VII. From Broken Gender to Economic Sex
id="vii-from-broken-gender-to-economic-sex">VII. From Broken Gender to Economic Sex#The purpose of this essay is not a history of gender but the elaboration of concepts allowing us to disentangle gender from sex121 within a history of scarcity. Reflecting on the declining Middle Ages, I have tried to show that a new economic order was instilled in souls through conscience. Conscience then weakened the guardians of vernacular gender several centuries before sex could replace it. A long period of broken gender separates the yoking of couples in conjugal wedlock from their industrial polarization into wage and shadow work. This time of broken gender differs greatly from place to place and could be given various names. To call it the war on subsistence highlights the rise of the nation-state. To call it the enclosure of commons underlines the transformation of common gender domains into genderless productive resources. To do justice to the processes involved, one would also have to call this era the age of witchcraft‚ the period of the birth pangs of sex. It begins when conscience is first fashioned, and ends when sexism becomes trivial.
Gender-blind historians describe it as a “transition to a capitalist mode of production,” thereby hiding the fact that an ahistorical novum emerged from the mutation: a consumption-dependent producer who is necessarily sexist.
Pre-capitalist societies are based on gender.121 Subsistence is a neutral term for this gendered survival. The shift to capitalism coincides anthropologically with the decline from broken gender into the regime of sex. Societies in which the reign of gender has broken down are capitalist; their genderless subjects are individual producers. Curiously, this decisive transformation has not yet been identified as the crucial anthropological condition that accounts for the transition from pre-capitalist economies to the growing commodity dependence for everyday needs called “capitalism.”
Capitalism is a curious term.122 It was unknown to Marx when Engels first used it in 1870. Proudhon had occasionally inserted it in a text, but only Sombart gave it familiar currency. Fernand Braudel123 still finds it necessary to apologize for its use in the title of Material Civilization, Economy and Capitalism from the 15th to the 18th Century, a magnificent portrait of economic life after the Reformation and before the French Revolution. An economic Breughel, he depicts a vast canvas of material, institutional, and political life during those centuries. He brings to life a post-medieval Europe, teeming with fairs, markets, and workshops, expanding trade routes and associations. Throughout, he underscores the fact that what he calls capital, capitalist, capitalism only very slowly penetrates into the procurement, production, and exchange of primary necessities. He carefully searches for the changes that might explain this penetration, and the reasons exponential capital accumulation became a factor affecting the everyday existence for most people before the beginning of the nineteenth century. He identifies growing market dependence, legal conditions protecting long-range accumulation, and overseas expansion of economic space as the converging conditions without which capitalist/industrial production could not have become dominant. But throughout the three volumes he consistently overlooks the universality of gendered existence in pre-capitalist societies and the loss of gender in the transition to capitalism. For him, gender is not a crucial historical factor.
To write the history of the foundations on which our world stands is quite different from the attempt to tell the story of what has been lost. For the historian who looks at the past in a rear-view mirror, sickle and scythe are but local farm tools once used in the harvest, replaced by techniques when modernization occurs. If such history pays any attention to mentalities and sentiments, it tends to focus on the characteristic alienation, loneliness, and exploitation that grow apace with the new techniques. It examines the pain inflicted on people by the new market economy, mechanization, or hunger. The other injury resulting from the loss of traditional gender, now washed away through the new plumbing, remains the hidden side of the sorry story. What did she lose with the sickle? What else went with the scythe he had to give up? To write the story of the motley losses, one has to rummage around and ferret out the specific vernacular feelings, which have barely left a trace. The historian has to describe the death of a gendered reality that, despite its existence through millennia, has eluded his colleagues.
To prepare for such a task, I have tried to provide a background for my theoretical reflections with a stage outline marked by an occasional charcoal sketch. In several of these, I wanted to illustrate societies’ housebreaking that precedes wedlock. Now one story only must suffice to enliven my description of the birth pangs of economic sex: A Lutheran village in Württemberg bears witness to the reactions of men and women faced with the first imposition of genderless work.
Between 1800 and 1850, the unusual number of four dozen divorce proceedings were recorded in Württemberg. David Sabean has tried to interpret the grounds given for the dissolutions, grounds unlike any adduced in earlier times.124 To understand what had occurred, he had to consider the economic transformation of the region during this period. A railroad was being built, tenancy was being altered, and most of the families were being forced from homesteading toward producing cash crops from fruit trees. Plum and apple orchards, together with the large-scale production of sugar beets, replaced diversified farms and kitchen gardens. Putting in and harvesting the cash crops proved to be more labor-intensive than homesteading had been. And the change occurred in one generation. Women were suddenly forced to join men in men’s work in order to earn enough family income to buy what had formerly been grown in the garden plot. They were also forced to work more and faster in the kitchen. The divorce proceedings reflect how deeply disturbing these innovations were for both men and women, how helpless each felt, how unable to understand the implications of their seemingly rational decisions. Women complained that men suddenly ordered them around at work, a totally new experience for them. No matter how much the gender-defined work of women might seem subordinated to that of men, the notion that men could direct women in the work itself had so far been unimaginable. Women resented the loss of domain. Women also complained that, while men had time after working at the rhythm of the plow to relax at the inn, they had to hurry back and forth between the hoe and the kitchen. Envy of a new kind, envy for the other gender’s schedule and rhythm, thus appeared, an envy destined to remain as a central characteristic of modern life, an envy fully “justified” under the assumptions of unisex work but unthinkable under the shield of gender. The men, on the other hand, regularly complained that their women were inferior to their mothers: Formerly their diet had been rich and varied; now they had to eat spaezli day after day. The curtain closed on the epoch of broken gender and conjugal coproduction. In this microcosm, we see vividly how the new script for the industrial age was to be written. For the drama to live and move, the stage had to be peopled with heterosexual actors who were also economically neutered workers.
