Who Pays for the Kids?: Gender and the Structures of Constraint (Economics As Social Theory)

WHO PAYS FOR THE KIDS?

‘Who pays for the kids?’ is the short version of the longer question: How are the costs of caring for ourselves, our children, and other dependents distributed among members of society? These costs are largely paid by women, both inside and outside the money economy. And they seem to be increasing, due to the expansion of wage employment, the increased importance of education, and improved health technologies. Despite the social programs of the welfare state, parents with young children, especially mothers on their own, are increasingly susceptible to poverty. How can we explain the distribution of the ‘costs of caring’ between men and women, parents and children, parents and non-parents? Traditional neoclassical economics answers this question by emphasizing individual choice. Traditional Marxian economics answers it by emphasizing class interest. Traditional feminist theory answers it by emphasizing gender interests. Arguing that all these answers are incomplete, this book offers an alternative analysis of individual choices within interlocking structures of constraint based on gender, age, sexual orientation, nation, race and class. A comparative history of this interaction in Northwestern Europe, the United States, and Latin America and the Caribbean helps explain differences in political movements, state policies and social welfare. Written in a fresh and energetic style by a well known feminist economist, Who Pays for the Kids? is an excellent text for upper level courses in women’s studies and the social sciences. A wider public will appreciate its relevance to current policy debates over welfare spending, old age insurance, and child support enforcement. Nancy Folbre is Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts and has written extensively on the interface between feminist theory and political economy. Her widely cited articles on household production and family decision-making have appeared in Feminist Studies, Signs, The Cambridge Journal of Economics, World Development, Journal of Development Economics, and Population and Development Review. A member of the International Association for Feminist Economics, she has also served as a consultant to the Population Council and the International Center for Research on Women.

ECONOMICS AS SOCIAL THEORY SERIES Series edited by Tony Lawson University of Cambridge

Social theory is experiencing something of a revival within economics. Critical analyses of the particular nature of the subject matter of social studies and of the types of methods, categories and modes of explanation that can legitimately be endorsed for the scientific study of social objects, are re-emerging. Economists are again addressing such issues as the relationship between agency and structure, between economy and the rest of society, and between inquirer and the object of inquiry. There is renewed interest in elaborating basic categories such as causation, competition, culture, discrimination, evolution, money, need, order, organization, power, probability, process, rationality, technology, time, truth, uncertainty and value, etc. The objective for this series is to facilitate this revival further. In contemporary economics the label ‘theory’ has been appropriated by a group that confines itself to largely a-social, a-historical, mathematical ‘modelling’. Economics as Social Theory thus reclaims the ‘theory’ label, offering a platform for alternative, rigorous, but broader and more critical conceptions of theorizing. ECONOMICS AND LANGUAGE Edited by Willie Henderson RATIONALITY, INSTITUTIONS AND ECONOMIC METHODOLGY Edited by Uskali Mäki, Bo Gustafsson and Christian Knudsen

WHO PAYS FOR THE KIDS? Gender and the structures of constraint

Nancy Folbre

London and New York

First published 1994 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1994 Nancy Folbre All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 0-203-16829-1 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-26348-0 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-07564-5 (hbk) 0-415-07565-3 (pbk)

CONTENTS

Figures Tables Acknowledgements Introduction

vii viii ix 1

Part I Concepts of social reproduction 1 FEMINIST THEORY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY Agents Structures Identities, interests, and institutions

15 17 29 38

2 COLLECTIVE ACTION AND STRUCTURES OF CONSTRAINT Divided loyalties and competing interests Natural selection and cultural evolution Modernizations, reforms, and revolutions

51 52 70 81

3 THE PERSISTENCE OF PATRIARCHAL POWER The expansion of wage employment The growing cost of families The emergence of welfare states

91 92 104 116

Part II Histories of social reproduction INTRODUCTION TO PART II

129

4 NORTHWESTERN EUROPE Class, gender, and age in the transition to capitalism Social democracy and the European welfare state

132 133 150

5 THE UNITED STATES Patriarchal power and early economic development A family divided: Early social welfare policy Social insecurity: welfare policy after 1935

166 167 183 196

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CONTENTS

6 LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN Colonial men and patriarchal states in Latin America The plight of Supermadres

211 212 228

7 CONCLUSION: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF FAMILY POLICY

248

Notes References Index

263 291 326

vi

FIGURES

1.1 A stylized comparison of Traditional Neoclassical and Neoclassical Institutionalist approaches 24 1.2 A stylized comparison of Traditional Marxian and NeoMarxian approaches 35 1.3 A stylized feminist approach 49 3.1 The allocation of labor time between household production and wage employment 93 3.2 A demand curve for children 105

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TABLES

4.1 Gross and net income support for two-child families, Northwestern Europe, 1980 4.2 Single-parent families with children under age 18, various years, as a percentage of all families with children 6.1 Employers, own-account workers, and employees as a percentage of the paid labour force, in Latin America, the Caribbean, the US and Northwestern Europe 6.2 Women as a percentage of employers and own-account workers and employees in Latin America and the Caribbean 6.3 Percentage of households with female householders, in Latin America and the Caribbean, mid-1970s and early 1980s

viii

160 162

232 237 240

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My greatest and most general debt is to my teachers and my students at the University of Massachusetts, which long ago became my intellectual home. Many other friends and colleagues have served me well. I remember vividly my first effort to present some of the basic ideas developed here at a summer conference of the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) in Western Massachusetts in 1983. Since then, regular URPE summer conferences have provided a critical and supportive environment for trying out a lot of ideas. I learned a great deal from my experiences at the New School for Social Research, where I taught in 1979, and again from 1983 to 1985. My students there, including Cindy Auburn, Claire Battista, Walter Mead, Berhanu Nega, and Lucia Stern constantly pressed for a more comprehensive theory of the relationship between class and gender. The ideas that David Gordon developed in the Socioeconomic Formations sequence there shaped my appreciation of Neo-Marxian theory. I owe specific thanks to members of two regular seminars at the University of Massachusetts on Political Economy and Economic History and Development. Sam Bowles, Jim Grotty, and Mohan Rao gave me helpful feedback on an early version of this manuscript entitled The Logic of Patriarchal Capitalism, as did Carmen Diana Deere, Julie Graham, and Carol Heim. Working with David Alexander, Lynn Duggan, Jane Kiser, June Lapidus, Dawn Saunders, Barnet Wagman, and Brenda Wyss on dissertations helped me clarify my own ideas. Barbara Bergmann provided a fresh, feisty, counterpoint to my background in political economy, and constantly insisted on intellectual commonsense. I am also grateful to Robert Pollak, whose intellectual curiosity and encouragement sustained my interest in neoclassical institutional economics. I first sketched out my story about the origins of the welfare state in a paper entitled Infra-family Transfers and the Origins of Social Security, presented at the meetings of the Population Association of America in 1985. Richard Sutch read the paper and gave me invaluable comments and ix

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

criticisms. His general enthusiasm for Big Think, as well as support for my more empirical forays, increased my commitment to economic history. Also important in this respect was a conference on the transition to capitalism in rural America, organized by Alan Kulikoff at Northern Illinois State University, where I benefitted from the comments of Susan Carter, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Daniel Scott Smith, and Carole Shammas. Judith Bruce of the Population Council often overwhelmed me with her energetic commitment to the welfare of women and children in developing countries. If it weren’t for her, I might never have dared extend my historical research to Latin America and the Caribbean. Thanks also to Cynthia Lloyd, Mayra Buvinic, Lisa McGowan, Kirsten Moore, and other contributors to the seminar series on families maintained by women alone, co-sponsored by the Population Council and the International Center for Research on Women. Sessions at two international conferences contributed to the evolution of my ideas: the meetings of the International Economics Association in Athens in 1989, and the meetings of the European Society for Population Economics in Istanbul in 1990. Thanks to Barbara Bergmann (again), Akile Gursoy-Tezcan, Amartya Sen, and Frederick Shorter for their organizational efforts, as well as their personal interest. Harvard University, Hampshire College, and the University of California at Riverside afforded me important opportunities to present preliminary drafts. As a visitor at American University in the spring of 1991, I benefitted from exchanges with many faculty, including María Floro and Robin Hahnel. Felicia Kornbluh, of the Institute for Policy Studies, provided a sustained commentary on early drafts that greatly influenced my choice of theoretical terms. As a visitor at the Eugene Havens Center at the University of Wisconsin in May 1991, I benefitted from wonderful discussions with Linda Gordon, Allen Hunter, Erik Olin Wright, and many graduate students. The Women’s Research and Resource Center at the University of California at Davis harbored me during the winter of 1992, giving me the opportunity for helpful exchanges with many people, including Fred Block, Frank Hertz, Eric Jones, Suad Joseph, Juhe Nelson, John Roemer, and Diane Wolf. Participation in a weekend retreat at Delta Marsh Field Station with members of the Economics Department of the University of Manitoba, in October of 1993, helped me refine some arguments. I am especially grateful to those who pushed me to improve on what I mistakenly believed were close-to-final drafts of several chapters: Bina Agarwal, Sam Bowles, Jim Crotty, Paula England, Sheila Ryan Johansson, and Tony Lawson. Ann Ferguson and Elaine McCrate prompted many vital changes and improvements. Richard Cornwall enriched my theoretical arguments. Marianne Ferber provided discerning comments on the entire final draft. Alan Jarvis, my editor at Routledge, was a model of patience and good humor. x

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For their personal support, I thank many family members. My parents, Jay, Eleanor, and Katherine Folbre, paid dearly and lovingly for me over the years. My sister Terrence McDonald and her partner Charles Stark gave me a home in Washington for several months and provided a model of professional excellence and hard work in the public interest. My partner Robert Dworak kept the home fires burning. His general craftsmanship and careful editing made this a better book and me a better person.

Main cover illustration: Red Women’s Workshop Background cover illustration: Jacek Depczyk

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INTRODUCTION

Who pays for the kids? This is the short version of a larger question: How are the costs of caring for ourselves, our children, and other dependents distributed among members of society? These are the costs of social reproduction, and they differ from the costs of production in a number of ways. They are difficult to measure in money. They are paid in the family, as well as in the market, the firm, and the state. They cannot be analyzed in terms of profit maximization or state planning. Success in caring for one another is a precondition for the production of goods and services, but also an end result, a goal. The first purpose of this book is to show that economists have not paid sufficient attention to relationships between men and women or parents and children, and that, as a result, they have failed to provide a convincing analysis of economic development, political conflict, or social welfare. This is a serious accusation, but if it succeeds in redirecting some attention from production to social reproduction, from Gross National Product to health, education, child care, elder care, and the environment that sustains these, it will be cause for celebration. The second purpose of this book is to develop the following hypothesis: Both production and social reproduction are shaped by diverse forms of collective action. Groups organized along lilies of gender and age make particularly conspicuous efforts to reinforce the institutional arrangements that they find advantageous, and to change those they find burdensome. A growing body of feminist research, for instance, explains how and why the costs of children affect the motives and mechanisms of elder male control over women. But the feminist emphasis on patriarchal power tells only part of the story. All societies place constraints on elder men in the name of larger collective interests. Most impose strong sanctions on both men and women who violate heterosexual norms. Individuals of common gender and age are typically divided along lines of class and/or race. In the course of economic development, wage employment and public social programs create new arenas of class- and race-based conflict over the distribution of 1

INTRODUCTION

the costs of health, education, and care. The labor force is ‘reproduced’ by national immigration, as well as gender- and age-oriented public policies. The new terminology of institutional economics and game theory offers a way of conceptualizing these dynamics. The institutions that govern social reproduction cannot be explained simply as efficient solutions to coordination problems, because they also reflect conflict between social groups. This does not imply that the ‘game’ is completely conflictual; merely that certain solutions to coordination problems offer opportunities for collective ‘rent-seeking’ (efforts to use power to get money) and aggrandizement. The metaphorical game cannot be described simply in terms of husband vs. wife, or men vs. women, or parents vs. children, because it consists of these and many other contests taking place simultaneously. Individuals play on many sides at once, cooperating with a variety of teams to seek their own advantage. The final outcome must meet the most basic requirements of social reproduction (else the society ceases to exist). But some groups will fare better than others, and there is no guarantee that any particular solution will be stable or optimal. To return to ordinary language, we could do a much better job taking care of children and other dependents. There are probably great potential gains to us all from doing so. But members of some groups within society would suffer losses, particularly in the short run, and the greatest potential beneficiaries are those with the least power—children and women. A better understanding of conflicts over the organization of social reproduction might foster a different set of alliances and a better solution to the problem. The third purpose of this book is to illustrate and substantiate its hypothesis through the use of historical narratives. The game may be too complicated to model, the hypothesis too broad to test in any literal way, but attention to collective struggles over the costs of social reproduction helps answer many important questions on the feminist research agenda: How is women’s unpaid work affected by their entrance into paid employment? Why does economic development raise the cost of children and stimulate fertility decline? What is the relationship between women and the welfare state? Answers to these questions, in turn, lead to new interpretations of several of the grand themes of economic history: the transition to capitalism, the emergence of political movements, the rise of the welfare state, and the slow rate of economic progress in many areas of the developing world. THE IMPORTANCE OF FAMILY LABOR Economists typically measure economic growth and welfare in terms of the value of goods and services exchanged for money. Despite 2

INTRODUCTION

appreciation of the concept of ‘human capital,’ they exclude time devoted to the care and education of the next generation from the macroeconomic category of investment. A certain historical reluctance to see women’s work in the family as an economic activity, rather than a natural or moral responsibility, has literally devalued the process of social reproduction. Children are often described as ‘consumer goods’ we can ill afford, not as valuable components of total ‘output.’ But many economists are beginning to recognize the importance of family labor, and, as a result, to reconsider the meaning of production. The market economy has expanded, to a large extent, at the expense of the family economy. Women have entered paid employment in increasing numbers, and fertility has declined. Many of the expenses of the modern welfare state, including education for the young and income security for the old, were once paid for outside the money economy. Even in the most developed countries, non-market family labor continues to absorb a tremendous amount of time and energy. The costs of social reproduction, however difficult to estimate, are easy to define. They include direct expenditures on behalf of dependents such as children, the sick, the disabled, and the elderly. They also include the costs of time devoted to the care of these individuals, and to the daily maintenance of adults. Housewives are often described as ‘dependents,’ but in fact their husbands, as well as their children, are quite dependent on them for care and nurturance. Many studies show that even women working full time in paid employment devote a very large share of their time to housework and child care. The value of family labor can be estimated by asking what the individuals performing it could have earned in market employment. But this provides only a lower bound estimate, because those who specialize in nonmarket labor (primarily women) typically earn less than they would if they had the same experience in paid work as men. Indeed, major reasons why employers typically pay women less than men include the belief that women should specialize in caring for families, and/or the suspicion that (whether they should or not) women will devote more time and energy to this task than men, detracting from their performance in paid work. A large percentage of paid work in the service sector of the economy is devoted to social reproduction: health, education, child care, and elder care. Public and non-profit institutions play a particularly important role here, because the final product is not a commodity that can be bought and sold, and profit maximization is not an appropriate goal. The overwhelming majority of employees in these forms of care-giving work are women, and they are generally paid considerably less than men. Their work is undervalued. Whether in the home or the market, women do a disproportionate share of the work of social reproduction. A great deal of empirical and 3

INTRODUCTION

historical research, much of it feminist in orientation, shows that this generalization holds for most areas of the world over most of the period of recorded history. What explains this sexual division of labor? This question cuts to the heart of political economy: the relationship between choice and coercion, efficiency and exploitation. Neoclassical economists explain the sexual division of labor as a simple outcome of rational choice and economic efficiency. They suggest that individuals behave in similar ways in the family, the market, and the state, rationally pursuing their own self-interest. Recent neoclassical efforts to explain the social institutions that mediate individual choices in those three sites imply that the sexual division of labor is simply an efficient way of organizing work. But this explanation is inconsistent with many aspects of the historical record. Many political rules, including explicit property rights, have restricted women’s choices more than men’s. Even when these rules were changed, women were left in a weak bargaining position. Social norms regarding appropriate gender roles were and are enforced by systematic violence. Many social institutions reflect and reinforce the collective interests of men. The Marxian tradition of political economy has always emphasized the limits to choice, the historical role of organized coercion and exploitation. Marxian economists apply the tools of class analysis to the sexual division of labor, suggesting that it serves the interests of a ruling class. They generally recognize important parallels between class interests and gender interests; socialist feminists explore the logic of systems in which capitalism and patriarchy are intertwined. But the Marxian approach is also inconsistent with some aspects of the historical record. Many social institutions, such as the nation-state, foster the operation of collective identities and interests that cannot be reduced to class or gender but are nonetheless associated with coercion and exploitation. In many societies, racial inequalities are extreme. Members of the same class and gender seldom act in ways that suggest perfectly consonant collective interests. And, as neoclassical economic theory suggests, individual choices play a role in the formation of alliances, the success of collective action, and the evolution of social institutions. The polarity between neoclassical and Marxian theories helps motivate an alternative approach that emphasizes choice and constraint, cooperation and conflict, individual and group dynamics. Chapter 1 outlines this approach in more detail, developing a feminist interpretation of economic interests that stresses the social construction of individual and collective identity.

4

INTRODUCTION

THE ROLE OF COLLECTIVE ACTION Many feminist theorists claim that men have collective interests as men that are at least partially opposed to the collective interests of women. This claim raises the central dilemma of any theory of collective action that respects the role of rational choice. Why do individuals identify themselves as members of particular groups, and pursue group interests, sometimes at their own expense? Neoclassical economists argue that this happens only when groups are able to monitor effectively and punish ‘free riding’ (the tendency for individuals to let others do the work or take the risks). Marxian economists argue that it would happen far more frequently if it weren’t for ‘false consciousness’ (a failure to recognize the potential gains from collective action). Both theories are incomplete. Individuals often identify with and care for others, denying a sharp distinction between self-interest and group interest. Rather than consciously choosing to join a group, they simply learn that they are members of a certain gender, or race, or class. They also belong to many groups at once, often with conflicting interests. Their failure to act collectively may have less to do with false consciousness than an awareness that actions which advance the interests of their gender may harm others of their race or class, or vice versa. Free rider problems still come into play, as does false consciousness. But these terms need to be placed within a larger theory of group identities and interests, which are shaped by structures of constraint that locate individuals in different positions in terms of asset distributions, political rules, social norms, and personal preferences. Individuals often find themselves in common positions based on their nation, race, class, gender, age, and sexual preference. Which ones do they choose to act on? Rational choice and strategic calculation provide part of the answer. Individuals consider the possible costs and benefits of different types of collective action. They join with others who are in a similar position in terms of assets or rules because they have something to gain. But in the real world (unlike some abstract models of game theory) the payoff is almost always indeterminate; it depends on the choices other players make, which are quite difficult to predict. Collective action would be difficult to sustain if it were nothing more than the outcome of strategic choice. Also, it would be costly to coordinate, monitor, and enforce (partly because of free rider problems). Collective identity, often reinforced by common norms and preferences, helps explain why collective action cannot always be explained in instrumental terms. Sometimes individuals act in ways that seem irrational in the sense that they offer no apparent economic benefits. They may choose to do something because they think that it is ‘right,’ rather than because it is advantageous. Also, they often engage in 5

INTRODUCTION

collective action with very little explicit coordination or monitoring, simply because they share the same priorities. To illustrate the interaction between interests and identity: men may recognize that they have something to gain from excluding women from certain jobs (a strategic calculation). But they may also share the common attitude that certain jobs are simply more ‘appropriate’ for men (an aspect of gender identity). Sharing this attitude makes it much easier to engage in forms of collective action that exclude women, because no explicit coordination is required. These aspects of identity and interest are interrelated. If changes in asset distributions or political rules dimmish the gains from excluding women, attitudes towards ‘appropriate’ work may change. If changes in norms and preferences modify definitions of ‘appropriate work’ it becomes more costly to coordinate collective action, and the gains from excluding women diminish. Women may remain loyal to norms and preferences that enshrine traditional gender roles, but if the cost of such loyalty increases, they are likely to become sympathetic to feminist forms of collective action. To illustrate the complexity of different dimensions of collective action: men have many different identities and interests (such as those based on their nation, race, or class) that shape the ways in which they perceive and act on their gender interests. What if, for instance, restrictions on women’s participation in certain forms of work enhance the perceived interests of a class? This would tend to increase support for such restrictions among members of that class. Similarly, if women believe that pursuit of their gender interests will diminish the success of other collective projects, they are less likely to identify with or engage in a feminist movement. This approach highlights the importance of structures of constraint that foster group allegiances based on factors such as nation, race, class, gender, age, and sexual preference. These allegiances cannot simply be taken as given; they are objects of human choice and action. Both individuals and groups try to understand, respond to, and modify the social institutions that influence the constraints imposed upon them. Neoclassical economists interested in this process would have us focus on cooperative efforts to increase efficiency, to increase the size of the total economic pie. Marxian economists would have us focus on conflict and exploitation, efforts to increase one group’s slice of the total economic pie. But neither of these is an effective strategy. The cooperative extreme invites other groups to engage in opportunistic behavior. The conflictual extreme risks fighting and destruction of the entire pie. Most forms of collective action fall somewhere in between, and resulting structures of constraint are the product of both cooperation and conflict. For instance, early forms of patriarchal control over women and children probably allowed patriarchal societies to outcompete more egalitarian ones. Similar factors may explain the early emergence of 6

INTRODUCTION

structures of constraint based on sexual preference, membership in a tribe or race, and social class. Yet these structures of constraint also provided extra benefits to dominant groups, and there is no reason to assume that they were either perfectly efficient or fair. The tendency of powerful groups to exploit others, to seek collective ‘rents,’ ‘surplus,’ or ‘tribute’ that exceed the value of the coordination they provide, is a destabilizing factor that provides incentives for less powerful groups to organize against them. Furthermore, the unpredictable forces of social and technological change often alter the viability of a given set of constraints, rendering some inherited hierarchies particularly inefficient. This story resembles one that Karl Marx told about the clash between technical forces and social relations of production, which he described as a key element in the succession of various modes of production based on social class. But Marx’s narrow focus on production and surplus obscured the complexity of competing collective allegiances. Like women who subordinate their gender interests to the promise of benefits for their children, wage-earners may subordinate their class interests to the promise of benefits for their gender or their race or their nation. These issues are explored at greater length in Chapter 2, which defines the concept of a structure of constraint and explains how such structures create many different types of collective identity. What we know about the early evolution of structures of constraint based on gender, age, sexual preference, nation, race, and class suggests that they helped coordinate social reproduction and aggrandize certain groups at the expense of others. The resulting constellations of collective identity and action help explain modern problems of economic growth, political stability, and social welfare. THE PROCESS OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT The best way to illustrate these rather abstract concepts is to explain their relevance to several important global trends. Three sweeping changes in the organization of social reproduction are associated with the process of economic development: the movement of women into paid employment, the decline in fertility, and the rise of public social spending. These changes are not simply the outcome of technological change and individual choices. They also reflect the impact of many complex forms of collective identity and action. Chapter 3 addresses these three trends, explaining how inherited structures of constraint have contributed to the persistence of patriarchal power. Gender bias in the very definition of work, as well as in the division of labor, has reproduced the exploitation of women in the home and the market. Increases in the cost of children have motivated fertility decline, but also encouraged men to default on paternal responsibilities. 7

INTRODUCTION

Public social programs have provided substitutes for income flows that once took place within the family (such as support of the elderly) but have failed to meet the needs of children and mothers. THE HISTORICAL EVIDENCE What are the implications of these arguments for the more detailed stuff and substance of economic history? The final chapters of this book answer this question by reviewing processes of development in Northwestern Europe, the United States, and Latin America and the Caribbean. Attention to the interplay of distinct structures of constraint and forms of collective action provides a more integrated picture of economic and demographic change, and helps explain some important results of variations in state policy, including the welfare of mothers and children. A brief prelude to histories of patriarchal power explains what factors influenced the choice of topics pursued. Chapter 4 challenges the traditional characterization of the transition to capitalism in Northwestern Europe, arguing that the initial weakening of feudal and patriarchal constraints had more positive implications for youth (both male and female) than for women. A combination of factors eventually contributed to women’s empowerment: increases in the female paid labor force, struggles to expand democratic rights (including female suffrage), and state policies designed to provide some support for childrearing. Social democratic policies have distributed the costs of social reproduction more equally in Northwestern Europe than elsewhere. Yet the costs of children to individual parents far outweigh the economic benefits, partly because young working adults are taxed to help support the entire older generation. Women and children remain economically disadvantaged, far more susceptible to poverty than adult men. Chapter 5 explores the United States’ experience. In the early period of colonization, rapid economic development and an expanding internal frontier dislocated traditional patriarchal families and strengthened the ideology of individualism. The structure of race-based constraint associated with Southern slavery and its aftermath had a tremendous impact on both class- and gender-based forms of collective action, and weakened national commitments to the welfare of mothers and children as a group. Efforts to publicly assist widows and the elderly emerged in the northern states in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but remained quite limited. Not until the 1930s did a political realignment associated with the Great Depression motivate public acceptance of a large share of financial responsibility for the older generation through the Social Security program. For a variety of reasons, including extensive immigration and persistent racial and ethnic divisions within the population, state support 8

INTRODUCTION

for parenthood remained very low. Feminist efforts to gain new political and economic rights benefmed all women, but some more than others. Women with access to education and new professional opportunities reaped the largest gains. Poverty rates among African-American and Latino families maintained by mothers alone are especially high. How has economic transformation affected women in the lessdeveloped countries? While the answers vary, recurrent themes emerge. Chapter 6 explores the history of Latin America and the Caribbean, where colonization disrupted a variety of different societies, ranging from the very patriarchal Aztecs to the relatively egalitarian Bari. Among the initial Spanish and Portuguese colonizers, men outnumbered women by about ten to one. As a result, many European men took Indian women as sexual partners, creating a large mestizo population. Differences in power between men and women were amplified by the military and political power of the colonists, and relatively few sexual liaisons outside the upper class were governed by explicit contracts or legal provisions for the support of offspring. Throughout the nineteenth century, a large percentage of births took place out of wedlock; many families were sustained by women alone. Similarly, in the slave economies of Brazil and the Caribbean, the groups that wielded state policy had no material interest in enforcing laws regarding family rights or responsibilities within slave families. Partly because industrialization is well underway in the economies of Latin America and the Caribbean, women there are more likely than their counterparts in other developing countries to live in cities, engage in wage labor, and limit their fertility. Feminist movements dating from the late nineteenth century won important political and legal gains, and remain active today. However, many mothers lack any enforceable claim on the earnings or income of their children’s fathers. Further, publicly funded old age insurance systems are oriented towards the needs of male household heads. The percentage of families maintained by women alone, already high, is rising fast along with the cost of raising and educating children in an urban economy. Yet many aspects of economic development in the region, including the persistent importance of family-based production, reduce the incentives to fertility decline. In sum, different patterns of economic development, political conflict, and social welfare in Northwestern Europe, the United States, and Latin America and the Caribbean cannot be explained simply by reference to nation- or class-based dynamics. The intersection of more complex forms of collective identity and action based on race, gender, and age is relevant to the larger picture of economic and demographic change.

9

INTRODUCTION

VALUES What look like female values are regulations of society at large: to protect, conserve, love and rescue life. It is because these are demanded as actions or attitudes from individual women and not from a social structure, that women are oppressed.1 Frigga Haug, ‘Daydreams’ If these histories display the logic of collective action, they also explain its arbitrary, unjust, and inefficient aspects. Changes in the labor market, the family, and the state reflect the rational efforts of individuals and groups to understand changing environments, to negotiate explicit and implicit contracts of social life better suited to new circumstances. But they also reflect structures of constraint that are conducive to exploitation and resistant to change. Women have long asserted a certain collective interest in equitable distribution of the costs of caring for children and other dependents. But men have conceded new freedoms and opportunities for women far more readily than they have accepted new responsibilities or obligations for themselves. Even the most developed countries of Northwestern Europe and the United States underinvest in children and impose a serious risk of poverty on those who care for them. The problem is even more acute in underdeveloped regions such as Latin America and the Caribbean. The conclusion of this book addresses the political implications of conflict over the relationship between human generations. It’s funny how many of these boil down to one of Mom’s recurrent questions: ‘Who’s going to take care of the kids?’ And the sick? And the elderly? Dad’s favorite answer is, ‘That’s your job, you lucky girl.’ This answer was never fair, but it was at least partly functional. It worked best when such tasks were compatible with other productive activities, when Dad willingly supported dependents because he expected pecuniary as well as emotional rewards, and when Mom’s other choices were restricted. These conditions no longer hold. What new conditions should we establish to govern the organization of social reproduction? The answer to this question depends on who we are, how we define our collective identities and interests. Possibilities reach beyond allegiances of gender to those of nation, race, sex, age, class, the species as a whole, the Blue Planet itself. In the long run, the answer will depend on how much we care for not only our own, but also other people’s children. The outcome will also be determined by our understanding of the larger dynamics of cooperation and conflict, by how well we conceptualize the strategies that individuals and groups use to define and pursue their self-interest. The following chapters are motivated by the 10

INTRODUCTION

conviction that a better understanding of past forms of collective action could contribute to better strategies for the future. Actually, more than mere strategies are at stake. The purpose here is not to win games, but to design better ones.

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Part I CONCEPTS OF SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

1 FEMINIST THEORY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY

Imagine a feminist economist standing between two groups of political economists, those to her right representing the neoclassical tradition, those to her left, the Marxian tradition. Ms. Feminist holds forth on the possibility of equal exchange and gains from trade. ‘Feminist theory has a great deal to learn from political economy,’ she announces, ‘but the reverse is also true.’ Three or four heads turn and offer her an encouraging glance. She continues. ‘I come to economics with a different set of questions than you do, and a different set of observations, perhaps because I come from a different place in the economy.’ Eyebrows are raised, and a gruff voice challenges her: ‘Why should that matter?’ ‘It’s a long story,’ she replies. ‘First, I was taught that my family should be more important to me than my career, and partly as a result, I think I care more than you do about the economics of the family, the sexual division of labor, the distribution of housework, the costs of children, the meaning of domestic violence…’ ‘Caring about it more doesn’t mean you have a better theory of it,’ a masculine voice points out. ‘Both neoclassical and Marxian economists are writing about the family now.’ ‘Yes,’ she agrees, ‘but being torn between family and professional responsibilities has made me realize that most economists do not do justice to the most interesting aspect of the family: the tension between selfishness and altruism, individual self-interest and the interests of the group as a whole. They treat the family either as though it were a single person, with one common will, or a collection of single persons bargaining with each other in a completely selfish way.’ ‘What’s the alternative?’ ask many voices in unison. ‘Love,’ she suggests a bit tentatively, ‘may be about interdependence, about identifying with others, considering them a part of your self—not necessarily placing their interests above your own as in pure altruism, but finding their happiness intertwined with your own, sometimes separable, 15

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sometimes not. This is a possibility relevant not just to the family, but to a larger theory of collective identity and action.’ ‘That’s a big jump,’ the audience protests. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘but joining with other women to try to change a few things has made me appreciate the complexities of collective action.’ ‘Ah ha!,’ say the neoclassical economists. ‘You mean the free rider problem!’ ‘Ah ha!,’ say the Marxian economists at the same time. ‘You mean the problem of false consciousness!’ ‘Well, uh,’ she says. ‘Both those problems are important: there are conflicts between individuals and larger groups, and individuals do sometimes fail to recognize common interests. But there’s another related problem: people generally have allegiances to more than one group at a time, and often the interests of these groups conflict.’ ‘Give an example,’ demands someone in the audience. ‘Take me,’ says Ms. Feminist. ‘Some of the interests I seek to fulfill are unique to me as an individual. I also identify with other women, partly because I have some interests in common with them. That’s why I consider myself a feminist. But I also identify with and have interests in common with varying subsets of other people: sometimes everybody, sometimes members of my nation, my race, my class, my profession, my neighborhood, my family, and so on. My choice of possible avenues of collective action is determined by particular circumstances, including what I predict other people’s choices will be.’ ‘This is beginning to sound more like sociology than economics,’ someone growls. ‘I do not care what you call it,’ she retorts, ‘but contending forms of collective identity and interest help explain the sexual division of labor, and I think they’re relevant to the larger course of economic history and development, as well.’ ‘Sounds a bit conspiratorial,’ someone says. ‘It would definitely be too conspiratorial,’ she replies, ‘if it were all executed in a perfectly conscious, rational, instrumental way. But individuals are so embedded in a complex structure of individual and collective identities and competing interpretations of these that sometimes they do not even know whose interests they are acting on.’ ‘Speaking of confusion,’ someone says, ‘I’m getting lost. It seems like this conversation is based on a lot of past conversations that I haven’t been a part of. I need to know more about the context of this argument. It would help to see it written down.’ ‘Here it is,’ she says. This chapter is divided into three parts. The first focuses on the neoclassical theory of individual ‘agents,’ criticizing conventional assumptions, praising recent revisions, and exploring their relationship to 16

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feminist concerns. The neoclassical concept of ‘rational choice’ implies some strong, probably unwarranted assumptions about how individuals makes decisions. We may do better to develop a less ambitious but more flexible concept of ‘purposeful choice.’ The second section follows a similar pattern, focusing on the Marxian theory of ‘structures’ in its traditional form, in more recent revisionist versions, and in dialogue with feminist theory. The Marxian concept of a ‘mode of production’ puts too much emphasis on one dimension of collective conflict (class) and one aspect of structural position (assets). We may do better to develop a more complex theory of structural constraints on individual choice. The third section examines the relevance of neoclassical, Marxian, and feminist insights to a broader theory of collective identity and action. It explains how and why individuals come to identify themselves as members of groups and yet make purposeful choices about group allegiances and actions. It also explains why social institutions such as the patriarchal family, the capitalist firm, and the bureaucratic state have both efficient and exploitative aspects. AGENTS Neoclassical economic theory focuses a brilliant analytical light on the rational choices of self-interested agents. The first distinctive glimmerings came from early utilitarian thinkers like Jeremy Bentham and James Mill. In the late nineteenth century, Stanley Jevons, Léon Walras, and Alfred Marshall intensified the glare. Non-neoclassical theorists were gradually relegated to the shadowy margins of the discipline, until the Great Depression of the 1930s lent credence to John Maynard Keynes and others who argued that individual decisions were not always rational and did not always lead to efficient social outcomes. Beginning about 1975, Keynesian arguments fell into disfavor and neoclassical theorists effectively reasserted themselves, pushing virtually all the social sciences towards more reliance on assumptions of rational choice. At the same time, however, even neoclassical theorists began to argue that rationality was being interpreted in rigid terms that required excessively strict assumptions. What if individuals do not have adequate information? What if the future is uncertain? What if individuals change their minds about what they want? Recently, feminist theorists began to add new questions: How do individuals define their self-interest? How are people’s desires socially constructed? Do conventional definitions of a separate ‘self’ reflect a masculine view of the world? Some feminists of post-modern persuasion have argued that rational choice is simply an interpretive fiction. Others insist that we need a theory of individual choice that retains at least some 17

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emphasis on rationality broadly construed as reasonable, purposeful behavior. A brief, informal introduction to all these debates sets the stage for a closer consideration of the problems and possibilities of a theory of purposeful agents. The REMS Traditional neoclassical theory stars Rational Economic Man. Call him Mr. REM, for short. His tastes and preferences are fully formed; his personal and financial assets are given. He is a rational decision-maker who weighs costs and benefits. He processes perfect information perfectly. All his decisions are motivated by the desire to maximize his own utility— to make himself happy. In the competitive marketplace, where he constantly buys and sells, he is entirely selfish, doesn’t care at all about other people’s utility. In the home, however, he is entirely altruistic, loves his wife and children as much as his very self.1 The same goes for Mrs. REM, who is like him in every respect, except for a different set of biological assets. Both Mr. and Mrs. love to calculate, to choose, to buy and sell. Can there be any exploitation, any oppression in their world? Only if some Big Brother, like the state, restricts their choices. What is their home life like? Pretty nice, because both of them want the same things—they (and all the little baby REMs) have a joint utility function. No fights over the dinner table, no buying and selling in the living room, either. Funny, it sounds sort of like Utopian socialism in one family. The minute they walk out the door, however, the REMs enter a different world in which individuals do not know or care about each other: the marketplace. There, the relentless pursuit of individual selfinterest is not only allowed but encouraged. Competition ensures that everyone will benefit. Excess profits can exist only in the short run. If one firm enjoys a higher than average rate of return on its capital and managerial skills, other firms rush into its market, driving profits down. Unemployment is transitory. When individuals lose their jobs, they agree to work for less, wages fall, and employers hire everybody back again. The same competitive process punishes individuals who let their opinions interfere with their single-minded search for profits. If Mr. REM was an employer with a taste for gender and race discrimination, he might hire only white male workers even if he had to pay them more. In that case, employers who hired the cheapest workers, regardless of their race or gender, would make higher profits and eventually outcompete him. The overall demand for the most discriminated-against (and therefore lowest paid) workers would increase, and bid their wages up. Over time, competition would erode discrimination.2 18

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Not surprisingly, Mr. REM argues that differences in the wages that men and women earn reflect differences in the kind of labor they are willing to supply. One possibility is that women simply do not want the most demanding, better paid jobs, because they want to save their energy for housework and child care. Another is that married women accumulate less human capital in the form of experience and on-the-job training because they take more time out from paid work. Just because you cannot explain all the variation in wages between men and women by differences in their education and experience doesn’t mean that discrimination is taking place. After all, researchers cannot observe many relevant factors, such as less effort on the job.3 What if Mr. REM was a worker rather than a boss? If he were a bigot, he would be reluctant to work with or under the authority of some people, which would limit his job opportunities. His attitudes might also reduce the demand for his labor, so he would end up earning lower wages (like a racist or sexist employer, paying a price). But he might try to get together with other like-minded employees to resist integration in their workplace, to try to keep some individuals out. He might even join the Ku Klux Klan or another organization that threatens to punish anyone who contests racist or sexist attitudes. Mr. REM’s designers insist that such collective strategies are unlikely to succeed. After all, the individuals involved would have to coordinate and plan their strategy of exclusion, a costly process in itself. Some individuals would have to be willing to bear substantial risks—such as being caught if they break the law. ‘Free riders’ eager to enjoy the benefits of collusion but reluctant to pay the costs would drag the group down. People like the REMs are clever opportunists, unlikely to vote or to participate in other forms of collective action unless the economic or psychic benefits of doing so exceed the costs.4 What if Ms. Feminist corners Mr. REM, and asks him why women do by far the greater share of housework and child care, even when they have full-time paying jobs? Biological differences help explain the sexual division of labor—but why should they result in a longer work day for women? Mr. REM can provide an explanation: women place a greater value on family amenities in general, children in particular. They are willing to pay a higher price for family life, because they enjoy it more.5 Otherwise, why would they do it? No one is holding a gun to their head. ‘Well,’ Ms. Feminist might retort, ‘maybe they’re not so willing to put up with inequality any more, and that’s why they are now less likely to marry and to specialize in motherhood.’ ‘No, no, no,’ say the REMs. They explain that women are just responding rationally to technological change. Its more efficient now to produce goods and services outside the home than within it. Today’s jobs require less physical strength, so women’s market wages have increased 19

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relative to men’s. The opportunity cost of having children (the market income that parents must forego) has soared, along with the direct costs, so parents now demand fewer children. Also, parents spend more money on children’s education. So naturally there’s less demand for large families.6 ‘But isn’t there more to economics,’ asks Ms. Feminist, ‘than changing relative prices?’ She wants an explanation of why women’s political and property rights have traditionally been defined differently from men’s. The REMs explain that such phenomena are an unfortunate feature of backward, non-market societies, which will eventually be transformed by the process of ‘modernization,’ the expansion of education and markets. The real danger, they argue, is the growth of Big Government, which interferes with the competitive market and undermines the incentives to individual effort. In general, the REMs are so confident of individual choice that they believe we live in the best of all possible worlds. So it is hardly surprising that Ms. Feminist disagrees. She has at least three criticisms of their theoretical perspective. First, they take too much as given, ignoring the processes that determine the initial allocation of financial and human capital and shape tastes and preferences. Second, their basic assumptions seem to be at odds. If individuals are perfectly selfish in the marketplace, how can they be perfectly altruistic at home? Where exactly does the boundary lie? Finally, their predictions are not borne out—people can and often do engage in forms of collective action that serve their economic interests, including overt, persistent forms of discrimination against women, racial and ethnic minorities, citizens of other countries, and individuals who are simply ‘different.’ There is not much point in developing these criticisms in more detail, because this simplistic interpretation of neoclassical economic theory is rapidly becoming irrelevant. A defense of individual choice and its relevance to gender inequality can be couched in much more persuasive terms. The IRSEPs In recent years, Mr. and Mrs. REM have revised themselves. The changes have come little by little, from many different directions, with enormous cumulative impact. Not everyone has noticed, but the REMs no longer resemble the pictures in their high school yearbook. They wear different clothes; they live in a different world that cannot be described as a market writ large. It is full of complex social institutions. In this new world, inhabited by Imperfectly Rational Somewhat Economic Persons, or IRSEPs, the future is uncertain. Information is costly. Even when it can easily be acquired, it takes time to process and analyze. Sometimes there is little basis for rational assessment of the possibilities. Habit, tradition, and cultural stereotypes provide individuals 20

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with shortcuts. The actual practice of decision-making doesn’t always conform to the theory of rational behavior. Mr. and Mrs. REM may, for instance, weigh $5 quite differently depending on whether it represents a potential gain, a potential loss, an unexpected gift, or an anticipated reward. Or if they get upset or emotional about something, they may act in ways that they will term, in retrospect, ‘irrational.’7 Markets do not work perfectly. Uncertainty about the future may lead to speculative behavior and boom-and-bust cycles. Many important contracts struck in the marketplace are difficult to enforce. Employees who are paid per unit of time do not have much incentive to work hard, and employers find it difficult to monitor their work effort. Borrowers who have obtained credit may decide to default on their loans.8 The scope of markets is limited. Barriers to entry and the inherent advantages of large size in many industries limit competition, enabling some firms to make super-profits. Many of the by-products of private transactions have negative economic consequences: pollution, resource depletion, crime. And most economies fail to produce sufficient amounts of public goods such as health, education, new ideas, and good humor. The imperfect, approximate character of rationality, as well as the limits and imperfections of markets, bear directly on explanations of discrimination. Employers making hiring decisions find it difficult to ascertain workers’ true abilities. They may simply assume that workers will conform to the average performance of others with the same ascriptive characteristics. If, in their experience, women are more likely than men to quit (or even if the variation in women’s quit rates is greater than in men’s), they may resist hiring women for more important, highly paid jobs. This encourages women to quit and specialize in family work, thus fulfilling their expectation.9 Rather than hiring and firing in a true market, large firms often hire from within, using personnel departments to specify job ladders. This makes it easy for them to divide workers by gender, race/ethnicity, and age, which discourages unified resistance from workers in general. Pay scales are also set bureaucratically. Indeed, a legal suit against two major corporations that set pay scales lower for female than for male jobs initiated the movement for pay equity in the USA.10 Employers are not necessarily the only ones to blame. Groups of workers who enjoy relatively well-paid jobs may use their bargaining power to protect themselves from low-wage competition. They may threaten strikes, slow-downs, or quits if employers hire the ‘wrong’ people. They may well be able to impose short-run costs that outweigh the long-run gains, to employers, of hiring the cheapest workers.11 The way that individuals define and pursue their self-interest is also relevant to the sexual division of labor in the home. If all they care about is efficiency, they will always assign tasks according to ability. But if they 21

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also care about social norms, they might not. So what if Nancy is a terrible cook. Women are supposed to cook. So what if Sam likes taking care of kids? Men aren’t supposed to get too involved in that. How many kids to have? Rather than comparing the costs of children with the utility they expect to receive from them (as neoclassical orthodoxy suggests) couples might just have the same number as everybody else. This means that cultural norms themselves must be explained. Who makes them, and who enforces them? Religious authorities, advertising agencies, even poets and economists may exercise a special influence. If tastes and preferences are subject to change, individual decisions cannot be explained simply by variations in prices and incomes.12 Conformity is easier than calculation. Cultural norms, however rational in the long run, may be ‘sticky,’ slow to adjust to new economic realities. On the other hand, norms cannot simply be reduced to habit or conformity, because they overlap with moral and philosophical concerns. Mr. and Mrs. REM may consider some wants more rational or more virtuous than others. If so, they have ‘meta-preferences.’ Sometimes they stay up late talking about what they should want, trying to develop their tastes and preferences rather than merely acting on them. One of the issues that troubles them is the difficulty of balancing self-interest against affection, cooperation, and commitment.13 Some economists now reject the stylized assumption that individuals are perfectly self-interested in the marketplace. Individuals may ‘acquire sentiment’ for those they work with, whether co-worker, employer, or employee. Cultural norms and rituals reinforce a sense of group solidarity, in which the individual identifies with a larger group. Employees may operate according to implicit contracts such as ‘A good day’s work for a good day’s pay.’ Employers may pay some workers high wages in order to encourage greater commitment and work effort. The consequences are not entirely positive, because other workers may suffer unemployment as a result. Other kinds of solidarity can have pernicious results—as when employers and/or employees collude against individuals of a different race, or nationality, or gender.14 Ironically, neoclassical reasoning suggests that ‘too little’ selfishness outside the family can be a more serious problem than ‘too much.’ The reason is that too little selfishness encourages forms of collective action that have much more significant consequences than bad preferences or attitudes, especially when social institutions are added to the picture of competitive markets. If discrimination is merely a preference, it gets punished by the market. But if it is an expression of collective interests, it shapes social institutions like the family and the firm which, in turn, have a powerful impact on preferences. Along with appreciation of the possibilities for solidarity at work comes new recognition of the possibilities for conflict at home. ‘Rotten 22

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kids’ are possible; even rotten parents. Many economists now model wars of maneuver between husbands and wives who take their spouse’s feelings into account but put their own priorities first. The relative bargaining power of family members, defined in terms of threat points (their fallback position, if they exit the relationship) affects the distribution of income, goods, and leisure time within the household. Inequality within the family reflects inequalities in individual power related to age and gender.15 Husbands are generally in a stronger bargaining position than wives, because men tend to earn more money than women, and gain forms of work experience that aren’t adversely affected by divorce. Full-time wives and mothers, on the other hand, specialize in providing personal services that have little value in the impersonal marketplace. Their lack of labor market experience makes it difficult for them to find well-paying jobs. The child support responsibilities of absent fathers are poorly defined and enforced. Many empirical studies confirm that divorce hurts women economically much more than men. The economic risks of being a housewife are high, but women often have reason to prefer an unequal, even unhappy marriage to none at all.16 Bargaining also takes place between parents and children. When children begin work at an early age, and know that their lifetime income will be strongly affected by gifts and bequests from their parents, such as inheritance of a family farm, they have a strong incentive to contribute to parental income. Economic opportunities outside the family, whether through migration or wage employment, increase young adults’ economic independence. New educational requirements postpone the age at which they can begin to earn substantial income. All these factors increase their bargaining power, and modify the distribution of wealth and income between generations.17 If individuals were always selfish, these intra-family bargaining processes would not be difficult to model. The problem is, they are not. Husbands and wives, parents and children love each other, at least part of the time. Family life is a shifting and somewhat unpredictable mixture of selfishness and altruism. Both components of the mixture are ‘rational,’ but their co-existence makes it very difficult to separate what people want from how they try to get what they want. So much for the REMs’ tidy world, where people acted as self-enclosed individuals in the market and as members of a perfect collectivity in the home. The boundaries between the self and others aren’t nearly so well defined. Partly as a result, the stylized assumptions of utility maximization begin to seem less convincing, and the social institutions that bring individuals together in different ways begin to seem more important. It is tempting to label this vision of a world inhabited by IRSEPs as neo-neoclassical economics, but the more accurate term is neoclassical institutionalism (though not everyone labeled by it would agree). The 23

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most important stylized differences between this new approach and its traditional antecedent are pictured in Figure 1.1. One assumes perfect knowledge and certainty about the future; the other does not. Factors once treated as givens (exogenously given) become variables subject to change within the system (partially endogenous). Groups, as well as individuals, can act as ‘agents.’ Exchange is no longer the only important process, but is joined by bargaining and by coordination, denned here as the establishment and development of social institutions. Social institutions are a kind of grab bag for means of social coordination, ranging from the very general category of social norms, to more formal institutions such as the family or the firm, to more specific examples like the U.S. Congress. Like markets, they are important sites of economic activity.18

Traditional Neoclassical model Exogenously given factors: rules, norms, preferences Agents: individuals Processes: exchange Sites: markets Neoclassical Institutionalist model Partially endogenous factors: rules, norms, preferences Agents: individuals, interest groups Processes: exchange, bargaining, coordination Sites: markets, social institutions Figure 1.1 A stylized comparison of Traditional Neoclassical and Neoclassical Institutionalist approaches

The institutionalist model seems more realistic, though more difficult to apply, than the traditional neoclassical model. One reason it hasn’t been more widely adopted is that it undermines any strong claims about the inherent efficiency of a pure market economy. It fact, it suggests a number of reasons why market economies might be prone to fairly serious malfunctions in addition to the perpetuation of inequalities based on gender and race. Unfortunately, neoclassical institutionalism doesn’t offer many insights into the exercise of power beyond the microeconomic level of the firm or the family. Bargaining and coordination are important, but what about confrontation, conflict, and organized violence? Analysis of collective behavior is largely limited to interest groups that people voluntarily join.19

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The traditional neoclassical legacy finds continuing expression in a distinct reluctance to examine the collective exercise of power. Meanwhile, the REMs talk about changing their name to IRSEP. But everyone is so used to thinking of them as REMs. What’s really frustrating is the chipper way most economists keep arguing that the REMs just need to be left alone to optimize. Under all this pressure, they decide to split up, go their separate ways, and seek their separate truths. Mrs. REM changes her name, after all, and signs up for a course in Women’s Studies. Beyond rational feminism Economists of all persuasions share an interest in ‘economic interests,’ in the role of economic rationality. They inhabit a rationalist tradition that has recently been challenged by feminist criticisms. How has neoclassical economic theory influenced feminist theory, and vice versa? The answer to this question helps explain why the insights of neoclassical institutionalism are necessary but not sufficient for a feminist political economy. In the nineteenth century, the liberal neoclassical emphasis on individuals and their choices had a subversive impact on traditional notions of women’s place in society. Emphasis on women’s connectedness with others served as a rationale for denying them political rights. James Mill invoked the concept of a joint utility function in 1825, when he argued that British women did not require the franchise because their interests were represented by their fathers and husbands. Other opponents of women’s suffrage claimed that women could not and should not be rational or selfinterested, and, indeed, that society might fall apart if they were! Such claims were contested by advocates of individual rights, including James Mill’s son John Stuart Mill, one of the forefathers of neoclassical economics. Feminists used the rhetoric of liberal political theory and individual rights to great advantage. Spokeswomen like Elizabeth Cady Stanton spoke eloquently of women’s need for self-determination.20 Other aspects of the neoclassical tradition were influential. In the 1930s, some economists began to argue that the household was an important site of economic activity, that women make rational decisions about how to allocate their time between family and paid labor. The Chicago school of ‘home economics,’ founded by Hazel Kyrk and Margaret Reid, treated the efficient organization of consumption as an important aspect of production. Although later ‘new home economists’ at the University of Chicago, such as Gary Becker, accepted the joint utility function approach, they treated the household as an important site of production of human capital. This work set the stage for recent efforts to model self-interested decision-making and bargaining within families.21 Ironically, once the concept of ‘self-interest’ was fully extended to women and the family, its meaning came into question. The liberal 25

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political notion that individuals could always separate their own selfinterest from the self-interest of others was based on an implicit picture of adult males interacting in an impersonal environment rather than, say, mothers caring for young children. Individuals do not start out as adults, jostling for position in a competitive marketplace. They start out as infants, dependent on others for their very survival. Affection, sympathy, love (or, in technical terms, ‘interdependent utilities’) are not exceptions to some rule; they are the rule.22 This possibility receives some mention in mainstream debates over rational choice, but is more fully developed in the interdisciplinary discourse of feminist theory. Recent research suggests that concepts of self-interest are highly gendered, partly as a consequence of the social organization of childrearing. Women may have a less ‘bounded’ concept of themselves than men, a greater propensity for interdependent utilities, even altruism. If so, bargaining outcomes favor men even when women have exactly the same economic resources.23 Feminists influenced by post-modern theories of deconstruction insist that self-interest cannot be treated as a universal or objective concept, because it is culturally constructed. It may simply be an interpretive device scholars invented for imposing some fictive coherence on human behavior. Certainly its definition varies across time and space. Selfinterest is a concept that must be handled with cautious appreciation of its cultural components.24 ‘Rational’ is a gendered term, associated with an objective, dispassionate, distinctly masculine approach, often counterposed to a subjective, emotional, feminine approach. Rational behavior can, technically, be self-sacrificing if a person places a higher value on something outside the self, but the term is often used in ways that imply that selfishness is more rational than altruism, that love (outside the nuclear family) is an irrational phenomenon. Indeed, ever since Bernard de Mandeville and Adam Smith, economists have used this claim to defend the superiority of a pure market economy that harnesses selfishness.25 But could a society based on unadulterated selfishness function effectively? Some economists say no. Amartya Sen argues that Rational Economic Man is a ‘rational fool.’ Robert Frank rhetorically suggests that parents wouldn’t want their daughter or son to marry Homo economicus. How interesting that such misgivings come to light in a cultural and historical context in which women are beginning to claim that they can be just as selfish as men. A society in which mothers, as well as fathers, defined their self-interest in opposition to others really would fall apart.26 In everyday language, the term ‘rational’ simply implies use of one’s power of reasoning; rational behavior is a prescription for getting what one wants, a means to an end. But economic theory has loaded new meanings onto the term, not only about the selfishness of rationality, but 26

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also about the very nature of desire. Economic theories of rational choice are typically based on strict assumptions about people’s ability to rank their wants, and to calculate how much of good X they would be willing to give up in exchange for another unit of good Y. Such assumptions ignore the possibility that, to quote W.H.Auden, ‘The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews.’27 The concept of Imperfectly Rational Somewhat Economic Persons is an important advance over Rational Economic Man. The mere assertion that rationality is imperfect, however, doesn’t say enough about how an individual comes to define his or her self-interest. Even the institutionalist interpretation of rational choice (which allows for uncertainty, imperfect information, and interdependent utilities) is reductionist. But it would be a mistake to throw the potentially rational baby out with the reductionist bath water. After all, some theory of purposeful choice lies at the heart of any claim that individuals can challenge the constraints of their culture and context. If we were merely the product of our social circumstances, we would not have much reason to try to modify them. Many feminist theorists explore the ways in which the organization of childrearing, the process of socialization, and the cultural construction of gender roles affect the ways in which women conceptualize themselves and their interests. These explorations clearly demonstrate the limits of the masculinist rational actor model. At the same time, feminist theorists seldom argue that women are incapable of looking beyond, or ‘stepping outside’ their culturally constructed identity to question its implications. On the contrary, feminist theory encourages precisely such a critical assessment. Women’s interests may be subjectively constituted, imperfectly understood, subject to constraint, and difficult to act upon. But if they are completely missing, there is no point in feminists encouraging women to act upon them. Appreciation of the conscious, deliberative aspects of human agency does not require the strict assumptions of the individualistic rational actor model. Individuals may have some needs and wants that are separate and autonomous and some that are interdependent and enmeshed. They may have some preferences that are consistent and rankable, and some that are not. We can still ask what their actions may reveal about their purpose, and explore the ways in which calculations of economic consequences may influence their decisions. Feminist economist Elaine McCrate argues that we can dispense with neoclassical concepts of formal rationality and develop an alternative emphasis on substantive rationality.28 Feminist sociologist Paula England makes a similar argument, arguing for a less restrictive interpretation of rational choice: We would like theories that make sense of the world. Yet 27

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economists’ assumptions are often unrealistic, and distorted in a way that in our cultural heritage is masculinist. As I see it, the challenge for sociology is to determine the social and cultural forms that flow from and make possible either separative or connected selfhood. This allows us to reject distorting assumptions while not giving up the search for systematic patterns.29 One way to signal a departure from strict rationalist assumptions is to dispense with the term ‘rational choice’ and substitute the term ‘purposeful choice.’ This term encourages us to ask how people define and pursue their desires, but avoids any implicit dichotomy between rational and irrational. It allows for the important possibility that economic selfishness plays a significant, if limited, role.30 Because a purposeful choice approach explicitly rejects the extreme individualism embedded in the rational actor model, it offers a better explanation of collective action. Even in neoclassical institutionalism, free riding is pictured as a natural state of affairs, overcome only when there are sufficient incentives and monitoring to minimize opportunistic behavior. The approach outlined here makes free riders a less serious problem because it emphasizes the extent to which they identify with other members of their group. At the same time, it acknowledges that some selfish purposes may be at odds with collective ones; free riders do not completely disappear. We might say that individuals are ‘socialized’ in ways that create commitments to their family, their race, their class, their country. But this would imply that they start out as separate individuals, and that commitments are imposed on them from without. Instead, realization and expression of commitments to others are parts of the process of ‘individuation.’ Collective action helps individuals constitute their own identity. At the same time, individuals have to mediate many conflicting forms of loyalty, and their behavior can seldom be explained simply by their ‘objective’ position or membership in a group.31 Collective action also enters the picture as a defensive strategy for protecting against a public ‘bad’ being imposed from without (or by another group) for which free riding offers no escape. People seldom face a choice between purely individualistic and purely collective options—rather, failure to join one group often assigns them, by default, to another. Individuals who do not mobilize the systematic support of others operate at a distinct disadvantage. Competition creates incentives for cooperation.32 Rejection of the perfectly ‘separative’ self helps explain the need to adopt a concept of purposeful choice, but also to go beyond choice to examine how purposes are constituted. A theory that takes individual agents as the starting point (whether they are perfectly rational, imperfectly rational, or simply purposeful) cannot explain how they come 28

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to want what they want or whether they are able to get what they want. The purposeful choices of one generation influence the next generation’s desires and capacities. Individuals are born into social structures that shape their sense of identity and ability to pursue their interests. Choice, in other words, is limited. A theory of social structures is key to any conceptualization of the context in which choice takes place. Precisely because we might like to choose a world without sexism or racism but find that we cannot, our attention shifts to consideration of the ways in which other people’s choices limit our own. Consider the feminist question: Do men pursue their collective interests at women’s expense? Marxian theory poses a similar question: Do capitalists pursue their collective interests at workers’ expense? The parallel helps explain why many feminist theorists have joined, criticized, and revised the Marxian tradition. STRUCTURES Like neoclassical economic theory, Marxian theory comes in simple and sophisticated versions. The former, based on a close (though not necessarily accurate) exegesis of the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, hardened into dogma in many authoritarian centrally planned economies. Elsewhere, however, it sustained powerful critiques of the unequally distributed wealth and power that neoclassical economic theory simply takes as given. Revamped and revised, Marxian theory offers a feisty interpretation of the interplay between collective interests, social institutions, and individual agency. Mr. Prol The simple version of Marxian theory reverses many of the assumptions of neoclassical theory. Enter our exemplar. Call him Mr. Prol, after the Latin term for wage-earner, proletarian. He is a member of the working class and, by definition, has nothing to sell except his labor power. Choices are a luxury to him; his world is almost pure constraint. His capitalist employers pay him less than the value of what he produces, extracting a surplus in the form of profits. If he quits his job he will be replaced by a willing member of the reserve army of the unemployed. If he becomes conscious of his exploitation, he will engage in class struggle, resisting his employer’s efforts to intensify the work process, joining a trade union, perhaps even organizing a revolutionary movement.33 Mr. Prol shares his earnings with his family and, in return, they provide him with a haven in an otherwise heartless world. The domestic services that his wife provides, like any income she might garner from sewing or gardening, effectively lower the cost of reproducing his labor power, making it possible for him to subsist on a lower wage. The pressure of 29

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poverty that impels his wife and children into the labor market puts further downward pressure on his wages. Still, the working-class family is united in struggle, all for one and one for all. You could even say it has a joint utility function.34 Mr. Prol reads himself to sleep with history, learning of the dark legacies of organized violence that left most people with few important choices to make. The movement from farm to factory, the genesis of wage labor, was not attributable to technological change and individual choice alone. The antecedents of capitalism lay in a process of primitive accumulation in which landlords forcibly enclosed common lands and drove peasants from the countryside in search of new employment. Slavery, he learns, was a form of collective violence imposed upon the vulnerable. Military superiority dictated the outcome of European colonization of much of the less-developed world. Oppressed classes suffered losses of property and power that were reproduced over time.35 Force and violence do not represent the only abrogations of individual agency. Arbitrary floors and ceilings, prison cells of history, define the Rooms of Choice. Mr. Prol quotes Marx: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past.’36 Lack of access to means of production and repression of efforts to organize collectively constrain the proletarian to ‘choose’ the only alternative open to him, wage labor. The ruling class, on the other hand, controls Capital and tries to control the State, defending property rights and rules that work to its advantage. In democracies, elections become an arena of class conflict in which capitalists may hold the future of the economy hostage.37 The power of the ruling class is further reinforced by its influence over culture and ideology, its capacity to legitimize exploitation. Marx described religion as the opiate of the working class, because the promise of rewards for humility in the next world served to deflect demands for economic justice in this one. Further, he insisted that economic theory itself, ‘bourgeois political economy,’ represented the interests of an ascendant capitalist class.38 Mr. Prol believes, with Marx, that the secret of capitalism lies in its distinctive form of exploitation. Unlike feudalism, its underlying inequalities are effectively concealed by the rhetoric of free exchange. Marx modified the labor theory of value developed by David Ricardo, postulating that the exchange value or long-run price of a commodity was determined by the amount of direct and indirect labor time required to produce it. Workers’ wages, their costs of production, are set by subsistence requirements that are culturally as well as biologically determined, affected, for instance, by their bargaining power. But 30

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workers’ labor power, unlike any other commodity, can actually create more value than it consumes. A proletarian who works 16 hours but receives a wage equivalent to the product of 8 hours (including the labor embodied in raw materials and machinery used up) creates a surplus. ‘Why then,’ Ms. Feminist (who happens to be in the neighborhood) inquires, ‘do men earn so much more than women, whites so much more than workers of color?’ Mr. Prol explains that capitalist employers have learned to divide and conquer, to pit each group against the other, to segment the working class. Only in periods of excess demand for labor are they willing to violate the agreement that different types of workers must be assigned to different types of jobs so that their interests will remain at odds. Further, the highest paid workers may actually be the most exploited—they produce more surplus value relative to their wage.39 ‘One of the few good things about capitalism,’ Mr. Prol points out, ‘is that it establishes the pre-conditions for women’s liberation.’ He has read Friedrich Engels’ late nineteenth-century classic, The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, which confidently predicted the demise of the patriarchal family. By this account, the problems all started with private property, which gave men an incentive to control women’s sexuality and ensure the legitimacy of their heirs. But proletarianization led to increased propertylessness and pushed women into paid labor on a par with men, undermining the material basis of women’s oppression.40 Similar reasoning was applied to nationalist struggles—with the development of capitalism, these differences would erode. Similarly, the further expansion of wage labor within the United States would eventually subsume differences among Whites, African-Americans, and Latinos within a unified and class-conscious proletariat. The labor theory of value contributed to a strong emphasis on capitalist relations of exploitation within the factory. Not that Marx and Engels did not allude to other dimensions of inequality. Rather, they argued that these would be superseded by the development of capitalism and eventual transition to socialism.41 Though forced to struggle with the ‘woman question,’ the ‘national question,’ and the ‘race question,’ and committed in principle to a larger vision of social equality, they remained confident that class was the ultimate, the dominant vector of collective action. And class, they believed, would be superseded in the transition from a crisis-ridden capitalism to an emancipatory socialism. Why was Marx so confident of this class-centric view of the world? Partly because he witnessed, during his life time, a relatively strong and successful working-class mobilization in Western Europe, but also because he believed that capitalism was a powerful engine of development that would eventually drive itself aground. He devoted the best part of Volume III of Capital to a compelling account of capitalism’s tendencies towards economic instability. He spent remarkably little time pondering 31

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the nature of socialism. Perhaps he wanted to leave its architectural design up to those who might actually construct it. However, he didn’t consider it a serious problem. If class differences were the major source of social conflict, their abolition would, by definition, lead to harmony. In Lenin’s words, ‘The government of people would be replaced by the administration of things.’ Planning an economy would be as easy as pie.42 This view of the world was too simple by half, and no one came to appreciate this better than feminists, who heard their demands for women’s rights belittled by the ‘bourgeois liberal’ label. Their disillusion anticipated that of later reformists punished for challenging the so-called ‘socialist’ bureaucracies. But these criticisms are now familiar; less widely appreciated are the results of persistent efforts to reform the Marxian theoretical tradition. The Neo-Prols Neo-Marxian theory is to Marxian orthodoxy as neoclassical institutionalism is to neoclassical orthodoxy. It is distinguished from its parent not only by its more recent provenance, but also by the way it flouts certain traditional assumptions. The distinction between Marxian and neoclassical reasoning has diminished as a result: the two have begun slowly to converge. But Neo-Marxian theory maintains a much stronger emphasis on collective conflict and exercise of power. The characters we can term the Neo-Prols are sometimes called revisionists. A motley group, they have moved beyond Mr. Prol’s simplistic view of the world in three important ways: they offer some new insights into the process of individual choice, they reject the labor theory of value, and they look beyond the extraction of surplus within the factory to other, more complex forms of exploitation. The insights they offer are distinct from but complementary to those of neoclassical institutionalism. Any structural analysis that offers the possibility of modifying structures must preserve an important place for individual agents. Although reluctant to develop an explicit microeconomics, English Marxists in particular have long embraced the concept of rationality, broadly defined. In the words of Ronald Meek, ‘Reason can help make us conscious, even if only dimly, of our own ideologies…. This may or may not be true. But we have to act on the assumption that it is true, if we are to act at all.’43 In recent years, a Marxist microeconomics has emerged. Models of ‘rational choice exploitation’ start from the same assumptions as orthodox neoclassical models, assuming utility maximization and taking original asset allocations, tastes and preferences as exogenously given. Under certain plausible conditions, free choice leads to exploitation, simply because one group of individuals starts off in a stronger bargaining position than another. Whether the outcome of a market exchange can be 32

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considered fair or not depends on how the initial allocations were determined—by choice or by force, equitably or inequitably.44 This approach, best developed by John Roemer, suffers from the same restrictive connotations as a neoclassical theory of rational choice. But it shifts emphasis away from the nature of individual preferences towards a consideration of the structure in which individuals operate. In particular, it explains how assets acquired outside the realm of choice or merit, through inheritance or threat of violence, define important economic consequences. A person lacking assets will have no viable choice but to work for a wage. Roemer also explains how ‘human capital’ or skills can function as assets whose prior distribution affects choices within the labor market. Like Neoclassical Institutionalists, Neo-Marxists focus their attention on non-market processes that influence market outcomes. Marx himself presented the labor theory of value as a theory of equilibrium prices. The relative prices of commodities can be explained in terms of the relative quantities of labor embodied in them. However, they can also be explained in terms of the relative quantities of any other input, such as corn, iron, peanuts, or units of energy. Many Neo-Marxists argue that labor is unique not in its capacity to create a surplus but in its ability to contest the terms of exchange.45 Socialist feminist theorists point to an even more serious flaw in the traditional labor theory of value, its assumption that labor power is a ‘nonproduced’ commodity whose value is determined simply by the wage bundle. A young wage-earner may get more from his parents than he gives them in return; a husband does not necessarily give his wife a share of his earnings commensurate with the hours of household work she performs. Thus, capitalist exploitation may be ‘redistributed’ within the family, as flows of unpaid labor time between family members complicate, even countervail, flows of unpaid labor time in the capitalist workplace.46 Neo-Marxist critiques of the traditional labor theory of value are consistent with greater attention to arenas of struggle outside the capitalist workplace. The exercise of military force and political influence affects the assets individuals bring to markets and the rules that govern their exchanges there. Many forms of organized violence fostered the early growth of the ‘market economies’ of Western Europe and the United States—robbery of gold, silver, and other resources, appropriation of territory, and exploitation of forced labor (peons and cheap wage workers, as well as slaves).47 The developed capitalist countries have long enjoyed favorable terms of trade and opportunities for foreign investment that have limited, even reversed, economic development in some parts of the Third World. Harsh restrictions on labor immigration perpetuate wage differentials that benefit citizens of the advanced countries, protecting (at least until recently) an ‘aristocracy of labor’ from low-wage competition, and lowering the cost of many imports. Many, though not all, of the military 33

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engagements of the advanced capitalist countries have delivered economic benefits to their entire citizenries, though capitalists have benefitted the most. From this point of view, the ‘world capitalist system’ defines the tenor of class relations in individual countries.48 One common theme in Neo-Marxian economics is collective conflict, often modelled upon the primal conflict between the capitalist class and the working class. Wives are to husbands as proletarians are to capitalists, as poor countries to rich ones. The parallel extends to conflict between poorly-paid and highly-paid workers. Mr. Prol’s argument that capitalist employers take advantage of divisions within the working class may hold true, but it cannot stand alone, because employers are not the only ones that benefit. In the short run, any group that successfully garners good jobs has an incentive to collude with employers to protect itself from low-wage competition. White workers gain, at least temporarily, from their disproportionate representation in better paying jobs, as do male workers. In the long run, however, workers have most to gain by rallying around their common class interests. Thus, for the Neo-Prols, racism and sexism represent a combination of ‘false consciousness’ and economic shortsightedness.49 Mr. Prol was convinced that the very process of capitalist competition would create a tendency for the rate of profit to fall and throw the system into crisis. The Neo-Prols are more likely to emphasize pressures on profitability wrought by international competition and financial instability. Many also point to the impact of political democracy, which makes it easier for the working class to demand public policies to lower unemployment and to provide social benefits such as health insurance and public education.50 Mr. Prol was confident of the potential efficiency of a non-market institution known as ‘the state,’ once the means of production had been socialized. The Neo-Prols are skeptical, with a new awareness of problems intrinsic to undemocratic centrally planned economies. A bureaucratic system in which managers rule without any external discipline or democratic accountability is doomed to inefficiency. It may also create new, exploitative class relations between managers and everybody else.51 The forms of undemocratic central planning that emerged in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, argue the Neo-Prols, cannot be called ‘socialism.’ A better economic system would promote democracy in the workplace as well as the polity. Within that context, markets might play an important role, enhancing economic efficiency by keeping bureaucratic power in check.52 In other words, the Neo-Prols understand the world better than Mr. Prol did, and have a more compelling vision of the future. Figure 1.2 summarizes some stylized differences between traditional and Neo-Marxist 34

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theories in terms parallel to the previous comparison of neoclassical approaches. Individual preferences, so important to the neoclassical world view, seldom appear on the Marxian lists, where the vocabulary tends more to ‘structural factors.’ Both Marxian approaches include a factor largely absent from neoclassical models—the distribution of assets (such as ownership of land, capital, or human capital in the form of education and training). And both include an additional process: coercion. Some would argue that the traditional Marxian model pictured here is too simple. Marx himself, for instance, devoted considerable attention to the process of exchange. But he was primarily concerned with the ways in which it obscured the fundamental process of exploitation in production. Similarly, Marx often mentioned the role of the state in enforcing exploitative relations, but did not devote much attention to how it operated. A major contribution of Neo-Marxism is its more sustained attention to a longer list of agents, processes, and sites. Traditional Marxian model Structural factors: assets, rules, norms Agents: classes Processes: coercion, production, bargaining Sites: capitalist firms Neo-Marxian model Structural factors: assets, rules, norms Agents: classes, class-like groups, individuals Processes: coercion, production, bargaining, exchange, coordination Sites: capitalist firms, states, markets, families Figure 1.2 A stylized comparison of traditional Marxian and Neo-Marxian approaches

Figure 1.2 may give a misleading picture of theoretical consensus—like neoclassical institutionalism, Neo-Marxian theory is a nascent, eclectic paradigm. Many scholars who endorse some of the arguments above denounce others, creating confusing permutations. Still, as a general paradigm, Neo-Marxism offers a powerful analysis of collective conflict, and helps explain many interconnected dimensions of social power. Its weakness lies in its preoccupation with class defined largely in terms of asset ownership. This preoccupation is reflected in a tendency to model other forms of collective conflict too narrowly on class, to treat them as less important than class, and to envision alternative forms of social organization primarily in class terms. The traditional Marxian legacy of 35

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economism, of emphasis on so-called ‘material’ or economic factors, has proved remarkably persistent. Even if the concept of assets is widened to encompass ‘human capital’ in the form of human skills and capacities, it does not provide a very good basis for explaining social divisions such as those based on gender, race, or national citizenship. Yet historically, such divisions have had at least as much impact on economic inequality as those based on ownership of assets. The basic vocabulary of Marxian theory, with its emphasis on a mode of production termed ‘capitalism,’ elides differences among capitalist countries in race and gender relations. Today, in a world where most countries can be labeled ‘capitalist,’ it no longer seems a very useful term. Many good arguments, both moral and economic, can be made for workers’ control and workplace democracy. But these concepts do not convey much concern for inequalities among wage-earners. In the United States today, for instance, white men are located in the best paying jobs. If their workplaces were democratized, they would remain in the best paying jobs. Neither women nor people of color would experience much improvement. The Neo-Prols recognize the political importance of new non-classbased social movements, the emergence of what has been called ‘identity politics.’ But they do not seem to recognize their economic importance. Like their neoclassical counterparts, the Neo-Prols are more comfortable thinking about ‘interests’ than about ‘identities.’ And they haven’t quite integrated the insights that feminist theorists have to offer them. Beyond socialist feminism Ms. Feminist has, or should have, an appreciation of the Marxian as well as the neoclassical tradition, because she has long been involved with both. Some interesting offspring have resulted. Marxist feminists have stuck closely to the revisionist approach described above, declaring their loyalty to class analysis. Socialist feminists have drawn from the larger socialist tradition, distancing themselves from any class-first position.53 But even socialist feminists have centered their analysis on the distinctive types of work that women do and the distinctive sites where such work takes place. This lingering economism obscures many aspects of female identity and action that are not based on the organization of work per se, such as nation, race, age, and sexual orientation. As with neoclassical institutionalism, a larger dose of feminist theory is required. Some important pre-Marxian socialists embraced the feminist cause. In 1825, long before Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto, William Thompson (aided by his journalist friend, Anna Wheeler) wrote a brilliant polemic entitled Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, to Retain them in Political and 36

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Thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery. The book explained men’s interests in controlling women, asserted the importance of feminist struggle, and declared the need for a more cooperative economic system. Societies based purely on individual competition, argued Thompson and Wheeler, placed mothers and children at a distinct and unfair disadvantage.54 Marx and Engels hoped to put socialism on a more ‘scientific’ footing by emphasizing class relations and economic ‘laws of motion’ instead. Both were dismissive of the notion that gender interests might overlay or contradict class interests. Yet they remained interested in the issue of women’s rights, and many of their political and intellectual fellow travellers went even further. August Bebel, for instance, echoed many of the arguments of the Appeal in his 1879 classic, Women and Socialism. Like the small number of feminists who also considered themselves Marxists, Bebel explicitly argued that men had interests as men that prompted them to self-interested collective action.55 Modern socialist feminists maintain this emphasis on the interests of men as a group but are careful to place them on the same footing as class interests. Gender exploitation is explained in terms similar to class exploitation, with serious consideration of the ‘surplus labor’ women typically provide within the home. Women’s biological and social capacities are conceptualized as a means of production. The patriarchal family becomes an analogue to the capitalist firm. ‘Patriarchy’ becomes a mode of production both analogous to and intertwined with ‘capitalism.’ This approach effectively calls attention to the structural aspects of gender-based inequality and challenges those who would prefer to describe sexism merely as a ‘superstructure’ of cultural norms or individual preferences. By suggesting that ‘production for use’ can be as exploitative as ‘production for exchange,’ it explains a conflict of interests that cannot be attributed to class differences between capitalists and workers.56 Even more importantly, socialist feminist insights undermine the constricted conventional definition of production as mere provision of material goods and services. The meaning of work and definition of ‘output’ come into question once non-market work is admitted into the economic picture, because this often involves ‘emotional labor’ or ‘caring work.’ Ann Ferguson defines ‘sex/affective production’ as a process that meets the needs for social union involved in sex and nurturance. As she points out, The sex/affective labour that women do for wages and in the family has a distinctive character. By and large it involves mediating and nurturance skills that encourage women to identify with the interests of children, husbands or lovers, clients, patients and customers, thus making it difficult for women to take an oppositional stance of the sort necessary to acknowledge one’s involvement in an exploitative exchange of labour.57 37

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Ironically, the redefinition and reorientation of these concepts of economic activity encourage socialist feminists to remain preoccupied with ‘production.’ If patriarchy and capitalism are simply ‘dual systems’ of production, changes in the technology and organization of production and reproduction tell the most important part of the story. Class and gender, therefore, become the crucial categories; other forms of collective identity and action are contingent or contextual. The dual systems model does not invite serious or sustained attention to inequalities that cannot be based in production, such as those based on nation, race, age, or sexual preference. These forms of difference often remain on a lower level of theoretical importance, even where they receive careful historical and political attention. Nationalism, racism, ageism, homophobia—these words all imply attitudes rather than structures. They do not comprise ‘systems’ comparable to capitalism or patriarchy.58 A broader analysis of production is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for feminist political economy. What the ‘women’s movement’ shares with other important forms of political mobilization is a sense of common (though not uncontested) identity and interests—an impetus to collective action. What creates and sustains this impetus? A satisfactory answer to this question lies beyond traditional socialist feminist preoccupations with the factory, the family, production and reproduction, in a broader consideration of both individual and collective forms of cooperation and conflict. Hence the need for more sustained analysis of what Neoclassical Institutionalists casually describe as ‘interest groups’ and NeoMarxian theorists lump into the ‘non-class group’ category. If individuals can identify with and act on behalf of more than one group, then their processes of decision-making become even more important. Shifting definitions of self-interest and changing possibilities for pursuing group interest create a strategic environment far more complex than any simple duality based on class and gender alone. IDENTITIES, INTERESTS, AND INSTITUTIONS Whatever her quarrels with neoclassical and Marxist economics, the feminist economist can draw effectively from both, as long as she remembers her primary goal: to explain why individuals of common gender might identify with one another and collectively pursue gender interests (as well as engage in other forms of collective action). Choice plays an important role. Individuals are not perfectly rational utility maximizers, but they are purposeful agents who make decisions to buy, to sell, and to engage in various social activities. Their choices are affected by relative prices and probabilities of gain, the economist’s 38

