Feminist contributions

The neutral state

Liberal feminists have conceptualized the state as a neutral arbiter between different interest groups in a way that comes close to pluralist state theories (see Chapter 1).

Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique (1962) illustrates some implications of the liberal feminist perspective. Friedan passionately critiqued women’s position in 1960s America and argued that women must enter the public and governmental arena and fight for legislation. For her, the full participation of women in society was dependent on making the differences between the sexes irrelevant. She argued that emphasizing the differences between men and women worked against women’s equality. For Friedan then, feminism signified first and foremost advancing and strengthening the formal rights of women.

Another liberal feminist, Susan Moller Okin, argued that the liberal models of justice had to be extended from the sphere of the benign state to the sphere of the family. Okin argued that the family was a major site of unequal relations and a source of unequal opportunities (1989: 170).

Liberal feminist ideas have been influential in policy terms. The concepts of equality and universality - both the embodiment of liberal theories - remain central in public debates surrounding equal pay, quotas and citizenship in Western countries, and are powerful tools for demanding entry for women to the male dominated state institutions. In sum, liberal feminists have provided a series of important and influential ideas about justice that continue to be employed in feminist debates.

The patriarchal state

Radical, Marxist and socialist feminist analyses of the state presented a fundamental critique of the notion of state in general and of the liberal feminist notion of the neutral state in particular. These approaches reflected the rise of so-called second wave feminism in the 1960s. This challenged liberal feminism. The radical nature of second-wave feminism was sympto­matic of the disillusionment with liberal feminist politics. The period was important in changing feminist understandings of the concepts of politics, state, patriarchy and gender.

Radical feminists defined the state in terms of its patriarchal nature. With Kate Millett, the concept of patriarchy acquired a new meaning (1970). Until her Sexual Politics, patriarchy had signified the rule of the father or the rule of the head of the household (Coole 1988: 71). Millett argued that what patriarchy actually was about was the rule of men - male supremacy.

Whilst liberal feminists understood the state in terms of its political institutions, radical feminists extended their focus to the wider structures of the state and society. Their analyses revealed the patriarchal nature of the formal and informal practices followed in decision-making. The concept of patriarchy informed feminist strategies and political goals: the whole structure of male domination had to be dismantled if women’s liberation was to be achieved (Acker 1989: 235). From the radical feminist point of view, the state, which was essentially patriarchal, its values and structures being estab­lished and dominated by men, could not help to solve the problems of patriarchy elsewhere. Therefore, there was no point in turning to the state. Civil society, rather than the state, was the sphere in which women should concentrate their energies in order to challenge patriarchy.

Catharine MacKinnon articulated a radical feminist stance on the state (1987, 1989). She argued:

The state is male in the feminist sense: the law sees and treats women the way men see and treat women. The liberal state coercively and authoritatively constitutes the social order in the interest of men as a gender - through its legitimating norms, forms, relations to society, and substantive policies. (1989: 161-2)

Feminists could not expect the state to liberate women because it was impossible to separate state power from male power.

Radical feminism employed the concepts of gender and sexuality. MacKinnon asserted: ‘Sexuality is to feminism what work is to marxism: that which is most one’s own, yet most taken away’ (quoted in Smart 1989: 76). States enforced the equation of women with sexuality. However, via consciousness-raising it became possible to rediscover what it was to be truly female, restoring women’s ability to speak politically with their own voice. Whereas liberal feminists understood differences between the sexes as non­pertinent, radical feminists celebrated and valued them. At best, this created new visions, for example, about alternative, anti-hierarchical ways of working (Ferguson 1984: 5).

In sum, the radical feminist contribution was to offer important tools for feminist theories of the state by stressing the patriarchal nature of the state. Their critical analyses helped to reveal the role of the state in perpetuating gender inequalities. Radical feminist theorising helpfully stressed women’s different concerns and provided new, alternative visions for tackling them.