In most versions of the modern drama, a short intermission separates gender from sex – the reign of gender (where the household obtains its subsistence from the apportioned tasks accomplished by the sets of non-interchangeable hands) from the regime of industrial economics (where genderless hands produce commodities in exchange for pay). During this proto-industrial intermezzo, unisex work, to be performed in the home, is forced on the household.125 Thus, the household is transformed into a mill where gender is ground down until only sex is left. The sufferings this crushing of gender caused both men and women have gone largely unreported. Two reasons can be offered to explain this blind spot. On the one hand, the new experience of economic misery became the glue of proletarian unity. Wage labor brought a new kind of pain that annihilated women and men. All wage laborers suffered from the very same epidemic of disorientation, loneliness, and dependence. These feelings brought forth political interpreters and an elite of a new class. The diagnosis of the universal woe became the career field for new professions – educators, physicians, and other social engineers – which thrived on the production of policies, guidance, and therapies. The self-interest of both the revolutionary leader and the socialization merchant precluded any attempt to understand the gender-specific pain of loss. On the other hand, the pain of impoverishment, due to the obliteration of gender, constituted something quite different in each region; few possessed a language suitable for translating the subtle vernacular varieties of this pain of loss.
While the stage for factory labor was being hammered together and a modern economic set was being constructed, but before the script was rewritten for the new and unfamiliar sex roles, novel critical theories were conjured up for the avant-garde theater. The genius of Marx and Freud can be appreciated only by those who see how early in the development of the modern drama they defined its rules. They forged the definitive concepts that would be used to describe and orchestrate the new kind of actor, industrialized “man.” Seven hundred years earlier, the Church had imputed genderless sin to genderless souls. Now the genderless power of genderless humans in a genderless cosmos became the key transcendental characteristic of the categories used in a new kind of metaphysics. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, a dozen natural scientists, simultaneously though independently, redefined the vis viva universi (the living force of the universe) as energy, sometimes bound, sometimes free. Helmholz is usually credited with the feat of having formulated the laws by which physical energy henceforth fit the assumptions of scarcity that are constitutive of formal economics. During the same decade, the labor force was made into a key concept, by which the human contribution to human existence could be treated as a scarce resource. Finally, a generation later, Freud, textually repeating sentence from Helmholz, attributed psychic energy in the form of libido – sometimes bound, sometimes free – to the human. The new canonists fabricated their theory of secular man and his salvation on assumptions derived from chemistry and fluid mechanics. They claimed to find a genderless power that, as capital, circulates through social conduits and, as libido, through psychological channels. Thus, during the first three-quarters of our century, we have had to live with energy, labor, and sexuality as “the facts of life.” Now that the code word “crisis” is abroad, perhaps we can publicly question their reality.
Society needs a past. To have a sense of the present, the living require a past that fits them. There is no first person plural, no “we,” without its myth of creation. The two-gendered “we” of all times was kept alive by each society’s rituals, feasts, and taboos. Industrial society, too, needed a myth of creation; it could not exist without one. So it created a special institution to provide each household with “news” and a constant sense of a “past.” The past became an industrial enterprise.
The scheme through which industrial society churns out its past has been called history. For one hundred years, history has fabricated a continuity between the genderless present and the gendered past, legitimating the descent of sex from gender. With an increasingly refined methodology, the new science has interpreted the story in sexist categories to give a past to our economic world. Without such economic reconstruction of a gendered past, the contemporary world of sexist economics could not have been made attractive, especially to those against whom it has consistently discriminated. History has joined myriad synthetic ties of sentimentality to a realm of gender that the contemporary world had in fact abandoned to begin its frenzied journey. Historians have woven a tapestry to make us feel comfortable in our sexist environment, but the fabric has been manufactured out of industrial fibers. Powerful enterprises attempted to make the past appear as seed, a primitive form of the present; its languages, customs, and institutions being the genuine ancestors, the embryonic forms, of those that are contemporary and familiar. Our library shelves are crowded with books that attribute a class structure to Greek city-states, which call the Sophist peddling his tricks a forerunner of modern educators, which report on the sex life (sic!) of Mesopotamia. I write this essay to counter such a centralist perspective on history. And I reject the label of scientific historian, for I will not reconstruct the past with key words, nor with concepts mined in utopia, yet I believe in honoring the dead by research that is public, disciplined, documented, and critical.