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traditional arbiters of efficiency. But they are also shaped by the social construction of individual preferences and cultural norms. Choice takes place within certain social structures, themselves the outcome of previous choices and structures. The ownership of the means of production, or, more broadly, the distribution of initial assets, is an important dimension of social structures. But political, cultural, and psychological factors also define the groups to which individuals belong, and locate their position within them. Sociologist Mark Granovetter offers an eloquent summary of this methodological compromise: Actors do not behave or decide as atoms outside a social context, nor do they adhere slavishly to a script written for them by the particular intersection of social categories that they happen to occupy.59 The question then becomes, what determines these ‘social categories,’ which include but are not limited to gender and class? At least four kinds of factors structure individual positions within social groups: asset distributions, political rules, cultural norms, and personal preferences. Individuals do not initially choose these aspects of the context in which they operate. They are born into them. As they mature, they may choose to change them, both individually and in concert with others. What kinds of motives influence the processes by which these structural factors are modified? As Neoclassical Institutionalists argue, efforts to create new social institutions often aim to solve problems of social coordination and improve economic efficiency. As Neo-Marxists argue, efforts to modify structural factors are also designed to empower some more than others and promote economic aggrandizement. An appreciation of the interaction between agency and structure must be fused with an appreciation of a dialectic between coordination and conflict. Economic theories of the market and the firm offer a rich arena for exploring the tensions between efficiency and inequality. But feminist theory demands that the family be explored in similar terms. A critical analysis of relations between mothers and fathers, parents and children reveals the logic of a set of gendered identities and interests that has both shaped and been shaped by processes unfolding in the market and the state. The family cannot be conceptually segregated from ‘the economy’— it is one of many sites where individuals pursue their diverse and sometimes contradictory interests. Assets, rules, norms, and preferences Neoclassical Institutionalists theorizing about Imperfectly Rational Somewhat Economic Persons describe collective action largely as an 39

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outcome of rational, instrumental choice—individuals decide to join ‘interest groups.’ Neo-Marxian theorists place more emphasis on asset distributions and the constellations of political power that enforce them. Feminist theorists insist on the importance of endogenous preferences and the impact of cultural norms on the formation of social identity, relevant to both individual choice and collective action.60 Why not put these all together in a systematic framework that accommodates the interaction between interests and identities, choices and constraints? Asset distributions, political rules, cultural norms, and personal preferences all help locate individuals in ways that foster a range of different types of collective identity and action. At first glance, this list may seem to conform to a traditional quartet of economic, political, cultural, and psychological factors. But all four pertain to sites traditionally considered ‘economic,’ such as the market, and to sites traditionally considered ‘cultural’ or ‘psychological,’ such as the family. All four define the context in which individuals try to get what they want.61 Assets comprise the resources that individuals and groups bring with them to the decision-making process, their initial endowments. They may take several forms: financial assets such as money, real assets such as land, military assets such as firepower, biological assets such as strength, intelligence, or reproductive capacity, acquired assets such as skill. Sometimes the value of assets is difficult to quantify. Skill, which often receives a rate of return in the form of higher wages, cannot always be assessed independently of higher wages. It is not necessarily something learned at school or on the job—general cultural and psychological traits that affect work performance also have important implications for social and economic transactions.62 An individual’s initial assets are exogenously given, socially determined. Children do not choose their parents’ economic class, the resources of the communities they live in, their own biological capacities. Children inherit these antecedents, which initially determine who they are and what they want. As they grow up, they become agents, making decisions that influence the disposition and accumulation of their assets. They may move up, down, or around, buffeted by random events and historical melodramas but guided by thoughtful efforts to make the best of things. Some may succeed more than others, but all are constrained by their initial asset endowment. Rules formally define the parameters of acceptable behavior. Though initially given, they are subject to change by both children and adults. Rules are specified by law or explicit contract. Most, formally constituted by institutional authorities such as states, set limits on human transactions, condoning some types of violence and interdicting others. Rules situate individuals within social groups. Citizens can do X, noncitizens cannot. Men can do Y, women cannot. Heterosexuals can do Z, 40

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homosexuals cannot. Rules tell people who they are, what they can do, and how they will be punished and rewarded. Rules define the scope and character of economic activity, such as property rights or, more specifically, what can and cannot be traded in a market. Can land be alienated? Can human beings be bought and sold? Can reproductive services be purchased? Markets themselves depend on rules, such as the definition of legal tender and the enforceabiliry of contracts. Rules govern the distribution of assets, by stipulating rights of inheritance and taxation. They also specify the rewards to certain types of assets, the rights of citizenship, the freedom to seek work, the ability to move capital across national boundaries, the types of individual characteristics (such as race, ethnicity, or gender) that may be used as criteria for inclusion, exclusion, hiring, or firing. Rules apply to the family as much as to the market and the state: who can and cannot marry, who owes support and services to whom.63 Rules define how rules can be changed, though they may also be changed simply by systematic violation. Individuals have the power both to defy and to modify, especially in concert with others. Alliances and coalitions form and re-form. Relative assets are important both in themselves and insofar as they facilitate alliances. Also important are the cultural norms that typically legitimize explicit rules. Norms are, in a sense, implicit rules. But they are distinct because they are not enforced by an external authority, such as a boss or a judge. Norms represent a more decentralized form of social authority, based on common agreements or understandings that are not necessarily unanimous, but nonetheless tend to restrain dissent. Norms connect individuals in ways that presume and enforce collective identity, as in: ‘Act like a man!,’ ‘She’s a real woman,’ ‘Don’t be a fag,’ ‘Blacks should know their place,’ or ‘My country right or wrong.’ Cultural norms influence but do not determine individual preferences; otherwise, nonconformists would be inconceivable. Individuals do not choose the norms to which they are initially subject, but they may seek to modify and redefine them. Though continually tested and contested, norms are social ‘habits’ that resist change. Why are they so important to economic transactions? Because explicit contracts are difficult to specify in advance, and expensive to enforce. Their successful operation hinges on a set of mutual understandings enforced by informal sanctions such as approval and disapproval. Often, these represent a virtual implicit contract, based on general principles of reciprocity. Firms that try to be ‘good employers’ can and often do ask more cooperation from their employees in return. The question, ‘Haven’t I been a good wife?’ implores a husband to return the favor. Group solidarity is often based on trust: ‘You do me a good turn, and I’ll do you one.’ The nature and timing of repayment seldom needs to be discussed. Yet solidarity should never be idealized, because it governs 41

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exclusion as well as inclusion, unifying privileged as well as disadvantaged groups. There can be no insiders without outsiders. Cultural norms also regulate conflict and violence, as reflected in slogans such as ‘tit for tat,’ or ‘an eye for an eye.’ Reciprocity, like identity and interest, is culturally constructed. Who sets the standards for a ‘good employer’ or a ‘good husband?’ Who measures tit against tat? Those who have considerable assets and explicit rule-making power are likely to exercise a disproportionate influence on the construction and enforcement of norms. It’s only rational: most individuals who start out with relatively large assets, playing by rules that work to their advantage, will enthusiastically enforce cultural norms that legitimate their position. However functional they may be, norms (like asset distributions and rules) define certain dimensions of difference that can structure allegiance and advantage. As Edna Ullmann-Margalit writes, a norm may be conceived of as a sophisticated tool of coercion, used by the favored party in a status quo of inequality to promote its interest in the maintenance of this status quo. It will be considered sophisticated to the extent that the air of impersonality remains intact and successfully disguises what really underlies the partiality norms, vis. an exercise of power.64 If this process worked perfectly, norms would never change. But the impulse to question and defy, as well as the temptation to free ride, usually exerts some counter-pressure. Moreover, individual incentives and abilities to defend, contest, and revise norms are shaped by configurations of assets, rules, and preferences that are quite susceptible to change. Preferences describe what individuals like and how much, the dimensions of desire. Neoclassical economists usually refer to them as ‘tastes and preferences’ or, more technically, as arguments in a utility function. Some are biologically given—we prefer types of food that can sustain us, and we also generally prefer living to dying. Certainly most preferences are molded by social norms, but some appear mysterious to us: why we are fond of liverwurst or Gorgonzola, or like Sandy better than Chris. We are what we want. People with similar preferences have a lot in common, a basis for collaboration. Not surprisingly, people in similar circumstances often want similar things. Wanting the same thing, they can be almost the same person. Yet preferences are not a simple function of assets, rules, and norms. They have an irreducibly personal, even idiosyncratic, quality. Some individual preferences may be evident at an early age, and persist over a lifetime. Others may be subject to change, influenced not only by assets, rules, and norms, but also by personal experience and learning. We often speak, for instance, of ‘acquired tastes.’ Sometimes we do not know what our preferences are, or find that some of them are at odds, and ask therapists to help us understand our own minds. Sometimes we have 42

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‘metapreferences,’ framed by conscious efforts to think about what we should like. It may seem odd, particularly to economists, to describe preferences as an aspect of social structures. But we do not choose to want everything we want; we inherit some of our desires. This does not imply that preferences are exogenously given and constant over time (as a traditional neoclassical approach would hold). Rather, they are partially endogenous, like assets, rules and norms. They all define individual positions at the beginning of a game called life, which may be changed in the course of that game. Some economists and sociologists who appreciate the importance of social institutions argue that norms and preferences can be considered assets, and lumped into a single category. James Coleman, for instance, defines ‘social capital’ as ‘obligations and expectations, information channels and social norms.’65 Initial endowments of social capital, like those of financial capital or human capital, help explain relative economic success. But the term social capital, however useful, should not be used to reduce structural factors to a single category. Unlike money in a bank, or equipment in a factory, the advantages that personal and social assets offer are not easily reduced to a common, quantifiable denominator. Furthermore, the differences between assets, rules, norms, and preferences, described above, are important. They convey the complexity of collective identities and interests. People do not belong to a certain class simply because they have a certain endowment of assets. They belong to a class because a combination of assets, rules, norms, and preferences identify their position in a socially constructed spectrum called class. Similarly, individuals do not belong to a certain gender simply because they have a certain endowment of biological assets. Rules, norms, and preferences also create the meaning and implications of biological difference. This emphasis on social identity is crucial to the development of an adequate theory of collective action. Purely rational actors who feel no affection towards one another, who never modify their habits or desires, behave like pawns on a chess board. Their interests can be described in purely instrumental terms. Initial assets and rules define the set of possible outcomes. Historical and cultural context is irrelevant. But what if pawns reject their assignment to teams of black and white, and define their collective loyalties in different ways? Their norms and preferences become as important as their assets and rules. They may combine against knights and bishops of both colors, or even against their queens. They may redefine the very meaning and purpose of the game. Particular configurations of assets, rules, norms, and preferences can encourage or discourage individual allegiance to or defection from a group. Their relative autonomy means they can conflict, as for instance 43

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when a set of rules once advantageous to the group with greatest assets no longer serves their interests. Or, when a defeated group develops such a retaliatory sense of solidarity that it finally prevails despite the assets deployed against it. The historian’s task is to explore ‘how the mysterious mixture behaves under varying experiments of Time.’66 The pie Since individuals have unstable, albeit strong, propensities to commit themselves to collective action, successful groups must deliver the objects of desire, even at the expense of other groups. To do so, they seek to modify existing asset distributions, political rules, cultural norms, and personal preferences to their advantage. They engineer and defend social institutions that solve basic problems of coordination in ways advantageous to themselves. From the point of view of any self-seeking individual or aggrandizing group, the optimal social institution is both efficient and extortionate, aimed at increasing both size and share of the pie. Some, of course, will be less efficient, more extortionate than others. Both Neoclassical Institutionalists and Neo-Marxian economists appreciate this distinction, but apply it quite unevenly to social institutions. The former tend to argue that the capitalist firm in the competitive marketplace fosters efficient incentives without possibilities for extortion. They view other social institutions in similar terms, as simple solutions to coordination problems. Some neoclassical economists, however, suggest that the state can foster extortion in the form of rent-seeking by state employees or other special interest groups.67 Neo-Marxists, of course, tend to argue just the opposite, that the capitalist firm promotes extortion in the form of exploitation, while the state could (under ideal conditions, freed of control by capitalist or any other elite) enhance efficiency. By their account, we should revise the firm so that it is more like the democratic state, giving workers more control. Both camps largely ignore the patriarchal family. Further, their arguments are overly stylized, which helps explain why the categories of ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ have lost much of their relevance to contemporary political discourse. Under ideal conditions, the capitalist firm in the competitive marketplace (absent any opportunities for collective influence over the prior distribution of assets, rules, norms, or preferences, with perfect information and no transaction costs) might be quite efficient without being unjust. Everyone would have the same chance of acquiring the assets that would allow them to be a successful owner or efficient manager. Under ideal conditions, the bureaucratic state implementing a socialist plan (meeting the same parenthetical conditions specified above) might be efficient and fair. No group of party members or state employees could pursue its own interests at the expense of the whole. With perfect 44

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information, markets might be unnecessary. Obviously, however, these ideal conditions are never met, with very uneven consequences for the relative efficiency of the capitalist firm and the bureaucratic state, contingent upon historical circumstance. Political economists preoccupied with the relative importance of their favorite sites and processes have underestimated the dynamics of collective agency, the dialectic between efficiency and power. Most theorists of neoclassical genealogy cling to the view Voltaire satirized with his character Pangloss: whatever happens, ‘we live in the best of all possible worlds.’ 68 The phrase could easily be restated, ‘Our social institutions simply represent the efficient outcome of a series of rational choices.’ This, in turn, closely resembles a widely accepted definition of a social institution as ‘a regularity in social behavior that is agreed to by all members of society, specifies behavior in specific recurrent situations, and is either self-policed or policed by some external authority.’ Note how perfectly consensual this sounds, as though everybody must approve, as though social institutions are never conflictual, never coercive, always perfectly rational solutions to coordination problems.69 This optimistic view that most institutions are perfectly functional and efficient pervades neoclassical economic history. Consider a common stylized theory of feudalism in medieval Europe. Feudal lords provided military leadership and protection for the serfs whose labor they controlled and appropriated. Was this a reasonable exchange? Perhaps so, but it was by no means an equal one. Feudal lords exercised forms of control over church and state that reinforced their military and economic power. Once they gained the advantage, why would they have settled for merely equal exchange? If they had, their privileges would not have proved so vulnerable to shifts in the relative bargaining power of the peasantry.70 Another classic example is the consolidation of private property rights in early capitalist development, the enclosure and partition of lands previously held in common. As neoclassical economists argue, this process probably enhanced incentives for certain types of technical innovation. On the other hand, it also enhanced the power of a new coalition that invested some of the resulting profits in political mobilization. This power, in turn, promoted technical and social innovations that reinforced the bargaining position of owners, managers, and foremen relative to workers.71 For an example outside the realm of economic history, consider the way economists typically explain a contemporary social institution, the capitalist firm. Its very existence is inconsistent with the simple presumptions of perfect information, efficient markets, and free riders. The capitalist firm, with its hierarchical management structure, is a ‘command’ economy in microcosm. Indeed, many multinational firms produce and sell a larger volume of products than most countries of the 45

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world—their Gross Company Product exceeds the Gross National Product of all but the superpowers. Why do not individuals simply buy and sell labor, capital, and management services in a spot market rather than setting up bureaucratic institutions and making long-term contractual arrangements that require negotiation and enforcement? The standard answer is that firms are simply more efficient: they lower the costs of certain types of transactions (the cost of gathering information, for instance) and they facilitate team production that can take advantage of economies of scale.72 What explains the hierarchical structure of the firm, its chain of command from owners to managers to workers? Here again, most answers simply repeat, ‘Efficiency.’ Hierarchy may lower transaction costs, the time that might otherwise be spent by contentious individuals debating what to do next. It may also discourage some forms of shirking. The owner (and often the managers) are ‘residual claimants,’ rewarded by a share of the revenues that remain once all costs have been met. Therefore, they have strong incentives to impose the kind of discipline that workers might be unwilling or unable to impose upon themselves. These answers may not be incorrect, but they are certainly incomplete. The structure of authority that makes owners and/or managers residual claimants gives them an incentive to lower wages in extortionate as well as efficient ways. It also creates incentives for wage-earners to disguise and lower their work effort (since they are paid per unit of time) and this in turn increases monitoring costs. Workers may retaliate, shirking not only out of laziness, but as a form of resistance to owners’ power over them. Whether or not the hierarchical firm is efficient depends partly on the actual and perceived balance of power between employers and employees.73 Even if the hierarchical firm were the most efficient form, it could have inefficient externalities of the rent-seeking variety if the shared identity and interests of employers led to collective aggrandizement outside the firm. Whenever and wherever employers supersede their own divisions and overcome free rider problems, they can use their accumulated assets directly and indirectly (through influence on both rules and norms) to their advantage. A small number of firms, taking advantage of low transactions costs and economies of scale, may dominate the market, set their own prices, create barriers to entry, and extract rents. Under these conditions, why should they bother with increasing efficiency or fostering technical innovation? Hierarchical firms succumb to the same problems that plague centrally planned economies.74 The libertarian vein of neoclassical institutionalism that emphasizes opportunities for ‘rent-seeking’ through the state offers a far more compelling vision than the mainstream image of institutional ‘neutrality.’ Clearly, interest groups can and do organize to lay claims on income or protection from the state. But this problem cannot be sidestepped by 46

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simply minimizing the role of the state, because this is not the only arena in which groups contend. Any group with disproportionate assets, with favorable rules, with supportive cultural norms and personal preferences, can pursue its collective interests quite effectively in the competitive market. Indeed, a minimalist state strengthens the position of those groups who already have maximum power. Libertarians argue that property rights should never be tampered with, because this creates perverse incentives, including energy wasted on inefficient forms of distributional struggle. But what if the initial property rights were established by force and violence, collective coercion? If so, failure to modify them creates even more perverse incentives. The processes that Neo-Marxists term ‘exploitation’ and that some Neoclassical Institutionalists term ‘rent-seeking’ cannot be confined to either the firm or the state. Institutionalist economists largely ignore what Darth Vader called ‘the dark side.’ They point to the evidence that people coordinate their actions and develop explicit and implicit social contracts to minimize the Hobbesian conflict of all against all. But they avert their eyes from evidence that people sometimes coordinate their actions to engage in systematic predation, the Clausewitzian (or Sun-Tzu-ian) war of the strong against the weak. Some game theorists consider such issues, but only in very abstract, stylized terms.75 This censure of the Panglossian aspects of the neoclassical tradition has a Marxian feel. Marx himself often drew upon the metaphor of war to describe the conflict of class interests. He also emphasized the contradictory character of social evolution. Institutions that initially emerge because they are efficient may persist long after they become an obstacle to progress. Their beneficiaries block, or at least postpone, change. Collective action cannot be reduced to some vector of class interests centered on the point of production. Often, many different, contradictory sets of individual and collective interests are at work, with distinct forms of exploitation constrained not only by the need to establish legitimacy, but also by the requirement that exploiters must provide at least a partial solution to a genuine coordination problem. Towards a feminist political economy Feminist political economy generates important criticisms of both the neoclassical and Marxian traditions. At the same time, it can appropriate insights from both to develop a more general theory of collective identity, interests, and action that goes beyond feminism per se. It can explain something like an ongoing skirmish of men against women in terms consistent with individual agency, other dimensions of collective conflict, and constant efforts to achieve a better truce. 47

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Feminist scholarship documents the many ways in which groups based on gender, age, and sexual preference have forged their collective identities and pursued their collective interests. The evidence of persistent struggle is embedded in the historical silt of formal rules that have denied women, children, and homosexuals rights over person and property and limited their ability to accumulate assets. Less tangible, but no less central, has been the reproduction of cultural norms and personal preferences that have legitimated adult male heterosexual authority. None of these mechanisms of hierarchical constraint has ever been limited to the family, but they have remained largely invisible to those who placed the family outside the domain of political economy. Neoclassical economists who deign to treat the family as a social institution generally describe it as an efficient solution to a coordination problem, dictated largely by biological differences between men and women.76 Their theory of the family is necessarily consistent with their theory of the firm. After all, both institutions represent collectivities that challenge the primacy of markets in which individuals competitively pursue their own self-interest.77 The family obviously serves important functional purposes, such as care and nurturance of dependants. This does not imply that all aspects of the family are functional, or that all its members benefit equally from it. Families, like firms, typically have an authority structure and a division of labor. By custom and law, older men are often designated household heads. It is difficult to explain this merely as a solution to a coordination problem, because headship provides systematic benefits and facilitates collective aggrandizement (rent-seeking or exploitation). Many aspects of the sexual division of labor are, obviously, efficient. Because women bear children they have a greater biological investment in them. Women may also have some comparative advantage in child care (breastfeeding, and possibly some psychological predisposition). But biology alone cannot account for the many coercive laws and customs that have traditionally reinforced the sexual division of labor and sanctioned the physical abuse of women.78 Individual decisions are important precisely because they aren’t limited to buying and selling in a competitive marketplace. Their effects must be conceived in circular, iterative terms, because structure and agency shape each other. Assets, rules, norms, and preferences define identities and interests that specify the context of individual choice. These mechanisms of group identity and interest shape and are shaped by social institutions which, in turn, systematically strengthen certain groups and weaken others. Institutions are means of coordinating the activities of individuals and groups; they reflect both the problem-solving and the power-seeking efforts of the past. The patriarchal family, the capitalist firm, the bureaucratic state probably all have some functional aspects, not merely because they 48

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emerged (which could be the result of accident or power) but because they prevailed in a wide variety of social contexts. They all have some dysfunctional aspects. Otherwise, they might be invulnerable to change. Figure 1.3 illustrates the stylized features of this model in terms that demonstrate its similarities and differences with Neoclassical Institutionalist and Neo-Marxist models described earlier. This feminist perspective utilizes the Neo-Marxist vocabulary of ‘structural factors’ but includes ‘preferences’ among these. It includes the same list of processes and sites as the Neo-Marxist model, including coercion. This is particularly important insofar as coercion applies to the family as a site.

Structural factors: assets, rules, norms, preferences Agents: individuals, chosen groups, given groups Processes: coercion, production, exchange, coordination Sites: firms, states, markets, families Figure 1.3 A stylized feminist approach

Like both institutionalist and Neo-Marxist approaches, this feminist perspective appreciates the roles of individual agency and processes of coordination, as well as coercion. But it describes collective agents quite differently, not as classes, non-class groups, or interest groups, but as chosen groups and given groups. A chosen group, which could also be termed a ‘voluntary group,’ resembles what Neoclassical Institutionalists and political scientists call an ‘interest group.’ Individuals choose to join it, and have a great deal of freedom to enter or exit. One can choose to join the National Organization of Women, or the National Rifle Association, or a committee to study race and gender bias in the economics curriculum. Such groups are, like individuals, important agents of economic activity. A given group, which could also be termed a ‘largely involuntary group,’ is not so easily joined or abandoned, though it also allows some room for choice. Individuals find that their memberships are given to them as children, and while they may seek to alter them, they will find it difficult to do so. Like a chosen group, a given group may be a vehicle for the pursuit of collective interests (in this respect, it too is an ‘interest group’). Examples include groups defined by nation, race, class, gender, age, and sexual preference, but this is not an exhaustive list. Some groups admittedly lie between the chosen and given, such as those defined by religious heritage.79 But the point here is not to develop a complete taxonomy or exhaustive list, but rather to emphasize the similarities among given groups in terms of the logic of collective identity, interests, and actions. The term ‘given 49

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group’ both clarifies the limits on individual choice and avoids the invidious distinction between class and non-class groups. It also helps clarify the crucial point that assets alone are not an adequate descriptor of group membership. One conspicuous feature of this model is that it does not suggest that the given group known as gender is, a priori, any more important than other given groups, or chosen groups, or individual choices. Indeed, the purpose is to illustrate the need for a theoretical framework that can accommodate the interaction among all these. The point is not that conventional political economy fails to put gender first but rather that it under-states its importance within the larger picture.80 This stylized model of a feminist political economy is nothing more than a starting point, a map designed to orient further exploration. Certainly, it raises as many questions as it answers. How do factors such as assets, rules, norms, and preferences structure membership in given groups? Since individuals always belong to more than one given group, how do they come to identify with some more than others, to define their interests through one form of collective action rather than another? We are talking history and herstory here, narratives that the mathematical tools of game theory cannot formalize. Still, there are patterns to structural factors and social institutions. Many are interlocked by common purposes and interests; others intersect orthogonally, at odds. The resulting set of shifting structures is architecturally complex, irreducible to any static blueprint. Yet pieces of it can be defined in terms of the collective identities and interests they sustain.

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‘Let me put this in my language,’ says a neoclassical economist. ‘You are trying to develop a theory of collective action that includes groups in which membership is largely given, rather than “chosen,” and you are trying to shift some emphasis from the individual pursuit of self-interest to what you call the social construction of interests.’ ‘In my language,’ interjects a Marxian economist, ‘you not only want to preserve an important role for individual agency, but also explore group memberships that cannot be explained in terms of class alone.’ ‘What I do not understand,’ both economists say in unison, ‘is why these distinctions matter. What can you explain that I cannot?’ ‘Well,’ this feminist economist replies, ‘I can explain how membership in given groups creates common identities and interests that are conducive to collective action, and why some given groups are more powerful than others. I can provide a framework for exploring the meaning of “equal opportunity” in a competitive economy. I can offer a concept of structure that is more specific than “social institutions” but more general than “mode of production.” ‘We can define “structures of constraint,”’ she continues, ‘as sets of asset distributions, rules, norms, and preferences that empower given social groups. These structures locate certain boundaries of choice, but do not assign individuals to a single position based on ownership of productive assets. People occupy multiple, often contradictory positions, because they belong to multiple groups.’ Her critics protest. ‘This sounds more descriptive than analytical. Emphasizing many diverse groups, you must lose any sense of the logic of social evolution, the “laws of motion” of historical change.’ ‘On the contrary,’ exclaims our heroine. ‘The origins of structures of constraint based on gender, age, and sexual preference might help explain the origins of structures of constraint based on nation, race, and class (and vice versa).’ ‘Wait a minute!’ protests a Neoclassical Institutionalist, ‘I can explain gender inequality with my own conceptual vocabulary. Once upon a time, 51

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social institutions of male domination were functional and efficient, but they have gradually been rendered obsolete by technological change and the growth of markets.’ ‘How optimistic!’ says the Neo-Marxist, a bit sarcastically. ‘Feminist struggle as a lagged adjustment process, a gradual but steady return to optimality! I think what she’s saying is that men, like capitalists, organized a mode of production that served their own interests, then resisted efforts to change it.’ ‘Not exactly,’ says our heroine, in response to both efforts to anticipate her argument, ‘but you’re both partly right.’ The first section of this chapter deploys the arguments developed earlier to define the concept of a ‘structure of collective constraint.’ This concept provides an analytical formulation of the insights of recent AfricanAmerican, Latina, and Third World feminist theories, emphasizing the interaction between many different dimensions of inequality. The tricky issue of origins leads the second section into the domain of cultural evolution, asking how different structures of collective constraint have affected the economic and demographic success of the groups that institutionalized them. The final section considers the co-evolution of old and new structures of constraint, challenging the use of theoretical constructs such as ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ that focus simply on the relative role of the market and the state. A more complex model of collective action offers better insights into the social determinants of economic development. DIVIDED LOYALTIES AND COMPETING INTERESTS A certain interplay of competing collective interests has long been emphasized by theorists critical of Marxian ‘class-centrism,’ who propose a ‘multi-systems’ approach. Many scholars now emphasize the interaction among inequalities based on nation, race, class, and gender. AfricanAmerican, Latina, and Third World feminist theorists often insist on this complexity, patiently explaining how national, racial, and ethnic allegiances affect women’s attitudes towards gender inequality. Bell Hooks depicts interlocking systems of domination based on gender, race, and class. Patricia Hill Collins describes a ‘matrix of domination’ that is structured along axes that include but are not limited to race, class, and gender. Within this matrix, an individual may be an oppressor, a member of an oppressed group, or simultaneously oppressor and oppressed.1 The purpose of this section is to develop this approach further using the new vocabulary of feminist political economy devised in Chapter 1. Membership in one given group (for example, women) is not necessarily any more important than membership in another given group (for example, African-Americans). Individuals cannot be located by a single set of coordinates, because they operate in many different collective 52

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dimensions, within many different chosen and given groups. Nor can they be located by a list of all the given groups to which they belong, by a simple ‘adding up’ of separate positions. The interaction between different dimensions of collective identity affects the choices individuals make about which collective interests to pursue. One problem with this so-called ‘multi-systems’ approach is that it is not clear exactly what the ‘systems’ are. Various phrases have been used to describe them: ‘systems of domination,’ ‘hierarchical social institutions,’ ‘modes of production,’ ‘structures of inequality.’ None of these phrases effectively conveys the importance of collective identity and action. None of them invites serious consideration of the ways individuals define, interpret, and act on their interests. What kind of concept could effectively portray ‘systems’ of group relationships and categorize the forms of power that some groups wield over others? It should be sufficiently general to encompass many different given groups, and many different forms of power. But it should also invite consideration of specific differences among various types of collective cooperation and conflict. The concept proposed here is a ‘structure of collective constraint’ qualified by the form of group membership that it is based on. Thus, we might speak of a structure of collective constraint based on gender, a structure of collective constraint based on class, a structure of collective constraint based on race, and so on. Together, these structures form a complex social edifice in which individuals and groups operate. What exactly does this particular designation of structure offer? To answer this question, we need to define structures of collective constraint more carefully, giving some specific examples. We need to consider the possibility that many structures of constraint are unfair and inefficient (even though a full treatment of this issue is beyond the scope of this book). Finally, we need to explore the implications of this analysis for strategies of collective action. Definitions The common meaning of membership in a given group, such as women, or the elderly, or gays and lesbians, or citizens of the US, or people of color, or the working class is difficult to determine. These groups are often treated as disparate categories, perhaps because gender, age, and sexual preference seem more related to biology, race and nationality more related to politics, class more related to economics. But these categories do have something in common: they are all bases (though by no means the only bases) for important forms of collective identity and action. Individuals within given groups face common constraints, and groups themselves are framed by structures of constraint. Before explaining this 53

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concept of structure, we should specify the meaning of ‘constraint.’ In neoclassical economic parlance, the term has a narrow, mathematical connotation, pertaining to an individual’s budget of time and money. The American Heritage Dictionary’s first definition sounds far more Marxian: ‘The threat or use of force to prevent, restrict, or dictate the action or thought of others.’ The term can be given a more general meaning, and applied to both individuals and groups. Constraints are defined here as the assets, rules, norms, and preferences that delimit what people want and how they can go about getting what they want. Constraints define the realm of choice. Time and money are the most basic assets: you cannot do anything without time, and you cannot buy anything without money. Political rules are also constraints. Certain actions are allowed, others not. Cultural norms are constraints. They impose a ‘price’ on nonconformity. Preferences themselves can be constraints when they conflict with one another. If your desire to be rich conflicts with your desire to do good, or your desire to be healthy conflicts with your desire to smoke tobacco, you might wish that you could change what you want. Assets, rules, norms, and preferences shape collective identities and interests precisely because they are constraints that place individuals in similar circumstances and create similar realms of choice. Distinctive sets of assets, rules, norms, and preferences shape both chosen and given groups. But they have a particularly important impact on the construction and consequences of membership in given groups. Constraints limit some individuals’ and some groups’ choices more than others. Sometimes the word ‘power’ is used to describe having more choices, especially being able to impose one’s own choices on other people. In this sense, power is the opposite of constraint; more power means fewer, weaker, less binding constraints. Certainly, a structure of constraint based on membership in a given group is also a ‘structure of power.’ So why not just call it that? One reason is that the term ‘constraint’ more effectively conveys the complex relationship between agency and structure emphasized in Chapter 1. Also, the term ‘constraint’ better explains the formation of collective identities and interests, which have as much to do with affinity within groups as conflict among them. Finally, the phrase ‘structure of constraint’ aims not to discount the importance of structural forms of power, but rather to explain them more effectively. To illustrate, consider how the four basic categories of constraint described above help define six important types of collective identity and interests: gender, age, sexual preference, nation, race, and class. In all these categories, power is important; some given groups have more power than others (and consideration of this longer list of categories helps 54

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demonstrate the complexity and diversity of social power). But the groups themselves are framed by the constraints described above. Consider women, a given group defined by gender. Women have some similar assets (their reproductive and sexual endowments), are subject to similar rules (many rights and responsibilities are gender-specific), are governed by similar norms (such as ideals of femininity), and express some similar preferences (such as enjoyment of caring relationships).2 None of these ‘similarities’ with other women implies that individuals are defined simply by their gender. Women can reject traditional cultural norms, or have very ‘masculine’ preferences, and still be women. Similarly, they can lose their sexual and reproductive capacities, or choose not to exercise these, and still be women. Their membership in the given group called women is the product of a loose configuration of different structural factors. The same is true of membership in the given group called men.3 The multi-dimensional construction of collective identity implies a multi-dimensional structure of power. Men often occupy a position of power over women partly because they have greater assets, such as physical strength or financial wealth. But these are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for collective power. Political and legal rules, such as those an Equal Rights Amendment might redress, are also relevant. And power also hinges on norms and preferences that are related to the constitution of gender itself, such as cultural norms that validate male domination and assign women primary responsibility for the care of children and other dependants. Gender-specific constraints and differences in power help explain why men (or women) develop a sense of shared identity and common interests based on gender, and sometimes engage in gender-based collective action. The co-existence of other constraints and forms of power that are not gender-specific helps explain why this is not the only form of collective action they engage in. Conceptualizing membership in a ‘gender’ in these terms allows for parallel concepts of membership in groups defined by age, sexual preference, nation, race and class. Not that all these groups reflect the same deployment of assets, rules, norms, and preferences, or that all four of these categories of constraint need be equally important. The point is that none of these groups can be defined by any single form of constraint. None is purely ‘economic’ or ‘political’ or ‘cultural’ or ‘psychological.’ To illustrate further, consider the role of constraints in defining the meaning of membership in other given groups. Many ‘multi-systems’ theorists overlook groups based on age and sexual preference, but these operate in terms analogous to those based on gender. Individuals often identify with members of their age cohort, and often pursue interests in common with them. Like gender, age is a category based on social interpretation of a biological characteristic, a category with particularly 55

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important implications for the organization of social reproduction. Certain assets are associated with age: the strength of youth, the wisdom of old age. Age has important implications for the accumulation and control over financial assets. But the meaning and implications of age are also determined by rules, norms, and preferences. Forms of group membership based on sexual preference, such as ‘straight,’ gay/lesbian, or bisexual, may have a small component of inherited predisposition or they may not. We do not know. Certainly they seem less related to biological characteristics than gender or age. In any case, the meaning of sexual preference is constructed through political rules, cultural norms, and other personal preferences that shape the power of given groups. Most contemporary societies restrict permissible sexual activities and family formation in ways that enforce what Adrienne Rich terms ‘compulsory heterosexuality.’ Important economic consequences are evident: many employers actively discriminate against openly gay or lesbian individuals. Same-sex relationships and families lack legal protections and are typically denied eligibility for work-related or citizenrelated public benefits based on one member’s employment, such as retirement or health insurance.4 These strong analogies between the multi-dimensional construction of constraints based on gender, age, and sexual preference may be extended to group memberships based on nation, race, and class. The term ‘nation’ is used here in a more general sense than ‘nation-state,’ which implies definite political boundaries. It may reflect cultural or religious allegiance, as in the ‘nation of Islam.’ In some instances, nation is strongly related to race, as in Israel, where citizenship is offered to all those born of a Jewish mother. Nation-states nominally control varying types of assets, ranging from physical wealth (such as oil reserves) to rights to work (non-citizens may be prevented from seeking employment). They also provide access to a set of public assets: an environment, an infrastructure, an educational system. In other words, they are economic as well as political and cultural units.5 Nation-states have long been the most significant entities behind the mobilization and exercise of military force. Citizens are often exhorted to care about ‘the national interest’ and commit themselves to patriotic ideals and norms. Citizenship guarantees certain rights: to seek employment, to engage in business, to receive public assistance. It imposes certain obligations, such as taxes and military duty. Citizenship also offers rewards for unified collective action against other nations, which compete in war and in trade. Racial differences operate in terms similar to national differences, though they are less dependent on explicit rules and political power. Race is categorized partly on the basis of a similar genetic heritage that includes skin color or other physical characteristics. But there is no distinct 56

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biological criterion for belonging to one race or another; this is defined by a history of rules (for instance, those that defined individuals with any discernibly African-American forebears as African-American) and norms of ‘appropriate’ social behavior. Individual attitudes are also important. Whether or not one racial group, such as African-Americans, has distinctive preferences, it is distinctively affected by the preferences of other groups, such as racist Whites, who do not want to be associated with them. Most individuals feel a certain solidarity with others of a similar racial background, and there are many historical examples of race-based strategies of collective action that have effectively reinforced the importance of racial identity. Racial inequality cannot simply be attributed to social norms or individual preferences for ‘racism,’ because it has economic and political dimensions. Many political rules, including restrictions on rights to vote or own property, have been race-specific and, partly as a result, assets such as wealth and educational attainment vary systematically by race. Class is more difficult to define than other categories of group membership. While people can generally categorize their own gender and race, they often use vague and contradictory terms when they describe themselves as middle class or working class. While most efforts to develop classifications stress economic measures such as financial assets, they also invoke rules and norms. Assets are clearly important to class, whether described in terms of initial inheritance (as in ‘the propertied classes’), current economic position (as in ‘the top 1 per cent of all income recipients’), or control of particularly crucial assets (as in ‘ownership of the means of production’). Class is also associated with a certain political position or ability to influence certain political outcomes. Many Marxian scholars stress the importance of ‘consciousness’ as a component of the very definition of class, emphasizing shared norms and common preferences. But while some Marxists see norms and preferences as aspects of a ‘superstructure’ generated by underlying asset distributions, the reverse may also be true. Systematic differences in preferences may generate new class differences.6 The point of these brief comparisons among the social categories of gender, age, sexual preference, nation, race, and class is simply that there are important similarities in the ways that they are constructed. Appreciation of these similarities requires an interdisciplinary approach, attention to different kinds of constraints, and recognition of the complex, multi-dimensional quality of social power. A structure of collective constraint can be defined as a set of assets, rules, norms, and preferences that fosters group identity and creates common group interests. It generates patterns of allegiance and encourages forms of strategic behavior based on social constructions of 57

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difference. Given this definition, the qualifier ‘collective’ becomes redundant, and we can shorten the term to ‘structure of constraint.’ A crucial aspect of this definition is the joint emphasis on identity and interests. If individuals engaged in collective action only when it was personally advantageous, if they were pure agents of their own selfinterest, structures of collective constraint would be far more susceptible to change. It is precisely because agents do not rely entirely on instrumental calculation, but are also bound by allegiances that feel entirely natural to them, that collective action proves so powerful. Allegiance, another way of describing social identity, helps explain why assets and rules alone are not sufficient to define structures of constraint (though they may be relevant to the formation of interest groups). By the same token, norms and preferences alone may sort individuals into groups, but are not sufficient to reinforce structures of constraint unless accompanied by rules and/or asset distributions. For definitional purposes, assume that a structure of constraint must include, at a minimum, a distinctive set of assets or rules, and a distinctive set of norms or preferences, associated with membership in competing groups. These four categories of constraint work in concert, shaping the potential for cooperation and conflict. The word ‘structure’ conveys the stability, the inertia of socially constructed difference. The best way to illustrate this point is to move beyond abstract definitions and consider some historical illustrations. The apartheid regime established in South Africa is an example of a structure of constraint based on race. It is more than a set of laws that limit the rights of individuals by race. It has economic, political, cultural, and psychological dimensions that make it more than a set of rules. In a recent article describing proposed legal reforms in South Africa, Christopher S.Wren wrote: Yet apartheid was so intricately constructed over four decades and has created such economic disparity between blacks and whites that many South Africans might find their separate lives little changed by the reforms…. The Government has no plans to return property taken from up to 3.5 million non-whites dispossessed from their homes under the Group Areas Act.7 Here, Wren emphasizes the ways that legal changes leave asset distributions unchanged. But is also worth noting that even if wealth and land are redistributed in South Africa, the cultural and psychological effects of apartheid will persist. Unless changes extend far beyond political and economic reform, South African whites as a group will still be able to pursue their interests more successfully than people of color. Similarly, if we were to describe a specific structure of constraint based on gender in the United States, we would look to assets, rules, norms, and 58

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preferences related to gender identity and interests, and not restrict our attention to a single one of these. Women have fought for and won most of the same legal and political rights as men. But significant gender differences are still embodied in the distribution of wealth, cultural norms, and personal preferences. As later chapters of this book will verify, men enjoy substantial economic advantages, though these vary considerably across other dimensions of collective identity such as race and class. A structure of constraint is not defined by what it governs, or the site where it exerts most influence. It spans production and social reproduction, the market, the factory, the family, and the state. Its defining characteristics are the kinds of collective identity and interests it fosters. Six different structures of constraint have been mentioned, based on gender, age, sexual preference, nation, race, and class. These will be explored further in the pages to come, but it is important to note here that they are not intended as a complete list of important structures of constraint. Only six were chosen because of constraints on the author’s intellectual capacity, time, and money. These six were chosen because they are particularly relevant to the problem this project set out to address: the distribution of the costs of social reproduction. Structures of constraint based on gender, age, sexual preference, nation, race, and class represent a useful alternative to the two theoretical constructs deployed by previous efforts to address this problem: patriarchy and capitalism. The term ‘patriarchy’ has long been recognized as somewhat problematic. The term literally means ‘rule of the fathers’ yet is often used to designate something like ‘rule of the men.’ When it is designated this broadly, however, it loses much of its relevance. Since most societies, over most of human history, can be described as patriarchal, the descriptor begins to seem pretty empty. Many scholars recognize that relations based on gender, age, and sexual preference are intertwined, yet somewhat independent. Theoretical terminology should reflect this.8 The basic features of society that scholars intend to describe when they use the word ‘patriarchy’ could be better understood as combinations of structures of constraint based on gender, age, and sexual preference. This encourages attention to three different, though related, forms of collective identity and interests. Of course, simply using these words is not enough; in and of themselves, they say very little. The claim here is that they can provide a better framework for historical and empirical research. Similar reasoning suggests the need for an alternative to the concept of ‘capitalism.’ Especially now that most countries in the world are capitalist, it is not clear that the term contributes anything to our understanding of the differences between them. The nature and consequences of capitalism vary enormously among nations and are significantly affected by racial/ ethnic divisions and class differences within countries. The basic features of society that scholars intend to describe when they 59

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use the word ‘capitalism’ could be better understood as combinations of structures of constraint based on nation, race, and class in which private property and market exchange play an important role. This implies that ‘capitalism’ in the abstract really has no distinct ‘laws of motion,’ but allows that societies with certain configurations of constraint may be susceptible to certain tendencies and trends. Again, the new terminology represents movement towards a less abstract, more historical analysis of social structures. This comparison of ‘structures of constraint’ with the concepts of ‘patriarchy’ and ‘capitalism’ is intended simply as a way of translating old terminology into new, not as a way of reproducing the traditional conceptual divide between production and social reproduction. Indeed, it is important to resist the temptation to separate structures of constraint based on nation, race, and class from those based on gender, age, and sexual preference, because they all co-exist with and co-influence each other. By now, it should be clear that ‘constraint’ itself is not a pejorative term. Constraints cannot be abolished. It is impossible to imagine a society functioning without them. A structure of constraint is not necessarily unfair or exploitative. But as the examples above illustrate, structures of constraint do have important consequences for the exercise of social power. Some are inefficient and/or unfair. ‘Bad’ structures I define privilege in terms of unfair advantage, a preferential situation or systematic ‘headstart’ in the pursuit of social values (whether they be money, power, position, learning, or whatnot). Robert Blauner, Racial Oppression in America The historical vision of political economy has centered on the prospect of creating ‘good’ structures that would work even with ‘bad’ people. Economists have long been skeptical of the possibilities for changing human nature, for making individuals less selfish or more cooperative. But they have often claimed that certain kinds of social institutions and/or modes of production might foster something called progress, usually conceived as some combination of democratic rights and higher material standards of living. This debate has traditionally focused on a grand melodrama featuring Capitalism vs. Socialism that now seems old and overstated. Most countries are struggling to find a balance between the market and the state, rather than to choose one over the other. These aspects of economic organization remain important, but their implications are shaped by the forms of collective power that groups can exercise in both the market and the state. The experience of the twentieth century suggests that neither 60

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capitalist nor state socialist economies provide any automatic solution to problems of given group inequality. What does it mean to talk about problems of group inequality from the vantage point of political economy? Most neoclassical economists would agree that inequality is problematic if it either causes or results from the abuse of a fundamental political right such as representative government or protection against coercion. Most Marxian economists would lengthen the list of fundamental rights to include some economic ones, such as a right to a paying job for those who can work, and basic subsistence for those who cannot.9 Inequality has economic, as well as political implications. Both neoclassical and Marxian economists would probably agree that inequality is problematic if it lowers economic efficiency or makes everyone worse off economically. Examples include inequalities that diminish incentives to hard work or innovative ideas, or that utilize arbitrary or irrelevant criteria to allocate resources. Of course, economists disagree over the ways that allocative criteria actually work. These dual concerns about inequality often find expression in debates over the relationship between equity and efficiency. Neoclassical economists often argue that there is a trade-off between the two. More egalitarian wages or progressive taxes, for example, may diminish incentives to hard work or innovation. Marxian economists sometimes argue just the opposite, that inequality can lead to inefficiency. Resentment over limited opportunities may diminish incentives to hard work or innovation. Also, resources devoted to monitoring and enforcing arbitary forms of inequality could be better spent on productive investments.10 Despite these many differences, at least some economists from each camp agree that equal opportunity is a political principle consistent with economic efficiency, built on the liberal democratic concept of individual rights and the meritocratic ideal of rewards for ability and effort. It is consistent with an element of the socialist tradition, ‘to each according to his or her work.’ Equal opportunity evokes the image of a level playing field, a fair but competitive game in which winners are allowed to enjoy some fruits of victory. The image, like the intellectual traditions it represents, is somewhat androcentric. It reflects a male standpoint that pictures society in terms of adult males engaged in competitive sport. Women, children, the sick, the elderly exist in some state of nature off the field. But as feminist political philosophers argue, the concept of equal rights can and should be accompanied by a concept of equal obligations to children and other dependents. The discourse of rights can be expanded to include the discourse of needs.11 Neither neoclassical nor Marxian political economists have much to say about individual obligations to contribute to the process of social 61

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reproduction. Both implicitly accept traditional constraints that assign disproportionate responsibility for this process to women. The feminist challenge to these constraints helps explain the need for a better theory of obligation. Women cannot compete fairly with men if they are saddled with greater responsibilities. Furthermore, if these responsibilities are not redistributed, they may go unfulfilled. Rather than picturing equal opportunity in terms of adult males playing games or running races, we might think of new-born children at the start of a much longer contest. Their success depends not only on their own capacities and efforts but also on the care and nurturance they receive. As they mature, they must provide care and nurturance to others in turn. If, by refusing, they can enhance their personal chances of success, their neglect may bring the contest itself to an end. With the important qualification that both equal rights and equal obligations are required, equal opportunity is a necessary condition for the realization of both human rights and economic efficiency. It is clearly not a sufficient condition. It says nothing about rewards, or exactly what is being rewarded. A game in which winners receive fifty times as much as losers is very different from one in which winners receive five times as much. And the ability that different players have to influence the nature of the game is relevant to considerations of both political rights and economic efficiency.12 Still, economists need to develop a better concept of this necessary condition, equal opportunity. Even though (or perhaps because) it represents a certain common ground for two otherwise diverse traditions, it receives insufficient attention. In the neoclassical tradition, the principle of equal opportunity is often interpreted entirely in terms of rules. It can only be violated by an explicit act of discrimination against a member of a given group. As a result, equal opportunity is often simplistically equated with effective establishment and enforcement of rules against discrimination. This is a usage that has emerged most clearly in discussions of race and gender inequality in the United States, where it is associated with efforts to evaluate the impact of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1992 and related legislation. The concept of rule-based discrimination has been at least partially extended to gays and lesbians and those with disabilities. But the implications of national citizenship rarely receive consideration, even though restrictions on immigration and similar rules clearly discriminate among individuals in ways unrelated to merit or effort. Other more intrinsic shortcomings of a rule-based definition of equal opportunity are apparent in recent debates over the meaning of ‘affirmative action.’ Recognizing the importance of unequal asset distributions, cultural norms, and personal preferences in the reproduction of racism and sexism, serious advocates of equal 62

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opportunity often push for broad-based efforts to overcome inherited inequalities. The rubric of affirmative action encourages more active efforts to achieve egalitarian outcomes. Affirmative action is not inconsistent with the principle that merit should be the primary basis for the allocation of opportunities, although it sometimes entails efforts to broaden or re-evaluate meritocratic criteria, such as standardized test scores. Nonetheless, it raises concerns regarding reverse discrimination. Those who see equal opportunity as a simple matter of enforcing neutral rules of choice are particularly likely to argue that affirmative action is inappropriate. But the prospects for equal opportunity are embedded in larger structures of constraint that cannot be reduced to rules. The role of asset distributions is particularly clear in the case of racial inequality. Partly as a result of past discrimination, children of color in the United States have less access to human capital (in the form of education) and money capital than do white children. Racist norms and preferences held by whites also have a negative impact. Gender inequalities were once more closely linked to explicit rules or asset distributions than they are today. Still, cultural norms and personal preferences work to reinforce discriminatory patterns, even where explicit discrimination is prohibited by law. Therefore, rules against discrimination are not sufficient to guarantee equal opportunity across either gender or race lines and affirmative action is required. Ironically, recognition of the importance of dimensions of constraint (or opportunity) that are not based on explicit discrimination weakens the case for affirmative action based only on race or gender. It raises the possibility that other forms of inequality, such as those based on class, also require remedy. It also suggests that sustained efforts to insure greater equality of opportunity for children are crucial, because it is very difficult to compensate adults for inherited inequalities. Some Marxian theorists, like John Roemer, suggest that equal allocation of assets is a precondition for equality of opportunity. Certainly, this represents an advance over the neoclassical preoccupation with rules. But it shares the same lack of appreciation of the role of norms and preferences in reinforcing given group inequalities. Equal asset distributions across race and gender lines may be a necessary condition for racial/gender equality, but there is no reason to believe that they would be sufficient. Dissident strands within both the liberal and socialist traditions have long offered an alternative to purely legalistic or economistic definitions of equal opportunity. Broadly speaking, justice demands that individuals enjoy equal opportunities to lead a good life. William Thompson insisted long ago that equitable sharing of domestic labors should accompany the redistribution of wealth. John Stuart Mill argued that political economists should be concerned not only with the efficiency of a market economy but 63

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also in ‘the full participation of every member of the community in its benefits.’13 In recent years, this approach has developed further, strengthened in important ways by feminist theory. John Rawls argues that justice requires equal access to ‘primary goods’ that include ‘rights, liberties and opportunities, income and wealth, and the social bases of self-respect.’ Susan Moller Okin explains why an equal sharing of family responsibilities is a necessary condition for justice. Amartya Sen asserts the importance of ‘capabilities,’ the ‘alternative combinations of functionings the person can achieve, and from which he or she can choose one collection.’ Iris Young insists on the need to look beyond distributional outcomes to processes of empowerment.14 ‘Radical liberalism’ and ‘market socialism’ are not oxymorons. The two terms reflect a convergent emphasis on concepts of fairness and efficiency that could balance self-interest and altruism, rights and responsibilities. Of course, an emphasis on efficient and just structures of opportunity raises a number of philosophical issues that require serious and sustained consideration. Economists, as well as everybody else, will continue to argue over the meanings of equality and opportunity.15 The aim of this discussion is not to resolve these philosophical debates, but rather to suggest that they would be enriched by more systematic efforts to explore the political economy of inequality among given groups. Structures of constraint are structures of opportunity. And these structures exist somewhat independently of structures of production, such as markets or states. Whether or not perfect equality of opportunity is desirable and feasible, the causes and consequences of different structures of constraint deserve close consideration. Some may be more unfair than others; some more economically inefficient; some more susceptible to change. These are historical and empirical questions. We can try to track the factors that influence a group’s membership and its probability of success. Sometimes choice plays a primary role. Given their constraints, individuals choose team A rather than B or C. Sometimes luck rules. Some individuals are randomly assigned to team A, others to B and C. In both cases, the best team may win, but its victory is difficult, if not impossible, to predict. Often, however, some individuals are assigned to team A and others to teams B and C with no scope for choice, and it is clear from the very outset that team A has a substantial initial advantage. Its victory can be predicted with high probability, if not perfect certainty. If its advantage is embedded in asset distributions, political rules, norms, or preferences, it is probably not incidental. In fact, an advantage along one of these dimensions may be associated with another: those in strong asset positions often exercise disproportionate influence over rules, norms, and preferences, and vice versa. The sources of advantage may be 64

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uneven, almost contradictory. A group might be strong in rules, not so strong in assets, weak in norms. We think of advantage as unfair if it is unrelated to the effort or the ability of the individuals and groups in question, and has a significant impact on the final outcome of competition. Thus, specific nation-based structures of constraint are unfair when they mean that citizens of some nations have little chance of escaping poverty, despite their best efforts. Specific race-based structures of constraint are unfair when they privilege, a priori, members of one race over another. Likewise for class-based structures of constraint. Even in an economically advanced country such as the United States, inheritance of financial assets has a significant impact on class position—as Forbes Magazine’s annual profile of the 400 richest individuals in the United States makes abundantly clear. Inheritance of access to education and other forms of human capital probably plays an even more important role. Studies of mobility in the United States suggest that family background explains at least 50 per cent of the difference in men’s earnings. Such patterns seem more fair than outcomes of some other class-based structures of constraint, but nonetheless unfair.16 Structures of constraint based on gender are unfair if they restrict women’s choices more than men’s, or give men an a priori advantage either in terms of rights or responsibilities. Clearly, such structures vary over space and across time, and some are more unfair than others. Likewise with age; a structure of constraint based on age is unfair if age itself (rather than ability to meet one’s needs, or capacities resulting from age) is the basis of significant advantage. Likewise with sexual preference; major rewards or penalties for sexual preference in and of itself are unfair. If a structure of unfair constraint is defined by unfair advantage, it becomes quite important to determine the beneficiaries. This is not as simple as it may seem because, as the previous chapter emphasized, social institutions cannot simply be reduced to either their problem-solving or their power-seeking aspects. Sometimes the beneficiaries can be ascertained only by a hypothetical counterfactual—what would happen if structures of constraint were modified in certain ways? Sometimes they can be ascertained historically, by tracing the distributional consequences of institutional change, by asking which groups gained and which lost. Another strategy may be to trace the collective imposition of violence and forms of resistance to it. The willingness to risk the ultimate assets of life and health reflects the high stakes behind collective games. Surely one reason why differences based on nation, race, class, gender, age, and sexual preference have caught historians’ eyes is that they are conspicuous vectors of violence. But in some historical contexts, other aspects of collective identity and action not even mentioned here may be more important. They can, perhaps, be analyzed in similar terms. 65

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The difficulties of defining power, privilege, gains, and losses remain. One obvious, persistent danger is economism—the assumption that economic gains are primary. It may be that individuals want such different things that their success in getting them cannot be measured with the same gauge. Perhaps some individuals are happier with less. Or some individuals define ‘more’ differently. After all, only unreformed and probably unhappy Rational Economic Man insists that more is always better, and believes that the power to realize his own personal desires should be supreme. Happiness, however, is not the issue here. Power means the ability to impose one’s will on others; privilege means getting more for less. Both expand one’s freedom to choose, without guaranteeing that good choices will be made. Free choice does not guarantee fair outcomes. Many children never even live long enough to find that out. In 1990, the global infant mortality rate was 7 times greater than that in the US (70 compared to 10 deaths per 1000 live births). The per capita value of market production in the United States was more than 5 times greater ($21,000 compared to $3,870). Imagine a game called Constraints. In it there are 5.3 billion players. Your task is to decide how the global assets should be distributed by nation, race, class, gender, age, and sexual preference, to stipulate the explicit and implicit rules by which production, distribution, and changes of the rules themselves can take place, to consider what kinds of norms should help coordinate individual choices, and what kinds of preferences should be encouraged. Would you decide differently if you did not know what groups you were assigned to?17 Strategies The affirmation of the shared experience within any group soon encounters limits and differences. Everyone’s identity exists at the nexus of a web of opposing, contradictory, or merely different group affiliations and personal commitments. Jeffrey Escoffier (1985) Multiple structures of constraint describe a complex gameboard, but raise the question of how people actually play. The vocabulary of game theory should not trivialize social conflict or imply that it is less than deadly serious. It should help demonstrate the co-existence of choice and constraint and the complexity of collective action in terms consistent with both neoclassical and Marxian political economy. It should also help explain the futility of any political theory based on a single dimension of collective identity, such as class or gender. The ‘team’ metaphor does not vitiate the role of choice. Individuals may not have perfect team spirit; they may try to free ride. Also, since they 66

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belong to many teams at once, they can choose their levels of commitment, change their minds about which teams they care about the most or which ones offer the best chance of winning. As a result, no single structure of constraint can summarize an individual’s position or her optimal strategy. To couch this in slightly more technical terms, assume a person gets both direct and indirect utility from participating in distinct possible forms of collective action. The direct utility represents the extent to which she identifies with a group, believes in its goals, and enjoys participating in it. The indirect utility is a function of the net pecuniary benefits of participation. Neither of these is easily calculated. Her identification with the group may depend on the context. If she feels the group is under attack, or has been treated unfairly, she may identify with it more than otherwise. She may try to estimate the pecuniary benefits of actions on behalf of the group, and balance these against the costs. Or she may commit herself to it no matter what the benefit/cost ratio. Both her feelings for the group and her estimate of its pecuniary benefits are affected by other people’s simultaneous decisions, which are difficult to anticipate. In the stylized game called the Prisoner’s Dilemma, two prisoners are separated and encouraged to confess. They will both be better off if they remain steadfast and refuse to assist their accusers. But each of them fears the other will incriminate her first, in return for special consideration from the prosecutor. If they succumb to this fear and fail to cooperate, they will both incriminate each other, the worst possible outcome. The game is as much a free person’s as a prisoner’s dilemma, because it pertains to all situations where lack of assurance regarding other people’s actions lowers the probability of cooperation. The assurance problem helps explain the tremendous importance of constraints that coordinate individual decisions, facilitate cooperation, and define competition. It also helps explain the tremendous importance of social theories that use both interpretive and instrumental reasoning to convince individuals where their best interests lie. Whether correct or not, some theories have somewhat self-fulfilling results because they help coordinate certain forms of collective action. Marxist theory aims (with occasional success) to improve the outcome of working-class collective action; feminist theory aims to improve the outcome of women’s collective action. Neoclassical economic theory discourages such forms of collective action by downplaying their relevance and understating their probability of success. Single-interest theories are not so much incorrect as incomplete, because they all recommend simplistic strategies for players in a very complex game. Nor can the implications of membership in many given groups be described in additive terms, as though individual position were the sum of many separate vectors. Memberships almost certainly have an 67

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interactive effect. A woman of color, for instance, probably experiences gender and class differently than a white woman.18 Because individuals belong to many teams at once, they often find themselves in contradictory positions. Class-based, gender-based, or individualistic strategies may be best in some circumstances, worst in others. Divisions along national and racial lines weaken the unity of groups organized along class or gender lines (and the other way around). Alliances between different kinds of groups are often crucial to success. Retaliation conies into play, the game known as Tit for Tat. If a group begins aggressively pursuing its national interests, for instance, it forces others to do the same, even though this may be disruptive of race or class or gender interests. This is not a simple ‘divide and conquer’ argument. No one is choreographing this strategic dance. Nor is it a version of ‘false consciousness,’ in which individuals need only recognize that national interests are not their ‘true’ interests. Rather it is an example of a coordination problem that is exacerbated by the fact that some groups will benefit more than others from nation-based collective action. One principle of ecology is that complex natural systems enjoy greater stability than simple ones. They are less susceptible to external shocks, have more possibilities of adjustment. A similar principle applies to structures of constraint. They articulate, often in stabilizing ways. Individuals always have the choice of pursuing one set of collective interests more assiduously than another. They can and do respond to the changing costs and benefits of alternative loyalties, as well as changing perceptions of moral and political dilemmas. Because they offer extra rewards not just to a certain gender, but also to a certain age group and a certain sexual preference, patriarchal societies are less vulnerable than they might otherwise be to feminist collective action. Sometimes older women exercise considerable control over young women (as in the traditional Chinese family where mothers-in-law dominate daughters-in-law). Older women who have experienced irreversible mutilation, such as foot-binding or clitoridectomy, may be threatened by the suggestion that the younger generation of women should not share their experience. Or, to take an example from a more modern society, an older woman whose career and childrearing years are over may be more interested in the level of Social Security benefits to the elderly than in women’s rights. Whatever their gender, the elderly often have a different stake in the status quo than the young. Similarly, heterosexuals as a group often unify across gender lines against those with different preferences. In general, groups that cannot show much by way of payoffs find it hard to maintain the levels of identification and loyalty they require. Individuals who see a lot of free riders on their team, a low level of identification and loyalty, are likely to become free riders themselves. In fact, those who remain primarily identified with a losing group are often 68

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those who have relatively little choice. All this simply by way of emphasizing the tremendous force of what political organizers call cooptation. Individuals will tend to identify with and commit themselves to winning teams. For example, public support in the US for the 1991 Gulf War burgeoned not only because it was perceived to be in the national interest, but because it was militarily successful.19 Some given groups have more fluid boundaries than others. Individuals cannot change their race, gender, or age; they can only try to modify the assets, rules, norms, and preferences that work to their disadvantage. But individuals often believe they can change their class position without risking much collective action, and sometimes they can. Most economies offer at least some modest promise of individual opportunity through membership in a relatively well-paid professional/managerial class. Upward mobility promises gains that can be shared with one’s community of origin. When economic growth facilitates such mobility, class consciousness may be more difficult to sustain.20 Individuals are often faced with contradictory options. A wage-earner may recognize the disadvantages of a weak class position, but appreciate the advantages of living in a powerful nation; thus he might fear that efforts to advance his class interests (such as striking for higher wages) will hurt his national interests (benefitting overseas competitors). A woman who stands to benefit as a woman from strict rules against discrimination in the workplace may, as a white person of European descent, fear that she will lose her job to a woman of color. A woman of color, in turn, may reject feminist priorities because these conflict with potential racial unity. All the individuals concerned make decisions shaped by divided loyalties as well as competing interests. They are forced to think about how much they care about the welfare of their nation, their race, their class, their gender, their age group, as well as general principles of justice and fair play. Their perceptions of the circumstances affect their estimates of individual gain. How threatening is international competition? How would equal opportunity in the workplace affect the distribution of jobs and wages? Can racial unity be accomplished without efforts to change gender relations? Posed in these terms, collective action problems resemble the everyday dilemmas of a mother who respects herself but also loves her children and the members of her family and community. She must constantly decide how to weigh her personal wants against those of others, and how to balance, interpret, and respond to the competing needs of family members. She makes use of what little power she has to strike bargains, form alliances, and persuade others to value collective welfare at least as much as she does. Her self-interest is linked to the interests of others, in ways affected by her perception of common purpose and shared identities. 69

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Most successful efforts to encourage collective action offer more than benefits to one group; they promise benefits for everyone, a better solution to coordination problems than Tit for Tat. Both neoclassical and Marxian theory, in their simplest forms, promise that a particular structure of production and exchange can provide a fair and efficient means of economic coordination. ‘Perfectly competitive markets will solve the problem,’ says one. ‘Perfectly democratic planning will solve the problem,’ says the other. The principle of equal opportunity represents a different strategy. Rather than focusing on the structure of production and exchange, it focuses on the structures of constraint that affect the positions of individuals who participate in markets and in states. Equal opportunity, defined in terms of equal rights and equal responsibilities, is clearly affected by the workings of markets and of states. But it cannot be subsumed under these. It is a principle of fairness and efficiency that is relevant to any structure of production and exchange. It is a principle that could unite individuals who are disempowered and disadvantaged by diverse structures of constraint. Equal opportunity is a feasible objective for collective action. A great deal of historical and empirical research examines the ways in which members of given groups pursue their collective interests. But much of this research is framed in theoretical terms that overlook important parallels and interactions among different kinds of group identity and interest. Even studies that aspire to a multi-dimensional analysis of nation, race, and class tend to ignore gender, age, and sexual preference, and vice versa. However difficult it may be to develop a unified theory of the relative power and success of given groups, it is important to try. NATURAL SELECTION AND CULTURAL EVOLUTION The subjection of women is largely a result of custom…. Throughout history, the nations, races, classes, which found themselves the strongest, either in muscles, in riches, or in military discipline, have conquered and held in subjection the rest. Harriet Taylor, ‘The enfranchisement of women’ Where did unfair structures of constraint come from, and why did they emerge? The problem with Harriet Taylor’s explanation of the subjection of women is that custom and strength themselves need to be explained. Yet the question of the ‘origins’ of social hierarchy in general, and patriarchy in particular, seems to invite either complacent chuckles or passionate denunciations. Some sociobiologists rationalize hierarchy as a mere reflection of biological differences. Some feminists search for a single heart of darkness, a mother of all dominations based on some 70

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original sin embodied, perhaps, in masculinity itself. Both approaches ignore the dialectic between efficiency and exploitation. Despite their compartmentalization within the modern university, the biological and social sciences are inextricably intertwined. Sociobiology today reflects the powerful but anachronistic influence of Mr. Rational Economic Man: the individual is treated as the primary unit of natural selection. Recent research in both evolutionary biology and cultural anthropology, however, contributes to a more complex picture. Collective forms of power may emerge from a process of optimization that does not necessarily lead to optimal results. Varying combinations of structures of constraint based on gender, age, and sexual preference have particularly important implications for the organization of social reproduction. Their origins may provide important insights into the evolution of structures of constraint based on nation, race, and class. Group selection Moving collective identities and interests to center stage in history implies something similar to what biologists term ‘group selection.’ Mainstream evolutionary theory treats the self-interested individual as the primary unit of analysis and discounts the role of individual commitments to a group. Like neoclassical economics, however, evolutionary biology is evolving toward theories that focus more explicitly on the interaction between individuals and groups. Especially relevant are general debates within sociobiology, more specific research on group selection, and new discoveries regarding the role of symbiosis in the development of new organisms.21 The conventional emphasis on individual selection is typically explained as follows: any individual who donates resources to the survival of others would reduce his or her own chances of survival. Therefore, altruists are at a competitive disadvantage compared to those who singlemindedly pursue their own interests. Altruism may be reciprocated. Individuals who risk their own well-being to help others may be rewarded later, benefitting from a kind of ‘insurance’ that enhances their survival chances in the long run. But then, opportunists may simply pretend to be altruists and refuse to pay their premiums. True altruists will suffer as a result. Self-interest wins again! Opportunists are the same free riders that old Rational Economic Man was worried about.22 Cynicism regarding reciprocal altruism parallels neoclassical skepticism regarding collective action. Michael Ghiselin writes: ‘The economy of nature is competitive from beginning to end…. What passes for cooperation turns out to be a mixture of opportunism and exploitation…. Scratch an “altruist” and watch a “hypocrite” bleed.’23 Where altruism does exist, it is attributed to genetic self-interest. The theory of kin-selection holds that individuals are altruists only toward 71

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kin, because they increase the chances that their genes (shared by kin) will survive and reproduce, even if they lower their own chances of survival. One could hardly ask for greater similarity to the concept of a joint utility function, which implies that individuals love their kin, and only their kin. Mr. REM isn’t any more convincing here than he was in Chapter 1. Many forms of solidarity build on the metaphor of kinship—as ‘the family of man.’ When it comes right down to it, the whole species actually is kin, and we humans also have many genes in common with other life forms. Not all sociobiologists discount the impact of social institutions on human cooperation. Edward O.Wilson, for instance, notes that the extent of bonding and reciprocal altruism among humans distinguishes them from other primates. He writes, The genius of human sociality is in fact the ease with which alliances are formed, broken and reconstituted, always with strong emotional appeals to rules believed to be absolute. The important distinction is today, as it appears to have been since the Ice Age, between the ingroup and the outgroup, but the precise location of the dividing line is shifted back and forth with ease.24 What is the unit of natural selection, anyway? The presumption that it is the ‘individual’ has been challenged from two very different directions. The real competition could be taking place on a smaller level: individuals could be merely a by-product of the natural selection of the genes that comprise them. By this account, some genes are more successful than others, and individuals are merely a vehicle for their reproduction and recombination. On the other hand, the real competition could be taking place on a larger level: individuals could be components of groups and the social orders they establish (in the same relationship to the group as the gene to the individual). By this account, the success of groups is the arbiter of evolutionary fitness.25 These different dimensions of competition are not mutually exclusive. Neither genetic nor individual selection needs be ruled out in order for group selection to have an impact, especially among humans. While many animal species have social institutions that sort individuals into groups, the degree of differentiation among our institutions is greater, as is our knowledge of their evolution over time (history and herstory). Most of the information relevant to our survival, persistence, and reproduction is transmitted independently from any genetic code. There is a cultural analogue to the gene, the ‘meme’—information conveyed behaviorally through language and customs.26 The alternative to a single-minded emphasis on individual selection (in both the economic and the biological sense of the word) is not pure altruism, but rather an appreciation of the possibilities for convergence between individual and group interests. The biologist David Sloan Wilson 72

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offers a very good defense of this perspective, explaining how variation within the population of a single species creates a situation in which subgroups, or demes, can increase their representation if they develop behaviors that benefit the deme as a whole. Sloan does not assume ‘strong’ altruism, or behaviors that are extremely costly to individual altruists. Rather, he explores the possibility that many forms of ‘weak’ altruism which impose small costs on individuals offer big benefits to the group. More importantly, sacrifices made on behalf of the group need not be made by the most altruistic individuals; groups may develop ways of imposing sacrifices on their weaker members.27 Another challenge to traditional evolutionary theory comes from the possibility that humans pursue goals independent of (perhaps even contrary to) biologists’ measure of evolutionary success—reproductive fitness, or the extent to which an organism successfully propagates its genes. If this is the trait our genes were originally selected for, we may have subverted the process, aiming for ‘economic fitness’ (standard of living) or ‘intellectual fitness’ (propagation of our own ideas) rather than proliferation of our DNA. Many people now consider biological reproduction too costly. If we faced a choice between prolonging our own life indefinitely and raising children, which would we choose? Unlike other species that we know of, we may someday face that choice. In the early stages of evolution, genetic codes may have been more important than social institutions. Now, although we lack a complete understanding of either, we have attained some capacity to alter both. Recent findings in the field of cellular biology suggest a complicated interaction between competition and cooperation. Multi-celled organisms, including ourselves, probably evolved from the symbiotic fusion of simple, unnucleated cells. Some single cells apparently found it advantageous to relinquish their individuality and become part of a more complex organism. Competition rewarded the most effective forms of cooperation. Old forms were preserved within the new. The very definition of individuality was transformed. In a sense, our Blue Planet is an organism characterized by the mutual dependence of many different species and individuals, with at least some capacity for self-regulation.28 Social groups are based not just on biological kinship but also on the cultural construction of affinity. Several types of natural selection govern an evolutionary process that selects and replicates both genes and memes. One particular set of memes includes codes crucial to the formation of collective identity and collective action—constraints that coordinate individual decisions. Certain structural combinations prove functional, fostering the biological, cultural, and economic reproduction of the groups that adopt them. But they remain partly arbitrary, conflictual, and prone to obsolescence. Structures of constraint may be the joint outcome of efforts to solve 73

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basic problems of coordination and the power of distinct social groups to force others to pay a disproportionate share of the costs. The efforts of previously disempowered groups to modify such structural inequalities are an important aspect of the evolutionary process. The origins of patriarchy This theoretical perspective sheds an interesting light on the possible origins of patriarchy, though any discussion of these is speculative (if not fool-hardy). Consider two polar extremes: the sociobiological argument that male domination is a perfectly functional response to biological differences and the radical feminist argument that men have an innate desire to dominate women, which serves no function other than their own aggrandizement. There is a great deal of room, between these two extremes, for complex interaction between problem-solving and powerseeking strategies. This interaction becomes more visible if patriarchy is conceptualized as a variable set of structures of collective constraint based on gender, age, and sexual preference.29 In the beginning, biological factors may have been significant. Men are larger and stronger than women; size and strength are assets. In their reproductive years, females are capable of conception year-round. The demands of pregnancy and breastfeeding are considerable. The capacity to bear and rear children is also an asset, but one that probably empowers individuals less than size and strength. Males may be more aggressive than females, psychologically as well as morphologically specialized for predation and combat. Females may be more nurturant, more easily taught to care for others. In other words, some gender differences in preferences, as well as assets, may be biologically given. These may have influenced the forms of collective identity and action that subsequently emerged.30 But we cannot simply assume that biological differences came first, as though biology is necessarily ‘prior’ to culture. The primates from which we evolved had memes as well as genes. Social institutions might have shaped genetic evolution by encouraging forms of sexual selection consistent with culturally defined sex roles. Alternatively, social institutions could have provided a kind of substitute for extreme sexual dimorphism, contributing to a reduction over time in differences of size and strength between human males and females.31 Until recently, studies of early hominid evolution focused on a predominantly male activity, hunting. Yet the technology and organization of a more characteristically female activity, gathering, was at least equally important. Nor did male physical strength necessarily dictate sexual domination. Among primates, females generally choose their mates. Among early hominids, females who selected mates willing to assume some responsibility for offspring may have been more likely to 74

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reproduce successfully. Their sons, in turn, may have been predisposed to help provide for children.32 Women were not passive bystanders of an evolutionary process, and many different socially constructed constraints based on gender may have emerged, some more egalitarian than others. However, tribes or ‘protonations’ in which men engaged in forms of collective action designed to control and exploit women may have outcompeted those which did not, for at least three possible reasons. Women could have been forced to work harder than before, increasing wealth accumulation. Women could have been forced to accommodate demographic pressures (to avoid conception, to seek abortions, or commit infanticide when population control was advantageous, and to bear more children when population growth was advantageous). Finally, tribes that controlled their own women may have been better able to steal and enslave women from more egalitarian tribes.33 Any one or combination of these reasons could help explain why, in so many different cultures, so many social institutions seem to reinforce and amplify male power over women. They could also explain why women acceded to these: not as pan of some Faustian bargain where they choose to sell their metaphorical souls, but as pan of an evolutionary process in which those societies whose men did not aggressively pursue their gender interests (and whose women failed to put tribal interests over their gender interests) were driven out of existence. Once established, structures of constraint that enforced male control over women were resistant to change even when they became inimical to tribal interests, because they benefitted men. If technological change modified the adaptive usefulness of early forms of control over women, tribes in which women had successfully maintained a modicum of power might have been able to respond more successfully (or to promote technological change more effectively). Too much exploitation of women, in other words, could have proved as detrimental as too little. The emergence of structures of constraint based on age can be analyzed in similar terms and has obvious relevance to the incentives for male control over female reproductive capacity. As with gender, biology is relevant to, but not determinant of, relations between parents and children, old and young. Infants and youth remain dependent on adults for a long period of time, but adults in turn become dependent in their old age. Such prolonged dependency creates more conflict between selfinterest and family-interest than in most other species: the responsibilities of caring for family members may lower individual chances of survival. Familial altruism, however strong, is not sufficient in and of itself to guarantee that responsibilities will be met. In all societies, a variety of social institutions regulate intergenerational relations. Parents almost always have substantial control over and responsibility for young children, but these are shared, to varying degrees, by 75

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a larger community. Parental and elder control over young adults varies widely. In many traditional patriarchal societies, fathers have legal authority over children well into adulthood, control their access to property, dictate their marriage decisions, and benefit from their labor. Mothers typically have less formal authority, but cultural norms and personal affections help enforce adult children’s responsibilities to them in their old age. Parental power differs by gender. Fathers generally have smaller investments of time and energy in children than do mothers, and therefore have less to lose from infanticide when the net costs of children are high, more to gain from high fertility when the net costs of children are low. At the same time, mothers and fathers clearly have common interests as parents. If children promise important economic benefits, the conflict between individual self-interest and large family size is reduced. Men gain from coercive pro-natalism. But they also gain from helping to provide for their children, because it is in their economic self-interest to do so.34 Many early hunting and gathering societies, operating in ecological and technological circumstances in which children were costly to parents, limited their fertility. Without domestic animals, it is difficult for an adult to carry more than one child at a time. Small hunting groups that must range widely for game do not necessarily benefit from increased numbers. Members of a small tribe tend to care for each other whether or not they are immediate family members. To this day, many nomadic tribes, such as the !Kung of Botswana, tend to space their children far apart. Gender-and age-based constraints in such societies have been, and continue to be, relatively egalitarian.35 Two of the great technological watersheds in human history, the transition from hunting and gathering to domestication of livestock and, later, to sedentary agriculture, probably increased the economic benefits of children. Young children did not need to be carried as much, and may have begun productive work at an earlier age. But changes in structures of constraint were equally relevant. Private ownership of livestock and land gave men more control over women, and parents more control over children, than they had in hunting and gathering societies, where individuals shared access to the commons.36 The combination of a structure of constraint that gives men substantial power over women with one that gives parents substantial power over adult children dramatically lowers the cost of children to fathers. Combined with technological circumstances (adequate resources such as land) in which children can provide some economic benefits, such a combination encourages especially high fertility and therefore promotes population growth. If tribes that grew faster than others tended to prevail, then their structures of constraint would have tended to prevail. There is no reason to assume that technological change came first. Alternatively, a society that happened to institutionalize structures of 76

