Welfare Feminism in Britain - Essay Example

Running Head: Critically examine the role of welfare feminism in the history of the Welfare in Britain Critically examine the role of welfare feminism in the history of the welfare state in Britain By ____________________ A welfare state has enabled us to define feminism while remaining in the boundaries of welfare policies, where we can see feminist in the form of wife, sister and daughter and above all a mother. If we analyse woman in the light of sociological perspective, we would come to know the ways in which she has survived throughout the history of the welfare state in Britain, all those ways has always kept her in a limited sphere, and that sphere is the family. It is difficult for us to perceive woman's role as a 'job' because of the surroundings in which it takes place, particularly the family. The institution of the family in modern, post-war society has been subjected to much sociological and psychological examination. During the past seven years it has also been a focus of controversy on the political Left, amongst feminists, socialists, and radicals of all kinds. It has come under attack; it has been defended. Often this debate, originally political, has taken on a highly moralistic flavour, and while it is true that political passions are, ultimately, moral passions, morals about the family has all too often prevented a constructive analysis of this institution as it exists in our contemporary society. Yet it is not hard to understand why the subject should arouse passion; the same reason makes it hard to perceive woman's role within it. (Wilson, 1977, p. 8) A woman has always been subjected to physical care that is mediated by means of on-going emotional and physical relationships of the most intense kind; whether sexual or parental, a woman in particular are reared almost from birth, certainly from early childhood, to conceive of happiness and emotional fulfilment in terms of their future relationship with husband and children. To many it therefore seems alien or even blasphemous to discuss these relationships as jobs undertaken for the capitalist State. Nonetheless, such is the peculiar nature of the family. It plays what is in many ways a repressive role on behalf of the State, not only psychologically but also at the level of economic functioning, and yet at the same time offers the individual a unique opportunity for intimacy, comfort, and emotional support. According to Juliet Mitchell (1971) the individualistic competitiveness of the wider modern society is truly a 'prison of love' for woman. And the Welfare State has always been closely connected with the development of the family and has acted to reinforce and support it in significant ways. (Basch, 1974, p. 79) This it has done by offering various forms of service, both in money and in kind, and also by means of forms of social control and ideology. Thus the Welfare State is not just a set of services, it is also a set of ideas about women's role in society, in family, and not least important socially. In Victorian society women were, for the first time, valuable because they did not work. It was her status as a non-worker that gave woman as wife and mother a very special ideological role. The single woman was society's reject, for celibacy was not highly valued (so that the attempts within the Church of England to start religious orders for women could be seen as radical) while the fallen woman's lot was to be completely outcast (Basch, 1974, p. 81). Yet work had to be found for the army of surplus middle-class spinsters and to them fell the task of teaching their impoverished married sisters how to be better wives and mothers. So grew up a paradoxical situation that still marks social work today; whereby middle-class women with no direct experience of marriage and motherhood themselves took on the social task of teaching marriage and motherhood to working-class women who were widely believed to be ignorant and lacking when it came to their domestic tasks. (Wilson, 1977, p. 44) Difference between working-class women and a minority of professional women, suggests different aspects of the articulate and trained women, who could be bought off at the expense of the majority. Yet one aspect of the dual role operates against this. Audrey Wise (1972) has suggested that one reason for female apathy about equal pay is that women workers have seen how men in exchange for high wages have accepted grueling conditions of work, productivity deals, and increased exploitation in all its forms, and do not themselves wish to pay this price. Women tend more towards issues related to the social conditions of work; adequate canteen and toilet facilities, rest periods, and child care provision. (Wilson, 1977, p. 79) Equally women employed in the professions tend to seek work they enjoy and are not necessarily so anxious to reach the heights of the profession, as are men. There are many reasons for this, including economic need and socialization, but it means that women can be a progressive influence within the unions. The Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination Acts offer opportunities for struggle that will keep to the forefront the situation of the more exploited women in the economy. The fight for the acceptance of the Working Women's Charter has led to new issues being raised in the unions and this heightened consciousness amongst many women in the labour movement must lessen the possibility of a split along class in the sociological rather than Marxist sense lines. (Wilson, 1977, p. 81) The British Welfare State has been copiously discussed since its beginnings. Its impact on the family, its impact on the working class, sometimes its impact on the middle class, have been examined, and there has been frequent discussion of its relationship to socialism. What has never been discussed is its impact on women. Yet women are central to its purposes, and it has always cast its safety net around the housewife and mother in her home. Even the feminist pioneers seem for the most part to have perceived their work as an effort to enable women more happily to undertake motherhood by being freed from economic and social stress. (Wilson, 1977, p. 170) Poultanzas (1975) has also discussed class in relation to politics and in particular the nature of classes in modern, advanced capitalist societies. The relationship of women to the class structure is a complex one, which he has by no means fully explored, at times usage of the word 'class' in the sociological sense, means class as defined by occupation, at times in the Marxist sense to denote the relationship of the individual to the means of production. The