The capitalist state

The strong influence of Marxism on feminism in the 1970s was also reflected in feminist analyses of the state. Whereas, for radical feminists, the state was a patriarchal state, for Marxist feminists, the state was a capitalist state (McIntosh 1978: 259). The state was not just an institution but a form of social relations (Watson 1990: 4). Women’s subordination played a role in sustaining capitalism through the reproduction of the labour force within the family. The influence of Marxist categories can be seen in the debates about the concepts of work and reproduction, the so-called ‘domestic labour debate’ (Barrett 1980; Delphy and Leonard 1992; Kuhn and Wolpe 1978; Molyneux 1979).

Socialist feminists attempted to combine the insights of both Marxist and radical feminism. From radical feminists, socialist feminists derived the understanding of the system of oppression called patriarchy, and from Marxist feminists the importance of the class oppression defining the situation for all workers (Sargent 1981: xxi). The two approaches were combined in anal­yses of this ‘dual system’ of capitalism and patriarchy. For Zillah Eisenstein, the concept of capitalist patriarchy captured the ‘mutually reinforcing dialec­tical relationship between capitalist class structure and hierarchal sexual structuring’ (Eisenstein 1979: 17). Michèle Barrett, in turn, identified a number of ways in which the state promoted women’s oppression: women were excluded from certain sorts of work by protective legislation, the state exercised control over the ways sexuality was represented through pornog­raphy laws, and the state’s housing policy was resistant to the needs of non-nuclear families (Barrett 1980: 231-7).

The debates revolved around questions about the relative autonomy of the two systems. Some theorists argued that patriarchy was more autonomous than capitalism (Harding 1981; Hartmann 1981) and others that capitalism had the upper hand (Young 1981). For Eisenstein, the capitalist class did not rule the state or government directly but instead exercised hegemony. A large part of the mystificatory role of the state was in this seeming identi­fication of male interests and bourgeois interests (Eisenstein 1984).

The Marxist and socialist feminist contribution was to conceptualize the state as a social relation and to stress the importance of understanding capitalist relations when theorizing the state. It focused upon women’s unpaid labour in the family and added new dimensions to liberal and radical feminist perspectives on the state. The socialist feminists’ emphasis on economic justice is increasingly important for some feminists (see Jaquette 2003).

The women-friendly welfare state

Towards the end of the 1980s, liberal, radical, Marxist and socialist feminist perspectives on the state were challenged from locations outside of the Anglo-American core. Nordic feminists, femocrats in Australia, and gender and development scholars highlighted differences between states. These scholars were united in arguing that there was a need to move beyond narrow Anglo-American understandings of the state outlined above.

The term ‘femocrat’ was coined in Australia to analyse feminists working within state bureaucracies to achieve positive social change (see H. Eisenstein 1991, 1996; Sawer 1990, 1991; Watson 1992). Development scholars, in turn, exposed the fundamentally different meaning of the state in non-Western countries (see Afshar 1996; Alvarez 1990; Dore and Molyneux 2000; Rai and Lievesley 1996; Visvanathan etal. 1997). Like Western debates, this literature was concerned to examine the processes and functions of state institutions in the exercise of power in various areas of the public and private lives of women and women’s resistance to these intrusions (Rai and Lievesley 1996: 1). However, there were important differences. The focus on post-colonialism, nationalism, economic modernization and state capacity emerged as key themes in the Third World literature, whereas Western feminists often took these issues for granted, focusing instead on how best to engage with the state (Chappell 2000: 246).

Nordic feminist analyses of the state were markedly different to radical and Marxist feminist perspectives, which had less resonance in the Nordic context of social democratic welfare states than, for example, in the British top-down, elitist democracy dominated by a hierarchical class structure (Raaum 1995: 25). Nordic feminist experience was not one of pervasive patriarchy (Borchorst and Siim 1987; Hernes 1987), and the analyses high­lighted that different states meant different things for women. Unlike radical and Marxist feminist theories, Nordic feminist understandings of the state provided scope to work within existing state structures.