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constraint that speeded population growth may have found that they could no longer provide for themselves by hunting and gathering. Population pressure may have induced technical innovations that made the transition to domestication of animals and sedentary agriculture possible. Societies that effectively maintained a demographic equilibrium may have experienced less pressure to invent new productive technologies.37 The possible adaptive advantages of population growth may also help explain the emergence of unfair structures of constraint based on sexual preference. Here again, biology is important; many men and women have some instinctual urge to mate, and one might expect natural selection to militate against forms of sexual activity that are not conducive to conception (including but not restricted to homosexuality). On the other hand, population growth is not always advantageous, and societies which maintained some knowledge and tolerance of sexual activities not conducive to conception may have enjoyed some advantages. Certainly this would have been a more humane and more efficient strategy than infanticide.38 There is considerable variation across different societies and over time in the extent to which sexual self-expression has been constrained. It seems that hunting and gathering societies allowed more sexual diversity than those based on private property. Pro-natalist ideologies, such as Catholicism, seem to be associated with strong sanctions against nonreproductive sexual intercourse. But structures of constraint based on sexual preference cannot be equated with or reduced to those based on gender or age. In advanced capitalist countries such as the United States, neither fertility decline nor the rise of a feminist movement did much to change oppressive rules and norms regarding homosexuality. They merely created more favorable conditions for gay men, lesbians, and their allies to organize collectively against them. These speculations concerning the organization of social reproduction all emphasize the interplay between individual choice and social constraints that are the product of past choices, between conscious efforts to engage in collective action and unanticipated results. Economists and demographers tend to put more emphasis on individual efforts to control fertility, of the sort Mr. and Mrs. REM might make. For instance, the term ‘natural fertility’ is often used to describe regimes in which parents do not explicitly aim to limit or space their births. However, the many structures of constraint that regulate population growth in ways independent of individual calculation call this term into question.39 There is nothing ‘natural’ about prohibitions on sexual practices that could aid contraception. There is nothing ‘natural’ about restrictions on women’s rights to earn money or hold property independently of men. There is nothing ‘natural’ about property rights or laws that give parents economic and legal leverage over their adult children. Yet rules like these are common in most high fertility societies. 77

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Some structures of constraint may have functional aspects. This does not imply that everyone accepts or benefits from them. Women and children did not volunteer to subordinate themselves on behalf of the tribe. Neither did all interested parties agree what kinds of sexual selfexpression should be limited. Members of disadvamaged groups were not ‘strong altruists,’ though cultural constructs of social responsibility may help explain their acquiescence. Rather, their choices were channeled by structures of constraint which they often challenged. The relative power of contending groups based on gender, age, and sexual preference has been an important determinant of historical change. This emphasis on collective struggle does not imply conspiracy. Oppressors do not don uniforms and go to war. They may even persuade themselves that they are merely trying to keep the peace. An unfair structure of collective constraint is much more likely to emerge if its beneficiaries are persuaded of their own moral and technical superiority, rather than temporarily unified by instrumental calculations of possible short-run gains. Such calculations, after all, tempt free riders to defect. A fundamental insight of strategic game theories is that external constraints often strengthen an individual’s bargaining position, because they provide a credible basis for refusal to compromise. Cultural norms such as ‘women shouldn’t do this’ lead to far more uniform and predictable results than individual assertions such as ‘I’m not going to let you do this, because it is not in my interests.’ The assertion invites bargaining, bribes, and compromise of the ‘let me make it worth your while’ sort. The cultural norm, on the other hand, protects its advocate from accusations of self-interested behavior that might invite retaliation.40 In sum, three distinct but related structures of constraint help explain the origins of societies characterized by the ‘rule of fathers,’ or patriarchy. The subordination of women, control over the younger generation, and the definition and repression of sexual ‘deviance’ probably emerged from the interplay between biology, group competition, and collective struggles. The many possible variations on and combinations of these three structures of constraint help explain why the term ‘patriarchy’ obscures important differences even as it highlights important similarities. Nation, race, and class If the competitive success of a group is influenced by its internal structures of constraint, how is the group itself to be conceptualized? On the smallest level, it could be the family, a unit that encompasses individuals of different genders and ages (and sometimes, different sexual preferences). Above, it was sometimes referred to as a larger unit, a collection of closely related families, a tribe or ‘proto-nation.’ The nationstate, race, and class also represent competing groups. 78

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These different aspects of collective identity are all relevant to the historical evolution of structures of constraint based on gender, age, and sexual preference. The reverse is also true. An explanation of the origins of one type of inequality might tell us something about the origins of others. Following the same reasoning applied above, we might ask how structures of constraint based on nation, race, and class may have provided benefits to a group even as they created opportunities for exploitation within it. Racial categories clearly pre-dated nation-states, but may have overlapped somewhat with tribal ‘proto-nations.’ These categories represented a social construction of difference, a distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ that reinforced collective identity and, for some groups, collective power. Such inventions may have been encouraged by awareness that close kin are more likely to resemble one another, that those of a different race are less likely to share the same genes or the same cultural values.41 Strong sanctions against racial intermarriage enforced forms of group identity that fostered internal cooperation and external defense. Such sanctions, which required social control over individual decisions regarding choice of mates, were quite consistent with gender- and agebased constraints, and might have been difficult to enforce without them. Some scholars have suggested that women of other races were the first slaves, indeed that slavery was an outgrowth of early strategies of stealing women from other tribes. Once established, slavery introduced significant distinctions among women that may have stabilized internal gender inequalities, by offering women within the dominant group the privilege of control over other women.42 Perhaps early forms of constraint were capable of fostering group identity and solidarity on only a small scale. This, combined with ecological diversity, could help account for the proliferation of so many distinct groups, the construction of a Tower of Babel interrupted by the emergence of many different institutions as well as languages. However, these forms of constraint were not merely functional. The differential success of groups that identified themselves in racial terms provided opportunities for collective predation and exploitation, which, in turn, reinforced the incentives to strong racial identity.43 Once established, for instance, slave-based societies may have outcompeted more egalitarian, less militaristic societies. How to explain which groups became dominant over others? Because no one group has enjoyed consistent dominance, the answer seems historically contingent: it depends on which group developed the most successful institutions in a given ecological setting (partly a function of sheer luck) and then managed to reproduce their dominance. Many of the same dynamics probably applied to related forms of identity based on nation. Concepts of racial superiority have long been used to justify national inequalities. Emphasis on the inherent superiority of white Anglo-Saxons and Aryans 79

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pervaded late nineteenth-century political discourse in Europe, though these claims were contested from the very outset.44 The origins of the nation, in its largest sense, probably lie in the early Empires of China, Mongolia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. The emergence of distinct nation-states is more recent, linked to the process of capitalist development in Western Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Robert Reich writes, ‘The familiar picture of a national economy whose members succeed or fail together would have appeared novel to someone living as recently as the seventeenth century—even in Europe, where the idea of the nation-state had developed furthest.’45 The particular constellation of nation-states that emerged in Western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries probably spurred economic growth there. In some countries, the state played a particularly important role in promoting technological change and capitalist property rights. Willingness to subordinate some individual and collective interests to those of the ‘nation’ probably empowered certain nations to dominate and exploit others. Indeed, groups that lacked the ability to defend themselves against imperialist nations literally lost their nationhood.46 The ability to deliver benefits based on national power helped legitimize structures of constraint internal to the imperialist countries. Here again, however, cause and effect are difficult to disentangle. It may be that certain structures of constraint based on gender, age, race, and class were more conducive to the emergence of strong national identities and interests than were others. It is easy to see how too much internal inequality might be an obstacle to nation-based strategies; not enough internal inequality might also prove a hindrance. Just as groups that achieved a demographic equilibrium might have had less incentive to develop new productive technologies, groups with little internal inequality might have had less incentive to develop military capacity and therefore been more vulnerable to attack from outside. We tend to think of class as a very different kind of group designation, based more on economic than on biological, political, or cultural factors. Yet class differences before the rise of capitalism were, like gender and race, largely based on birth and kinship. In Europe, at least, the authority of kings and feudal lords was modeled on the authority of fathers. Sometimes class coincided with race, as when the victorious Norman invaders seized assets that enabled them to perpetuate their power in England even as their racial identity became less important. Definitions of class have become more complex and differentiated over time. Slavery and feudalism treated individuals according to their family of birth; class was largely inherited. Capitalism and socialism afford individuals more mobility. Indeed, idealistic visions of both these systems promise a ‘classlessness’ of equal opportunities for all. Most stories about the possible genesis of a ruling class resemble those 80

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told about the genesis of a ruling gender or race. By some accounts, the driving force was technological change, the emergence of a ‘surplus’ over and above the necessities of subsistence that provided an incentive for some individuals to aggrandize themselves. By other accounts, it was the initial scheming that generated surplus. In either case, the proto-nation played a crucial role as arbiter of official rules and organized violence.47 Having emphasized similarities between the origins of six types of given groups, we should also consider their differences. Those based on nation and on class seem to be associated with modern economic growth. Their social evolution is associated with two rules which, however imperfectly realized, still hold considerable appeal—democracy and meritocracy. How, then, have these structures of constraint shaped those based on gender, age, sexual preference, and race? Is there some direction to their co-evolution? Can we predict their future? MODERNIZATIONS, REFORMS, AND REVOLUTIONS Social theorists often envision an automatic process of progressive social evolution, in which more efficient structures of constraint based on rational principles happily displace those based on ascriptive characteristics, heralding either a happy process of democratic ‘modernization’ or a gradual transition to democratic socialism. Many feminist economists, like Barbara Bergmann, celebrate ‘the breakup of the sex-role caste system’ and seem confident that capitalist development will eventually overcome patriarchal traditions. These visions of the future overlook the remarkable persistence of structures of constraint based on gender, age, sexual preference, and race. They also underestimate the extent to which structures of constraint based on nation and class undermine democratic and meritocratic ideals.48 Rather than thinking in terms of a transition from the ‘traditional’ to the ‘modern,’ or some evolution of distinct modes of production, such as capitalism and patriarchy, we need to focus on the ways in which structures of constraint stabilize and destabilize each other. Rather than debating the relative economic efficiency of capitalism and socialism, or markets and state planning, we need to ask how given groups interact in processes of political change and economic growth. Sets of assets, rules, norms, and preferences that enforce membership in given groups define the context for both market exchange and state planning. They set the stage for contest among competing distributional coalitions.49 Conflicts and conjunctures Political change, be it reform or revolution, unfolds in a complex and unpredictable environment of collective conflict and struggle. The Marxian propensity to conceptualize contending interests in class terms is 81

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not so much incorrect as it is incomplete. The same can be said of liberal political theory or ‘interest group’ models that describe individuals actively choosing to join groups that mobilize around specific issues. A matrix of competing allegiances complicates group conflict. No comprehensive account is intended here, merely some illustrations of coevolution and co-determination. Sequences are important. Individuals who are in a strong position within one structure of collective constraint are often able to parlay themselves into a strong position in another. Even if gender inequality is weakened, it may leave men in a better position than women within a class structure. Similarly, when some legal constraints based on race are modified, but no assets are redistributed, one racial group starts out disadvantaged in class competition. Mobilization around one set of collective interests is often associated with reductions in other dimensions of collective conflict. Citizens of a country, once attacked, rally round despite their differences. An oft-noted feature of United States history is the provision of greater opportunities for women and people of color during periods of war. Also, countries that were once at odds find it easy to cooperate if they face a common enemy.50 Internal divisions tend to weaken a larger group. The Islamic nations would be a more cohesive force were it not for the dramatic differences in their wealth and income, and the small number of oil-rich ruling families who control some of the more affluent countries. If class or race inequalities within a nation are too extreme, they weaken its capacity to pursue its national interests. Countries with highly polarized distributions of wealth and income often fail to develop or maintain even token democratic institutions.51 A sudden weakening of one structure of constraint can have disruptive effects, creating new incentives for collective action. A ruling class that is not effectively pursuing at least some collective interests loses the legitimacy required to keep internal divisions under control. In the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, for instance, the collapse of the Communist Party has given rise to intense national and racial conflict. Different collective identities and interests competing for allegiance within a nation often weaken one another. Acute racial differences impede the development of class consciousness. For example, the propensity to vote along racial lines in the US has probably undermined potential class coalitions. Acute class differences impede the development of racial solidarity. The emergence of a small professional-managerial class among African-Americans and Latinos in the United States may have left poor and working-class people of color in a weaker position. The preceding section gave examples of conflicts between interests based on gender, age, and sexual preference.52 On the other hand, different identities and interests can overlap, 82

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providing a basis for alliances. One reason why specific forms of mobilization tend to occur in waves is that people recognize the advantages of acting in concert. Contrary to traditional Marxist theory, socialist revolutions emerged not in countries in the highest stage of capitalist development but in countries where allegiances based on some combination of nation, race, class, and gender reinforced each other. The Bolsheviks, for instance, emphasized class exploitation but promised prosperity to the Soviet Union as a whole. The Chinese Communist Party organized against the anachronisms of the existing class structure, but rallied its troops primarily against a foreign power, the Japanese invaders. Anti-imperialist nationalism was a driving force in many political revolutions of the postwar period, including those in Algeria and Vietnam. Despite their class-centric theoretical rhetoric, Marxist activists have often mobilized cross-class groups such as racial minorities as part of a larger political alliance or popular front. Many socialist revolutions promised important gains to women as a group. The Bolsheviks were initially in the vanguard of international feminism, and early Soviet laws provided a model of progressive family law reform and social policy: rights to divorce, abortion, contraception, and child care. In the long run, however, new structures of class constraint labeled socialism actually institutionalized and reinforced new gender inequalities. Women were excluded from political power, segregated in less lucrative occupations, encouraged to take sole reponsibility for housework and child care, and denied reproductive rights.53 Colonial and imperial powers have always tried to coopt elements of the local power structure to consolidate their own control. In many countries of Africa, for instance, European settlers made sustained efforts to gain the loyalty of male elders, by reinforcing their political authority over ‘homelands.’ Partly as a result, young men and women often played a particularly important role in the overthrow of white minority control.54 Another example of overlapping collective interests and revolutionary change lies in the re-establishment of a fundamentalist Islamic regime in Iran. The former Shah, installed by the United States and its allies, implemented policies that enriched a small ruling class but threatened the patriarchal authority that remained a primary basis of economic organization, especially in rural areas. In particular, rapid ‘Westernization’ of laws and customs eliminated many traditional forms of elder male control over women and children. The mullahs who joined Khomeini in leadership of the revolution there implemented a nationalist strategy that also re-established strict parental authority over youth, fathers’ control over their children’s marriage decisions, men’s ability to divorce at will, violent campaigns against homosexuality, and severe restrictions on women’s rights. In this case, the identification of feminism with Westernization made it easier for patriarchs to claim that they were acting in the national interest.55 83

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Varying configurations of given groups also help explain the uneven development of feminist mobilization. Organized efforts to modify unfair structures of constraint based on gender are scattered, uneven, and relatively recent in many countries. Feminism has gained most of its adherents in capitalist countries with strong national economies, where a large percentage of women engage in wage employment and fertility rates are low. Within those countries, activism is often strongest among women who are somewhat (but not too) privileged in terms of race and class— women in the middle. Women within a small, affluent elite often have a great deal to gain from allegiance to the status quo, including the cheap domestic services of poor women of different race and ethnicity. On the other hand, women in the poorest classes and poorest countries are often preoccupied, of necessity, with the provision of basic subsistence needs. These conflicts and conjunctures among different sets of collective interests affect the distribution of economic welfare, the share of the pie that individuals and groups enjoy. Yet they also have consequences for the size of that pie, the overall quantity of goods and services available to distribute. An expanding pie allows everyone to have more, even if some get more than others. A shrinking pie, on the other hand, intensifies distributional conflict. Inequality and growth Economists have long argued that capitalist ‘rules’ based on private property and competitive markets promote economic development. Sociologists have often given more credit to the emergence of new norms, a ‘Protestant ethic’ and/or a transition to reward systems based on achievement rather than ascription. But no specific set of rules or norms is sufficient. Capitalist development ‘takes off’ in some countries, and barely stays afloat elsewhere. Sometimes, economic growth provides widespread, tangible benefits. Sometimes it does not.56 What determines successful development? Before answering this question, it is important to caution that economists typically define growth in arbitrary and inconsistent ways that overlook negative social and environmental side effects. A high rate of growth in market Gross National Product is not necessarily beneficial. But improvements in an economy’s capacity to produce goods and services efficiently are a precondition for sustainable improvements in standards of living.57 The conditions that foster productivity increase in market economies are partly related to the configuration of given groups based on nation, race, and class. Competition cannot be defined simply in terms of market structure or lack of government intervention; its meaning must be expanded to encompass other factors that affect probable outcomes. If assets are distributed fairly equally, and rules facilitate a flexible class 84

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structure (such as easy access to human capital in the form of education), the incentives to hard work and innovation can be very high, the results quite efficient. But if inherited attributes such as race or class of origin largely determine outcomes, the game can hardly be described as competitive. Losers who have little to gain from trying harder have an incentive to resist, disrupt, or contest the rules. The relationship between given groups based on gender, age, and sexual preference is also important to overall productivity. The organization of social reproduction affects the ways that national, class, and racial differences operate. It directly affects the distribution of public expenditures between men and women, old and young, parents and non-parents. It also influences the rate of population growth and the level of investment in education and other forms of human capital formation. A nation that fails to educate and train its younger generation adequately cannot enjoy sustainable growth (unless it imports its labor force entirely from abroad). An important set of rules, known as democracy, can encourage sustainable economic growth by holding decision-makers accountable for policies that benefit all citizens, rather than merely a small minority. A strong, well organized working class with significant amounts of human capital can encourage employers to increase productivity and to pursue profits in ways that benefit the nation as a whole. When increases in wages accompany increases in profits, higher domestic demand for goods and services can provide a further stimulus to investment. Similarly, a strong environmental movement can force producers (whether private or public) to take hidden costs into account. It can contribute to the design of property rights that are socially efficient, rather than advantageous to special interest groups. Carefully designed and strictly enforced regulations can improve economic productivity. Countries that lack mechanisms for citizen participation in environmental planning, in the former Soviet Union as well as many areas of the developing world, are rapidly becoming ecological disaster zones.58 On the other hand, political democracy can have negative economic consequences if groups contend in ways that stalemate one another. As Mancur Olson points out, proliferation of interest groups can contribute to a kind of institutional atherosclerosis that impedes change of any sort. Contrary to Olson’s view, however, the sheer number of interest groups competing for influence is probably less important than the balance of alignments based on positions that individuals do not choose, such as their class, race, and gender.59 Olson contends that societies can minimize the costs of distributional struggle if they ‘repeal all special-interest legislation or regulation and at the same time apply rigorous anti-trust laws to every type of cartel or collusion that used its power to obtain prices or wages above competitive levels.’60 But recommendations like these ignore inequalities between 85

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given groups. Distributional struggles based on class, race, gender, age, and other groups would take place even within a perfectly competitive market economy, because they are based on structures of constraint that exist outside of markets. The long-run success of markets in improving standards of living is affected by the historical and cultural contexts in which they operate. They seem to work best in situations where citizens are somewhat satisfied with given structures of constraint. They do not function particularly well in societies with extremely unequal asset distributions or, for that matter, within state socialist economies still dominated by a bureaucratic elite. Markets work if they reward effort, initiative, and skill, not if they simply provide a vehicle for the aggrandizement of those who inherit or seize power and money. In a plutocracy, the wealthy find ways of making money that are easier than taking risks—investing capital, managing efficiently, and increasing productivity. A ruling class that is too small, too concentrated, or just too rich need not bother with entrepreneurship. A classic historical case is the fate of the Spanish Empire, whose imperial armies conquered Mexico and much of South America in the sixteenth century and sent back many thousand tons of gold and silver. Did Spain prosper? No, largely because the ruling elite spent the money on luxury goods, contributing to an inflationary rise in prices that actually hurt the Spanish economy.61 A similar process unfolded in many countries of Latin America, where the process of colonization created a small land-owning elite that was capable of extreme exploitation of Indians and mestizos. Those few oligarchs who did invest in new industries in the nineteenth century found themselves outmatched by multi-national British and, later, US firms with much better access to credits and markets. The combination of internal inequality and external competition hindered the development process.62 Many classic debates on the relative importance of markets, state planning, and class structures focus on the divergent economic paths of India and Japan. Why has a large diverse sub-continent, rich in natural resources and land, fared so poorly, while a collection of rocky islands has become an economic superpower? In Free to Choose Milton and Rose Friedman offer a simple answer: After World War II, India utilized considerable state planning, while Japan relied more on free enterprise.63 In his classic Political Economy of Growth, Marxian political economist Paul Baran offers a different answer. The British colonized India precisely because it was so rich. They ruled the country largely through a network of petty royalty and rajah landowners, whose authority they reinforced. In Japan, by contrast, the power of the traditional land-owning class (absent any European imperial support) was broken by a nascent capitalist class with nationalist aspirations during the Meiji Restoration of the 1870s.64 Some previously colonized countries (like the US and Australia) have 86

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enjoyed considerable economic success. And, contrary to the Friedmans’ view, British rule in India was thoroughly laissez-faire, but failed to catalyze rapid growth. Neither the role of markets nor of colonization seems a sufficient explanation. Mancur Olson points to another possibility: India suffered from a proliferation of distributional coalitions that hardened into castes. Its legacy of internal inequality has probably impeded its development.65 Sometimes a strong state takes actions that restructure class relations in ways conducive to development. The economic success of South Korea over the last twenty years is partly attributable to the sweeping land reforms implemented there. In the case of both Korea and Japan a strong and relatively homogeneous ethnic identity, heightened by external threats, contributed to the emergence of a very nationalist capitalist class. In both countries, state policies promoted aggressive export strategies that enhanced economic growth.66 International position is also relevant to national success. After World War II, the United States was in a unique position to help rebuild ravaged areas of Europe. A postwar economic boom created the conditions for rapid growth in investment. Between about 1950 and 1973, the United States economy generated significant increases in wages and family income. Since 1973, however, improvements in productivity and per capita income have been quite small. This slowdown partly reflects increased competition from Japan, Western Europe, and the newly industrializing countries such as Korea. The loss of international economic dominance has contributed to the intensification of race and class differences, and these, in turn, have taken an economic toll that is reflected in high crime rates and outright riots.67 A few examples also serve to illustrate the influence of structures of constraint based on gender, age, and sexual preference. One factor of obvious relevance is population growth. The economic benefits of fertility decline were gained at a relatively early date by countries of Northwest Europe and the United States, because a number of changes in patriarchal structures of constraint increased the cost of children to parents. As later chapters of this book will show, feminist efforts to organize women in these countries affected both access to contraceptive technology and the social norms of parenthood. In many areas of the developing world, on the other hand, parents still have strong economic incentives to rear large numbers of children, and women still lack basic reproductive rights. Many economists continue to think of child welfare purely as a result, rather than as a cause, of economic growth. But the level of public commitment to the younger generation, reflected in their health and access to education, represents an investment in human capital that offers a high social rate of return. Most countries of Northwestern Europe, as well as Japan, are now performing better in this respect than the United 87

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States. Underinvestment in health and education is an even more serious problem in most countries of Latin America and the Caribbean.68 Contrary to the conventional wisdom, which remains largely preoccupied with the performance of manufacturing sectors, efficient provision of public services is a major factor in international competition. Lester Thurow argues that the low quality of education for children in the US raises labor costs and hinders the adoption of new technologies. In all affluent countries, health care consumes a large share of Gross National Product, but some countries, like the US, spend more without commensurate improvements in public health. The quantity and quality of child care and elder care affect the utilization of a country’s labor force, particularly its women.69 Some countries, like Japan, appear to pay less for social welfare because the costs are hidden in the family, outside the market economy. But a purely family-based strategy for providing such services, especially one that automatically assigns women to this task, is demonstrably inefficient. It will be interesting to see what happens if and when married women in Japan engage in paid employment in percentages comparable to those in Northwestern Europe and the United States. Successful economic development is not a simple function of competitive markets, but the product of a balance between individual and collective incentives in both production and social reproduction. These incentives are significantly affected by inequalities among given groups. Even more serious complications are imposed by the limits on what both markets and states can accomplish. Natural resources, natural processes (such as climate), and people themselves are indispensable inputs into production. They cannot be produced either by the market or the state. Markets, states, and social reproduction Economic development in both capitalist and socialist countries has helped deliver some genuine gains in standards of living. Even its most striking successes, however, have been partially subsidized by the devalorization of women’s work, the extraction of tribute from other disempowered groups, and the degradation of the natural environment. These are problems that will not necessarily be solved either by ‘getting prices right’ or conducting the very best democratic planning. Neither the market nor the state offers a very good solution for problems of social reproduction, which require an important role for families and communities. However important ideals of meritocracy, democracy, and equal opportunity may be, they do not provide guidelines that specify our responsibilities to dependents, to future generations, or to other species. Some economists might argue that we need no guidelines, that we can rely on natural altruism and survival instincts. But history is 88

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not a naturally self-regulating process, like some idealized market writ large. The capacities of nature are not fixed, but many of its assets are—fossil fuels and fossil water are good examples. We can increase our access to these by drilling more and deeper wells, but we cannot increase the ultimate supply. More importantly, nature is not a rational or conscious participant in the bargains that we strike with her. She never says, ‘Sorry, I do not want to sell, because I cannot sustain my long-run production at that price.’ Our interactions with nature are a form of extraction, not a form of exchange. Of course, you could describe them (and economists do) as a fictive form of exchange with future generations. What we use up today, no one will be able to use tomorrow. On the other hand, what we use up today might further the development of new technologies, so we are doing our children a big favor. But such trade-offs are inevitably uncertain. Future generations are not around to set their own price on that uncertainty. Their potential standard of living can only be valued via an interdependent utility function, one with a ‘dynastic’ component such as love for one’s own children, and their children, and their children after them, or love for future generations in the abstract. Just how much are we willing to bequeath? Cost-benefit analysis cannot answer this question. A truly selfish Rational Economic Man, asked the appropriate level of solidarity with those to come, would answer, ‘None.’ Most people would scratch their heads and answer, ‘Some.’ The Great Law of the Iroquois required the ruling council to consider the impact of its decisions on the next seven generations. Our modern decision rules tend to be more short-sighted.70 Indeed, the naive confidence that markets are a sufficient condition for efficient allocation (like the naive confidence that state ownership was a solution) amplifies a widespread tendency to discount the future. Our environmental capital is rapidly being depleted. The accumulation of public and private debt levies costs onto future generations. What if, in the short run, those societies that mortgage the future outcompete and eradicate all others? To paraphrase John Maynard Keynes, in the long run, we are all extinct. Similar objections apply to the claim that economic and political democracy can provide a solution. How can democracy ensure fair treatment of future generations, when a potential majority of voters has not yet been born? How can planners consult constituents who do not yet exist? These are questions that cannot be answered by economic or political theory, because they concern cultural, moral, and personal values. They ask us to decide how much we care for children not yet born, and how much we should care for them. This is why we need to think about the most important product of 89

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structures of constraint: ourselves. What kinds of people are we encouraging ourselves to become? Economic development promises us important benefits, including greater freedom to pursue our individual self-interest. But it may also encourage us to define our self-interest in narrow, ultimately self-defeating terms, in terms especially harmful to children and other dependents. To understand why, we need to focus on the ways that technological change, individual choice, and collective struggle are transforming family life.

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‘You have argued,’ patient readers of the preceding pages might protest, ‘that given groups use their collective power to influence the course of historical change. But you still haven’t explained their current relevance to your initial question. Who does pay for the kids? And why is this question so important?’ ‘What I’ve done so far,’ responds the author, ‘is explain why groups may try to minimize their share of the costs of social reproduction. Now, I want to explore some of the possible consequences for women and children. Consider the following paradox,’ she continues. ‘The family is gradually losing some of its significance as an economic unit in both capitalist and socialist economies. Women and children are gaining some important rights and enjoying some new freedoms. Yet forms of collective power based on gender, age, and sexual preference remain remarkably persistent. Partly as a result, modern economies are not doing a very good job of caring for children or valuing the future.’ This chapter brings some of the traditional themes of economic demography within the scope of political economy by showing how recent trends in labor force participation, family composition, and social welfare have been shaped by unfair structures of constraint. It argues that many processes associated with economic development penalize commitments to family labor. This argument links the preceding theoretical chapters to the historical accounts that follow. The contradictory impact of economic development is evident in the expansion of wage employment, the growing costs of parenthood, and the emergence of welfare states: 1 Even where women enter the wage labor force in large numbers, nonmarket work remains economically important, and women continue to perform a disproportionate share. Their movement into wage employment enhances their productivity and their economic independence, and weakens some traditional gender-based constraints. Yet women remain segregated in the least remunerative jobs, which pay less partly because they are staffed by women. 91

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2 The weakening of fathers’ power over children and the growing relative costs of childrearing impel fertility decline. These same trends, however, motivate changes in family law and family structure that increase women’s and children’s vulnerability to poverty. The decline of coercive pro-natalism makes it easier for gay and lesbian individuals to collectively assert themselves, but their ability to form families of choice remains restricted. 3 The attenuation of income transfers within the patriarchal family intensifies pressures to ‘socialize’ many of its income-sharing features through public transfer payments. Yet social security programs that redistribute money from wage-earners to the elderly population offer relatively little assistance to the next generation of workers or those who are rearing them. The following sections explore these trends, emphasizing that in each case their significance has been obscured by the conventional vocabulary of economic theory. The process of development is described in terms that build on concepts discussed earlier, emphasizing the interaction between technological change, individual choice, collective identities and interests. THE EXPANSION OF WAGE EMPLOYMENT Sometimes rapidly, sometimes gradually, economic development shifts individual work away from families toward the less personal environment of private or public firms. This process is not unique to capitalist market economies. In fact, ‘proletarianization’ took place particularly rapidly under state socialist regimes. In developed countries today, an overwhelming majority of men and between about 30 per cent and 60 per cent of women work for a wage. Ironically, this very transformation of the social relations of production fosters new concepts and definitions that exaggerate the relative importance of market work. Although you would never guess it from conventional labor force surveys or statistics, even the most advanced economies are quite dependent on large quantities of unpaid (and largely female) family labor. On average, women enjoy less leisure than men. There are only so many hours in a day. As female labor force participation rates continue to increase, the overall amount of time devoted to family labor will further decline. Why do women choose to enter wage employment? Neoclassical economists offer a simple explanation. Technological change increases the productivity of work outside the home more rapidly than work within it. Furthermore, fertility decline reduces the relative efficiency of forms of work that are compatible with child care. By this account, women continue to specialize in household production to a greater extent than 92

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Figure 3.1 The allocation of labor time between household production and wage employment

men simply because they are better suited, biologically and emotionally, to this work. The logic of this argument is illustrated in Figure 3.1. Labor devoted to household production is subject to diminishing returns; if the value of household capital and technology remains constant, the value of goods and services produced by an additional hour of labor eventually begins to decline. The horizontal line represents the market wage. The curve representing the value of household production by men is lower than the curve for women, because men are assumed to be less productive in that type of work. Both men and women making purposeful decisions about time allocation devote their labor to household production as long as the value of hourly product there is greater than the market wage. Hence, women work longer hours in the household than men, and fewer hours in the market (overall hours of work are determined by the relative value of labor and leisure). One outcome might be that men gain more labor market experience and therefore earn higher wages than women. This would reinforce the tendency for women to specialize in household production. Neoclassical reasoning does not suggest that consideration of the relative return to market and household labor alone determines time allocation. Individuals may also be affected by norms and preferences that affect the utility, or pleasure, they get from different types of work. For instance, if women get more utility from doing housework than men, they would engage in it for an even longer number of hours. However, by 93

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assuming that norms and preferences are exogenously given and relatively constant, neoclassical theory suggests that the driving force behind changes in labor supply is changes in relative prices. Both men and women are affected by technological changes that increase wages. The growth of cheap substitutes for goods once produced in the home actually lowers the value of household production. When it is cheaper to buy bread or clothes, rather than making them, women choose to increase their market earnings. As they devote more time to market work, and gain valuable experience, their relative wages should increase. As a result, time devoted to household production should decrease further. This process does not necessarily proceed in such a dynamic, idealized fashion. For instance, wage employment might not be available. Or technological change might not take place. Or women might be prevented from engaging in many jobs. Any of these possibilities could explain a lack of growth in female labor force participation over time. From a Marxian perspective, these contingencies are less important than the interpretation of class constraints. Workers may have choices, but their outcome is largely predetermined by the social forces that determine output per hour in household production (production for use) and wage employment (production for exchange). These cannot be attributed to technology alone. For instance, a class of capitalists may use military force to seize common lands, reducing household productivity relative to the market wage. Or they may use the power of the state to block forms of class-based collective action aimed to increase wages. The Marxian emphasis on social history asks how collective power influences the relative levels and slopes of the lines drawn in Figure 3.1. The problem with this Marxian approach is that it underestimates the ways in which given groups other than capitalists and workers may act collectively to affect individual options. In a bureaucratic state, the ruling party has the ability to set wages to its own advantage. More to the point here, given groups based on gender, age, and sexual preference may be able to influence the wage offered to their members and their competitors. They may do so by restricting others’ access to financial, human, or social assets, enforcing rules that restrict certain jobs to certain people, or establishing norms or preferences that have a similarly restrictive impact. This broader picture helps explain the role that feminist political struggle may play in economic development. Technological change and purposeful choice clearly affect trends in female labor force participation. But shifts in collective identities, interests, and actions also play an important role. As economic development proceeds, women have more to gain from greater gender equality in the workplace. Feminist demands for equal rights, equal pay for equal work, and greater remuneration for traditionally female jobs are not simply forms of interference with otherwise neutral market 94

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processes. Rather, they represent explicit efforts to countermand and countervail past and present forms of male collective action. The unproductive housewife As the market for labor expanded during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most women continued to specialize in unpaid family labor, particularly child care. For a long time, this work was considered economically important. Yet proponents of the new discipline of political economy (including Marxists) developed a new concept of ‘unproductive work’ that literally devalued activities outside the marketplace. The history of the ‘unproductive housewife’ illustrates the impact of gender and class interests on the development of political economy itself.1 Early economists like Sir William Petty treated the family as a basic unit of production and assumed that married women were productively employed in family enterprises. Not until the late eighteenth century did Adam Smith and his counterparts decide that work that did not create a vendible commodity was ‘unproductive.’ British census takers and statisticians, more interested in public health than in political economy, took issue with this decision. The 1861 Census of Great Britain, for instance, enumerated ‘housewives’ among the productive occupations. The Massachusetts State Census of 1875 followed similar conventions. Over time, however, these censuses gradually changed their terminology to conform to economic theory, first moving housewives to a separate category, then including them among the ‘unoccupied,’ then labeling them ‘dependents,’ and, finally, omitting their enumeration altogether. One feminist group protested the US Census Office’s treatment of housewives in a written letter to Congress in 1879, but to no avail. By 1920, women’s non-market work had largely disappeared from official view. The assumption that housewives were not productive workers was exported to many countries of the developing world. Was this redefinition of non-market work a mere intellectual vagary, an incidental byproduct of some important theoretical insight? Not likely. It seems more than coincidental that the new conceptual vocabulary neatly strengthened arguments being made by two distinct, if overlapping, groups participating in public debate. Those who benefitted most immediately from the growth of wage employment were eager to show that it increased general economic welfare. How convenient to employ a measure of economic growth that counted increases in market product without subtracting concomitant declines in non-market production. Male trade unionists also exploited the concept of the unproductive housewife when they demanded a male family wage sufficient to support their wives as well as their children. Women, they argued, had no need to earn high wages.2 Feminist scholars and activists contested this argument in several 95

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different ways. They argued that housewives and mothers should have a legal claim to a share of their husbands’ earnings, and also defended the principle of equal pay for equal work. Some, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, encouraged women to work outside the home, while others demanded more recognition and remuneration for women’s work as mothers. At a debate held at the Carnegie Lyceum in New York on January 7, 1909, a largely female audience voted ‘No’ to the question: ‘Do Husbands Support Their Wives?’3 Ironically, it was not until married women began entering the paid labor force in large numbers that economists became interested in nonmarket work. In the 1930s, two professors at the University of Chicago, Hazel Kyrk and Margaret Reid, began systematic studies of the economics of household production. Today, many economists agree that non-market work should be carefully surveyed, and estimates of its value included in national income accounts. But that is another story.4 The point here is that the image of the unproductive housewife was connected to a cultural norm that portrayed women as dependents who should be grateful for their husbands’ support. The devaluation of housework and child care was enforced by the official terminology of economists and statisticians. It was contested by those who recognized its normative significance and believed it was inimical to women’s interests. But it was not contested very successfully, in part because women were explicitly excluded from positions of academic and political influence. The lack of attention to women’s unpaid work not only distorted the picture of economic development. It also obscured an important dimension of gender inequality and weakened the bargaining power of individual women. The importance of family labor International comparisons of the composition of the labor force focus on the percentage of women engaged in market work, which tends to increase in the course of economic development. Indeed, the movement of women into the paid labor force promotes economic development by definition, because work that earns money income, unlike family labor, is included in estimates of national income. But even in the most advanced capitalist countries a significant proportion of women specialize in family labor, and even those who have paying jobs devote a large percentage of their time to housework and child care. In addition to asking how many women have entered the paid labor force, economists should also ask how many men have shouldered traditionally female responsibilities. While many activities have shifted from the family to the firm and the state, the family remains a primary site for the care, training, and maintenance of people—the day-to-day as well as long-run reproduction of 96

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the labor force. ‘Housewife’ is probably the largest single occupational category in the world. In the United States, in 1986, a total of 29.9 million women, or 32 per cent of all women aged 16 years or over, described themselves as ‘keeping house.’ About 468,000 men described themselves the same way. By comparison, the sum total of men and women in professional and managerial occupations was only 26.4 million.5 Surveys from the US show that adult women (with paying jobs and without) devote an average of 29 hours a week to housework and child care. Adult men devote about 11 hours per week to household tasks. Since only a portion of adult men (about 76 per cent) and women (about 57 per cent) engage in wage employment in the US, the total amount of time devoted to household production amounts to at least 40 per cent of total work time. Yet little attention has been devoted to the measurement or analysis of such work.6 Increases in time devoted to market work do not necessarily result in a reduction in time devoted to family labor. Though few sources of longitudinal data are available, studies of United States families show that hours devoted to housework have declined over the last fifteen years, but not enough to compensate for increases in hours of market work. In other words, women have purchased new opportunities for work outside the home at the price of a ‘double day,’ often 40 hours of paid labor, followed by 20 hours of family labor per week. When children enter a household, men’s total work hours remain virtually unchanged, while women’s increase dramatically. Time-use studies from all over the world show that women work much longer hours than men overall, typically adding income-earning tasks onto their traditional family responsibilities.7 Nor do time-use statistics, often based on narrow and economistic definitions of ‘work,’ fully capture the importance of family labor. As Ann Ferguson writes, ‘The needs for social union involved in sex and nurturance are just as basic to human survival as eating, being clothed, and having a roof over one’s head.’ Talking and listening, activities that might superficially seem to qualify as leisure, are often responsibilities that require concerted effort. Kin/community networks that are maintained by visiting, gift-giving, and meal-sharing often prove crucial for family welfare. Women devote more time to informal care outside, as well as inside, the home.8 The unequal division of family responsibilities, enshrined in patriarchal culture and tradition, perpetuates occupational segregation. As Arlie Hochschild puts it: One reason that half the lawyers, doctors, and business people are not women is because men do not share the raising of their children and the caring of their homes. Men think and feel within structures of work which presume they do not have to do these things. Women who enter these traditional structures and do the work of the home, 97

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too, cannot compete on male terms. They find that their late twenties and mid-thirties, the prime child-bearing years, are also a peak period of career demands. Seeing that the game is devised for family-free people, some women lose heart.9 How can we explain this aspect of gender inequality? One simple answer, offered by economist Victor Fuchs, is consistent with a neoclassical approach. Women simply have greater preferences for family life than men, and are therefore willing to sacrifice more for them. But even if this answer is partially correct, it raises further questions. Are these family preferences biologically determined, culturally constructed, or both? If they are culturally constructed, even in part, then men and women may seek collectively to modify them. The relative power of given groups will influence the eventual outcome. A gendered contest over the norms and preferences of family labor is conspicuously evident in current political discourse. Conservatives like George Gilder and Alan Bloom insist that women are naturally suited to family labor. Feminists retort that men romanticize women’s abilities partly in order to avoid their share of what can be very burdensome responsibilities. Men who participate more actively in family labor might learn how to like it and teach their sons to value it more.10 This complex cultural renegotiation of the traditional division of labor affects the choices that individuals make. A wife’s decision to seek paid employment, for instance, is affected by her perception of her husband’s willingness and ability to assume a share of non-market family responsibilities, and vice versa. Thus, contested norms and preferences, as well as assets and rules, affect labor supply decisions. Women and paid employment In spite of the persistent demands of family labor, economic development draws women into paid employment and destabilizes patriarchal structures of constraint. The reasons for this are simple, though they operate in cumulative, circular ways. Women are initially limited to the most tedious, least skilled jobs, generally those most compatible with the demands of child care and control over women’s sexuality. Explicit laws and implicit customs restrict women’s access to forms of work that might afford economic independence. Within these constraints, however, women generally allocate their time in the most productive ways possible, applying skill and craft to the production of goods and services within the home. The expansion of market production is disruptive, because it provides cheap substitutes for many goods once efficiently produced for own consumption in the home. Traditional restrictions on women’s work become quite costly, creating incentives for reallocation. Women who 98

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once busied themselves spinning thread or growing food can contribute more to family income by seeking paid employment as domestic servants or factory workers. Complete resistance to changes in women’s traditional responsibilities would be expensive. But men may be willing to pay a small price (a reduction in the earnings women contribute to their family income) for the preservation of their bargaining power in the household and the labor market. The threat to male interests is contained by restricting women to the least remunerative paying jobs. How do men preserve their advantage without any explicit coordinated effort? By dint of social norms that present women’s subordination as a natural and necessary phenomenon. Part of the implicit argument is based on functional reasoning: someone must be willing to sacrifice their individual interests to keep the home (and society as a whole) together. Men are reluctant; if women refuse, home and family may begin to fall apart.11 Bargaining takes place on the cultural as well as on the microeconomic level. Individuals act out threats that are culturally prescribed. ‘If you do not do the housework, you are not a good mother, so I do not have to be a good father.’ ‘If you do a man’s job outside the home you cannot be a real woman inside the home.’ ‘You think you are as good as a man, but I can beat you up if I want to.’ These threats are not necessarily correlated with the relative earnings or assets of the individuals involved—macroeconomic or macrocultural dynamics complicate microeconomic negotiations. Individuals have varying capacities to survive threats and to violate accepted cultural norms. Random violations constantly occur. If these become systematic or increase in number, norms can gradually be delegitimated. Both men and women say, ‘We do not have to be like this. We can be different.’ These are exclamations about who they are and what they want, not merely how they can get what they want. Here, collective interests, actions, and power come into play. Men can, and do, defend social norms that they perceive as being in their gender interests. They are in a strong position to enforce occupational segregation and pay discrimination in the workplace. Most employers and managers are men, consciously or unconsciously willing to pay a price for gender solidarity. Male workers often organize against female competition through explicit trade union efforts and implicit resistance such as sexual harassment of women workers. Collective action can take a million forms, few of which leave a visible trail. By far the easiest to trace are explicit political efforts to establish, defend, or attack explicit rules. Some of the more obvious manifestations of collective pursuit of male self-interest in the labor market include bars on women’s education, restrictions on the types of labor they can 99

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perform, limits on their property rights (such as control over earnings), and denial of political representation. Other, more subtle, manifestations include many types of legislation ostensibly intended to protect women from dangerous working conditions, which exclude them from well-paying jobs. Maternity leave or child care policies that impose extra costs on employers who hire women create perverse incentives. The concept of a ‘family wage’ continues to exercise a covert influence. These factors, in turn, divide workers along gender lines, making gradations of pay and skill within the firm resemble the hierarchy of the patriarchal family. Large firms develop internal labor markets and job ladders, pay male workers a wage premium, and reward seniority in order to foster forms of solidarity that lower monitoring costs and enhance productivity.12 Employers often provide more generous benefit packages to men than to women (covering female but not male spouses). Many tax policies subsidize workers whose spouses specialize in non-market work. Such benefits and subsidies are normally available only to legally sanctioned families defined by heterosexual marriage. Gender-biased rules are important not only in and of themselves, but also because they reduce women’s incentives to accumulate assets of their own and their ability to contest social norms. Rules that discriminate according to sexual preference make it harder for members of gay and lesbian families to care for one another.13 As market production expands, the displacement of home produced goods continues, and women’s participation in wage employment tends to increase, in turn creating more demand for market substitutes. The combination of women’s continued commitment to family labor and men’s continued opposition to workplace equality reproduces occupational segregation. Yet the greater women’s participation in paid employment, the more destabilizing forces come into play. The reduction in time devoted to household labor reduces the incentives to maintain bargaining power there; the more women work for pay, the more costly their lower pay becomes to men who pool income with them. Women’s increased access to individual income enhances their individual and their collective bargaining power. Economic development may heighten the importance of class and race identities, which tend to unify families. Competing interests come into play: why should a white middle-class man collude in forms of collective action that restrict his wife’s or daughter’s earning ability? Competition from women is less threatening to his economic position than competition from others who are willing to work for an even lower wage. Men in privileged class or race positions have more to gain from combatting gender discrimination than other forms, because their female family members have access to high earnings. As women enter the paid labor force in greater numbers, they begin to 100

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contest occupational segregation more assertively. The longer they plan on working for a wage, the more important their jobs become to their social identity, the more likely they are to risk sanctions and engage in forms of collective action that express gender rather than family interests. Increases in the percentage of women who do not pool income with men (that is, living alone or supporting children on their own) contribute to a concerted gender consciousness, particularly among women in a strong class and race position. On the other hand, men also become more identified with their jobs, perhaps even less interested in family life. Often they seem more willing to allow women into their workplace than to assume any ‘female’ responsibilities or tasks. Women are allowed to wear trousers, but men remain terribly afraid of dresses. Women are promised a form of success defined entirely in male terms—yet another devaluation of feminine abilities. Rights for women vs. responsibilities for men This cultural bargaining process helps explain the contrast between two different strategies of contesting women’s inferior position in the labor market. One strategy seeks to guarantee women exactly the same legal rights as men, and encourage women to develop more masculine preferences. This would certainly improve women’s relative earnings. Empirical studies show that women without children earn far more, on average, than mothers. This strategy, however, assumes that all women really care about, or should care about, is their market earnings. Hence the importance of an alternative strategy that aims to change the organization of family as well as market labor, and to encourage men to assume more traditionally female responsibilities. The first strategy involves changing some important rules, and eliminating overt forms of discrimination. But simply encouraging women to compete with men for the best paying, traditionally male jobs may have a very limited impact on overall gender inequality. Women’s jobs have traditionally been underpaid not merely because they have been crowded into fewer jobs, but also because patterns of remuneration for work reflect the history of gender-based constraints. Definitions of ‘skill,’ ‘responsibility’ and ‘deserving of high pay’ are culturally constructed.14 Skill has some relatively objective components, such as the amount of time required to acquire it. But it also reflects subjective elements. Take child care, for instance. Obviously, people can and do provide child care without any special training. On the other hand, some undergo extensive training in child psychology and development. Child care is not intrinsically skilled or unskilled—it depends on the standards set for it. Also, the value that a skill commands in the labor market is determined partly by whether that skill is widely available or not. If the demand 101

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exceeds the supply, then the skill commands a scarcity premium, a rent. Women have seldom been excluded from jobs requiring the development of child care skills. But they have often been excluded from other jobs by employers, trade unions, and professional associations. Collective efforts to exclude members of distinct groups from certain jobs limit the supply of skills learned on those jobs. For a variety of reasons, men have been more successful at defining the most lucrative jobs as male and restricting female access to them. Therefore, a lot of male occupations carry premiums that are often incorrectly attributed simply to the level of skills required. The crowding of women into a smaller number of occupations not only contributes to lower wages in those jobs; it also lowers the market value of the skills the jobs demand. Many studies of the methods that firms use to set their internal pay scales show that women are paid less for the same skill ratings, and that the skill ratings themselves are biased—they reflect the collective interests of the best paid, predominantly male managers who design and implement them. In other words, when it is defined by a group that wields considerable power, skill becomes partly a rationalization of power.15 Thus, the ‘unskilled’ child care worker (or teacher, or secretary) is a cultural construction, like the unproductive housewife discussed earlier. Indeed the two are closely related—they both reflect a devaluation of women’s traditional forms of work that serves the interests of men and employers. This work can only be re-valued by processes of explicit and implicit bargaining in which women withhold their skills until a better price is offered for them. More general aspects of the organization of work, as well as relative pay levels, also reflect a confluence of class and gender interests. The lack of flexibility in work hours, resistance to accommodating the demands of family labor, emphasis on continuous work experience—all of which are typically explained as measures that enhance efficiency—are far more efficient for employers and for men than for women, children, or society as a whole. These structural aspects of paid labor can be reformed only by gender-conscious strategies that are also conscious of other collective identities and interests. Consider two alternative scenarios of the future, one in which women have exactly the same rights as men, but class and race inequalities remain unchanged, and one in which men have exactly the same responsibilities as women, across class and race lines. In the first scenario, men and women would be equally likely to be owners and managers of business enterprises, and the full-time labor force participation rate of women would reach that of men. Forms of work that women once specialized in, such as child care and teaching, would be performed by men and women from disadvantaged groups, such as people of color. Domestic servants willing to work for a minimal wage would 102

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take care of children, the sick, and the elderly in private homes and in public institutions. In the second scenario, men would substantially increase their hours of unpaid work, devoting more time to home, children, and community. Their formal labor force participation rate would decline to levels more typical of women today. Forms of work that women once specialized in, such as child care and teaching, would be re-valued. High skill levels, as well as high wages, would be required. The family would remain an important economic institution, and common commitments to certain kinds of unpaid household labor would reduce class and race inequalities. The first scenario is probably easier to secure. It is consistent with cultural values that prioritize high earnings, and could be pursued through largely individualistic strategies. Although women might need to engage in some collective action, they would not need to form coalitions with other disadvantaged groups. Women in a strong nation, race, and class position would benefit the most.16 The second scenario, in which purchased substitutes for family labor would play a less important role, is more inviting. It speaks to concerns about the erosion of family life, but assigns responsibility for dealing with this problem to men equally with women. It appeals to the intrinsic value of family labor and the social relationships it sustains. Some aspects of sex-affective production are not adaptable to ‘commodification,’ to replacement by hired labor or market substitutes. But this scenario would be more difficult to achieve, because it would require more sustained collective effort and coordination. It would certainly be more threatening to men and women in strong nation, race, and class positions. Emphasis on equal sharing of rights, responsibilities, and work within the family points towards a more egalitarian vision of society as a whole. Inequality in the workplace Women’s rapid entrance into paid employment has many disruptive effects. Conservatives sometimes blame feminism for destabilizing the traditional division of labor. Orthodox Marxists sometimes blame the ‘logic of capitalism’ for relentlessly undermining all forms of production for use. But a major driving force behind the proletarianization of women is the process of economic development itself, the potential for producing goods and services more efficiently outside the household. This technological potential often pits desires for greater consumption against other norms and preferences that value family relationships. This conflict may be inherent in the process sometimes called ‘modernization’ that seems to affect most human cultures (though never in exactly the same way). But along with choices between personal and impersonal 103

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methods of organizing production come important implications for the relative power of given groups. Structures of collective constraint affect the context in which individuals make labor supply decisions, and their ability to defend old social institutions or develop new ones. They help explain the persistence of a sexual division of labor that is more advantageous to men than to women. An understanding of how structures of constraint operate points beyond issues of gender inequality to a wider definition of equal opportunity. Neither men’s nor women’s actions are motivated by gender interests alone. Efforts to challenge gender inequality in the workplace bring other aspects of the division of labor into question. THE GROWING COST OF FAMILIES Fertility decline, a reduction in the average number of children born per woman, has long been underway in most countries. Like women’s entrance into paid employment, it is associated with economic development in both capitalist and socialist contexts. Both trends are intertwined, because increases in the wages women can earn outside the home increase the cost of taking time out from paid employment to care for children, and because women without small children are more likely to seek employment outside the home. Both trends reflect a complex interaction between technological change, individual choice, and the power of given groups. Economic development and fertility decline go hand in hand almost by definition, given the biases in conventional economic accounting systems. Since caring for family members is not counted as an economic contribution, a reallocation of time towards activities that are counted, such as wage employment, increases Gross National Product. The more interesting causality runs the other way: development motivates fertility decline not only by lowering infant mortality but also by modifying economic relationships among family members. The claim that individuals consider the cost of children when making decisions about whether to commit themselves to caring for them does not imply that they are selfish or economistic. It simply implies a certain purposeful concern with their ability to meet those commitments. Even a person who would rather spend money on children than on anything else will take some estimate of future costs into account, if only out of consideration for their impact on children already born. As the costs of children go up, people generally make greater efforts to restrict family size. Neoclassical theories of fertility decline emphasize the technological and economic factors that increase the cost of children. Among these are increases in the intensity and complexity of work that make it difficult for young children to make a productive contribution, and greater educational requirements. The opportunity cost of time devoted to child care is another 104

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Figure 3.2 A demand curve for children

major factor. Improvements in contraception and new reproductive rights, including legal access to abortion, make it easier for families to plan. In Figure 3.2, the demand curve represents an inverse relationship between price and quantity that tells part of the story. Whatever the pleasure parents get from children, an increase in the cost of children tends to reduce their demand for them. This does not mean that they immediately and costlessly reduce their fertility if costs increase, because their ability to do so is limited by their particular circumstances. They may, instead, suffer increased economic stress. Take a particular couple that starts out with the general notion that they might like to have three children, based on their perception of the anticipated costs. Technological and social changes completely beyond their control may double the actual costs. But children, unlike other items people spend money on, are difficult to sell, exchange, or abandon, especially by those who love them. Another factor that the simple relationship between price and quantity fails to explain is that the mother, who pays the greatest costs, is not necessarily the person making the family size decision. The costs of children to individuals are heavily influenced not only by relationships between mothers and fathers, but also by relationships between parents and children, families and society as a whole. Fertility decline is not the only important response to changes in the cost of children. In certain circumstances, men respond differently than women to the increased financial pressures that childrearing imposes, and reduce their commitments to children through desertion and divorce. 105

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Changing family forms are not simple, costless adjustments to higher prices; they are associated with changes in the distribution of the costs of children. Reproductive choices The abilities of individuals to respond to changes in the relative risks and costs of family commitments are limited by their institutional context. That is why collective efforts to change the institutional context of reproductive choice are just as important to fertility decline as individual decisions to become a parent. When traditional rules and restrictions become costly, individuals often mobilize collective efforts to loosen and redefine them. ‘Reproductive choice’ has in recent years become a slogan for feminist organizing efforts because choice historically has been so limited. The most obvious examples have been mentioned in previous chapters: concerted efforts to punish and discourage sexual activities not conducive to conception and to restrict access to contraception and abortion. But many other aspects of economic organization, family law, social policy, and culture also define the space within which individuals become parents. Technological factors seem to affect fertility not merely by changing individual costs and benefits, but also by fostering certain structures of constraint. As mentioned earlier, in many hunting/gathering societies children are costly because they limit tribal mobility. In agrarian societies, on the other hand, small children need not be carried and can begin to contribute to production at a relatively early age. Acquiring skills primarily from their parents, they soon cross the boundary dividing dependents from producers. It is easy to see why individuals might make different choices in these two different types of societies in response to relative prices. But it is also important to note that structures of constraint encourage individuals to make the ‘right’ choice. In many hunting and gathering societies, cultural norms regarding sexuality, abortion, and infanticide made it much easier for individuals to limit fertility.17 Agrarian societies are more likely to practice coercive pro-natalism. Male control over private property in land restricts women’s economic independence. Strict regulation of marriage and sexuality channels both male and female efforts into reproduction, though a sexual double standard means that women suffer more serious consequences. In this context, individuals who want to have fewer children find it difficult to do so without embracing complete celibacy. The complex interaction of technology, social structure, and individual choice helps explain the tremendous variety of outcomes within the same type of technological regime. Pro-natalist agrarian societies all face a similar dilemma. If they are successful at promoting population growth 106

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they are eventually forced to cope with increased population pressure. Varieties of response include military expansion, immigration, technological change, and efforts to lower the birth rate, all mediated by relations among given groups. In a closed agrarian economy that has exhausted its internal frontier, rapid population growth uncompensated by technical change leads to exhaustion of land and natural resources, and resulting reduction in per capita output may drastically lower the benefits of children. Fathers cannot adjust quickly, because social norms and preferences are slow to change. However, they may develop strategies for lowering aggregate fertility that are consistent with maintaining strong control over women and children, such as forcing the younger generation to delay marriage. Demographic pressures may also contribute to technological change, encouraging the process of industrial development. The way these pressures operate and the outcomes they generate depend on particular historical circumstances. Given groups with a vested interest in traditional technologies may seek to block change. But industrialization, if associated with considerable growth of wage employment and mobility, tends to alter the costs of children in new ways. Technological factors come into play here, as well. Children may not be strong enough or skilled enough to enter industrial jobs at an early age. As educational requirements expand, they impose new costs on parents. Women find it harder to care for children while they work if they work outside the home. But technology alone does not drive the costs of children up. Industrialization can actually increase children’s potential contributions by increasing the demand for unskilled, repetitive labor in cottage industries and factories. Successful collective efforts to implement child labor laws and promote public investments in education influence children’s participation in market work at least as much as the intrinsic characteristics of industrial technology. In Northwestern Europe and the United States, such public policies accompanied industrialization; not so in many areas of the developing world.18 Education does more than simply increase the direct costs of children. The greater the importance of on-the-job training, job-specific experience, and extended job tenure, the greater the opportunity cost of time devoted to child care. Education also has a tremendous cultural impact, calling religious dogma into question and promoting the legitimacy of purposeful choice and reproductive rights. Education of women, in particular, affects preferences for children as well as opportunity costs. Fertility decline, in other words, is not simply the result of changing relative prices. It is also the product of a complex cultural and political renegotiation of the meaning of family life. Membership in communities has an enormously important impact on individual decisions. People who speak the same language and live within the same political boundaries do 107

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not reduce fertility in complete unison, but they follow discernibly common patterns.19 As the costs of children go up, the costs of coercive pro-natalism go up as well. Men and women, heterosexuals and homosexuals begin to contest it, not only by demanding their own choices, but also by organizing for social, political, and economic reforms that increase reproductive and sexual choice. Their success in doing so is affected by their ability to form coalitions across national, racial, and class lines and by the relative power of given groups based on gender and age. The distribution of the costs of children The distribution of the costs of children is relevant not only to fertility decisions, but also to the distribution of social welfare. Intra-family income flows affect the wellbeing of men relative to women, and the old relative to the young. These income flows are influenced by altruistic preferences and individual calculations of self-interest. But they are also strongly influenced by patriarchal structures of constraint and prone to modification in the course of economic development. In hunting and gathering tribes without much in the way of private property, the tribe as a whole often provides the resources to care for members who are young, sick, or infirm. In early agrarian societies, on the other hand, ties between parents and children tend to be stronger, enforced by intergenerational transmission of property. Children depend largely on their parents for inheritance of assets, and parents in turn depend largely on children for security in old age.20 The ‘social security’ functions of the patriarchal family are reinforced by implicit contracts that define the responsibilities of individual family members. Parents raise large numbers of children with the expectation that they will begin to defray their own expenses at a relatively early age, and that they will assume some of the risks and costs of caring for other family members in sickness, indigence, or infirmity. Men assume considerable responsibilities as fathers with the expectation that they will enjoy virtually unquestioned authority over wives and children. These implicit contracts have economic, legal, cultural, and psychological dimensions. When parents have considerable economic leverage over family property, they can claim a share of adult children’s income. The age at which children begin to produce a surplus may affect their net costs to parents less than the age at which children gain control over their product or income. This in turn is related to the value of the assets and income parents control relative to what children can acquire on their own.21 But bargaining power cannot be conceptualized purely in terms of relative wealth and income. Negotiations between parents and children take place both on the cultural level and in explicit, table-pounding 108

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arguments. What does it mean to be a good son, a good daughter, a good father? What do the generations owe each other? Norms and preferences, as well as assets and rules, determine the ability that parents have to capture some economic payback from their children. The process of economic development, particularly the growth of opportunities for individual employment outside the family, often destabilizes the types of intergenerational income flows that provide parents with some compensation for raising children. Families in a weak class or race position, who have little in the way of financial assets, lose much of their economic leverage over children. Geographic mobility reduces the value of less tangible assets such as reputation and loyalty. Increased educational requirements put parents in a bind. On the one hand, they must invest in their children’s human capital to enhance their income-earning capabilities. On the other hand, once they have made this investment, they lose control over it. Parents may prefer to have their children continue to work on a family farm or business, or remain within their home community, even if this reduces children’s potential income. But an increase in the level of children’s income can more than counterbalance a decline in parental share. Pressures come to bear on the younger generation as well. Improvements in life expectancy may increase the cost of parents to children, who face a higher probability and cost of caring for them as dependents in old age. At the same time, working-age individuals may face increases in the cost of their own children due to declining work opportunities and expanding educational requirements for youth.22 The contentious and somewhat unpredictable transformation of intergenerational income flows varies enormously according to historical context. The pace and timing of the growth of individual wage employment, which has barely begun in some parts of the world, matters a great deal. The extent of geographic mobility is also relevant, since this diminishes informal exchange and assistance between the generations. In some cases, the perception that children are defaulting on economic responsibilities to aging parents leads to efforts to legally stipulate those obligations, but such laws are difficult to enforce without economic leverage. Some cultures seem particularly resistant to the corrosive forces of children’s economic independence. Others may be particularly vulnerable to imported or externally imposed norms of filial responsibility.23 Although causality is difficult to discern, social norms and preferences may change even before relative asset positions or rules. Parents may simply decide to spend more on their children and demand less from them in return. Or, parents may lower their economic expectations of children (and perhaps increase their psychological ones) partly as an adaptation to new circumstances. The growth of markets for capital and labor not only increases the economic options available to the younger generation; it also 109

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increases the flexibility of the older generation, which finds alternative sources of income security.24 Intergenerational transfers are openly contested in ways that can be empirically documented. In the 1970s, for instance, the East-West Institute conducted a number of studies entitled the International Value of Children surveys. Many respondents agreed that children were becoming less willing to support their parents in old age and to give part of their wages to their parents when they start working. In Hawaii, 41 per cent of respondents felt this way, in Thailand, 63 per cent, in Japan, 64 per cent. The following chapters of this book explore evidence of intergenerational conflict in Northwestern Europe, the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean.25 The extent to which children help ‘pay for themselves’ is linked to the extent to which mothers and fathers share the costs of parenthood. Biology dictates a certain inequality in distribution of the pain and risks of childbearing, but structures of constraint based on gender govern the ways in which men and women share other costs. Children may lower mothers’ current income or consumption patterns more than fathers’. They may increase mothers’ total work time more. Or, they may increase mothers’ risk of low income or poverty in the future. Of course, there may also be inequality in the distribution of the benefits of children. Widowed mothers may receive more assistance from their adult children than widowed fathers (certainly they are often more dependent on such assistance). The emotional, non-pecuniary benefits of childrearing may be greater for mothers than for fathers. Often women place more intrinsic value on parenthood than do men. But it is circular to assume that this balances the account; any pecuniary deficits can be made to disappear by post-hoc assertions of non-pecuniary benefits. The price that women are asked to pay is often higher than they anticipated. The fact that most would willingly pay it again out of love for their children doesn’t mean that they do not feel exploited by the lack of financial support from fathers or from society as a whole.26 The gender distribution of the costs of children has important ramifications for demographic decision-making. An increase in the percentage of total child care costs borne by men reduces their incentives to high fertility even more. It is fairly obvious, then, why improvements in the status of women are associated with fertility decline (a trend that William Thompson emphasized as early as 1824). But fertility decline does not automatically improve women’s position. It may simply reflect men’s self-interested response to the growing costs of children. Coercive anti-natalism is just as oppressive as coercive pro-natalism. Forced sterilizations or forced abortions are no less abusive than prohibitions on contraception or abortion. Both types of policy deny mothers’ rights in the name of some larger good defined primarily by men.27 110

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Women have strong collective interests as women—not necessarily in reducing their fertility but certainly in exercising choice over it. They also have strong collective interests as mothers in enforcing paternal responsibilities. While conditioned by specific economic, political, and cultural circumstances, women’s ability to pursue these interests is often enhanced by the economic independence that paid labor can afford them. Fertility decline cannot be described as a simple aggregation of individual choices to conceive or not to conceive. A circular, cumulative process of struggle over the distribution of the costs of children accompanies the technological changes associated with fertility decline. Precisely because it has a structural character, the process of adjustment to the changing costs and benefits of children is neither quick nor easy. In fact, it generally proves quite difficult, especially for women and children. Poverty and parenthood The same processes of economic development that encourage fertility decline also penalize efforts devoted to the care of children and other dependents. This unfortunate outcome cannot be attributed simply to modern technology or to cultural modernization. It is related to the ways in which these factors interact with traditional patriarchal structures of constraint and with more modern structures of constraint based on nation, race, and class. Parents are, at best, guessing about the possible costs of children, weighing these against a set of preferences that are shaped by social norms. Their guesses have long-run implications. Unlike other investments, children are not fungible; they cannot be bought or sold, traded or exchanged (though fostering and apprenticeship arrangements provide a bit of flexibility). Nor is it easy to achieve desired family size. Even where sex education is widespread and contraceptives widely available, family planning is prone to errors. Modern contraceptive technology offers, at best, a mean trade-off between reliability and women’s health. The high incidence of abortion in the United States, Japan, and many other countries testifies to the difficulties. Thus, even while men and women are responding to increases in the costs of children by modifying their individual and collective behavior, many are still forced to pay these higher costs. They turn their attention to strategies for coping with the intensified economic stress of parenthood. Men are in a stronger position than women to deal with (or avoid dealing with) this problem. When and where the costs of children are low, fathers generally maintain strong legal control over them, enjoy custody rights in the event of separation or divorce, and discourage outof-wedlock births. When and where the costs of children are high, however, fathers’ obligations tend to be reduced, mothers tend to be 111

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granted custody, and women are allowed, sometimes even encouraged, to bear children out of wedlock. Patterns of relative cost and parental obligation vary widely. But there is evidence that increases in the cost of children intensify the temptation to default. For reasons related to family law and social policy, as well as social norms and personal preferences, mothers tend to default less than fathers. They pay dearly for their commitment. Many of the individual rights that women gain are counterbalanced by the growing costs of motherhood. Improved access to divorce and greater rights to child custody for women make it easier for fathers to minimize their responsibility. The increased incidence of divorce and non-marriage would have little impact were it not for the failure to establish new forms of economic obligation to replace those of the formal marriage contract. New personal freedoms for women, such as the loosening of traditional sexual double standards, are often matched by new freedoms for men, including the increased availability of casual, responsibility-free sex. As the costs of children increase, men have greater incentives to resist legal specification of their child-support responsibilities. Mothers bearing children out of wedlock bear the burden of proof in paternity suits, which are often expensive to pursue in court. Levels of child-support payments in the wake of divorce are set in low absolute terms, rather than as a percentage of fathers’ income. As a result, affluent fathers stand to gain substantially from divorce. Enforcement of the child-support responsibilities of non-custodial parents is typically half-hearted and inadequate.28 Mothers are disadvantaged within two-parent families as well. They tend to spend a higher percentage of whatever income they earn on their children. They often bear the brunt of increased poverty by consuming even less and working even longer hours than their spouses. Availability of family planning sometimes means that women are blamed when it fails. Where extreme poverty drives families to infanticide, female children (with lower earnings potential) are the most likely to suffer neglect.29 Gays and lesbians are often able to take advantage of the new potential for autonomy that wage employment offers. The freedom to move from their communities of origin to develop communities of affinity has many liberating aspects. But gays and lesbians are seldom allowed to legalize their relationships or designate their partners beneficiaries of workrelated benefits. In many states they have difficulty gaining custody over their children in the event of divorce and face serious restrictions on their freedom to adopt children.30 Non-parents fare better economically than parents. They have more time and energy to devote to activities that yield an income, and need not share their income with dependents. Families with small children are overrepresented among the poor, and given groups that place a high cultural and personal value on childrearing suffer economically. One 112

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result is that efforts to recognize and valorize family labor imply a redistribution of income from rich to poor, from white families to people of color. Thus, interests based on nation, race, and class come into play. The growth of individual mobility and economic independence from the patriarchal family provides incentives to renegotiate family law and social norms. This process contributes to fertility decline and a new tolerance of sexual diversity. Yet it begins long before women have garnered the economic bargaining power, political organization, or cultural awareness they need to effectively defend their collective interests. As a result, the new terms of endearment reproduce, even intensify, some gender inequalities. Families maintained by women alone The clearest demographic manifestation of gender inequality associated with economic development is the growing incidence, in many areas of the world, of families maintained by women alone. This phenomenon is difficult to measure accurately, not only because statisticians and censustakers do not pay much attention to it, but also because they continue to use categories that reflect out-dated assumptions. In some ways, the story of evolving census terminology is more telling than the numbers themselves. Until recently, demographers relied on one summary measure of the gender composition of households—the incidence of female ‘headship.’ This is a politically charged term that embodies the assumptions of patriarchal family law. The Roman legacy of Patria Potestas, which shaped all European legal systems, explicitly stipulated the political authority of the elder male as ‘head.’ The convention was exported to much of the developing world through the imposition of colonial rule. With very few exceptions, households are designated ‘female-headed’ only if no adult male is present.31 In the 1970s, largely in response to organized protest from women, many countries modified their legal definitions of household headship, adopting more gender-neutral family laws. At the same time, national and international statistical agencies began to develop a new, less politically charged terminology. The US Census Bureau led the way, adopting the term ‘householder’ for the 1970 census. Respondents could themselves choose who would be the household ‘reference person.’32 The United Nations moved relatively quickly to recommend a similar nomenclature for other countries ‘where spouses are considered equal in household authority and responsibility.’ In publications such as the UN’s Demographic Yearbook, the term ‘householder’ is used to encompass all variations in ‘household head/reference person’ concepts. However, virtually all developing countries continue to use the ‘household head’ nomenclature. Typically, the head is defined as the person ‘recognized as such’ by the members of the household. 113

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In other words, the apparently neutral terminology simply defers to existing cultural norms. In most circumstances, a woman living with a father, husband, brother, or other male kin would not be considered a household head even if she were the only person employed or contributing income to the household. Only a very few national and international agencies have recently conducted surveys examining the flow of income among family members. As a result, we can only guess at trends in the percentage of families maintained by women alone on the global level. The record on household headship is clearest for the countries of Europe and the United States. We know that the percentage of households with no adult male resident has increased substantially since 1950. In these, the most economically developed regions of the world, women are far more likely than men to be single parents. They assume a disproportionate share of the escalating costs of children. Some regions of the developing world have a long tradition of female headship. In many areas of Latin America and the Caribbean, the predominance of common law rather than legally enforceable marriage has left mothers with very weak claims on fathers’ incomes. The pattern first emerged in an economic context in which children were not terribly costly. What happens to mothers, then, as the costs of children begin to rise? The bright side of female headship is the potential for independence from men. But mothers, in particular, are shadowed by increased financial responsibility for dependents. The freedom to live alone is generally more valuable to adult men than women, because it allows them to reduce, if not escape, their family obligations. If we believe that these obligations have intrinsic value, we must conclude that fathers lose something important as well. The re-valorization of family labor The trends that promote fertility decline, like those that promote increases in female participation in paid employment, have a contradictory impact. On the one hand, they increase individual capabilities and choices and probably enhance economic efficiency. On the other hand, they contribute to a devalorization of family labor that has some negative consequences, particularly in a historical context in which many women and children are vulnerable to poverty. One way to further explain this contradictory impact is to draw upon a distinction that Gary Becker and other neoclassical economists have developed between child ‘quantity’ and child ‘quality,’ but apply it in a different way. Becker argues that fertility declines in the course of economic development in part because the demand for child quality, defined as the amount of money spent on each child, increases with income. Parents choose to have fewer children in part so they can spend more on each.33 114

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The preceding sections argue that this may be the outcome of constraint as well as choice. But the point here is that the same structural pressures that have discouraged individuals from having large numbers of children (reducing child quantity) have also made it difficult for individuals in weak class, race, and gender positions to increase time and money devoted to children already born (limiting child quality). This poses a serious dilemma for those who believe (as I do) that low levels of fertility are a desirable social goal, conducive to higher standards of living and greater ecological sustainability. The most powerful stimuli to fertility decline can have a disturbing side-effect: a decline in the economic wellbeing of many children already born. And this has negative economic consequences at least as serious as overpopulation: waste of human capital and violation of basic principles of equal opportunity. A common objection to policies aimed at improving the wellbeing of families with young children, particularly in developing countries, is that they will have a pro-natalist impact. But while this objection bears consideration, it can be met by serious efforts to devise broader and better kinds of support for non-market work that are consistent with social goals regarding population growth. First, support for family labor need not be defined simply in terms of support for raising one’s own children. The care that individuals offer to children of friends and family, and to sick or elderly family members or friends, should also be valued and rewarded. An important and inspiring model of caring labor not necessarily limited to biological families is the personal support and assistance that friends and lovers often provide for those suffering from AIDS. Second, policies that reinforce children’s claims upon their fathers’ incomes are unlikely to have a pro-natalist impact. While they lower the cost of children to mothers, they increase the cost to fathers, giving them a greater incentive to take responsibility for birth control. Under some conditions, such as inability to care for them, both fathers and mothers should be able to relinquish responsibility for their offspring. But current structures of constraint based on gender place mothers at a distinct disadvantage in this respect. Third, the provision of greater support for children does not necessarily encourage their parents or primary care-givers to specialize in raising large numbers of children. In fact, it can be designed in ways that encourage greater integration of paid and unpaid work (consistent with the second scenario of work reorganization described in the first section of this chapter). Efforts to re-valorize family labor could actively discourage high fertility while respecting reproductive rights. One of the functional aspects of traditional patriarchal structures of constraint lay in the incentives they provided for the care of the very young and the very old. The transition from a family-based to an individual wage 115

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economy encourages fertility decline, but also renders those unable to garner a decent wage (the sick and elderly as well as the young and their mothers) increasingly vulnerable to poverty. Not surprisingly, the process of economic development tends to generate a new set of institutions to deal with these problems—the welfare state. As the next section demonstrates, however, these institutions have a very uneven impact. THE EMERGENCE OF WELFARE STATES In advanced industrial societies, whether capitalist or socialist, the family loses some (though by no means all) of its significance for economic welfare. The growth of formal education diminishes the role of parents and kin in conveying skills. The development of capital markets encourages savings, and the expansion of labor markets makes parents and children less economically dependent on one another. Individuals can save money in middle age to hire others to care for them when they are old. They can buy health insurance to provide for themselves when they are sick. If they earn enough income, they can buy substitutes for most of the goods and services once provided primarily within families. These processes of commodification can take place either through the market or the state. In many countries, however, the state plays a particularly important role in socializing many of the implicit contracts of the patriarchal family that established responsibility for the care and security of family members. Like that patriarchal family, the state generally places a disproportionate share of that responsibility on women. Not incidentally, the adjective ‘unproductive,’ typically used to describe women’s non-market work, is also widely applied to social spending. In the United States, social welfare programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children are criticized for lowering work incentives and dragging productivity down. In the international arena, the World Bank promotes policies of ‘structural adjustment’ and fiscal austerity that demand cuts on social spending on health, education, and assistance to the poor. The rise of welfare state policies reflects a combination of technological and social trends. On the one hand, spreading the risks and responsibilities of income security increases efficiency (the principle behind all modern insurance systems). On the other hand, once such income flows are institutionalized by the state, some groups organize more effectively than others to increase their claims. Neoclassical theorists tend to describe these trends either in terms of ‘market failure’ or the ‘rent-seeking’ behavior of special interest groups. Marxian theorists tend to describe them in terms of conflict between capital and labor over the distribution of social surplus. But conflict between given groups based on age and gender also plays an important part in the melodrama of the welfare state. 116

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The social security systems common in economically developed countries offer a generous substitute for one of the functions of the traditional patriarchal family, income security and support in old age. Family allowances and/or income transfers to families with dependent children, however, provide at best partial compensation for the costs of childbearing and childrearing. As a result, welfare state policies do little to improve the wellbeing of parents and children, especially those in weak class and race positions. ‘Family failure’ The growth of state spending as a percentage of total output in the advanced capitalist countries over the last fifty years has been steady and significant. Nor has its upward creep been significantly slowed by the anti-social-spending rhetoric of recent years. This trend is really something of a paradox. On the one hand, the market economies congratulate themselves on outperforming the state-run economies. On the other hand, their own entitlement programs are rapidly expanding. Part of the explanation lies in the conventions of our accounting system, which measures public, but not private transfers. Just as the growth in so called ‘female labor force participation rates’ conceals the decline in time devoted to non-market services, the apparent growth in social spending obscures declines in private transfers. When working age adults pay taxes into an old age security system, their elderly parents receive a stipend that relieves their children of much responsibility for supporting them. When poor people enjoy some public assistance, private contributions from neighbors and kin are often reduced. Even in countries as economically developed as the United States, private transfers among family members far exceed public transfers. Married women without paying jobs and children under age 19 in the US total about 97.6 million, about 40 per cent of the total population. Only 4.5 million women receive Aid to Families with Dependent Children. That leaves about 93.1 million individuals largely dependent on ‘aid’ from family members. It is interesting to note that recipients of private aid, unlike those who receive public aid, are seldom publicly accused of being lazy or undeserving.34 Yet the sum total of family transfers per capita today is far lower than it has been in the past, because more women are working for pay and families have fewer children. Also, many costs that were once borne largely by family members—care of the sick, the poor, the young, and the elderly—are now shared by the citizenry as a whole. Previously invisible costs are being moved to a visible place in our national income accounts. Why are these costs gradually moving from the family to the state? ‘Market failure’ helps explain part of the demand for public provision of 117

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social services. Under some conditions, markets just do not exist, as when one firm is able to take advantage of economies of scale and dominate an industry, or when no exclusive property rights can be established. It is hard to buy and sell common resources like air, water, or climate. Sometimes the consequences of a market transaction affect others who are not party to it, creating negative externalities such as pollution. Sometimes it is impossible to separate supply and demand, as in health care, where the physicians who supply services also prescribe the demand for them. Sometimes putative national interests are at stake, as with military budgets. Health and education are public goods, in the sense that they improve the wellbeing of the economy as a whole. Because individual decisions in these areas have important social consequences, they are seldom left entirely to individual choice. Old age security programs emerged for similar reasons. Individuals may lack sufficient foresight or ability to save for their old age. More importantly, savings may be unreliable unless banks are publicly insured against failure. Still, it is difficult to explain social spending entirely in terms of market failure. The logic of class conflict contributes some additional insights. The growth of many public welfare programs reflects working-class demands, pursued collectively through the electoral process. Unemployment insurance, for instance, clearly increases the bargaining power of wageearners because it buffers the consequences of being laid off or fired. But other social programs cannot really be explained in class terms. Furthermore, the state is just as prone to serious failures as the market, as when a political elite or a set of bureaucratic managers aggrandize themselves, or when powerful interest groups dominate.35 Consideration of ‘market failure’ and ‘state failure’ needs to be accompanied by serious consideration of ‘family failure.’ The mainstream literature uses this term to refer only to broken marriages, or divorce, but it should be defined more broadly as the failure of healthy working age adults to provide adequately for dependent family members. Economists tend to notice such failures when they can be blamed on state social spending programs. Some argue, for instance, that public old age security programs discourage private intergenerational transfers. Others insist that income security programs for single mothers create significant incentives to non-marriage and divorce.36 But family failures often take place even in the absence of public transfer programs. And they are often intensified by the process of economic development, which, as the preceding sections argue, tends to diminish intra-family income flows. The growth of non-family-based employment diminishes the economic incentives to care for dependents. All implicit contracts based on sharing and reciprocity among kin become increasingly susceptible to default. This does not imply that everyone suddenly abandons all their family responsibilities; clearly they do not. 118

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But the risk of default increases. Public transfer programs may indeed replace or undermine certain types of intra-family transfers. On the other hand, they are generally adopted in the first place as a response to a decline in those transfers. Economists typically use the term ‘moral hazard’ to describe the tendency to be careless (or even dishonest) in a situation in which one is protected by insurance—for example, the temptation to drive carelessly because your car is insured, or to wreck it intentionally to collect on your policy. The temptation is particularly high if the costs of monitoring are high and the chances of getting caught are low. The problem of moral hazard applies to families as well as to more impersonal institutions. Why feel compelled to care for children or other dependents if you know that another family member will do it in your absence? The costs of caring for the very young and very old (and the sick) increase as it becomes more difficult to integrate this care with other, more directly productive activities. Fertility decline and geographic mobility diminish the size of kin networks. As a result, risk sharing with a larger group through social insurance is safer and more efficient than relying on a small kin network vulnerable to unexpected illness, mortality, and default. Also, relieving kin of total economic responsibility makes it easier for them to provide the kinds of personal and emotional support they alone can provide. Joseph Schumpeter asserted long ago that capitalist economic systems undermine traditional family values. Many social norms that enforce larger, more general concepts of familial commitment are weakened by a growing emphasis on self-realization. Indeed, the discipline of economics itself extols the virtues of rational pursuit of self-interest. But Schumpeter failed to recognize the gendered aspect of this process. As long as male individualism is counterbalanced by female altruism, as long as rational economic man is taken care of by irrational altruistic woman, families play a particularly important (and unfair) role. But when women gain the freedom to act more like men, pursuing their rational self-interest, the price of caring labor goes up. More of it must be purchased in the market, provided by the state or shared by men.37 Schumpeter put almost exclusive emphasis on changes in norms and preferences associated with economic development. Equally relevant are changes in asset distributions and political rules. Family failure is an institutional, not merely a cultural problem. State social programs are not a completely efficient or adequate response to family failures, but they are, at least in part, a response. Neither their origins nor their effects can be fully understood independently of the interaction between labor markets, institutional change, and intra-family income flows.

