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Reply: Citizenship, Policy, and the Political Construction of Gender Interests
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2008
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- Scholarly Controversy: Women, Work and Citizenship
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- Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 1997
References
NOTES
1. Connell, R. W., Gender and Power (Stanford, 1987) describes “gender regimes” as the state of play in gender relations in any given social institution.Google Scholar
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5. For example, Rosemary Pringle and Sophie Watson argue for shifting attention away from the question of “how women's interests can be most accurately represented to the processes whereby they are constituted”; see their “‘Women's Interests’ and the Post Structuralist State,” in Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates, ed. Barret, Michele and Phillips, Anne (Stanford, 1992), 53–73;Google Scholar quotation 63. An institutionalist view calls attention to the interests and identities constituted by virtue of existing political and institutional structures and policies and in the course of specific political struggles, with their characteristic alliances and oppositions. See Weir, Margaret, Orloff, Ann Shola, and Skocpol, Theda, ed., The Politics of Social Policy in the United States (Princeton, 1988).Google Scholar For further commentary on gender interests, see Jonasdottir, Anna, “On the Concept of Interest, Women's Interests, and the Limitations of Interest Theory,” in The Political Interests of Gender ed. Jones, Kathleen D. and Jonasdottir, Anna (Newbury Park, 1988), 33–65;Google ScholarBorchorst, Anette, “Welfare State Regimes, Women's Interests, and the EC,” in Gendering Welfare States, ed. Sainsbury, Diane (Thousand Oaks, 1994), 26–44;CrossRefGoogle ScholarMolyneux, Maxine, “Mobilization without Emancipation? Women's Interests, the State, and Revolution in Nicaragua” Feminist Studies 11 (1985): 227–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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12. Molyneux, , “Mobilization without Emancipation?,” 232. Of course, feminists are not the only ones who make political, moral, and strategic use of claims about “long-run interests.” For example, politicians of the Right, enamored with the magic of the market, promise that the pain of welfare cutbacks in terms of women and children's poverty will be compensated for by the better-functioning society that they are sure will result when their reforms have unleashed the power of the market from its welfare-state shackles.Google Scholar
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15. In response to difficulties of these types, some analysts (e.g., Jonasdottir, “On the Concept of Interest”) have tried to avoid making claims about the content of women's gender interests at all. Rather, they emphasize that women's only real interests are in participating in the decisions that affect them and in creating the conditions for and expanding the capacities for choice with respect to engaging in paid versus unpaid work or any other significant issue. Then, analysis can focus on how well “needs” are met. Yet this has its own set of problems. Moreover, it can be argued that an organic view of society and women's place in it cannot accommodate choice. Indeed, some would argue that this worldview is undermined by the very possibility of exit from the social connections or the traditional roles for men and women that it valorizes. It is therefore entirely consistent for exponents of this view to oppose the legalization or toleration of divorce, abortion, atypical family forms, and the undermining of “natural” roles for men and women.Google Scholar
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