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Sunshine for
Women Book Summaries | Home |
| One | Introduction: The Romantic Solution |
| Two | Witches, Healers, and Gentlemen Doctors |
| Three | Science and the Ascent of Experts |
| Four | The Sexual Politics of Sickness |
| Five | Microbes and the Manufacture of Housework |
| Six | The Century of the Child |
| Seven | Motherhood as Pathology |
| Eight | From Masochistic |
| Afterword: | The End of the Romance |
One Introduction: The Romantic Solution
1) "Rebellious women might be beaten privately (with official approval) or punished publicly by the village "fathers'" and any woman who tried to survive on her own would be at the mercy of random male violence.
But the rule of the fathers is not based on mere coercion. Patriarchal authority seeks to justify itself in the minds of each of its children, and this justification takes the form of a father-centered religion." page 7
2) "Philosophy (especially in Britain and the United States) abandoned its search for the Good and the True and made a pragmatic peace with materialism and individualism of the Market economy. Religion learned to turn an ethical blind spot toward the Market and confine itself to matters of private life." page 16
3) "The emerging world view of the new age [18th and 19th centuries] was, in fact, distinctly masculinist. It was a world view which proceeded from the Market, from the realm of economic, or "public" life. It was by its nature external to women, capable of seeing them only as "others" or aliens.
Patriarchal ideology subordinated women too, of course. But it was not formed in some other realm than that inhabited by women, for life in the Old Order had not been fractured into separate realms. Masculinist opinion, however, is cast in a realm apart from women. It proceeds from the male half of what has become a sexually segregated world. It reflects not some innate male bias but the logic and assumptions of that realm, which are the logic and assumptions of the capitalist market." pages 17 and 18
4) "Nothing could be more abhorrent from a romantic standpoint than the sexual rationalist program. To dissolve the home (by removing the last domestic chores and letting women out to work) would be to remove the last refuge from the horrors of industrial society. Communal dining halls, child care services, and housekeeping services would turn out to be outposts of the hated factory- or factories themselves, imposing their cold and regimented operations on the most intimate and personal details of life. And to liberate woman would be to take away the only thing which cushioned man from psychic destruction in the rough world of the Market. If she became a female version of "economic man," and individual pursuing her own trajectory, then indeed it would be a world without love, without human warmth. The lonely prospect which stretched before economic man- ". . . a forbidding and frostbound wilderness to be subdued with aching limbs beneath solitary stars" - would have to be accepted as inescapable reality.
But this, of course, is what the romantic could not do. Man must have a refuge from the savage scramble of the Market, he must have consolation for his lonely quest as "economic man." Sexual romanticism asserts that the home will be that refuge, women will be that consolation. " page 23
Two Witches, Healers, and Gentlemen Doctors
1) Regarding the witch hunts: "Many writers have estimated the total number killed to have been in the millions. Women made up 85% of those executed - old women, young women, and children." page 35
Three Science and the Ascent of Experts no notes
Four The Sexual Politics of Sickness
1) "So the logic was complete: better-off women were sickly because of their refined and civilized lifestyle. Fortunately, however, this same lifestyle made them amenable to lengthy medical treatment. Poor and working-class women were inherently stronger, and this was also fortunate, since their lifestyle disqualified them from lengthy medical treatment anyway, The theory of innate female sickness, skewed so as to account for class difference in ability to pay for medical care, meshed conveniently with the doctors' commercial self-interest." page 115
2) "And Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi put the matter most forcefully when she wrote in 1895, "I think, finally, it is in the increased attention paid to women, and especially in their new function as lucrative patients, scarcely imagined a hundred years ago, that we find explanation for much of the ill-health among women, freshly discovered today. . . . " page 115
3) "According to this "psychology of the ovary" woman's entire personality was directed by the ovaries, and any abnormalities, from irritably to insanity, could be traced to some ovarian disease. Dr. Bliss added, with unbecoming spitefulness, that "the influence of the ovaries over the mind is displayed in woman's artfulness and dissimulation."
