The Fortunes of Feminism. Nancy Fraser
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integrated action, provides Habermas with some critical resources for analyzing the modern, restricted, male-headed, nuclear family. Such families can be understood as normatively secured rather than communicatively achieved action contexts—that is, as contexts where actions are (sometimes) mediated by consensus and shared values, but where such consensus is suspect because it is pre-reflective or because it is achieved through dialogue vitiated by unfairness, coercion, or inequality.
To what extent does the distinction between normatively secured and communicatively achieved action contexts succeed in overcoming the problems discussed earlier? Only partially, I think. On the one hand, this distinction is a morally significant and empirically useful one. The notion of a normatively secured action context fits nicely with recent research on patterns of communication between husbands and wives. This research shows that men tend to control conversations, determining what topics are pursued, while women do more “interaction work,” like asking questions and providing verbal support.17 Research also reveals differences in men’s and women’s uses of the bodily and gestural dimensions of speech, differences which confirm men’s dominance and women’s subordination.18 Thus, Habermas’s distinction enables us to capture something important about intrafamilial dynamics. What is insufficiently stressed, however, is that actions coordinated by normatively secured consensus in the male-headed nuclear family are actions regulated by power. It seems to me a grave mistake to restrict the use of the term “power” to bureaucratic contexts. Critical theorists would do better to distinguish different kinds of power, for example, domestic-patriarchal power, on the one hand, and bureaucratic-patriarchal power, on the other.
But even that distinction does not by itself suffice to make Habermas’s framework fully adequate to all the empirical forms of male dominance in modern societies. For normative-domestic-patriarchal power is only one of the elements which enforce women’s subordination in the domestic sphere. To capture the others would require a social-theoretical framework capable of analyzing families also as economic systems involving the appropriation of women’s unpaid labor and interlocking in complex ways with other economic systems involving paid work. Because Habermas’s framework draws the major categorial divide between system and lifeworld institutions, and hence between (among other things) official economy and family, it is not very well suited to that task.
Let me turn now from the question of the empirical adequacy of Habermas’s model to the question of its normative political implications. What sorts of social arrangements and transformations does his modernization conception tend to legitimate? And what sorts does it tend to rule out? Here it will be necessary to reconstruct some implications of the model which are not explicitly thematized by Habermas.
Consider that the conception of modernization as the uncoupling of system and lifeworld institutions tends to legitimate the modern institutional separation of family and official economy, childrearing and paid work. For Habermas claims that there is an asymmetry between symbolic and material reproduction with respect to system-integration. Symbolic reproduction activities, he claims, are unlike material reproduction activities in that they cannot be turned over to specialized, system-integrated institutions set apart from the lifeworld. Their inherently symbolic character requires that they be socially integrated.19 It follows that women’s unpaid childrearing work could not be incorporated into the (official) economic system without “pathological” results. At the same time, Habermas also holds that it is a mark of societal rationalization that system-integrated institutions be differentiated to handle material reproduction functions. The separation of a specialized (official) economic system enhances a society’s capacity to deal with its natural and social environment. “System complexity,” then, constitutes a “developmental advance.”20 It follows that the (official) economic system of paid work could not be dedifferentiated with respect to, say, childrearing, without societal “regression.” But if childrearing could not be non-pathologically incorporated into the (official) economic system, and if the (official) economic system could not be non-regressively dedifferentiated, then the continued separation of childrearing from paid work would be required.
Effectively, then, Habermas’s framework is primed to defend at least one aspect of what feminists call “the separation of public and private,” namely, the separation of the official economic sphere from the domestic sphere and the enclaving of childrearing from the rest of social labor. It defends, therefore, an institutional arrangement that is widely held to be one, if not the, linchpin of modern women’s subordination. And it should be noted that the fact that Habermas is a socialist does not alter the matter. Even were he to endorse the elimination of private ownership, profit-orientation, and hierarchical command in paid work, this would not of itself affect the official-economic/domestic separation.
Now I want to challenge several premises of the reasoning I have just reconstructed. First, this reasoning assumes the natural kinds interpretation of the symbolic versus material reproduction distinction. But since, as I have argued, childrearing is a dual-aspect activity, and since it is not categorially different in this respect from other work, there is no warrant for the claim of an asymmetry vis-à-vis system integration. That is, there is no warrant for assuming that the system-integrated organization of childrearing would be any more (or less) pathological than that of other work. Second, this reasoning assumes the absolute differences interpretation of the social versus system integration distinction. But since, as I have argued, the modern, male-headed, nuclear family is a mélange of (normatively secured) consensuality, normativity, and strategicality, and since it is in this respect not categorially different from the paid workplace, then privatized childrearing is already, to a not insignificant extent, permeated by the media of money and power. Moreover, there is no empirical evidence that children raised in commercial day-care centers (even profit-based or corporate ones) turn out any more “pathological” than those raised, say, in suburban homes by full-time mothers. Third, the reasoning just sketched elevates system complexity to the status of an overriding consideration with effective veto-power over proposed social transformations aimed at overcoming women’s subordination. But this is at odds with Habermas’s professions that system complexity is only one measure of “progress” among others.21 More importantly, it is at odds with any reasonable standard of justice.
What, then, should we conclude about the normative, political implications of Habermas’s model? If the conception of modernization as the uncoupling of system and lifeworld does indeed have the implications I have just drawn from it, then it is in important respects androcentric and ideological.
2. PUBLIC AND PRIVATE IN CLASSICAL CAPITALISM:
THEMATIZING THE GENDER SUBTEXT
The foregoing difficulties notwithstanding, Habermas offers an account of the inter-institutional relations among various spheres of public and private life in classical capitalism which has some genuine critical potential. But in order to realize this potential fully, we need to reconstruct the unthematized gender subtext of his material.
Let me return to his conception of the way in which the (official) economic and state systems are situated with respect to the lifeworld. Habermas holds that, with modernization, the (official) economic and state systems are not simply disengaged or detached from the lifeworld; they must also be related to and embedded in it. Concomitant with the beginnings of classical capitalism, then, is the development within the lifeworld of “institutional orders” that situate the systems in a context of everyday meanings and norms. The lifeworld, as we saw, gets differentiated into two spheres that provide appropriate complementary environments for the two systems. The “private sphere” or modern, restricted, nuclear family is linked to the (official) economic system. The “public sphere” or space of political participation, debate, and opinion-formation is linked to the state-administrative system. The family is linked to the (official) economy by means of a series of exchanges conducted in the medium of money; it supplies the (official) economy with appropriately socialized labor power in exchange for wages; and it provides appropriate, monetarily measured demand for commodified goods and services. Exchanges between family and (official) economy, then, are channeled through the “roles” of worker and consumer. Parallel exchange processes link the public sphere and the state system. These, however, are conducted chiefly in the medium of power. Loyalty, obedience, and tax revenues are exchanged for “organizational