Helga Maria Hernes defined Nordic states as potentially women-friendly societies (1987). A woman-friendly welfare state signified that women’s political and social empowerment happened through the state and with the support of state social policy (Anttonen 1994). The social democratic citizenship tradition resulted in more optimistic acceptance of the state as an instrument for social change. Hernes argued:

In no other part of the world has the state been used so consistently by all groups, including women and their organizations, to solve collectively felt problems. (1988: 208)

For Hernes, Nordic women acted in accordance with their own culture in turning to the state, even in those instances where they wished to build alternative institutions (1988: 210).

Studies of the Nordic women-friendly welfare states were concerned with the roles of women as political actors. In Nordic feminism, it was argued that women become empowered as political subjects through the institutionali­sation of gender equality (Borchorst and Siim 2002: 91). An exclusive focus on patriarchy, in contrast, risked reducing women to victims of patriarchal structures, which meant that their contribution to maintain or change gender relations became invisible (Siim 1988).

Nevertheless, Nordic feminism was more pessimistic and less simplistic in its analysis of gender and the state than liberal feminism. The private dependency of women on individual men was transformed to public depend­ency on the state in the women-friendly welfare states (Dahlerup 1987). The expansion of the public sector, even if it benefited women, was planned and executed by a male-dominated establishment. The parameters for distribu­tion and redistribution policies were increasingly determined within the framework of the corporate system, where women had an even more marginal role to play than in the parliamentary system. Thus, women were the objects of policies (Hernes 1988a: 83). This tendency was exacerbated by the observation that women’s lives were more dependent and determined by state policies than men’s (Hernes 1988a: 77).

This approach contributed to feminist debates on the state by demon­strating that context mattered in feminist state theory and that knowledge was situated. It recognized the historical and spatial varieties of states and avoided making a priori claims about gendered states. One of its analytical contributions was to challenge universal theories and conclusions about women’s relation to the welfare state based upon Anglo-American theory and research (Borchorst and Siim 2002: 91; see also Lister 1997: 174).

A further contribution was to sensitize analysts to the importance of women’s agency when theorizing gender and the state (Bergqvist etal. 1999; Siim 2000). Recognition of the structural constraints on women’s interaction with the state did not blind the analyses of the possibilities of women’s action.

The poststructural state

Postructuralism has had a twofold impact on feminist theorizing of the state. Firstly, poststructuralism’s deconstruction of the state resulted in the rejection of the very category of the state. Judith Allen argued:

Feminism has not been guilty of oversight or failure in not developing a distinct theory of ‘the state’. Instead feminist theorists’ choices of theoretical agendas with priorities other than ‘the state’ have a sound rationale that deserves to be taken seriously. The ‘state’ is a category of abstraction that is too aggregate, too unitary and too unspecific to be of much use in addressing the disaggregated, diverse and specific sites that must be of most pressing concern to feminists. (Allen 1990: 22)

She argued for other priorities in political analysis in contrast to lavishing further attention on the problematic concept of the state.

Secondly, for those who did not dismiss it altogether, poststructuralism resulted in a more nuanced theorizing of the state. Poststructural feminist approaches highlighted differences amongst and within states. They challenged the unity of the state in previous feminist theorizing and argued that the state consisted of a set of arenas that lacked coherence (Pringle and Watson 1990: 229). In other words, the state was a differentiated set of institutions, agencies and discourses and had to be studied as such (Waylen 1998: 7). The approaches shifted the emphasis to state practices and discourses rather than to state institutions. The state was depicted as a discursive process, and politics and the state were conceptualized in broad terms (Waylen 1998: 6).

The state was not inherently patriarchal but was historically constructed as patriarchal in a political process whose outcome was open (Connell 1987: 129). The patriarchal state could be seen, then, not as the manifestation of patriarchal essence, but as the centre of a reverberating set of power relations and political processes in which patriarchy was both constructed and contested (Connell 1987: 129-30). Particular discourses and histories constructed state boundaries, identities and agency (Cooper 1995: 61; Pringle and Watson 1992: 54).