It should be emphasized, before we follow the workings of the uterus and ovaries any further, that woman's total submission to the "sex function" did not make her a sexual being. The medical model of female nature, embodied in the "psychology of the ovary," drew a rigid distinction between reproductivity and sexuality. Women were urged by the health books and the doctors to indulge in deep preoccupation with themselves as "The Sex"; they were to devote themselves to developing their reproductive power and their maternal instincts. Yet doctors said they had no predilection for the sex act itself. Even a woman physician, Dr. Mary Wood-Allen wrote (perhaps from experience), that women embrace their husbands "without a particle of desire." Hygiene manuals stated that the more cultured the woman, "the more is the sensual refined away from her nature," and warned against "any spasmodic convulsion" on a woman's part during intercourse lest it interfere with conception. Female sexuality was seen as unwomanly and possibly even detrimental to the supreme function of reproduction." page 121
4) "The notion of the female body as the battleground of the uterus and the brain led to two possible therapeutic approaches; one was to intervene in the reproductive area - removing "diseased" organs or strengthening the uterus with bracing doses of silver nitrate, injections, cauterizations, bleedings, etc. The other approach was to go straight for the brain and attempt to force its surrender directly. The doctors could hardly use the same kind of surgical techniques on the brain as they had on the ovaries and uterus, but they discovered more subtle methods. The most important of these was the rest cure - the world- famous invention of Dr. S. Weir Mitchell. The rest cure depended on the now-familiar techniques of twentieth-century brainwashing- total isolation and sensory deprivation. For approximately six weeks the patient was to lie on her back in a dimly lit room. She was not permitted to read. If her case was particularly severe, she was not even permitted to rise to urinate. She was to have no visitors and to see no one but the nurse and the doctor." page 131
Five Microbes and the Manufacture of Housework
1) "Yet throughout the nineteenth century, through the upheavals of urbanization, industrialization, war - over 95 per cent of married women remained, like their mothers before them, at home, seemingly untouched by the industrial and social revolution sweeping through American life. But, their lives too were drastically changed: the traditional home crafts were vanishing into factories." page 143
2) "But social control was an investment which only the largest and most farsighted corporations could afford. Most employers could not have cared less how their workers lived, and all, of course, viciously opposed the workers' own attempts to raise their standard of living. Efforts to promote home values among the workers were usually confined to the least expensive, most trivial, measures. For example, the Palmer Manufacturing Company provided basins and towels for its employees so that they could return home looking like "gentlemen," and thus gain a higher respect for home life. Not until the nineteen twenties when business came to see the home as a market would the nation's corporate leadership launch a concerted effort to promote domesticity among the workers." page 149
3) "The wide ranging, rationalist feminism of Susan B. Anthony's generation had been abandoned for the single-minded focus on getting the vote and, secondarily, getting women into college. Domestic science was appealing because it provided a dainty cover-up for both activities. " page 165
4) "Domestic science became a way of justifying higher education for women. According to the Lake Placid Conferences the truly scientific housekeeper needed to have studied, at a minimum, chemistry, anatomy, physiology, and hygiene, and to refine her taste for interior decorating, she needed in addition an acquaintance with great works of literature and art. If one couldn't demand to study things for their own sake- and certainly not for the sake of a "male" career - all that was left was to demand them for the sake of the home." page 166
Six The Century of the Child no notes
1) "But in the course of the twentieth century, a major cultural inversion takes place: private life becomes an end in itself, and effort in the outside world becomes merely instrumental to greater private fulfillment." page 211
2) "Throughout the century, the steadily climbing index of consumer spending would be matched by a decline in the old inhibitions - in sex, in dress, in attitudes, and etiquette." page 212
3) "In short, communism looked like nothing so much as the rationalist nightmare which had always been latent in industrial capitalism- a world without love, without poetry, without illusion." page 252
4) Regarding the 1950's: "In fact there was a widespread suspicion that Americans had no values at all. Intellectuals were suffering through a mass case of "alienation." Housewives were showing the first signs of the boredom which would later be considered their characteristic occupational disease." page 256