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The concept of social security The modern welfare state was born in Northwestern Europe in the late nineteenth century, when a clever Prussian realized that a social insurance scheme for workers would strengthen the new German nation. From the very outset, the rhetoric of welfare drew upon the image of the state as patriarchal family writ large. Many state policies were engendered by changes in the relationship between the family and the larger economy. Although programs such as old age security and family allowances provided substitutes for intra-family income transfers, they also reinforced some traditional inequalities. The Swedish economist Alva Myrdal summarized a widely held view when she wrote, in 1941: Changes in the economic structure of society weaken the family as an institution. Unproductive age groups have no assured place in the new economic order of individualistic money-making in nation-wide competitive markets…. Since we cannot, and do not want to, revert to an agrarian or patriarchal order, some collectivistic devices must be instituted in the larger national household to substitute for the relative security enjoyed in the family household of old.38 Her theoretical perspective was simplistic—describing a weakening of ‘the family’ in the abstract, rather than pointing to the weakening of patriarchal structures of constraint. And her political perspective was overly optimistic, identifying patriarchy as a relic of the past and expressing almost complete confidence in the new ‘collectivistic devices.’ Still, Myrdal correctly identified the important relationship between the family and the state when she referred to ‘the larger national household.’ The notion that the young should support the old built on traditional patriarchal culture at the same time that it relieved younger men and women of the responsibility of supporting their individual parents. The assumption that women would continue to provide services to family members at a relatively low cost promised to keep the welfare state within bounds. Demographics also exerted no uncertain influence. The elderly comprised a small share of the total population. With fertility decline, however, the relative size of the elderly cohort began to grow. Workers fought for old age security on the grounds that low wages left them little scope for savings. Standardization of work schedules, as well as increased intensity of work, made it more difficult for men to ease gradually into retirement. Those who could no longer fulfill standard responsibilities lost their jobs. Wage labor was less adaptable to old age than self-employment. Racial and ethnic divisions also played a part. Sweden, an ethnically homogeneous country, moved quickly to provide almost its entire 120

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population with social insurance. The United States, at the other extreme, not only moved slowly, but excluded a majority of black and Latino workers (farm laborers and domestic servants) from social security during its first twenty years of existence. Gender differences and patriarchal social norms also shaped the specifics of old age security. In most countries, the concept of the family wage, which had enjoyed limited success in the market, was institutionalized by the state. Retirement benefits, unlike wages, typically included a spouse benefit to cover the expenses of a dependent wife (workers’ husbands were not initially covered). Thus, married workers fared better than single ones, and married men enjoyed greater benefits than married women. While widows typically received some benefits, divorced or separated women lacked a legal claim on their husband’s retirement income. Gays and lesbians, not allowed to marry their chosen partners, were obviously penalized.39 In Northwestern Europe and the United States, many gender-biased provisions have been reformed. In most areas of Latin America, however, where old age security programs were modeled on the European system, gender bias remains widespread. And in virtually all countries, the legacy of the family wage concept remains embodied in income tax provisions that treat the family as a unit with one breadwinner and a housewife along with other dependents qualifying for deductions. Such policies implicitly recognize the social importance and economic value of family labor, but reward it primarily when it takes place within a household headed by a married male wage-earner. Further, they tax the second earner at a very high marginal rate, discouraging women’s labor force participation. In Japan, as well as the US and Northwestern Europe, tax policies subsidize male-headed single-earner families and accentuate differences between male and female job experience and earnings.40 The welfare state, like the patriarchal family on which it is modeled, shoulders considerable responsibility for the care of dependents. In this sense, it represents a family writ large. Also, like the patriarchal family, it reinforces gender and age inequality. The assistance it provides to mothers and children is less generous than transfers to other groups, such as older men. Family allowances In most countries of Northwestern Europe, and, later, in many countries in the developing world, old age security has been supplemented by family allowance programs and/or tax deductions that subsidize at least some of the costs of rearing children. A patchwork of collective interests influenced the programs that emerged. The political empowerment of women brought new support for the 121

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concept of the progressive family state. Feminists argued for enfranchisement with the assertion that women were more likely than men to vote for their principles rather than their self-interest. Opponents often argued that the results would be disastrous. Herbert Spencer, for instance, warned that women were too altruistic to be allowed to vote, that they would allow the welfare state to run amuck. His apprehensions were obviously overblown. Yet the historical relationship, in the US and Northwestern Europe, between the enfranchisement of women and new legislative initiatives on behalf of women and children is more than incidental.41 In Europe, in particular, nationalism fueled the desire to maintain a strong army and to promote population growth sufficient to defend cultural pride and ethnic identity. Extensive out-migration during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, much of it concentrated in the younger age groups, increased the vulnerability of dependent groups. High male mortality resulting from World War I left many families without fathers. Generals worried more than economists about the size of the next generation, the armies of the future. In the British case, at least, they also paid their soldiers according to the number of children they were supporting, providing a genuine family wage.42 The Catholic Church, with intensely pro-natalist views, encouraged employers to pay married men with families more. A significant number of employers complied in the first two decades of the century, but the policy brought complaints from single men, who were being paid less for doing the same work. At the same time, feminists within the social democratic parties (as well as without) insisted that mothers and their children needed greater income security. The solution that emerged explicitly ‘socialized’ part of the cost of children by providing family allowances. Political conditions were far different in the United States, where racial and ethnic inequalities remained pronounced and rapid in-migration contributed to a sense of population pressure. There, official pro-natalism took the form of eugenic recommendations that native-born whites should bear more children, while all others should bear fewer. While federal policies eventually provided some income assistance to mother/ child families living in poverty, and implemented some tax deduction provisions, family allowance policies were never adopted. Conditions also varied in Latin America. The legacy of colonialism included the concept of the family wage, especially for state employees. Political and trade union movements modeled on European precedents fought for state ‘social wage’ policies that included family allowances for a small subset of wage-earners. Typically, such policies cover an even smaller percentage of the population than social programs in the United States. Family allowance systems vary widely, but all share a common characteristic. They defray only a small percentage of the cost of children, 122

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and fail to protect women adequately from the increased risk of poverty that motherhood imposes. In recent years, many European countries have increased their allowances, hoping to motivate higher birth rates. Their efforts have been largely unsuccessful—not surprising, given the large gap between subsidies and rapidly increasing costs. It is as though policy-makers are afraid to ask what the actual cost of rearing the next generation is, because this might raise the question of who is actually paying for it. Contemporary welfare states redistribute income in perverse ways. Taxpayers support the sick and elderly. Parents produce the taxpayers of the next generation. But taxpayers do not adequately support parents. It follows that people who do not devote time and energy to childrearing are free riding on other people’s labor. The top-heavy age pyramid Because most accounts of the emergence of social insurance ignore the role of given groups based on gender and age, they tend to describe elements of gender bias as a lag in policy responses to the changing social roles of men and women. The International Labour Office, cognizant of the problem, often treats it as a simple matter of bringing programs up to date. But the treatment of women within social security programs does not simply reflect gender roles within society as a whole; it reinforces those roles. Because many traditional provisions of social security serve the collective economic interests of men better than those of women, we can expect considerable political resistance to reform—more than ‘modernization’ is at stake.43 The low level of public support for childrearing contributes to fertility decline, and, ironically, fertility decline leads to diminished support for childrearing. When a relatively small percentage of the population is actually raising children, their political voice is weak. The elderly, on the other hand, speak in concert. They have already raised their children; their claims are staked on those currently in the working ages, not on the taxpayers of the future. In the long run, a dilemma looms. Low fertility rates are economically advantageous. But rapid fertility decline, in conjunction with increases in life expectancy, inverts the traditional population pyramid and diminishes the size of the working age population relative to the elderly. When there are 20 workers for every retiree, relatively low taxes can provide for old age security. As that number drops, tax increases are required. What happens when there is only 1 worker for every retiree? Or when there is only 0.5? Of course, the number will not necessarily drop that low; the effects can be significantly postponed. Retirement age could be increased. Immigration of educated, skilled workers could be encouraged. Once sick, 123

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disabled, or past a certain age, they could be deported. The costs of social reproduction, in other words, could be conveniently redistributed across national lines. In the end, however, the costs of social reproduction must be paid. They cannot be continually postponed, or passed on to the next generation. Like the costs of a healthy environment, they are largely external to the market economy. But these externalities constrain its longrun possibilities of success. One might suggest, following the standard precepts of neoclassical theory, that the private and social rates of return to childrearing should be brought into balance—those who receive the benefits should also pay the costs. The methodological and political difficulties of doing so are awesome. It would be difficult to calculate exactly what the current working age population owes to the parents of young children, in return for the taxes they expect to levy on their offspring. But by almost any calculation, the public acknowledgement that caring for dependents constitutes productive labor would lead to considerable redistribution of income from men to women, and from rich to poor. Re-thinking the welfare state The modern welfare state emerged from a particular dynamic between patriarchal structures of constraint and a process of economic development in which collective identities and interests based on nation, race, and class played a decisive role. It is hardly surprising that it internalized and reproduced some inequalities based on gender, age, and sexual preference. What is surprising, and indeed ironic, is that the failure to adequately recognize and valorize family labor threatens the very future of the welfare state. The welfare state should recognize the value of family labor and provide greater support for children without threatening the welfare of other dependants such as the elderly. But simple increases in spending on parents and children are not sufficient. The distribution of that spending among groups defined by nation, race, class, gender, and sexual preference matters a great deal. Also, many specific welfare state programs fail to meet the needs of dependents, because they are organized in inefficient and undemocratic ways. Many of the inadequacies of the welfare state are related to problems in the organization of work and family life described in the previous two sections. If paid labor were restructured to allow individuals sufficient flexibility to meet the needs of their families and communities, if the responsibilities of family labor were more equally shared among men and women, old and young, then transfer and entitlement programs could contribute more effectively and fairly to social reproduction. 124

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Economic development and the family The growth of paid labor, the appearance of new family forms, and the emergence of state welfare programs reflect a reorganization of the process of caring for ourselves, children, and other dependents. Many aspects of the process of economic development increase the scope for individual choice. At the same time, they weaken family commitments, which are not a necessary, naturally altruistic, or simply ‘traditional’ way of organizing society, but a product of patriarchal structures of constraint. Economic development is not a happy march of unambiguous progress, but a contradictory process that creates new problems even as it solves old ones. Another common theme of all three sections of this chapter is the pathdependent nature of historical change, the ways that traditional inequalities based on gender and age are reproduced and internalized within modern institutions such as the internal labor market, the mother-headed family, and the welfare state. The persistence of patriarchal power has implications not only for social inequality, but also for the ability of modern economies to promote healthy and sustainable development. However speculative, these hypotheses help explain the relevance of the concepts developed in Chapters 1 and 2 to a better understanding of the process of economic development. They provide a framework for re-thinking some of the most important themes of comparative economic history.

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Part II HISTORIES OF SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION TO PART II

Economic history has, for most of its life, been conducted primarily by men preoccupied with the male world of market work and production in the public arena. Today, a growing interest in women’s history and family history is generating new and exciting research, but much of it remains confined to its own, private sphere. The very concept of ‘family history’ implies that the history of a particular site of relations, the family, can be told in isolation from the economy as a whole. The concept of social reproduction, on the other hand, calls attention to the traditionally female world of family labor, but points beyond the family itself to the larger organization of power and production. The following chapters ask how structures of constraint shaped the distribution of the costs of caring for dependents over the course of economic development in Northwestern Europe, the United States, and Latin America and the Caribbean. They illustrate the themes developed in the previous chapter: the relationship between different forms of patriarchal power, the expansion of wage employment, the growing cost of families, and the rise of state social welfare programs. History is full of contending puzzles, and every exploration of it entails choices about what to emphasize. Here, I try to connect new arguments to old debates, to answer traditional questions about the transition to capitalism and the demographic transition to lower fertility rates in nontraditional ways. The narrative explores time-honored motifs such as European social democracy, United States ‘exceptionalism,’ and Latin American underdevelopment in order to show that the concepts of collective identity and action developed in preceding chapters offer some important historical insights. While historians are more difficult to sort into distinct schools of thought than economists, many can be identified as members of a neoclassical or a Marxian school. They scrutinize history through a telephoto lens that focuses, respectively, on individual choice, on class, or simply on ‘institutions.’ The resulting image, however detailed, offers a 129

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very incomplete picture of the whole. A more wide-angle lens is used here, with more panoramic intent. Widening the concept of the ‘economy’ to include non-market labor requires more than merely widening the scope of economic history to include changes in family relations. Although an ample body of feminist historical research documents the pursuit of gender interests, little attention has been devoted to forms of collective action based on age, and even less to forms based on sexual preference. Likewise, historical research on the collective pursuit of class interests far outweighs that devoted to race. Reliance on the existing literature always limits the scope of revisionist history, but completely new narratives lie beyond the reach of this project anyway. Its intent is simply to illustrate an alternative perspective that might alter existing research agendas and generate corroborating evidence. In the process, it should also provoke economic historians to think more carefully about the social history of both feminism and the family. Conceptualizing structures of constraint in terms of assets, rules, norms, and preferences invites insights from all the humanities and social sciences, even where lack of information means that many potential contributions remain undeveloped. The ways in which groups conceptualize and define their collective interests are really inseparable from the issue of how they pursue them. Cultural innovation is as much a cause as a consequence of economic change. The following chapters emphasize economic, demographic, and political trends more than cultural ones partly because the former are easier to reconstruct. They do not suggest that cultural values are unimportant, rather that different societies, under the force of common pressures, move in similar directions. Even if they never converge, they may follow a comparable trajectory. The success or failure of feminist efforts to mobilize women on behalf of their interests as women is strongly affected by simultaneous efforts to mobilize individuals on behalf of other collective interests. Obviously, many other specific factors are relevant, such as how states are organized. But the similarities between feminism and other social movements aiming to modify unfair structures of constraint suggest that they should be studied in concert. A broad comparison of trends in Northwestern Europe, the United States, and Latin America and the Caribbean is worthwhile especially because it highlights the impact of national, racial, and class relations on families and on feminism. Countries that began experiencing economic growth at an earlier date affected the pattern of growth in other countries. Countries that were racially homogeneous were generally more effective in pursuing their national interests than those that were racially divided. Extreme class and race inequalities had an inhibiting effect on feminist efforts to organize women. 130

INTRODUCTION TO PART II

Differences in emphasis in the chapters that follow largely reflect the uneven historiography on which they are based. Often, issues explored at length in some contexts have hardly been raised in others, making it difficult to establish parallels. Wherever possible, I use basic census data to establish benchmarks for trends in the structure of families and the paid labor force, but broad comparisons inevitably gloss over important details. Whatever their limitations, these histories of social reproduction contribute to a better picture of economic development and its impact on social welfare. They invite more extensive and intensive attempts to study collective efforts to contest unfair structures of constraint.

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4 NORTHWESTERN EUROPE

Most accounts of the ‘transition to capitalism’ and the ‘rise of the welfare state’ have centered on the experience of Northwestern Europe. Therefore, this region remains an important testing ground, even for revisionist history that hopes to escape the limitations of traditional Eurocentrism. Many factors help to explain why the countries of Northwestern Europe followed a unique trajectory of economic growth that built upon and contributed to their strong international position in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Among these were distinctive gender- and age-based structures of constraint. Changes in European families may well have contributed to some aspects of European economic success, but they also created certain problems that social welfare policies sought to address. Consideration of the role that patriarchal power played in the organization of social reproduction in Northwestern Europe requires some major revisions of the traditional Marxian story of class conflict and technological change. It also requires some major revisions of the traditional neoclassical story that stresses changing relative prices and the development of more efficient property rights. The questions posed here are particularly important to women and the family, but also pertain to society as a whole. Did forms of collective power based on gender, age, and sexual preference systematically constrain individual choices? If so, what were the economic and demographic consequences? How did such structures of constraint change over time? Is there evidence of explicit collective struggle over them? How were such struggles affected by structures of constraint and forms of collective action based on nation, class, and race? A comprehensive answer to any one of these five questions, applied to a very specific historical context, would require a book in itself. The following discussion simply shows that the existing historical literature on Northwestern Europe (Great Britain in particular) provides considerable evidence of the impact of changing forms of patriarchal power over a period of time that most scholars consider particularly crucial to our understanding of economic development and change.1 The first section of this chapter explains why patriarchal structures of 132

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constraint had economic, demographic, and political consequences for feudal society. They contributed to a rapid rate of population growth that became an impetus to technological change. They also influenced the particular form taken by efforts to slow population growth. The expansion of labor markets had a destabilizing effect, but gender-based inequalities were incorporated into, rather than displaced by, new institutions such as the factory. The influence of given groups based on gender, age, and sexual preference was reflected in the evolution of laws, cultural norms, and explicit forms of collective struggle. The second section pursues similar themes, but focuses on the social repercussions of family failure, the political efforts of social democrats and feminists, and the emergence of state social spending. Groups mobilized around their age and gender interests shaped the evolution of European welfare states. These states provide one of the best social safety nets in the world, but they have yet to solve a major problem in the realm of social reproduction: a high incidence of poverty among mothers and children. CLASS, GENDER, AND AGE IN THE TRANSITION TO CAPITALISM The conceptualization of ‘capitalism’ has been deeply influenced by accounts of its origins within a social formation long described simply as ‘feudalism.’ The feudal relations of production that so many historians have documented were primarily relations among adult men-kings, lords, vassals, and serfs. But relations between parents and children, men and women, were equally significant, and these relations were no less ‘economic’ than those based on class. When linked to feudal class constraints, patriarchal constraints encouraged high fertility and hampered the operation of labor markets. Yet they also proved adaptable to fertility decline and the development of a new sexual division of labor outside the family, within the capitalist firm. In some respects, the growth of wage employment empowered women. By the late nineteenth century, feminist groups all across Europe had publicized the demand for women’s rights and won some important gains. But women remained occupationally segregated and underpaid. Because they continued to specialize in family labor they became particularly vulnerable to the new economic pressures that capitalist development imposed on families. The structure of patriarchal feudalism Although many aspects of the historical record remain opaque, it seems clear that both the expansion of the Roman empire and the later spread of Christianity entailed a certain consolidation of patriarchal constraints. 133

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These proved quite complementary to the emergence of a feudal system in which a class of men wielding military power was able to establish and institutionalize control over peasant families. Both feudal and patriarchal relations were structural, in the sense that they spanned economic, political, cultural, and psychological dimensions and were clearly reinforced by organized violence. The traditional family forms of the Northern European countries conquered by Rome were various, but the empire established absolute primacy of inheritance in the male line. The Roman law of Patria Potestas bestowed the male head of household with the right of life and death over family members and the right to sell family members into slavery. The origins of the word ‘family’ can be traced to the term ‘famulus,’ or slave. Modified by Christianity, with its strict proscriptions against infanticide, ‘the power of fathers’ was a consistent principle of the feudal order, both within the family and without.2 Roman culture and the later development of Christianity encouraged the spread of patriarchal norms. The pre-Hellenic religions of the Mediterranean featured female deities, often served by female priestesses. These were displaced by the classical Greek pantheon which included many goddesses but was ruled by Zeus. Rome initially adopted the Greek pantheon, but by the third century many of its citizens had converted to Christian views which, building on Judaism, recognized only one god, the Father Almighty. Christianity was forcibly imposed on many Northern European tribes that initially practiced pagan religions in which women ‘witches’ played an important role.3 Early Christianity was actually somewhat ‘anti-family’ in its emphasis on a spiritual, rather than material, father. As it became institutionalized, however, its theologians began to develop a view of the world quite relevant to secular life. St. Augustine described women as morally and mentally inferior to men, and ascribed feminine characteristics to the deadly sins. Official doctrines became increasingly pro-natalist, condemning abortion, infanticide, contraception, and homosexuality. By the twelfth century Catholic theologians had consolidated a theoretical position that equated contraception with witchcraft and homicide. Opposition to the Manichean and Cathar ‘heresies’ clarified the Church’s encouragement of procreation within marriage. In the thirteenth century, St. Thomas Aquinas included masturbation, intercourse with animals, homosexual intercourse, and nonprocreative heterosexual coitus in a long list of vices against nature.4 By this time, ecclesiastical jurisdiction over marriage had been established in most of Western Europe. The Church, by insisting on the consent of prospective brides and grooms, curtailed the power of fathers to control their children’s marriage decisions. At the same time, increased centralization of power by both Church and royalty, enhanced perhaps by the xenophobia associated with the Crusades, contributed to an 134

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intensification of efforts to outlaw all sexual activities that were not conducive to conception. John Boswell argues that between 1250 and 1300, homosexual activity passed from being completely legal in most of Europe to incurring the death penalty in all but a few legal codes.5 Laws and statutes against sodomy did not have the specific meaning that they do today, because sodomy was often defined as any ‘unnatural’ sexual act. Coitus interruptus, and any intercourse outside ‘the fit vessel,’ were often included. David Greenberg notes that a Dutch writer of the sixteenth century ‘even counted intercourse with Turks, Saracens, and Jews as sodomitical, on the grounds that Christian faith counted these infidels as equivalent to “dogs and animals.”’6 The power of the father over his wife and children served as a template for feudal structures of constraint that treated the lord as a father exercising natural, God-given authority over his family. When Sir Robert Filmer wrote that the King of England derived his authority from the original father, Adam, and when Nikolai Bogachev argued that a peasant who respected his parents must respect the Czar, they were asserting a chain of command that fortified men’s control over women and children in return for their own allegiance to a bigger, stronger father. This hierarchy defined the character of all relations between men and women.7 Yet patriarchal and class structures of constraint were not completely harmonious. The power of the lord may have been modeled on the power of the father, but it inevitably attenuated the power of individual men. In England, for instance, William the Conqueror imposed husbands on all the daughters of his vassals, despite their fathers’ loud protests that this should be their own prerogative. Vassals, in turn, wielded enormous power over the peasant families who provided them with labor services. Patriarchal power was always mediated by class (and vice versa). Fathers of the landholding classes had less to gain from the labor of their family members than from control over alliances and intergenerational transmission of property. The consolidation of authority and descent in the male line and extreme forms of control over women’s sexual activities were symbolized by the forged iron chastity belt. A well-born wife’s primary responsibility was to provide the lineage with legitimate sons. Daughters inherited property only in the absence of a male heir, and the dower they received upon marriage was seldom equivalent in value to the shares of real wealth that their brothers received.8 Among peasant families, women and children were a crucial source of labor in agricultural and household production. If the family could be termed an economic partnership, it was by no means an equal one. Userights to land, like property, typically descended in the male line. As wives participating in a family enterprise, women occasionally engaged in high status occupations that were proscribed for single women and widows. But for the most part, official guild rules and informal restrictions 135

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excluded them from highly skilled, well-paying jobs. Women were constrained by explicit restrictions on the type of education and training they could receive and the types of jobs they were allowed to perform. Wages, often set by law and custom, were lower for women even where they performed the same work as men.9 The legacy of Patria Potestas restricted women’s legal rights. Once married, they lost their independent status as individuals. According to a prominent English jurist, a woman was obliged to obey her husband in everything, as long as he did not order her to do something in violation of Divine Law. Few restrictions were set on domestic violence; in England and France a husband had a legal right to physically abuse his wife as long as he did her no ‘lasting’ harm. Although men had a legal duty to support their wives, the level of support was seldom specified or enforced.10 Descriptions of leisure activities in feudal art and literature pertain almost entirely to men, suggesting that women seldom had time to indulge. Children began to contribute useful labor to the household at a relatively early age, and men with healthy, hard-working wives and large numbers of children were best able to accumulate a small surplus. The most successful patriarchs may well have become the first capitalists.11 Children remained under paternal authority long past the age of economic dependence. In the thirteenth century, provision for aged parents was required by law in England’s East Midlands. In the fourteenth century, retirement contracts specifying adult children’s economic responsibilities were not uncommon. Economic leverage (a theme Shakespeare explored at length in King Lear) was probably more consequential. Fathers could make transfers of property contingent on children’s obedience. Even control over use-rights or rental property could be used to postpone the economic independence of the younger generation.12 The array of inequalities based on class, gender, age, and sexual preference within European society before 1500 makes the term ‘feudalism’ seem inaccurate; either ‘patriarchal feudalism’ or ‘feudal patriarchy’ would be more apt. The organization of family life was not a simple outcome of natural, biological instincts, or a byproduct of the organization of production. Nor can it be described simply as a solution to a ‘coordination problem.’ Early debates over class hierarchies in feudalism revolved around the claim that they were perfectly functional, that serfs willingly submitted to subordination in exchange for the military protection their overlords provided. But many historians now agree that whether or not they originally had a functional element, feudal class relations resulted in forms of exploitation that peasants contested in a variety of ways.13 Some research on European patriarchy describes it as essentially benign. Marc Bloch hints that women submitted to a patently unequal marriage contract in return for male protection. Peter Laslett and others 136

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describe marriage as a contract that served primarily to stipulate fathers’ obligations to their families. Hierarchies based on gender, age, and sexual preference clearly did help coordinate social reproduction. But they also dispensed privileges and punishments in ways that benefitted members of some groups far more than others.14 Population growth The ramifications of patriarchal feudalism reached beyond relations between men, women, and children to affect family formation and rates of population growth. Like slavery, feudal relations gave ruling classes control over the labor of primary producers and therefore gave them a stake in increasing the supply of labor. But unlike slavery, feudal relations allowed primary producers a great deal of control over their own children, creating microeconomic incentives to high fertility. At the same time, feudal religion and culture strongly encouraged filial loyalty, female subordination, and high fertility within marriage. The impact of these structures of constraint, however, varied according to economic circumstances. They did not always promote high fertility. When large numbers of children became an economic liability, patriarchal control over the marriage decisions of the younger generation provided a safety valve. Where the demand for agricultural labor was great, the net benefits of children were positive, especially for fathers, who paid a smaller share than mothers of the direct costs and risks. Feudal lords, as well as Catholic priests, urged the masses to ‘be fruitful and multiply.’ Indeed, in some areas, a fine was levied on a woman who married a man from another manor, thus depriving her lord of her prospective brood.15 Because mortality rates were relatively high, even high fertility resulted only in a low rate of population growth. Still, demographic expansion was an impetus to technological change. Between the ninth and the fourteenth centuries the percentage of land under cultivation in much of Europe increased significantly as forests were cut and swamps were drained. Growing population densities intensified the pressure for economic and military innovations.16 These innovations were not immediately sufficient to dissipate all demographic stresses, and their impact was interrupted by the disastrous advent of the bubonic plagues that raged across the continent beginning in 1347, reducing the population in many areas by 50 per cent or more. High mortality resulted in labor scarcity and increased per capita wealth as survivors found themselves in possession of unprecedented quantities of land, livestock, and tools. Combined with the effects of war, the plagues contributed to increases in the relative size of the unattached female population.17 The balance of feudal class relations was abruptly altered. Not 137

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surprisingly, labor scarcity increased the bargaining power of serfs and peasants. In many areas they successfully negotiated with landowners for a commutation of traditional services into rents. By the end of the fourteenth century, for instance, half of the English land previously under the control of lords who had commanded the labor services of its cultivators was rented to peasants.18 Patriarchal relations were also destabilized. Parents’ economic control over children was diminished by the ready availability of cheap land. Many women inherited property, and the high demand for labor diminished traditional sexual wage differentials. The few examples in English history of equal daily wages for men and women date from busy agricultural seasons in the period immediately following the plague. Surprisingly, increased per capita income and wealth did not encourage more rapid family formation. Marriage rates seem to have declined; contraception, abortion, and infanticide apparently became more common. Some individuals took advantage of the weakening of patriarchal power and modified their reproductive strategy.19 Resistance to feudal pro-natalism probably differed along gender lines; certainly there is evidence of systematic efforts to re-establish strict control over women. Between 1450 and 1700, over 200,000 individuals were executed as witches in Western Europe, and over 80 per cent of these were female. Unmarried women, widows, and midwives were disproportionately represented among the victims.20 The most influential religious handbook for witch hunters, the Malleus Maleficarum (first published about 1486) focused on the threat that witches posed to fertility through contraception, abortion, and symbolic emasculation. The text makes it clear that many individuals were familiar with methods of preventing conception, both through withdrawal and the use of natural herbs, but denounces these as suspect practices: The Canonists treat more fully than the theologians of the obstructions due to witchcraft; and they say that it is witchcraft, not only when anyone is unable to perform the carnal act, of which we have spoken above; but also when a woman is prevented from conceiving, or is made to miscarry after she has conceived.21 In addition to describing methods of interrogation and torture in some detail, the Maleficarum prescribed an infallible test of witchhood: inability to cry, even when in extraordinary pain. We know now that one of the more conspicuous effects of menopause in many women is a hormonal change that affects the tear ducts, causing ‘dry eye’ and, often, inability to cry.22 Within a century and a half of the first great plague, population growth had resumed, and by the sixteenth century there were signs of persistent population pressure in many areas. Women were blamed for too many 138

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children as well as too few. Martin Luther, among others, denounced their ‘insatiable lust.’ Where the limits of cultivation had been reached, when non-agricultural employment was limited, technological changes were not always rapid enough to prevent reductions in labor productivity. Children’s net contributions probably began to decline, partly because the parcelization of fixed holdings through partible inheritance diminished patriarchal leverage as well as the living standards of the next generation. Primogeniture, long practiced by the wealthiest families (who were also the first to limit their family size), became more widespread.23 A more general strategy that avoided unpleasant sibling rivalries was a general effort to slow family formation by delaying, even discouraging, marriage. Unlike medieval villagers, many English citizens of the sixteenth century did not marry until they were in their middle or late twenties, and significant numbers never married at all. This distinctive marriage pattern, common to much of Northwestern Europe, has been explained as the manifestation of an ‘unconscious’ collective rationality that recognized the benefits of slower population growth. But a key factor was the predominance of family-based production units firmly controlled by men who had economic incentives to delay their children’s departure from their own household. Decreases in the average productivity of children’s labor were effectively countervailed by extension of the amount of time they devoted, as adults, to the production of goods and services under their fathers’ control. Non-marriage, as well as late marriage, probably increased adult children’s ability and propensity to contribute to the welfare of their family of origin.24 This form of community control over fertility, which Wally Seccombe terms a ‘nuptiality valve,’ was more consistent with patriarchal authority, and easier to turn off and on than female independence or control over reproduction. It was reinforced by formal rules, as well as paternal control over assets. Some guilds forbade apprentices and journeymen to marry. A French royal edict decreed that fathers could disinherit children who had married without their permission, and at the same time established the legal age for marriage without parental consent at 30 for men and 25 for women. In the French city of Strasbourg, the limits for marriage without parental consent were 19 and 15 in 1500, rose to 24 and 20 in the 1530s, and peaked at 25 for both sexes in 1565. Not until 1875 did the unified German legal code eliminate the requirement of parental consent for sons under 25.25 Thus, patriarchal constraints were relevant not only to early high fertility, but also to the distinctive pattern of late age at marriage and increased non-marriage that slowed population growth after the sixteenth century. This distinctive pattern was related not only to the disruptive impact of the plague on class relations, but also to the successful reestablishment of control over women through the execution of so-called 139

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witches. The form of population control that emerged reinforced existing forms of power based on class, gender, and age. But these forms were by no means completely hegemonic; in fact, they were increasingly destabilized by the expansion of labor markets. The expansion of labor markets Labor mobility posed a threat to both feudal and patriarchal constraints, because it increased the range of choices for those who owned nothing but their wits and ability to work. The growth of cities and small enclaves where labor markets could thrive was a crucial stage in the development of a new kind of economy. Still, the institution of wage labor did not expand in a vacuum; it was configured by patriarchal interests and traditions. And while markets created new choices for some individuals, they also imposed new class-based constraints on those who lacked sufficient land or property to remain economically independent.26 Participation in the labor market was never a simple function of individual choice, for adults or children. Forcible enclosures of common land, increased population pressure, and official repression of labor organizations such as trade unions forced many individuals into jobs where they could, at best, eke out a bare subsistence. The loss of access to commons for grazing animals and gathering fuel, whether as a result of dispossession or migration to the city, diminished the potential contributions that women and children could make to household consumption without engaging in wage employment. At least in some areas, higher individual wages for men were counterbalanced by declines in the value of household labor, as well as diminished contributions from both young and adult children.27 Landlords and capitalists enjoyed privileges that men of other classes lacked. Yet some commonalities complicated what might otherwise have been ordinary class conflict. In 1563, for instance, the English Statute of Artificers established strict rules that required all those who wanted to enter industry to undergo seven years of apprenticeship, and limited access to the most skilled trades to the sons of men with land worth more than £2 per annum. The statute was one of many restrictions that hampered the younger generation’s ability to compete with their elders, an example of age-based constraints extended beyond inheritance of land to transmission of skill.28 Apprenticeships and domestic service may have offered youth opportunities outside their immediate families, but they conformed in important ways to traditional patriarchal principles: young men should serve and obey their elders and women should cook, clean, and generally care for others at a low cost. By the early seventeenth century, a large percentage of English youth—about 60 per cent of those between the ages of 15 and 24—worked as servants outside their parental households. 140

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Little is known about the extent to which they shared their wages with their parents and siblings. But even where parents lacked direct control over older sons and daughters, they benefitted from the large supply of youthful labor that could be cheaply purchased.29 The influence of market forces on wages was limited by political regulations which made it difficult for individuals to leave home in search of jobs. The first extensive formal efforts to restrict English vagrancy were made in 1531; these were systematized in 1601 by the Elizabethan Poor Act, which instructed parish churchwardens and overseers of the poor to provide relief only for those who were parishioners by birth. A man or woman who left their family of origin also left behind any promise of mutual aid. The act further stipulated that the children of every poor, old, blind, lame, or impotent person were responsible for their parents’ relief and maintenance.30 In England, the early development of parish assistance by the state (partly a response to Henry VIII’s expropriation of all properties of the Catholic Church, which had once helped provide for the poor) may have reduced the pressure on individual families to rely on children for income and security. Some scholars have recently argued that the economic benefits of children were lower in seventeenth-century England than in contemporary peasant societies, and that the predominant flow of income was from old to young, rather than vice versa. Such comparisons require further research. But whether the advantages of patriarchal control over youth were large or small, they were threatened by the growing mobility of labor, which also gave many landlords cause for concern.31 The early growth of manufactures based on cottage industries increased the economic independence of young adults by making them less dependent on inheritance of rights to land. The nuptiality valve opened somewhat and age at marriage began to drop, with a concomitant increase in birth rates. Out-of-wedlock births also began to increase, symptomatic of a loss of parental and community control. While women enjoyed increased mobility, they were seldom allowed to compete directly with men in the labor market. It is difficult to trace the increase in wage employment across the region as a whole. European censuses were not designed to measure such characteristics in accurate or fully comparable terms. But by the close of the nineteenth century, a distinctive pattern was apparent: a large percentage of men worked for a wage, literally dependent on someone other than themselves or a family member for their livelihood. In the United Kingdom in 1891, about 84 per cent of the paid labor force were neither independent nor family workers. Austria was also high, at about 71 per cent in 1880. Most other large countries, like France and Germany, were in the 50–60 per cent range; Sweden had an unusually low share of wage-earners, about 45 per cent in 1880.32 141

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These figures, however, exclude workers engaged in unpaid family labor (primarily women), and therefore overstate the degree of proletarianization among adults. If we assume that the percentage of women engaging in productive activities (market and non-market) was the same as the percentage of men with listed occupations, employees and wage-earners represented 59 per cent (rather than 84 per cent) of all workers in the United Kingdom.33 However important the growth of a market for labor, a hefty proportion of individuals continued to work day and night within families, rather than firms. The costs of children In the early nineteenth century, children still began to work and to defray their own costs at an early age. Yet they were becoming more costly than they had been, partly because child care was less compatible with women’s factory work. Early critics of British poor law policies (John Locke among them) argued that children between the ages of 3 and 14 should be self-sufficient, capable of sufficient effort within a workhouse to pay for their own keep. In fact, the wages children under 14 could earn, however important as a subsidy for their own consumption costs, were probably not adequate to meet those costs. After that age, their wages approached those of adults.34 In some areas, both proto-industrialization and early factory employment initially increased economic opportunities for the young. In 1835, children under 14 comprised about 20 per cent of the workforce in English textile factories. But their potential contributions to family income increased only temporarily, because they were almost immediately curtailed by new political rules imposed in the name of national interest. Excessive child labor, reformers argued, threatened the long-run viability of wage employment.35 Among the poorest families, economic pressures channeled by age as well as class constraints contributed to extremely high rates of exploitation that disrupted the family itself. Describing straw-plaiting piecework in Herefordshire and Essex, Karl Marx wrote, ‘The wretched half-starved parents think of nothing but getting as much as possible out of their children. The latter, as soon as they are grown up, do not care a farthing, and naturally so, for their parents, and leave them.’36 As the pace of factory machinery quickened, young children became a less satisfactory source of labor. Many prominent English employers, including the socialist Robert Owen, supported the Factory Act of 1819, which prohibited the employment of children under the age of 9 in cotton mills; in 1833 new requirements made it expensive for employers to hire children under age 13. In France children under the age of 8 were banned from certain types of factories in 1841; in 1874 children under age 12 142

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were banned from any type of factory work. Many male wage workers who did not earn enough to support their large families were strongly opposed; most were not eligible to vote.37 The legislation did not have the effect of immediately removing children from productive occupations, because ample room remained for their reallocation to unregulated jobs. In 1851 the Census of England and Wales listed 37 per cent of male children between the ages of 10 and 14 with occupations; by 1901 the percentage had dropped but remained surprisingly high at 22 per cent. Because fathers in most countries legally controlled children’s earnings until they reached the age of 21, older teenagers probably continued to make substantial contributions.38 Further curtailments, however, came with the development of mandatory public education. Often explicitly designed to give children a sense of national identity as well as a common conceptual vocabulary, public education was more efficient than personalized systems of instruction and skill transmission, such as apprenticeships. Employers were particularly cognizant of these advantages, and often played an important role in the promotion of new requirements, despite the shortrun costs of reduction in the supply of child labor. The Prussians took the lead in 1763, mandating eight years of compulsory education. Sweden, the country most characterized by small proprietorships, came next, legislating the principle of compulsory education in 1842. In 1878 the number of compulsory years was set at six. In England and Wales, eight years of compulsory education were stipulated in 1880. The German empire, France, and Norway passed similar laws about this time. These requirements were all augmented in the early twentieth century.39 Meanwhile, the growth of wage employment created new opportunities for older children to leave home. Fathers were also aggrieved by their loss of control over those who remained behind. The English writer Peter Gaskell wrote in 1833 that the individual wage led to a crying and grievous misfortune, namely that each child has ceased to view itself as a subordinate agent in the household; so far indeed loses the character and bearing of a child, that it pays over to its natural protector a stated sum for food and lodging, thus detaching itself from parental subjection and control. In late eighteenth-century Zurich, a local scholar complained that ‘it became common for children to pay their parents their weekly maintenance allowance and to think that they have bought thereby complete independence.’ Such complaints were, no doubt, an exaggeration. But they certainly illustrate the renegotiation of family relationships.40 Emigration also imposed distinct costs on families. Out-migration tended to be age- and sex-selective; young men were the most likely to 143

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seek new opportunities in the United States, Canada, South America, Australia, and Africa. This out-migration increased the percentage of elderly with no offspring able or willing to care for them; combined with increases in life expectancy it also increased the share of the elderly in the total population. Tilted sex-ratios increased the incidence of nonmarriage among the women who remained behind.41 The higher costs and risks of children almost certainly affected the calculations that men and women made regarding marriage and childrearing. The upper-class families most concerned with intergenerational wealth transfers were the first to limit their fertility. The larger process was governed by a process of cultural change, a gradual transformation of norms and preferences that often respected national and linguistic boundaries but eventually enveloped the region as a whole. By the mid-nineteenth century, total fertility rates in Sweden, the United Kingdom, and France averaged only about 3–4 children per married woman. The downward trend was to continue.42 The reinforcement of gender inequality In the decades before the outbreak of the English Civil War in 1640, defenders of the monarchy reaffirmed a basic principle of patriarchal authority—that a king was to his subjects as a father to his children. But the outcome of the Puritan Revolution, as well as the development of new political theories, challenged this principle. Changes in the conceptualization of patriarchal prerogatives were a major theme of the classic political debates of the seventeenth century, which established new rights for adult sons, but reinforced male authority over women.43 In the same treatise in which he launched an attack on Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, John Locke reasserted the natural character of a wife’s subjection to her husband, extolling the power that every husband hath to order the things of private concernment to his family, as proprietor of goods and land there, and to have his will take place before that of his wife in all things of their common concernment. The reaffirmation of this gender-based aspect of patriarchal governance pervades European political philosophy during this period.44 Young men benefitted more than young women from the weakening of age-based constraints. The decrease in marriage age that gradually took place in many areas in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was predicated on new opportunities and new forms of self-assertion. Rates of pre-marital conception, higher in this period than ever before, suggest that young adults were actively circumventing patriarchal control 144

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over marriage. But women became increasingly susceptible to desertion and out-of-wedlock births.45 A growing appreciation of the costs of children probably helped motivate state policies that shifted the risks of unplanned births away from fathers. In pre-revolutionary France an unmarried woman, once pregnant, could easily sue the father of her child according to the doctrine of ‘creditur virgini’ (literally, ‘believe the virgin’). New legislation passed in 1793 guaranteed an illegitimate child full rights if recognized by its father, but forbade any investigation into paternity and stipulated that no married man could acknowledge an illegitimate child. Similarly, the Napoleonic code forbade investigation of fatherhood unless the mother in question had been ‘abducted.’ This restriction, which remained in force until 1912, weakened the legal and economic position of unmarried mothers.46 English policy evolved along the same lines. In the early eighteenth century, the oath of an expectant mother was sufficient to have the putative father of an illegitimate child called to account, and magistrates could and often did write out orders of filiation based on the testimony of the mother alone. Opponents of the traditional poor law system complained of this, deploring the incentives to women to bear children out of wedlock in order to make claims on men and to qualify for more public assistance. As a Mr. Simeon explained in testimony before the Poor Law Commission of 1834: I rather believe we shall never be able to check the birth of bastard children by throwing the onus upon the man; and I feel strongly convinced, that until the law of this country is assimilated to the law of nature, and to the law of every other country, by throwing the onus more upon the females, the getting of bastard children will never be checked.47 The Commission agreed that fathers of children born out of wedlock should no longer be punished, using similar language: ’Providence appears to have ordained, that it [the bastard] should be a burden on its mother.’ In 1844, and again in 1868, new legislation made it possible for such mothers to sue for child support, but required stringent standards of proof.48 While women had access to a whole range of new employments outside the home, they were limited to those that required the lowest skill and paid the least wages. Organized male workers energetically opposed violations of the culturally defined sexual division of labor. They engaged in forms of collective action which excluded women from unions and trade organizations, petitioned the government to forbid married women from working, and organized violence against nonconformists.49 Employers also benefitted. A commissioner investigating conditions among weavers in the west of England in 1848 wrote that 145

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when it becomes needful to lower wages, women are employed who will readily undertake it at a lower price than men receive…. Indeed it appears to be a custom in every trade to pay women at a lower rate than men receive for the same article. Why, then, did they not hire women exclusively? Apart from their adherence to prevailing norms, likely reinforced by their own gender interests, they recognized that such actions would disrupt factory discipline and incur organized male opposition in the political arena.50 Patriarchal norms proved quite complementary to the establishment of control over the labor process. Women and children often predominated among workers; overseers were almost always adult men. The working class was partitioned into groups denned by age and gender as well as ethnicity and skill. Efforts to overcome these differences, such as the early socialist Grand Moral Union of the Working Classes of All Nations, were not successfully sustained.51 Women who worked for a wage earned so much less than their male counterparts that economic independence remained far beyond their reach. Those who engaged in commercial activity usually did so under the authority of a husband or father who retained a legal right to his family members’ earnings. The ‘willingness of other family members to provide for them’ was often proffered as an explanation of their low wages. In fact, the causality worked the other way. Even wage-earning women devoted large amounts of time to household tasks in return for the ‘support’ they needed from other family members.52 In his Philosophy of Manufactures, published in 1835, Andrew Ure wrote: Factory females have in general much lower wages than males, and they have been pitied on this account with perhaps an injudicious sympathy, since the low price of their labour here tends to make household duties their most profitable as well as agreeable occupation, and prevents them being tempted by the mill to abandon the care of their offspring at home. Thus Providence effects its purpose with a wisdom and efficacy which should repress the short-sighted presumption of human devices.53 Here again, Providence clearly represented the best interests of men. The factory actually had less bearing on women’s work than another form of wage labor modeled closely on their role in the traditional patriarchal economy. In Great Britain in 1841, more women over age 20 were engaged in domestic service than in commerce, trade, manufacturing, and agriculture combined, about 34 per cent of total female paid employment. Among women under age 20, 69 per cent were so employed. About 15 per cent of French households employed one or more domestic servants. Maids, cooks, and housekeepers earned extremely low wages, 146

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averaging less than half of what male servants earned. They were also sexually vulnerable, highly susceptible to impregnation and desertion.54 No occupation better illustrates the interaction between constraints based on class and gender, for the availability of cheap domestic servants enabled affluent women to become household managers, rather than mere domestic workers. Ironically, these new household managers were members of a social class with privileges that allowed them to press hard for their gender rights, if and when they chose to do so. Early feminist movements Foreshadowed by many feminist manifestoes, the first wave of organized efforts to mobilize women on behalf of their own cross-class interests slapped the European establishment in the face after about 1850. Among the most important initial victories were concessions of legal property rights over wealth and earnings. These were countervailed, however, not only by continued gender inequality in paid employment, but also by new family law reforms that assigned women a disproportionate share of the growing costs of caring for dependents. The conventional account of the evolution of family law pictures it simply as a process of lagged adjustment to changing economic conditions, and describes failure to enforce child support responsibilities as an accident or oversight. But the effects of changing economic conditions were strongly mediated by political struggles in which gender interests played an important role.55 Early feminist tracts such as Mary Wolstonecraft’s Declaration of the Rights of Woman (published in 1792) capitalized on the inconsistencies of liberal political theory, which promoted individual rights for men but not for women. Some economists rallied to the cause of liberal feminism; Jeremy Bentham defended women’s rights to wage employment, the vote, and birth control as early as 1800. Not incidentally, Bentham also quietly defended homosexuals, comparing the English persecution of ‘venery non-prolific’ to the evils of the Spanish Inquisition. Later John Stuart Mill and his collaborator Harriet Taylor developed systematic arguments on behalf of women’s political rights.56 Early socialists like William Thompson and Anna Wheeler welcomed such arguments, but also challenged the presumptions of liberal individualism. A purely competitive market economy, they argued, would always penalize those caring for children or other dependents. The basic principles of selfinterest central to political economy gave men an incentive to subjugate women, and their political power gave them the means to do so. Thompson and Wheeler argued that women needed political rights in order to defend their collective interests, but that rights alone would be insufficient. Cooperation was also necessary, specifically, communities of 147

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cooperation that could share the tasks of housework and child care. The early socialist vision, which Marxists later termed ‘utopian,’ had a strong feminist component that demanded better realization of the altruistic ideals of family life. At least one socialist, Charles Fourier, argued that society should not discourage sexual tastes held by a minority, such as homosexuality.57 Such ideas had limited impact at the time, but they contributed to the general sense that new institutions might be required to deal with the sideeffects of economic change. In England, in particular, observers deplored low marriage rates. Only improved opportunities for female employment, they argued, could solve the ‘spinster problem.’ The 1851 Census of Great Britain observed that one out of eight women never married. This particular demographic problem was rare in areas of the world where opportunities for permanent, long-distance emigration were limited, and sex ratios remained relatively balanced.58 The birth of organized feminism in Great Britain is usually dated to 1856, when a circle of upper-class women known as the ‘Ladies of Langham Place’ began to meet regularly. Three years later they founded an important magazine, the Englishwoman’s Journal, and a Society for Promoting the Employment of Women. They also helped set in motion a long campaign to improve women’s opportunities for higher education. Their success in establishing new property rights was especially striking. The Married Women’s Property Act of 1882 (with related legislation) has been described as ‘one of the greatest expropriations and reallocations of property in English history.’59 Individual rights for women came slower on the continent. While a series of French statutes passed after 1881 and the German Civil Code of 1896 were analogous to the British acts in some respects, they were more restrictive. French women did not gain the right to dispose freely of their own salaries until 1907. Until 1965, they required their husband’s permission to work outside the home. The new German code preserved the husband’s explicit right to decide all matters of matrimonial life. Later legislation defined a wife’s duty to be running the household, and allowed her to work outside the home ‘so long as this was compatible with her primary responsibility.’ Wives did not gain the legal right to make their own decision until 1976.60 In every country, family law remained a significant bastion of fathers’ and husbands’ authority. In a celebrated English legal case in 1891, a husband who kidnapped and imprisoned his runaway wife was required (on the second round of legal appeal) to release her. The Times condemned the decision for weakening the institution of marriage. Until 1935, a French father with ‘grave cause for dissatisfaction’ could obtain a court order for his child’s arrest and detention. Not until 1942 was the authority of French mothers over their children legally recognized.61 148

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Some, though by no means all, feminists agitated for easier access to divorce. Sweden led the way with new legislation, while France lagged behind. Germany was somewhere in between, with a tradition of relatively ‘no-fault’ divorce apparently related to an early king’s pronatalism. In 1793 Frederick the Great had expressed the fear that estranged couples would be unlikely to procreate, and recommended they should be freed to find new mates.62 Even more crucial to wives and mothers were efforts to contest the presumption of automatic paternal custody that gave fathers absolute rights over children in virtually every European country. Even where fathers did not choose to exercise these rights, they could use them as leverage against fractious wives, threatening to deny them any contact whatsoever with their children. As Jeremy Bentham observed, paternal rights to the services and income of their offspring were seen as indemnity for the expenses devoted to their upkeep. Men’s resistance to changes in child custody was almost certainly diminished by their appreciation of the growing costs of children. By the early twentieth century, the ‘best interests of the child’ often provided the rationale for assigning primary economic, as well as direct, responsibility to custodial mothers.63 The obligations of non-custodial parents (whether married or not) were seldom clearly specified or strongly enforced. As a result, increased access to divorce also provided men with easy means of defaulting on paternal responsibilities. The very threat of desertion and divorce worked to the advantage of men who wanted to enjoy the pleasures of parenthood while minimizing its impact on their own leisure time and consumption.64 Re-thinking the ‘transition’ The economic significance of these changes in the structure of patriarchal constraints suggests that the traditional concepts invoked by the term ‘transition to capitalism’ obscure more than they reveal. Nor is it sufficient to append a new adjective and describe a transition from patriarchal feudalism to patriarchal capitalism, because this implies that gender and age relations remained constant while class relations changed. Instead, the decline of patriarchal control over children modified the motives and mechanisms of control over women. The descriptor ‘patriarchal’ remains apt, because many of the new constraints effectively minimized the costs of fatherhood. In any case, the notion that one term or set of terms could effectively summarize a complex dynamic among contending collective interests was probably misplaced. The narrative above illustrates an alternative approach, focusing on the interaction between technical and institutional changes and structures of constraint based on nation, class, age, and sexual preference. Partly as a result of increased population pressure, greater geographic 149

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mobility, and the growth of wage employment, class interests and national interests converged in ways that weakened the power of fathers over children and diminished the economic incentives to high fertility. These changes enhanced women’s potential to engage in collective action in their own gender interests. Gender-based struggles, in turn, affected the distribution of the costs of children and the character of wage employment. The interaction between class, age, and gender also had implications for the distribution of income. Families with large numbers of children began to experience economic stress. Mothers of children born out of wedlock became particularly vulnerable to poverty. The growth of industrial wage employment made it more difficult for elderly men to continue working once they could no longer match prime-age levels of sustained effort. Elderly women who lacked savings or pensions became increasingly susceptible to poverty. Children became a less reliable and less adequate source of support in old age. In more ways than one, the rising cost of children and other dependents set the stage for new struggles over state spending. SOCIAL DEMOCRACY AND THE EUROPEAN WELFARE STATE In twentieth-century Europe, capitalist development proceeded apace; differences based on class and skill superseded other aspects of social inequality, and the working class demanded the protections of a welfare state. That, at least, is the conventional story. One of the reasons it is incorrect, as well as incomplete, is that it ignores the persistence of gender-based structures of constraint. The emergence of the welfare state is a particularly important episode in the new, more complicated story that feminist scholars have begun to tell. The growth of wage employment was associated with new demands to socialize income transfers that once took place within the family. While this process was motivated by a confluence of technological and institutional pressures, it was also shaped by the collective action of many different given groups, including men and women. Social democrats were among the first to call attention to the growing incidence of poverty among the elderly and families with young children, and they generally proposed solutions at least somewhat more favorable to women than did members of conservative political panics. Still, the social democratic welfare state reproduced many aspects of traditional gender inequality. Even in the most generous regimes, the private costs of caring for dependents, paid primarily by women, remain quite high. Other kinds of collective interests also defined the limits of the welfare state. Even where wage-earners were well organized, their solidarity was weakened somewhat by differences in pay and skill. Employers were more cohesive in their efforts to maintain conditions favorable to profitability. 150

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Sometimes class differences, as well as gender differences, were partly overcome by the concerted definition and pursuit of national interests. ‘Modern’ strategies of collective action often build upon the metaphors of family life—the mother country, the fatherland, the fraternity of workers, the sisterhood of feminists. The family continues to play a crucial, indispensable role even in the most developed economies. Still, widespread recognition of the historical decline of intra-family income flows informed the development of the welfare state. This is evident from even a brief consideration of the rhetoric of twentieth-century social reform. The emergence of social democracy One influential typology of the twentieth-century welfare state distinguishes between social democratic regimes (such as Sweden), corporatist regimes that provide substantial entitlements to all citizens but preserve status and class differentials (such as Germany), and liberal regimes that provide more limited public transfers (such as Great Britain and the United States). These are important distinctions that help explain why different class configurations both give rise to and result from state policies. But European welfare policies also have important implications for the distribution of income between men and women, old and young, straight and gay. Feminists and social democrats recognized at least some of these implications at a very early date.65 The label ‘social democrat’ was applied to the reform-minded, electionoriented socialists identified with the First International Workingmen’s Association in Germany in the 1880s. It came to describe many socialist and labor parties elsewhere in Europe, as well as smaller organizations that were their precursors, such as the British Fabian Society (in Great Britain meanings have shifted, and the Social Democrats are a centrist party). Most descriptions of social democracy emphasize its reformism, its allegiance to trade unionism and the empowerment of the working class. But social democrats also endorsed women’s rights and emphasized the corrosive effects of wage employment on traditional family ties. They argued that state-sponsored social programs should compensate for family failures. At the same time, they relied upon the rhetoric of family values, of solidarity, brotherhood, and respect for the elderly. The resulting tension made for certain inconsistencies, among them greater attention to the needs of male ‘breadwinners’ than of women and children. These inconsistencies were perhaps amplified by the fact that women did not gain the vote in most countries until the 1920s, and the slow growth of female participation in wage employment kept most women dependent on male income. Within the First International, social democrats’ sympathies for feminism distinguished them from more orthodox Marxists. Unlike Karl Marx or Friedrich Engels, August Bebel suggested that all men had an interest in 151

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restricting women’s access to well-paying jobs. An ardent defender of reproductive rights, he argued with great prescience that prosperity would foster fertility decline. The English Fabians were reluctant feminists, initially more preoccupied with class than gender inequalities (with the exception of George Bernard Shaw). With the establishment of the Fabian Women’s Group in 1908, however, the society began to advocate better pay for women as well as the public ‘endowment of motherhood.’66 Social democracy, at its best, represented a dual commitment to individual rights and to social responsibility that distinguished it from individualistic liberalism at one extreme and corporatism at the other. This dual commitment provided a framework for feminists to insist on reproductive rights and equal opportunities outside the home, as well as more social support for mothers. In the early 1900s, the German Bund für Mutterschutz agitated for dissemination of contraceptives, legalization of abortion, and ‘maternal insurance’ for married and unmarried mothers. Its founder Helene Stocker also defended lesbianism and individual freedom in love life.67 Some socialist militants even advocated a ‘birth strike’ that would create labor scarcity and improve the bargaining power of the working class. Clara Zetkin and other orthodox Marxists stood by the traditional class-first position and denounced what they interpreted as capitulation to Malthusian assumptions. Still, even they refused to jump on the antifeminist, pro-fertility bandwagon that rolled through France, Germany, and much of the rest of continental Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century.68 Family policies in most of Europe veered in one of two directions. The ‘corporatist’ strategy, emphasizing national interests, promoted a notion of the ‘national family’ that was hostile to women’s individual rights. In 1912, the Prussian Ministry of the Interior published a report asserting that the women’s movement, by encouraging women to take jobs which removed them from their function as childbearers, was endangering the future of high German culture. Even some German feminists began to denounce birth control. In 1920, the French National Assembly made it illegal to divulge, offer to divulge, or facilitate the use of methods to prevent conception. French women did not gain the right to vote until 1945, and anticontraceptive laws remained on the books (though probably with diminishing impact) until the 1960s.69 Social democrats explicitly mobilized opposition. The 1926 program of the Austrian Social Democratic party (whose membership was 30 per cent female) demanded the distribution of free birth control devices, legalization of abortion, and family allowances. But social democratic influence waned rapidly, especially in Germany. Under Hitler’s leadership, the National Socialists took the philosophy of corporatism to an extreme, fusing concepts of national and racial allegiance with the concept of 152

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innate Aryan superiority. Women’s role was defined as propagation and nurturance of the superior race.70 German laws against reproductive choice were initially no stronger than French ones, but the Nazis engaged in vigorous police actions to close all birth control clinics and prosecute abortionists. In 1941, they passed their own law, a complete ban on all ‘methods, materials and instruments for the prevention or interruption of pregnancy.’ The Nazis also intensified the repression of homosexuality, extending the list of punishable offenses from sodomy to even a simple kiss or embrace.71 In Great Britain, neo-Malthusians and feminists like Annie Besant gained acceptance for contraception at an earlier date, risking government prosecution in a series of highly publicized trials in the late 1870s. The birth control movement faced little government hindrance after that time, though a national commission complained that demographic stagnation was ‘injurious to the public interest’ and worried about the ‘extinction of the upper classes.’ Prominent eugenicists argued that feminism was contributing to race suicide and went so far as to suggest that only mothers who had at least four children should be allowed the vote. British feminists countered with persistent, passionate demands for suffrage, which was granted to women over age 30 in 1918 and to those over 18 in 1928. While the liberal tradition probably militated against public support and entitlements for families, it worked to the advantage of campaigns for women’s rights.72 Scandinavian policies came closer to realizing social democratic ideals. Women in Finland won the right to vote in national elections in 1906; in Norway, 1913; in Denmark, 1915; in Sweden, 1921. While Sweden outlawed contraception in 1910, public opinion shifted rapidly in favor of reproductive choice, as did public behavior: fertility rates in the 1920s were lower than elsewhere in Europe. Yet the emphasis on choice was accompanied by an explicit endorsement of social responsibility. In 1935, the Swedish Riksdag proclaimed that ‘the costs of childbearing, and thus also the costs for the maintenance of the population stock, should not fall entirely upon the parents but should be shared by all alike.’73 Alva and Gunnar Myrdal developed this basic principle in considerable detail in The Crisis in Population and Family and Nation, books that were widely publicized and read all across Europe. The Myrdals dwelt on the importance of ‘getting the birth rate back up’ partly because they felt that low population growth threatened economic stagnation (they were honored by a new idiomatic expression for sexual intercourse, ‘to myrdal’). Yet they steadfastly advocated not only family planning but also increased opportunities for women outside the home to ensure that none was economically coerced into motherhood. The theory of social democracy was not unique to Sweden. It was simply practiced a bit more successfully there. Why did Sweden, in particular, embrace it so strongly? Surely ethnic homogeneity played an 153

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important role, as did a legacy of relatively egalitarian class relations— feudalism took a mild form in Sweden, and differences between skilled and unskilled workers were less extreme than elsewhere. It is difficult to say, however, what caused what. It could be that a tradition of more egalitarian gender relations tempered forms of conflict based on race and class, rather than vice versa. Wherever and however it developed, social democracy encouraged a cooperative vision of both families and the state. The extent to which that vision was realized had formidable implications for the evolution of specific welfare state policies. The evolution of old age insurance The growing demands of the elderly posed a common problem for all the countries of Northwestern Europe in the early twentieth century. It is difficult to disentangle the economic from the political dimensions of this problem. Clearly, relationships between families and the larger economy were changing in ways that left the elderly more at risk, relative to the young, than ever before. Yet these underlying shifts might have had only a minor impact, without the electoral influence of the elderly.74 Great Britain followed a liberal strategy, limiting assistance to the officially poor and dividing the elderly constituency along lines of income. Germany took a corporatist approach, providing benefits to full-time wage-earners, reinforcing the economic power and authority of the male bread-winner. Social democratic Sweden, at least initially, offered assistance to all citizens of a certain age, disrupting some aspects of both class and gender inequality. The decline of the family economy was a recurrent theme in debates over poor relief and public policy in the late nineteenth century. In Great Britain, Charles Booth collected and analyzed reams of data on the income and living conditions of the elderly. According to his calculations, the average rate of pauperism among those over age 65 in England and Wales was more than 29 per cent in the 1890s. Men and women with no living family members made up a disproportionate share of the workhouse population.75 Booth had no accurate standard of comparison to judge changes over time, and few if any studies have quantified trends in the incidence of poverty during this period. Therefore, it is difficult to say whether the new attention to retirement reflected increased need or the assertion of new political priorities. What is clear is that new state programs were described as substitutes for traditional intergenerational transfers and modeled after the traditional patriarchal family. Public assistance for elderly workers was initially conceived as a means of consolidating political support for the German state. The pioneering program there, put into place in 1889, covered wage-earners in most 154

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industries, including agriculture and domestic service. Contributions were earnings-related, with equal contributions from workers and employees and a small subsidy from the state. Old age pensions were payable at age 70 to persons with a record of 24 years of work. The benefits were at first extremely small, hardly more than prevailing poor relief rates. Few women wage-earners qualified. Most other countries were reluctant, at least initially, to link old age assistance so closely to wage employment. In 1908, Great Britain adopted a system aimed primarily to provide support for the elderly poor, establishing a small pension for all subjects of age 70 or above whose income did not exceed a certain amount. Sweden offered coverage for its entire population, adopting a universal social insurance pension in 1913. In the years after World War I, new provisions regarding disability, illness, and unemployment proliferated, and pension systems began to hybridize. Sweden added supplementary earnings-based benefits, while some countries with earnings-based benefits added on some universal benefits. The trade union movement fought long and hard for new provisions for its membership. After World War II, most democratic nations signed an International Labour Office convention that formalized a commitment to provide pension coverage for all employed persons and their dependents. Entitlements oriented toward wage-earners began to predominate in terms of overall expenditures.76 Most European states adopted programs, tailored to the needs of married men, that discouraged female independence. Some countries, notably Austria and Germany, declined to provide explicit benefits for wives. The Netherlands and Belgium provided spouse benefits for married women, but explicitly limited women’s benefits based on their own earnings. According to Dutch rules, married women were not entitled to pensions based on their own labor force participation unless they married after they had acquired pension rights or their husbands lacked pension rights. In Belgium, male wage-earners could qualify for a pension at a ‘family rate’ to help support their wives, but wives could not receive a pension at the family rate even if their husband was unemployed, and clearly her dependent. Similarly, the wife of a male employee was eligible for a survivor’s pension, but the husband of a female employee was not. Not until the 1970s were West German provisions liberalized to allow housewives to contribute on an individual basis in order to gain eligibility and a claim to their husband’s pension income in the event of divorce.77 English and French systems fell somewhere in between the German and Dutch provisions, providing some spousal benefits and allowing women with an employment record to choose individual rather than spousal pensions. Still, the structure of benefits, combined with patterns of labor force participation, encouraged women to choose spouse benefits despite the fact that divorce would attenuate their claims. Widows generally fared much 155

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better than divorced, separated, or single women. In effect, these social insurance provisions, unlike universal pensions, both reinforced traditional gender roles and made the cost of divorce much higher for women than for men. Scandinavian systems, with a larger universal component, were less gender-biased though far from completely egalitarian.78 Women’s increased participation in wage labor and the growing incidence of divorce gradually increased awareness of and resistance to gender bias. A new wave of feminist mobilization in the 1970s contributed to significant changes in public pension systems in virtually all of Western Europe. In 1978 the European Economic Community set a deadline of seven years for member countries to implement ‘the principle of equal treatment for men and women in matters of social security’ (but excluded family allowance and survivor’s benefits from the requirement). In 1986, the Council of Ministers of the European Community adopted an even stronger directive prohibiting any discrimination based on sex, either directly or indirectly by reference to marital or family status. However, it is not clear what sanctions, if any, the Community is willing to apply to countries which have not reformed their systems.79 Equalization of rights to survivor benefits has proceeded very slowly. Provisions in effect at the end of 1989 in Finland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Great Britain, for example, discriminated against women wage-earners by providing more limited benefits for their spouses. Only in 1990 did Sweden replace its widow’s pension with a survivor pension for spouse or co-habitant, without regard to a person’s sex.80 Nor is it clear what steps, if any, European nations will take to deal with ongoing discrimination against gay and lesbian couples. Lack of research on this topic makes it impossible to draw any conclusion except that few countries (if any) allow a wage-earner covered by old age insurance to stipulate a same-sex partner as either a dependent or a beneficiary. The provision of a spouse benefit through old age insurance simply institutionalized the concept of a male family wage. Public revenues were used to subsidize wives and mothers who were attached to a male wageearner, and to reinforce traditional gender roles. Restrictions on women’s individual access to retirement benefits discouraged their labor force participation. European old age insurance programs socialized some of the most important features of the traditional patriarchal family. Like that family, they promised at least some security in old age to women who fulfilled their God-given responsibilities as wives and mothers. They also reinforced the relative power of male wage-earners, both in the home and in the market.