Feminists working with poststructural feminist methodologies focus on the micro-practices of states (Cooper 1998; Gwinnett 1998). For example, Davina Cooper examines hunting, the arts, religious orthodoxy, sexuality, public space and secondary education to grasp the nature of governance in a liberal state (1998). Her analysis is motivated by a series of specific questions: Is the state going too far? Should it be rolled back? Where does the boundary between public and private lie? (Cooper 1998: 4) Others highlight the ways in which different policy fields present a different picture of the state. A collection edited by Linda Briskin and Mona Eliasson studies trade unions, immigration, violence against women, and sexuality to challenge stereotypical images of Canada and Sweden (Briskin and Eliasson 1999).

Poststructural approaches have contributed significantly to feminist debates about the state by highlighting the differentiated nature of the state and by questioning the unity of state responses. An important question for poststructural feminists was what the most effective strategies were for empowering women in their engagements with the state (Randall 1998: 200). In other words, the feminist aim became to make sense not only of the state’s impact on gender, but also of the ways in which the state could be made use of and changed through feminist struggles. In this way, poststructural feminists destabilized the dichotomy between ‘in’ and ‘out’ of the state, arguing that the dichotomy failed to capture the multifaceted nature of the state. Their analyses allowed the complex, multidimensional and differentiated relations between the state and gender to be acknowledged. They recognized that the state could be a positive as well as a negative resource for feminists and sensitised feminists to gender diversity, the fluidity and the constructed nature of the category of women.

Criticisms of feminist perspectives on the state

Evidently feminists have approached the concept of the state from a number of different perspectives and have generated important insights into gendered states. Nevertheless, feminist perspectives on the state are problematic for a number of different reasons. The critiques discussed in this section stem mainly from within feminist debates themselves. As the mainstream state theory literature still fails to engage extensively with feminist approaches, feminist debates have been conducted primarily among feminists with little input from mainstream scholars.

Like pluralists, liberal feminists sometimes failed to distinguish between the normative, prescriptive and descriptive elements of their state theories (see Chapter 1). Problematically, it was at times unclear whether liberal feminists were analysing the abstract idea of the state or actual states. Furthermore, the liberal feminist notion of the state was very narrow and understood the state mainly in terms of institutions. Such a narrow conception of the state and politics was rejected by other feminists. Critics argued that liberal feminists, such as Friedan, failed to understand the structural relations in which women’s lives were situated - the family, the sexual division of labour, sex­class oppression - as part of the political life of society (Eisenstein 1986: 181). As liberal feminism did not challenge the deep structures of male dominance, it could be argued to create space for a new form of patriarchy, one which was subtler, and potentially more stable and powerful than earlier forms (Pringle and Watson 1990: 231). Legislation provided formal equality but, at the same time, diverted attention away from powerful economic, social and psychological bases for inequality. Zillah Eisenstein argued:

The major purpose of patriarchy, besides actualizing its system of power, is mystifying the basis of this power so that it cannot be recognized by the oppressed. (1986: 223)

Similarly, for Kathy Ferguson, liberal feminism had become a voice subservient to dominant patriarchal discourses (1984: 193). An exclusive focus on integrating women into state institutions produced a situation that perpetu­ated dominant patriarchal discourses and norms rather than challenging them. Important questions were not asked, critical arguments were not formulated, and alternatives were not envisioned (Ferguson 1984: 29).

Radical feminists, in contrast, tended to essentialize the state as patriarchal. For example, Wendy Brown saw MacKinnon’s approach as flawed because she naturalized male dominance (1995: 178). Also, problematically, radical feminists sought to specify a single cause of women’s oppression, namely the exploitative structure of patriarchy (Barrett and Phillips 1992: 3). In the model, the state became a key source of patriarchal power and power became men’s power, authority or dominance over women (Dahlerup 1987: 94). For critics, neither the state nor masculinity had a single source or terrain of power (Brown 1995: 179). Carol Smart argued:

Part of the power that law can exercise resides in the authority we accord to it. By stressing how powerless feminism is in the face of law and legal method, we simply add to its power. (1989: 25)

According to this line of argument, the radical feminist understanding of the state risked adding to the unequal power relations by not engaging the patriarchal state.