5) Regarding a 1960 Presidential Commission of Goals for Americans: "Now, "individualism" can be a reason for fighting courageously, but it can also be the rationale for defecting to the enemy, betraying a friend, or terrorizing old people on the streets. Besides, individualism is hardly a unifying value. Dr. Spock observed sadly that the American emphasis on individual success "does not bind us together, but puts us in competition with one another." It wasn't that American ideals were "unworthy," he wrote, "it is only that they do not serve to unite and inspire us." In the age of POW turncoats and juvenile delinquents, the child-raising experts uneasily faced the fact that America did not have any transcendent, unifying "values": nor could it, because the imposition of any other overarching value would undercut the first value, "individualism," and thus would be a step toward totalitarianism." page 257
6) "The age dimension allowed the experts to psychologize away what was actually a serious political uprising. Calling the problem a "generation gap" made it sound as though the whole thing was a family dispute, an unexpected Oedipal flare-up." page 261
Eight From Masochistic Motherhood to the Sexual Marketplace
1) "The experts clung for as long as they could to the romantic ideal of femininity. But gradually the tension between the culture of self-gratification, on the one hand, and the experts' ideal of maternal self-sacrifice, on the other, became unbearable. To bridge the contradiction, psychomedical theory would become ever more tortured and bizarre - until once again femininity could only be explained as a kind of disease - "masochism." By the sixties the experts' theories would become hopelessly out of touch with women's own aspirations." page 270
2) "It was hard to reconcile the self-denying "essence" of woman's nature with the cultural atmosphere created by a consumption-centered economy. Here was a society which claimed to value individualism above all and which exhorted everyone to devote themselves to the search for personal gratification. Yet one half the population seemed to be committed, by their very anatomy, to a life of self-denial. The obvious objective sorts of explanations- that most women were economically dependent on their husbands, that abortions and day care were virtually unavailable - had no place in the psychoanalytic world-view. The only logical way to reconcile woman's commitment to suffering with the over-all cultural commitment to pleasure was to assert that, for women, suffering was pleasurable. The psychoanalytical construction of the female personality found mounting cultural acceptance from the thirties on, and by the forties and fifties - the height of the permissive era- the Freudian faith in female masochism stood almost undisputed.
For women, even sex was to be an exercise in happy self-denial. Female sexual pleasure had become respectable enough, by this time, for therapists to prescribe it in cases of overprotection or other forms of maternal maladjustment." page 271
3) "To say now, at mid-century, that it was not energy, but passivity, that held a woman to her home, not ambition, but resignation, not enjoyment, but pain- was to say that from a masculinist point of view the female role was unthinkable, and that those who fit into it were in some sense insane." page 273
4) Regarding the 1960's: "They went out to work now because they needed the money and, in many cases, because they were "going nuts." " page 285
5) "By the sixties, with close to 30 million women employed and a quarter of them not even married, the discrepancy between the romantic ideal and economic reality was getting out of hand. The contradiction was acute for the working "housewives," torn between a romantic ideal which demanded masochistic servitude, and the reality of a double life which barely left time for an occasional laundry, much less memorable home cooking. The growing number of self-supporting single women could find even less to identify with in the ideal of feminine self-sacrifice. The times called for a new feminine image- one which would reflect the working woman's new sense of independence and self-worth. It all happened so quickly that the psychomedical authorities were caught unprepared - with no time to revise their theories or rewrite their advice." page 285
6) "[Helen Gurley] Brown's message was more than a pep talk for insecure singles. She grasped the appalling fact that "magazines never deal with, that single women are too brainwashed to figure out, that married women know but won't admit. . . " namely, that men didn't like the suburban housewives of the romantic ideal." page 287
7) "Men resented their domestication, and hated the company of sexless "Moms." " page 287
8) "Of course, most women were not weighing the possibility of a child against morning horseback rides and champagne dinners, but weighing a second or third child against a family vacation trip, a chance to go back to college or just a stack of unpaid bills. The pill made the decision easier, as did the lack of day care for children and the declining number of grandmothers willing to make a second career of baby-sitting." page 295
9) "But for women it was an ambiguous kind of liberation. After the old dependency came the new insecurity of shifting relationships, a competitive work world, unstable marriages- an insecurity from which no woman could count herself "safe" and settled. There was a sense of being adrift, but now there was no one to turn to. The old romantic ideology, buttressed by 150 years of psychomedical theory, was transparently useless, and the old experts were increasingly discredited. The post-romantic era called for a new ethos, a new ideology, new rules for "right living." " age 297