I have tried to direct attention to the break between gender and sex, to bring into view the chasm that divides the present from the past. I have tried to expose the counterfeit genealogy of sex that underlies economic history. It is a fiction needed by a sexist society that cannot face its lack of legitimate ancestry. The grounding of sex in gender is spurious. Both sex and gender have social origins, but they stem from unrelated matrices. The matrix of sex is Alma Mater; the matrix of gender can only be found beyond “the cavern of the seven sleepers,” “lodged in rock-clefts on the branches of enormous hollow yews.” (Robert Graves, White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth [New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1948], p. 13).
Whether they are born outside the matrix of gender or first delivered from and then educated into the matrix of sex, women must face men. Each matrix, however, endows them with a different relative power. Under the reign of gender, men and women collectively depend on each other; their mutual dependence sets limits to struggle, exploitation, defeat. Vernacular culture is a truce between genders, and sometimes a cruel one. Where men mutilate women’s bodies, the gynaeceum often knows excruciating ways to get back at men’s feelings. In contrast to this truce, the regime of scarcity imposes continued war and ever new kinds of defeat on each woman. While under the reign of gender women might be subordinate, under any economic regime they are only second sex. They are forever handicapped in games where you play for genderless stakes and either win or lose. Here, both genders are stripped and, neutered, the man ends up on top. No wonder that it is the woman who now “discovers” the transmogrification of gender by economics. Typically, she complains that “she” is invisible to others and to herself. She can neither perceive herself in the regime of economics as an equal partner, nor can she recognize herself in a gender. The turgid scenarios of political science, constructed with a set of assumptions about the equality of all men, do not apply to her. The sexist utopia of Herland fails to provide the rank consolations of the locker room, and attempts to reconstruct women’s past with key words only caricature the enterprise of scientific history, as such. Now, by their passionate inquiries within this double bind, women’s studies have cemented the pivot to upset the scientific applecart.
In this essay I have not tried to explain why society places the man on top and the handicap on the woman. I have controlled my curiosity in order to be free to listen more attentively to the report of the losers, to learn not about them but about the battlefield that is the economy. Industrial society creates two myths – one about the society’s sexual ancestry and another about the movement toward ever greater equality. Both myths are unmasked as lies in the personal experience of the neuter of the second sex.
I set out to argue that the fight against sexism converges with efforts to reduce environmental destruction and endeavors to challenge the radical monopoly of goods and services over needs. I have argued that these three contemporary movements converge because economic shrinkage is the common condition for all three. And the recognition that economic cutback, for reasons specific to each movement, is for each not just a negative necessity but a positive condition for a better life can lead from theoretical convergence to concerted public action. I have further argued that these three movements represent three aspects of an attempt to recover the commons, the commons in that sense in which the term designates the precise inverse of an economic resource. For this undertaking I wished to suggest a theory to clarify the concepts necessary for a history of scarcity.
The historical transition from gendered subsistence to dependence on scarce products establishes my argument. Scarcity is historical, as historical as gender or sex. The era of scarcity could come to be only on the assumption that “man” is individual, possessive, and, in the matter of material survival, genderless – a rapacious neutrum oeconomicum. And this assumption, incarnate in institutions from wedlock to schools, transforms the subject of history. That subject is no longer the gens, or the lares, which designate the ambiguous and asymmetric match of a self-limiting set of women and men. Rather, the subject becomes a construct of ideology fashioned into a spurious “we,” a construct like class, nation, corporation, or partnerly couple. For a theory on the action necessary for the recovery of the commons, I think it important to explore the etiology of this transmogrification of history’s subject.
I have no strategy to offer. I refuse to speculate on the probabilities of any cure. I shall not allow the shadow of the future to fall on the concepts with which I try to grasp what is and what has been. As the ascetic and the poet meditate on death and thus gratefully enjoy the exquisite aliveness of the present, so we must face the sad loss of gender. I strongly suspect that a contemporary art of living can be recovered, so long as our austere and clear-sighted acceptance of the double ghetto of economic neuters then moves us to renounce the comforts of economic sex. The hope for such a life rests upon the rejection of sentimentality and on openness to surprise.
A second reason structuralism is incapable of relating gender to kin is implied in the criticism of Leach, who points out that the system of kinship that is central to structuralist analysis fits neither culture nor a society’s institutional framework as conceived by those making the analysis. I submit that this weakness is the result of the structuralist mania to consider the male/female polarity as just one among many dualities, thereby perpetuating the confusion between analogical complementarity and exchange. The difficulties of criticizing structuralism from a point of view that is both Marxist and feminist appear clearly in the brilliant article by Gayle Rubin, *“The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Rayna Reiter (op. cit., pp. 157–210, FN 22) and in Felicity Edholm, Olivia Harris and Kate Young (op. cit., FN 22).