Radical feminism was insensitive to differences between women and risked claiming that states oppressed women everywhere in the same way (Acker 1989: 235). For example, MacKinnon posited the objects of pornographic representation so unambiguously in the position of victim that she denied the agency of the oppressed. Thus, she failed to recognize that lesbian and gay pornography did not simply replicate structures of victimization, but, in fact, had emancipatory implications for those whose sexuality was otherwise denied public expression (McNay 1999: 180).

The universalising tendencies were also strongly rejected by black feminists who pointed out that their solidarity was often with black men rather than white women. The black feminist criticism was directed both at radical and liberal feminists who failed to understand the different meanings that concepts such as work and family have for black women. Work never symbol­ized ‘freedom’ for black women but was a necessity, and the sphere of family was not a site of oppression as white feminists assumed (Amos and Pamar 1984; Barrett and McIntosh 1985; Palmer 1983). Also, American black women did not perceive themselves as the weak, idle, dependent gentlewoman as depicted in Western feminist theory (Coole 1988: 250). Moreover, such theory largely ignored the experience of Third World women under the post-colonial state. The assumptions made were West-centred but the theorizing took on a universalizing language (Rai 1996: 5).

Marxist and socialist feminist perspectives on the capitalist state were also critiqued. Sophie Watson argued that despite the Marxist and socialist feminist emphasis on the state as a form of social relation, the state still appeared to be an ‘entity which limits and determines our lives, which acts in the interests of capital, which defines who we are and what we need, which deflects class conflict and which obscures class divisions’ (Watson 1990: 4). More specifically, Marxist feminist accounts employed reductionist and functionalist arguments to explain the persistence of sexual divisions and the patriarchal family form, which ended up subsuming gender relations within the all-powerful system of something called the ‘needs of capital’ (Watson 1990: 6).

In other words, Marxist feminists were criticized for privileging Marxist categories of analysis at the expense of feminist ones. Heidi Hartmann argued:

The ‘marriage’ of marxism and feminism has been like the marriage of husband and wife depicted in English common law: marxism and feminism are one, and that one is marxism. Recent attempts to integrate marxism and feminism are unsatisfactory to us as feminists because they subsume the feminist struggle into the larger’ struggle against capital. To continue our simile further, either we need a healthier marriage or we need a divorce. (Hartmann 1981: 2)

Privileging Marxist categories meant that Marxist feminists continued to suffer from the problems faced by Marxists: structuralism, determinism and an over-emphasis on economics (see Chapter 3). Socialist feminists did provide more nuanced analyses of the two systems. However, at times the capitalist and patriarchal structures of the society remained so dominant that there was hardly any room for positive social change.

Critics have argued that Nordic feminist theory of the women-friendly welfare state is more a ‘consensual political strategy’ than an analytically coherent starting point for feminists to theorize the state (Kreisky 1995: 215). It could be argued that the Nordic feminist focus on actors and empowerment underestimated continuous patterns of gender hierarchies and segregation both in the state and in the society (Borchorst and Siim 2002: 92). Problem­atically, the values of the women-friendly welfare state were promoted normatively outside the Nordic context, for example in other European countries (Borchorst and Siim 2002a; Towns 2002).

Because the term women-friendly welfare state was premised on the idea of common and collective interests of women (Borchorst and Siim 2002: 91), the category of women was very homogenous. Hernes noted herself that the egalitarian values had their limitations when it came to introducing pluralism of any form (Hernes 1987: 17). The concerns of, for example, lesbians and ethnic minorities have yet to enter the agenda of Nordic feminism and there has been little analysis of the impact of the welfare state on ethnic minorities or, conversely, of the impact of the ethnic minorities on the welfare state (Christensen and Siim 2001). Gender equality signified, first and foremost, equality for the white heterosexual working mother in the Nordic context (Lindvert 2002). Diversity and fluidity within the category of women and women’s identity were missing from Nordic feminist analyses of women-friendly welfare states.