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Family allowances and child care Similar dynamics are evident in the evolution of family policies in Northwestern Europe, which also emerged from a process of collective efforts to reorganize social reproduction in response to increased economic pressures. Here again, the predominant policies adopted by liberal, corporatist, and social democratic regimes varied in their empowerment of women. Family allowances and public child care services were often adopted primarily to promote population growth, rather than to improve the living standards of families with young children. It is difficult to reconstruct the comparative history of family policies, because scholars have just begun to direct attention to them. But several consistent themes emerge. Levels of support for mothers and children remained low, relative to other social programs, and until recently, virtually all state policies strongly reinforced traditional gender roles. On the other hand, differences between several Northwestern European countries show that public policies can have an important positive impact on family welfare. Like the elderly, families with young children were disadvantaged by the shift away from family-based employment. Whether paid on the basis of individual performance or class bargaining power, workers’ wages were not affected by family size; the contributions of the young diminished over time, as did the productivity of women’s household labor relative to what they could earn in the market. Male trade unionists often referred to the growing costs of supporting a family when they demanded higher wages. The first demands for family allowances were couched in terms of a family wage. Advocates insisted that men (but not women) should simply be paid wages sufficient to support an average number of dependents. Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical, De Rerum Novarum, endorsed the principle. So too did much social scientific research. The extensive household surveys conducted by Seybowm Rowntree in early twentieth-century Britain aimed to demonstrate that most male wage-earners were supporting wives and children, and that their wages were inadequate to this responsibility.81 Several eminent English economists also defended the idea of a wage premium for men. Alfred Marshall argued that increases in women’s wages relative to men’s would be injurious because they would tempt wives and mothers to neglect their household duties. F.Y.Edgeworth, editor of the Economic Journal, wrote, ‘If the bulk of working men support families, and the bulk of working women do not, it seems not unreasonable that the men should have some advantage in the labour market.’82 Feminists pointed out that many women were also supporting family members, and that there were no guarantees that men would share their high wages fairly with dependents. A better solution, they argued, was 157

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state support for childrearing. Eleanor Rathbone’s classic, The Disinherited Family, written in 1924, systematically developed such arguments. The fairness argument, however, seemed less persuasive than rhetoric concerning national and racial interests, which gradually came to the fore. Even principled feminists and social democrats stooped to overt chauvinism and racism. Rathbone warned of the threat that low fertility posed to native English stock. William Beveridge, often described as the father of the English welfare state, expressed alarm at the prospect of his island being overrun by foreigners. Beatrice Webb observed more drily if the nation wishes the population of Great Britain to be maintained without recourse to allen immigration on a large scale, it will be necessary for the State to provide, through the parents, for the maintenance of the children during the period of their economic dependence.83 Military concerns were not unimportant. French generals were concerned about fertility decline, long underway in rural areas. The Catholic Church, as well as many employer associations, promoted higher wages for workers with children. Single men, however, resented being paid less than their married counterparts for the same work, and trade unions began to press for compulsory family allowances to be distributed by the state. As one representative of the metal working and engineering industries put it, ‘The worker’s child was not the thing of the manufacturers. It was a human being with a value for the future which belonged to the community.’84 During World War I, the British military paid soldiers allowances for wives and children, and the Departmental Committees on Teachers followed suit. The German state had long provided family allowances for public employees, and during the war many private firms such as Krupp adopted the policy. In the wake of the War, with its high male mortality, it became apparent that the percentage of widows among the population had increased, and their vulnerability to poverty was exacerbated by poor economic conditions. In 1925, Great Britain adopted public pensions for widows and unmarried mothers. In France and Germany, private ‘equalization funds’ for families proliferated.85 Debates over wage-based versus state-based recognition of family labor intensified in the 1930s. Public implementation of such policies was slowed by the difficulties of the Great Depression. Not until after World War II were publicly financed family allowance systems widely adopted. Provisions put into effect between 1945 and 1955 varied from country to country, complemented by a proliferation of programs such as birth grants, guaranteed maternity leave, tax credits, and housing subsidies. In England, Eleanor Rathbone, who had fought relentlessly for universal family allowances for twenty-five years, spent her last efforts in a barely 158

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successful campaign to ensure that mothers, rather than fathers, should actually receive the stipend.86 In post-World War II Germany, conservative Christian democrats advocated supplementary payments to the male wage, regulated by the private sector, to assist mothers. Social democrats objected that such a system would discriminate against single mothers, including war widows. Some middle-class women’s organizations agreed, and called for payments to be paid directly to mothers rather than as a supplement to male wages.87 The social democratic approach eventually prevailed, partly because German social scientists insisted that family welfare was crucial to economic welfare. The demographer Friedrich Burgdörfer called for the preservation of ‘that living human capital that works for our economy and that is certainly no less important for our national income than money capital.’ He warned against restricting payments to low-income families because this might promote ‘negative selection.’ Others strongly endorsed the notion that, as Robert Moeller puts it, ‘the work of reproduction was clearly on a par with the work of production, once human capital accumulation was equated with other forms of created value.’88 In Northwestern Europe today virtually all families with children receive public transfers. Family allowances are supplemented by a variety of programs such as birth grants and maternity benefits, plus many in-kind benefits such as child care and housing subsidies. Some aspects of social democratic rhetoric have become official wisdom. Austrian law, for instance, explicitly states, ‘There must be transfers between those bearing the burden of family responsibilities in the interest of the whole of society and those who do not bear it but consciously or unconsciously benefit from the fact that others do.’ Yet the size of these transfers remains small relative to actual costs and comprises only a small share of total social spending. As David Glass explained in 1940, ‘However urgently governments may have declared their desire to increase the supply of births, they have nevertheless persistently tried to buy babies at bargain prices.’89 The amounts of direct assistance have never approached the actual costs of raising children. In the 1970s, family allowances in the region averaged about $500 per child per year. By comparison, conservative estimates of the annual cost of childrearing were well over $5000 per year. Of course, it is difficult to estimate the actual cost, which is determined not only by direct expenditures, but also by the opportunity cost of parental time devoted to their care. The opportunity cost depends on parents’ labor force participation patterns, the rewards to continuous labor market experience, and wage rates. These are, in turn, affected by labor market discrimination and the availability of child care services.90 A simple comparison of average family allowances with gross average earnings is telling: in 1980, the percentage ranged from a high of 14.1 per cent in Belgium to a low of 3.9 per cent in Denmark, far below a level 159

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sufficient to allow one parent to refrain from paid employment without sacrificing a large share of potential family income. Family allowances are taxed in some countries, but not others. A comparison of the additional net income that two-child families received relative to a couple with no children shows a maximum 21.7 per cent increment in Belgium, a low of 5.8 per cent in Denmark in 1980 (see Table 4.1). In West Germany, in the 1980s, allowances paid to families with two children amounted to about 9 per cent of an average employee’s earnings, compared to about 17 per cent in East Germany. Such amounts hardly seem sufficient to compensate for the direct and indirect costs of child care, even where substantial public services are provided.91 Table 4.1 Gross and net income support for two-child families, Northwestern Europe, 1980

Source: ILO (1989:62)

Family allowances are also low relative to social insurance provisions linked to wage employment (although these sometimes include short-term maternity benefits). In 1984, family allowances comprised only about 9.5 per cent of all expenditures on social insurance in Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Furthermore, worsening economic conditions in the region in the 1980s led to family allowance cutbacks and the imposition of means-testing in many countries.92 Lynn Duggan, in one of the very few recent efforts to estimate the distribution of the costs of children between parents and the state, utilizes detailed household survey data from West and East Germany before unification. She estimates that, among co-resident couples with children under 18, East Germany compensated 32–34 per cent of total childrearing costs (including the cost of foregone earnings and leisure time) and West Germany only 6–8 per cent. The effect of unification has been national implementation of West German standards. Though little research has been conducted, similar cuts in assistance to families with children are probably a concomitant of privatization in much of Eastern Europe.93 160

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Most discussions of the effects of family allowances marvel at their negligible effect on family size decisions. Some countries, such as France and Germany, explicitly encourage high fertility, offering, for instance, significantly greater benefits for the third than for the first or second child. Fertility rates might have declined even faster in the absence of family allowances, but they have nonetheless continued to decline. Nor do levels of family benefits across countries explain much of the national variation in demographic patterns. This is hardly surprising, given that benefits compensate for only a small share of the costs of raising children.94 Low levels of support are not the only problem. Many of the benefits added on to family allowance programs, such as maternity leave, provide benefits to mothers who refrain from paid employment in order to care for children, but not to fathers. As a result, women are more likely than men to engage in intermittent and part-time employment, less likely to enjoy career advancement. Employers’ expectations that women will show less attachment to their jobs contribute to continued occupational segregation and low pay for women, which, in turn, make it more likely that they will specialize in family labor. Combined with tax policies that take a larger cut of a second earner’s income, and benefit policies that make part-time work unattractive, such programs lower women’s lifetime earnings.95 Hugh Davies and Heather Joshi calculate and compare the earnings loss that mothers in West Germany, Britain, France, and Sweden in 1980 probably experienced as a result of lost years of employment, lower hours upon returning to the labor force, and lower rates of pay. Their calculations are based on a statistical analysis of cross-sectional differences in women’s hours, earnings, and family size. They estimate that a West German mother sacrificed about 49 per cent of her lifetime earnings when she embarked on the employment and earnings path typically associated with a two-child family. A British mother sacrificed about 57 per cent. In France and Sweden, on the other hand, where much greater public investments in child care facilities were made, estimates of foregone earnings amounted to 12 per cent and 6 per cent, respectively.96 The provision of child care services, child and maternal health services, and family leaves from work has a particularly important impact on women’s economic welfare. Yet most studies of European policies simply emphasize that they provide much greater benefits than the United States, without asking whether they foster equal opportunity for mothers and fathers. For instance, France offers a particularly generous and wellorganized public child care system. But virtually all its employees are women and few if any aspects of French public policy encourage men to take a more active role in child care.97 Family policy need not reinforce traditional gender roles. Sweden officially recognized a more egalitarian alternative in 1974, with a provision that parents might share 6 months of parenthood leave at 90 161

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per cent of their regular pay. The length of leave was extended several times until, by 1991, it covered 18 months with full pay. In addition, legislation passed in 1979 allows all full-time employed parents of preschool children the right to reduce their hours to 75 per cent of full-time until the child is 8 years old (provided they have been employed full-time for at least 6 months). Gender-neutral provisions are now being widely adopted by other European countries. Such provisions are unlikely to have much effect unless accompanied by changes in social norms and personal preferences. Even in Sweden, policies look better than realities. Fathers are far less likely than mothers to actually take a parenthood leave, and women perform the majority of paid and unpaid caring work.98 Families maintained by women alone The growing prevalence of families maintained by women alone in the 1970s and 1980s amplified the economic impact of family policies and laws governing child support. As can be seen from Table 4.2, most singleparent families with young children are headed by women. Until recently, most countries failed to adequately specify or enforce the responsibilities of non-resident parents; fathers were effectively allowed to divorce their children. Some of the changes wrought by collective efforts to modify family law offer a model for needed reforms elsewhere in the world. Table 4.2 Single-parent families with children under age 18, various years, as a percentage of all families with children

*=Figures include unmarried co-habiting couples. Source: Kamerman and Kahn (1988a: Table 1) 162

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In Great Britain, child support awards were traditionally set quite low. In the 1970s, when the problem first began to receive systematic scrutiny, the standard of living of custodial parents (predominantly mothers) and their children was far below that of non-custodial parents. Indeed, one survey showed that four out of five one-parent families lived below the poverty line. In the 1980s, the average amount granted was less than one half the level of minimal state support for poor families. Legal reforms instituted in 1984 promised to remedy this situation. It is not yet clear whether they have succeeded.99 The Swedes formulated the principle of a maintenance advance in 1935, and established one of the strongest child support collection systems in Europe in the 1970s. Awards are based on the standard of living of the parents as well as children’s subsistence requirements, and are indexed to the rate of inflation. Collection rates are generally high. At the same time, a number of public programs provide additional assistance to families maintained by women alone. Until the mid-1970s, post-divorce economic arrangements in France and Germany were determined largely by a judicial assessment of who was ‘at fault’ in the divorce. Judges had considerable latitude in determining child support awards. Since 1975 in France, child support has been collected through a highly organized system that entails deductions from the non-resident parent’s wages, and failure to pay child support is a crime. Even so, some argue that the amounts awarded are not sufficient to guarantee children’s welfare.100 The German system has apparently worked better, partly because the courts follow a set of detailed guidelines regarding the costs of children of different ages. As a result, children tend to receive a larger share of the non-resident parent’s income than in other countries. Recent reforms in France and Germany now mandate a ‘maintenance advance’ to dependents of a defaulting support debtor; the state effectively assumes the burden of collection for a significant period of time.101 In the period preceding their unification, East Germany offered more secure support for unmarried mothers than did West Germany. The contributions of non-custodial parents were insured for a period of sixteen years, rather than a period of three years, as in the West. With unification, Western policies became the rule. This had many negative consequences for families maintained by women alone; they lost important housing and social insurance subsidies, as well as a portion of state-guaranteed child support.102 How do the members of families maintained by women alone fare economically? Until recently, it was difficult even to compare levels of total family income among European countries, given the complexity of sources as diverse as tax credits, family allowances, earnings, and subsidies. Between 1979 and 1982, however, the Luxembourg Income 163

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Study collected comparable data from Germany, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom (as well as Canada, the United States, Australia, and Israel). Detailed analyses of this survey data show that family policies in the five European countries significantly reduced the poverty rates of both two-parent and single-parent families. Today, families with young children fare better relative to other families than in the United States; the overall incidence of poverty among children is also significantly lower.103 Yet mothers and children on their own remain disadvantaged. In Great Britain, the average gross income of one-parent (overwhelmingly femaleheaded) families measured about 39.5 per cent of that of a couple with two children in 1984. Even in Sweden, median income for a single mother with one or two children is only about 54 per cent of that of comparable married couple families. Policies in all the countries included in the Luxembourg Income Survey reduced poverty among the elderly better than among children.104 Families with young children, particularly those maintained by women alone, suffered the highest incidence of poverty. Furthermore, among the elderly, very old single women were the most susceptible to poverty. Timothy Smeeding, Barbara Torrey, and Martin Rein summarize their analysis of the Luxembourg Income Study as follows: ‘It is the situation of young single women and their children and very old single women that characterizes social disadvantage in industrial societies.’105 This summary seems a bit simplistic, especially since high unemployment rates now plague many European countries. But gender, age, and conformity to traditional gender roles remain important and unfair determinants of economic welfare. The cost of caring Not all the costs of being a woman in Northwestern Europe are attributable to state policy. Women earn less than men even if they have the same amount of education and labor force experience. Women work longer hours than men, especially if they are employed outside the home, because they spend three times as many hours on household obligations as men on workdays, and about twice as many on days off. Fathers spend minimal time caring for their children. Legislative reforms alone would never be sufficient to alter these inequalities, which are deeply embedded in cultural norms. On the other hand, collective efforts to implement legislative reforms often challenge and ultimately modify such norms.106 The history of Northwestern European welfare states shows how certain gender-based constraints were institutionalized, lowering the costs of social reproduction for men. The liberal approach adopted by Great Britain proved particularly disadvantageous for mothers, although it was 164

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also associated with greater tolerance for women’s individual rights. Corporatist strategies were more generous to parents. Gosta Esping-Anderson argues that social democratic regimes sought to ‘preemptively socialize the costs of familyhood.’ This hardly seems accurate. The Scandinavian countries did not implement old age pensions or family allowances any sooner than their neighbors to the south. Rather, they adopted pro-family policies that were at least somewhat more prowoman, with fewer restrictions on reproductive choice and fewer penalties for families that did not fit the traditional male breadwinner model.107 The social policies of Northwestern European welfare states were not simply imposed on women and families. They were shaped, to varying degrees, by feminist efforts to assert women’s individual rights and to revalorize family labor. But feminists never entirely got their way; rather, they made their most significant gains when women’s interests were consonant with perceptions of national and racial interest. Men’s perception of their own interests also played a role: they were most willing to increase public support for childrearing when and if the forms of support reinforced traditional gender roles. Also, pro-family spending consistently fell short of pro-family rhetoric. Many of the policies of the emergent welfare state addressed problems created by the changing relationship between the family and the market. They did not, however, solve these problems. The increasing cost of children will probably continue to drive fertility rates down, reducing the size of the working age population relative to the share of the elderly. Implicit contracts between the generations can and must be renegotiated. But these cannot be rearranged independently of relations between men and women, gays and straights, or rich and poor. A better understanding of the ways in which collective interests have shaped the distribution of the costs of social reproduction in Northwestern Europe could help women and children strike a better bargain.

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The English colonies that later became the United States were founded by migrants who dispossessed the native population and settled the vast interior regions of the country through a continuing process of internal migration. Forced immigration also played a role: African slaves became a major source of labor power in the plantation economy of the South. Both migration and slavery had disruptive effects on families, and these effects in turn shaped important economic and political trends. This chapter offers some examples of the interplay between forms of collective identity and action that were particularly relevant to the organization of family life in the United States. Perhaps the best way to motivate this historical narrative is to specify, in advance, a distinct hypothesis: the current distribution of the costs of social reproduction is even more disadvantageous to mothers and children in the United States than in Northwestern Europe. No single policy is at fault, nor can the limits of trade unionism or the tenor of US feminism take the blame. The explanation lies deeper, in a particular confluence of historical circumstances that affected patriarchal structures of constraint. Some important similarities with the experience of Northwestern Europe are apparent. The growth of wage labor weakened patriarchal control and contributed to increases in the costs of children. The expansion of markets and decline of fertility empowered women in some respects, but also pushed many outside the family economy into lowpaying jobs that offered little potential for genuine independence. In many respects, however, circumstances in the United States were distinctive. Persistently high levels of geographic mobility increased stresses on family relationships, promoting individualistic norms. Racial inequality and ethnic complexity also militated against the kind of allegiance to ‘the social family’ that inspired European social democracy. The evolution of patriarchal constraints in regions of ‘free’ and slave agriculture in the period before 1900 is the topic of the first section, which describes interrelated economic and demographic trends, as well as the early emergence of feminist collective action. The second section 166

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focuses on the Progressive Era, arguing that racial divisions retarded the development of federal social welfare policies, though the perception of increased vulnerability among widows, children, and the elderly motivated the emergence of many state-level programs for whites. The final section traces struggles over social welfare spending from the Social Security Act of 1935 to the present, showing that public policies have provided less assistance to families with young children in the US than in Northwestern Europe, and offering some possible explanations. PATRIARCHAL POWER AND EARLY ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT Changes in the distribution of the costs of children had important repercussions for economic development in the United States before 1900, and vice versa. A closer look at the way these changing costs were mediated by structures of constraint based on gender and age helps explain the process of fertility decline, the character of occupational segregation, and the emergence of a feminist movement. Patterns of social inequality in the United States were distinct from those of the Old World and varied considerably across regions. In early New England, an ethnically homogeneous ‘yeoman’ peasantry rejected royalist and feudal values but maintained strict control over women; inequality appeared greatest along gender lines. The South could hardly have been more dissimilar. There, slavery and plantation-based agriculture reinforced extreme race and class differences. The motives, methods, and results of control over female slaves were quite different from the limits placed on white belles. The expansion of markets and other forces corrosive of patriarchal control over children and, to a lesser extent, women proceeded more rapidly in the northern states. These contributed to increases in the cost of children, despite the relative availability of land on the frontier. As in Northwestern Europe, families with large numbers of children, as well as a substantial segment of the elderly, became more susceptible to poverty. Race and class differences, however, impeded the development of social welfare policies. They also had a divisive effect on efforts to mobilize women on behalf of their interests as women. The family economy of colonial New England While the European, predominantly British, settlers who came to the New World left much of their feudal legacy behind them, they brought their patriarchal traditions along. The new circumstances they found themselves in exerted a somewhat contradictory influence on age-based constraints. On the one hand, the potential availability of land facilitated 167

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the expansion of a family farm economy in the North and West; on the other, it reduced the leverage of fathers over sons. Gender relations were initially less susceptible to change, since women who set off completely on their own faced considerable threat of physical violence. A precondition for the type of economic development that ensued was the gradual but virtually complete dispossession of Native Americans. It was this dispossession, largely accomplished by military means, that created a moving frontier. During most of the colonial period, the limits of settlement were sharply denned by neighboring Indian territories. This factor, combined with the difficulties of clearing land and preparing it for crops, meant that the costs of establishing a new farm were fairly high. Changes in the relative costs of farming in old and new areas affected geographic mobility more than did the simple availability of land. The principles governing the operation of the New England family farm have long been a subject of debate. Some historians, influenced by neoclassical economic theory, argue that farmers were instinctive profit maximizers who gladly seized the opportunity to buy cheap and sell dear. Others, influenced by Marxian theory, insist that farmers had a ‘precapitalist mentality’ that resisted the encroachment of the market and sought primarily to preserve a way of life. Most farmers probably had attitudes somewhere in between these extremes, but virtually all relied on patriarchal constraints that gave them considerable control over the labor of their wives and children.1 Labor was scarce in the New World, and therefore precious. Adam Smith himself marveled at the benefits of high fertility in the colonies, and calculated ‘the labour of each child, before it can leave their [the parents’] home is computed to be worth a hundred pounds clear gain to them.’ Children provided important economic benefits not only because they began to perform productive work at an early age, but also because many continued to live at home, contributing to household production until well into their twenties.2 Poverty was not so widespread as in the Old World, and men could expect to accumulate wealth as they aged. The economic benefits of childrearing cannot be specified with any exactitude, although they were greater in rural than in urban areas. Large families may have contributed substantially to wealth accumulation in some regions; in others they probably had only a small impact. In any case, children provided an important source of security in old age. Capital markets were limited, and wage workers were hard to find. As a result, the elderly had few ways to convert real wealth into usable income. A man who could raise a number of sons to maturity and promise them a substantial inheritance of improved land could depend on support for himself and his wife in old age.3 Elder male control over assets cemented an implicit contract that was vulnerable to the vagaries of good will. Inheritance practices were 168

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strongly influenced by patriarchal self-interest, and tended to change as new economic opportunities shifted the relative bargaining power of fathers and sons. In the eighteenth century, some Massachusetts fathers began transferring land to their sons at an earlier age in order to persuade them to remain in the local community.4 What of daughters? They usually received only a small cash dowry upon their marriage, rather than an inheritance, as they were expected to become part of their husband’s family. Gender-based constraints pushed them to specialize in types of work complementary to childbearing and childrearing. Differences in the physical strength of men and women doubtless influenced the sexual division of labor, but these cannot fully explain the strict character of occupational segregation. Women in early New England seldom performed jobs defined as male, and when they worked for wages, earned about half as much as men.5 The antebellum South Conditions were different in the South, where the institution of slavery dominated the social and political landscape. Slavery was more than just a set of asset distributions or political rules. It represented a profoundly exploitative structure of racial and class constraints that channeled the benefits of African-American children to white slave-owners. It fostered a distinctive organization of social reproduction in which African-American women performed extraordinarily demanding physical labor, even while pregnant or nursing. The privileges that white women enjoyed by virtue of their race, further complicated by class differences between planters and poor whites, largely impeded the development of feminist sympathies. Because these differences were inscribed in cultural norms, they proved remarkably resistant to change. Slave-owners in the United States and the Caribbean wielded absolute power over their human chattel, and this power was apparently crucial to the economic success of the institution. Robert Fogel partly attributes the early decline of slavery in the Spanish colonies to royal decrees that stipulated that slaves could marry, that married families could not be separated, and that individuals had the right to purchase their freedom.6 Virtually complete control over slave women’s reproduction gave planters strong pecuniary incentives to maximize childbearing. New-born slave children had a positive market value. Adult female slaves sold for prices about 80 per cent those of males, probably because the value of their reproductive labor was fully realized only after a long time period, and attenuated by the risk of maternal and child mortality.7 Quantitative analysis of plantation records shows that most slave children entered the labor force at age 4, and began producing more than they were consuming after age 8 if they were girls, age 9 if boys, reaching 169

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peak productivity around age 35. Owners were partially successful at encouraging high fertility. Circa 1830, slave women living to age 49 bore an average of about 9 children. Marriage, even acquiescence, was unnecessary. According to interviews of ex-slaves, some children were fathered by whites in about one out of every six mother-headed families.8 Still, fertility rates were well below the biological maximum, partly as a result of conflicting economic objectives. The freedom to buy and sell slaves substantially disrupted marriages and other stable unions that were conducive to high fertility. Between 10 and 20 per cent of marriages were destroyed by trade, and one-third of all slave households headed by a single parent resulted from a sale of mother or father. Sex ratios were often unbalanced, and owners discouraged any search for mates off the plantation that might disrupt work routines.9 Infant and child mortality rates were also quite high, despite the apparent costs to the slave-owner. About one-half of all slave children died before reaching maturity, twice the rate for white children. One contributing factor was overwork among mothers, who often wielded hoes well into the late months of their pregnancy. Another was the tendency to wean infants at an early age, thus ‘freeing’ the mother to return to work, but depriving infants of the advantages that prolonged breast-feeding offered at a time when both water and animal’s milk often carried disease. Some mothers actively sought to prevent births, induce abortions, or commit infanticide in outrage at their own and their children’s circumstances.10 Relations between the sexes were drastically altered by slavery. As Jacqueline Jones writes, ‘the institution of bondage deprived black men of access to the patriarchy in the larger economic and political sense.’ Many scholars point to this historical legacy as evidence of the pathology of African-American family life, an interpretation that holds the patriarchal family up as the appropriate norm. Ironically, the slave family, held together by affection rather than law, came closer than the stereotypical white family to romantic ideals of altruism and love. Still, the AfricanAmerican family was not always an altruistic haven in an otherwise heartless world. The contingency of family ties had particularly negative consequences for mothers, even after emancipation.11 Slavery increased black women’s participation in the formal labor force, and placed a greater value on their labor, relative to that of men, than did the wage system of the Northeastern states. While men generally did plowing, a greater percentage of women than men overall worked in the fields. Relative wage rates for slaves who were hired out show that women earned about 80 per cent as much as men, compared to less than 40 per cent in the North. Some economists have argued that this simply reflected technical differences, that women were less productive in the North because the types of crops raised there required more physical 170

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strength than did weeding and picking of labor-intensive southern crops such as cotton and tobacco.12 While such technical factors may have been relevant, different structures of constraint were also in effect. In the North, women who sought paid work before the growth of factory employment were largely limited to jobs as domestic servants. Men did not want to face wage competition from women or be deprived of their cheap domestic services. In the South, slaveholders had little to gain and much to lose from a strict sexual division of labor between African-American men and women. The overt power they wielded over women slaves made occupational segregation by gender unnecessary.13 Few things rankled women of the slave-owning class more than their men’s easy sexual access to black women, which was widely condoned, though seldom mentioned in polite society. But the exhortations of feminist abolitionists like the Grimke sisters, describing southern white women as victims of the slave system, did not excite much sympathy. Affluent women clearly benefitted from the cheap labor that slaves provided as domestic and field workers, even if these benefits were largely controlled by their husbands and fathers. As Elizabeth Fox-Genovese writes, the history of slave women ‘demonstrates how dangerous it can be to study women in isolation from the interlocking systems of class, gender and race relations that constitute any society.’14 The expansion of markets Markets were felt differently by region. One of the anchors of the patriarchal farm economy in the Northeast was the immobility of family labor. As mobility increased, this anchor began to slip. The expanding frontier and the growth of opportunities to work for wages not only lured many young men away from home; they also enhanced the bargaining position of those who stayed behind. At the same time, the expansion of commodity markets provided substitutes for goods once produced in the household, rendering some of women’s traditional tasks obsolete. Such changes in relative prices exerted considerable pressure on the traditional sexual division of labor, particularly in the northern states. The expansion of wage labor in the early nineteenth century, which threatened loss of governance over youth as well as impersonal exploitation of both men and women, excited great controversy in rural New England. Initially, it was hoped that the factories springing up would stem the tide of out-migration and increase the productive contributions of women and children. But many farmers became convinced that urban wage employment was creating rural labor shortages. They feared that ‘cotton and woolen mills might attract every farmer’s son and daughter’ until homesteads would be left ‘running up to bushes.’15 171

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Rural opposition to labor markets was manifest in early debates over poor relief policies, which functioned to some extent as a form of unemployment insurance that made it possible for individuals to extend their search for jobs. Far from welcoming in-migrants, New England towns went to great pains to warn off the wandering poor in the latter half of the eighteenth century. In the early part of the nineteenth century, in both New York and Massachusetts, representatives from the smaller rural areas expressed far more opposition to public assistance than did representatives from urban, commercial areas.16 Expanding sales of imported textiles in the late eighteenth century, followed by the increase in US production after the War of 1812, led to dramatic price declines and the virtually complete displacement of homespun, home-woven cloth. At the same time, deeply embedded notions of appropriate work for women impeded their participation in farm labor. Male out-migration was high, and non-marriage increased as a result. In the 1830s, almost 15 per cent of all native-born adult women in Massachusetts were spinsters, virtually double the national average. They threatened to become burdens on their fathers and brothers, and as the cost of restrictions on women’s work outside the home increased, resistance to their participation in wage labor diminished. Entrance into new occupations that utilized new technologies, such as factory jobs, was less threatening than female appropriation of traditionally male skills.17 The growth of industrial employment for young women after 1820 did not openly challenge patriarchal traditions, because the sexual division of labor was kept almost as strict outside the household as it had been within it. In the Hamilton mill in Lowell, Massachusetts, women with three to six years’ experience earned one-half the wages earned by men who had been there a comparable time. Occupational segregation was evident even in industrial homework. In Massachusetts, the manufacture of palm leaf hats was conducted primarily by rural women. A more remunerative activity, broom-making, was no more complex, and involved tasks no less familiar to women, yet was conducted almost exclusively by men.18 In the early textile mills, young women’s personal lives were closely supervised. They were limited to the least skilled and least well-paying jobs and never placed in positions where they might supervise men. When, in the 1840s, large numbers of Irish immigrants began to alleviate labor shortages, working conditions deteriorated, and wages were cut. Most male trade unions did not include women or even support their organizing efforts. The report of the National Trades Union meeting of 1836 explained, ‘The physical organization, the natural responsibilities, and the moral sensibility of women prove conclusively that her labors should be only of a domestic nature.’ Not until the 1880s did a new labor organization, the Knights of Labor, make a serious effort to build crossgender and cross-ethnic coalitions.19 172

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While the pull of the frontier was felt almost everywhere, the factory whistle was seldom heard in the South. Slavery retarded the expansion of labor and commodity markets. The last census taken before the Civil War showed that only 13 per cent of the free labor force of the Southern states was engaged in manufacturing, compared to 26 per cent in the Northeast. Women comprised only 8.5 per cent of workers in manufacturing, compared to 25.4 per cent in the Northeast. These regional differences affected demographic as well as economic and political trends.20 Emancipation of slaves gave blacks control over themselves, ‘one kind of freedom,’ but little else. Lacking independent access to land or capital, they were forced into a system of share-cropping and debt peonage that gave them little scope for economic improvement. As Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch persuasively argue, the economic institutions that emerged in this era aggrandized whites as a group, albeit with uneven class consequences. During the era of Reconstruction, blacks enjoyed at least some political power, but the possibilities for economic and educational reform were lost as soon as the federal government allowed whites to reestablish supremacy.21 Employers and landowners benefitted from the availability of a twotiered pool of cheap labor, and white workers vehemently defended the formal rules and cultural norms that kept them out of the lower pool. W.E.B.Du Bois, the first African-American scholar to analyze Reconstruction, carefully explained his divergence from the traditional assumptions of Marxian theory when he wrote, ‘The Negro is exploited…and that exploitation comes…from the white capitalist and equally from the white proletariat.’22 The South suffered a major decline in marketed output in the postwar period, even after it recovered from the immediate devastation of buildings, equipment, livestock, and person-power. Many explanations have been offered for this, among them a decrease in labor hours by ex-slaves who were no longer subject to coercion. Another likely factor was a shift away from production for sale towards production for own consumption, which was never adequately measured by the census or other surveys. The sharecropping system created obvious incentives for a re-orientation of effort towards activities such as vegetable gardening, cooking, hunting, and fishing, whose produce was not shared with the landowner. At the same time, sharecropping increased the economic incentives to high fertility because it was based on the mobilization of family labor. Relatively high mortality among African-American children also contributed to high birth rates.23 The low standard of living that King Cotton offered meant that black men and women were eventually forced to seek wage employment, where their opportunities were circumscribed by occupational segregation based on both race and gender. Discrimination took effect early in black children’s lives, as they were limited to distinctly inferior schools. Racial 173

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supremacy was enforced by the organized violence of groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. Between 1889 and 1946, almost 4000 African-Americans were lynched, for reasons that included competing with whites for jobs or markets and alleged personal contact with white women.24 Not surprisingly, the black women’s groups that emerged in the South concentrated their efforts on organizing opposition to lynching, and improving educational opportunities. In these efforts, they enjoyed little support from white women’s groups. Mary Church Terrell, president of the National Association of Club Women, was openly rebuffed by white women affiliated with the General Federation of Women’s Clubs and the National-American Woman Suffrage Association. Women’s political allegiances were clearly affected by their identification with groups based on race, as well as class.25 The increased cost of children and the elderly As in Northwestern Europe, increases in the costs of children and the elderly took place gradually and unevenly, mediated by class and race differences as well as changes in gender and age relations. Fertility began to decline first in older, longer settled areas. Native-born families prosperous enough to forego children’s earnings and to be concerned with the intergenerational transmission of wealth began limiting their family size as early as the late eighteenth century. On the other hand, farmers growing crops that children could effectively work on (such as cotton and tobacco) continued to benefit from large family size. In Northern cities, poor and working-class families were often forced to send their children into factories at an early age, and child labor was unevenly regulated. Many of the new immigrants of the late nineteenth century came from robustly patriarchal cultures that emphasized children’s responsibility to contribute to family income.26 After 1880, however, many states in the North and Midwest began to regulate child labor, partly at the behest of adult men who sought protection from low-wage competition. In areas of the South where fathers collected wages on behalf of their entire family, child labor was viewed more favorably. Similar differences emerged in the implementation of mandatory public education. Both regulation and education expanded more slowly in the South, prompting major campaigns for national child labor legislation between 1910 and 1930. On the national level, the percentage of boys aged 10–15 with gainful occupations actually increased between 1870 and 1900, from 19.3 per cent to 26.1 per cent, but much of this represented the increase in nonagricultural employment, which the census measured more accurately than work on family farms. Regional variations and rural-urban differences remained significant. While children’s opportunities to earn 174

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wages were quite limited in urban areas outside the South by 1900, exceptions included the city of New York, where the demand for messengers, stockboys, and newsboys remained high.27 In Southern cotton mill towns, children provided a significant fraction of total family income as late as 1910. Children’s earnings were especially important to families headed by women. In the Northeast, a declining demand for agricultural labor took effect in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The Children’s Aid Society, founded in the 1850s, relocated poor and orphaned children from large Eastern cities to rural farms where they could work and help pay their own way. As time went on, they were forced to send children from the Northeast further afield, to the South and West.28 The state of Massachusetts required orphan children to pay their own way, indenturing them to foster homes on farms. In 1881, the accumulation of children in state orphanages compelled the state to acknowledge a need to pay families to care for foster children. The more agricultural state of Wisconsin not only expected children to pay their own way in foster family homes up till 10 years of age, but actually charged foster families for the value of their services after that age, to the tune of $6.25 a year. Not until 1923 did they modify this practice.29 These trends, of course, varied by race and class. Several studies of child labor in 1880 and 1890 show that it was strongly related to family income: the higher a father’s wage, the less likely a child’s participation in the labor force. Wage increases probably played an important role in the gradual decline of child labor, as families chose to educate their children. On the other hand, many poor and working-class families were hard-hit by new limits on children’s activities.30 Legal records offer another source of information regarding the gradual decline in children’s economic contributions. Throughout the nineteenth century, legal suits for damages in accidental death cases treated children as financial assets, and sons were considered more valuable than daughters. About the turn of the century, legal claims shifted to emphasize emotional loss rather than economic value.31 How effectively could families respond to these changing relative costs? The limited scope of reproductive choice was an issue for women everywhere. The primary methods of birth control within marriage were abstinence and withdrawal, both essentially male-controlled. Many men practiced these effectively, bolstered by faddish new theories that sexual self-control would lengthen their life and that abstinence, like thrift, would contribute to prosperity. But widespread misunderstanding of women’s monthly cycle led to many unwanted births. Women whose partners were unwilling or unable to cooperate were helpless; rape within marriage was not a punishable offense. A new interest in limiting births actually elicited a backlash from those 175

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who believed the very concept was obscene. A federal law passed in 1873 outlawed the dissemination of contraceptives or contraceptive information through the mail. In 1880, Anthony Comstock proudly announced the confiscation, over a seven-year period, of 64,094 ‘articles for immoral use, of rubber, etc.’ and ‘700 pounds of lead moulds for making Obscene Matter.’ Similarly, the increased demand for abortion, accompanied by the professionalization of medical care, motivated new efforts to discourage and punish abortion providers. Many families ended up with more children than they would have chosen, and found that the costs were even higher than they had anticipated.32 Meanwhile, the costs of providing for the elderly also increased. They began to live longer, had fewer children to rely on, and found it more difficult to earn an independent living. The effects were felt in race- and class-specific ways. Those elderly with substantial assets could easily withstand changes in intergenerational income flows. With sufficient wealth, they could retire in enviable circumstances, enjoying considerable leverage over their children with little actual need for their labor or income. Elderly who lacked wealth were probably more susceptible to desertion by their children. Those who lacked both wealth and children were particularly susceptible to poverty. Public recognition of the economic needs of the ‘deserving’ elderly came with the Civil War pensions that Congress established for veterans of the Union Army. Initially limited to those who were actually disabled in the war, the program proved extremely popular, and eligibility was extended to all those who had served honorably (and were not receiving poor relief) and to their widows and dependents. By 1910, about one quarter of all elderly men in the Northern states were receiving generous benefits. No single women were covered, and very few black men. The program probably had the effect of redistributing income from South to North through federal taxes and transfers (though several Southern states provided pensions for Confederate veterans).33 The growth of markets in capital and labor provided even some middle-income parents an alternative to children as a source of old age security. By the late nineteenth century, better paid workers were retiring to live off their own savings, and their efforts to finance their own retirement may have boosted savings in the economy as a whole. But as savings gradually became more important to the retirement portfolio, income inequality among the elderly probably increased, for the simple reason that children are generally distributed more equally than money.34 The family ‘safety net’ had never guaranteed security for the elderly or adequate support for mothers with young children. Both groups were traditionally overrepresented among the poor. Before the Civil War the percentage of people aged 60 or older in most poorhouses ranged from 16 per cent to 25 per cent. But the problems of the indigent elderly became 176

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particularly conspicuous toward the end of the nineteenth century, despite the provision of Civil War pensions to veterans. Demographic factors such as smaller families and greater longevity combined with a decline in children’s contributions to increase their economic vulnerability. After 1875, private institutions for the charitable care of the aged began to proliferate. Among state almshouse paupers, the percentage of those aged 65 and over increased from 26 per cent in 1880 to 43 per cent in 1910. Part of the explanation lay in the expulsion of other groups. The elderly were more difficult to expel, not only because they were conspicuously needy, but also because patriarchal traditions accorded them at least some generalized respect.35 The new sexual division of labor The expansion of wage employment among women proceeded rapidly, but followed a pattern consistent with the traditional division of labor in the home. Single women, especially immigrants, rushed into paid employment after 1860. By 1900, the census listed 44 per cent of all single women aged 15 and over with gainful occupations, a percentage that was not reached for married women until after 1970. Working girls were expected to leave their jobs upon marriage.36 Debates over the effect of industrialization on women and the family intensified. One of the recurrent themes was a fear that motherhood was somehow being threatened; another was that male prerogatives were being challenged. To absolutely forbid women’s participation in wage employment would have meant foregoing the improvements in technical efficiency and contributions to family income that work outside the home began to promise. But to allow them to participate on the same terms as men would have destabilized many aspects of male privilege. Restrictions on the employment of married women, as well as strict occupational segregation, helped balance these conflicting pressures. Most of the factories that single women entered applied new technologies and systems of labor supervision to the production of goods that women had once produced in the home: clothing and food. But it is important to remember that most wage-earning women did not work in factories. They moved into the homes of affluent families who could afford to pay them room, board, and a small cash stipend for their domestic services. In 1870, domestic servants represented 46 per cent of all gainfully employed women aged 10 and over. After that year, domestic servants declined in relative importance, but female employment in the larger category of domestic and personal services grew quite rapidly.37 Married women’s specialization in domestic labor probably increased in the last thirty years of the nineteenth century. The percentage with occupations tabulated by the census remained under 6 per cent, and in 177

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industrial states such as Massachusetts opportunities for participation in informal types of market work (such as selling butter or cheese, taking in boarders, or engaging in industrial homework) declined. Despite important technical changes that increased the productivity of household labor, the demand for household services seems to have increased. Families wanted better meals, higher standards of cleanliness, and fancier clothing, and in some ways, the departure of daughters from the home increased the pressure on mothers. While factory production offered cheap substitutes for goods once produced at home, the commercial service sector was slower to develop.38 Also relevant to married women’s slow entrance into paid employment were several forms of resistance—husbands’ opposition, threats from male workers, and overt employer discrimination. Indications of these are found in the terms of public debate, as well as in the patterns of collective action. Trade unionists explained their resistance to female employment not only by invoking the importance of men earning a family wage, but by complaining that women might neglect their domestic duties. A member of the National Typographers’ Union protested the seating of feminist organizer Susan B.Anthony at a National Labor Union Conference in 1869 as follows: ‘The lady goes in for taking women away from the wash tub, and in the name of heaven, who is going there, if they don’t? I believe in a woman’s doing her work, men marrying them and supporting them.’39 The typographers’ union was one of only two affiliates of the American Federation of Labor that accepted women. Most others passed resolutions prohibiting them from joining. Racial exclusion was even more widespread, virtually guaranteeing the absence of African-American women in unions. In the South, white workers in textile mills were known to threaten strikes if and when blacks were hired.40 Carroll Wright, dean of late nineteenth-century census and cost-of-living surveys, was an ardent defender of working girls. He performed one of the earliest studies of female factory employment, and scoffed at the common complaint that women living away from home had loose morals. In an article entitled, ‘Why Women Earn Less than Men,’ he acknowledged that women faced discrimination in the labor market.41 Yet even Wright was dismayed by the prospect that married women might be neglecting their traditional duties. In his essay on ‘The Factory System,’ published as part of the 1880 census, he wrote, ‘The employment of married women, it seems to me, is the very worst feature of factory employment.’ He went on to express a sympathy for working mothers that clearly revealed conventional assumptions regarding their responsibilities: Domestic felicity does not and cannot reach a very high place when a mother must arise before the rest of the family to prepare hastily the breakfast for all, then hasten to the mill and make her time good 178

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till the noon hour, when the dinner must be prepared as hastily as was the breakfast; while at night, after a day of constant labor, she must see that supper is served and then take up the thousand and one duties of the household, which keep her busy till the hour has long passed when she should be asleep.42 It did not occur to Wright that other family members might take on some of mothers’ additional responsibilities. Ironically, the idealization of women’s non-market work was not accompanied by much appreciation of its economic importance. Neither the US census nor early professors of political economy considered housewives to be productive workers. A rough estimate of the percentage of women who were primarily engaged in housework and child care can be obtained by assuming that a minimum of 85 per cent of all women aged 15 and over were engaged in productive work. This compares to about 90 per cent of men in that age category who were listed with gainful occupations, and is consistent with the findings of the Massachusetts State Census, which actually tabulated the number of both men and women engaged in housework between 1875 and 1905. By this calculation, about 64 per cent of all women workers in 1900 were primarily engaged in non-market work, or about 36 per cent of the total of all market and non-market workers.43 Trends in productivity in the non-market household sector could easily have had a greater impact on overall productivity than changes within manufacturing. And there are many reasons to believe that productivity increased dramatically—the development of municipal services providing water, gas, and electricity was accompanied by increased sales of improved stoves, sewing machines, and washing machines. The growth of public infrastructure and consumer durables represented a crucial form of productive investment. The household sector made an important contribution to the overall rate of economic growth in the United States in the late nineteenth century. Feminist collective action Men’s rights and nothing more; women’s rights and nothing less. Motto of the feminist newspaper, The Revolution Although the first feminist organizing efforts in the United States grew out of the struggle to abolish slavery, feminism remained a whitedominated movement. Its organizations were generally centered in the Northeast; in the South, white women remained largely uninterested and, after emancipation, African-American women devoted their political energies to the cause of racial betterment. But the impact of feminism reached beyond specific organizations and actions to challenge prevailing 179

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views of women’s proper place. In this respect, it affected women across lines of class and race. Feminist writers, both theorists and popularizers, sought to articulate women’s collective interests and to argue that society as a whole would benefit from their realization. Their rhetoric encouraged women to organize in the workplace and to assert themselves at home. Even where they failed to redistribute economic assets or revise political rules, they helped modify social norms and personal preferences relevant to women’s wages, the organization of housework, and the process of fertility decline. Feminists made an economic difference. A meeting called in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 officially inaugurated the campaign for women’s suffrage. It produced a memorable document that began with a paraphrase of the Declaration of Independence: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.’ Later passages were more militant, calling attention to gender interests: ‘The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.’ The list of more specific observations was topped by the complaint that men denied women the vote. But the items that followed protested women’s subordination in the family, the Church, and the economy, and included a specific reference to occupational segregation: ‘He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments…. He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction which he considers most honorable to himself.’44 The struggles against race and gender inequality were closely allied (Frederick Douglass, the famous African-American agitator, attended the Seneca Falls meeting). The Equal Rights Association formed that day was relatively successful in agitating for women’s property rights. By 1860, fourteen states had modified their rules regarding the disposition of property in marriage. A growing number of colleges and universities began admitting both women and people of color. The Civil War drastically altered the political climate. Immediately after the surrender of the Confederate Army, the Equal Rights Association began to press for an amendment to the Constitution that would guarantee black men the right to vote. Most members felt it would be impractical to press for female suffrage at the same time. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B.Anthony disagreed, and led their followers out of the organization. Their resistance was intensified by a matter of language. The 15th Amendment (like the English Reform Act of 1832) introduced more gender-specific language than had hitherto been included in the Constitution or its amendments. It used the word ‘men’ where previously the word ‘individuals’ had served. The decision that Anthony, Stanton, and others made to abandon their alliance with African-Americans was not merely a strategic one, based on 180

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confidence in the cause of women’s suffrage. It reflected, at least to some extent, their own concepts of racial self-interest and the hope that women could find better allies among native-born whites. At the meetings of the Equal Rights Association in 1869, Anthony declaimed, ‘If you will not give the whole loaf of suffrage to the entire people, give it to the most intelligent first.’45 Stanton later elaborated as follows: ‘If you do not wish the lower orders of Chinese, Africans, Germans, and Irish, with their low ideas of womanhood to make laws for you and your daughters,…demand that women, too, shall be represented in the government.’46 The new organization that Stanton and Anthony founded pursued more militant strategies than the mainstream American Women’s Suffrage Association. Efforts to woo the craft unions, through groups like the Working Women’s Association, proved largely unsuccessful. But at least one major labor organization, the Knights of Labor, was clearly influenced by feminist convictions. The strikes they conducted in the 1880s prepared the ground for the Women’s Trade Union League, an organization that would become influential in early twentieth-century labor struggles.47 After they were reunited in 1890, the two major women’s rights organizations pursued a staid but relentless strategy of pressing for legal reforms and women’s suffrage. In the 1890s visible gains were made in access to graduate education and the professions. Reforms in family law made divorce more accessible. Feminist economic gains were most apparent in areas where they served the interests of the wealthy and white. Before 1850, women owned less than 10 per cent of wealth probated in wills. The Married Women’s Property Acts gradually modified this pattern; by the end of the nineteenth century women’s wealth amounted to 25 per cent or more of the total.48 Less tangible, but nonetheless significant, were feminist efforts to valorize household labor and encourage housewives to assert their economic importance. ‘Women’s work in the home differs from men’s gainful pursuits in the marketplace,’ wrote Stanton, only in that it is ‘unpaid, unsocialized, and unrelenting.’ The Association for the Advancement of Women formally protested federal census terminology in 1878, complaining that housewives were ‘not even incidentally named as in any wise affecting the causes of increase or decrease of population or wealth.’49 Some feminists proposed legislative changes that would give wives and mothers a legal claim to half the family wage-earners’ paycheck. Others, like Melusina Pierce, called for the collectivization of housework, and adoption of technical innovations that would diminish its drudgery. Pierce organized cooperative dinner clubs in which responsibility for meals was shared by several families. None of the clubs lasted very long, but the controversy they aroused called attention to the problems of domestic work. In large cities, white housewives began to demand better kitchens, more consumer durables, and more municipal services.50 181

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Feminists were among the first to assert that wives should have the right and the gumption to refuse sexual intercourse with their husbands if they did not themselves desire it. In 1838, Sarah Grimke argued that equal rights to person and property would release women from the ‘horrors of forced maternity.’ By example (the love of her life was a woman) as well as argument, Susan B.Anthony challenged the stigma attached to non-marriage, and upheld the dignity of self-support.51 Even those feminists who most romanticized motherhood believed it should be voluntary. The temperance movement, conservative in many respects, encouraged women to become ‘guardians of virtue’ (which incidentally required asserting control over their husbands). In her classic Women and Economics, first published in 1898, Charlotte Perkins Gilman pointed out that children were no longer economic assets, that they were imposing larger costs on their parents, and that greater opportunities for women outside of motherhood would benefit men as well as women.52 By 1900, a famous feminist of the anarchist persuasion, Emma Goldman, had spent several days in jail for lecturing on ‘voluntary motherhood.’ Margaret Sanger and other editors of the Woman Rebel coined the term ‘birth control’ in 1914. When Sanger’s husband was sent to jail for thirty days for distributing a pamphlet entitled ‘Family Limitation,’ the presiding judge opined that ‘if some of the women who are going around and advocating equal suffrage would go around and advocate women having children they would do a greater service.’53 Sanger herself came to appreciate the difficulties of preaching social reform as well as contraceptive revolution; by 1917 she had opted for the latter. The political and financial support she enjoyed once she began to argue that birth control would protect the upper-class native population from the proliferation of ‘the poor and unfit’ testifies to the powerful operation of class and race interests. Still, her efforts pushed both the medical and the legal establishment towards some recognition of the concept of reproductive rights.54 Distinctive features of early US history The founding fathers understood the inherently contentious nature of the polity. ‘The latent causes of faction,’ wrote James Madison in The Federalist Papers, ‘are thus sown in the nature of men; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society.’ Yet neither Madison nor his fellow politicians anticipated that the economic progress of the republic would alter the relationships between parents and children, men and women, because they placed these relationships in the world of nature, outside of civil society.55 The rapidly expanding internal frontier and early expansion of wage employment undermined patriarchal control over youth and increased the 182

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likelihood of women engaging in non-domestic labor. The liberal rhetoric of democratic rights, as well as the culture of individualism, encouraged self-assertion. While the family remained extremely important as a kind of social safety net, it was subjected to new stresses and strains. Relatively egalitarian class relations probably contributed to a strong awareness of gender conflict. In nineteenth-century Europe, many working-class men and women were excluded from political representation through restrictions on suffrage. In the United States, on the other hand, the early successes of male republicanism effectively isolated white women and divided access to the vote along gender and race rather than class lines. Partly as a result, white feminists in the United States pursued their collective interests more single-mindedly than their counterparts in Northwestern Europe.56 Racial differences, however, had unfortunate consequences for early forms of collective action based on gender, channeling them towards the pursuit of individual rights rather than social responsibilities. Allegiance to racial interests deflected efforts to develop a cross-race coalition of women, just as they impeded the development of a militant working-class movement. By the turn of the century, feminism in the United States was more politically and intellectually developed than in Europe, but it was also more isolated, less connected to other insurgent social movements. A FAMILY DIVIDED: EARLY SOCIAL WELFARE POLICY Unlike most of the countries of Northwestern Europe, the United States failed to generate a strong social democratic party by 1900 and, despite occasional surges of solidarity, the trade union movement did not extend far beyond an elite of relatively skilled workers until after 1930. Why? Most explanations emphasize the effects of a relatively fluid class structure, racial inequality, regional heterogeneity, or political institutions. But United States ‘exceptionalism’ was also shaped by a distinctive evolution of gender- and age-based constraints. The unequal distribution of income between men and women, and between young and old, impeded the success of class-based coalitions.57 Despite the sporadic successes of a fledgling socialist party and the reformists of the Progressive Era, the concept of a ‘social family’ rallied less support in the United States than in Northwestern Europe. The continuing flow of immigrants from abroad, largely unrestricted until 1921, was accompanied by the movement of many African-Americans to Northern cities. Most policy-makers wanted to discourage population growth, particularly among non-whites and non-natives. State assistance to families with children, which took the form of ‘mothers’ pensions,’ was almost entirely limited to recipients of proper color and comportment. Debates over new state policies displayed a clear awareness of changes in the family 183

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economy, but also revealed the persistence of patriarchal norms and interests, and a greater generosity towards elderly men than other dependents. The rhetoric of race suicide Dynamic tensions among allegiances based on class, race, and gender defined the character of what many historians have termed ‘The Progressive Era.’ These tensions were particularly evident in public discussions of demographic trends. The impact that economists, sociologists, journalists, and politicians had on public policy is difficult to ascertain, but their views both reflected and shaped the identities and interests of many different given groups. The prominent Francis Walker (who during his lifetime presided over the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the American Economics Association, and the US Census Office) published a popular magazine article in 1891 explaining that the declining number of children among the white native-born population could not be attributed to any shortcomings of American health or climate. The notion that Americans actually needed immigrants to promote demographic and economic expansion, he maintained, was ‘grotesquely in the wrong.’ The decline in the American birth rate, Walker claimed, was attributable to immigration. The native population was reeling from economic shock: ‘the access of vast hordes of foreign immigrants, bringing with them a standard of living at which our own people revolted.’ A society that had never before suffered class conflict was now polarized by differences between natives and foreigners. While virtually all Americans had foreign forebears, Walker complained that immigration had become too easy and was no longer selective of the strong and vigorous.58 In 1902, an article published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics presented estimates that the birth rate was more than 70 per cent higher among immigrants than among natives, and concluded that the native population would be unable to hold its own. National, as well as racial, hegemony was at stake. Theodore Roosevelt observed that Germany had won the ‘warfare of the cradle’ in the nineteenth century, and warned that larger families would be crucial to national security. Roosevelt went on to make the term ‘race suicide’ famous. Like many of his contemporaries, he preached that native-born white women were neglecting their responsibilities, comparing efforts to avoid childbearing to soldiers’ cowardice on the battlefield. College-educated women, who showed an alarming tendency to avoid marriage altogether, were particularly culpable. The ‘emancipated’ childless working woman was characterized as a ‘sexless female.’ Feminist exhortations regarding voluntary motherhood were cast as selfish and individualistic concerns that would undermine the welfare of the nation.59 184

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In 1907, a Wisconsin university professor named John R.Commons developed Walker’s theme of class conflict in more detail. His views are notable not only because he was an influential economist, but also because he played an active part in reform efforts such as the campaign for workmen’s compensation. Commons argued that continuing immigration was fomenting class conflict, and that the participation of incompetent races threatened the very efficacy of democracy. Fertility decline among the American or colonial stock was, for the same reason, a fundamental social problem. An enthusiastic advocate for trade unions, Commons suggested that upper-class families were lowering their birth rate out of a desire for luxury and easy living. Skilled working-class families, on the other hand, were simply trying to cope with the ill effects of economic uncertainty and unemployment resulting from unrestricted immigration.60 Unlike many others who voiced anti-immigrant sentiments, Commons also took pains to elaborate his views of the inherent inferiority of African-Americans, along with other indolent and fickle races of tropical provenance. Education, he argued, was no solution. Forty years had passed, he wrote, since Negroes in the South had been given educational opportunities, and the experiment had proven unsuccessful. Nor was greater public attention to their health likely to prove useful. Commons attributed high levels of infant mortality among blacks to sexual immorality and debauchery. More tolerant (though still racist) views were promoted by the Wisconsin sociologist Edward A.Ross, who expressed greater optimism regarding feminism and fertility decline. He believed that immigrants would eventually see the benefits of smaller families, and public policies could speed this transition: The lower strata are coming or may be brought within reach of the influences that moderate multiplication. If we speed up the individualizing agencies till the unthinking and brutish have become a mere remnant, the danger will disappear. Furthermore, the closer legal restriction of child labor, by making offspring expensive instead of profitable, may check the free propagation of stocks deficient in capacity or parental altruism.61 A variety of academic experts were invited to comment on Ross’s article, ‘Western Civilization and the Birth-Rate,’ and their responses were telling. William Bailey of Yale University sided with Ross on the benefits of fertility decline, but argued that if it fell too far, as in Europe, government intervention would be warranted. Miss Emily Balch of Wellesley College expressed views more in keeping with Commons, and criticized the English Fabians on eugenic grounds. She predicted that the endowment of motherhood would lead to the reproduction of undesirable elements. She even expressed disapproval of school lunch programs: 185

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If you believe that the decrease of the birth-rate has gone so far that it is a serious matter as a total, then, of course, if you want simply to have more people, to have any kind of people, depraved people quite as well as any other class, measures like this, like feeding school children, are a good thing; but if you believe it is important to have not only more people, but most particularly to have more of the right kind of people, then any measure of encouragement should be most carefully selective in character.62 By the 1920s, such attitudes were widespread, even among former socialists like Margaret Sanger, whose new slogan became ‘More children from the fit, less from the unfit—that is the chief issue of birth control.’ Of course, not everyone agreed with Miss Emily Balch, even at Wellesley. The conviction that the welfare of all mothers and children served the larger welfare of the nation played an important role in Progressive Era politics. But the perceptions of national and racial interest promoted by Balch, Ross, Commons, and Walker testify to the complex grid of opposition that reformers faced.63 The progressive family agenda Around the beginning of this century, women trade unionists, as well as middle-class members of women’s clubs, began a concerted campaign for public policies on behalf of mothers and children. Many prominent women within academic and political circles also promoted the new ‘maternalist’ agenda. While some feminists argued that these strategies were a distraction from the suffrage battle, others insisted that commitment to social welfare and equal rights could go hand in hand. The variety of white women who participated in the family policy movement, contrasted with the apathy of mainstream trade unions, suggests that the coalition was largely gender-based, and drew what little power it had from its cross-class character. A brief look at the protagonists helps explain their larger agenda. Socialists in the United States, as in Europe, harped on the point that the capitalist system was increasing the costs of children without providing parents with any compensation. Some activists, like Florence Kelley, also emphasized the ill effects of increased individualism, discussing children’s increased tendency to default on responsibilities to their parents and younger siblings. Worse still, poverty and unemployment were forcing mothers into wage labor, to the detriment of the young children they had already brought into the world. In 1910, Annie Maclean wrote, ‘the woman is worth more to society in dollars and cents as the mother of healthy children than as the swiftest labeler of cans. Yet our present industrial practice would indicate a preponderance of value in the latter.’64 186

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Such concerns prompted many women, as well as men, to defend the concept of a family wage. Conflicts often flared as working-class women argued that protective legislation was a higher priority than the right to vote. Some feminists countered that such maternalist policies would reinforce occupational segregation and unequal pay. Public transfers to mothers on their own offered a solution to this political dilemma, because they would acknowledge the importance of reproductive labor without penalizing women wage-earners. The Fabian term ‘endowment of motherhood’ was seldom used; instead support coalesced behind a movement for ‘mothers’ pensions’ modeled after the Civil War pensions.65 Many feminists sought to valorize women’s non-market work as mothers. Even the individualistic wing of the women’s movement, the National Women’s Party (NWP), promoted public support for parenthood. When Florence Kelley objected that the proposed Equal Rights Amendment would threaten the mothers’ pension programs, NWP members argued that the programs should be made gender-neutral, that motherless as well as fatherless families should be eligible.66 An editorial in the magazine Equal Rights elaborated further on the argument that mother’s pensions did not imply discrimination on the basis of gender: There is an overwhelming social need for an intelligent treatment of maternity as a fixed social charge…. The Equal Rights Amendment will not hinder the progress of true maternity legislation any more than it will interfere with soldiers’ bonus measures…. It merely involves inequality of treatment between the mother and nonmother, just as the soldiers’ bonus involves inequality of treatment between the veteran soldier and the civilian.67 Support for progressive family policies was not limited to socialist and feminist circles. Beginning about 1900, a new cohort of predominantly middle-class, college-educated women began moving into positions of moderate political and economic influence. Of these, Jane Addams, leader of the settlement house movement in Chicago, was the most visible. Also influential were Sophonisba Breckinridge and Edith Abbott, who studied political economy at the University of Chicago and later became faculty members there. Among the first to publish research on women wageearners in scholarly journals, they also played a crucial role in convincing the Bureau of Labor Statistics to conduct special research on female wageearners. Abbott spent a year at the London School of Economics, studying with Sidney and Beatrice Webb.68 None of the members of this influential Chicago contingent applied socialist rhetoric to social work. On the contrary, they explicitly sought allies among members of the more conservative Charity Organization Society. They were more restrained in their praise of motherhood, more determined in their defense of women wage-earners, than European social 187

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democrats. Yet they strongly endorsed the social democratic vision of public responsibility for the poor, for poor mothers and children in particular. This was a cause with which many middle-class women could sympathize. Groups such as the National Congress of Mothers and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs wanted to extend the domestic morality of the home to society as a whole. Indeed, the issue of maternal health and welfare offered them their own separate sphere within the realm of national politics. As Theda Skocpol and Gretchen Ritter point out, women’s groups were distributed widely across local political districts (unlike trade unions, whose members were concentrated in large urban centers), and exercised considerable political influence even though individual women lacked the right to vote.69 The initial, and in some ways most significant, victory for the maternalist coalition came in 1907, when the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that protective labor legislation for women (unlike that for men) was consistent with the United States Constitution. The judges ruled that long hours and night work were detrimental not only to women’s health, but also to their reproductive functions. Their paternalist tone accentuated the contradictory implications of a policy that ‘protected’ women primarily by excluding them. The protective and minimum wage legislation subsequently implemented in many states almost certainly reinforced occupational segregation.70 Reforms aimed to protect women without offering benefits to men enjoyed considerably less success. One of the most important goals of the federal Children’s Bureau, established in 1912 as a platform for attention to children’s welfare, was revision of the laws governing the rights of unwed mothers and children born out of wedlock. In most states these laws left mothers without much legal recourse. In many they left a convenient loophole for fathers: a woman could bring suit only within a certain fixed period, normally two years after the birth of a child. A man who provided support during that period, then withdrew it, was effectively immune from prosecution. Reform efforts met with tremendous resistance; even in the few states where some progress was made, new rules were not effectively enforced. The Children’s Bureau reoriented its efforts towards the workplace. In 1918, a federal law strengthening compulsory education requirements was passed. But efforts to promote federal child-labor legislation excited substantial opposition from both employers and parents in the South, and a bill finally passed in 1919 was declared unconstitutional in 1922.71 Ratification of a constitutional amendment in 1921 finally gave women the right to vote in federal elections. By all accounts, women’s suffrage tipped the balance in favor of the Sheppard-Towner bill providing maternal health services, which had first been introduced to Congress several years earlier. Women trade unionists, social welfare 188

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workers, women’s clubs, the Children’s Bureau—all these groups had lobbied for new federal efforts to reduce infant mortality by providing publicly subsidized health care for expectant mothers and young infants. The original proponents had hoped to include family planning services, but decided against it, for fear this would diminish its chances of passage. Physicians’ organizations strongly opposed the bill, labeling it a form of socialism. Although the bill passed, total appropriations for it remained quite small (about one-ninth as much as federal money spent on roads and bridges). In the conservative backlash after World War I, Congressional opposition to the program mounted; by 1927 it was being phased out.72 The maternalist-feminist alliance was arguably more successful on the state level, where mothers’ pensions were first established in 1911 and adopted in most states by 1935. The sources of success in this particular arena lay in the careful limitation of eligibility and benefits. For this reason, and because they foreshadowed the later Aid to Dependent Children program, mothers’ pensions provide a useful window into the economic circumstances of women and children before 1935, Mothers on their own While early family policies were clearly shaped by political coalitions and specific institutional factors, they were also driven by new patterns of economic vulnerability. The costs of children were rising, particularly for women who faced the additional risk of paternal default. Far from aiming to enhance the relative wellbeing of families maintained by women alone, the mothers’ pensions represented an effort to stave off serious deterioration in these families’ standard of living. It seems unlikely that they proved adequate to this task. Whether widowed, separated, or deserted by the fathers of their children, mothers on their own were particularly disadvantaged in urban environments, where it was difficult to combine child care with other forms of productive work. The gradual constriction of earnings opportunities for young children made it even more difficult to make ends meet. Indeed, one of the most common arguments against child-labor legislation was that it would impose undue hardship on widows, and states sometimes included exemptions for widows’ children. Despite continual challenges to the constitutionality of national legislation, both technological change and public sentiment militated against the employment of children. In 1900, 12 per cent of children of 12 to 13 years of age and 31 per cent of those between 14 and 15 were listed as gainfully employed by the census. By 1930, the percentages had dropped to 2 per cent and 9 per cent, respectively. The improved enforcement of mandatory public schooling after 1918 diminished children’s contributions to non-market work (such as caring for siblings), 189

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and postponed the date at which they might begin to bring earnings home.73 Divorce became more accessible after 1880, but remained both expensive and stigmatizing. Women who were currently divorced (i.e. had not remarried) comprised less than 1 per cent of all women over 15 in every decennial federal census from 1900 to 1920. De facto divorce resulting from desertion and separation was far more common. Many families maintained by women alone lived in households headed by men (such as fathers, brothers, or boarding house keepers), and therefore were not tabulated as ’female-headed.’ In 1900, about 8.5 per cent of all children lived with a single parent.74 The growing cost of rearing children increased the temptations for men to default on their paternal responsibilities. As noted earlier, laws regarding children born out of wedlock were quite advantageous to fathers. Regarding divorce, feminists had argued since the 1860s that fathers should not automatically be awarded the custody of children. Even where men did not actually exercise the prerogative, this traditional legal right gave husbands considerable bargaining power. Not surprisingly, the scales of justice tipped towards mothers after about 1880, as the costs of rearing children began to escalate. By 1911, twenty-two states explicitly granted women equal custody rights, and typically assigned young children to their mothers’ care. As Carol Brown puts it, the doctrine of ‘father right’ to child custody was supplanted by the doctrine of ‘mother obligation.’75 Women without inherited wealth were forced to support their families on wages that averaged less than half what a man could earn. And, by most accounts, even male earnings were inadequate to the costs of family life. Many mothers on their own simply could not feed and clothe their children, and were forced to relinquish them to charitable institutions and public agencies. The state mother’s aid programs were initiated largely as a means of allowing families to stay together, and were rationalized in part by the argument that this form of assistance was less expensive than supporting children in a foster home or orphanage. In 1911, Illinois passed the first ‘funds to parents’ act. Similar legislation passed quickly in states which had already granted or were actively considering women’s suffrage. By 1935, forty-five states provided similar forms of assistance.76 But most of these programs simply empowered counties or similar political units to provide assistance, and many chose not to, especially where the client population was largely African-American or Latino. Even as late as 1934, less than half of all counties were actually providing aid. Provision was particularly weak in the South, where Alabama, South Carolina and Georgia lacked programs altogether, and less than 5 per cent of counties in Texas, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Kentucky participated. African-Americans received only 3 per cent of all state-provided pensions and were explicitly barred in a number of counties.77 190

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Most states imposed citizenship and residency requirements. Mothers with only one child were often excluded from consideration. Assistance was intended primarily for widows. Even in relatively liberal Massachusetts, authorities would not consider an application by a deserted mother until at least one year had passed and she had requested the court to prosecute her husband for non-support. Amendments to the Illinois act denied divorced women eligibility. By 1934, most states technically allowed support for mothers who had been deserted or divorced, but in practice, administrators sought to exclude them. Only three states specifically included nevermarried mothers. Women could also be denied assistance if their behavior was considered ‘improper,’ if they failed to meet standards of ‘good housekeeping,’ or if they worked outside the home.78 Benefits were set below the level of wages women could earn, and fears were expressed that higher amounts might discourage women from seeking new husbands. In 1921, Edith Abbott and Sophonisba Breckinridge undertook a detailed study of the administration of the Aid to Mothers law in Illinois, and found that general levels of assistance were even lower than those stipulated by law. Per person, they amounted to less than either Civil War or state old age pensions provided. Uneven, scanty assistance meant that mothers with dependent children were particularly hard-hit by the Depression after 1929, and in the early 1930s their households accounted for about 9 per cent of all those receiving Federal Emergency Relief (a definite improvement over state assistance). Yet most new forms of federal assistance explicitly discriminated against both women and people of color. Three-quarters of all participants in New Deal voluntary work programs were white males. Only heads of households were eligible, and the federal Works Progress Administration (WPA) cited a ‘desire to put some brake upon women’s eagerness to be the family breadwinner, wage recipient, and controller of the family pocketbook’ and a ‘desire to protect the WPA program against possible public criticism from employing “too many women.”’ As unemployment among men increased, the old family wage argument was resurrected as an excuse for firing women. A federal government regulation passed in 1930 mandated that married couples could not serve as federal employees; one spouse must be discharged. Many municipalities prohibited the employment of women whose husbands earned a ‘living wage.’ Some states stipulated the level of family income sufficient to warrant dismissal of a married woman.79 In sum, state policies towards mothers expressed maternalist sentiments, but did not do much to improve the welfare of mother-headed families. Levels of assistance provided were not only minimal, but conditional on conformity to traditional gender roles. Families of color were largely excluded. Even policies developed in response to the stresses of the Great Depression reinforced the notion that the responsibilities of child care and housework were, by definition, female. 191

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The indigent elderly New programs for assistance to the indigent elderly followed the mothers’ pensions; by 1930, New York, Massachusetts, California, and nine other states were involved. Like aid for mothers, public old age pensions were inspired by concern for the increasing economic vulnerability of a group disadvantaged by the new system of wage employment. The cultural and political circumstances, however, favored the elderly. Patriarchal norms reinforced the notion that women should be dependent on men (a dependency that state assistance might abrogate). The same set of norms sanctified the independence of the elderly; for men, in particular, dependence was considered an indignity. Fraternal organizations such as the Eagles paralleled the women’s clubs’ efforts on behalf of mothers, seeking to unify the elderly as a voting bloc. While some grassroots labor organizations also lobbied for support, the American Federation of Labor placed greater priority on trade union pensions.80 There is no evidence that the elderly, as a group, suffered a decline in their standard of living in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In fact, many benefitted from rising wages and were able to save money and accumulate assets for retirement. This we know from household budget surveys in 1889–90, 1917–19, and surveys of the elderly in the 1920s. It may well be that the elderly fared better than mothers on their own. Still, the risk of age-related hardship was increasing. As the Civil War pensions (along with their recipients) began to expire, a spirited public debate over old age poverty intensified.81 Arguments in favor of relief normally began with the observation that industrial jobs forced retirement at an earlier age than agricultural work. But the debate also dwelt on changes in the role of the family as a source of economic security. The weakening of traditional implicit contracts governing intergenerational support was acknowledged by new efforts to legally stipulate children’s responsibilities. In Massachusetts, for example, ‘opponents of the pension movement sought to administer the coup de grâce by the enactment of a statute making it a criminal offense for a person to fail or neglect to support his destitute aged parent.’ Such laws proved difficult to specify and enforce.82 Opposition to relief was widespread. The Civil War Pension system had long been a venue of unseemly patronage. Perverse incentives were also a concern. Why should individuals save for their old age, if they would be provided for in any case? Why should sons and daughters support their parents if the state assumed this responsibility? Spencer Baldwin published an article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics asserting that family cohesion was rooted in ‘filial obligation for the support of aged parents.’ Miss Alice Higgins, Secretary of the Associated 192

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Charities, declaimed that any pension system would have a negative impact on the ‘spirituality of family life.’83 Precisely because this argument was influential, advocates of old age pensions stressed the extent to which family ties had already weakened. Conceding that these remained an important source of support for the elderly, they noted that the proportion of elderly in the population had grown and that many elderly simply lacked surviving kin (partly as a result of fertility decline). Echoing the arguments that Charles Booth had made in England, Abraham Epstein observed that ‘pauperism among the aged is in inverse ratio to the number of family relations and is largely a result of the lack of family connections.’ Modern analyses of manuscript census data validate this perception. In 1910, among women over fortyfour, those who were childless were nearly seven times more likely to be in poorhouses than those who had become mothers.84 Advocates for the elderly insisted that family cohesion had already been and would continue to be weakened by capitalist development. Lee Squier’s 1912 study of old age dependency explained that a high ethical regard for the aged persisted in the Orient, but had disappeared in the US everywhere but in agricultural communities. Abraham Epstein reiterated the theme of declining patriarchal power: ‘With increasing rapidity, home ties and family solidarity are being weakened and broken by the mobility so essential to modern industrial development.’ Indeed, Epstein and others went further to document the extent of what contemporary economists have labeled ‘child default.’ In Massachusetts in 1910, 44 per cent of all almshouse inmates had adult children living at the time of entrance. Often children simply lacked adequate resources to support their parents. But an Ohio Commission report concluded that about 7 per cent of inmates had children who, though in fairly good economic circumstances, were unwilling to maintain them. While most of the elderly could and did rely on assistance from kin, those left to their own resources often went under.85 Household budget surveys did not encompass the most impoverished individuals, those dependent on other family members or relegated to the almshouse. But they reveal a striking pattern among families headed by male wage-earners. In 1889–90, children in households headed by men aged 40–44 contributed about 18 per cent of all family income. By 1917– 19, their contributions in comparable households had declined to 5 per cent. In households headed by men of 60 years and older, however, children contributed about the same percentage of family income (30–33 per cent) in both periods. Sons and daughters clearly remained an important part of the old age security portfolio. But however significant their contributions, the cost of raising them was increasing along with the risk of default.86 Advocates of public assistance did not merely dwell on the failures of the traditional patriarchal family. They appealed to positive patriarchal values, insisting that elderly men should not have to suffer the shame of 193

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economic dependence. Many pointed to Civil War veterans, ‘made comfortable in their old age by living with their children, their friends, or in homes where they are paying their own way and have a feeling of independence that old people should have.’ In conjunction with the growing electoral power of the elderly, such arguments proved persuasive enough to garner official recognition and response.87 A number of states established special State Commissions to collect information on the indigent elderly and consider the option of public assistance. Two major surveys conducted in the 1920s moved beyond the earlier interest in the indigent elderly to the elderly as a whole. A Commonwealth of Massachusetts study covered 19,000 aged, while a National Civic Federation study investigated 14,000 aged in eleven cities and two towns in four states—New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. Both studies emphasized the gaps in the protection offered by family and market. Both found that about 17 per cent of the elderly had no income or property of their own. Whether or nor they escaped the almshouse depended almost entirely on the generosity of family and friends.88 In 1915 the State of Arizona passed a law abolishing almshouses and establishing new provisions for old age assistance. It was declared unconstitutional, but Montana established a similar law in 1923, and other states began to follow suit. The new state legislation recognized the inadequacy of family-based support while upholding it in principle. Virtually all the state laws passed (the exceptions were Arizona and Hawaii) excluded from assistance all those with financially competent children or relatives. But the difficulty of ascertaining ‘financial competence’ proved a major loop-hole for relatives who chose to plead poverty. As with mothers’ pensions, fairly onerous restrictions were imposed on recipients. Some states required residency of fifteen years or more, and elderly of ‘questionable character’ were excluded. Another similarity with mothers’ pensions lay in forms of regional inequality that largely coincided with racial/ethnic composition; Southern states were conscicuously underrepresented.89 The relative success of the mothers’ and old age pension movements is difficult to compare. In the first place, they overlapped to some degree. Many Progressive Era activists fought for both. Gender and age interests were intertwined; elderly women clearly benefitted from state old age pensions (though studies have yet to explore their representation among beneficiaries) and young boys benefitted from mothers’ pensions. The ‘maternalists’ enjoyed more widespread success in terms of the number of states involved, but the combination of Civil War pensions and state assistance (not to mention private pension programs) probably reached a larger percentage of the needy elderly population. Furthermore, the elderly received much higher per capita benefits. In 1931, the median 194

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monthly grant to mothers, who had an average of 2.6 children, was $21.78, about the same as average individual grants to the elderly.90 The elderly were perhaps harder hit by the Depression, as banks failed and many private pension programs went bankrupt. Unemployment rates, high for everyone, were even higher for those over age 65. Relatives often had too few economic resources to provide adequate support. Where unemployment overlapped weakened family ties, its effects were particularly devastating. By 1934, about 700,000 elderly were members of families receiving Federal Emergency Relief.91 The abrupt shock of the business cycle compounded the effects of the more gradual, long-run trends that were raising the costs of dependents relative to average family income. Collective action and political mobilization led to at least partial amelioration. After 1929, increases in unemployment gave male wage-earners more direct experience of the indignities of dependence. In 1932 the American Federation of Labor finally threw its weight behind federal old age insurance and relief, as well as unemployment compensation. The stage was set for an age/class coalition that more closely resembled the driving force behind European social democracy. Within this coalition, however, women, children, and people of color operated at a distinct disadvantage.92 Women and the US welfare state How does the story told above differ from other accounts of state policies in the Progressive Era? Unlike most social-historical accounts, it stresses an underlying economic trend. The expansion of wage employment destabilized intra-family income flows, increased the costs of children, and created important pressures for change. On the other hand, these pressures had little impact in and of themselves. Rather, they created an opportunity for given groups based on class, race, age, and gender to pursue new collective strategies. Many historians of this era focus on one dimension of collective identity and action. Frances Piven and Richard Cloward, strongly influenced by the Marxian tradition, interpret struggles over public welfare programs primarily in class terms, and discount the importance of the early mothers’ pensions movement. From their point of view, gender played a relatively unimportant role. At the other extreme, Theda Skocpol celebrates the mothers’ pensions movement, along with the development of early old age pensions, as a great victory for a new maternalist welfare state. The role that she ascribes to women as standard-bearers of progress is reminiscent of the role that old fashioned Marxists confidently assign the working class.93 Both these approaches are simplistic. The argument of this chapter, supported by more detailed histories of the US welfare state, emphasizes 195

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the complex and contradictory interplay of collective interests. Forms of solidarity based on class and gender were important, but tenuous. Racial allegiances and interests had enormously important consequences not only for the direct success of efforts to organize wage-earners and women, but also for the early provisions of social welfare policy.94 Racial and ethnic conflict provides the strongest explanation for United States ‘exceptionalism,’ its significant divergence in social policies from even the least corporate of Northwestern European nations, Great Britain. But it is also important to note that groups pursuing the interests of elderly and single mothers were more successful than trade unions in influencing state and federal government (perhaps because they faced less opposition from employers). Also, the elderly fared better than mothers on their own. In any case, US social democrats found it difficult to unify their constituency. This difficulty, in turn, contributed to even greater class and race divisions that reinforced a tendency among whites to rally around groups based on age and gender. Women’s organizations in the US claimed important victories. As in Northwestern Europe, however, they faced tremendous resistance to any efforts to redistribute the costs of children. SOCIAL INSECURITY: WELFARE POLICY AFTER 1935 Sometime in the 1970s, feminists began to use a catchy phrase to protest against women’s economic vulnerability: ‘the feminization of poverty.’ It was not quite accurate, because the gender composition of the poor did not change dramatically, and highly educated women in professionalmanagerial jobs actually made important gains even as mothers on their own became increasingly susceptible to poverty. A more apt description of the changing economic position of women would be the ‘pauperization of motherhood.’ But this term is also too simple, because it elides the worsening economic position of children, especially children of color. Interconnected inequalities based on race, class, age, and gender have all influenced and been influenced by inadequate social welfare policies. Like most programs implemented in Northwestern Europe, the Social Security Act of 1935 institutionalized the concept of a family wage, keeping income in the hands of male household heads. However, enforcement of gender constraints was carried to even greater extremes in the US than in Europe by a sharp distinction between the treatment of widows and other mothers maintaining families on their own. A confluence of collective interests helps explain the low and declining level of benefits provided to unmarried, deserted, and divorced mothers through Aid to Families with Dependent Children. The ‘pauperizing’ effect of these policies has been compounded by poor enforcement of child support responsibilities and rapid increases in the percentage of families maintained by women alone. Since the 1970s, inequality has intensified along lines of age and gender, as 196

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well as race and class. The country’s reluctance to provide adequately for its young threatens its future capacity to provide for its elderly. The Social Security Act of 1935 Landmark legislation passed in 1935 inaugurated the modern American welfare state, providing the legislative basis for a complex amalgam of federal assistance and insurance for certain groups. Aid was authorized for the elderly poor, lone mothers and children in poverty, and the disabled. New investments in public health were authorized, and old age insurance and unemployment compensation programs were put into place. The Social Security Act has been explained variously as a functional response to market failure, an outcome of class struggle, and the overdetermined result of both these factors combined with specific features of the political institutional context. The list of relevant factors must be further lengthened. The Social Security Act and related amendments met some of the needs of the social family, but also reproduced gender-, age-, and race-based inequalities.95 The components of the act relevant to the elderly comprised two parts: a means-tested public assistance program (Title I) and retirement insurance for eligible workers (Title II). These emerged from a complex process of political negotiation in which groups like the Fraternal Order of the Eagles and the Townsend Clubs played an important role. One popular proposal, developed by the eponymous Dr. Townsend, called for a straightforward economic application of the Biblical injunction to ‘honor thy father and mother’—a government stipend of $200 a month to all men and women over age 65 (provided that recipients conform to newly popular Keynesian logic by agreeing to spend all the money). The Townsend Plan, funded by a sales tax, would have treated men and women, wage-earners and nonwage-earners, whites and people of color, exactly alike.96 Employers, as well as many taxpayers, blanched at the thought and argued strongly for a purely self-financing pension system based on a paycheck deduction. But such a system could not pretend to solve the problems that the elderly were experiencing at the time, since the benefits would not accrue for years to come. A political compromise was forged. Old age insurance would resemble a contributory system, stipulating eligibility requirements based on employment and imposing a tax on employers and wage-earners. Old age assistance would provide for the needy elderly who were not wage-earners. In the early years, the old age assistance program reached a large percentage of the elderly population. The insurance provisions were more selective, covering little more than half the labor force, and excluding several occupational categories, including two (farm work and domestic service) in which people of color predominated. Single earners were scheduled to receive monthly benefits 197

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amounting to, on average, about 40 per cent of their earnings, beginning in 1939. The provisions of the act relating to mothers and children built upon earlier reform efforts. The portion that provided for maternal health services closely resembled the earlier Sheppard-Towner Act. Similarly, the new terms of aid to dependent children were modeled after the states’ mothers’ pension programs. The benefits provided were somewhat higher, and the number of recipients more than doubled between 1935 and 1937.97 But the new federal program institutionalized glaring inequalities in provision for different categories of ‘dependents.’ Funds for the indigent elderly were made available to match state expenditures, dollar for dollar, up to a maximum of $30 per month per recipient. Funds for indigent mothers and children were offered on a different basis: only one dollar for every two dollars of state expenditure, up to a maximum of $18 per family. States acted quickly to widen eligibility for the elderly, but many failed even to set up Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) programs. By 1937, almost three times as many aged persons as dependent children were assisted by the new federal government program of grants-in-aid. The average ADC family of 3.5 persons received less than one-half the amount granted to a sole recipient of Old Age Assistance. Administrators in the Bureau of Public Assistance observed that divorced, separated, and unmarried women were underrepresented; in five states, no children born out of wedlock were even eligible.98 These inequalities were compounded by amendments to Social Security in 1939, which transformed Old Age Insurance into Old Age and Survivor’s Insurance (OASI), extending benefits to widows and children of covered workers, and providing larger benefits for married than for single workers. Federal matching funds for ADC were increased, but maximum payments were left at the low initial level. ADC remained as a recourse for widows of men not covered by Social Security, along with divorced, deserted, and unmarried mothers. With the expansion of OASI, most widows became eligible for more generous benefits than other mothers on their own. In 1940, the average monthly payment for recipients of Aid to Dependent Children was $9.85. By contrast, the average for widows was $19.60, and for child survivors of deceased workers, $12.22. The average monthly benefit for unemployment compensation was even higher, at $43.50. Since few black workers were covered by old age insurance, few black widows were eligible for survivors’ benefits. Mothers and children were effectively divided into two groups: widows and their families, collecting the insurance considered their due, and welfare recipients making do with less.99 Old Age Insurance proved exceedingly popular, since taxes were low and benefits were high. Everybody wanted in. In 1950, coverage was extended to farm workers and domestic servants, as well as farmers. Both 198