"But ultimately the new psychology turned out to be as misogynistic as anything that might creep out from under the fallen log of sexual romanticism. Romanticist ideology, finding no place for the values of love and nurturance in the Market, had fastened them onto woman. More precisely, nailed them into her flesh. Women would love in a world that did not honor love, so, as it was put in the final neo-Freudian debacle, women would have to love pain. But the new ideology was willing to accept the values of the marketplace as universal principles; in the world of the marketplace psychologists there was no place for the old "human values of love and caring- not even on the backs of women. In a flash all the feminine traits which had been glorified as natural and instinctual were exposed as the trappings of a "socialized sex role," which- almost overnight- had become obsolete." pages 298-299
10) "The marketplace model purports to be egalitarian or even feminist. But in fact it assumes a false equality, and denies that women have any special needs or experience any special discrimination as women." page 310
11) "Psychological ideology had swung 180 degrees from the neo-Freudian theories of libidinal motherhood and female masochism. From being the only source of fulfillment in a woman's life children had become an obstacle to her freedom. From being a symbolic act of submission, sex had become a pleasurable commodity which women as well as men had a right to demand. The old rationalist promise that the forces of the Market would break the ancient ties of the family seemed to be coming true, and the ideology of sexual romanticism at last began to crumble. But if the rules imposed by sexual romanticism had denied woman any future other than service to the family, the new psychology seemed to deny human bonds altogether- for women or for men. Pop psychology, which had begun with the effusive evocation of universal joy, ended up with the grim "realism" of the lifeboat strategy: not everyone can get on board, so survival depends on learning how to fight it out on the way to "getting yours." Despite their radical break with sexual romanticism, the experts of marketplace psychology ended up promoting an ideal of women's nature which was no less distorted and limiting than the ideal which had once been advanced by nineteenth-century gynecology." page 311
Afterword: The End of the Romance
1) "The romantic solution persisted for as long as it did because it had moral force. It asserted, in however trivialized and sentimental a fashion, the supreme value of love as against self-interest, human persons as against dead things. It affirmed the human needs which could not be met in the marketplace - needs for love and intimacy, for nurturance and caring. It upheld the weak, the infant, the elderly, in an economic world which rewarded only the victorious and the strong.
But the romantic "solution" was to take all the responsibility for love and caring and place it squarely on the backs of women: individual women, each one in isolation, holding out against the anarchy of the marketplace. And in this lay the fatal moral compromise of sexual romanticism: it chose not to remake the world, but to demand that women make-up for it. From the beginning (even when the pedestal seemed most secure), this was a task which could only lead to humiliation. Women worked to maintain the home as a sanctuary for human values. But there was no honor in this work. Women's domestic efforts had been so marginalized as to be scarcely visible (and offered less financial reward than that of the most menial labor). Women tried to be "feminine," and found themselves forced to be the negation of everything purposive and dynamic. In demanding that women "humanize" society, sexual romanticism ended by dehumanizing women.
The romantic reality had already been seriously undermined by the mid-sixties. But it took a conscious, organized effort to overthrow sexual romanticism from its position as the dominant ideology and this was the work of the feminist movement of the late sixties and seventies. The movement was in one sense a coming--to-consciousness of the changes which were already reshaping women's lives- the decline of the sexual double standard, the mass entry of women into the work force, the new opportunities, and dangers, of independence. But feminism quickly transcended and even contradicted the "singles culture" articulated by corporate ideologues. It represented a new moral force, one capable of exposing (as Cosmo and its followers could never do) the moral corruption of sexual romanticism.
The founders of the early feminist movement were activists schooled in the civil rights and antiwar movements. Like men of their generation, they had seen beyond the bucolic peacefulness of the suburbs to the war zones at the perimeter- the ghetto rebellions in the cities, the guerrilla struggles in the Third World. They had come to understand that the force which held the status quo together was not consensus, but force itself. Inevitably they drew the analogy between women and blacks, between women and all other oppressed people." Where sociologists saw "roles" and "institutions," psychiatrists saw "feminine adjustment" and medical authorities saw "biological destiny," feminists saw oppression. Sexual romanticism, for all its chivalry and sentiment, existed only to conceal the most ancient injustice: the forcible rule of men over women.