Like liberal feminists, Nordic feminists tended to opt for the sameness route to equality, which signified the idea of gender equality as a condition where men’s and women’s lives were uniform (Lindvert 2002: 100). The normative foundation of the women-friendly welfare state rested on a dual-breadwinner model where both women and men were wage-workers. In other words, the feminist discourse about women-friendliness was based upon the premise that women’s labour market participation was a key to gender equality (Borchorst and Siim 2002: 92). Measures associated with civil rights, rather than social rights, and their importance were neglected in the women-friendly welfare state literature (Lindvert 2002: 101). Julia O’Connor, Ann Shola Orloff and Sheila Shaver argued that liberal countries - the United States, Canada, Australia and Britain - offered a somewhat different set of gender-equality measures from those offered in the social democratic states (1999). These included reproductive or body rights, anti-discriminatory regulations and workplace policies. The measures were associated with civil rights rather than with social rights.

Nancy Fraser, in turn, argued that neither a politics of redistribution - remedying social inequalities - nor a politics of recognition - revaluing disrespected identities - were sufficient on their own (1995, 1997). Nordic feminists problematically showed partiality towards the politics of redistri­bution and, as a consequence, gender equality became separated from cultural politics (Siim 2000: 126, Borchorst and Siim 2002: 95-6). Such fundamental civil right issues as the right to bodily integrity (violated by violence against women) were notoriously slow to arrive on the Nordic agenda, partly as a result of the minor role played by the gender difference approach to gender theory.

Poststructural feminist understandings of the state were criticized for focusing on discursive processes. This shifted attention away from institu­tions and policies. Foucauldians, in particular, concentrated on relations and techniques of governance, treating institutions as an effect of processes and practices rather than as their origin (Cooper 1998: 10). Due to their lack of focus on institutions and institutional mechanisms, the approaches underestimated the difficulty of achieving change compared with the relative ease of reproducing status quo power relations (Cooper 1994: 7). A further implication of the oversight of state institutions was the neglect of the linkages between state bodies, for example that the influence that the central govern­ment exerted over the local government (Cooper 1994: 7; O’Connor, Orloff and Shaver 1999: 11). Poststructural feminism could also be argued to lack specificity. The state was treated as a terrain of struggle without much thought being given to how the state differed from other such terrains (Cooper 1994: 7).

The most persistent counter-argument was directed against poststructur­alism’s deconstruction of women’s subjectivity and identity. It was argued that as soon as women gained strength and power to fight oppression from the subject position of women, postmodern theorists came along and decon­structed the notion of the subject (Walby 1992: 48). Foucault’s attack on subjectivity was argued to be so total that it foreclosed any alternative theoretical space in which to conceive non-hegemonic forms of subjectivity (McNay 1992: 12). The notions of ‘women’ and ‘men’ were dissolved into shifting, variable social constructs that lacked coherence and stability over time (Walby 1992: 34). This was claimed to prevent women’s struggle against oppression. Seyla Benhabib (1995: 29) argued:

Postmodernism undermines the feminist commitment to women’s agency and sense of selfhood, to the reappropriation of women’s own history in the name of an emancipated future, and to the exercise of radical social criticism which uncover gender ‘in all its endless variety and monotonous similarity’.

Just as women seemed to be gaining a voice in the Western world, post­modernism deconstructed the basis for their action, their common identity.

In addition to the specific criticisms discussed above, all of the approaches fail to engage with debates on globalization, multi-level governance, and institutional change. Thus, it is debatable to what extent the approaches offer tools for studying recent institutional changes such as devolution or the European Union (EU). These were not key issues for liberal or radical feminists who focused upon the neutral and patriarchal states respectively. One can ask whether these new institutions are neutral and patriarchal in similar ways as the states. Do the strategies promoted by these feminist theories, for example integration or autonomy, apply to the new levels of governance as well? Arguably, the approaches do not capture the ways in which discourses, actors and institutions have influence across the levels of governance and state boarders.