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contributions and benefits were based on wages, with more generous benefits (relative to tax contributions) for workers with below average earnings. Steady growth in real wages after 1950 made it easy to justify boosting benefits on a regular basis, and, in 1972, these were protected against the worst effects of inflation by a cost-of-living adjustment.100 In the 1960s, the escalating cost of medical care in an otherwise booming economy renewed interest in national health insurance, an issue that had first been raised by President Truman. Here again, the combination of business opposition and racial/ethnic inequality weakened support for a universal program and a compromise took shape along age and gender lines. The new Medicare system offered medical insurance for all those over age 65, while Medicaid provided the same only for motherheaded families ‘on welfare’ or defined by their state as ‘medically needy.’ Old Age and Survivor’s Insurance remains a traditional intergenerational contract, written in such a way as to leave control in male hands. Women lost any claims to their husband’s Social Security upon divorce, until 1965, when they were guaranteed rights if they had been married twenty years. In 1977 the requisite time period was reduced to ten years. Since a majority of divorces take place less than ten years from the date of marriage, few divorcees can take advantage of this provision. The program allows married women wage-earners to choose between benefits based on their earnings, or a ‘dependent’s benefit’ based on their husband’s earnings. The latter option typically offers more money. In other words, most married women who work for wages (and pay Social Security taxes) receive the same benefits as wives who never engaged in paid employment. As married women moved rapidly into the paid labor force after 1960 they boosted the financial stability of the system, since their tax contributions increased far more rapidly than their benefits.101 This family wage feature of the system remains unchanged today, with paradoxical results. Many more women receive benefits than actually pay into the system. If one ignores the value of their non-market labor, this appears to be a transfer from workers to non-workers that actually discriminates against men. Appreciation of the value of non-market labor yields a different interpretation. Social Security rules (like income tax deductions for ‘dependent’ housewives who actually perform considerable productive work) reward non-market labor if and only if it is performed on behalf of a wage-earner spouse. Since women tend to specialize in nonmarket work, this effectively lowers the cost of housewives to husbands, discouraging women’s participation in paid employment.102 In other words, Social Security subsidizes marriage, not non-market work. Married women enjoy a pension based on their husband’s earnings and insurance, through relatively generous spouse and widow’s benefits. But most single and divorced mothers lack eligibility for any Social Security benefits except those based on their own earnings. Since they are 199

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often unable to find jobs lucrative enough to allow them to purchase child care, they often fail to make substantial payments into the Social Security system and are left vulnerable in old age. The emphasis on marriage also means that gay and lesbian couples lack eligibility for dependent benefits. The number of children that a family raises does not affect their Social Security benefits in any way. The only support that parents receive comes in the form of income tax exemptions and credits that account, on average, for about 8 per cent of the direct costs of raising children. Yet parents in general, and mothers in particular, are creating the future labor supply on which the financial stability of the Social Security system rests. Probably very few are aware of the ways in which the system penalizes their efforts.103 Old Age and Survivor’s Insurance spread the burden of support for a large percentage of the elderly to virtually all wage-earning adults, including those whose parents had already died. In 1945, there were 50 covered workers for each beneficiary; the ratio fell to 5 in 1960 and 3.3 in 1985. Because this insurance is funded by taxes on employees, it is particularly susceptible to declines in the relative size of the working population. Until the 1980s, at least, the retiring elderly received far more in benefits than they had put in. In fact, they received between two and four times as much as they could have if they had placed their tax contributions in a high-yielding private pension. The changing age structure of the population means that current and future workers will almost certainly pay much higher taxes relative to the benefits they receive. The younger a current worker is, the greater the probable negative impact.104 The political compromises that shaped the Social Security system in the US actually reinforced the incentives for the elderly and near-elderly to defend collective interests based on age, rather than on class, race, or gender. They also institutionalized a set of policies that benefit nonparents far more than parents, and men more than women. A full appreciation of the consequences requires a careful look at one of Social Security’s spin-offs, Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Aid to Families with Dependent Children The fate of AFDC between 1940 and 1990 represents a particularly telling episode in a larger story of lack of concern for ‘other people’s children.’ Efforts to insure the youngest generation against the risks of poverty were persistently riven by interests based on class and race, as well as gender and age. Unlike the broader entitlement programs for families developed in Europe, AFDC covers only the poor and offers virtually no benefits to the affluent. Equally significant is overrepresentation of African-Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans among poor families maintained by women alone. Racist attitudes, as well as a race-conscious awareness of 200

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the redistributive impact of government policies, stigmatize AFDC recipients. All these factors compound the traditional devalorization of childbearing and childrearing.105 Throughout the 1950s, states sought to discourage ‘immoral behavior’ by implementing rules that also conveniently limited eligibility. Arkansas cut off aid to mothers engaged in a ‘non-stable illegal union;’ Texas did the same for those in ‘pseudo-common law marriages.’ Michigan worded its requirements more diplomatically, excluding families with male ‘boarders.’ In the 1960s, legal challenges by welfare rights activists, as well as the larger Civil Rights Movement, led to the lifting of these restrictions, and the number of eligible families that applied for aid increased sharply. Increases in AFDC payments actually exceeded increases in spendable earnings between 1963 and 1971. In 1961, states were given the option of extending eligibility to children of unemployed parents, but few chose to do so.106 Critics of AFDC and welfare in general railed, from the beginning, about the so-called ‘independence effect.’ Providing funds to single mothers, it was feared, would further weaken families. ‘Strong’ families were defined as those unaffected by divorce (with little or no consideration of weaknesses reflected in domestic violence, child abuse, or economic stress). John Bishop, of the University of Wisconsin’s Poverty Institute, argued that relief payments caused a decline in the morale of the male head of household, and went so far as to suggest that transfers should be added onto the husband’s paycheck so that he personally could bring them home.107 In the 1960s, partly in response to these concerns, some economists began to promote the idea of a ‘negative income tax’ that would guarantee a minimum income to all families, regardless of their composition. Unfortunately, empirical studies of an experimental negative income tax program put into effect in Denver and Seattle showed that moderate income transfers to husband-wife families increased the probability of marital dissolution. These empirical results (which have since been largely discredited) contributed to widespread disenchantment with the proposed reform.108 A backlash against the ‘independence’ effect demonstrated by welfare rights activists began to take hold in the early 1970s. Most states, with the tacit support of the federal government, effectively lowered AFDC benefits by failing to compensate for accelerating inflation rates (Social Security benefits, including those for survivors, had been tied to the Consumer Price Index). Even the expansion of in-kind transfers such as Food Stamps, Medicaid, and Housing Assistance failed to reverse the downward trend in real benefit levels. In 1972, mothers with no children under the age of 6 were required to register for work. Many of those who did, however, found that the program didn’t provide sufficient funds to process them, much less find them jobs. More stringent restrictions were imposed in 1980, including a ‘workfare’ requirement that recipients with 201

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children more than 6 years old must find a paying job. Eligibility criteria were also revised to include families in which a resident father is unemployed. Any money that a recipient earns in a paying job reduces their benefit. Widows of men covered by Social Security, on the other hand, are not subject to any work requirement. In 1970 the average monthly payment per recipient of AFDC was $169.10 (in $1990). By 1990, this average had dropped to $136.00. This amount offers a family of four only enough income to bring them up to about 50 per cent of the poverty line. Cash benefits are often supplemented by non-cash transfers in the form of medical assistance (Medicaid), Food Stamps, and public housing assistance programs that are not explicitly targeted at families maintained by women alone. Real expenditures on these programs also declined throughout the 1980s. The indexation of Old Age Insurance increased the gap between assistance provided to widows and that available to separated, divorced, and never-married mothers. In 1990, the average survivor’s benefit for a widow was $408, and for a surviving child under 18, $403, about 2.4 times as much as the average AFDC payment per recipient. Overall, almost as much money was spent on children with a disabled or deceased parent as on children eligible for AFDC, although there are far more of the latter. Nor were any eligibility requirements, such as having income below the poverty level, imposed on those who benefitted through Social Security rather than AFDC.109 AFDC benefit levels have long varied substantially among states, along distinct racial and ethnic contours. African-American families comprise approximately one-half of the AFDC case load nation-wide but are concentrated in states with the lowest benefits. In 1981 in the thirteen states where African-American families comprised at least 60 per cent of the case load, the average total monthly disposable income from AFDC, Food Stamps, and energy assistance was $354, or 60 per cent of the federally established poverty standard. In those states where AfricanAmerican families comprised 10 per cent or less of the AFDC case load, the average income was considerably higher: $451, or 78 per cent of the poverty level. Yet very little systematic attention has been devoted to this aspect of racial inequality.110 AFDC is frequently accused of worsening the very problem it was designed to address: poverty among families maintained by women alone. But levels of female headship are higher in the United States than in Austria, Germany, or Great Britain, even though these countries provide greater benefits. Since 1975, female headship has continued to increase despite dramatic declines in the average level of benefits provided.111 Without AFDC, poverty levels among children in the United States would be even higher. Still, the entire structure of public transfers in the United States is problematic on larger grounds. Why should public 202

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assistance to children be conditional on the types of household they live in, or the relationships between their parents? Why should children of widows receive more than children of divorced, separated, or unmarried women, or, for that matter, than children in needy two-parent families? Edith Abbott and Sophonisba Breckinridge, among others, raised these questions more than fifty years ago. Child support One of the explanations offered for low AFDC benefits is that they create perverse incentives, encouraging out-of-wedlock births, divorce, and separation, and reward free-riding welfare mothers. This issue has received far more attention than the perverse incentives created for fathers by poor enforcement of child support responsibilities. Since the Census Bureau first began to collect survey data on this issue in 1975, the patterns have hardly changed. Little more than half of all mothers on their own have garnered child support agreements. Among these, only about half get the amount stipulated. Even the full amount seldom approaches a fair share of the direct and indirect costs of children. As Diana Pearce observed, noting the loss of male income associated with female headship, ‘It is as though a husband’s economic support is in payment for the wife’s housekeeping, emotional support, and sexual access, not for her childrearing activities.’112 Child support enforcement received little attention in the US until growing opposition to social spending raised the possibility of substituting private for public transfers. Traditionally, the obligations of fathers whose children were born out of wedlock were determined through civil suits, which many unwed mothers could not afford to file. The growing incidence of divorce after 1960 dramatically increased the number of legal support agreements. Until 1988, awards were made by a decentralized legal system in which judicial discretion was virtually unlimited. Award levels varied almost randomly, but were generally low. They did not keep pace with inflation or increases in children’s educational needs in the 1970s and 1980s. Despite recent reforms, child support payments remain too low today. In many states, the more a single mother earns, the less she is likely to be awarded by the court. Partly as a result, the average award fell almost 25 per cent in real terms from 1975 to 1988.113 Since 1988, states have been required to set guidelines for support awards, but efforts to define an adequate level often focus on this criterion: support should at least equal the estimated amount that the non-custodial parent would have spent on the children if the family were intact. This seems a strange principle, since some parents might not have spent a fair or adequate amount under those circumstances. Further, it ignores the value of the non-market labor time that the custodial parent devotes to child care. If 203

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the non-custodial parent provides substantially less (as is typically the case) some pecuniary compensation should be required. Growing awareness of these problems, combined with growing opposition to public transfers, led to a series of amendments to the Social Security Act; some experts see in these amendments the ‘potential to have real teeth.’ In 1975, recipients of AFDC were required to cooperate in establishing paternity and locating an absent father for the purposes of child support enforcement, or risk losing their benefits. In 1984, Congress extended tougher enforcement policies to families not receiving AFDC and, with the Child Support Enforcement Amendments, required states to withhold money from the paychecks of parents in arrears on child support payments. Total child support collections fell between 1978 and 1985, but have recently begun to rise.114 A pilot program established by the state of Wisconsin goes much further than these federal reforms. An administrative rule sets the amount of child support at 17 per cent of the gross income of the non-custodial parent for one child, with graduated increases of 25 per cent, 29 per cent, 31 per cent, and 34 per cent for additional children. This money is withheld, like income and payroll taxes, from wages and other sources of income. All children with a legal entitlement to child support receive either the amount paid by the non-custodial parent or an assured benefit set by the state. While this child support ‘floor’ (a modified transfer payment) is less than an average AFDC payment, it is not reduced if the custodial parent earns money.115 Implementation of this program on a national level would have significant effects on the distribution of income and the incidence of poverty, though it would not eliminate the need for public assistance to poor families. Many factors other than deadbeat behavior affect fathers’ propensity to provide support, including unemployment, low wages, and a legal bureaucracy that makes it difficult and time-consuming to modify child custody and support agreements. Also relevant is the influence of a man’s relationship with his own father. Many researchers have asked if growing up on welfare affects women’s propensity to apply for welfare as an adult. Few, if any, have asked similar questions regarding young men and the effect of nonsupport from a father on their future behavior. The intergenerational transmission of poverty is generally treated as a female pathology. Emphasis on perverse incentives for mothers, but not for fathers, reflects the influence of patriarchal social norms on public policy.116 The pauperization of motherhood The growth in the number of families maintained by women alone, with little support from either fathers or the state, has exacerbated gender-based 204

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inequalities in the distribution of the costs of children. Over one-half of all children born in the US today will spend some of their first eighteen years in single-parent households, with negative consequences not only for their own economic welfare, but also for that of their mothers. Women who choose to raise children today are assuming far greater risks than did their own mothers, partly because they hold themselves to higher standards of education for their children, and partly because their increased participation in market work has not been accompanied by any compensating increase in men’s non-market work. In two-parent households, women are likely to be ‘time-poor,’ working a double day and sacrificing most of their leisure time. In single-parent households, 90 per cent of which are headed by women, they are likely to be both time- and money-poor. What do we know about the growth in the number of families maintained by women alone in the United States? It began long before it showed up in the census category of ‘female-headed households.’ Before 1950, mothers on their own often lived in boarding houses or in households headed by male kin (such as a father, or a brother). Therefore, they seldom showed up on the census as household heads. The decline of boarding and lodging arrangements, the development of small housing units such as apartments, and the general expansion of the housing stock made these families more visible. After 1950, all individuals became more likely to live alone, and average household size declined. The overall rate of nonmarriage (the percentage of adults not currently married) also increased.117 Two contradictory trends were at work. Continued fertility decline and greater participation in wage employment increased women’s economic independence and made marriage seem less necessary. At the same time, women’s bargaining power within the family probably increased, making marriage seem more attractive to them, but probably less attractive to men. Men’s experiences living away from home taught them that it wasn’t that hard to get along without a wife. As the cost of children continued to increase, men also became less interested in fatherhood. A central theme of the new beatnik and Playboy ethos of the 1950s and 1960s was male disaffection with domesticity. Men acted on this ethos in large numbers after 1970. The percentage of men aged 25–29 who never married increased from 19 per cent in 1970 to 46 per cent in 1989. The number of divorced persons per 1000 married increased from 47 in 1970 to 133 in 1988.118 These gender-specific trends were mediated by economic factors. Women with low levels of education and meager employment opportunities tended to have more children, at an earlier age. The ‘opportunity cost’ was lower to them; more importantly, the challenges of motherhood compared quite favorably with the menial and meaningless character of their paying jobs. Yet precisely because of their low level of assets and lack of economic independence, these women were the least able to enforce claims on the fathers of their children. And many of these 205

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fathers, subject to unemployment and low wages, found the growing costs of children particularly burdensome. Other factors came into play among African-Americans. High levels of mortality and incarceration among men tilted the sex ratio and made it harder for women to find partners.119 The percentage of all children living with mothers alone increased from 11 per cent in 1970 to 22 per cent in 1991. Among African-Americans the change was even more extreme, from 30 per cent to 54 per cent. Statistics were first collected for Latinos in 1980; in that year, 20 per cent of children were living with mothers alone, compared to 27 per cent in 1991. These cross-sectional estimates understate the percentage who will spend part of their childhood in a mother-maintained household.120 The lack of public support for parenthood in the US has contributed to rates of poverty among families maintained by women alone far higher than in any countries of Northwestern Europe. Another not surprising result is a higher incidence of poverty among children, particularly children of color. As Sylvia Hewlett points out, one out of five children is poor, almost one out of four children younger than 6 is poor. One out of three children in families headed by young adults (under 30) is poor. And one out of every two black children is poor. The poverty rate for children under 6 is twice that among the elderly; if non-cash benefits such as Medicare are taken into account, the rate of poverty among the very young is nearly seven times as high as among the old.121 These facts are widely publicized by the Children’s Defense Fund and other organizations that have continued the maternalist tradition established earlier in the century. Unlike its predecessors, however, the Children’s Defense Fund emphasizes the importance of racial inequalities and the need for increased public assistance to all families with young children, as well as increased expenditures on day care and education. These are important moral and political issues, but they also have an economic dimension. Support for childrearing and investments in children will affect the costs, to parents, of raising children, the quality of their human capital, the fiscal stability of the Social Security system, and the trajectory of economic growth. The insecurity of Social Security Economists have become increasingly concerned about problems in the current Social Security system. As the title of a recent book by Henry Aaron, Barry Bosworth, and Gary Burtless asks, Can America Afford to Grow Old? Important changes were made to the financing of the system in 1977 and 1983: taxes were raised in order to move beyond the ‘pay-asyou-go’ arrangement based on intergenerational transfers to a form of financing that would require individuals to contribute more of their own earnings to their own retirement package. But it is by no means clear that 206

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the surplus being generated will actually increase future economic capacity to provide for the elderly.122 As the ratio of beneficiaries to workers began to mount in the 1970s and 1980s, some economists began to argue that the whole idea was a mistake. Arguments first raised in the early years of the century were reiterated: incentives for private provision for dependents were being undermined, as were incentives for private savings. These arguments failed to appreciate the history of changes in the family economy described above, but they proved largely unpersuasive for a different reason—the electorate’s strongly expressed preference for the type of old age security that only a comprehensive government program can provide. Since political efforts by the Reagan Administration to cut back Old Age Insurance failed, attention turned to tax increases.123 Looming over the discussion was the inevitable retirement of the postWorld War II baby-boom generation. The anticipated tax burden on the workers who would be supporting this elderly demographic bulge was so high that it was quite easy to imagine them making a concerted effort to lower benefits. Policy-makers (many of them ‘boomers’ themselves) agreed to tax current workers now for their own future retirement (as well as for the support of the current elderly) and accumulate a surplus within the system, as if they were putting money in the bank to be withdrawn with interest at a later date. Some minor benefit reductions were also negotiated (including greater taxability of benefits, and a very gradual increase in retirement age). Since 1983, the Old Age, Survivor’s, Disability, and Health Insurance system (OASDHI) has accumulated a substantial surplus. The payroll tax increased to a hefty 7.6 per cent of the first $51,300 in earnings. Employers pay a matching percentage, and economists agree that the burden of the employer’s tax is largely passed on to employees. In other words, employers reduce wages to below what they would pay in the absence of the tax. The total tax burden weighs more heavily on lowincome than on high-income workers, for two reasons. First, income from profits, rents, interest, and capital gains is not taxed. Second, earnings over $51,300 are not taxed. For about three-quarters of American workers, the total OASDHI bite is bigger than what they pay in federal income taxes. The 1980 amendments, in other words, increased the regressive impact of a system that had once treated low-income workers relatively generously.124 The new higher tax system also raises questions about future intergenerational transfers. How is the surplus being utilized? Will it actually accumulate the ‘interest’ that current workers want to benefit from in their old age? The surplus is currently included in the federal budget, where it helps balance the effect of the deficit. To the extent that this relieves some of the pressure to reduce other components of federal spending, and results in a larger deficit, it is really not ‘savings.’ In other words, future retirees may get their guaranteed benefits, but have to pay 207

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much higher taxes to help pay for interest on ever-increasing federal debt. Concern over this possibility has prompted many economists to argue that the OASDHI surplus should be taken ‘off-budget’ where it will be less likely to affect debates over the federal budget deficit.125 The deficit itself has become an intergenerational issue. Fathers cannot bequeath their debts to their children. They cannot go to a bank and borrow money against their children’s anticipated earnings. Governments can, and they do. And governments (or rather their representatives) promise that children will be better off as a result, because the money borrowed from them will increase the productive capacity of the economy in ways that will benefit them when they grow up. This promise seems fair as long as the economy is expanding and the wage level is rising. But the slowdown in long-run economic growth rates after the early 1970s, combined with the threat of expensive environmental problems and the reality of increased competition from other countries, reduces the probability that the promise will be fulfilled. Today’s voters may actually be reducing the standard of living of future generations. Far more important than the budget/off-budget issue (largely a matter of accounting terminology) is the question of how the OASDHI surplus affects the future productive capacity of the economy. Will it contribute to economic growth? Since 1983, public investments in physical infrastructure (such as roads, bridges, and telecommunications) and in human capital (child welfare, child care, education, and training) have increased hardly at all. Private investment in these areas has been sum. As in a family, the elderly, though more powerful than the young, are ultimately dependent upon them. Economists Sylvia Hewlett, Timothy Smeeding, and Robert Eisner, among others, call for more investment in children as a means of maintaining the larger viability of Social Security and protecting the long-run health of the economy. As demographer Norman Ryder puts it: To the extent that the problems of both the junior and the senior dependents in society are to be resolved by intercohort transfers, the key question becomes the productivity of the labour force. That is clearly dependent on the level of expenditures on the education of young people. But education is not the only, or even the most important, input into the production of the next generation. Without an adequate level of parental resources and time, educational expenditures do not make much difference.126 The current Social Security system is unfair to mothers. A male wageearner who divorces his wife and contributes a negligible amount to his own children’s expenses will receive far more income in old age through the Social Security system than the single mother who remains largely 208

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unemployed, or employed at low wages, because she devoted her time and money to raising those children. Men who default on their parental responsibilities not only escape certain costs, they also reap the benefits of the largely unpaid parental labor embodied in the younger generation, whose wages are a primary source of Social Security funds. Parents in general are penalized. Since most married women today spend a considerable portion of their life in the paid labor force, the value of the ‘dependent’s benefit’ has diminished over time. And even that benefit is unrelated to the amount of time, money, and energy devoted to raising children. Families with no children, or a small number of children, will fare better economically under the existing Social Security system than families (disproportionately African-American and Latino) with large numbers of children. A combination of reforms could remedy this problem without changing the basic structure of Social Security. Rather than providing a dependent’s benefit that discourages female labor force participation, each member of a couple could be given credit for one-half of their combined earnings, on which their claim to old age insurance would be based. This could give individuals other than married couples the option of sharing market and non-market responsibilities. In addition, a parent could receive earnings credits (equivalent to what he or she would receive at a well-paid job) for each dependent being cared for. Such a policy would provide more public recognition and reward for family labor.127 It seems unlikely, however, that such modest revisions of existing provisions could really solve the problem posed by the growing costs of raising children. Even the countries of Northwestern Europe, with more generous child care, social welfare, and family allowance programs, have failed to provide adequate support for parenthood. And the historical trends described in this chapter, including the growing percentage of families maintained by women alone, show no signs of abatement. Families with young children represent a shrinking minority in the United States, and their relative income has long been declining. In 1960, 49 per cent of all households included a child; in 1988, only 35 per cent did. As the birth rate continues to decline, this percentage will dwindle further. If electoral power and narrowly defined group interests continue to determine public transfers, these families can expect even less assistance in the future.128 Samuel Preston, among others, calls attention to the generational conflict apparent in US social policy. But the history outlined above shows that the problem cannot be reduced to conflict between old and young. It cannot be solved by simply redistributing money from the elderly (many of whom, particularly women, live close to the poverty line) and giving it to children. The inequities of social policy reflect clashes between rich and poor, men and women, whites and people of color, as well as other 209

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groups. Unfortunately, these clashes remain virtually invisible to economists who conceptualize the social world only in terms of individual choice or class interest.129 The US in comparative perspective In a sense, the problems of declining fertility and old age dependency were postponed for the United States precisely because they were borne by Europe. Most immigrants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were working age adults, and their relocation lowered the costs of social reproduction in the United States relative to their countries of origin. A smaller, second wave of immigration (legal and illegal) after 1970, comprised primarily of Mexicans, Central Americans, and Southeast Asians, has had a similar effect. In Northwestern Europe, nationalistic fears of demographic decline fostered by out-migration and the ravages of war helped overcome opposition to forms of social spending that would recognize the value of family labor. Social democratic political coalitions stressed the analogies between family and nation and the responsibilities of social reproduction. As Chapter 4 emphasized, European policies still protect many male prerogatives. Yet by comparison with those of the United States, they seem remarkably advanced. In the long run, however, both the United States and Northwestern Europe face problems in adjusting their old age security systems to demographic change, and both regions are turning their attention to the prospects for selective immigration. Over the decades to come, the flow of workers in search of jobs, as well as that of capital in search of cheaper labor, will probably increase. Relations between countries, and concomitant concepts of national interest, will continue to shape state policies relevant to the costs of family life. The organization of social reproduction, like that of market production, is global. All the more reason to ask whether the concepts of collective identity and interests developed above can be applied to areas of the developing world.

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The experience of neither Northwestern Europe nor the United States provided a template for Latin America and the Caribbean, because colonial domination re-routed the path of economic growth. One result was greater internal inequality. Even within those countries that sustained rapid rates of capital accumulation, regional and sectoral differences were pronounced; wealth and income were distributed extremely unequally along both race and class lines. Another result was a weak position within the world economy, a process of development somewhat dependent on external events and other countries. Gaps in the historical record make it difficult to trace changes in the cost of children, intra-family income flows, and forms of political mobilization related to age and gender. But the available information suggests that the relationship between the family and economic development is both more complex and more important than development economists realize. The weak position of women and children in Latin America and the Caribbean probably contributed to income inequality and high fertility. The faltering process of dependent development meant that the family remained a more important unit of production than in Northwestern Europe and the US. Yet it did not serve as a very reliable source of income security. The European invasion of Latin America and the Caribbean combined national and racial domination, with profound consequences for relations between men and women. Rules of marriage, as well as enforcement of paternal responsibilities towards children, varied considerably by race and class, and differences among families weakened feminist efforts to advance women’s rights and corporatist efforts to pursue national interests. Twentieth-century welfare state policies, such as social security programs, strongly reinforced traditional gender roles. These dynamics are the subject of the first section of this chapter. The second section addresses contemporary economic and demographic trends, exploring the interaction between individual choices and social constraints. In rural areas, many families lacking access to 211

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adequate resources face strong microeconomic incentives to high fertility, with negative macroeconomic and environmental consequences. In urban areas, the uneven growth of wage employment has disruptive consequences. Traditional implicit contracts governing intra-family income flows are being broken even though the promises of modernization remain unfulfilled. As a result, fertility decline is accompanied by increases in poverty among the young, the old, and families maintained by women alone. COLONIAL MEN AND PATRIARCHAL STATES IN LATIN AMERICA Many historians of Latin America have emphasized the impact of colonial domination on class structure, suggesting that a powerful land-owning elite extracting surplus from a weak peasantry had little incentive to promote productive forms of investment. Such class structures resulted, at least in part, from a unique confluence of race- and gender-based inequalities. A distinctive aspect of Latin American colonization was the survival and partial assimilation of the native population, accomplished through high rates of intermating—not intermarriage—between colonizers and colonized. State policies reflected collective interests based on gender, as well as on class and race.1 Economic and political power were inscribed within the racial categories of Spanish, Portuguese, Indian, African, and mestizo, dividing individuals who might otherwise have considered themselves members of a common class. These divisions not only increased the power of a small, racially homogeneous elite; they also weakened the position of Indian and mestizo women relative to men of European lineage, in ways that undermined the formal rules of family law. The mestizo race was born of the ‘intercourse of white men and Indian women outside the pale of matrimony.’ Though often described as arrangements of mutual passion and convenience, common-law marriages left women with little means of enforcing paternal responsibility, and contributed to the early proliferation of families maintained by women alone.2 The nineteenth century brought political independence and efforts to establish democracy. In the early twentieth century, a small feminist movement and new state-sponsored social insurance programs appeared. These latter efforts were initially strengthened by international connections, but may have been weakened by their dependence on organizations and theories that developed in a different historical context. Although many Latin American feminists were maternalist in orientation, they proved less successful than their counterparts in Northwestern Europe or the United States. State policies reproduced a particular structure of constraint based on gender not only through the denial of 212

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basic political and reproductive rights, but also through social insurance programs designed to benefit male household heads. The legacy of conquest One of the most important legacies of conquest was the early imposition of largely unregulated sexual relations on Indian and mestizo women. This resulted partly from the pattern of military domination combined with settlement. A small number of Spanish soldiers seized control of crucial areas of Latin America in the sixteenth century, and the Portuguese successfully maintained a political claim to Brazil. The Caribbean islands, more accessible by sea, were divided among the Spanish, English, French, and Dutch. Once the conquistadores had melted down and sent home all the gold and silver treasure they could find, their attention turned to the establishment of mining and agricultural enterprises based on the exploitation of Indian labor. Economic consolidation proved difficult, partly because of the devastation of the indigenous population, who suffered from a widespread lack of immunity to European diseases. Relatively little is known of the traditional family patterns and laws of the centralized Aztec, Incan, and Mayan empires, though they seem to have institutionalized a stricter form of control over women than the other tribes scattered across the continent. The Aztecs were certainly more hierarchical and militaristic than their Olmec and Toltec predecessors. They routinely raped and enslaved the women of their subject tribes, and while these practices may have strengthened their empire in the short run, they also fueled a hatred conducive to the development of unified opposition. This opposition, neatly manipulated by Hernán Cortés and aided by Spanish military technology, proved the Aztecs’ undoing.3 Many of the tribes who joined the conquistadores in their siege of Tenochtitlán complained of Aztec oppression. Cortés’ most indispensable aide and interpreter, Malinche, was a woman who had been sold into slavery as a child. She served him for several years and bore him a son; he rewarded her with considerable property, but he also passed her on to one of his lieutenants, a common practice among the Spaniards. Male colonists outnumbered females by about ten to one in the early years of the Mexican empire, partly because the Spanish crown limited the outmigration of women. European men took and traded Indian women as tribute; their power over these women was amplified by their dominant class position, making conformity to the explicit rules of Catholic marriage completely optional. Marriage to scarce and precious Spanish women, on the other hand, signified an alliance with a powerful set of in-laws, necessarily guaranteed by the strictest rules of Church and state. Marriage was also a determining factor in the inheritance of the land and tribute rights 213

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dispensed by the Crown, the encomiendas. In 1549, a new law excluded persons of mixed race from inheritance of encomiendas, regardless of the legitimacy of their birth. Marriage lost much of its significance for intergenerational transmission of property, except among the Spanish elite. The terms ‘mestizo’ and ‘illegitimate’ became almost synonymous. An elaborate caste system based on racial/ethnic identity began to emerge. The distinction between children of limpieza pura (pure blood) and those of Indian, African, or mixed ancestry, like the distinction between offspring of married parents and those considered ‘illegitimate,’ weakened support for a significant portion of the younger generation.4 A similar interaction between class, race, and gender shaped the evolution of family structure in countries to the south. Among the preIncan tribes of Peru, production was organized in kinship units where women maintained independent usufruct rights to land, with a tradition of parallel inheritance (men descending from a line of men, women from a line of women). The rise of the Incan empire modified this organization, requiring subjugated tribes to set aside a portion of their land for tribute. Gender hierarchy was linked to tribal hierarchy. Incan was to non-Incan as male to female and sun to moon. Here, as in Mexico, conquistadores built onto existing inequalities; once they conquered the center, they also controlled the periphery. The Spanish imposed their own system of labor tributes, under which all males between the ages of 18 and 50 were subject to labor service. They also introduced their version of family law, according to which married women were demoted to legal minors, and patrilineal rights and ties took precedence. In Peru, as population decline exacerbated labor shortages, women also became subject to labor service. Indigenous traditions remained strong in remote rural areas, where a culture of resistance developed. Still, native women were more likely than men to come into direct contact with the Spanish. Again, sex ratios played an important role. Among the Incas, women substantially outnumbered men (perhaps due to war-related mortality); among the Spanish, women were scarce. While some Indian women were able to parlay scarcity into power, they lost whatever bargaining edge they might have had by the end of the sixteenth century, with the birth of a new mestizo generation. The deterioration of women’s position was even more abrupt among tribes that had not been subject to Incan, Mayan, or Aztec rule, such as the Bari of Colombia.5 A new type of sexual relationship emerged, in which female lovers were considered servants. Ideologies of Indian and female inferiority reinforced each other, eventually affecting women of European lineage, as well. In one parish of seventeenth-century Lima, 46 per cent of all births among whites took place out of wedlock, compared to 72–90 per cent among Indians and las castas, those of mixed race. Most children born out of wedlock were not even recognized by their fathers, and a significant 214

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percentage (about 20 per cent) were registered with both parents unknown.6 The Spanish Crown did not officially discourage formal marriage between Europeans and Indians, as it did marriage with those of African descent. Some aspects of family law, however, such as parental approval for the marriages of children under the age of 25, were not applied to las castas. The Catholic Church was strongly opposed, in principle, to all forms of concubinage. But the sanctions it imposed, especially where inter-ethnic sexual relations were concerned, were hardly sufficient to discourage the behavior.7 The largely ‘illegitimate’ mestizo population grew in relative importance, partly because of the decimation of the Indian population. In the Caribbean, several tribes were literally rendered extinct. The European solution to labor shortages there, as in Brazil, was the enslavement and importation of large numbers of African men and women. New World slavery stripped African men of any authority over (or responsibility for) women and children, replacing it with the authority of the master. Conditions varied widely among the Caribbean islands, and state policies had a discernible impact on the economic viability of slavery. The Spanish Crown strictly regulated owners’ prerogatives by insisting that family bonds must be respected and that individuals must have the right to purchase their own freedom; manumission rates were higher in the Spanish West Indies than elsewhere. No such rules were enforced in the English and French colonies, and slave-owners there prospered on the profits of a labor-intensive sugar industry. Among Caribbean slaves, family organization was less often nuclear than in the US South, and owners often complained of slave women’s attempts to avoid childbearing. Overwork and malnutrition also lowered birth rates. The exploitative relations of slavery had a perverse effect on all gender relations. As Marietta Morrissey writes, ‘Labor shortages and the failure of European women to settle in the region combined to make white men completely utilitarian in their treatment of slave women, untroubled by the degraded social status of their sexual partners.’8 In most of Latin America and the Caribbean, a distinct class- and racebased family pattern emerged. The rules of marriage were strictly enforced within the upper class, where women provided access to family property, legitimate heirs, and careful maintenance of useful kin networks. In other classes women were an inexpensive source of reproductive and productive labor. Informal sexual relationships may have afforded women more independence, but they also offered less support for mothers and children. Extensive internal migration and the development of export agriculture in plantation systems that employed individual workers rather than family units further weakened Spanish and Portuguese traditions of family law and domestic governance.9 215

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In Brazil, the internal frontier expanded even more rapidly than in early New England. In 1725, the Portuguese Overseas Council complained that the majority of the residents of those lands [Minas Gerais] do not marry because of the free and easy ways in which they live, it not being easy to coerce them to separate from their black and mulatto concubines, [for which] all the families are being stained. Other observers often remarked upon the high incidence of out-ofwedlock births and households maintained by women alone.10 The historical record in other countries remains largely unexplored. But patchy evidence suggests that female headship was not always a sign of poverty. In Mexico City, women of Spanish descent were more likely than Indian or mestizo women to head households, perhaps due to the very high cost of housing in that city (a higher average age and greater incidence of widowhood may also have played a role). Upper-class parents, with an eye to the intergenerational transmission of property and status, discouraged marriage in difficult economic times and provided substantial support for unmarried daughters. Clearly, a woman’s position in society was not determined by her gender alone.11 The colonization of Latin America mixed individuals of different races more rapidly, more extensively, than colonization anywhere else in the world. Possibilities emerged for creation of a new, hybrid culture that would transcend the limits of racial identity and interest. In some ways, for instance, African-Americans benefitted from their location on a complex continuum of racial categories, in which they were less isolated, less starkly distinguished from ‘whites’ than in the United States. The possibilities for mutual acculturation and assimilation, however, were largely blocked by the overlay of class relations that guaranteed the political and economic dominance of those of European lineage. As the Council of the Indies explained to the King of Spain in 1806, It is impossible to deny that the different hierarchies and strata are of the greatest value to the monarchical state because their gradual and connected links of subordination and dependence support and substantiate the obedience and respect of the lowest vassal towards the king, this system is required for many more reasons in America.12 The gendered character of the Conquest also played a role, by weakening the families of las castas. If European women had migrated in large numbers to the New World to marry men of American and African descent, the outcome would have been dramatically different. Powerful institutions of both Church and state would have better enforced paternal and social responsibility for the next generation. 216

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Demography and development Debates over the transition to capitalism in Latin America emphasize two issues also central to the European and US experiences: changing class structures and the role of labor markets. In the Latin American case, a specific focus of debate is the role of the peasant household. Some argue that it has hampered capitalist development, others that it has contributed to the cheap production of a wage labor force for agrarian and urban capital. The debate, in other words, focuses on whether capitalists or workers pay for the kids. Recent feminist research explores additional dimensions of conflict over the costs of social reproduction.13 While the diverse demographic circumstances of nineteenth-century Latin America and the Caribbean remain largely unresearched, they invite careful speculation. It seems likely that the colonial legacy described above diminished the ability of communities, families, and individual women to exercise the forms of control over family size that emerged in Northwestern Europe and the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Political independence did little to remedy internal class and race divisions, which continued to retard the development of coalitions unified by their concern for national interests. Economic circumstances, state policies, and household-level incentives contributed to persistent high fertility. Rapid population growth weakened the bargaining power of workers and peasants and thereby further slowed economic development. One of the distinctive features of the European regime of late age at marriage was a process of ‘community regulation’ based on a perception of collective interests enforced by the nation-state on behalf of the population as a whole. Rules of marriage and inheritance were, of course, more relevant to families with considerable property, but they applied to a wide cross section of the population. The older generation had sufficient political and economic control to delay marriage and childbearing among their children. Circumstances were different in the United States, where the younger generation enjoyed greater independence. Still, the devastation and containment of the Native American population contributed to a relatively homogenous and egalitarian rural economy outside the South, at least until the mid-nineteenth century. If mothers paid a greater share of the costs of children, fathers were made highly aware of these costs through their reliance on family labor and the importance of gifts and bequests as a means of reinforcing filial loyalty. In much of Latin America, on the other hand, political and economic circumstances weakened fathers’ and children’s claims on each other. Families that were landless and/or politically disenfranchised found it difficult to take advantage of family labor. The persistence of a politically powerful landed elite was an obstacle not only to capitalist development, but 217

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also to enforcement of intergenerational income flows and community-level regulation of fertility. A large percentage of families were weakened not by ‘modernization,’ but by a combination of race and class oppression.14 The very attenuation of formal ties between fathers and children may have increased the cultural and emotional importance of informal ties. It may also have amplified the importance of relationships between mothers and children, brothers and sisters, and of larger kin networks. At the same time, the prevalence of families maintained by women alone among the poor and working classes created a different context for fertility decisions. They were less affected by considerations of property or law. Intergenerational regulation varied by class. Spanish and Portuguese legislation regulated the transmission of property far more strictly than English common law, to women’s benefit. Parents were required to divide most of their property equally between sons and daughters (though nothing prevented them from giving it away quite unequally before their death). Children could not marry without their parents’ permission until the age of 25; in the Spanish colonies unmarried children, unless specifically emancipated, remained under paternal authority for their entire lifetime. But these laws were not applied outside the elite families of ‘pure blood,’ or to children born out of wedlock.15 The fact that divorce was strictly forbidden by Church or state probably contributed to the incidence of non-marital unions; it certainly weakened the position of children born out of wedlock. The general Hispanic code gave an unmarried women the right to demand child support from the father of her children only if neither was married, and then only if her sexual behavior conformed to standards of ‘decency,’ which would have been, under the circumstances, relatively easy to impugn. On the other hand, if a father acknowledged a child born out of wedlock, he could apparently exercise control and custody over it whether he contributed to its support or not. Unwed mothers had no legal authority over their own children.16 Most explanations of the prevalence of non-marital unions emphasize that previous marriages were an obstacle and that the ceremony was too expensive, as though men and women were equally indifferent to the formality. In fact, the implications were far more serious for women. Non-marriage gave men a certain freedom and flexibility where fatherhood was concerned; they could embrace it or ignore it depending on vagaries of circumstance or mood. Abandoned mothers faced an all-ornone situation. Those who became too insistent in demanding support could be threatened with the possibility that the father would assert his custody rights and they would lose their children altogether. It is difficult to say how the construction of these legal incentives and disincentives actually affected behavior. Probably, much depended on specific social, cultural, and economic conditions, which varied widely. In 218

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countries with small Indian populations, individuals of mixed race tended to assimilate; this was particularly true in Argentina and Uruguay, where large numbers of European immigrants poured in after 1850. Since over 70 per cent of these were young men, women became scarce and may have gained some implicit bargaining power.17 By contrast, in Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, Indian populations gradually increased in size, and ethnic divisions intensified. Their impact depended in large part on class relations. Where indigenous groups continued to practice traditional forms of subsistence agriculture, community regulation probably protected mothers and children regardless of marital status, without increasing or decreasing incentives for high fertility. Where haciendas produced goods for export through exploitative forms of control over rural peasants and laborers, incentives were modified. Individual men who provided labor dues or worked for wages had little to gain from large numbers of children, but hacienda owners probably hoped to increase the supply of labor by promoting high fertility among women, married or not. In some areas, such as the Dagua region of Colombia, family farms played an important part in the nineteenthcentury colonization of the internal frontier. Male household heads benefitted directly from high fertility and a large supply of family labor.18 Elsewhere, economic factors militated against stable co-resident families. The Brazilian record, one of the few that has been reconstructed, suggests that many men struck off on their own to rural areas. In the city ~o Paulo in 1802, there were only 75 men for every 100 women, and of Sa 45 per cent of all urban households were headed by women. Once set, the pattern endured. By 1836 the sex ratio had begun to approach parity, but 39 per cent of all households were female-headed. Probably about 25 per cent of households in interior areas of Brazil were headed by women in the early nineteenth century.19 By this time, class may have begun to play a role as important as race in determining the incidence of legal marriage and co-residence. In Vila Rica in 1804 and 1838, white women were just as likely as mulatto, creole, or African women to be household heads. In 1835, in Santiago Maior do Iguape, part of the expanding sugar economy of Bahia, about 33 per cent of all households were headed by women, who tended to be in relatively low occupational classes. These households also had a higher proportion of dependents than those headed by men.20 One might argue that Latin American and Caribbean women, with less-enforceable promises from fathers than their counterparts in Northwestern Europe or the United States, had greater incentives to avoid conception. We do not know whether mothers on their own were less likely than other women to space their births, or cease childrearing at an early age. We do know, however, that the only reliable method they could 219

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have employed was complete abstinence, since there were no methods of birth control that they could employ without full male cooperation. We also know that social norms and personal preferences contributed to high fertility. While the economic benefits of children were limited, their costs were also relatively low. The Catholic Church glorified maternalism in ways that left women economically vulnerable; at the same time, however, it provided forms of spiritual and material assistance that made it easier for mothers to care for children. Political independence from Spain and Portugal, gained by most countries in the early and mid-nineteenth century, did little to change economic conditions. Although a nascent capitalist class gained some additional influence over national economic policies, it often found itself at odds with landowners, who had little to gain from urbanization or industrialization. Neither group put much emphasis on the development of mandatory public education, and in some countries, the Catholic Church provided most schooling. Higher education remained the prerogative of a predominantly affluent male elite. Industrialists with a greater stake in the education of the workforce might have gained a louder voice had they been more successful in international competition. But domestic factories were forced to compete with cheap imports from Europe and the United States, and overseas investors often bought out the most lucrative enterprises. Industrialization proceeded most rapidly during periods when trade with the developed countries was hampered, such as World Wars I and II.21 There is evidence of continual, if gradual, restructuring of race, age, and gender relations. The continental abolition of slavery was completed in 1888 when Brazil formally implemented emancipation. The growing size and influence of the mestizo population in some countries, such as Mexico, resulted in elimination of race-based rules and laws. As in the United States and Europe, formal patriarchal authority over children was attenuated. The age of majority was lowered from 25 to 21 in both Mexico and Brazil. As elsewhere, women’s organizations began to demand political reforms. Still, the slow, uneven character of industrialization and small size of the wage labor force meant that families remained important units of production. Their predominance probably reinforced some of the constraints that weakened the prospects for national economic development. Certainly, the lack of economic opportunities for women outside of families, was fortified by Catholic doctrines. Religious sanctions against any sexual acts unconducive to conception contributed to high fertility. So too did social norms that treated motherhood, but not fatherhood, as a permanent, sacred, and secular responsibility.

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First-wave feminism As in the United States, feminist collective action coalesced more successfully in areas where racial differences were muted. Women’s groups in Latin America never simply imported their ideas from abroad; they often pressed for a broader assault on social inequality than feminists in more developed countries. In some respects, international ties strengthened their organizing efforts, lending economic as well as ideological support. Ironically, however, outside influences may have made it more difficult to understand and respond to circumstances unique to the region. Latin American feminists faced particularly difficult conditions. Their constituency was deeply divided along both race and class lines, and the limited extent of formal marriage complicated issues such as family law reform. The Catholic Church wielded considerable political power, and in a context in which paternal responsibilities were widely flouted, its emphasis on family values may have appealed to many women more than the liberal rhetoric of individual rights. Still, feminism was alive and kicking by the 1880s, particularly in countries of the Southern Cone (Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay), with their small mestizo populations, expanding industrial and commercial sectors, and secular traditions. In Mexico and Brazil, where workerpeasant alliances began to contest oligarchical control, feminists often aligned themselves with socialists. Outreach from feminists in the United States began about this time. In 1883, Susan B.Anthony sponsored the formation of the International Council of Women, a loose collection of women’s groups, and in 1902, the president of the National American Women’s Suffrage Association, Carrie Chapman Catt, formed the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, which sought affiliates in Latin America. As yet, little is known about the political discussions and debates that emerged in their meetings and correspondence.22 European influence may have been greater in the Southern Cone countries, as thousands of Italians, Germans, and Spaniards brought the vocabulary of social democracy with them to the New World. In Argentina in 1896, the Socialist Party demanded not only women’s suffrage, but also sweeping changes in the Civil Code: the right to absolute divorce, the right to investigate and enforce paternal responsibilities, and legal equality of legitimate and illegitimate children.23 In 1910, the Argentine Association of University Women sponsored the First International Feminist Congress, at which Peru, Chile, Uruguay, Italy, and the United States were represented. Delegates bemoaned the economic plight of single mothers and argued that the government should give financial assistance to any woman wanting to keep her child. However, political rights and the need for increased education dominated the agenda. In Cuba, the 221

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second National Women’s Congress in 1925 called for equality of claims for illegitimate children. Such issues seem to have received about the same amount of attention as they had in Northwestern Europe, despite the fact that the problem was far more serious in Latin America.24 In Mexico, the revolution of 1910 led to some important reforms. In 1917, a new Law of Domestic Relations guaranteed married women guardianship and child custody rights, and a legal voice in their children’s education and the expenditure of family funds. Married women remained prohibited from engaging in any profession or business without the consent of a husband, and unmarried women under thirty could still not leave home without parental consent. While the law made it easier for mothers to file paternity suits, this remained an unrealistic option for most. Far more radical policies were implemented by the socialists who came to power in the state of Yucatán. There, between 1922 and 1924, General Salvador Alvarado and Felipe Carrillo Puerto established laws that gave all children their father’s name and the right to share equally in all rights and privileges regardless of their parents’ marital status. Grassroots organizations called the Feminist Leagues were organized to make sure that women understood their new rights, and to promote a statesupported birth control program. All these policies and programs were revoked after Victoriano Huerta seized control of the state in 1924.25 In Brazil, several feminist magazines and newspapers thrived in the late nineteenth century, and their ideas met the same type of resistance from male wage-earners as they did in the United States. Delegates to a congress of reformist trade unions, held in 1912, decided that ‘in the interests of humanity it would be best if women did not pursue tasks other than those of the home and a few limited occupations appropriate to the female sex.’ The Republican Civil Code of 1916 offered women few reforms; married women still required their husband’s permission to exercise a profession. But early efforts set the stage for several important feminist congresses between 1922 and 1936.26 Feminist efforts in Peru were more limited, concentrated in a small Spanish elite of women reluctant to mix with those of less prestigious race or class. Describing a visit there in 1923, Carrie Chapman Catt wrote, ‘The pure Castillian woman would die before she moved equally herself with those of color’ (Catt did not move very equally, herself). An orthodox Catholic women’s group not only lobbied against reform, but supported the imprisonment and eventual exile of a leading feminist activist.27 The more developed countries (Argentina, Uruguay, and Cuba) took the lead in providing public education systems that admitted women in the primary level ‘normal’ schools, and later in high schools, colleges, and universities. However, it is difficult to discern cause and effect here. Did development create support for public education, or did the race and class relations conducive to development also promote women’s education? 222

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In Peru, the Catholic Church dominated the education system until the mid-twentieth century, enforcing not only sex segregation, but also a strictly conservative curriculum. Was the Church itself the cause, or was its tenacious hold a result of extreme forms of race and class inequality, which also weakened women’s position? Clearly, political coalitions were a crucial factor in Mexico, where the post-1910 revolutionary government promoted a vast secular literacy campaign that benefitted many women. Similarly, in Brazil, after the 1930 revolution, female schooling was significantly improved.28 Across the continent, feminist successes were generally sporadic and uneven. Countries that took the lead in social and educational reforms were not always among the first to grant women the vote. Women gained the suffrage before 1934 in Ecuador, Brazil, Uruguay, and Cuba, but had to wait until after 1947 in Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Peru. Everywhere, changes in political rules were conceded more readily than access to economic assets. Land reforms implemented after World War II, for instance, redistributed property under oligarchical control to individual men, with little provision for wive’s coownership and active disregard for single women and those heading their own households.29 In some cases, women’s economic rights were actually reduced. Carmen Diana Deere points out that inheritance in most Andean highland areas had been bilateral, but Peruvian President Belaúnde’s reforms distributed land titles only in the names of male household heads. More recent land reforms in Honduras were not so egregiously biased. But while single women were eligible, by law, for redistributed land, stricter conditions were imposed upon them than upon men. Similarly, forms of protective legislation adopted in the post-World War II era raised the cost, to employers, of hiring women.30 Virtually all historians of gender-based collective action in Latin America have emphasized its embrace of motherhood, its commonality, in this respect, with European social feminism. This interpretation is certainly consistent with recurrent demands not only for child custody, but also for the legal rights of illegitimate children. Yet Latin American feminists were less successful than their European counterparts in reforming family law, and it is not clear that they ever made this a priority. More influenced by Marxian theory, they may have been more handicapped by its blind spots regarding inequality within the family.31 The form that maternalism took also proved problematic. Socialists and trade unionists favored the imposition of the costs of social reproduction on employers through guaranteed maternity leaves. These were implemented and financed in ways that restricted women’s employment opportunities and reinforced a traditional division of labor in the home. As a result, they did little to improve the resources or the bargaining power of mothers. More research is needed before any 223

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conclusions can be drawn, but a tentative hypothesis can be offered: far from being too maternalist, early Latin American feminism may not have been maternalist enough. Whether because of theoretical blind spots, or tremendous resistance, it failed to address the economic consequences of poor enforcement of paternal responsibility, which were particularly devastating in countries with large mestizo populations. The development of social insurance A good example of institutional reinforcement of structures of constraint lies in the development of social insurance. Latin American and Caribbean states failed to provide much public assistance to mothers and children on their own. They also developed programs that institutionalized a male family wage and strengthened the economic authority of men in strong race and class positions. Despite their numerical importance, families maintained by women alone were treated even worse than in the United States. Latin American social security programs also illustrate how state policies reinforced existing class inequalities. By the early twentieth century, economic development had created a large number of salaried employees as well as an emergent capitalist class, both with interests quite distinct from those of rural landlords and peasants. New class conflicts were played out in many arenas, including the development of social insurance programs that provide far greater benefits to the urban salariat than to any other group. These programs, closely modeled on European precedents, provide retirement pensions, health care, and family allowances that consume a large share of Gross Domestic Product in some countries. However, they cover a much smaller proportion of the population than in Europe or the US, and the benefits they provide reflect an alliance between upper- and middle-class families solidified by adherence to the male breadwinner model. Families maintained by women alone are largely excluded from the social safety net. ‘Social security in Latin America,’ writes Carmelo Mesa-Lago, ‘has often been manipulated to gain the electoral support of a particular clientele, to legitimate a spurious political regime, and to satisfy the needs of and coopt powerful pressure groups which threaten the status quo.’ Other experts emphasize the tendency to use paternalistic policies to preempt social conflict. But the literal relevance of ‘paternalism’ is seldom explored, and definitions of pressure groups never mention men or the elderly. These groups have exerted influence partly as a result of patriarchal norms, partly as a result of active efforts to defend their own collective interests.32 Social insurance programs in Latin America are far more extensive than in most other areas of the developing world, comprising about onethird of all government spending. About 60 per cent of the regional 224

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population is covered, but this number conceals considerable heterogeneity. Social security coverage in Cuba approaches 100 per cent, including universal health and maternity benefits. Excluding Brazil, a country with a large population and about 90 per cent coverage, about 43 per cent of the population of Latin America is eligible for some benefits; in seven countries, coverage is less than 25 per cent of the population. Urban wage- and salary-earners are covered in virtually all countries, while low-income, rural, self-employed, informal sector, and domestic workers are under-represented to varying degrees. Programs typically include retirement benefits (generally proportional to earnings), health insurance, maternity benefits, and family allowances. Health care assistance is distributed somewhat more equitably than old age assistance, but neither is effectively directed to those who need it most.33 Countries can be divided into three groups on the basis of their chronology and coverage. The Southern Cone countries, plus Cuba and Brazil, were the first to implement programs, and all provided close to universal coverage by the 1980s, accounting for a large share of national income. In Argentina, for instance, expenditures on social insurance in the 1980s exceeded the value of agricultural production. All these countries are beginning to suffer from a low ratio of workers to beneficiaries, and like Northwestern Europe and the United States, they face serious problems of actuarial imbalance (projected revenues are not sufficient to meet projected costs).34 Falling into an intermediate group are Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela; in the 1930s and 1940s they introduced social insurance programs which cover between 20 per cent and 50 per cent of their population. The remaining countries set up systems in the 1950s and 1960s that cover less than 10 per cent of the population; here actuarial imbalance is a less pressing problem than extreme income inequality exacerbated by uneven provision of assistance. With the possible exception of Mexico, these countries provide few significant benefits to the poor.35 The size of social security expenditures relative to Gross Domestic Product varies considerably; it ranges from less than 2 per cent in many countries to 9.6 per cent in Uruguay. By comparison, social security expenditures in the US comprise 12.5 per cent of GDP; in Germany, 23.4 per cent; in Sweden, 31.3 per cent. Latin American and Caribbean programs tend to be partly financed by payroll taxes, but these account for less than one-third of total revenue, and are supplemented by other taxes. This means that many non-beneficiaries are helping finance these benefits.36 Many countries originally intended to accumulate an investable surplus, but the difficulty of garnering an adequate positive rate of return forced governments into a pay-as-you-go system, similar to that of the 225

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United States before 1983 (in some countries, such as Mexico, the rate of return on social security surpluses was actually negative). While the overall incidence of the taxes is unclear, it is probably regressive; in many countries income is transferred from those with less to those with more, from the young to the old, and from female-headed households with lower eligibility for benefits to traditional male breadwinner households. With the exception of maternity leave, female wage-earners are far less likely than male wage-earners to receive benefits, and wives and children enjoy benefits only through intact marriages. In the region as a whole, women represent about 30 per cent of all employees, and many of these are working only part-time, or for periods of time inadequate to qualify them for benefits. As a result, most women gain a claim on social insurance only through marriage.37 Recent discussions of social security policies seem oblivious to the aspects of gender bias strongly contested in Europe. Mesa-Lago explains that social security programs have been ‘explicitly designed to prevent the loss of income of the head of the family.’ This is true: they give little concern to the welfare of other family members, simply assuming that altruism prevails, and that benefits will be shared. Women maintaining families alone, and the children that they are raising, remain largely unprotected.38 A general picture of the impact of social insurance on women and mothers can be drawn from a summary of basic provisions in effect in 1989 that covered nineteen countries in Latin America and thirteen in the Caribbean. Most Old Age, Invalidity and Death programs in Latin America cover a subset of the employed. Only Argentina and Mexico allow voluntary affiliation for non-working individuals. Most countries offer women retirement benefits at a younger age (it is not clear from available information whether benefits are commensurately reduced). This double standard recognizes the fact that women often face a double burden of paid and unpaid work, but compensates only very partially for other forms of bias that work to the disadvantage of women.39 There is very little official recognition of the fact that women tend to remain in the labor force for shorter and less continuous periods than men. Eligibility requirements are stringent. Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, with three of the most extensive programs in the region, require thirty or more years of paid employment. It would be interesting to know what percentage of women in paid employment and in the population as a whole actually attain coverage, relative to men, but such information could probably be obtained only through country-specific surveys.40 The most explicit form of discrimination against women workers in paid employment takes the form of restrictions on eligible survivors. All countries list a widow as an eligible survivor (though sometimes with conditions based on age or presence of small children). But fifteen Latin 226

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American countries either do not list widowers as eligible, or impose the restriction that they must be both ‘invalid’ and ‘dependent.’ Most Caribbean countries require that the widower be ‘invalid’ or ‘needy.’ This differential coverage of spouses means that married men in covered employment and their families enjoy greater benefits than married women in covered employment and their families, per dollar of tax contribution. This can also be construed as a form of sex-role bias that penalizes men as well as women, because it means that men are unable to obtain coverage through marriage.41 All but two Latin American countries, and all Caribbean countries, fail to specify the eligibility of sexual partners or co-parents who are not married. One exception, Ecuador, explicitly states that a ‘common law wife of at least 5 years’ or a ‘mother of the deceased’s children’ is eligible for a survivor’s benefits. The other exception, Uruguay, stipulates a ‘divorced wife receiving alimony.’ It is not clear what practices are actually followed in adjudicating the eligibility of women in other countries that fall into these categories. Most Latin American Sickness and Maternity programs are financed through social insurance, and ironically, they also tend to provide more generous benefits to men than women. In all countries, a male wageearner in covered employment enjoys at least some sickness and maternity insurance for his wife and children. The language used often seems to exclude coverage for the husband of a covered woman worker. For instance, in many countries eligibility is limited to ‘dependents,’ a characterization that would not normally apply to a man capable of bringing any income into the family. Venezuela is unique in its use of gender-neutral language for this provision.42 Evident in Sickness and Maternity programs, as in the case of Old Age, Invalidity, and Death, is a general lack of attention to the eligibility of individuals who are not legally married to covered workers. Of Latin American countries, only Guatemala specifies that common-law relationships also qualify—the ‘concubine’ of an insured man is eligible. No Caribbean countries make this specification.43 Family Allowances are part of the social insurance system in seven Latin American countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Uruguay. In Argentina, they account for 22 per cent of all Social Security expenditures, a greater percentage than either Sweden or France, countries with relatively generous family allowances. Chile and Uruguay devote about 7 per cent of Social Security expenditures to such programs.44 In all but Costa Rica, allowances are restricted to families of those in covered employment. The Costa Rican system merits close attention, because it uses family allowances as means-tested assistance for persons not meeting qualifications for other pensions, including widows over the age of 55 with or without dependents, and single mothers with children 227

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under the age of 15. This is the only mention made in summaries of Latin American programs of special attention to the needs of single mothers. A distinctive feature of three countries’ family allowance systems is a payment for an adult dependent, such as a wife, in addition to a per-child allowance. In Argentina, fathers are eligible for such payments only if they are a ‘dependent invalid;’ in Chile, fathers are not eligible; in Costa Rica, all ‘dependents’ qualify, but it is doubtful that an able-bodied man would be considered a dependent. Brazil is unique in that family allowances are payable to both parents if both are insured. Employer-provided maternity benefits comprise another form of recognition of non-market family labor. While the level of these benefits cannot be ascertained from aggregate data, it is probably significant in countries where women’s participation in wage labor is relatively high. The costs of maternity benefits are typically imposed on employers as a class rather than on individual firms, and therefore do not provide a direct disincentive to avoid hiring women (as they do in many countries of sub-Saharan Africa). Still, the emphasis on maternal leave, rather than a more gender-neutral parental leave, means that female workers are far more likely to take leaves from work, and gives employers a good excuse for occupational segregation. Indeed, interviewed employers often justify their reluctance to hire women because of the disruption maternity leaves impose.45 Multilateral agencies such as the World Bank have expressed considerable concern over the actuarial imbalances in the Southern Cone countries. In response to strong criticism for encouraging cutbacks in social spending in the 1980s, the Bank recommends reductions in average benefits accompanied by expansion of coverage. A variety of strategies are being pursued. Chile has partially ‘privatized’ its system. Discussions are currently taking place in Argentina regarding de-linking wages and benefits. Although negotiations are secret due to ‘political sensitivity,’ the World Bank is currently pressuring Uruguay for social security reform. Yet World Bank studies ignore the issue of gender and age bias in existing programs.46 This is an issue relevant to women across lines of nation, race, and class. Latin American social programs (like their counterparts in Northwestern Europe more than thirty years ago, and in the United States today) partially socialize the costs of children in ways that benefit relatively well-off men more than needy mothers and children. They encourage poor families to continue to rely on children as a source of social insurance, reinforcing the incentives to high fertility. They also oblige mothers to pay a disproportionate share of the growing costs of raising children. THE PLIGHT OF SUPERMADRES In Spanish, the word ‘supermadre’ means ‘supermother,’ and it seems an apt description of women’s dual contributions to production and social 228

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reproduction in Latin America. It is also a soothing description, because it implies that mothers meet the extraordinary demands placed upon them by dint of extra effort and commitment, and are rewarded by appreciative praise. This is the best that can happen, and it does not happen very often. In fact, mothers and children outside the privileged classes are subject to extraordinary privation. Their poverty cannot simply be attributed to underdevelopment, or to rapid population growth, because it is partly the result of structures of constraint based on nation, race, class, gender, and age. Latin America and the Caribbean have a history of economic disappointments, fits and starts of development interrupted by bouts of inflation and stagnation. Despite an overall record of economic growth since the nineteenth century, the region suffered declines in per capita income in the 1980s. Many international as well as domestic factors have contributed to the lack of progress. Conventional Malthusian reasoning describes population growth as the cause of poverty, and attributes that growth to irrationality and ignorance. This reasoning is simplistic. Fertility declines have more than matched mortality declines in many urban areas. In rural areas, the major obstacles to fertility decline are four distinct but related structural aspects of poverty: the incomplete coverage of social insurance (discussed in the previous section); inadequate services for maternal and child health and education; the persistence of economic incentives to high fertility (particularly for men); and the lack of reproductive rights (particularly for women). Policies that directly tackled these obstacles could contribute to genuine improvements in families’ standards of living. But in recent years, the emphasis in development policy has shifted from meeting people’s basic needs toward repaying international debts, through ‘structural adjustment’ designed to stimulate the growth of market production, particularly exports. Many of the policies implemented have not only hurt women and children, but have also reduced the types of investments that could generate long-run, sustainable development. Poverty and population The best rejoinder to Malthusian anxieties has always been the point that population growth is as much a result as a cause of poverty. In colloquial terms, poverty is the population bomb and development is the best contraceptive. But this prescription is also too simple. Not just any development will lower fertility, only those forms that weaken patriarchal structures of constraint by increasing women’s power and augmenting children’s opportunities. The classic Malthusian/anti-Malthusian debate over the relationship between population and development slights the importance of social 229

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inequalities. Those who argue that population growth should be reduced at any cost ignore issues of reproductive rights, and overlook the extent to which poor families are economically dependent on children as a source of income security. Those who argue against greater investments in family planning facilities and legalization of abortion ignore both reproductive rights and the implications of coercive pro-natalism.47 The relationship between demographic and economic growth remains the topic of considerable controversy that cannot be resolved by mathematical models or quantitative research. Much depends on particular historical conditions and cultural, political, and economic counterfactuals (what would have happened if…?) that can only be guessed at. Factors tending to speed fertility decline in Latin America and the Caribbean (as in most developing regions) include new family planning facilities and the impact of cultural values from the developed countries. As John and Pat Caldwell note, the content of educational curricula and mass media reflects the norms and preferences of countries where fertility rates are quite low. On the other hand, the persistence of family-based production and the uneven provision of collective forms of social security bolster the economic incentives to high fertility in some areas, and these, in turn, reinforce traditional pro-natalist constraints.48 The particular form that economic development has taken in Latin America and the Caribbean has probably slowed fertility decline. Partly because of extreme social inequality, improvements in public health and child mortality have been uneven. The slow growth of wage employment and the burgeoning of the ‘informal sector’ have reinforced the role of the family as an income-earning unit. Neither child-labor laws nor education requirements have been strongly enforced. Emphasis on these social policies is not intended to belittle the autonomous influence of Catholic religious doctrine, which discourages family planning, but to suggest that its influence has been reinforced, even amplified, by economic incentives. Fertility decline has been uneven. By 1960, the total fertility rate (the number of children a woman is expected to bear over her life-cycle, based on current age-specific birth rates) in Argentina and Uruguay was around three, about the same as in the United States. By 1987, the rate in the United States had fallen to 1.8, but remained about the same in Argentina and Uruguay. In Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, and Mexico, where rates were initially higher, they fell about 45 per cent between 1960 and 1987. Fertility rates are higher in countries with a larger rural population such as Peru, Bolivia, and Guatemala, where Indians and small farming families of all races have benefitted little from the process of economic development. Even in these countries, where women bear, on average, about five children, the trend is downward. But the movement is slow, largely because of the poorly distributed effects of development.49 230

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Declines in child mortality are one stimulus to fertility decline. European historians have long debated the comparative importance of improved medical technology (including public health measures) and better standards of living in the mortality decline that took place in Europe and the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Because developing countries can import state-of-the-art medical technologies and knowledge, they have the potential to reduce mortality more rapidly despite slow economic growth. Many Latin American countries partially realized this potential between 1955 and 1970, and in the 1980s a new wave of public health measures directed toward children increased immunization, improved the treatment of diarrhea (a major child-killer), and encouraged better spacing of births.50 Yet in this region the mortality rate for children under 5 (U5MR) remains extraordinarily high by developed country standards, and varies considerably across countries. In 1987, none of the countries of Northwestern Europe or the United States had rates over 15 per thousand live births. Cuba, Costa Rica, Chile, Trinidad and Tobago, and Jamaica had rates in the 20s; Argentina and Uruguay in the 30s. Most other countries of the region had rates between 60 and 100. Guatemala, Bolivia, Peru, and Haiti, all countries with large indigenous or black populations, were outliers at the high end, with rates over 100. These variations reflect differences in state policies towards health and education at least as much as variation in GNP per capita.51 Parents’ potential to make use of their children’s labor in these countries also remains far greater than in Northwestern Europe or the United States. As earlier chapters pointed out, the percentage of employers and selfemployed in the paid labor force of Great Britain and Austria was below 20 per cent by 1900, and below 50 per cent in most other countries of Northwestern Europe. In the United States in 1910, employers and the selfemployed comprised only slightly more than 25 per cent of the paid labor force. By 1980, in both Northwestern Europe and the United States, this group accounted for 10 per cent or less of the paid labor force. More than 90 per cent of paid workers in both regions were employees (see Table 6.1).52 In Latin America and the Caribbean, on the other hand, rapid processes of proletarianization proved the exception, rather than the rule. The Southern Cone countries of Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay seemed to be following the European trajectory in the 1950s and 1960s, when the percentage of employers and self-employed comprised little more than 20 per cent, and employees about 70 per cent. However, there was little change in the 1970s and 1980s; the structural transformation of the labor force simply came to a halt. In Mexico, Venezuela, and Colombia, significant declines in the percentage of employers and self-employed took place between 1960 and 1980, but these largely reflected increases in the categories of ‘family employed’ and ‘other.’ The percentage engaged as 231

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Table 6.1 Employers, own-account workers, and employees as a percentage of the paid labor force, in Latin America, the Caribbean, the US and Northwestern Europe

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Table 6.1 continued

Source: ILO (1990: Table 2B). Figures for ‘family employed’ and ‘other’ are not included because their definitions vary so widely

employees remained fairly constant, between 50 per cent and 60 per cent. In the less-developed countries of Ecuador, Guatemala, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Peru, the percentage of those in the paid labor force receiving a wage or salary also changed little, remaining between 40 per cent and 50 per cent. Of Caribbean countries with available statistics, only the Dominican Republic experienced a sharp increase in the percentage of wage-earners in the total labor force (see Table 6.1). In other words, between 30 per cent and 60 per cent of the paid labor force of Latin America, and about 20 per cent to 50 per cent in the Caribbean, is primarily engaged in activities that are conducive to family employment, such as farming or buying and trading in the informal sector. Children are more likely to continue working within the family enterprise when there are few opportunities outside it. They have less economic independence from their parents than they would have in a rapidly expanding labor market. The structure of the paid labor force helps explain why Latin American norms and preferences are more familistic and less individualistic than in the United States. This does not imply that the elder generation exploits the younger generation more than in developed countries (where intergenerational transfers take place primarily through the state). Clearly, young people would be even worse off if they could not fall back upon family farms or enterprises in the absence of better opportunities. Nor does this pattern of greater dependence on family-based enterprises necessarily reduce the incentives to limit fertility. The European experience suggests that when the supply of land is limited, technological change is slow, and external opportunities are few and far between, parents recognize that high fertility may hamper the viability of the family enterprise.53 Nevertheless, the persistence of family-based production probably complicates and slows the process of fertility decline, for reasons related to cultural insulation as well as economic incentives. In rural areas, in particular, traditional pro-natalist values are less vulnerable to modern influences. Where child mortality rates remain high, and the marginal 233

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product of children’s labor remains positive (even if declining), families may actually strive to maximize their fertility. Even in urban areas, the net costs of children remain lower than in the United States or Northwestern Europe, though they have certainly begun to increase in recent years.54 Official policies that might have increased social investment in children have not been vigorously implemented. While the labor force participation rate of children aged 14 and under in Latin America is officially estimated to be between 2 per cent and 5 per cent, the actual rate is between 12 per cent and 26 per cent. Though almost all countries have adopted national minimum age laws and other regulations of child labor, these rules are seldom strictly enforced even in wage employment. They are virtually ignored in family farm and informal sector employment. In both Northwestern Europe and the United States, the expansion of mandatory education played a crucial role in reducing young children’s economic contributions. In Latin America, neither educational requirements nor opportunities have expanded as steadily or as rapidly.55 While school enrollments have increased since the 1960s, they remain both low and uneven. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, less than 50 per cent of all children who enrolled in grade 1 completed their primary school education (in most countries for which data was available). Completion was particularly low in Brazil (20 per cent), Nicaragua (27 per cent), Honduras (27 per cent), Bolivia (32 per cent), and Colombia (37 per cent). Caribbean countries generally had higher rates, ranging from a low of 45 per cent in Haiti to a high of 80 per cent in Jamaica. Even in Uruguay (88 per cent) and Cuba (86 per cent), the two countries with the highest rates, primary completion was far below the 97–100 per cent characteristic of the United States and Northwestern Europe. Enrollment rates in both the primary and secondary level were generally higher for males than females, although the differences were smaller than in other developing regions.56 These patterns raise questions about the economic role of education in the developing countries. In the United States and Northwestern Europe, employers had a collective interest in increasing the skills of their labor force, and they played an important role in state policies that increased educational investments. In Latin America and the Caribbean, on the other hand, high levels of unemployment and underemployment, in conjunction with the relatively small size of the wage labor force, suggest that the demand for skilled labor is relatively low. The transnational corporations that play an increasingly important role in the global economy can relocate in search of appropriate worker skills rather than investing in local education. Structures of constraint based on race, class, and gender are also relevant. Extreme inequalities in the distribution of income create a vested interest in forms of educational investment that reproduce those inequalities. As earlier chapters have pointed out, women in Northwestern 234

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Europe and the US had to organize collectively to fight for access to education. Whites in the US used (and in many instances, continue to use) their political power to limit the quality of schooling for AfricanAmericans. A professional or managerial elite that reaps high gains from its human capital has an interest in limiting access to higher education. Further research on the political economy of education in Latin America could help explain patterns of variation in public spending.57 The future is uncertain; changes in attitudes or increased support for family planning could countervail these structural factors and accelerate fertility decline. But if economic incentives are important, then the particular form that development takes, and the types of state policies that accompany it, are more relevant than the pace of increase in the value of market production. The Cuban economy, for instance, has not fared well in terms of Gross National Product, but is close to the top of the Latin American list for low infant mortality, high educational attainment, and low fertility. Trabajo feminino—women’s work Another aspect of economic development particularly important to fertility decisions is the changing nature of women’s work, which affects not only the opportunity costs of children, but also the empowerment of women in the home and in the polity. While female labor-force participation has increased rapidly in Latin America and the Caribbean, it has been concentrated in marginal enterprises in the informal sector that provide little income and even less security. Furthermore, the structure of female employment seems more polarized than in the United States or Northwestern Europe, with a large share of women concentrated in domestic service occupations and a small elite in relatively high-paying professional jobs. Most efforts to compare levels and rates of change in women’s employment in developing countries have foundered on inconsistencies in definitions of the paid labor force. The commonly used term ‘unpaid family worker’ is generally restricted to individuals engaged in market production without pay, but sometimes includes those engaged in agricultural production whether for market sale or for own consumption (in no case does it include individuals who are primarily providing domestic services or child care). An added difficulty in Latin America and the Caribbean is the growing importance of informal jobs and underground activities such as selling drugs and sex.58 Many women who show up in the ‘employers and own-account workers’ category are engaged in marginal informal sector enterprises in which their hourly income is below minimum wages. Such activities often represent something very close to disguised unemployment, a desperate response to poverty and the lack of opportunities for remunerative work. Over the last 235

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twenty years, women’s participation in the informal sector in the region has increased relative to men’s. Official measures of the ‘paid labor force’ or the ‘economically active population’ are simply not reliable.59 One category of the paid labor force is measured more accurately: those who work for a wage or salary. Partly because of Latin America’s long history of industrialization, women represent a larger share (32.1 per cent) of employees in the major non-agricultural occupations than in any other region of the developing world. But the relatively slow growth of wage employment overall has resulted in levels of female proletarianization lower than those characteristic of the United States and Northwestern Europe at comparable levels of their development.60 Women comprise a significant share of total wage and salary employment, ranging from 23 per cent to 27 per cent in the countries for which data are available in the 1980s, and they are better represented in this category than among employers and own-account workers (see Table 6.2). This pattern is not very different from that of the United States in 1960, when 34 per cent of all wage and salary employees were women, and it probably reflects the greater share of services (relative to industry) in the Latin American paid labor force. But total wage employment remains small relative to the total paid labor force.61 The development of maquiladoras in export-oriented free-trade zones represents a major exception to the trend of slow growth in women’s wage employment, especially in industries in which female labor has traditionally been important, such as clothing and electronics. Employees tend to be young and unmarried. Their willingness to work for lower wages than men became especially attractive as global competition intensified in the 1980s. Further, as employers became more transnational in orientation, they also became less likely to respect local norms of occupational exclusion. As Linda Lim observes, the result is not only a weakening of class solidarity, but sometimes a backlash against female employment in the name of traditional patriarchal values.62 The supply of women seeking factory jobs has been augmented by the decline of other alternatives (especially in public-sector employment) and by their increased responsibility for family welfare. The pressure to violate traditional norms regarding women’s place has intensified. According to Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, many women working in Mexican maquiladoras explain that the unexpected absence of male support in their families led them to look for jobs.63 Will the increased importance of competitive export platforms lead to a rapid feminization of industrial wage employment? This is not an unlikely prospect in many of the rapidly industrializing countries of Asia, and may also be relevant to the export-oriented countries of the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and El Salvador. Guy Standing argues that other factors are militating in favor of ‘feminization,’ including deregulation (which 236

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Table 6.2 Women as a percentage of employers and own-account workers and employees in Latin America and the Caribbean

Source: ILO (1990: Table 2B). Figures for ‘family employed’ and ‘other’ are not included because their definitions vary so widely

lowers the cost of maternity and other benefits) and lower skill requirements. He asks whether this might not be a negative trend, bringing a corresponding growth of ‘vulnerability, precariousness, and insecurity.’ The answer depends on what other alternatives are available, for women in particular.64 As elsewhere in the world, male employers generally prefer to hire men for better-paying professional and managerial jobs. Their preferences are sometimes related to greater costs imposed by maternity leaves, or greater 237

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absenteeism among women with family responsibilities. They are sometimes related to an awareness of gender conflicts, such as concerns about sexual harassment, or women’s ability to give orders successfully to men. And they are sometimes related simply to conformity to existing norms of appropriate work for women.65 Gender pay differentials have not been widely studied. Women in industrial employment earn between 60 per cent and 80 per cent of what men earn, a percentage that may be increasing slowly over time in Mexico and El Salvador, at least. Once they get into a relatively well-paying sector, in other words, women do not fare much worse relative to men than in the United States. This may reflect the impact of international standards (endorsed by groups such as the International Labour Office and the United Nations), as well as the consciousness-raising efforts of feminist organizations and unions. By 1983, virtually all Latin American countries had signed the International Labour Office Equal Remuneration Convention of 1951, which stipulated that men and women workers should be equally remunerated for work of equal value.66 International standards may also have benefitted many women employees in professional jobs, concentrated in teaching and nursing. Together with women in industrial jobs, such women represent a female ‘aristocracy of labor.’ Their numbers, however, are small relative to the largest occupation, domestic service. In the 1980s, about 20 per cent of all women in paid employment in Argentina, Peru, and Brazil were domestic servants. Overall earnings inequality among women is probably less than among men, but the form it takes is particularly divisive. The best-paid women workers are often literally the employers of the least well paid, the maids, hardly a recipe for gender solidarity.67 Domestic servants, however, free only a small minority of women from the responsibilities of social reproduction. Most women wage-earners work a ‘double day,’ performing a disproportionate share of family work, and they clearly have little choice in the matter. Time-use surveys from Guatemala in 1977 and Venezuela in 1983 show that women worked twenty-two more hours per week than men, including paid work, household chores, and child care. A recent survey of Peruvian households of comparable socio-economic status found that women who were primary sources of market income for their families worked many more hours than men with the same responsibilities. The major difference in their work hours arose from the demands of family labor—child care and family maintenance.68 In general, poor opportunities for employment outside the home, combined with responsibilities of motherhood and the threat of domestic violence, place most women in a weak bargaining position in the household. Their disproportionate contributions to social reproduction lower the costs of children to men. At the same time, women’s work as 238