Armed with moral insight into the coercive side of sexual romanticism, feminists proceeded to challenge its "scientific" basis. The terms of the debate were those that the experts had chosen themselves- the rules and logic of science. Again and again feminist critics matched male "science" against a superior rationality. In pamphlets, books, underground newspapers, and scholarly articles, women cut to the theoretical core of sexual romanticism. In consciousness-raising groups, in women's study groups, and in college classrooms women held the scientific theories up to their own experiences, and the old "facts" went up in smoke." pages 314-315
2) "The great romance between women and the experts was over, and it ended because the experts had betrayed the trust that women had put in them." page 16
3) "So the world opening up to women today is not exactly the halcyon vista of "careers," options, relationships portrayed by our more positive-thinking feminist leaders. For every sexually successful single there must be a hundred unsuccessful, unslim, "unattractive" housewives. For every career woman, there are dozens of low-paid woman job-holders. For every divorce that frees a woman, there are others that throw women into poverty or loneliness. The alternative to the suffocation of domesticity turns out to be the old rationalist nightmare; a world dominated by the Market, socially atomized, bereft of "human" values. At best sexual romanticism had aimed to set women apart in an oasis of love and nurturance. Most of the time the "oasis" turned out to be a mirage covering a parch of quicksand. But now even this much seems unattainable, or too thoroughly discredited to bother with: there is only the desert.
Out of the real confusion in women's lives- the ambivalence, impatience, disillusionment- a terrifying version of the romanticist/rationalist dialectic is emerging one in which neither pole has the moral force for a "solution," and both agree ultimately only in their cynicism. On the one side is the neo-romanticist ideology represented by the anti-abortion movement, the anti-equal rights movement, and mass self-improvement courses like Total Woman and Fascinating Womanhood. The onstituency for neo-romanticism is the vast number of women who see themselves as potential "losers" in the sexual free marketplace: housewives who have no alternative means of support to their husbands' income and. they fear, no alternative to their present husbands.
For these women every advance in women's legal status seems to represent a further erosion of male responsibility. "Equal rights" seem to threaten the only security a woman has left when her husband's sexual interest wanes- alimony and child support. Abortion is threatening simply because it does make pregnancy a "woman's choice," rather than something that men inflict and must be held responsible for (and at the same time, of course, abortion makes it easier for other women to "play around.") And in a society which licenses casual couplings and uncouplings but has nothing to offer a discarded wife but welfare, these fears are real enough.
But today's neo-romanticism is at best a degenerate descendant of the sexual romanticism of the nineteenth century. It makes no claims to intellectual rigor. When a higher justification is needed, it skips backward over the corpse of romanticist science and appeals to the ghosts of patriarchal religion: God has decreed unequal rights, involuntary pregnancies, monogamy, male domination, and if worse comes to worst, alimony. But, except when he contemplates homosexuality or the mixing of the races, the God of neo-romanticist ideology is a strangely mellowed, permissive version of the old God of Abraham or Calvin. He is a God who has made His peace with the consumer society, we are led to believe by Mirabel Morgan (who advises in Total Woman on how to exchange sex for "gifts") - a God who smiles benignly on the wife who serves dinner topless to earn a new living room rug and approves when she performs fellatio to win a weekend in Miami.
But there is a deeper level of corruption to today's neo-romanticism. Nineteenth-century romanticist ideology upheld the home as a negation of the Market, one small haven for Christian values within the moral wasteland created by capitalism. But the contemporary middle- or upper-middle-class home defended by neo-romanticism can hardly be said to stand in moral antagonism to the Market; it has been too thoroughly colonized, for too long. Its ideals do not come from the Bible or from some autonomous principle of womanly virtue, but from Madison Avenue, CBS, General Electric, Procter & Gamble. To hold up the home as designed by Frigidaire, Bendix, RCA, and General Foods as a social ideal is not to challenge, in however indirect a way, the inhumanity of the marketplace, but to defend the material wealth of a particular class and race of people. For all its emphasis on the "right to life," neo-romanticist ideology does not even have a charitable nod for poor black children, for welfare mothers, and for that majority of the world's people who don't have indoor plumbing, much less Whirlpool baths and lawn sprinkler systems. All these must be simply kept at bay, along with the "women's libbers" who would unleash sexual anarchy if anyone were so foolish as to give them equal rights and free access to abortions.