position of the Women's Movement as regards its class structure is ambiguous. The attacks on it made by traditional economist socialists have tended to brand it as 'middle-class' (in the sociological sense) whereas it should probably more correctly be seen as a petty-bourgeois movement, although one that is more wholly progressive than the connotations of 'petty-bourgeois' might suggest. The whole question is too important to be dealt with here, but it is certainly the case that both Marxists and sociologists in their discussions of class have tended to ignore women who once again have been defined merely by their husband's position. (Wilson, 1977, p. 187) Living standards consciousness was awakened in Britain during the 1950's when some aspects of the history and culture of gender revealed the relationship between gender and class and attracted scholarly attention. The value of Hart's contribution is in its insistence that gender and class were interconnected in the fifties. Its specific arguments overstate the gender convergence of the fifties. The growth of part-time work for women certainly offered material gains for women, but in other spheres, at the same time it was hard to see a clear empirical case for any convergence between male and female workers. This is particularly true in terms of the wage differential between men and women. If we look at the period between 1924 and 1970, the largest gap between male and female earnings came in 1940, when women earned 42% of men's wages; the smallest difference came in 1946, when women earned 55% of men's wages. The average wage differential was fairly consistent at approximately 50.4%. (Brooke, 2001, p. 773) Feminist when studied from a psychological point of view revealed different frameworks and approaches. Examining feminist with community determined the implicit assumptions embedded in traditional psychological research and theory. Perhaps one of their most fundamental and important shared concerns is the relationship between epistemology and methodology. Theories of philosophical perspectives, however implicit about what constitutes knowledge ground and to a large extent determine the methods that we use to gather our data. In contrast to traditional psychology, feminist and community psychology have paid special attention to the role that the values, biases, and assumptions of the researcher have on all aspects of the research process (Cosgrove & Mchugh, 2000, p. 815) Feminist research recognizes that as a result of unexamined androcentric biases at both the epistemological and methodological level, women's experiences have been marginalized and pathologised. Feminist researchers have challenged the implicit values in traditional research that render women in a different sense and conflate difference with deficiency. However, substituting a gynocentric position, which privileges a distinctly feminine voice, way of being, knowing, or solving moral dilemmas, continues to reify the categories "men" and "women." According to Cosgrove and Mchugh (2000) "our attempts to correct psychology's androcentric perspective, we must avoid retelling the same story that essentializes masculinity and femininity". (Cosgrove & Mchugh, 2000, p. 87) Cosgrove and Mchugh further said, "A simplistic approach to feminist research is that it is research by, about, and for women. Clearly, however, not all research by or about women is feminist, and research conducted by and about men may be feminist. We believe feminist research examines the gendered context of women's lives, exposes gender inequalities, empowers women, advocates for social change, and/or improves the status or material reality of women's lives. In an essay examining primatology as a feminist science, Fedigan (1997) outlines six features of feminist science: reflexivity (i.e., the acknowledgement of the influence of contextual values on the scientific enterprise and of the values and assumptions of the researcher); the goal of empowering women by understanding the world from a woman's perspective; a reconceptualization of the natural world as active, complex, and holistic (as opposed to reductionistic, compartmentalized, and simplistic models); the view and use of scientific knowledge as a liberating force and solution oriented; and a scientific community that is itself accessible, cooperative, and egalitarian. It is exciting, and perhaps not that surprising, that our review of the research on feminist science resulted in a similar dimensional analysis". (Cosgrove & McHugh, 2000, p. 815). The notion of group rights in the welfare context for women, which is sometimes expressed as the rights of the community to self-determination, has gained some currency in recent years. A group in this context may be created by religious, racial, linguistic, ethnic, or other traditional identities that define the nature of social collectivities within national boundaries. Interposed between the individual and the state, a community may represent itself as an interest group in the politics of national policy-making. It also imposes expectations on the behavior of group members, some of which are likely to violate members' basic human rights. Such expectations are often pronatalist both in intent and outcome, in part because they are so often fired by religious injunctions or ethnic rivalries. Proscriptions against certain forms of sexual expression or birth control, expectations of early and universal marriage for girls, restrictions on the physical movement and social roles of girls and women, economic discrimination resulting in female dependency, prohibitions on divorce or the encouragement of polygyny, strong social incentives for the birth of children, especially sons, and so on, all create conditions favoring if not requiring high fertility. Cultural prescriptions such as these can be as coercive as official population policies or even more so in limiting the range of individual choice. The struggle to establish individual rights thus confronts both group and national claims. (Mueller, 1993, p. 22) Perhaps the most fundamental threat to women's right to self-determination is the patriarchal family system. Patriarchal institutions are systems of social relations by which the old dominate the young, men dominate women, and those at the center of male descent lines dominate "outsiders" who marry or are adopted into the lineage. To varying degrees in different settings, patriarchal family and community systems impose the collective wills of their older and more powerful members on girls and women (as well as on boys and young men). Social institutions are structured in ways that perpetuate the gender and class or caste-based division of