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mothers unifies them in some respects. One of the factors contributing to increased gender solidarity is a growing awareness of the plight of families maintained by women alone.69 Madres solas—mothers alone As women in Latin America and the Caribbean consider the costs of an additional child to themselves, their partners, and their existing children, they face somewhat contradictory prospects. On the one hand, they realize that they will bear a disproportionate share of the costs. On the other hand, the slow growth of opportunities for employment outside the home, the low level of remuneration, the uneven provision of social insurance for old age, and high rates of non-marriage and separation probably make women more dependent than men on economic and emotional relationships with children. This very dependency makes them particularly vulnerable to the economic stresses imposed by the rising cost of children. Despite a long history of development that has contributed to a high incidence of families maintained by women alone, relatively little data on the gender composition of households has been collected. The Annual Statistical Yearbook for Latin American and the Caribbean never mentions the topic, nor do the statistical yearbooks of Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, or Colombia, though several of these tally households according to whether they are nuclear or extended. In response to a United Nations survey, most countries define the ‘head of household’ or ‘householder’ as the person recognized as such by other family members. This practice probably contributes to underestimates of the percentage of female householders in Latin America, where many married women describe their husband as head of their household even if he has not lived there or contributed to their economic support for many years.70 With these caveats in mind, surveys from the 1970s and compilations of census data from the 1980s provide a rough estimate of the percentage of households in which no adult males were present. In the early 1980s, this was greater than 20 per cent in eight out of the twelve Latin American countries for which data was available and more than 30 per cent for nine out of the twelve Caribbean countries for which data was available (see Table 6.3). A comparable figure for the United States is 31 per cent; for the United Kingdom, 25 per cent; for France, 22 per cent. The rate of female headship is probably higher in Latin America than it ever was in the United States at comparable levels of development, and higher in the Caribbean than anywhere else in the world. Female headship is not a terribly useful category, because it says little about economic burdens. If, for instance, female household heads received substantial remittances from absent fathers and husbands, they could be 239

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Table 6.3 Percentage of households with female householders, in Latin America and the Caribbean, mid-1970s and early 1980s

Source: for mid-1970s, de Vos (1987); for early 1980s, UN (1991:18; 1989:1132–56) Note: 1=based on household surveys; 2=based on census data

relatively well off. Or, if all male-headed households included children, and most female-headed households were comprised of single women wage-earners, male-headed households might be more susceptible to poverty. On the other hand, the fact that women’s wages are far lower than men’s means that households they head are likely to be worse off unless they receive compensating remittances or have fewer dependants.71 Researchers are just beginning to assess the impact of gender and age composition on family welfare. Census data and household surveys from Brazil, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Mexico, Peru, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic all show that families maintained by women alone are economically disadvantaged. In many cases, lower incomes are accompanied by lower levels of dwelling ownership, less 240

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likelihood of receiving credit, and higher unemployment. In Colombia, surveys of ‘marginalized’ households in three cities found that femaleheaded households had incomes very much below the level necessary to buy a least-cost basket of goods necessary for subsistence.72 A number of studies of Brazil suggest that children without co-resident fathers are worse off in terms of both income and health. A recent survey of the three cities of Recife, São Paulo, and Pôrto Alegre shows that children living in such households are likely to suffer poverty, to drop out of school and go to work at an early age in order to contribute to household income. Both their education and their potential lifetime earnings are probably diminished as a result.73 Family welfare is strongly affected by the marital status of mothers, whether a father is present in the home or not. The percentage of households headed by individuals who are separated or divorced is under 5 per cent in Latin American countries (relative to 15.8 per cent for the United States), but the percentage in consensual unions is far higher. National censuses are inconsistent in their definition and measurement, but estimates from the early 1980s of the percentage of householders in consensual unions range from about 5 per cent in Chile and 9 per cent in Brazil and Argentina to 17 per cent in Peru, 28 per cent in Venezuela, and 41 per cent in Guatemala. The average proportion of childhood years that are spent in such households is significantly higher, around 25 per cent, for instance, in Peru.74 The extent and reliability of women’s informal claims on their partners’ income remains largely unexplored. In rural areas of Colombia, Mexico, and Costa Rica, where between 32 per cent and 41 per cent of all unions are consensual, about 30 per cent eventually become legal marriages. But the probability of this happening is apparently unrelated to pregnancy and childbirth. And children born in consensual unions face considerable economic risks. In Brazil, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic, they are more likely to be malnourished than children born to mothers in legal marriages (holding constant other factors that might affect household income). Evidence from Chile shows that children born to unmarried adolescent women are at extremely high risk of poverty.75 Even in married couple households where fathers are present, mothers may provide a disproportionate share of financial as well as direct support, spending a larger percentage of their own income on family health and educational needs. A recent analysis of Brazilian household survey data shows that mothers’ non-wage income has a bigger impact than fathers’ on a range of health outcomes, such as child survival, height, and weight for height.76 The least explored dimension of intra-family income distribution is the payment of child support from absent fathers. None of the countries of Latin America or the Caribbean systematically monitors such transfers, 241

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even where they are stipulated by law. A recent study of Mexico finds that the courts are unable to sanction non-payment of child support. Given what we know about the welfare of women and children on their own and resistance to paying child support in the United States and Europe, it seems quite unlikely that remittances from absent fathers match even low levels of contribution from resident fathers. Surely this is a pressing issue for political mobilization, as well as for further research.77 Feminism and family rights The 1970s and 1980s witnessed a renascence of feminist collective action in Latin America, part of a larger international trend, but by no means a mere reflection of it. Women’s issues, linked to larger issues of democracy and social welfare, gained a new legitimacy. Still, legal reforms stopped far short of effective enforcement of men’s child support obligations, and the actual effects of these reforms remain largely unexplored. Gender bias in social insurance programs, described in the previous section, has not yet been systematically challenged. While women’s organizations have improved the quality of maternal health and family planning services, access to sex education and contraception remains inadequate, and abortion is illegal. Because family planning programs have traditionally targeted married women, they are not in a very good position to promote the public health measures crucial to combatting the spread of the HIV virus. Latin American feminism now has a momentum of its own that allows it to accommodate political and cultural diversity. As one account of recent women’s conferences explains, ‘The distinctive Latin American context of economic dependence, exploitation, and political repression gave rise to feminist political projects centered at the intersection of gender oppression and other more local forms of exploitation and domination.’ Feminists have effectively forged coalitions with other groups in opposition to authoritarian regimes. In Argentina and Chile groups that called themselves The Mothers risked arrest and torture by carrying pictures of sons, daughters, husbands, and friends who were among those who had officially ‘disappeared.’ Careful not to endorse any political position other than opposition to military terrorism, they nonetheless offered a powerful model of gender-based organizing.78 At the same time, a new generation of Latin American social feminists began to challenge traditional Marxian orthodoxy, asking how class struggles might affect women’s position, rather than merely vice versa. They never restricted their attention to gender alone, emphasizing the larger interrelationships between democracy in the family and in the polity. In 1978, International Women’s Day celebrations began calling attention to family law, reproductive rights, and children’s welfare. This 242

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was a more ‘maternalist’ form of feminism than that typical of the United States during this period (when affirmative action in the paid workplace took center stage), but more appropriate to actual conditions and more effective as a coalition-building tool.79 Major family law reforms took place in Cuba in the wake of the revolution. In the 1970s, recurrent labor shortages prompted the government to ask the Federation of Cuban Women for help in recruiting women to paid employment. Representatives of the Federation protested the dual pressures of work and family. In debates over a proposed family law reform, one woman worker argued, ‘If they’re going to incorporate us into the workforce, they’re going to have to incorporate themselves into the home, and that’s all there is to it.’ The 1975 Family Code not only gave women equal rights and responsibilities within the family, it also prescribed equal sharing of housework. The code reiterated the economic obligations of kinship, holding parents responsible for the support of minors and establishing the explicit responsibility of workers to support parents or siblings in need.80 Cuban policies provide considerable public support to families. Maternal and child health services, as well as primary and secondary school education, are among the best in Latin America and the Caribbean. Pregnant women receive a fully paid leave of six weeks before and twelve weeks following childbirth. In 1984, a regulation that permitted employed women leave from work to care for a hospitalized family member was extended to men. Feminists and others question the impact of nominal reforms, such as the housework law, to women’s everyday lives, but Cuban precedents have raised consciousness of these issues throughout the region. A new generation of women scholars began calling attention to the colonial roots of paternal irresponsibility and insisting on cross-class enforcement of children’s rights. In Colombia, before 1982, children born out of wedlock were eligible for inheritance only if recognized by their fathers. Since that date they have enjoyed equal inheritance rights. Other important gains include the establishment of civil marriage and divorce, and the juridical equality of women with respect to familial rights and responsibilities.81 In Peru, the new constitution of 1979 assigned women the same rights within the household as men, revising earlier codes that stipulated that the male head of household was in charge of conjugal decisions, ruled the home, and could prevent his wife from working for pay outside the home. Legislation passed in 1984 declared that consensual unions that lasted for two continuous years (with written proof) would be treated as legal marriages.82 When the Sandinistas came to power in Nicaragua, they immediately eliminated the old doctrine of patria potestas, which designated the husband as head of the family, and they also established new rules holding men responsible for the children they fathered, regardless of marital 243

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status. Later reforms of family law were designed to alleviate poverty among women and children. The 1982 Ley de Alimentos made all adult members of the family, up to three generations, legally liable for maintaining the family unit (including taking a share in household tasks). Government credit policies encouraged women-run agricultural collectives, which initially sprang up in many areas (their long-term economic viability now seems questionable). New family laws remained in place even after the electoral defeat of the Sandinista party.83 As of 1986, the rights and responsibilities of marriage were shared by both spouses in seventeen countries: Barbados, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Uruguay, and Venezuela. In Ecuador and El Salvador, however, the husband owed his wife protection, while the wife owed her husband obedience. In thirteen countries parents shared authority over their children, but in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Paraguay only fathers could exercise fatria, potestas.84 The 1988 constitution approved by Brazil represented a remarkable advance. It increased maternity leave and created paternity leave, struck down restrictions on women’s access to work, increased social benefits and rights of domestic servants, revoked the notion of husband’s leadership of the conjugal unit, and established the general responsibility of the state to provide ‘free care to children from zero to six years of age, in nurseries and preschools.’ Yet even this constitution falls short. While family planning is now a constitutional right, abortion is forbidden. A gay lobby fought for, but failed to win, recognition of gay rights.85 As in Northwestern Europe and the United States legal changes have done more to widen men’s choices than to increase their responsibility for children. For instance, all Latin American countries now recognize complete divorce except for Argentina, Chile, and Paraguay, where neither spouse can legally contract a new marriage. But the economic consequences of divorce are not determined by past contributions to family welfare or by current family needs. In Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Mexico, when divorce is not by mutual consent, the ‘guilty’ party may be liable for the support of his or her partner. In Peru and Nicaragua payments to spouses can be required in cases of indigence. Responsibilities for child support are not clearly stipulated, and are probably determined in most countries by idiosyncratic and highly variable judicial decrees. No effective enforcement mechanisms are in place. Jamaica set an extraordinary example in 1976, with a law that not only obliges fathers to support children born out of wedlock, but establishes children’s right to support from any co-resident male. At least some women seek to enforce their claims. Yet what limited empirical evidence we have suggests that male contributions to female-headed households are small and unpredictable. Whatever the explicit rules, they 244

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are poorly enforced. Interviews with Jamaican women suggest that most single mothers regard children as their exclusive responsibility.86 The Jamaican model may represent the future for Latin American women—a rapidly increasing share of families maintained by women alone, living in poverty. But this model is neither desirable nor necessary. While legal changes alone would be insufficient to reverse the tremendous momentum of patriarchal tradition, Latin American and Caribbean feminism could effectively build on familist values to insist on better enforcement of paternal and social obligations. Over the last fifteen years, feminist groups have devoted increasing attention to reproductive rights. In the process, they have been forced to confront the contradictory impact of international aid oriented toward ‘population control.’ The eagerness of many international agencies (as well as individual governments such as the United States) to promote contraceptive acceptance and female sterilization without much attention to maternal and child health services initially generated considerable hostility. Not surprisingly, programs whose explicit purpose is to lower birth rates enjoy less support from women than programs whose goal is to help women exercise choice. Policies have gradually shifted towards more health-oriented programs, and a significant proportion of married women aged 15–44 in Latin America employ contraception, ranging from a low of 25 per cent in Guatemala to a high of 68 per cent in Costa Rica. Still, in many countries, medical and educational provisions are limited. Abortion is prohibited under most circumstances in all Latin American countries, and the maternal death toll from botched illegal abortions is shocking.87 In general, efforts to promote family planning in Latin America have been directed at women. Many of the factors described above, including the poor enforcement of child support, soften the consequences to fathers of an unwanted birth. Strict enforcement of paternal responsibilities would increase men’s incentives to employ contraception. When this issue was raised at a recent meeting of development experts in Washington, DC, several participants objected that such enforcement would violate local customs and traditions. While this may be true, development experts seldom express similar concerns regarding promotion of modern contraceptives, which also challenge local customs. A lot depends, apparently, on which customs are at stake and whom they benefit.88 Partly because of the tendency to target married women, family planning programs in Latin America fail to place much emphasis on sex education or use of condoms. The global spread of the HIV virus, as well as the persistence of other sexually transmitted diseases, now makes these measures a priority. Feminist organizations have an important role to play in contesting traditional religious and cultural sanctions against the very concept of ‘safe sex.’ The struggle for reproductive rights is widening into a struggle to protect public health. 245

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Social spending Social spending on health, education, and welfare has long been seen as crucial to a process of development oriented towards meeting basic human needs. Many studies demonstrate that a country’s success in preventing hunger and raising general standards of living depends more on public policies than on Gross National Product per capita. In the 1970s, however, the accumulation of enormous public debt in Latin America and the Caribbean intensified the demands of international creditors, who could be repaid only with marketable products, specifically with foreign exchange generated by net exports. As a result, the World Bank and other multi-lateral lending organizations made new loans contingent on the adoption of ‘structural adjustment’ policies designed to address the debt repayment problem. These policies often included cuts in government spending on health, education, and food subsidies, which have had a particularly adverse impact on women and children.89 The promise of structural adjustment was that the temporary pain of fiscal austerity would contribute to long-run growth, which would provide a better basis for future improvements in social welfare: growth as a precondition for equity. From the very outset, this promise was based on the implicit assumption that the health of the market economy should take precedence over non-market production, despite the obvious interdependence of the two. In a sense, the invisibility of non-market work helped obscure the negative effects of structural adjustment policies on family welfare. For instance, the removal of agricultural price subsidies increased the demands on farm families to grow more of their own food. Efforts to increase hospital efficiency by discharging patients earlier increased the demands on family members to care for the sick. Cutbacks in education and day care saved money, but made it difficult for mothers to get out of the home and earn desperately needed income.90 It is difficult to sort out the effects of explicit policy changes from those imposed by the serious recession that began in the 1980s. Unemployment rates increased across the region as a whole. Between 1980 and 1985, the percentage of the population under the poverty line increased. Cuts in per capita expenditures on health and education were particularly severe in Bolivia, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Surinam, El Salvador, and Chile. Negative effects on poor households in Jamaica have been well documented. Current policies focus on efforts to protect the economically vulnerable, under the rubric of ‘adjustment with a human face.’91 The phrase itself suggests that structural adjustment policies often had a monstrous face. While it is difficult to assess their long-run impact, it seems likely that they weakened the position of workers and worsened the distribution of income. Yet it is by no means clear that they improved conditions for renewed economic growth. Their implications for family 246

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welfare reiterate the importance of better monitoring of trends in the nonmarket sector of the economy, including women’s unpaid labor time. These are not merely distributional concerns, because they affect the productivity of labor and the human capital of future generations. Social spending on health, education, and welfare is not a luxury; it is an investment. Gender and the costs of human capital The most common objection to concerns about social welfare in developing countries such as Latin America and the Caribbean is that poor countries cannot afford large expenditures on health, education, or income security. But the comparative histories outlined in this and preceding chapters suggest that public efforts to encourage investments in children played an important role in economic development, even when these investments fell short. In Latin America and the Caribbean, extreme inequalities of gender, as well as race and class, impeded the types of political coalitions that could have promoted the development of human capital. In one of the few efforts to examine the problem of family desertion in Latin America, Ruben Kaztman of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America asks, ‘Why are men so irresponsible?’ He answers this question in much the same way as US social scientists in the 1960s and 1970s, by suggesting that men are suffering from their loss of power in the family: In view of the lack of other sources of self-esteem, the loss of family authority deeply affects a man’s appraisal of his own worth. The hypothesis I am putting forward is that the supposedly irresponsible behavior of men in the lower strata with regard to their function in the process of social reproduction is essentially a response to the structurally conditioned devaluation of their own image.92 By this account, men are the victims, and the solution to their problem is to give them more power and authority over family members. This represents a serious misunderstanding of the relationship between gender, power, and the distribution of the costs of social reproduction. As this chapter shows, women and children need more power within the family and society, not less.

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7 CONCLUSION: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF FAMILY POLICY

The changing nature of relationships between parents and children, men and women, is a central feature of economic development, with important implications for sustainable growth and social welfare. This book shows that these relationships cannot be explained simply by individual choices or class dynamics, because they reflect many aspects of collective identity and interest. Some groups have more power than others, and forms of power based on gender, age, and sexual orientation must be analyzed in concert with forms of power based on nation, race, and class. Growing problems of child poverty have been widely acknowledged in the United States. Yet many assume that this is a recent trend, attributable to cultural changes such as the growing incidence of divorce and nonmarriage. This book argues otherwise. Increases in the cost of children, a central aspect of the process of economic development, tend to create more economic stress on parents in general and mothers in particular. Women and children have lacked the political, economic, and cultural power required to establish a social contract that would adequately reward family labor, especially in nations characterized by extreme class and/or race inequality.1 Acknowledgement of the role of collective power has important implications for family and social policy. Most immediately, it suggests that policy cannot be disconnected from a larger theory of political economy or an understanding of comparative history. Both the expansion of markets and the enlargement of state participation in the economy empowered women and youth just enough to destabilize the patriarchal organization of social reproduction, but not enough to generate a nonpatriarchal system that might fairly and efficiently meet the needs of children and other dependents. All these arguments demand more detailed historical and empirical inquiry. But it seems important now to pause, consolidate the claims that have been made, and consider their implications for economists, feminists, and policy-makers. To begin, what might the protagonists of earlier chapters have to say? 248

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THE CONVERSATION ‘We’ll be interested to see,’ say some neoclassical economists, ‘if further research can generate more than anecdotal evidence for these hypotheses about collective action. In the meantime, we notice that you seem to have a strange political agenda. On the one hand, you talk about equal opportunity and “fair” versus “unfair” games, which implies that you are not opposed to market competition. On the other hand, you spend much of your time describing unfair structures of constraint, without explaining how they might be transformed. ‘You claim that the growth of markets has destabilized some aspects of traditional patriarchal authority, and you argue that many given groups have used the state to exercise power over others. Yet you don’t seem to see markets as a solution for the problems you describe. Why not just encourage markets to expand and to play a larger role in social reproduction?’ ‘Like you,’ explains the author, ‘I like the scope that markets give for individual choice. But unlike you, I want to challenge the structures of constraint that affect what people bring to the market, and how they act there. In some ways, I’m more committed to ideals of competition than you are, because I argue that any inherited status or privilege undermines its legitimacy. Unfair structures of constraint can be reformed, not only by fostering solidarity and resistance among disempowered groups but also by developing better, more efficient means of social coordination. ‘I consider myself part of the social democratic tradition whose emergence I have described,’ she continues. ‘Markets can be a good means of organizing some forms of economic activity if they take place among consenting adults within an egalitarian, and therefore truly competitive, setting. But the scope of markets should be limited to circumstances where the pursuit of self-interest benefits others. Apart from the fact that many of us consider it morally wrong to buy and sell humans, or buy and sell love, profit maximization is not an efficient way of organizing the care and nurturance of other human beings.’ ‘We’re glad to hear you say that, at least,’ say some Marxian economists. ‘But we’re dismayed at your view of human nature. You seem to have gone beyond the liberal individualist view of competing individual interests to an even more conflictual model of group competition. If some groups are always trying to gang up on others, there’s not much hope for any progressive social change. ‘Aren’t you underestimating the forms of altruism that exist naturally, especially within the family? You yourself argue that individuals often identify with others, and define their self-interest in very unselfish terms. Have you considered the ways that markets, with their emphasis on individual choice, break down traditional forms of solidarity, and 249

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intensify destructive forms of competition? Your own historical argument suggests that capitalist development has unfortunate consequences for mothers and children.’ ‘Wait a minute,’ objects the author. ‘I may have a less optimistic view of human nature than you do, because I see more complex temptations to collective exploitation. But my views are pretty similar to those of the early socialists, who were, I think, mistakenly called “utopian.” Like you, I reject the view that economic conflicts are inevitable zero-sum games. I think they have a logic that’s susceptible to analysis and to modification; some better strategies for resolving them could make everyone better off. ‘I also think altruism is important, both within the family, and without. But altruism does not emanate from our genes, or fall from the sky. It is socially and culturally constructed, economically and politically reinforced. Markets and mobility are not the only forces that can weaken altruism. The growth of states also provides opportunities for collective aggrandizement. That’s why we need to contest unfair structures of constraint, develop better ones, and define appropriate roles for the family, the market, and the state. ‘All societies enforce some degree of reciprocal altruism: commitments to children, the sick, the elderly, future generations, and our larger ecosystem. My point in this book is that some societies do this better than others, but that even the best fail to enforce enough commitment to the welfare of dependents and those who care for them. ‘In the long run,’ she continues, ‘I believe we will face an economic crisis caused by underinvestment in children, difficulties supporting the sick and the elderly, and extremely costly forms of group conflict based on nation, race, and class.’ She looks around the room, knowing this debate will continue; sure enough, a third group speaks up. ‘Up to now,’ say some feminist theorists, ‘we haven’t intervened, because we recognize that political economists are your primary audience. But now we want to tell you what we like and what we don’t like about what you have done. It’s great that you’ve highlighted the economic relevance of women’s traditional realm, the family. We’re not totally convinced by your concept of structures of constraint, though we like the way you’ve used it to suggest that patriarchy is a variable combination of distinct forms of collective power based on gender, age, and sexual orientation. ‘Probably what we like best,’ they explain, ‘is the way you’ve dealt with the problem of “difference.” Over the last few years we’ve come to recognize that women are divided in many ways; they do not necessarily share priorities and needs. Yet, as you’ve shown here, gender identities and interests are no more fragmented than those based on nation, race, class, age, or sexual orientation, all of which coalesce in complex, historically contingent ways. Clearly, we need to build political coalitions based on larger principles of economic justice.’ 250

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‘But,’ say some of the feminists, sounding troubled, ‘your analysis seems very economistic. We like your deconstruction of economic theories more than your construction of an alternative. Your framework may afford you a way of talking with other economists, but in some ways it shuts non-economists out of the discourse. In this sense, aren’t you just defending your own identity and interests as an economist? For all your emphasis on the social construction of identity and interests, and the importance of norms and preferences, your historical chapters don’t give these much attention. They dwell, instead, on asset distributions and political rules, the more tangible aspects of collective interest and action.’ ‘You’re right,’ concedes the author, ‘to note that the stories I tell are incomplete. But I think I offer a theoretical framework that encourages interdisciplinary research, even if my own applications of it fall short. Scholars better trained than I in the methods of social and cultural history might further explore the ways that individuals assume, talk about, and mediate among divided loyalties and conflicting interests. ‘Feminist theories of knowledge,’ she adds, ‘have taught me the important lesson that “objective interests” can’t be contrasted with some “subjective consciousness.” If we simply assume that women have objective interests as women, then their history appears to be one of victimization. Loyalties to their family, their children, their nation, their race, and so on appear as forms of false consciousness that have simply obscured their gender exploitation. This assumption diminishes women, who have often made conscious and passionate decisions to define their own self-interest in quite unselfish terms, to subordinate themselves on behalf of something they believed in. ‘On the other hand,’ she says with some vehemence, ‘we can’t assume that women never care about their own self-interest, or their collective interests as women, because they often act on these. Nor can we assert that external circumstances such as poverty, exploitation, or violence are less important than women’s interpretations of them, because interpretations often change in response to circumstances. One can never prove a person guilty of false consciousness, of failing to recognize their own interests. But sometimes the accusation motivates a person to actively reconsider their identity, and to redefine their interests in ways that feel truer to themselves. Surely that was the intent of what the early women’s liberation movement termed “consciousness raising.” ‘Forgive me for sounding so earnest,’ she says, ‘but I think that some of the conservative backlash against feminism grows out of the fear that it encourages women to be less altruistic and therefore endangers the process of social reproduction, which depends to considerable extent on unselfish behavior. Often, arguments over reproductive rights provoke these larger anxieties; a woman who elevates her own right to choose over the rights of a fetus becomes a symbol of a larger threat of maternal abandonment. 251

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‘If you consider the history of paternal abandonment and male efforts to evade parental responsibility on both the individual and social levels, you can see why the prospect of women assuming male roles (and perhaps becoming more like men) is rather terrifying. This helps explain why feminists have often struggled to defend feminine values even while asserting masculine rights, why they have often refused to choose between “equality” and “difference.” ‘Which brings me to my final point,’ she says breathlessly, ‘defending the tradition of feminist social democracy. We need to persuade men in particular, and society in general, to take better care of the children, the sick, the elderly. We need to devise structures of constraint based on principles of equal opportunity that can encourage social cooperation and minimize violence. Otherwise, women will have a hard time freeing themselves from a set of responsibilities to which they have been unfairly assigned. They will never feel free to choose.’ Some in the feminist audience are rolling their eyes, but others are nodding their heads. ‘Be more specific,’ yells someone from the edge of the circle. ‘What kind of strategy do you have in mind?’ GENERAL PRINCIPLES A theory of economic justice is not simply an exercise in moral philosophy. It is also a device for coordinating collective action, for reorganizing the ways in which people think about and pursue their own interests, for helping them to reach efficient and cooperative solutions to competitive games. Like the players in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, or in any team sport, individuals generally fare better when they can agree on a common strategy. Since people have many conflicting identities and interests, they can seldom be unified for long by an appeal to any one of them. Indeed, efforts to play on purely selfish or sectional interests may encourage selfish and retaliatory behavior, the strategy of tit for tat. In contrast, all participants have an interest in establishing a decision rule that they can all agree to, an efficient form of arbitration. One example of such a decision rule is political democracy, the principle of majority rule accompanied by the protection of individual rights. It seems more difficult to arrive at a good decision rule for economic life. State planning enforced by party rule clearly does not work. On the other hand, market competition in some arenas of production may be a necessary, but not sufficient rule. More sustained efforts to devise guarantees of basic economic rights and better protections for the welfare of dependents could provide a basis for coalitions between many different groups who are disempowered by unfair structures of constraint. Three basic principles emerge from the foregoing effort to ask ‘Who pays for the kids?’ We need an economy based on equal opportunity that 252

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enforces equal responsibilities as well as rights. We need to reorient our economic goals away from increasing Gross National Product and toward improving social welfare. We need to provide greater recognition and support for labor devoted to the care and nurturance of children, the sick, and the elderly. An economic system that puts a high priority on individual choice can reward effort and ability and create incentives for socially desirable behavior. The extent to which it actually approaches this ideal depends largely on underlying structures of constraint. Membership in given groups is a determinant of economic outcomes that often overshadows individual merit. When an ostensibly competitive game is rigged, it creates disincentives that can be a major source of inefficiency. Some individuals resign themselves to losing, or refuse to participate wholeheartedly. Others engage in forms of collective action designed to redefine the game; they may or may not be successful. Intense collective conflicts, like wars, impose substantial costs on everyone involved. The cost and risk of trying to modify structures of constraint makes them quite resistant to change. Whenever assets are redistributed, rules are reformed, norms or preferences changed, some individuals suffer a loss. Constant changes in the nature of the game can create enervating uncertainty. On the other hand, the failure to modify unfair structures that were established by force and violence discourages members of disempowered groups from making strong individual efforts and encourages them to engage in retaliatory behavior. The task of designing a competitive game that is truly fair (and ensuring that it stays that way) is a daunting one. That the optimal game should enforce responsibilities towards those who cannot compete makes it even more difficult. But the neoclassical, Marxian, and feminist traditions within political economy can contribute to this project, which needs to look beyond assets and rules to recognize the importance of norms and preferences. The economy is much bigger than the sum of private and public enterprise, the goods and services currently valued in monetary terms. The current vocabulary of macroeconomics systematically distorts perceptions of current trends. Economic welfare should not be measured in terms of the value of market output; nor should ‘capital’ or ‘investment’ or ‘depreciation’ be limited to non-human assets. Time spent in family labor, investments in human capital through child care and education, depletion of natural resources, and degradation of the environment must all be monitored. New non-market accounts could provide far better indicators of economic development and welfare than current measures of Gross National Product. One of the major errors of economic planning in the Soviet bloc 253

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countries grew out of the dogma that housework was unproductive labor. The failure to invest in housing, retail distribution networks, and consumer durables contributed to tremendous inefficiency in household production. Soviet planners regarded ‘consumption’ as an unproductive, and therefore unimportant sphere of the economy.2 It is difficult to estimate how much this particular dogma contributed to the economic inefficiencies of state planning. But it is clear that competitive markets in Northwestern Europe and the United States proved more responsive to the possibilities for technical innovation in household production and consumption. Overall productivity in the period after World War II increased even more rapidly than in the market sector, contributing to improvements in standards of living.3 Now it seems that some of the most prosperous capitalist economies are making a different, but related mistake: assuming that the high incidence of poverty among children and mothers is a social rather than an economic problem. Economists should challenge the traditional assumption that families ‘naturally’ produce future workers, and that the only way they can go wrong is if they produce too many. The global economy faces a crisis of social reproduction. Children, like the environment, are a public good. The individual decisions that parents make about childrearing, and the level of resources they can devote to this work, have economic consequences for everyone. In many countries, old age security programs are based on transfers from the working to the retired population, which means that all the elderly depend on other people’s children. But even where old age insurance is completely privatized, based purely on individual savings, the old still depend on the young. The rate of return on savings and the prices of basic commodities they will pay in retirement are strongly affected by the productivity of the working age generation. Some private responsibilities to kin have been defined by custom and law, often, as the historical chapters of this book show, in ways that allowed men to minimize the costs. But efforts to distribute the costs of social reproduction more equally between male and female kin will not be sufficient, especially as more and more individuals live outside biological kin networks. Modern economies need to define social responsibilities to dependents both inside and outside of families. Critics of social spending seldom, if ever, suggest that spending on children, the sick, the elderly, or otherwise needy within private families should be cut because it hinders the growth of marketed output or creates disincentives to work. Unlike private transfers, public commitments to social welfare show up in the national income accounts. This does not mean that they are any less productive than less visible private expenditures. We seldom criticize mothers who are dependent on financial remuneration from their husbands. Why should we criticize parents who 254

CONCLUSION

are also dependent on public remuneration for the important work they do? Much of the resistance to increased social spending on children comes from relatively affluent families who oppose the redistribution of income along class or race lines. That is why issues of welfare based on age cannot easily be separated from issues of given-group inequality. That is why it is so important to break down unfair structures of constraint and to establish stronger norms of social responsibility. The rhetoric of individualism is often used to obscure and denigrate concepts of social obligation. Opposition to taxation often comes from the view that individuals earn their money free and clear but are forced to fork over a share to some abstract entity called the government. This is wrong. We could think of individuals as capitalists who receive loans from their family, from other people, and from the global environment that allow them to develop their human and social capital. Individuals should be rewarded for their personal efforts—they should have a right to whatever is left over after their loans are repaid. But they should also be required to pay for the costs of running a fair, efficient, sustainable enterprise. Our task, as collective creditors, is to provide equitable access to loans and an appropriate rate of interest. We must also enforce repayment. Otherwise, we will all go out of business. RE-THINKING ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT The historical approach developed here shifts emphasis away from the market and the state towards a broader consideration of the ways in which economic development interacts with families. Unlike modernization theory, it does not attribute the decline of the family as a productive unit to the emergence of more efficient, impersonal forms of organization. Rather, it emphasizes both the weakening of patriarchal structures of constraint and their remarkable persistence. The current organization of social reproduction is unfair, inefficient, and probably unsustainable. This generalization encompasses considerable variation across countries and regions. The preceding chapters focus on the evolution of social policy in Northwestern Europe, the United States, and Latin America and the Caribbean, pointing to important differences in relative levels of poverty among mothers and children. Several other issues relevant to the design of new policies deserve at least brief mention. More research is needed on the policies of the state socialist countries like the former Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, which made the provision of health and educational services a high priority. In general, they seem to have been more successful in the realm of social reproduction than production. In fact, one could argue that the failure to systematically monitor or report on improvements in public health, child 255

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mortality, and education has exaggerated perceptions of the failures of central planning. State planning also has implications for the emergence of an autonomous women’s movement. Before unification, for instance, East Germany took much more extensive measures than West Germany to socialize the costs of children by providing extensive child care services, family allowances, and housing subsidies. A larger percentage of women became mothers, even though female labor force participation rates were much higher in the East than in the West. East Germany also adopted many policies that reinforced traditional gender roles, such as allowing women workers an extra day off every month in order to perform housework.4 In some ways, extensive socialization of the costs of children, accompanied by a relatively small gender wage differential, took the pressure off efforts to modify relations between men and women in East Germany. Feminist organizations were more successful in the West, and the greater political freedoms they enjoyed may not have been the only factor. Perhaps mobilization around gender identity and interests in Europe is strongest in circumstances where resistance to socializing the costs of children imposes greatest costs on women. If so, we can expect a strong feminist movement to emerge in the wake of privatization and democratization in the former Soviet bloc countries. The experience of the Asian countries also invites careful analysis. Economic development in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea seems, to date, to have had less disruptive impact on patriarchal structures of constraint than in the West. Part of the explanation may lie in the more limited role of geographic mobility. These countries experienced less of the spatial disruption associated with immigration, emigration, and an internal frontier. On the other hand, there is a very real possibility that some Asian cultures have developed stronger, more robustly patriarchal norms and preferences than the West. These may have succeeded not only in insulating traditional family structures, but also in influencing the character of the capitalist firm. Many state policies have been designed in ways that carefully reinforce national allegiances, perhaps also reinforcing family allegiances. But the strength of these structures of constraint has not yet been fully tested. It remains to be seen what will happen when women begin to participate in wage employment for more than a brief period of their life before marriage, and fertility continues to decline. Sometimes the Japanese model is held forth as a possible example for the United States, as though the simple reinforcement of patriarchal values could alleviate the growing economic stresses of family life. Conservatives George Gilder and Allan Bloom assert that feminism itself is the destabilizing evil. If women and youth could simply be persuaded to reassume their traditional responsibilities, if gays and lesbians could just 256

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be shoved back into the closet, the private family could solve the public problems of social reproduction.5 This argument ignores the historical legacy of economic development, as well as the energy with which women and other given groups will contest efforts to turn back the clock. To illustrate, consider a specific proposal raised by Gary Becker, an influential neoclassical economist and Nobel Prize winner. In a recent article in Business Week, Becker proclaims the need for reforms that would strengthen family life. Calling attention to poverty among families maintained by women alone in the United States and other countries, he blames this problem on no-fault divorce laws.6 His proposed solution: allow divorce only when both the husband and wife agree, by mutual consent. This is a solution to the loss of male power, not to the economic plight of women and children. Marriage laws in the United States provide married women and children with a right to minimal support by husbands and fathers, but no legal claim on a share of male earnings. In most states, married women lack property rights over their own bodies—rape within marriage is not a punishable offense. Domestic violence against women and children is widespread. Prohibiting exit from marriage without mutual consent would give the primary wage-earner (typically male) and the physically stronger partner (also typically male) tremendous power over the person specializing in family labor (typically female). That power might be accompanied by considerable love and altruism, or it might not. The risk of relying on altruism alone explains the long history of feminist efforts to guarantee women’s right to exit unhappy marriages. The solution to resulting problems of poverty is to give mothers and children a stronger claim on fathers’ earnings both in and out of marriage. Too often, the rhetoric of ‘strengthening families’ conceals efforts to reimpose traditional forms of patriarchal control over women. The best evidence of this lies in the historical resistance to specifying and enforcing high standards of child support from fathers. A family’s success cannot be defined simply by avoidance of divorce or dissolution. A strong family is one that meets its members’ needs for love and economic support. POSSIBLE POLICIES While prescriptions usually raise more questions than they answer, they can serve to clarify the stakes of the game. Recasting social responsibilities in terms of a social contract modeled on an egalitarian family represents a general strategy. What follows is by no means a complete agenda for public policy, merely some items at the top of the list, not necessarily in order of priority. It leaves open the issue of the relative role of market-based solutions based on tax credits versus more centralized provision: 257

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1. Basic health, social insurance, and employment opportunities for all and a high standard of social welfare for children. Individuals should demand basic rights to health care, disability, unemployment, and old age insurance, which they should pay for or defray through financial contributions, paid employment, or family labor. Children should be protected from poverty, hunger, and ill-health. 2. Equal sharing of the costs of family labor between men and women. Fathers and mothers should be encouraged to share the direct responsibilities of caring for dependents, but when women specialize in this work they should not suffer a greater loss of income or leisure. Equal sharing also requires strict enforcement of the child support and direct caring responsibilities of absent parents. Amounts of child support should be based on a percentage of the absent parents’ income rather than an absolute amount. Absent parents’ responsibilities need not be defined in pecuniary terms alone, but could also include direct care. Child support policies should not be used to discourage joint custody agreements or direct sharing of parental labor rather than merely financial costs. On the other hand, individuals who want to raise children without the assistance of another parent should have the right to do so, contingent on the agreement of the other parent. 3. Public compensation for the value of family labor. Regardless of income level, or biological relationship, all those who devote time and energy to caring for children, the sick, or the elderly outside the market economy should receive some remuneration. This could take the form of family allowances or tax credits for family or community labor. The provision of personal household services to healthy working age adults, on the other hand, should not be subsidized. For instance, no adult should be able to claim a tax deduction for another healthy adult as a ‘dependent.’ 4. Equal childcare and educational opportunities and contributions. Child care services should be publicly subsidized in ways that promote high quality care. All children and adults should have equal opportunities to develop their skills and abilities through free education ranging from nurseries and day care through college and graduate study to practical job training. Education should be financed in ways that provide for equalization of per student expenditures and allow students meaningful choice of schools. All students should be required to engage in ‘pay-back’ child care, teaching, or other related work, either in combined ‘work-study’ or after-graduation programs. Pay-back responsibilities should be strictly enforced. 5. Reproductive rights. Men and women should have easy and open access to contraceptives and sex education. Women should be guaranteed rights to control their own reproductive capacities, including rights to abortion and rights to refuse abortion or sterilization. Sex education 258

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relevant to public health should be mandatory. Personal reproductive rights and services should not be subject to sale. 6. Family law reform. Individuals should have free rights of entry into and out of marriage. Gay and lesbian couples should have the right to formalize their commitments if they so choose. Any person who specializes in non-market family labor should enjoy explicit claims on the market income of other family members. 7. Workplace rules that encourage men and women to combine family work and market work. Work schedules should be complementary to day care and school schedules. The average work day should be reduced, and flexible schedules and part-time work should be encouraged. All employees should be guaranteed a minimum ‘family leave’ from work without loss of seniority. 8. Elimination of bias against unmarried couples in public or private benefits policy. The provision of universal health and social insurance, combined with compensation for family labor, would remove the need to provide individual workers with spousal or family benefits. However, unless or until such policies are implemented, existing benefit and pension policies should not discriminate against non-married individuals, including gay and lesbian couples. 9. Strict limits on gifts, bequests, and other transfers to family members and friends. The principle of equal opportunity requires that individuals should not enjoy privileges they have not earned. Restrictions on the transfer of real and financial assets, along with equalization of educational expenditures, would encourage parents to help their children by spending more time with them rather than through large expenditures or bequests. 10. Affirmative action to promote equal opportunity. No arbitrary criteria, including membership in groups based on nation, race, class, gender, age, or sexual orientation, should be used in hiring or promotion decisions. Employers should make efforts to advance qualified members of groups who have suffered systematic disadvantage. Many specific aspects of policies such as these are explored in detail by groups like the United Nations Children’s Fund and the Children’s Defense Fund of the United States. They deserve more public attention and debate, especially in an international context. Even if not adopted in the near future, these ten prescriptions could help change the way in which people think about the economy. They could contribute to efforts to build the kinds of coalitions necessary to create new and better structures of constraint.7

259

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DIFFICULTIES AND DILEMMAS It is impossible to anticipate all the objections that such policies might raise, but several are immediately apparent. Population growth is problematic. On the one hand, Northwestern Europe and the United States face new economic stresses related to the slow growth and consequent aging of their population; on the other hand, Latin America and many other developing countries face stresses related to rapid growth, and the large share of the population under the age of 15. Both problems could be addressed by improvements in the productivity of the younger generation, efforts to enhance their ‘quality’ rather than their ‘quantity.’ But it is difficult to increase quality without also creating incentives to increase quantity. The preceding chapters argue that parents in general, single mothers in particular, need more support for the valuable non-market labor they perform. They do not, however, suggest that the costs of childrearing should be fully reimbursed. Such a policy would imply that there are no intrinsic pleasures to being a parent, and convert parental labor into just another commodity. Not everyone wants to be a parent; those who do should be willing to assume some costs. But those costs must be kept within bounds that protect parents and children from serious disadvantage. The experience of Northwestern Europe shows us that public assistance to families does not necessarily increase fertility. Fears of global population growth are often overstated in the advanced capitalist countries, where high levels of resource utilization and luxury good consumption create serious environmental problems even with declining populations. Many citizens of the United States would rather restrict high fertility in other countries than limit their own purchases of second homes or cars. This glaring inconsistency reflects the conscious or unconscious influence of national, class, and racial interests, as well as an eagerness to blame women for problems of larger provenance. Still, rapid population growth is a source of serious economic stress in many areas of the world. Even the most developed countries could benefit from continued fertility decline, if it were accompanied by significant increases in the productivity of the younger generation. Lower fertility rates could help free resources for greater investments in education, more efficient forms of old age security, and a better quality of life for children of the future. If children can be public goods, they can also be public bads. If the larger polity takes responsibility for the welfare of children, would it not claim the right to limit family size decisions? In China, for instance, some families have been coerced into conformity with a ‘one-child’ rule. It is precisely such potential for abuse that demands a strong, formal defense of 260

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reproductive rights. Such rights cannot be protected in the absence of political democracy and provision of some basic level of economic welfare.8 Family policies should respect principles of reproductive rights and try to persuade individuals to make choices that benefit society as a whole. Unlike the French system, which offers greater benefits for the third or later children, family allowance programs should not encourage high fertility. Policy-makers should consider ways of increasing support for parents and children that are consistent with larger demographic goals. Another important task is to create a culture that values family labor, but does not stigmatize those who choose to live alone, or to forego childrearing. People can and must contribute to the care of dependents in many different ways. Increases in longevity, combined with fertility decline, will intensify the needs of the elderly population. And there is a fearsome possibility that we will need to care for a substantial subset of the global population condemned to early death from AIDS. We need to reward care for all dependents, not just kids. Another dilemma, related to but separate from population growth, concerns the contradictory impact of patriarchal norms, which remain remarkably powerful even within modern, secular societies. Unfortunately, support for what we might term ‘pro-family’ and ‘proaltruism’ values is split between those who want to reaffirm old traditions, and those who want to establish new ones. In Latin America, this split is exemplified by the role of the Catholic Church, which raises a powerful voice on behalf of children and the poor, but also speaks against reproductive rights and sexual choice. The resulting political divisions make it easier for those in strong class, race, and gender positions to enforce oppressive structures of constraint. In Northwestern Europe and the United States, pro-family coalitions are seriously weakened by disagreements over sexual orientation, which have become increasingly visible in recent years. Those who define family values in traditional patriarchal terms see gay and lesbian families as a contradiction in terms. They seek to punish forms of social ‘deviance’ such as homosexuality, extra-marital sex, and out-of-wedlock births, rather than to encourage new forms of cooperation, commitment, and support for dependents. Nothing exemplifies this conflict more clearly than widespread opposition to the kinds of sex education necessary to stop the spread of AIDS. At stake is the very definition of the family. This book demonstrates how and why the development of market economies and wage employment transforms relations between parents and children, husbands and wives. In order to defend those aspects of family life that we truly value, we need to change our definition of what a family is, to celebrate and support families ‘of choice’ as much as those that fit the traditional mold. A third dilemma concerns the role of the nation-state. This book 261

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underscores the importance of national interests and international inequalities. Relations between nations are not determined by political democracy or by competitive markets. They still reflect, to a very large extent, patterns of military and economic power. Most population, family, and social welfare policies are implemented by nation-states, but social reproduction is a global process. Some nations may pursue strategies that harm others. Northwestern Europe and the United States can benefit from loosening their immigration restrictions, especially if they turn all but healthy and educated young adults away from their gates. But while such policies offer important opportunities to citizens of less affluent countries, and contribute to a kind of cultural internationalization, they also weaken the countries left behind. Even a steady stream of remittances cannot compensate for the loss of valuable human capital. We do not know whether the further development of a global market economy, unaccompanied by new institutions of international governance, will generate sustainable increases in standards of living. Robert Reich seems confident that intensified international competition will reward human skills. If modern transnational corporations demand a better educated and more skilled labor force, countries that invest in human capital will be rewarded. But cheap hands are often a substitute for smart minds. The easier cheap hands are to find, the less incentive corporations have to develop technologies that efficiently utilize highquality labor.9 Inequalities based on national citizenship loom larger than most others in the world today. While it may be difficult to address these inequalities within the current political environment, they should not be forgotten. Neither concepts of equal opportunity nor principles of social obligation stop at national boundaries. Who pays for the kids? Future research may be able to tell us more. Who should pay for the kids? The answer to this question depends on an interplay of collective identities, interests, and power that we still do not completely understand. The problems that this book describes are too big for scholars to resolve. They can be addressed only by an unprecedented political coalition committed to something parents call fair play.

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1 FEMINIST THEORY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY 1

In more technical terms, consumers’ tastes and preferences are exogenously given, vary randomly if at all, and are stable over time. For a particularly strong interpretation, see Backer and Stigler (1977). Utility functions are typically assumed independent. That is, one person’s utility cannot enter as an argument into another’s utility function. This assumption cannot be suspended without undermining one of the most important neoclassical concepts, the downward sloping demand curve. At the opposite extreme, the conventional neoclassical model of household decision-making assumes that utilities are entirely interdependent, so that the family can be treated as though it were a single individual. Though this assumption has a long intellectual history, Samuelson (1956) is a classic formulation. Gary Becker explicitly defends the dichotomy between altruism in the family and self interest in the market (1981b). 2 Gary Becker formalized this argument in his pioneering work, The Economics of Discrimination (1957). Since then, it has pervaded the labor economics literature. 3 Becker (1985); Mincer and Polachek (1974, 1988). 4 Mancur Olson immortalized the free rider problem in his book, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (1971). See also Hardin (1982) and Reisman (1990). 5 See Victor Fuchs, Women’s Quest for Economic Equality (1988). 6 The classic formulation of this argument is Becker (1960). See also Becker (1981a) and Willis (1982). 7 One of the first discussions of information costs was Herbert Simon’s exposition of ‘imperfect rationality’ and ‘satisficing’ as an alternative to ‘maximizing’ (1978). See also Harvey Leibenstein (1976). A good summary of the implications of recent research in cognitive psychology is Robert Frank’s recent essay (1990) as well as his earlier book (1988). 8 On labor markets, see Shapiro and Stiglitz (1984) and Bowles (1985). On financial institutions, see Gintis (1989). 9 These and other variations on the theme of ‘statistical discrimination’ are often credited to Phelps (1972). However, relatively little attention has been devoted to the self-reinforcing aspects of this dynamic. 10 Gordon, Reich, and Edwards (1982). For an account of how the rise of internal labor markets and new personnel departments intensified sex discrimination in the United States, see Goldin (1990). On suits brought against General Electric and Westinghouse, see Steinberg (1984). 11 W.E.B.Du Bois (1933) made this argument long ago, as did early feminists. 263

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12

13

14

15

16 17 18

19 20

21 22 23

For modern formulations, see Bonacich (1972), Hartmann (1981b), and Bergmann and Darity (1981). The technical term for this is ‘endogenous preferences.’ One of the first neoclassical economists to seriously broach this issue was Robert Pollak (1976). A good review of the literature can be found in Chapter 4 of Hahnel and Albert’s Quiet Revolution in Welfare Economics (1990). An engaging discussion, more accessible to the non-economist, is Jon Elster’s Sour Grapes (1983). On the importance of ideology and socialization to economic history, see Douglas North (1981). An early, eloquent discussion of these issues is Amartya Sen’s ‘Rational fools: a critique of the behavioral foundations of economic theory’ (1977). See also Schelling (1984) and Frank (1988, 1990). For a neat summary of the sociological literature and its relevance to the household, see England and Farkas (1986). On the relevance of ‘sentiment’ and the influence of social custom, see George Akerlof’s essays (1984), especially ‘Labor contracts as partial gift exchange’ (first published in 1982). On the importance of custom, see Elster (1989b) and Robert Frank (1988). For a recent discussion of gender solidarity and its influence on occupational segregation, see Reskin and Roos (1990). Gary Becker uses the term ‘rotten kid’ in his Treatise on the Family (1981a). In his model, the altruist within the family (the father) has greater bargaining power than the self-interested party (the kid). Other economists point out that the outcome is quite different if the roles are reversed, and the self-interested party has greater bargaining power. See, for instance, Hirschleifer (1977), Folbre (1986), McCrate (1987). Early efforts to explicitly model bargaining power within the family include McElroy and Homey (1981) and Manser and Brown (1981). Pollak (1985) provides an excellent review of the literature. See Bergmann’s classic essay, ‘The economic risks of being a housewife’ (1981), Weitzman (1985), England and Farkas (1986), Bergmann (1986), Hartmann (1981a). Caldwell (1982), Kotlikoff (1992). One widely accepted Neoclassical Institutionalist definition of a social institution is ‘a regularity in social behavior that is agreed to by all members of society, specifies behavior in specific recurrent situations, and is either selfpoliced or policed by some external authority’ (Schotter 1981:11). The best known institutionalist treatments of collective action are Olson (1971, 1982). For a more detailed account see Folbre and Hartmann (1988) and the writings of Catherine Beecher (1974, first published in 1841). For a discussion of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s most famous speech on individualism, see Chapter 11 of Elizabeth Griffith’s biography, In Her Own Right (1984). Kyrk (1933), Reid (1934), Becker (1957, 1960). On bargaining, see McElroy (1990), McElroy and Homey (1981), and Manser and Brown (1981). Feminist theorists who criticize masculinise interpretations of rational choice include Nancy Hartsock (1983), Ann Ferguson (1989), Elaine McCrate (1988, 1991), and Paula England (1989). Some diverse representatives of the mainstream debate are Jon Elster (1979), John Roemer (1988), and Robert Frank (1990). On differences between men and women, see Chodorow (1978), Gilligan (1982), Ferguson (1989), England (1989), and England and Kilbourne (1990). In conventional Nash bargaining models of husband/wife bargaining, both partners seek to maximize a ‘joint utlity product gab’ function, the product of their gains from marriage times their partner’s gains from 264

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24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39

40 41

marriage. The comparative statics are modified if the two have different but still interdependent utility functions, in which wives weigh their husband’s gains from marriage more heavily than their own (or if husbands are more ‘selfish,’ weighing their wives gains from marriage less then their own). I am not suggesting that this is necessarily the case, merely translating an interesting feminist theoretical insight into more formal economic language. Joan Scott is suspicious of the very concept of economic interests (1988). Nancy Hartsock strongly questions the ‘rational actor’ model (1983:38). On ‘masculinist’ discourse, see Nelson (1992). On selfishness, see Robert Frank’s distinction between a ‘self-interest standard of rationality’ and a ‘present-aim standard of rationality’ that does not assume perfect selfishness (1991:17). In my opinion, Frank understates the extent to which economists hue to the first standard, and overlooks the relationship between this and arguments regarding the optimality of a pure market economy. On Mandeville and Smith see Folbre and Hartmann (1988). Sen (1977); Frank (1991:19). For a clear discussion of the theory of consumer preferences, see Frank (1991:68–82). McCrate (1992). England (1989:27). James Grotty suggested the term ‘purposeful choice’ and persuaded me to use it. See Bowles and Gintis (1986). See Ferree (1990). For an official Communist Party version of these arguments, see Cornforth (1972). See Folbre (1982, 1992a). I believe this characterization is consistent with most of Marx’s own writings on the subject. For a more generous interpretation of Marx’s views, see Vogel (1983). See Marx’s Capital (1977). A famous, though certainly out-of-date application to the English case is Tawney (1967). My intent here is not to assess the validity of this argument—a topic of enormous debate—but merely to highlight the Marxian perspective on it. From ‘The eighteenth brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,’ in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1977, Vol. 11:103). For a relatively modern version of this Marxian theory of the state, see Therborn (1978). See Marx’s Theories of Surplus Value (1969–72). A good discussion of the Marxian literature on segmented labor, as well as a widely respected version of the divide-and-conquer argument, is Michael Reich’s Racial Inequality (1981). William J.Wilson’s Declining Significance of Race (1978) also includes an interesting critique of traditional Marxist views. Despite a general awareness within the Marxian literature of the problems raised by a ‘labor aristocracy,’ the labor theory of value contributed to an emphasis on precisely these workers—the predominantly white, male, better organized, and better paid workers in relatively capitalintensive industries. See Cherry (1987) and, for stronger critiques of traditional Marxian assumptions, Darity (1989) and Shulman (1989). However flawed his arguments, Engels’ optimism was echoed by many of his contemporaries. Engels (1948), Bebel (1971). For a more complete critique of Marxian theories of women’s oppression, see Folbre (1982, 1992a). Avineri (1968). 265

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42 See Alec Nove’s discussion of this issue in the early chapters of The Economics of Feasible Socialism (1983). 43 Meek (1967:224). See also E.P.Thompson’s discussion of the ‘reasons of unreason’ in his ‘Notes on exterminism, the last stage of civilization,’ in Exterminism and Cold War (1982). 44 See John Roemer’s Free to Lose (1988). Another example of a Marxian micro-economics, applied more explicitly to labor effort within the firm, is Bowles (1985). 45 In my opinion, the best sources here are Steedman (1977) and Hodgson (1982). 46 Wally Seccombe’s early writings on this topic, including ‘The housewife and her labour under capitalism’ (1974), first raised the issue of equality of exchange between housewife and wage-earner, but assumed it to be equal. Radical feminists like Christine Delphy (1976) insisted that such exchanges were unequal, that wives were exploited by husbands. My article, ‘Exploitation comes home: a critique of the Marxian theory of family labour’ (1982), emphasizes the possible co-existence of exploitation in the workplace and the home. The orthodox position is clearly articulated in Himmelweit and Mohun (1977). Orthodox Marxists counter that a concept of exploitation based on the labor theory of value cannot be applied to noncapitalist relations. If so, all the more reason to reject that theory. 47 See Williams (1966), Frank (1967, 1969,) Amin (1974), Rodney (1981), and Wolf (1982). Note that the extent to which such forcible transfers may or may not have been necessary to the process of capitalist accumulation in Europe is hotly debated. Few would contest their important contributions to that process. The best example of a value-theoretic approach to these issues is Emmanuel (1972). 48 The classic treatment of this issue of military imperialism is Magdoff (1969). I would cite the 1991 Gulf War as the best recent example. See also the general review of the dependency debate in Blomström and Hettne (1984). On the capitalist world system, see Wallerstein (1974). 49 On race, see Reich (1981). On gender, see Vogel (1983). For a discussion of current debates over race and ethnic differences from a Neo-Marxian point of view see Cherry (1987) and Shulman (1989). 50 See, for instance, O’Connor (1973), Bowles, Gordon, and Weisskopf (1986, 1989), Grotty (1985), and Kotz (1987). 51 On the political and economic problems of central planning, see Nove (1983). 52 For a vision of a completely democratic economy without markets, see Albert and Hahnel (1981, 1991a, 1991b) and Albert et al. (1986). For a general picture of socialist market economy, see Weisskopf (1992). 53 For a good example of Marxist feminism, see Vogel (1983). For good examples of socialist feminism, see Hartmann (1981b), Walby (1986), and Ferguson (1989). 54 Thompson (1825). 55 For a more detailed discussion of this intellectual history, see Folbre (1993a). 56 Hartmann (1981b), Walby (1986, 1990). Fraad, Resnick, and Wolff (1989) develop a variant of Marxist feminism that treats patriarchy as a feudal mode of production. 57 Ferguson (1989:97). 58 Hartmann (1981b), Ferguson (1983), Walby (1986, 1990), and Folbre (1987) all proposed such ‘dual systems’ approaches. An influential early critique was Young (1981). African-American feminists within the United States have repeatedly observed that the ‘class-and-gender’ emphasis excludes race—Davis (1981), Hooks (1981, 1984, 1989), Aptheker (1982), Joseph and Lewis 266

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59 60

61

62

63 64 65 66 67 68

69

70 71 72 73 74 75

(1981). I have also been greatly influenced by Ann Ferguson’s more recent ‘trisystems’ approach (1991). For a historical critique of dual systems theory, beautifully applied to the United States, see Amott and Matthaei (1991). Granovetter (1985:487). The best example of Neoclassical Institutionalist approaches to collective action is Olson (1971, 1982). For a Marxian approach based on rational choice, see Roemer (1988). Feminist critiques of both general approaches were outlined in the previous two sections. Sociologists will recognize a similarity with Talcott Parsons’ classic typology here. As a political economist, I have shied away from any detailed commentary on the sociology literature, but it may be useful to point out that Neoclassical Institutionalists are Parsonian in their emphasis on the ‘functionality’ of social institutions. My criticisms of the neoclassical literature are, implicitly, criticisms of Parsonian sociology as well. On skills as assets, see Wright (1985) and Roemer (1988). On cultural endowments that are virtually skills, see Darity (1989). On the related concept of cultural capital, see Bourdieu (1977) and Bourdieu and Passeron (1977). One could argue that, under certain circumstances, membership in a group may represent an asset in and of itself (as well as a claim on greater assets). Being white could be an asset, or being male. In a way, this usage is appealing, because it condenses my argument that gender and race have economic dimensions analogous to class. But I think this usage should be resisted, because it places too much weight on assets per se, and implies that rules, norms, and preferences are of less importance. For a detailed treatment of the market as a social institution, see Hodgson (1987). Ullmann-Margalit (1977:189). Coleman (1988: S95). Economists who use this concept include Chiswick (1983) and Lundberg and Startz (1992). These are the English novelist George Eliot’s words, in the introduction to Middlemarck (1988). Buchanan (1980, 1986); Buchanan, Tollison, and Tullock (1980). See also Barzel (1989) and Colander (1984). The Encyclopedia Britannica (15th edition) attributes the phrase to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, as a description of ‘the present world of monads coordinated in pre-established harmony.’ Voltaire’s Candide satirized this view in 1759. Quotation is from Schotter (1981:11). See also Taylor (1987). Sugden (1986) offers an interesting critique of the claim that moral rights and obligations evolved as a way of maximizing social welfare. However, he does not explore the possibility that they evolved as a means of aggrandizing a powerful social group. Sweezy (1976). An enormous body of literature addresses this issue. For two extremely different views compare the Neo-Marxist approach of Marglin (1974, 1975) with both North and Thomas (1973) and Landes (1986). The classic discussions of these issues include Coase (1937) and Alchian and Demsetz (1972). See Bowles (1985). The classic example, in the United States, is the auto industry before it was challenged by Japanese competitors in the 1970s. Notice, for instance, the optimistic, even cheerful tone of Robert Frank’s work (1988, 1991). Darth Vader was commander of the evil aggressors in the 267

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79

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movie Star Wars. Clausewitz (1960) and Sun-Tzu (1981) are classics of military strategy. One economist who has dealt seriously with these issues is Thomas Schelling (1960, 1978, 1984). By far the best example is Gary Becker’s A Treatise on the Family (1981a). For an excellent discussion of this issue and related literature, see England and Farkas (1986) and Pollak (1985). Examples of systematic physical abuse include foot-binding, genital mutilation, and domestic violence. For a pioneering analysis of forms of control over women and children in China as a ‘property right’ by an economist considered a pioneer in institutional analysis, see Cheung (1972). Ironically, this article is seldom if ever cited by current practitioners of the Neoclassical Institutionalist approach. Gay and lesbian activists sometimes argue that the term ‘sexual preference’ is misleading because it implies voluntary choice. Many prefer the term sexual ‘identity’. As I use it here, the term ‘preference’ does not imply choice. We do not freely choose what we like or do not like; in that sense, a preference is a constraint. On the other hand, we are not always prisoners of our own desires; we all have some potential for occasional escape, or at least change of venue. We exert at least some power over our preferences and our identity. Describing a certain sexual orientation as a preference does not suggest that gays and lesbians should be encouraged to ‘change their minds’ or ‘choose’ to be other than they are. Describing homosexuality as an identity rather than a preference does not protect them from the self-righteous criticisms of heterosexuals. Only a strong sense of collective identity and interests, and collective action, can do that. Needless to say, many radical feminists would disagree with this refusal to put gender ‘first.’ But, in my view, the real contribution of feminist theory lies in its efforts to reconceptualize the relationship between different forms of social inequality, rather than simply to empower women. 2 COLLECTIVE ACTION AND STRUCTURES OF CONSTRAINT

1

In Liberating Theory, seven prominent radical activists and scholars make a persuasive case for a complementary holistic analysis of four spheres of social life, without reducing political conflict to any single ‘monism.’ ‘Contrary to most radical formulations,’ write Michael Albert et al., ‘we argue that it is wrong to call a society “capitalist,” or “patriarchal,” or “racist,” or “dictatorial,” and think that with a single descriptor one has revealed the essence of the society in question’ (1986:14). Earlier work by Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel (1981) has also influenced my arguments here, as have many splendid arguments with Robin in person. I disagree with him on two major issues, his emphasis on ‘sites’ or ‘spheres,’ rather than ‘identities and interests’ and his critique of all (or at least most) material incentives and market mechanisms. The former issue is probably more nomenclatural than substantive. The latter issue lies well beyond the scope of this discussion. Some other efforts to conceptualize multiple allegiances include Anthony Giddens’s description of three different axes of exploitation—between states, between the sexes, and between ethnic groups (1981:25), and Ernest Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s exploration of the ‘unfixity’ of political commitments (1985). Emphasis on the construction of collective identity is sometimes referred to as ‘identity politics’ (Bromley, 1989). 268

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2 3 4 5

Another approach to the critique of Marxist economism is a broader definition of class and an emphasis on the complex interrelationships between its conditions of existence. While Steve Resnick and Richard Wolff (1987) devote little attention to issues of national or racial/ethnic inequality, their theoretical framework could certainly accommodate them. My own formulation has been heavily influenced by Ferguson (1983, 1989, 1991), Young (1990), and Amort and Matthaei (1991). However, my approach is somewhat more individualistic than theirs, with more emphasis on redefining equal opportunity. Among African-American feminist theorists, see especially Davis (1981), Hooks (1981, 1984, 1989), Dill (1983), Aptheker (1982), and Collins (1990). Among Latina theorists, see Anzaldua (1987, 1990). Among Third World feminists, see Jayawardena (1986), LACWC (1983), Sen and Grown (1987). On the relationship between race and class, see Blauner (1972:44), Barrera (1979), and Darity (1989). The apt term ‘matrix of domination’ was devised by Patricia Hill Collins to describe the emphasis of a larger intellectual tradition. See her Black Feminist Thought (1990). Even in a country like the United States, where many political and legal rules are now gender neutral, women do not have the constitutional guarantee of gender-neutrality that the proposed Equal Rights Amendment offered. For a fascinating account of the difference between physiological characteristics and gender identity, see Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire (1979). On ‘compulsory heterosexuality,’ see Rich (1980). On the social construction of homosexuality, see Stein (1990), Greenberg (1988), D’Emilio (1983). See Olson (1982), Reich (1991). Also, consider the following passage from a recent article in the Wall Street Journal by W.W.Rostow: There are, indeed, barriers of income level, race, and religion in all modern societies including our own. Nevertheless, I believe there is great staying power in nationalism; and a vital communal sense, transcending lines of class and race, is demonstrated every day in our cities and states as they wrestle with unresolved problems. (Rostow 1991)

6

The classic argument for ‘the working class’ as a subject that is constituted through its own consciousness of itself rather than any simple ‘objective’ position can be found in E.P.Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1966). On the possible role of different preferences in establishing class differences, see John Roemer’s discussion of preferences for work and leisure in Free to Lose (1988). 7 Christopher S.Wren (1991). 8 Influential criticisms of the concept of patriarchy include Young (1981) and Fox-Genovese (1989, 1991). Radical feminist theorists such as Dworkin (1987) and MacKinnon (1987) have called attention to the role of sexual identity. The most powerful criticisms, in my opinion, have come from the efforts to theorize nation- and race-based inequalities cited above. 9 In more technical terms, I believe that most practitioners of both neoclassical and Marxian political economy reject the narrow presumptions of ‘welfarism’ and share some notion of ‘rights.’ But even if they do not, I think they should. For a classic discussion of these issues, see Sen (1987b). 10 On neoclassical trade-offs, see Okun (1975). For Neo-Marxian arguments regarding the relationship between inequality and inefficiency, see Bowles, Gordon, and Weisskopf (1991). 269

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11 Susan Moller Okin (1989) develops this argument via a critique of John Rawls. Carol Pateman (1988,1989) specifically explores the issue of political obligation. Nancy Fraser (1989:183) defends the importance of ‘translating justified needs claims into social rights.’ Iris Young (1990) also criticizes the androcentrism of traditional political theory, though she is skeptical of even an expanded concept of equal opportunity. 12 Iris Young (1990) offers an eloquent critique of simplistic notions of distributional equity. 13 Thompson (1825), Mill (1970:367). 14 Rawls (1971:60), Okin (1989), Sen (1985, 1990:35), Young (1990). 15 Conservative political philosophers will assert that perfect equality of opportunity interferes with individual rights. Neoclassical economists will worry that too much equality might be costly, because it would result in some loss of efficiency. Radical political philosophers will assert that emphasis on equal opportunities (rather than equal outcomes) fails to address some basic human rights and needs. Marxian economists will protest that opportunities alone will not foster cooperation or democratic self-management. An excellent example of the conservative political argument that equal opportunity interferes with individual rights is Nozick (1974). The classic formulation of the equality vs. efficiency ‘trade-off’ is Okun (1975). For a critique of this trade-off argument, see Bowles, Gordon, and Weisskopf (1991). On the radical argument that ‘equal opportunity’ is a wholly inadequate criterion, see Albert and Hahnel (1991a, 1991b). Iris Young (1990) argues that merit can never be accurately measured, anyway. If so, reverse discrimination makes no sense as a concept, and there is no point in trying to achieve a merit-based allocation based on equal opportunity. I agree that merit is a socially constructed concept, one that is often distorted by ideological bias. But I also believe that there are important ways in which definitions of merit can be contested and improved. One example is the methodologies employed in studies of comparable worth such as those described by Paula England (1992). The only alternative to efforts to define and reward merit more fairly is an economic system that distributes goods either in a purely egalitarian way or by a purely random lottery. In my view, this would be both unfair and inefficient. I am not arguing, however, that distribution should be based on merit alone. Serious consideration of the process of social reproduction further complicates these issues. It is much easier to insure equal distribution of money capital than human or social capital. Gifts and bequests of money from parents to children can be restricted. But restrictions on the human and social capital that parents bestow upon their children through nurturance, care, and socialization represent restrictions on parenthood itself. Conservative political theorists like Robert Nozick (1974) suggest that equal opportunities for children are inconsistent with the individual rights of parents. On the other hand, if individuals should have property rights to whatever they labor for and produce, parents, especially mothers, should have property rights to children. No man can produce himself, nor any woman produce herself. 16 Jencks et al. (1979:214–17). It is hard to find comparable studies of other countries, but the distribution of earnings is more equal in most European countries (especially Sweden) and in Japan. 17 This is a modification of Rawls’ (1971) classic formulation of the ‘veil of ignorance.’ Global statistics are taken from CIA (1990:324, 325, 340). 270

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18 Erik Wright pointed out to me a clear way of illustrating this argument in more technical terms. A linear, additive model of the implications of membership in six given groups would have no interactive terms. For instance, a dependent variable, ‘overall position’, could be as a function of seven independent variables (plus stochastic factors) as follows: overall position=a(national position)+ b(racial position)+c(class position)+d(gender position)+e(age position)+ f(sexual preference position)+g(other positions)+stochastic factors. The more complex model suggested here would include interactive terms for all the independent variables. 19 The point about the perceived effectiveness of collective action is very well argued in an essay by Debra Friedman and Carol Diem (1992). They distinguish between effective and ineffective choices, explaining that the free rider problem cannot be interpreted as a simple issue of excessive ‘selfishness.’ 20 For more discussion of the concept of a professional-managerial class, see the essays in Walker (1979). Barbara Ehrenreich paints a brilliant and funny picture of its class consciousness in Fear of Falling (1989). Erik Wright offers a more quantitative analysis that focuses on the relevance of ‘organizational assets’ (1989). 21 Some feminist theorists fear that references to biological difference imply biological determinism or foundationalism. See, for instance, Nicholson (1992) and Butler (1990). I disagree. To suggest that biological differences have social consequences is not to suggest that the consequences are the same across time and space, history and culture. 22 On reciprocal altruism, see Trivers (1971). On the putative fallacies of group selection, E.O.Wilson’s Sociobiology (1980) remains a good source. On the similarity between sociobiology and neoclassical theory, Donna Haraway writes: ‘Biology’s logic of reproductive competition is merely one common, early form of argument in our inherited capitalist political economy and political theory. Biology has intrinsically been a branch of political discourse, not a compendium of objective truth’ (1991:98). 23 Ghiselin (1974:247). 24 E.O.Wilson (1980:272; 1978:163). 25 On ‘the selfish gene’ see Dawkins (1976). On the inversion of this argument, which emphasizes the social order over the individual, see Sahlins (1976). 26 Dawkins (1976). See also Bonner (1980). 27 David S.Wilson (1980). 28 For an exposition aimed at laypersons, see Margolis and Sagan (1986). 29 Among sociobiologists, Edward O.Wilson comes close to this interpretation (1980), but for truly extreme interpretations, see Gilder (1973) and Goldberg (1977). On radical feminism, see Daly (1978), MacKinnon (1987), and Dworkin (1987). These theorists often deny that their arguments are based on assumptions regarding inherent differences between men and women. As Ferguson points out, however, ‘they assume a social divide between male and female sexual natures which is unconvincingly universal, static, and ahistorical’ (1991:54). 30 This is an argument Alice Rossi made famous in an essay entitled ‘A biosocial perspective on parenting,’ reprinted in Rossi (1985). I am not persuaded by her arguments, but believe the issue remains open. 31 For a very clear summary of this argument, see Leibowitz (1986). 32 On gathering, see Dahlberg (1981); on sexual selection, see Zihlman (1978a, 1978b). 33 On the advantages of having ‘managers’ control total product and be ‘residual 271

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34

35 36 37 38

39

40

claimants,’ see Alchian and Demsetz (1972). On population control, see Harris and Ross (1987). On the capture of women, see Meillasoux (1981). On infanticide, see Divale and Harris (1976) and Harris and Ross (1987). As later chapters will make clear, I put more emphasis than Harris on forms of coercive pro-natalism, which I believe he underestimates. I also put more emphasis on the incentives, to men, to help provide for their children. See Lee (1984) and Leacock (1978). Sacks (1982). On population pressure as an impetus to technological change, see Boserup (1981). David Greenberg (1988), among others, takes issue with the argument that sanctions against homosexuality are linked to coercive pro-natalism. But, in my opinion, he states the argument in excessively narrow terms. It is not that gays and lesbians do not become parents. Many do, and those who do not often contribute to the parenting efforts of others. But tolerance of homosexuality promotes a concept of healthy sexuality disconnected from reproductive intent. This, in turn, undermines a traditional form of coercive pro-natalism, rules and norms that prohibit forms of sexual self-expression that are not conducive to conception. Contrary to the Malthusian picture of overpopulation and famine driven by uncontrolled demographic expansion, most pre-industrial societies developed constraints on reproductive decisions that evolved alongside productive technologies and other social relations. On ‘natural fertility,’ see Tilly (1978) and Wrigley (1969). On cultural norms and social practices relevant to fertility, see Harris and Ross (1987). This is a generalization of an argument Christopher Jencks makes regarding norms: The interpretation of genetic and cultural selection systems also allows unusually powerful individuals or groups within a society to manipulate cultural norms so as to promote their selfish ends. Their success in doing this will be directly proportional to their capacity to persuade others that the norms in question actually promote the common good rather than the good of a particular subgroup. As a result, the culture as a whole is likely to embody a complex mix of partially contradictory norms, some of which promote the common good, some of which merely appear to promote the common good while actually promoting the interests of powerful subgroups, and some of which explicitly assert the legitimacy of individual selfishness. (1990:66)

On the difference between intent and outcome, see Elster’s discussion in Chapters 8–9 of Nuts and Bolts For the Social Sciences (1989b). On external constraints, see Schilling (1978) and Frank (1988). 41 In a classic experiment in social psychology, a homogenous group of children was sorted into two groups who were encouraged to compete. The groups developed strong images of themselves as very different types of people. See Lieberson (1980:383). 42 See Lerner (1986), Coontz and Henderson (1986), Meillasoux (1981), Chevillard and Leconte (1986), Etienne and Leacock (1980), and Reiter (1977). 43 The argument about ‘scale’ is quite consistent with Mancur Olson’s reasoning about free riders, but suggests that stronger methods of overcoming free rider problems have evolved over time. On the relationship between slavery and racism see the first section of Robert Blauner’s classic 272

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50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

60 61 62

63 64 65 66

essay, ‘Racial oppression in America,’ tided ‘Race consciousness as a rational project’ (1972:19). He argues that the implementation of slavery as an institution crystallized the racist potential of earlier modes of thought. See Banton and Harwood (1975) and Banton (1987). Reich (1991:13). On global inequality, see Wallerstein (1974). On the role of the state in fostering technological change, see Holton (1985). See, for instance, Carneiro (1970) and Service (1975). ‘The break-up of the sex-role caste system’ is the title of Chapter 1 of Bergmann’s classic, The Economic Emergence of Women (1986). The term ‘distributional coalitions’ is Mancur Olson’s (1982). I have been partly inspired by his treatment of them in The Rise and Decline of Nations, especially Chapter 6. However, I believe that Olson underestimates the role that given groups play in setting the stage for competition among smaller interest groups, and underemphasizes the role that norms and preferences play in coordinating collective action. On US history, see Foner (1979, 1982). On the relationship between income inequality and democracy, see Muller (1985, 1988). On racial voting patterns in the US, see Edsall and Edsall (1991) and Huckfeldt and Kohfeld (1989). On class differences among AfricanAmericans, see W.J.Wilson (1978). On Russia, see Lapidus (1978) and Rowbotham (1974); on China, see Stacey (1978); on Vietnam, see Wiegersma (1988). For a more detailed account of this process in Zimbabwe, see Folbre (1988b). Afshar (1982, 1985). See also Bina Agarwal’s essay, ‘Patriarchy and the “modernising” state: an introduction,’ in Agarwal (1988). For a historical analysis of the institutional determinants of benefits from growth, see Morris and Adelman (1988) and Morris (1992). For a more contemporary analysis, see Dréze and Sen (1989). On the pitfalls of market GNP, see Waring (1988). For an interesting perspective on the relationship between economic inequality and environmental degradation, see Boyce (1992). On the effect of political stalemates on macroeconomic policy, see Maital and Lipnowski (1985) as well as Olson (1982). In what I consider the best chapter of The Rise and Decline of Nations (Chapter 6), Olson does consider racial and caste groups. However, he does not devote much attention to the difference between voluntary and involuntary groups, and, to my knowledge, never considers the possibility that men and women might be groups contending over the distribution of resources. Olson (1982:236). For an insightful discussion of class relations conducive to class development, see Brenner (1977). See, among others, Frank (1967, 1969) and Laclau (1971). In their more detailed, empirical analysis, Morris and Adelman (1988) find an association between political weakening of landed elites and policy outcomes benefitting family agriculturalists and wage-earners. Friedman and Friedman (1980:48–55). Baran (1957). Olson (1982:178–9). Amsden (1989). See also Dréze and Sen (1989). 273

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67 For a summary of trends in inequality, see Braun (1991). On US economic decline, see Bowles, Gordon, and Weisskopf (1991). 68 Thurow (1992). 69 Thurow (1992). 70 On the limits of cost-benefit analysis, see Sagoff (1988). 3 THE PERSISTENCE OF PATRIARCHAL POWER 1 2 3 4