The alternative to neo-romanticism which most forcefully and publicly competes for women's allegiance today is not, alas, rationalist feminism, but the marketplace psychology purveyed in the "self-help" literature, popular magazines, psychotherapy programs, and occasionally, feminist literature itself. As an ideology for women, marketplace psychology bears a superficial resemblance to the old rationalist feminism. It emphasizes autonomy and opportunity; it implicitly acknowledges the need for formal equality between the sexes. It offers techniques, some similar to feminist consciousness-raising, to build women's confidence and self-reliance. But there the resemblance ends. For rationalist feminism had always had a program of social change, and not just individual improvement. Women would not be liberated one by one, but through political efforts to socialize the caring functions they had performed in the home. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's vision (and she remains one of the most radical rationalist feminist thinkers of this century), women would not simply desert the home, they would organize for the collective dining halls, day care centers, laundries, etc. which alone would make all women free of domestic labor.
But marketplace psychology, at least in its most cynical forms, would see in such collective organizing efforts only the snivelings of people afflicted with a "victim mentality." There is no justification for mutual help or social change in an ideology which holds each person wholly responsible for her own condition, from the welfare mother to the million-dollar-a-year TV star. They each "chose" to be what they are, and they could choose to be something else." pages 319 - 322
4) "These then are the ideological poles which dominate sexual politics in the late twentieth century- the "romanticism" of the sun-belt suburbs or the "rationalism" of the paperback self-help shelf. Claustrophobia or agoraphobia. Suffocation or free-fall. Neither projects a vision of moral redemption or social transformation. Neither upholds any higher value than material self-interest in a world of scarcity. The neo-romanticists huddle in their fortress and the neo-rationalists strike out in the lifeboat: both are strategies of defense and desperation. As rallying points for idealists they are embarrassing, as living options for women they are bankrupt." page 322
5) "The reason we hang back is because there are no answers left but the most radical ones. We cannot assimilate into a masculinist society without doing violence to our own nature, which is, of course, human nature. But neither can we retreat into domestic isolation, clinging to an archaic feminine ideal. Nor can we deny that the dilemma is a social issue, and abandon each other to our own "free choices" when the choices are not of our making and we are not "free."
The Woman Question in the end is not the question of women. It is not we who are the problem and it is not our needs which are the mystery. From our subjective perspective (denied by centuries of masculinist "science" and analysis), the Woman Question becomes the question of how shall we all- women and children and men- organize our lives together. This is a question which has no answer in the marketplace or among the throng of experts who sell their wisdom there. And this is the only question.
There are clues to the answer in the distant past, in a gynocentric era that linked woman's nurturance to a tradition of skill, caring to craft. There are outlines of a solution in the contours of the industrial era, with its promise of a collective strength and knowledge surpassing all past human efforts to provide for human needs. And there are impulses toward the truth in each one of us. In our very confusion, in our legacy of repressed energy and half-forgotten wisdom, lies the understanding that it is not we who must change but the social order which marginalized women in the first place and with us all "human values."
The romantic/rationalist alternative is no longer acceptable: we refuse to remain on the margins of society, and we refuse to enter that society on its terms. If we reject these alternatives, then the challenge is to frame a moral outlook which proceeds from women's needs and experiences but which cannot be trivialized, sentimentalized, or domesticated. A syntheses which transcends both the rationalist and romanticist poles must necessarily challenge the masculinist social order itself. It must insist that the human values that women were assigned to preserve expand out of the confines of private life and become the organizing principles of society. This is the vision that is implicit in feminism- a society that is organized around human needs: a society in which child raising is not dismissed as each woman's individual problem, but in which the nurturance and well-being of all children is a transcendent public priority. . . a society in which healing is not a commodity distributed according to the dictates of profit but is integral to the network of community life . . . in which wisdom about daily life is not hoarded by "experts" or doled out as a commodity but is drawn from the experience of all people and freely shared among them.
This is the most radical vision but there are no human alternatives. The Market, with its financial abstractions, deformed science,, and obsession with dead things- must be pushed back to the margins. And the "womanly" values of community and caring must rise to the center as the only human values. " page 323 - 324
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