The Fortunes of Feminism. Nancy Fraser

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The Fortunes of Feminism - Nancy  Fraser


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study of societies. The system perspective is objectivating and “externalist,” while the lifeworld perspective is hermeneutical and “internalist.” In principle, either can be applied to the study of any given set of societal phenomena. Habermas argues that neither alone is adequate. So he seeks to develop a methodology that combines both. On the other hand, Habermas also contrasts system and lifeworld in another way, namely, as two different kinds of institutions. It is this second system lifeworld contrast that I am concerned with here. I do not explicitly treat the first one in this essay. I am sympathetic to Habermas’s general methodological intention of combining or linking structural (in the sense of objectivating) and interpretive approaches to the study of societies. I do not, however, believe that this can be done by assigning structural properties to one set of institutions (the official economy and the state) and interpretive ones to another set (the family and the “public sphere”). I maintain, rather, that all of these institutions have both structural and interpretive dimensions and that all should be studied both structurally and hermeneutically. I have tried to develop an approach that meets these desiderata in Chapter 2 of the present volume, “Struggle over Needs.”

      15 See, for example, Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions, ed. Barrie Thorne and Marilyn Yalom, New York and London: Longman, 1982, and Michele Barrett and Mary McIntosh, The Anti-Social Family, London: Verso, 1982.

      16 TCA I, 85–6, 88–90, 101, 104–5; TCA II, 179; McCarthy, “Translator’s Introduction,” ix, xxx. In presenting the distinction between normatively secured and communicatively achieved action, I am again modifying, or rather stabilizing, the variable usage in Theory of Communicative Action. See note 7 above.

      17 Pamela Fishman, “Interaction: The Work Women Do,” Social Problems 25:4, 1978, 397–406.

      18 Nancy Henley, Body Politics, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1977.

      19 TCA II, 523–4, 547; “A Reply to my Critics,” 237; Thompson, “Rationality,” 288, 292.

      20 McCarthy pursues some of the normative implications of this for the differentiation of the administrative state system from the public sphere in “Complexity and Democracy.”

      21 McCarthy makes this point with respect to the dedifferentiation of the state administrative system and the public sphere. Ibid.

      22 TCA I, 341–2, 359–60; TCA II, 256, 473; “A Reply to my Critics,” 280; McCarthy, “Translator’s Introduction,” xxxii; Thompson, “Rationality,” 286–8.

      23 The following account of the masculine gender subtext of the worker role draws on Carole Pateman, “The Personal and the Political: Can Citizenship Be Democratic?,” Lecture 3 of her “Women and Democratic Citizenship” series, The Jefferson Memorial Lectures, delivered at the University of California, Berkeley, February 1985.

      24 Ibid., 5.

      25 Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment, Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1984.

      26 The following account of the masculine gender subtext of the citizen role draws on Carole Pateman, “The Personal and the Political.”

      27 Ibid., 8.

      28 Judith Hicks Stiehm, “The Protected, the Protector, the Defender,” in Women and Men’s Wars, ed. Judith Hicks Stiehm, New York: Pergamon Press, 1983.

      29 Pateman, “The Personal and the Political,” 10.

      30 Insofar as the foregoing analysis of the gender subtext of Habermas’s role theory deploys categories in which gender and political economy are internally integrated, it represents a contribution to the overcoming of “dual systems theory” (see note 6 above). It is also a contribution to the development of a more satisfactory way of linking structural (in the sense of objectivating) and interpretive approaches to the study of societies than that proposed by Habermas. For I am suggesting here that the domestic sphere has a structural as well as an interpretive dimension and that the official economic and state spheres have an interpretive as well as a structural dimension.

      31 TCA II, 505ff; Legitimation Crisis, 33–6, 53–5; McCarthy, “Translator’s Introduction,” xxxiii.

      32 TCA II, 522–4; Legitimation Crisis, 36–7, McCarthy, “Translator’s Introduction,” xxxiii.

      33 TCA II, 530–40; McCarthy, “Translator’s Introduction,” xxxiii–xxxiv.

      34 TCA II, 540–7; McCarthy, “Translator’s Introduction,” xxxi.

      35 TCA II, 275–7, 452, 480, 522–4; “A Reply to my Critics,” 226, 280–1; Observations, 11–12, 16–20; McCarthy, “Translator’s Introduction,” xxxi–xxxii; Thompson, “Rationality,” 286, 288.

      36 TCA II, 581–3; Observations, 18–19, 27–8.

      37 TCA II, 581–3; Observations, 16–17, 27–8.

      38 For the US social-welfare system, see the analysis of male vs. female participation rates and the account of the gendered character of the two subsystems in Fraser, “Women, Welfare and the Politics of Need Interpretation,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 2:1, 1987, 103–21. Also, Barbara J. Nelson, “Women’s Poverty and Women’s Citizenship: Some Political Consequences of Economic Marginality,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 10:2, 1985; Steven P. Erie, Martin Rein, and Barbara Wiget, “Women and the Reagan Revolution: Thermidor for the Social Welfare Economy,” in Families, Politics and Public Policies: A Feminist Dialogue on Women and the State, ed. Irene Diamond, New York: Longman, 1983; Diana Pearce, “Women, Work and Welfare: The Feminization of Poverty,” in Working Women and Families, ed. Karen Wolk Feinstein, Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1979, and “Toil and Trouble: Women Workers and Unemployment Compensation,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 10:3, 1985, 439–59; and Barbara Ehrenreich and Frances Fox Piven, “The Feminization of Poverty,” Dissent, Spring 1984, 162–70. For an analysis of the gendered character of the British social-welfare system, see Hilary Land, “Who Cares for the Family?,” Journal of Social Policy 7:3, 1978, 257–84. For Norway, see Patriarchy in a Welfare Society, ed. Harriet Holter, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1984. See also two comparative studies: Mary Ruggie, The State and Working Women: A Comparative Study of Britain and Sweden, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984; and Birte Siim, “Women and the Welfare State: Between Private and Public Dependence” (unpublished typescript).

      39 Carol Brown, “Mothers, Fathers and Children: From Private to Public Patriarchy,” in Sargent, ed., Women and Revolution. Actually, I believe Brown’s formulation is theoretically inadequate, since it presupposes a simple, dualistic conception of public and private. Nonetheless, the phrase “from private to public patriarchy” evokes in a rough but suggestive way the phenomena for which a socialist-feminist critical theory of the welfare state would need to account.

      40 At the time this essay was written, US data indicated that sex segmentation in paid work was increasing, despite the entry of women into professions like law and medicine. Even when the gains won by those women were taken into account, there was no overall improvement in the aggregated comparative economic position of paid women workers vis-à-vis male workers. Women’s wages remained less than 60 percent of men’s wages. Nor was there any overall improvement in occupational distribution by sex. Rather, the ghettoization of women in low-paying, low-status “pink collar” occupations was increasing. For example, in the US in 1973, women held 96 percent of all paid childcare jobs, 81 percent of all primary school teaching jobs, 72 percent of all health technician jobs, 98 percent of all Registered Nurse jobs, 83 percent of all librarian jobs, 99 percent of all secretarial jobs, and 92 percent of all waitperson jobs. The figures for 1983 were, respectively, 97 percent, 83 percent, 84 percent, 96 percent, 87 percent, 99 percent, and 88 percent (Bureau of Labor Statistics figures cited by Drew Christie, “Comparable Worth and Distributive Justice,” paper read at meetings of the American Philosophical Association, Western Division, April 1985).

      41 See note 38 above.

      42 Cf. Zillah Eisenstein, The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1981,


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