5 6

7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16

For a more detailed account, see Deacon (1985), Waring (1988), Folbre (1991b). For more discussion of the concept of the family wage in the US context, see Kessler-Harris (1990). The New York Times, 7 January, 1909. Reid (1934), Kyrk (1933). Later T.W.Schultz and Gary Becker, also of the University of Chicago, began to explore household production under the rubric of ‘human capital.’ Their contributions are alluded to in Chapter 1. For a general overview of the importance of non-market production, see Waring (1988). More technical discussions of survey and imputation methods include Chadeau (1985), Eisner (1989), Fitzgerald and Wicks (1990). On the number of housewives, see Bergmann (1986:200). Since 1986, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has changed its nomenclature and definitions. Time-use figures based on Fuchs (1988); labor force participation rates from the US Council of Economic Advisors (1991). For an example of recent efforts to impute the value of time devoted to household production in the US, see Eisner (1989). See, for instance, Vanek (1974), Hartmann (1981a), Gershuny and Robinson (1988), Picchio (1992). Ferguson (1989:95). Ferguson provides a very clear exposition of the significance of ‘sex-affective production.’ On kin-community networks, see DiLeonardo (1987). On other aspects of caring labor, see Devault (1991) and Gerstel (1991). Hochschild (1989: xi). Gilder (1973, 1981); Bloom (1987). The most explicit articulation of this point of view can be found in the writings of George Gilder (1973, 1981). On the development of internal labor markets and personnel departments in the United States, and their influence on gender inequality, see Goldin (1990). Quadagno (1988) explains how pension rules penalize women for their reproductive labor. The so-called ‘crowding hypothesis’ is a common explanation of earnings inequality by gender. See Bergmann (1986). For a very clear summary that places comparable worth in a larger context, see Bergmann (1986). For more detailed studies of comparable worth issues, see Remick (1984) and England (1992). For more discussion of the gendered character of skill, see Phillips and Taylor (1986) and Acker (1989). Ironically, the interaction between the mothers who purchase child care services and the generally less well-paid, lower status women who provide them often resembles the relationship between fathers and mothers in a traditional, male wage-earner family. Whatever their gender, individuals rushing off to lucrative jobs underestimate the demands of child care. They often complain about how much it costs. They wish it could be arranged more conveniently for themselves (‘Does it really matter that I’m thirty minutes late to pick up my child? I’m under so much pressure at work…’). And they imply that child care is more inherently 274

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24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

rewarding than their own work, saying things like ‘Oh, aren’t you lucky to be able to spend all day with these wonderful kids?’ See Nelson (1989). Divale and Harris (1976), Leacock (1978), Sacks (1982), Lee (1984). See Fyfe (1989). This case has been made most persuasively for Western Europe by Watkins (1991). For more discussion of the distribution of the costs of children, see Folbre (1982, 1983). The importance of intergenerational bargaining has been well argued by Caldwell (1982), Mosk (1983), and Parsons (1984), among others. On this point, see Ryder (1987). See Caldwell’s perceptive discussion of the impact of education and Westernization (1982). He argues that Western Europe’s unique role as the cradle of capitalism may explain why the demographic response, uninformed by historical precedent, was relatively slow. In 1982, at least, he was quite optimistic about the influence of cultural modernization and the potential impact of education on the transition to lower fertility rates in developing countries. His more recent work in conjunction with Pat Caldwell (1987) is less optimistic, emphasizing the persistence of patriarchal pro-natalist incentives in areas such as Sub-Saharan Africa. Robert Willis has argued this point (1982). Most other neoclassical economists assume that levels of ‘intergenerational altruism’ remain constant over time. See Barro (1974); Feldstein (1974). See Burpakdi (1978), Initani (1978) and Arnold and Fawcett (1978). Victor Fuchs (1988) makes the argument that women simply have greater preferences for children than men. He seems to imply that mothers’ love for their children serves as a kind of compensating differential, even making poverty worthwhile. But once a woman realizes she is being exploited as a result of her affections, she is likely to modify them or, if already committed to children, to urge other women to be more assertive. Lack of information about the probability of marital dissolution and the actual costs of raising children has worked to women’s disadvantage. For a brief discussion of William Thompson’s views, as well as the related views of August Bebel, see Folbre (1993a). For an excellent discussion of the abuses of population control around the world, see Hartmann (1987). Later historical chapters substantiate this point in considerable detail. For a general discussion of this issue as it pertains to the United States, see Weitzman (1985) and Garfinkel and McLanahan (1986). For further discussion of inequalities within the family, see the essays in Dwyer and Bruce (1988). For documentation of differential infant mortality, see Miller (1981), Sen and Sengupta (1983), and Sen (1987a). On the relationship between the growth of wage employment and development of gay and lesbian communities, see D’Emilio (1983) and Greenberg (1988). For more detailed discussion, see Folbre (1990, 1991a) and the many studies cited therein. For more detailed discussion of the evolution of US Census categories, see Folbre and Abel (1989). Becker (1981a). Statistical Abstract of the US (1990:7, 12, 368). Typical Marxist analyses of the welfare state include Gough (1979) and Vobruba (1989). On the concept of the social wage, see Bowles and Gintis (1982). For an early and important exposition of ‘non-market failures,’ see Wolf (1974). 275

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36 Kotlikoff and Spivak (1981) lay all the blame for ‘instability in family arrangements’ on social security. By this reasoning, elimination of public transfers could solve the problem. Lampman and McDonald (1982) explicitly recommend turning back the clock: ‘Many of the functions of the present day welfare state could be handled by mandating that responsibility for current benefits be assumed not by the taxpayer, but by all relatives, broadly defined, of current beneficiaries.’ Others who discuss this issue, such as Barro (1974) and Feldstein (1974), completely ignore the issue of effective enforcement of intra-family transfers as though families are somehow immune to the free rider problems that other institutions suffer. 37 Schumpeter (1950). See also Gilbert (1983). 38 Myrdal (1941:5). 39 See M.S.Gordon (1988); Brocas, Cailloux, and Odet (1990). 40 See Boskin (1974), David and Starzec (1989), Sundström (1992), and Shibata (1992). 41 See Spencer (1976) and later discussion in Chapters 4 and 5. 42 See Eleanor Rathbone’s prescient discussion of this issue in The Economic Journal in 1917, later developed in her book, The Disinherited Family (1924). 43 The best International Labour Office study of gender bias in social security, to date, is Brocas, Cailloux, and Odet (1990). 4 NORTHWESTERN EUROPE 1 My interpretation of these issues has been influenced by Wally Seccombe’s recent book, A Millennium of Family Change (1992), as well as by many wonderful, wide-ranging discussions with its author. His book provides a beautifully detailed account of changes in the organization of social reproduction that are beyond the scope of my efforts here. However, Seccombe focuses on ‘domestic patriarchy,’ largely ignoring gender and age interests outside the family (see p. 30). Also, he adheres to a Marxian theoretical framework of historical materialism and emphasis on modes of production that, I believe, obscures the importance of contending forms of collective identity and interest that are not based on class, age, or gender. Since my primary concern is the development of an alternative theoretical framework, I have chosen to provide a much more schematic and stylized historical account, with a broader comparative focus. Nonetheless, I hold his book out as an excellent example of the fruits of detailed historical research on inequalities within the family. 2 Bloch (1961:137), Arthur (1977), Seccombe (1992:46–9). 3 On pre-Hellenic religions, see Spretnak (1978) and Lerner (1986). On pagans, see Murray (1971). 4 Quaife (1987); Murray (1971:169); Stone (1977); Noonan (1965). A countervailing factor was the rule of abstinence among priests, monks, and nuns, but it is not clear that their numbers were sufficient to affect overall birth rates. Because this was probably a period in which female mortality rates exceeded male rates (except in times of war), the number of nuns would be more relevant than the number of priests and monks. 5 Glendon (1989:26); Boswell (1980:293). 6 Greenberg (1988:275). 7 On patriarchalism in general, see Laslett (1949); Schochet (1975); Stone (1977:110). On Bogachev, see Pethybridge (1974:49). As Susan Amussen 276

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8

9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24

25

26 27 28 29 30 31

writes, ‘A clear subordination of wives to husbands provided the model for all relationships between women and men’ (1988:95). On William the Conqueror, see Fourquin (1976:155–6). On general dimensions of class power, see Anderson (1974); Duby (1980); Dobb (1963). Unfortunately, these accounts almost entirely ignore women. For a more contemporary account of class exploitation, informed by feminist theory, see Seccombe (1992). On peasant families, see Clark (1967); Scott and Tilly (1978); Goody (1983); Hanawalt (1986a). On gender discrimination in employment, see Kowalski (1986); Howell (1986); Hanawalt (1986a: 12). On wages, see Shahar (1983:242–3). On domestic violence, see Dobash and Dobash (1979). On law and leisure, see Shahar (1983:89, 246). On surplus accumulation, see Middleton (1979). On Midlands, see Hilton (1966:111); On contracts, see Hanawalt (1986a: 229). For an example of two opposing views, compare North and Thomas (1973) with Sweezy (1976). On feudal patriarchy as a benign, functional arrangement, see Bloch (1961:135); Laslett (1977:104); Mitterauer and Sieder (1982). For a more detailed critique, see Seccombe (1992). Coulton (1931:83). Boserup (1965, 1981); Grigg (1980); Seccombe (1992:126–9). Anderson (1974); Lee (1978); Hatcher (1977). Hanawalt (1986b: 138). See also Dobb (1963). On wages, see Hanawalt (1986a: 12). On demographic trends, see Helleiner (1965) and Seccombe (1992:150–2). Boswell (1980:323). I should note here that I strongly disagree with Boswell’s suggestion that repression of homosexuality had little to do with coercive pronatalism. Indeed, I think he significantly understates the role of coercive pronatalism, suggesting that religious doctrine was motivated by a desire to minimize the production or abuse of unwanted children (1980:162). On witchcraft prosecution, see Ben-Yehuda (1980). Kramer and Sprenger (1951:66). Kramer and Sprenger (1951:227). On Luther, see Quaife (1987:93). On family limitation, see Flinn (1981:45) and Seccombe (1992:152). On population pressures, see Grigg (1980); Postan (1975); Habakkuk (1965). On marriage patterns, see Hajnal (1965); Razi (1980); Wrigley (1969, 1978); Wrigley and Schofield (1981). As R.H.Tawney noted long ago, small land-holders were more likely than either serfs or proletarians to postpone family formation (1967:105). For a summary of the effects of this ‘nuptial valve’ on the rise of industrial capitalism, see Seccombe (1992:239–41). On state policy, see Ozment (1982:42). On guilds, see Lynch (1988:77). On the unified German code, see Glendon (1989:43). Dobb (1963); Anderson (1974). On population pressure, see the classic account in Chambers (1953). On the impact of the enclosures on women’s productivity in non-market work, see Humphries (1990). Hill (1969:92). MacFarlane (1986); Kussmaul (1981:3). Quadagno (1982:122). It is not clear how stringently these rules were enforced. Smith (1981); MacFarlane (1986); Cain and McNicoll (1988). 277

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32 Flora et al. (1983–7: Chapter 7). 33 For number of men and women who were employees and workers, see Flora et al. (1983:525). For the size of the male and female population, see Mitchell (1985:34). By this calculation, male and female workers each comprised 62 per cent of their respective populations. 34 Pinchbeck and Hewitt (1969:309). 35 Nardinelli (1990:64). 36 Marx (1977:599). 37 On Great Britain, see Pinchbeck and Hewitt (1969:404). On France, see McMillan (1981:59) and Heywood (1988:229). 38 Nardinelli (1990:119). 39 Flora et al. (1983:553–633). 40 On Gaskell, see Pinchbeck (1969:313). On Switzerland, see Braun (1978:320). 41 On the preponderance of unmarried men among British emigrants, see Glass and Taylor (1976). On effects on old age security, see Williamson (1990). 42 On fertility decline among the well-to-do, see the studies cited in Flinn (1981:45). On national boundaries, see Watkins (1991). For estimates of total fertility, see United Nations (1980:76). 43 Stone (1977:110). 44 Locke (1960: II, 2); O’Brien (1981); Clark and Lange (1979). 45 For two contrasting views, see Shorter (1976) and Tilly, Scon, and Cohen (1976). For an overview, see Seccombe (1992:244). 46 Brinton (1936:42, 50, 57). 47 Poor Law Commission (1834:176). 48 Poor Law Commission (1834:350); Cowherd (1977:269). On later legislation, see Pinchbeck and Hewitt (1969:588–91). 49 Neff (1929:30, 31); Pinchbeck (1969:198); Soldon (1978:4, 20); Hunt (1986). 50 Quotation from Pinchbeck (1969:128). On the interaction between class and gender in English factories, see Lazonick (1978); Rose (1986, 1987). 51 On relevance of patriarchal norms to the factory, see Smelser (1959); Hill (1958:387); Lazonick (1978:9). On the Grand Moral Union, see Taylor (1983). 52 On relations within the working-class family, see Scott, Tilly, and Cohen (1976); Scott and Tilly (1978); Glendon (1989). 53 Cited in Neff (1929:29). 54 Census of Great Britain, 1851 (BPP, 1852–3:86); Mayhew (1967); Duchatelet (1981); McBride (1976). 55 There are occasional hints in Glendon (1989) that gender interests are at stake, but important changes are often attributed simply to ‘industrialization.’ 56 For further discussion, see Folbre and Hartmann (1988) and Folbre (1992b). 57 For a more detailed discussion of Thompson and Wheeler, see Taylor (1983) and Folbre (1993a). On Fourier, see Greenberg (1988:351). 58 Census of Great Britain, 1851 (BPP, 1852–3:56); Neff (1929:11). 59 Banks (1986:34). On the value of married women’s property rights, see Holcombe (1983:217). 60 On France, see McMillan (1981:26). The French Napoleonic code stipulated that the wife owed her husband obedience, and was owed protection in return. See also Glendon (1989). 61 Sachs and Wilson (1978:136). 62 In England in 1857, a man could divorce his wife for a single act of adultery, but a woman could divorce her husband only for adultery under aggravated circumstances such as desertion. See Glendon (1989:150, 174). 63 Bentham (1931:213); Glendon (1989:198). 278

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64 Glendon (1989:97). 65 On the typology, see Esping-Anderson (1990:33). On gender interests, see Michel and Koven (1990) and Orloff (1991a, 1991b). 66 For a more detailed exposition of Bebel’s views, see Folbre (1993a). In general, Marxist scholars have overlooked and underestimated the feminist influence on European social democracy in the early twentieth century. The entry on ‘social democracy’ in Tom Bottomore’s Dictionary of Marxist Thought (1983), for instance, contains not a mention of feminists. On the Fabian feminists, see the collection edited by Alexander (1988). 67 Evans (1976:138). On Stocker, see Steakley (1975:40). 68 Banks and Banks (1964); Soloway (1982); Evans (1976:116, 185). 69 On Germany, see Evans (1976:116, 185). Much of the concern over diminished fertility levels reflected a fear of its possible social and political ramifications for male authority. See Soloway (1982). On Sweden, see Myrdal (1941:24); on France, McIntosh (1983:52); Jenson (1985:11); Van de Walle (1978); on Belgium, Noonan (1965:410–11). On suffrage, see Morgan (1984:224). 70 Lafleur (1978:216). 71 McIntosh (1983:64). On homosexual repression, see Steakley (1975). 72 Banks and Banks correctly point out that not all feminists favored birth control, but they overstate their case when they insist that feminists did not contribute at all to the growth of family planning (1964). On attitudes towards contraception, see Soloway (1982:143); Glass (1940:35); Carlson (1990: xv). On suffrage, see Morgan (1984:89). 73 Riksdag quotation from Myrdal (1941:159). 74 Hage and Hanneman (1980); Williamson and Weiss (1979). See also Ashford (1986) and the essays in Flora and Heidenheimer (1981). Esping-Anderson argues that ‘the history of political class coalitions is the most decisive cause of welfare state variations’ (1990:1). On declining intergenerational transfers, see Quadagno (1982). 75 Booth (1891, 1894); Quadagno (1982:132). 76 Esping-Anderson, Rainwater, and Rein (1988). 77 Gordon (1988:69–70); Fuchs (1982); Hoskins and Bixby (1973:3). 78 Pascal (1986:216). 79 International Labour Office publications often suggest that these issues were raised simply because large numbers of women entered the paid labor force, as though explicit feminist political efforts were of little relevance. See, for instance, ILO (1989:53). Many official discussions of this issue call attention to the problematic character of traditional assumptions of ‘dependency’ and ‘headship,’ but generally ignore the operation of gender interests. See ISSA (1982); Laurent (1982, 1986). 80 SSA (1992). It is not clear from available documentation whether or not Swedish provisions cover same-sex relationships. 81 Rowntree (1922). 82 On Pope Leo, see Glass (1940:100); Rowntree (1922); Marshall (1930:685, 715); Edgeworth (1922:449) and (1923:493). 83 Webb (1919:69). 84 Richardson (1924); Rathbone (1949:171). 85 Breckenridge (1923:538); Glass (1940:100–22). 86 Gordon (1988:293); Hubback (1949). 87 See the fascinating discussion in Moeller (1989). 88 Burgdörfer quotation is from Moeller (1989:148); Moeller quotation from Moeller (1989:150). 279

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89 On Austrian law, see Munz (1982:302). Glass (1940:371). 90 Kuttner (1984:244). For examples of such calculations, see Joshi (1990) and Calhoun and Espenshade (1988). Even in Hungary, the country that provided the most generous family allowances, benefits covered only about 36 per cent of the average total costs of childrearing. On the US, see Espenshade (1984); on Hungary, Teitelbaum and Winter (1985). 91 German figures are from Duggan (1993:68). On the general issue, see also O’Higgins (1988:221). 92 ILO (1989:59, 61). 93 Duggan (1993:13). For a more general perspective on the effects of unification on women, see Rosenberg (1991). 94 Gordon (1988:291). More detailed analysis may reveal some specific policy impacts. For instance, both marriage and fertility rates were higher in East than in West Germany despite a higher rate of female labor force participation, perhaps because more generous family allowances were combined with a housing allocation system that gave priority to families with young children. 95 For a specific estimate of the opportunity cost of raising children in Great Britain, see Joshi (1990). 96 Davies and Joshi (1990). 97 Kamerman and Kahn (1988b); Bergmann (1991). Lynn Duggan (1992, 1993) explores this issue in some detail in her consideration of differences between East and West Germany. 98 Between 1986 and 1990, for instance, married fathers in East Germany had the legal option of paid post-maternity leave in place of their wives—see Duggan (1992). On Swedish family policy, see Moen (1989); on relative wages, see Sundström (1992). 99 Maclean (1990:95); Report of the Committee on One-Parent Families (Finer Report) (1974); Eekelaar and Maclean (1986:71–2). 100 Under one category of divorce in France today, based on ‘disruption of the life in common,’ the innocent party retains a right to ongoing financial support. See Glendon (1989:216). 101 Kahn and Kamerman (1988). 102 Duggan (1993). 103 Comparable types of data sets for other regions include the US Census Bureau’s Survey of Program Participation and the World Bank’s Living Standards Measurement Surveys conducted in many developing countries. On relative poverty rates, see Kamerman and Kahn (1988b: 357). 104 Note that there is no reason to expect that the average gross income of a oneparent family should equal 100 per cent of a two-parent family, since one less adult is claiming a share of total income for consumption. The point here is that the percentage is lower in Great Britain than in Sweden. See Kamerman and Kahn (1989:18). 105 Smeeding, Torrey, and Rein (1988:105). 106 On time use studies in Belgium, the German Democratic Republic, the Federal Republic of Germany, France, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia, see United Nations (1980:110). 107 Esping-Anderson singles this out as the distinguishing feature of social democracy (1990:28).

280

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5 THE UNITED STATES 1 On profit maximizing, see Grant (1961), Lemon (1972), Rothenberg (1988). On pre-capitalist mentality, see Henretta (1978), Clark (1979). On patriarchal constraints, see Dublin (1979), Farragher (1979), Kerber (1980), Norton (1980), Koehler (1980), Ryan (1981), Jones (1985), Stansell (1986), Fox-Genovese (1988), Kulikoff (1989). 2 Smith (1809:95), Greven (1970), Gross (1976). 3 On the relationship between age and income, see Williamson and Lindert (1980) and Main (1985). On the benefits of children, see Folbre (1985). On intergenerational relations, see Ransom and Sutch (1986a), Sundstrum and David (1988). 4 Alston and Schapiro (1984), Bidwell and Falconer (1925). On the relationship between wealth and age, see Williamson and Linden (1980:26). On poverty, see Main (1985). 5 On occupational segregation and relative wages in the colonial period, see Koehler (1980:129). 6 Fogel (1989:38). 7 Linden (1980:43), Fogel and Engerman (1974). 8 Fogel (1989:53, 149, 182). 9 Fogel (1989:150–2, 187). 10 On mortality, see Jones (1985:35) and Fogel (1989:115,145). On slave women’s resistance to childbearing, see Bush (1990). 11 Jones (1985:36). On ‘pathology,’ see Moynihan (1965). 12 Goldin and Sokoloff (1984). 13 See Jones (1985). Goldin and Sokoloff do not actually measure the sexual wage differential in Northern agriculture because of scarcity of data for women agricultural workers. Instead, they compare women’s earnings as domestic servants to the earnings of male farm hands. They never ask whether this occupational segregation may have reflected discriminatory barriers rather than (or in addition to) differences in physical strength. Goldin and Sokoloff’s relative wage data for the South in 1850 are based on estimates of slave earnings, and do not disaggregate by race in later years (1984:472). They do not demonstrate that Southern white women were paid more relative to Southern white men than their counterparts in the North. 14 Fox-Genovese (1988:48). 15 On controversies over wage labor, see Clark (1979). On the impact of mills on farmers, see Prude (1985:81). On general conflict in intergenerational relations, see Sundstrum and David (1988:56). 16 On wandering poor, see Jones (1975). On poor relief policies, see Folbre (1989) and Hannon (1984). 17 On household manufactures, see Tryon (1966). On unmarried women, see Chambers-Schiller (1984:5). For a discussion of the importance of new, ‘ungendered’ technologies, see Davies (1979) and Strober (1987). 18 On the Hamilton mill, see Dublin (1979); on broom-making, Nobles (1983). 19 Foner (1979:54). 20 US Census (I860, Vol. I: 662; Vol. Ill: 729). 21 Ransom and Sutch (1977). See also W.J.Wilson (1978) and Walker (1991) for a critique of the notion that class differences were more important. 22 Du Bois (1933:104); see also Du Bois (1935). 23 On the decline in market hours worked, see Ransom and Sutch (1977). On share-cropping and high fertility, see Jones (1985:87). 24 On schooling, see Margo (1990). On lynching, Walker (1991:30). 281

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25 Jones (1985:194). 26 Parsons and Goldin (1983); Bodnar (1982, 1985). 27 Guest and Tolnay (1983), Kaestle and Vinovskis (1980). On the regulation of child labor, see Nardinelli (1990). On resistance to mandatory schooling, see Katz (1970). For national statistics, see US Census (1943:97). 28 On the South, see McHugh (1988:74) and Hall et al. (1987:63). On the Children’s Aid Society, Thurston (1930). 29 Seybolt (1917), Thurston (1930:169, 204, 211). On the value of children’s labor on farms, see also Lindert (1980:59). 30 On the impact of family income on child labor, see Goldin (1979, 1981), Haines (1979, 1981), Angus and Mirel (1985), and Horan and Hargis (1991). 31 On legal claims, see Zelizer (1985). 32 On abstinence, see Barker-Benfield (1976); on Comstock laws, Kennedy (1970:45). For a general account of reproductive rights, see Gordon (1976). 33 Skocpol (1992). 34 Ransom and Sutch (1986b). 35 Achenbaum (1978:80); Epstein (1922:25, 30). On the mixed poorhouse, see Thurston (1930:27). For a critique of the claim that the elderly became more vulnerable to poverty, and an emphasis on their political power, see Gratton (1992). 36 Goldin (1990:17). 37 This calculation is based on the disaggregation of domestic and personal service suggested by David Katzman (1978:282–83). 38 See Folbre (1993b), Folbre and Wagman (1993), Wagman and Folbre (1992). 39 On the family wage, see May (1985) and Kessler-Harris (1990). Quotation from Foner (1979:136). 40 Foner (1979:106, 214, 247). 41 Wright (1884, 1892). 42 Wright (1881:20,26). 43 See Folbre and Wagman (1993) and Wagman and Folbre (1992). 44 Kraditor (1968:184–5). 45 Stanton, Anthony, and Gage (1881:379). 46 Cited in Dubois (1978:174). 47 Foner (1979:212). 48 Shammas (1991:12). 49 The quotation is from The Revolution (December 24,1868). For a more detailed discussion of the Association for the Advancement of Women’s letter to the Census Bureau, see Folbre (1991b). 50 On proposed legal changes, see Leach (1980:193) and Bordin (1981:114). On Pierce and other material feminists, see Hayden (1981). 51 Grimke (1838:63), Boughner (1988). 52 On voluntary motherhood, see Gordon (1976). Gilman (1966:169). 53 Kennedy (1970:23, 73). 54 Kennedy (1970). 55 Cooke (1961:58). 56 Skocpol (1992). 57 The ‘classic’ argument regarding American exceptionalism is Sombart (1976). For an account emphasizing the role of political institutions, see Friedman (1991). 58 Walker (1891:634, 643). 59 Kuczynski (1902). See also the discussions in Gordon (1976:136) and Kennedy (1970:43). 282

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60 On Common’s influence on government policies, see Nash, Pugach, and Tomasson (1988:5); Commons (1927:12, 205). 61 Ross (1907:614). 62 Balch (1907:625). 63 Sanger, cited in Kennedy (1970:111). 64 Maclean, cited in Lehrer (1987:37). Kelley wrote: No one who has not lived long in the foreign colonies can estimate what it means to an immigrant parent, when a boy decides that he will no longer acknowledge a duty to his parents and brothers and sisters, will no longer carry home his wages. In serving on a scholarship committee it is startling to read in the family record that there are two older brothers or two older sisters who recognize no duty toward their parents or the younger child—the candidate for a scholarship—who is left to suffer hardship or to accept charity. We acquiesce very generally in the loss of the sense of duty toward the family on the pan of sons and daughters because industry has habituated us, and tempted them, to consider the worker as an isolated unit, regardless of family ties (1914:20). 65 For a detailed historical treatment of the tensions between ‘maternalists’ and advocates of equal rights, see Cott (1987). For a more detailed discussion of the origins of protective labor legislation, see Lehrer (1987). On mothers’ pensions, see Skocpol (1992). 66 Orloff (1991b), Sarvasy (1992). 67 Equal Rights, March 3, 1924:94 and October 6, 1923:268. 68 Costin (1983). 69 Skocpol and Ritter (1991), Skocpol (1992:3). 70 Lehrer (1987), Kessler-Harris (1982). 71 Tiffin (1982:177, 180). 72 Costin (1983:176). 73 Abbott (1938:265. 74 On divorce, see O’Neill (1967). On the families maintained by women alone in the US, see Gordon and McLanahan (1991). State-level data for the heavily industrialized state of Massachusetts shows that a disproportionate number of married women with paying jobs between 1880 and 1910 lived in households with no husbands. See Folbre (1992c). 75 Vandepol (1982), Brown (1981). 76 Leff (1973:408). 77 Tiffin (1982:124–5), Abbott (1938:234). On counties providing assistance, see SSB (1937:237). On racial bias, see Leff (1973:414) and Garfinkel and McLanahan (1986:99). 78 SSB (1937); Abramowitz (1988); for a detailed study of the Massachusetts program, see Saunders (1992). 79 On WPA, see Howard (1943:279), cited in Rose (forthcoming: 8). On municipalities, see May (1985:13). 80 SSB (1937:156). On the AFL position, see Achenbaum (1986:13). 81 On financial instruments available to elderly families, see Ransom and Sutch (1992). On levels of household income and wealth among the elderly, see Gratton (1992); Gratton and Rotondo (1991). On the patronage aspects of the Civil War pensions, see Skocpol (1992). 82 Linford (1949:17). 83 Baldwin (1910:727). On Miss Higgins, see Massachusetts Commission (1910:234). 283

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84 Epstein (1928), Smith (1979:292). 85 Squier (1912:312), Epstein (1922:6). For a modern treatment of child default, see Williamson (1990). 86 Gratton (1992), Gratton and Rotondo (1991). 87 Quotation from Epstein (1922:35, 242); Massachusetts Commission (1910:334). 88 Lubove (1968:134). 89 SSB (1937:159). 90 SSB (1937:165, 242, 246). 91 Achenbaum (1978:129). 92 Achenbaum (1986:18). 93 Piven and Cloward (1971, 1988); Skocpol (1992). See also the review of Skocpol by Wolfe (1993). 94 Gordon (1988a, 1988b); Abramowitz (1988); Amott and Matthaei (1991). 95 See, for instance, Lubove (1968); M.Gordon (1988); Gough (1979); Skocpol (1980). The role of gender has begun to receive considerable attention. See Gordon (1990), Michel and Koven (1990), Orloff (1991a, 1991b), Brenner and Laslett (1991), and Skocpol (1992). The role of race and racial interests has received much less attention. Garfinkel and McLanahan (1986:99) allude to racial bias, but describe this euphemistically as the effect of ‘community values.’ Abramowitz (1988) gives racial interests slightly more consideration. 96 Holtzman (1963). 97 Garfinkel and McLanahan (1986:102). 98 Abbott (1938, II: 243); Coll (1988:233). 99 Social Security Bulletin, 44:11 (November 1981) 38, 48, 57. 100 Social Security taxes are highly regressive. The ceiling on the amount of earnings subject to the tax means that those with relatively low earnings pay tax on a higher percentage of their earnings. Benefits, however, are highly progressive. The two effects largely balance each other out. 101 Nash, Pugach, and Tomasson (1988:18). 102 Boskin (1974). 103 Whittington (1992:216). 104 Hewlett (1991:140). Ginzberg calculated that the benefit to tax ratio for a person who retired in 1979 with a dependent spouse was 9.19 for a high income-earner, and 13.06 for a minimum income-earner (1982:52). 105 The deterioration of public education in the United States is another case in point. See Kozol (1991). 106 On exclusionary state laws, see Patterson (1981). On increases in aid, see Steiner (1981). 107 On Bishop, see Steiner (1981:109). 108 Pechman and Timpane (1975). For a good brief review of criticisms of the Negative Income Tax findings, see Wilson (1987:184–5). 109 For value of benefits, see Social Security Bulletin, Annual Statistical Supplement, 1991:108, 193. On declines in spending, see Smeeding (1991). On the role of survivors’ benefits, see Social Security Bulletin, 1992, 55(1): 57. In 1986, nearly 90 per cent of white and 70 per cent of African-American widows received survivors’ benefits; no more than 60 per cent of separated, divorced, and never-married mothers received AFDC. See Garfinkel and McLanahan (1986:26). 110 Joe (1982). 111 On conservative arguments regarding the growth in families maintained by women alone, see Gilder (1973, 1981) and Murray (1984). On the comparison 284

NOTES

between 1900 and 1960, see Gordon and McLanahan (1991). On the relationship between growth in AFDC and female-headed households between 1950 and 1975, see Garfinkel and McLanahan, who argue that it had, at most, a small effect (1986:45). See also Ellwood and Bane (1984) and Cutwright and Madras (1976). AFDC does have a discernible ‘female independence’ effect. Across states, high benefit levels seem to reduce the likelihood of remarriage and may encourage out-of-wedlock births. On out-of-wedlock births, see Hutchens (1979:59); Leibowitz, Eisen, and Chow (1986). 112 On perverse incentives, see Murray (1984). On child support enforcement, see Garfinkel and McLanahan (1986); US Census (1990); Beller and Graham (1985); Hewlett (1991); Pearce (1979:122). 113 On inflation, see Beller and Graham (1985); on the effect of mothers’ earnings, see Robins (1989). In 1987, the average level provided was less than one-quarter of the average cost of children. On awards relative to costs, see Hewlett (1991:89). 114 On the ‘potential to have real teeth,’ see Bassi and Barnow (1991). Total child support collections declined by 7 per cent between 1978 and 1985 in the US, and child support and alimony as a percentage of the total income received by female-headed families declined by 8 per cent, despite new legislation aimed to improve enforcement. See Robins (1989) and the summary of it in Focus 12:2 (Fall and Winter 1989), published by the Institute for Research on Poverty of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. On the recent increase in child support collections, see Statistical Abstract of the United States (1991:375). 115 Garfinkel and McLanahan (1986). 116 See Hill and Ponza (1983), McLanahan (1988). 117 Folbre and Abel (1989), McCrate (1987). 118 McCrate (1987), Ehrenreich (1983). On increase in never-married men, see Statistical Abstract of the United States (1991, Table 52). On increase in divorce, see US Census, Studies in Marriage and the Family, Current Population Reports, P–23 (162): 3. 119 Wilson (1987:95). 120 Statistical Abstract of the US (1992:55). 121 Hewlett (1991:36). For additional evidence, see Kamerman (1984); Kamerman and Kahn (1988a, 1989). On poverty among children, see Smeeding, Torrey, and Rein (1988). 122 Aaron, Bosworth, and Burtless (1989:23). 123 Friedman (1980), Kotlikoff and Spivak (1981), Feldstein (1974), Barro (1974). For a persuasive critique of the merits of ‘privatization,’ see Aaron, Bosworth, and Burtless (1989). 124 Hewlett (1991:139). 125 Aaron, Bosworth, and Burtless (1989); Smeeding (1991). 126 Hewlett (1991), Smeeding (1991), Eisner (1991), Ryder (1987:118). 127 Rita Ricardo-Campbell proposes that the dependent spouse benefit should be replaced by three years of earnings credits for the primary care giver for each of the first two children. Three years of credit, however, hardly seems sufficient; it would provide no more generous recognition of childrearing than the current system provides indirectly through the housewife subsidy. See Achenbaum (1986:136). 128 On declining income of families with children, see Danziger and Gottschalk (1986). On number of families with children, see Hewlett (1991:152). 129 Preston (1984). 285

NOTES

6 LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

Furtado (1970); Frank (1967, 1969). Crow (1992:150). Vitale (1981:19). Nash (1980:140). Silverblatt (1980), Burkett (1978:123), Buenaventura-Posso and Brown (1980). Feijoó (1991:73, 76). Mörner (1967:38, 40). Bush (1990:139); Morrissey (1989:100, 101, quotation 156). On two distinct forms of the patriarchal household economy, see Mallon (1986:159). Cited in Ramos (1989:1). Arrom (1985). Mörner (1967:48). For the classic debates, see Frank (1967, 1969); Laclau (1971); Wallerstein (1974); and, for an excellent summary, De Janvry (1981). For recent feminist research, see Deere (1976, 1977, 1978); Mallon, (1986); Reinhardt (1988); Morrissey (1989). I have been unable to find any systematic discussion of the issue of sexual orientation or gay/lesbian rights in the region before the 1970s. For a summary of the arguments that a landed elite slowed the development of capitalism in agriculture, see De Janvry (1981). On Hispanic law, particularly as applied in Mexico, see Arrom (1985:57, 92). On Brazilian law, see Hahner (1990:6). Arrom (1985:63, 690). Mörner (1967:133). Reinhardt (1988:71). Kuznesof (1980). Ramos (1989), Díaz and Stewart (1989). Frank (1967), Amin (1974). Hahner (1990:138). Little (1978:243). Little (1978:246), LACWC (1983:31), Miller (1991:91). Soto (1979:56–60). Hahner (1990:110, 168). Catt, cited in Miller (1991:81). See also Chancy (1979). Miller (1991:57, 58, 64). On suffrage, see Miller (1991:96). On land reforms, see Palmer (1985). Deere (1987:180), Safílios-Rothschild (1983). Francesca Miller writes, In the Latin American context, the feminine is cherished, the womanly—the ability to bear and raise children, to nurture a family—is cherished, celebrated. Rather than reject their socially defined role as mothers, as wives, Latin American feminists may be understood as women acting to protect laws and conditions which threaten their ability to fulfill that role (1991:74).

On Marxian theory, see the discussion in Chapter 1. 32 Mesa-Lago (1978:3). See also Malloy (1979) and MacPherson and Midgley (1987). 33 For a detailed summary and chronology of individual country provisions for social insurance, see SSA (1992). On coverage in Cuba, see Mesa-Lago (1981). The Sandinistas implemented a universal health care system in 1980, but its efficacy was seriously limited by the war, and its political future is in 286

NOTES

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43

44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

question. On distributional inequities, see McGreevey (1990:2) and MesaLago (1991:363; 1985:1). McGreevey (1990:25). Mesa-Lago (1991:363). ILO (1992: Table 3). On women employees, see Anker and Hein (1986:71). Mesa-Lago (1985:1). See SSA (1992). While the summaries provided may oversimplify the picture, they provide die only basis for a comparative analysis. For a more detailed discussion, see Folbre (1992a). Only 2 of the 19 Latin American countries covered, or about 11 per cent, impose a lower eligibility requirement on women than on men workers. None of the Caribbean countries does. In Latin America, the exceptions are Belize, Colombia, Guyana, and Honduras. In the Caribbean only the Bahamas and Barbados impose similar conditions on widows and widowers. SSA (1992). Sometimes the phrase ‘same benefits as head of family’ is used, as in Nicaragua. It is unclear whether or not this applies if the covered worker is not the family head; women are seldom considered family heads if an adult male is present in the households, whether he is employed or not. Work Injury programs, like Old Age, Invalidity, and Death programs, are often characterized by gender bias in definition of survivor benefits. Of the 16 Latin American countries for which information on eligibility was relevant and available, all provided survivor benefits for a wife; 13, or 81 per cent, provided them for a ‘dependent invalid widower,’ but only 4 (Argentina, Brazil, Guyana, and Panama) provided them for the husband of a covered worker. Of the 9 Caribbean countries for which information on eligibility was relevant and available, all provided survivor benefits for a wife; 6, or 67 per cent, provided them for a ‘dependent invalid worker’ but only Saint Vincent and Trinidad and Tobago used gender-neutral language indicating that husbands are also eligible. ILO (1992: Table 10). See SSA (1992). On employers incentives, see Anker and Hein (1985). McGreevey (1990:2, 18); Grosh (1990). For a discussion of this debate, see Hartmann (1987). For a discussion of the concept of coercive pro-natalism, see Blake (1974). Caldwell (1982), Caldwell and Caldwell (1987). UNICEF (1989:88–9). Palloni and Wyrick (1981), UNICEF (1989). UNICEF (1989:88–9, 94–5). For historical figures for Northwestern Europe, see Chapter 4. For the United States in 1910, see Wagman (1991:111). Figures for the late 1970s and 1980s from ILO (1990: Table 2B). In the Bolivian highlands, for instance, rural families are smaller than urban ones. Where land ownership is highly fragmented and parcels are small, marriage and family formation tend to be delayed (CEPAL, 1986:90). Reinhardt (1988:215), Bourque and Warren (1981:89). Fyfe (1989:3, 158). The history of children’s economic contributions in Latin America has not yet received much attention. One indicator of its importance in the post-World War II period, however, is the age categories that national census bureaus selected to calculate the relative magnitudes of paid employment. In the United States and Europe after 1950, die base was the population aged 18+. In Argentina, the category 16+ was used; in Chile, 287

NOTES

56 57 58 59 60 61

62 63 64 65 66 67 68

69 70

71

Colombia, and Venezuela, 12+. In Guatemala, Bolivia, and Peru, the paid labor force was calculated as the percentage of the population aged 6+ or 7+ with paying jobs. Such broad categories clearly imply that census-takers expected individuals to enter remunerative employment at an early age. See CEPAL (1983:161). UNICEF (1989:100–1, Table 4). I am suggesting here an approach similar to that taken by Bowles and Gintis in their Schooling in Capitalist America (1976) but more attentive to race and gender interests and based on a more disaggregated analysis of class interests. See also Anker (1983). Bonilla (1990:233–6). Anker and Hein (1985:75, Table 1). The trend in women as a percentage of all employees, however, is not changing as rapidly as in most countries of Northwestern Europe, or in the United States, where it increased from 34 per cent in 1960 to 43.3 per cent in 1980. Among the countries of Latin America for which the International Labour Office provides data, changes over that time period were smaller, and in the case of Paraguay, negative (see Table 6.2). In the Caribbean, changes were also small except in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, two countries in which female-intensive export-oriented manufacturing boomed. Richard Anker and Catherine Hein observe that women’s share of all paid wage and salary workers decreased between 1960 and the 1970s or early 1980s in 5 out of the 9 countries for which data were available. The figures I present encompass a longer time period, using data from the 1950s and the late 1980s, where available. See Anker and Hein (1986:71). Lim (1986:88). Fernández-Kelly (1983:55). Standing (1989:1091). For words of caution regarding fears of ‘feminization,’ see Lim (1986) and Sen (1984). Anker and Hein (1985). Anker and Hein (1986:106). On Peru, see Kuznesof (1989:29); on Brazil, Pereira de Melo (1989:246); on Argentina, Gogna (1989:84). United Nations (1991:101, Table 7). Estimates from Peru in 1966 showed men and women with about equal amounts of leisure time. For a recent study of Peru, see Rosenhouse (1988). The value of unpaid housework in Chile in 1981 has been estimated at about 15 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (Pardo and Cruz 1983); in Venezuela in 1982, 22 per cent (Valecillos 1983). In countries with lower rates of female participation in paid labor, such as Bolivia or Peru, these shares would be significantly higher. See also the discussion in Bonilla (1990). For a discussion of domestic violence, see United Nations (1991:19–20). See United Nations (1989). On Mexico, see de la Paz (1988); on Colombia, Rico de Alonso (1985). Surveys conducted in the Dominican Republic also reveal substantial inaccuracies in surveys of family structure and marital status. A much larger percentage of men than women described themselves as separated or divorced. Men apparently preferred to describe themselves as single. See Pou et al. (1987:77). The Mexican census office has emphasized the underenumeration of female householders. Difficulties have also been noted in Colombia, where separated women less than 40 years old are likely to be registered as ‘daughters, not single’ rather than household heads, even when not living with their fathers. A recent study of Jamaica that focuses on headship per se finds that female288

NOTES

72

73 74

75 76

77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91

92

headed households are not significantly worse off than male-headed households, but in the sample population includes significant numbers of single households without children. See Louat, Grosh, and Van der Gaag (1992). For a summary of these studies, see ICRW (1989). For Brazil, see note directly below; for Chile, Vial (1989); for El Salvador, Balakrishnan and Firebaugh (1987) and Lastarría-Cornhiel (1988); for Guatemala, Engle (1989); for Mexico, Chant (1985) and de la Paz (1988); for Peru, Rosenhouse (1988); for Jamaica, Massiah (1983) and Bolles (1986); for the Dominican Republic, Gomez (1988). On Colombia, see Velez Bustillo and Kaufmann (1985). See Merrick and Schmink (1983), Ludwig (1985). On infant mortality, see Wood (1989). For the recent three-city survey, see Barros and Fox (1990). Calculations of the percentage of householders in consensual unions based on United Nations (1989:1156–95). On childhood years spent in households characterized by consensual unions, see Lloyd and Desai (1991) and Desai (1992). On legalization of consensual unions, see Goldman and Pebley (1981); on relative malnutrition, see Desai (1992); on Chile, see Buvinic (1992). Dwyer and Bruce (1988), Blumberg (1991). Chant’s (1985) survey of an urban shanty town in Mexico showed that per capita household income was distributed so much more equally in woman-headed households that members were actually better off despite lower overall family income. On Brazil, see Thomas (1990). For an excellent summary of the larger family research and policy issues, see Bruce and Lloyd (1992). On Mexico, see Brachet-Márquez (1992:41). Sternbach, et al. (1992:403). Jaquette (1989:4), Alvarez (1989). See also the writings of the Chilean feminist theorist, Julieta Kirkwood (1986, 1987a, 1987b). Quotation from Nazzari (1986:76), Stone (1981:151). Rico de Alonso (1985:57), Echeverry de Ferrufmo (1985:68). Comision de la Mujer (1985:82), Schuler (1986:227). Rodriguez (1987), Molyneux (1986:296; 1988; 1989). Ramirez (1987:13–15). Verucci (1991). On the law, see Cumper and Daly (1979). On enforcement, see Jackson (1982). On maternal responsibility, see Mason (1985). On actual size of contributions, see Bolles (1986:77). UNICEF (1989:102–3, Table 5). On feminist organizations and reproductive rights organizations, see Hartmann (1987:286–96, 352–5). Conference on Intra-Household Allocation, jointly sponsored by the Institute for Food Policy Research and the World Bank, Washington, DC, February 12–14, 1992. On the ‘basic needs’ strategy, see Streeten et al. (1981) and Streeten (1988). On social policies, see Dréze and Sen (1990). Elson (1991). On poverty levels, see Bonilla (1990:215); on cuts in social spending, see Pinstrup-Anderson, Jaramillo, and Stewart (1987). On Chile, see Raczynski (1988). On Jamaica, see Boyd (1987). See also the other essays in Cornia, Jolly, and Stewart (1987, 1988). Katzman (1992:85).

289

NOTES

7 CONCLUSION 1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9

On child poverty in the United States, see Fuchs and Reklis (1992) and Hewlett (1991). Planners did recognize that these policies limited the supply of female labor, but seemed to believe that the provision of child care and canteen facilities was adequate to solve the problem. See Lapidus (1978). It is sometimes argued that technological changes in housework did not make any difference, because hours devoted to housework remained unchanged. See, for instance, Strasser (1982) and Cowan (1983). This argument neglects the fact that the demand for high-quality household services was quite high, and increased as the price of providing these services declined. Housewives generally worked as many hours as before, but they produced much more per hour. I owe my understanding of this issue to many conversations with Lynn Duggan, as well as to her published and unpublished work (1992, 1993). Gilder (1973, 1981), Bloom (1987). Becker (1992:22). UNICEF (1989), Edelman (1987), Hewlett (1991), Kamerman (1984), Kamerman and Kahn (1988a, 1988b). My thinking about these issues has been greatly influenced by Betsy Hartmann’s Reproductive Rights and Wrongs (1987), which addresses these issues in more detail. Reich (1991).

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325

INDEX

Aaron, Henry 206 Abbott, Edith 187, 191 abortion 83; Latin America/Caribbean 230, 242, 244–5; Northwestern Europe 134, 152–3; reproductive choices 106–8, 110–11, 258–9; United States 170, 176 Addams, Jane 187 AFDC 116–17, 196, 200–3, 204 affirmative action 62–3, 243, 259 age 1–2;based constraints 6, 7, 54–60, 65–6, 68, 74–6, 78–9, 87;pyramid 123–4;in transition to capitalism 137–44;see also elderly agents 16–29, 49–50 agriculture 106–7, 108;slavery in 166–71, 173 Aid to Dependent Children programs 189, 198 Aid to Families with Dependent Children 116–17, 196, 200–3, 204 almshouses 193–4 altruism 23, 26, 64, 71–3, 75, 88, 108, 119, 170, 249–50 Alvarado, General Salvador 222 American Federation of Labor 178, 192, 195 American Women’s Suffrage Association 181 antebellum South 169–71 Anthony, Susan B. 178, 180–1, 221 anti-natalism 110 anti-trust laws 85 apartheid 58 apprenticeships 140, 143 ‘appropriate work’ 6 Aquinas, St Thomas 134

Argentine Association of University women 221 Asia 256 assets 40, 42–4, 48, 50–1, 54–8, 62– 5, 69, 130 Association for the Advancement of Women 181 Augustine, St 134 Aztecs 213 ‘bad’ structures 60–6 Bailey, William 185 Balch, Emily 185–6 Baldwin, Spencer 192 Baran, Paul 86 bargaining power 21, 30, 32, 45, 96,118, 138, 217;in family 23, 25– 6, 99, 100, 108–9, 190, 205, 219 Bebel, August 37, 151–2 Becker, Gary 25, 114, 257 Belaúnde, President 223 Bentham, Jeremy 17, 147, 149 Bergmann, Barbara 81 Besant, Annie 153 Beveridge, William 158 birth grants 158, 159 birth rates 245;race suicide 153, 184– 6; see also abortion;contraception; fertility;infant mortality;population growth Bishop, John 201 Blauner, Robert 60 Bloch, Marc 136 Bloom, Alan 98, 256 Blue Planet 10, 73 Bogachev, Nikolai 135 Bolsheviks 83 Booth, Charles 154, 193

326

INDEX

Boswell, John 135 Bosworth, Barry 206 Breckinridge, Sophonisba 187, 191 Brown, Carol 190 Bund für Mutterschutz 152 Bureau of Labor Statistics 187 Bureau of Public Assistance 198 bureaucratic state 44–5, 94 Burgdörfer, Friedrich 159 Burtless, Gary 206 Caldwell, John 230 Caldwell, Pat 230 capitalism 4, 94, 119; exploitation and 4, 30–1, 33–4, 44, 142; as social institution 44–7; social structures 30–1, 33–4, 36–8; structures of constraint 59–60, 80– 1, 84, 88; transition to (Latin America) 217, 220, 224 capitalism, transition to (Northwestern Europe) 8, 132;costs of children 142–4; early feminist movements 147–9; gender inequality 144–7; labor markets 140–2; patriarchal feudalism 133– 7; population growth 137–40; rethinking ‘transition’ 149–50 Caribbean (social reproduction) 8–9, 129, 211;colonialism/patriarchy 212–28; women’s dual roles 228–47 caring, cost of 164–5 Catholic Church 122, 141, 158, 213, 215, 220–3, 230, 261 Catt, Carrie Chapman 221, 222 Charity Organization Society 187 Chicago School 25 ‘child default’ 193 child quantity/quality 114–15, 260 child support 112, 258;Latin America/ Caribbean 241–2, 244–5; Northwestern Europe 162– 4;United States 203–4 childcare 96–8, 101–2, 258;cost 104– 5; family allowance and 157–62 children:dependence 75–6; employment 140–3, 146, 174–5, 189, 233– 4;infanticide 76–7, 106, 112, 134, 170;mortality rates 104, 170, 185, 189, 231;opportunity cost 20, 104–5, 107, 159, 205, 235;see also family allowances;illegitimate children

children (cost of) 1;Northwestern Europe 87–8, 142–4;patriarchal power and 104–16;socialization of 122, 256;United States 87–8, 174–7 Children’s Aid Society 175 Children’s Bureau 188–9 Children’s Defense Fund 206, 259 Chinese Communist Party 83 choice 4, 38–9;see also preferences; rational choice chosen group 49–50 Christian Democrats (Germany) 159 Christianity 133–5;see also Catholic Church citizenship 56, 62, 191, 262 Civil Code (Germany) 148 Civil Code (USA) 222 Civil Rights movement 62, 201 Civil War (USA) 176–7, 180, 187, 192, 194 class 4, 35, 43, 100;-based constraints 6, 7, 54, 57–60, 63, 65–6, 68, 78–81, 94; -centrism 31–2, 52, 83;conflict 1, 34, 118, 132, 184–5;consciousness 31, 57, 69, 82;natural selection 78– 81;relations 86–7, 139, 216, 219; structure 212; struggle 197, 242; in transition to capitalism 133–7; see also ruling class; working class Cloward, Richard 195 co-optation 69 coercion 4, 35, 42, 48, 49, 61, 110 Coleman, James 43 collective action 1, 4, 10, 16, 28, 140; feminist (USA) 179–82;and patriarchal power 99–101;role 5–7 collective action (and structures of constraint) 6–7, 51;definitions 53– 60;divided loyalties 52–70; modernizations and reforms 81–90; natural selection/cultural evolution 70–81 collective identities 4, 5, 16, 28–9; interests and institutions 38–50 collective power (role) 248 Collins, Patricia Hill 52 colonialism 83, 86–7, 122 colonialism (Latin America) 9, 211–12; conquistadores 213–16;demography and development 217–20;first-wave feminism 221–4;social insurance 224–8

327

INDEX

commodification 103, 116 Commons, John R. 185, 186 competing interests 52–70 competition 18, 28, 72, 73, 84–5, 100 ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ 56 Comstock, Anthony 176 conflicts and conjunctures 81–4 conquistadores (Latin America) 213–16 consensual unions 241, 243 constraint see structures of constraint contraception 83; Latin America and Caribbean 242, 245;Northwestern Europe 134, 152–3;reproductive choice 106–8, 110–11, 258– 9;United States 175–6, 182 corporatism 151, 152, 165, 211 Cortés, Hernán 213 cost-benefit analysis 89 costs:of caring 164–5;children see children (cost of);elderly 174–7; families 104–16;human capital 247; social reproduction 1–3, 59, 91, 124, 164–6, 217, 223, 247, 254 Council of the Indies 216 Council of Ministers 156 ‘creditur virgini’ doctrine 145 crowding hypothesis 101, 102 Crusades 134 cultural evolution 52;and natural selection 70–81 cultural norms 22, 27, 37, 40–4, 47– 8, 50–1, 54–9, 62–6, 69, 78, 99, 130, 164 custody 111–12, 149, 190, 203–4, 218 Davies, Hugh 161 debt (government) 116, 229, 246 decision rule 252 deconstruction theories 26 Deere, Carmen Diana 223 democracy 34, 36, 81–2, 85, 88–9, 212, 242 demography (Latin America) 217–20 dependence 75–6, 95–6 dependent’s benefit 199–200, 209 development (Latin America) 217–20 discrimination 18, 19, 21–2, 62–3, 69, 100 distributional coalitions 81–7 divided loyalties 52;‘bad’ structures 60–6;definitions 53–60;strategies 66–70

division of labor see sexual division of labor divorce 83, 118, 155–6, 163, 199, 244, 257; custody 111–12, 149, 190, 203–4, 218;see also singleparent families domestic service 140–1, 146–7, 177–8 domestic violence 201, 238 domination 52, 74, 79, 242 Douglass, Frederick 180 dual system model 38 DuBois, W.E.B. 173 Duggan, Lynn 160 Eagles 192, 197 East-West Institute 110 economic development 7–8, 125, 255–7 economic efficiency 4, 61, 62 economic growth, inequality and 84–8 economies of scale 46 economism 63, 66 Edgeworth, F.Y. 157 education 107, 109, 143, 148, 189– 90, 220, 222–3, 234–5, 258 efficiency 4, 61, 62, 70 Eisner, Robert 208 elderly 123–4;cost of 174–7;indigent 176–7, 192–5, 198;old age insurance 118, 120–1, 154–4, 176, 197–200, 202, 207–10, 226–7, 254 emigration 143–4 employees 231–3, 236, 237 employers 21, 145–6, 231–3, 236, 237 employment 259;occupational segregation 167, 169, 171–3, 177, 187–8, 228;paid, women and 98– 101; sexual division of labor 16, 104, 145, 169, 171, 172, 177– 9;self-employment 120, 231–3, 236, 237; workplace inequality 103–4;see also family labor;labor;women’s work employment (expansion) 92;family labor 96–8;inequality 103–4;rights 101–3;unproductive housewife 95– 6; woman and paid employment 98–101 encomiendas 214 Engels, Friedrich 29, 31, 36–7, 151 England, Paula 27–8 Englishwoman’s Journal 148 Epstein, Abraham 193

328

INDEX

equal opportunities 61–4, 70, 80, 88, 104, 115, 152, 252–3, 259 equal pay 94, 96 Equal Rights Amendment 55, 187 Equal Rights Association 180–1 ‘equalization funds’ 158 Escoffier, Jeffrey 66 Esping-Anderson, Gosta 165 eugenic movement 122, 153, 185 Europe see Northwestern Europe European Economic Commission 156 exceptionalism 129, 183, 196 exchange theory 30, 33, 35 exploitation 4, 30–5, 37, 44, 47, 70– 1, 75, 83, 142, 242 Fabian Society 151–2, 185, 187 Fabian Women’s Group 152 Factory Act (1819) 142–3 factory work 142–3, 146, 177–8, 236 false consciousness 5, 16, 34, 68, 251 families (growing cost) 104–16 family 125;bargaining 23, 25–6, 99, 108–9, 190, 205, 219;-based enterprise 233;changing definition 261;economy (New England) 167– 9;rights 242–5;size 111, 161, 174, 217, 260;as social institution 48– 9;structure (Latin America) 213– 16;see also single-parent families family allowances 121–3, 152, 227–8, 261;childcare and 157–62 Family Code (Cuba) 243 ‘family failure’ 117–19;social repercussions of 150–65 family labor 100, 103, 121, 258; importance 2–4, 92, 96–8;revalorization 114–16, 124 family law 147–8, 181, 259;patria potestas 113, 134, 136, 243–4 family leave (proposal) 259 family policy, political economy of 248; debate (viewpoints) 249–52; dilemmas 260–2;general principles 252–5;policy proposals 257–9;rethinking economic development 255–7 family transfers 117–19 family wage 95, 100, 121–2, 157, 178, 187, 191, 196, 199, 224 fathers 148;custody rights 111–12, 149, 190, 203–4, 218;family

deserted 247, 252;poverty 111– 13;single-parents 162;see also child support; patriarchy entries Federal Emergency Relief (USA) 195 Federation of Cuban Women 243 female-headed families 113–14, 162– 4, 189–91, 205, 239–42, 245, 260 feminism 1, 94–6, 250–2, 256;family rights and 242–5;first-wave 212, 221–4;maternalist 186–9, 191, 194–5, 206, 220, 223–4, 243;rational 25–9; social democracy and 151–4;socialist 4, 33, 36–8, 221–2, 223;structures of constraint 51–2, 83–4 feminist: collective action 6, 179–82; movements 147–9, 167;political economy 47–50 Feminist Leagues 222 feminist theory and political economy 4;agents 16–29;identities/interests and institutions 38–50;Marxian/ neoclassical theories 15– 17;structures 29–38 feminization process (industry) 236–7 Ferguson, Ann 37, 97 Fernandez-Kelly, Patricia 236 fertility 137;decline 104–8, 110–11, 113–15, 119–20, 123, 133, 144, 161, 165, 167, 174, 205, 229–31, 233–5; race suicide 153, 184–6;see also abortion;contraception feudalism 30, 45, 154;patriarchal 133–7, 149 Filmer, Sir Robert 135, 144 firms (as social institutions) 45–6 First International Feminist Congress 221 First International Workingmen’s Association 151 Fogel, Robert 169 food stamps 201, 202 foster care 175, 190 Fourier, Charles 148 Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth 171 franchise 25, 121–2, 153, 180–1, 183, 188, 190, 221, 223 Frank, Robert 26 Fraternal Order of the Eagles 192, 197 Frederick the Great 149 free rider problem 5, 16, 19, 28, 42, 68–9, 71 329

INDEX

Friedman, Milton 86 Friedman, Rose 86 Fuchs, Victor 98 ‘funds to parents’ (Illinois) 190, 191 game theory 2, 47, 50, 66 Gaskell, Peter 143 gender 1–2, 4, 247;-based constraints 6, 7, 54–5, 57–60, 62–3, 65–6, 68, 74, 76, 78–9, 87; inequality 98, 144–7; transition to capitalism 133–7, 144–9; see also men; women General Federation of Women’s Clubs 174, 188 Germany:Civil Code 148; unification 160, 163, 256 Ghiselin, Michael 71 Gilder, George 98, 256 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 96, 182 given group 49–50 Glass, David 159 Goldman, Emma 182 Grand Moral Union of the Working Classes of All Nations 146 Granovetter, Mark 39 Great Depression 8, 17, 158, 191, 195 Greenberg, David 135 Grimke, Angelina Emily 171 Grimke, Sarah 171, 182 Gross Company Product 45–6 groups: divided loyalties 52–70; selection 71–4; team strategies 66– 70; see also solidarity growth, inequality and 84–8 Gulf War (1991) 69 health insurance 258; United States 199, 201, 202, 207–8 Henry VIII 141 Hewlett, Sylvia 206, 208 hierarchical structure (firms) 46 Higgins, Alice 192–3 historical evidence 8–9, 129–31 history, early United States 182–3 Hitler, Adolf 152 HIV virus 242, 245, 261 Hochschild, Arlie 97–8 ‘home economics’ 25 homosexuals 48, 56, 92, 112, 121, 134, 148, 153, 156, 200, 244, 259, 261 hooks, bell 52

households: budgets 193; collective action 181–2; female-headed 113– 14, 162–4, 189–91, 205, 239–42, 245, 260; production (time) 93–4; sexual division of labor 4, 19, 21– 2, 48, 98, 177–9 housewife (role) 95–8 housing assistance 158–9, 163, 201, 202 Huerta, Victoriano 222 human capital 3, 33, 36 identities (interests and institutions) 38–50 ‘identity politics’ 36 illegitimate children 144–5, 150, 190, 218;mestizo race 9, 86, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 220, 224 Imperfectly Rational Somewhat Economic Persons (IRSEPs) 20–9, 39 Incas 213, 214 ‘independence effect’ 201 indigent elderly 176–7, 192–5, 198 individualism 186, 249, 255 individuation process 28 industrialization 177, 220, 236 inequality 61, 103–4; gender 98, 144– 7; growth and 84–8 infant mortality 104, 170, 185, 189, 231 infanticide 76, 77, 106, 112, 134, 170 ‘informal sector’ 230, 235–6 inheritance rights 217–18, 223, 243 institutionalist model 2, 23–4, 25, 38– 50 interdependant utilities 26 interest groups 25, 38–40, 49, 81–2, 85 interests 38–50 intergenerational relations 75–6, 108– 11, 117–19, 144 internal labor markets 100, 125 International Council of Women 221 International Labour Office 123, 155, 238 International Value of Children 110 International Woman Suffrage Alliance 221 International Women’s Day 242 International Workingmen’s Association 151 investment 85, 87 Iran 83

330

INDEX

IRSEPs 20–9, 39 Japanese model 256–7 Jevons, Stanley 17 joint utility function 25, 30, 72 Jones, Jacqueline 170 Joshi, Heather 161 Kaztman, Rubén 247 Kelley, Florence 186 Keynes, John Maynard 17, 89 Khomeini, Ayatollah 83 kin-community networks 97, 119 kinship 71–2, 73, 80 Knights of Labor 172, 181 Kyrk, Hazel 25, 96 labor:employees 231–3, 236, 237; expansion of wage employment 92– 104; family 2–4, 96–8, 114–16; human capital 3, 33, 36; mobility 140, 141; self-employment 120, 231–3, 236, 237; theory of value 30, 31, 32, 33; see also division of labor labor markets: expansion 140–2; internal 100, 125 labor time (allocation) 93 ‘Ladies of Langham Place’ 148 land reforms 223 las castas 214–15, 216 Laslett, Peter 136 Latin America (social reproduction) 8–9, 129, 211;colonialism/ patriarchy 212–28; women’s dual roles 228–47 Law of Domestic Relations 222 ‘laws of motion’ 51, 60 Lenin, Vladimir 32 Leo XIII, Pope 157 lesbian women 56, 92, 112, 121, 156, 200, 259, 261 Ley de Alimentos 244 Lim, Linda 236 living standards, 84, 86, 88–9, 115, 139, 163, 189, 192, 229, 254 Locke, John 142, 144 London School of Economics 187 Luther, Martin 139 Luxembourg Income Study 163–4 McCrate, Elaine 27 Maclean, Annie 186

Malleus Maleficarum 138 Malthusian population 229 Mandeville, Bernard de 26 maquiladoras 236 ‘market economies’ 33, 84 ‘market failure’ 116, 117–18 market socialism 64 markets 21;expansion (USA) 171–4; and growth 84–8; social reproduction and 88–90 marriage:consensual unions as 241, 243;contract 136–7; dependent’s benefit 199–200, 209; legacy of conquest (Latin America) 213–16, 217; patterns 138–9, 141, 144–5; see also divorce Married Women’s Property Acts 148, 181 Marshall, Alfred 17, 157 Marx, Karl 7, 29–33, 35–7, 47, 142, 151 Marxian theory 4, 15–17, 94, 129, 132, 195, 249;collective identity 38–50; neo-Marxism 32–6, 38–9, 44, 47, 49, 52;socialist feminism 36–8; of structures 29–38; structures of constraint 51–2, 54, 57, 61, 63, 66–7, 70, 81, 83, 86 Massachusetts study 194 maternalism 186–9, 191, 194–5, 206, 220, 223–4, 243 maternity benefits 159, 228 maternity leave 158, 161–2, 223, 226, 228, 237 ‘matrix of domination’ 52 Mayans 213, 214 Medicare/Medicaid 199, 201, 202 Meek, Ronald 32 Meiji Restoration 86 ‘memes’ 72, 73, 74 men:responsibilities 101–3; see also fathers; patriarchy entries meritocracy 81, 88 Mesa-Lago, Carmelo 224, 226 mestizo race 9, 86, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 220, 224 meta-preferences 22, 42–3 migration 143–4, 166, 171–2, 183, 184–5, 210 Mill, James 17, 25 Mill, John Stuart 25, 63, 147 mode of production 17, 36, 51, 52

331

INDEX

modernization 20, 103, 123 modernizations and reforms: conflicts and conjectures 81–4; inequality and growth 84–8; markets, states and social reproduction 88–90 Moeller, Robert 159 moral hazard 119 Morrissey, Marietta 215 mortality levels 137;infant mortality 104, 170, 185, 189, 231 mothers: dual role (Latin America and Caribbean) 228–47; endowment of motherhood 152, 185–6, 187; pauperization 196, 204–6; pensions 187–9, 194, 195; poverty 111–13 single (female-headed households) 113–14, 162–4, 189– 91, 205, 239–42, 245, 260;widows 155–6, 158, 189, 191, 202, 226–7 multi-dimensional analysis 55, 56, 57, 66, 70 multi-systems approach 52–3, 55 Myrdal, Alva 120, 153 Myrdal, Gunnar 153 nation: -based constraints 6, 7, 54, 56–60, 65–6, 68, 78–81; natural selection 78–81 nation-states 56, 78–81, 261–2 National American Woman Suffrage Asosciation 174, 221 National Assembly (France) 152 National Association of Club Women 174 National Civic Federation Study 194 National Congress of Mothers 188 National Labor Union Conference 178 National Socialists 152–3 National Trades Union (USA) 172 National Typographers Union 178 National Women’s Congress 222 National Women’s Party 187 nationalism 31, 83, 122 natural environment 88–9 ‘natural fertility’ 77 natural selection and cultural evolution 70;group selection 71–4; nation, race and class 78–81; origins of patriarchy 74–8 ‘negative income tax’ 201 neo-Marxian theory 32–6, 38–9, 44, 47, 49,52

neoclassical theories 4–6, 15, 92–3, 104, 116, 129, 132;of agents 16– 18, 22–5, 29;collective identity 38– 50; institutionalism 23–5, 28, 32, 35, 38–9, 46–7, 49, 51;structures of constraint 17, 61–2, 67, 70, 249 New Deal 191 New England 167–9 non-married couples 56, 92, 112, 121, 156, 200–1, 241, 243, 259 norms 22, 27, 37, 40–4, 47–8, 50–1, 54–9, 62–6, 69, 78, 99, 130, 164 Northwestern Europe 210;capitalist transition 8, 132, 133–50;social democracy/welfare state 8, 150–65 objective interests 251 occupational segregation 167, 169, 171–3, 177, 187, 188, 228 Okin, Susan Moller 64 old age insurance 118, 120–1, 154–6, 176, 197–200, 202, 207–10, 226– 7, 254 Olson, Mancur 85, 87 opportunism, exploitation and 71 opportunity cost of children 20, 104– 5, 107, 159, 205, 235 Owen, Robert 142 parents:‘leave’ 161–2; poverty 111– 13; power 75–6; see also fathers; mothers paternalism 149, 224 patria potestas doctrine 113, 134, 136, 243–4 patriarchal:capitalism 149; feudalism 133–7, 149; norms 146; power 1, 129, 132, 249 patriarchal power (persistence) 7–8, 91; growing cost of families 104–16; wage employment (expansion) 92– 104;welfare states (emergence) 116–25 patriarchal power (United States): antebellum South 169–71;cost of children/elderly 174–7; early history 182–3; family economy 167–9; feminist collective action 179–82; markets (expansion) 171–4; new sexual division of labor 177–9 patriarchy 4, 6, 31, 37–8, 59–60, 68, 81, 87, 108, 138–9, 250;origins 70, 74–8 332

INDEX

pauperization of motherhood 196, 204–6 Pearce, Diana 203 pensions 118, 120–1, 154–6, 176, 197–200, 202, 207–10, 226–7, 254 Petty, Sir William 95 Pierce, Melusina 181 Piven, Frances 195 plague 137, 138, 139 policy proposals 257–9; difficulties and dilemmas 260–2 political economy 91, 95;of family policy 248–62;feminist theory and 4, 15–50 political rules 4, 40–4, 47–8, 50–1, 54–8, 63–6, 69, 130 Poor Act (1601) 141 Poor Law Commission 145 population, poverty and 229–35 population growth 75–7, 106–7, 122, 217, 260–1;transition to capitalism 137–40 Portuguese Overseas Council 216 postmodernism 17, 26 poverty 150, 154, 164, 167–8, 246;Aid to Families with Dependent Children 116–17, 196, 200–3, 204; parenthood and 111– 13; pauperization of motherhood 196, 204–6;population and (Latin America/Caribbean) 229–35 power 54–5, 57, 60, 66 preferences 40, 42–4, 47–51, 54–9, 62–6, 69, 130 pressure groups 224 Preston, Samuel 209 primogeniture 139 Prisoner’s Dilemma 67, 252 pro-family values 261 pro-natalism 76–7, 92, 106, 108, 110, 115, 122, 134, 138, 149, 230, 233 production 37–8;modes 17, 36, 51, 52; social reproduction and 1, 60 productivity 84–5, 87, 100 profits 18, 34, 85 Progressive Era (USA) 167, 183, 184, 186–9, 194, 195 proletarianization 31, 92, 103, 142, 231, 236 property rights 4, 20, 31, 45, 47, 77, 85, 100, 132, 147–8, 180, 218 proto-nations (tribes) 75–6, 78–9, 81

Puerto, Felipe Carrillo 222 Puritan Revolution 144 ‘purposeful choice’ 28–9 race 1, 200–1, 202;-based constraints 6, 7, 54, 56–60, 62–3, 65–6, 68, 78–81; natural selection 78–81;and racism 18, 173–4, 185; see also slavery race suicide 153, 184–6 radical feminism 74 radical liberalism 64 Ransom, Roger 173 Rathbone, Eleanor 158 rational choice 4, 5, 17, 32–3; IRSEPs 20–9, 39;REMs 18–23, 25–7, 66, 71–2, 77, 89 ‘rational choice exploitation’ 32 333 Rational Economic Man 18–23, 25–7, 66, 71–2, 77, 89 rational feminism 25–9 Rawls, John 64 Reagan administration 207 reciprocity 41, 42, 71, 72, 250 Reconstruction era 173 Reform Act (1832) 180 reforms see modernizations and reforms Reich, Robert 80, 262 Reid, Margaret 25, 96 Rein, Martin 164 REMs 18–23, 25–7, 66, 71–2, 77, 89 rent-seeking 2, 44, 46, 47, 116 reproductive choices 106–8, 110–11, 152–3, 175, 230, 245, 258–9, 260–1 Republican Civil Code 222 research proposals 255–7 residual claimants 46 retaliation 68, 70, 252, 253 revisionism 32–6, 130 revolution see modernizations and reforms Ricardo, David 30 Rich, Adrienne 56 Ritter, Gretchen 188 Roemer, John 33, 63 Roman empire 133–4 Roosevelt, Theodore 184 Ross, Edward A. 185, 186 Rowntree, Seebohm 157 rules 4, 40–4, 47–8, 50–1, 54–8, 63– 6, 69, 130 ruling class 30, 80, 83, 86, 137

333

INDEX

Ryder, Norman 208 Sandinistas 243–4 Sanger, Margaret 182, 186 Schumpeter, Joseph 119 Seccombe, Wally 139 self-employment 120, 231–3, 236, 237 self-interest 4, 5, 17–18, 21–2, 25–7, 37, 48, 58, 64, 69, 71, 75–6, 78, 89–90, 99, 108, 119, 249, 251 selfishness 22, 23, 26–7, 28 Sen, Amartya 26, 64 Seneca Falls meeting (1848) 180 service sector 3, 140–1, 146–7, 177–8 ‘sex-role caste system’ 81 sexual division of labor:in employment 16, 104, 145, 169, 171–2, 177–9;household 4, 19, 21–2, 48, 98, 177–9; new 177–9 sexual preference-based constraints 6, 7, 54, 56–60, 65–6, 68, 74, 77–8, 87 Shah of Iran 83 Sheppard-Towner Act 188, 198 Sickness and Maternity programs 227 single-interest theories 67–8 single-parent families 113–14, 162–4, 189–91, 205, 239–42, 245, 260 skills 40, 101–2 Skocpol, Theda 188, 195 slavery 79, 134, 137, 166–7, 169–71, 173, 215, 220 Smeeding, Timothy 164, 208 Smith, Adam 26, 95 social capital 43 social categories 39 social conflict 66 social control 79 social democracy 8, 187–8, 249, 252 social democracy (and European welfare state) 129, 150;cost of caring 164–5; emergence of 151–4; family allowances/childcare 157– 62; old age insurance 154–6; single-parent family 162–4 social evolution 47, 51, 81 ‘social family’ 166, 183, 197 social identity 38–50, 58 social institutions 51, 65, 72–6; identities/interests 38–50; neoclassical institutionalism 23–5, 38, 39 social insurance 119–21, 123, 258;Latin America 212–13, 224–8 social relations of production 7, 92

social reproduction 4;costs 1, 2, 3, 59, 91, 124, 164–6, 217, 223, 247, 254; markets and states 88–90; organization of 10, 56, 71, 77, 85, 157, 169, 210;production and 1, 60 social reproduction (concepts of): collective action 7, 51–90; feminist theory 4, 15–50; patriarchal power 7–8, 91–125 social reproduction (histories of) 129– 31; Latin America/Caribbean 211– 47;Northwestern Europe 132– 65;political economy of family policy 248–62;United States 166–210 social responsibility 78, 152, 153, 254–5 social security 8, 108, 116–17, 120; family allowances 121–3, 157–62, 227; problems (USA) 206–10;welfare policy after 1935 (USA) 196–210 Social Security Act (1935) 167, 196–200 social spending 246–7, 254–5; emergence 150–65;welfare states (emergence) 116–25 social structures 29–38 social wage 122 social welfare (distribution) 108–11 social welfare policy, early (USA) 183; indigent elderly 192–5;lone mothers 189–91; maternalism 186– 9; ‘race suicide’ 184–6; women and welfare state 195–6 socialism 31–2, 44, 60–1, 64, 80, 83, 88, 91–2, 147–8, 183, 186, 250, 255–6 socialist feminism 4, 33, 36–8, 221–3 socialization 27, 28, 122, 256 Society for Promoting the Employment of Women 148 sociobiology 70–3, 74 solidarity 22, 41–2, 44, 89, 99–100, 249 South Africa (apartheid) 58 Spencer, Herbert 122 Squier, Lee 193 Standing, Guy 236–7 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady 25, 180–1 state 30, 34;bureaucratic 44–5, 94; failure 118;planning 255–6; social reproduction and 88–90 Statute of Artificers 140 Stocker, Helene 152 strategies (collective action) 5, 66–70 structural adjustment 116, 229, 246 ‘structural factors’ 49

334

INDEX

structures 29–38 structures of constraint 17, 108, 130, 249–50, 252, 255 structures of constraint (and collective action) 6–7, 51; definitions 53–60; divided loyalties 52–70; natural selection/cultural evolution 70–81; reforms and modernizations 81–90 suffrage 25, 121–2, 153, 180–1, 183, 188, 190, 221, 223 Sutch, Richard 173 taxation 207–8, 225–6, 255;benefits and 198, 199, 200; credits 158, 163, 257 Taylor, Harriet 70, 147 team strategies (collective action) 66–70 technological change 76–7, 80, 92, 94 technological factors (reproductive choice) 106–8 Terrell, Mary Church 174 Third World 33, 52 Thompson, William 36–7, 63, 110, 147 Thurow, Lester 88 time-use studies 97, 238 Tit for Tat strategy 68, 70, 252, 253 Torrey, Barbara 164 Townsend Plan/Clubs 197 trade unions 140, 145, 155, 157–8, 172, 178, 181, 183, 185–6, 192, 196, 222–3 transaction costs 46 tribes (proto-nations) 75–6, 78–9, 81 Truman, Harry S. 199 Ullmann-Margalit, Edna 42 underdevelopment (Latin America) 129 underemployment 234 unemployment 118, 164, 195, 201–2, 234, 235, 246 United Nations 113, 238, 239, 247, 259 United States 8–9, 129;family divided (early welfare policy) 183–96; partriarchal power 167–83; welfare policy (after 1935) 196–210 unproductive housewife 95–6 Ure, Andrew 146 utility function 18, 25, 30, 42, 72 utility maximization 23, 32 Utopian socialism 148, 250 value, labor theory of 30, 31, 32, 33 values 10–11 Voltaire 45 wage employment see employment

wages 85, 87, 141, 142;equal pay 94, 96; family wage 95, 100, 121–2, 157, 178, 187, 191, 196, 199, 224; gender differential 18–19, 101–3, 136, 138, 146, 170, 238;labor theory of value 30, 31, 32, 33 Walker, Francis 184–5, 186 Walras, Léon 17 Webb, Beatrice 158, 187 Webb, Sidney 187 welfare policy, US (after 1935) 196; Aid to Families with Dependent Children 200–3; child support 203–4; comparative perspective 210; pauperization of motherhood 204–6; social security (problems) 206–10; Social Security Act (1935) 197–200 welfare state 3; Europe 150–65; United States 195–6 welfare states (emergence) 116–25 Westernization policies 83 Wheeler, Anna 36–7, 147 widows 155–6, 158, 189, 191, 202, 226–7; see also single-parent families William the Conquereor 135 Wilson, David Sloan 72–3 Wilson, Edward O. 72 witchcraft 138, 139 Wollstonecraft, Mary 147 women 70; clubs 174, 188, 192; dual roles 228–47; female-headed household 113–14, 162–4, 189–91, 205, 239–42, 245, 260; maternalism 186–9, 191, 194–5, 206, 220, 223–4, 243; paid work 98–101; right 101–3; unproductive housewife 95–6; welfare state and 195–6; see also mothers; widows Women’s Trade Union league 181 women’s work 145–6; family labor 2– 4, 96–8, 114–16; Latin America and Caribbean 235–9 ‘workfare’ requirement 201–2 working class 30, 34, 85, 146 Working Women’s Association 181 Works Progress Administration 191 World Bank 116, 228, 246 Wren, Christopher 5, 58 Wright, Carroll 178–9 Young, Iris 64 Zetkin, Clara 152

335