feminists do not think in terms of common political goals for women. They assume that women are too different, depending on their locations in social, racial, and economic hierarchies. But these “difference feminists” are amenable to the idea that the second shift and lack of access to top government positions are commonalities. Once it is clear that FMP is a definition that associates women with the historical human groups that have made feminism necessary, that a person need not be a mother, birth female, or male heterosexual choice, to be a woman, and that male-to-female transsexuals are women according to FMP, then there is little theoretical objection to FMP as a formal definition. However, there are two deeper differences in perspective that I cannot as easily address with the ideas I have set forth:

1. Rule by women may be no better for women in the population than rule by men. There are examples of women leaders (for example, Margaret Thatcher) who have been insensitive to the values assumed in unpriced women’s work. So how could a gender change in top leadership guarantee either better lives for women or preservation of the natural environment?

My answer is that many women leaders rise to the top and survive there by playing the men’s game. What is needed is worldwide women’s political leadership, through women’s political parties. This is more than a question of a “critical mass” making a difference, than of women being able to rule based on their historical identities and ongoing interests as family-makers.[3] This answer leads right to the second problem.

2. Why should we accept the historical sex-gender system that divides human beings into two sexes or genders? Instead of just flipping over who oppresses or dominates whom, why not devote theoretical and political work to abolishing the entire male-female system? Once the virtues, vices, and negative constructions of both genders are properly critiqued and obliterated, all leaders will be less aggressive and governments less supportive of exploitation.

I repeat that Category FMP is a descriptive and not a normative definition of women. Beyond that, I do not have a clear or easy answer to this question. I confess that I lack a passion of opposition to the male-female gender system as an organizing/sorting/labor-dividing mechanism. This system has evolved not just for human beings, but for other mammals also, and it has provided basic social organization in every known human society. Without a strong motive, I do not see why it would be worth the effort to try to abolish it. We do not know it could be abolished. The great majority accept their man-woman/male-female gender assignments, actively choose and relish them, even. But, and this is really quite amazing given the abuses of the system, that same majority is quite receptive to different emphases at different times. If the last were not true, second wave feminism would not have had the great success it did for women entering the workforce (in conjunction with a silent inflation that made it impossible to maintain certain living standards if only men worked outside the home). The dual gender system has huge ranges of liberatory and oppressive practices; conceptually and in practice it can accommodate a wide range of sexual and gender minorities and exceptions. More reasons than gender inequality, heterosexism, homophobia, rigid gender role assignment and identity, as well as other practices based on substantialist gender essentialism, would have to be forthcoming because all of these ills can be corrected within the system. Indeed, some who suffer from these ills may require the system as a foundation, or a backdrop, to develop their own sex/gender identities. The sex-gender identities of the vast majority are associated with distinct biological structures and functions, although, at the same time, those for whom that is not the case deserve every consideration and overall respect. Significant changes to the man-woman/male-female taxonomy are more likely to originate from the lives of those whom the system does not fit, than from theoretical imperatives. Some may believe that such change is already here, but I think this should be viewed as a huge empirical question to be answered by very broad investigation.

For the time being, the man-woman/male-female system is a stable taxonomy. It seems reasonable to pursue deep political change on an understanding of the shared historical identity of the half of our species that has not yet had ultimate power. If this women’s identity is in itself inherently unpowerful, then women in positions of ultimate power will have interesting effects on that power itself.

Endnotes

1. The ideas in this paper are largely from Naomi Zack, Inclusive Feminism: A Third Wave Theory of Women’s Commonality (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), particularly chapters 1, 7, and 8. A more scholarly presentation of this material appears in my “Can Third Wave Feminism be Inclusive?: Intersectionality, Its Problems and New Directions,” in Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy, edited by Linda M. Alcoff and Eva Kittay (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006).
Since 2003, I have received highly useful responses from audiences to the ideas summarized here. I am grateful to the members of the audiences at: DePaul University (April 2003), The American Philosophical Association Pacific Division Meeting (March 2003), Fall SWIP meeting at the University of Oregon (Nov. 2003), Pacific APA (March 2004), Philosophy Dept. at the University of Oregon (April 2004), Spelman College (May 2004), Linfield College (Dec. 2004), Seattle University (May 2004), University of North Carolina, Charlotte (March 2007), Washington and Lee University (March 2007).

2. See Zack, Inclusive Feminism, 121-40.

3. See Zack, Inclusive Feminism, 151-2, for discussion of this issue, and sources.

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