Before I started studying women’s history in depth, I was trying to understand the development of racism from that perspective. For example, I was struck by the way that capitalism fostered a progressive ideology of equality, and yet actually helped produce a much more coherent and far-reaching ideology of racism than had existed in hierarchical precapitalist societies. I began to see racism as a way that people reconciled their material interests in slavery, or their acquiescence to its continuation, with their belief in equal opportunity. And I noticed a similar dynamic in the development of biological theories about women’s inability to participate in the freedoms supposedly being granted to men. [...]
My research increasingly changed my point of view. Working with an anthropologist colleague, I began to see that the very mechanisms that initially reproduced cooperation and reciprocity in early foraging and horticultural societies also undermined both social and gender equality. Obviously, the family has long been a source of coercion and domination of women. But it’s also been a way of dominating men. First because parental control over women’s mating choices was also a way of controlling young men, and much later in history, because men’s responsibility for women has kept their shoulder to the grindstone, so to speak. The family regulates and polices its members but also protects them in some ways. It’s a site of struggle and accommodation as well as a site of control. Families have been shaped by and for the existing hierarchies of societies but sometimes they have changed in ways that weaken or challenge those hierarchies. As I began to see how much family life has changed over time, and how complex its dynamics have been, it made me question whether something like marriage was an inherently oppressive institution. I no longer believe that it is, even though we still carry a lot of baggage from the days when it did serve as a major way of enforcing gender, racial, and class power relations. [...]
The seventeen and eighteenth centuries. The new ideology of democracy rejects the idea that some people must be subordinate to others because of a social hierarchy. And yet you do need women in the home and you’ve got this increasing division of spheres between husbands and wives. And you’ve also got a lot of anxiety about the love match — what will keep people from staying single if they don’t find love, or getting divorced if love dies? How will we maintain gender order if love is more powerful than parental authority? And gradually a new ideology emerges that says no, it’s not because women have to be subordinate to men that men are in charge of the outside world and women in charge of the home. It’s because men and women have totally different capabilities and needs. Men and women are total opposites, each incomplete without the other. In premodern Europe and colonial America, women were expected to be tough enough to wring a chicken’s neck and drive a hard bargain at the marketplace. It was not unmanly to weep, and men were in charge of arranging many social events, keeping track of kin, and arranging weddings. Women were actually considered the lusty sex, more prone to sexual error, and there was very little sentimentality about their maternal role. [...]
You can see this trade-off as early as the nineteenth century. Nancy Cott studied the diaries of middle-class women experiencing this transition to the idea of the nurturing female homemaker. 2 She found that their diaries (and I’ve seen this in the public writings of nineteenth-century women as well) reflect a new sense of themselves as morally superior to men, who are caught up in the impersonal world of materialism and cash exchange. But there is simultaneously a new self-doubt about the worth of the work they do at home — an anxiety to, so to speak, prove themselves worthy of their keep, since they’re not providing for the family. Women lose their sense of themselves as productive co-providers for the family. They have to make up for it in the realm of love.
You can see this trade-off as early as the nineteenth century. Nancy Cott studied the diaries of middle-class women experiencing this transition to the idea of the nurturing female homemaker. 2 She found that their diaries (and I’ve seen this in the public writings of nineteenth-century women as well) reflect a new sense of themselves as morally superior to men, who are caught up in the impersonal world of materialism and cash exchange. But there is simultaneously a new self-doubt about the worth of the work they do at home — an anxiety to, so to speak, prove themselves worthy of their keep, since they’re not providing for the family. Women lose their sense of themselves as productive co-providers for the family. They have to make up for it in the realm of love.
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