labor, reinforce beliefs in female inferiority, and impose behavioral rules that curtail women's abilities to exercise those basic human rights to which they are, in principle, entitled (Mies, 1986, p. 34). Generational hierarchies, gender hierarchies, and lineage hierarchies are the building blocks of patriarchal family (and community) systems in Britain. Patriarchy has both a material base and an ideological justification. The material base involves, to varying degrees, control by elder male heads of a lineage, extended family, and/or household, or by the male in a couple, over the means of production and reproduction, that is, over valued property (especially land, livestock, capital) and its uses; over female labor and its returns; and over the circumstances under which female members enter and leave sexual unions and have children. The ideological justification consists of assertions in various forms of the 'natural' or 'divine' origins of filial obligation, male dominance, and female subordination, and their expression in legal and moral codes of behavior. Patriarchal ideologies can wield considerable influence independent of a material base, for instance by mandating female seclusion as a symbol of family honor even among resource-poor households, or by convincing girls and women that their paid or unpaid work has little value even if it contributes significantly to family and community welfare. (Mueller, 1993, p. 34) The dilemma of women's health advocates in Britain who are caught between the ideologies of population controllers and of nationalist and religious pronatalist movements. Womens' organizations have tried in various ways, some successful and some not, to influence or challenge the population policies of Britain as democratization has opened up new avenues of political engagement. The possibilities of extending comprehensive reproductive health services to women as a basic entitlement have been tempered by the harsh realities of economic austerity as well as by political resistance from conservative sources. Feminists are struggling to identify key issues and programs that will reflect their own sense of priorities rather than those of national political parties and elites, powerful religious institutions, and the international population establishment. They are also developing a unique feminist identity, which, on some political issues, sets them apart from or even in opposition to many feminists in the north. Histories of colonialism, imperialism, racism, and economic exploitation that have produced glaring international disparities in power, privilege, and wealth are far too powerful to be ignored. (Mueller, 1994, p. 54) A major challenge to the global women's movement is to transcend these geopolitical divides in the defense of women's reproductive health and rights. Nineteenth-century bourgeois feminists remained suspicious of those advocates of artificial contraception who, it seemed, were men concerned primarily with their own sexual pleasures. Feminism was not a causal factor in the advent of family planning in Victorian England. Rather, it was the neo-Malthusian crusade combined with socioeconomic changes, especially in the middle classes of England, that appeared to be primarily responsible for the spreading practice of family limitation. (Banks, 1954) Feminism, women's rights, birth control, population control: they are all social movements engaged in political action to promote specific policy agendas. Connected in complex and sometimes combative ways with one another, they are also involved in collaborative or antagonistic relationships with other social/political movements: with liberalism, radicalism, and socialism, for example, and with ethnic and state nationalism and religious fundamentalism. The ideas of these and other movements compete in a clash of contradictory ideologies backed by interest groups with varying degrees of power. Competing claims often incorporate the control of women's bodies and women's lives as symbols of group power. In the midst of antinatalist and pronatalist agendas, feminists claim the right to control their own bodies and their own lives. (Kent Kingsley Susan, 1999, p. 31) The most important issue of feminism in Britain today, 'demand for birth control', divided the socialist movement, however, particularly in Europe where many socialists adhered to an orthodox line. Some birth control opponents spoke from a position of ideological purity: family limitation was reformist, they argued; moreover, it sacrificed the collective and revolutionary interests of the working classes to the personal interests of the individual. Excessive individualism was causing dangerous declines in birth rates, which threatened the future of socialism. Other opponents disassociated themselves from the economic theories and reformist politics of the neo-Malthusians and from the anarchists, whose advocacy of birth control rooted in hostility to the state and the bourgeois family carried a strong (and not at all respectable) element of sexual liberation. Feminists found themselves torn between their advocacy of reproductive control for all women and their distaste for the anti-feminist methods and neo-Malthusian motives of the population control movement. Many feminists have also been uneasy with the single-issue politics of the abortion movement, insisting that greater attention must be paid to winning grass roots support for a full range of reproductive (and economic and social) rights and freedom. (Kent Kingsley Susan, 1999, p. 47) References Banks J. A. 1954. "Prosperity and Parenthood: A Study of Family Planning Among the Victorian Middle Classes"(London: International Library of Sociology and Social Reconstruction). BASCH, F. (1974) Relative Creatures, Victorian Women in Society and the Novel, 1837-1876. London: Allen Lane. Brooke Stephen, 2001. "GENDER AND WORKING CLASS IDENTITY IN BRITAIN DURING THE 1950s" in "Journal of Social History". Volume: 34. Issue: 4. Page Number: 773. COPYRIGHT 2001 Journal of Social History; Cosgrove Lisa & Mchugh C. Maureen, 2000. "Speaking for Ourselves: Feminist Methods and Community Psychology".in "American Journal of Community Psychology". Volume: 28. Issue: 6. Page Number: 815. COPYRIGHT 2000 Plenum Publishing Corporation Kent Kingsley Susan, 1999. "Gender and Power in Britain, 1640-1990". Westport :CT Mies Maria, 1986. "Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale" (London: Zed Books). Mueller Dixon Ruth, 1993. "Population Policy & Women's Rights: Transforming Reproductive Choice": Praeger. Place of Publication: Westport, CT. Wilson Elizabeth, 1977. "Women & the Welfare State": Tavistock Routledge. Place of Publication: London. Read More