GENDER and the POLITICS of TIME
Feminist theory and contemporary debates
Valerie Bryson
Gender and the politics of time Feminist theory and contemporary debates Valerie Bryson
Gender and the politics of time
First published in Great Britain in 2007 by The Policy Press University of Bristol Fourth Floor Beacon House Queen’s Road Bristol BS8 1QU UK Tel +44 (0)117 331 4054 Fax +44 (0)117 331 4093 e-mail
[email protected] www.policypress.org.uk © Valerie Bryson 2007 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested. ISBN 978 1 86134 749 7 paperback ISBN 978 1 86134 750 3 hardcover The right of Valerie Bryson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act. All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of The Policy Press. The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the author and not of The University of Bristol, or The Policy Press. The University of Bristol and The Policy Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication. The Policy Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age and sexuality. Cover design by Qube Design Associates, Bristol. Front cover: Photograph kindly supplied by www.jupiterimages.co.uk Printed and bound in Great Britain by Hobbs the Printers, Southampton.
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Contents Acknowledgements
vi
Introduction The political importance of time The chapters
1 1 3
Part 1: Time, politics and society: mainstream perspectives Time, temporality and political thought one Temporal perspectives: why history matters Temporality, agency and strategies for political change Welfare states in time Political theory, political movements and changing perspectives on time Political implications and conclusions
9 10 14 16 17 20
two
Time culture(s) and the social nature of time Durkheim and beyond: the social functions of time From traditional to modern time From modern time to postmodern times All times are not equal: issues of power and control Conclusions: resisting capitalist time
23 23 25 28 30 32
three
Time use in capitalist societies Free time as a scarce resource States, time use and temporal regimes Long working hours and the capitalist economy Conclusions
35 35 39 44 47
Part 2: Feminist perspectives: reframing the issues four Women and men in feminist political thought Women and men: a naturally and/or socially different relationship with time? Which women, what woman? The impact of postmodernism And yet ... From sisterhood to solidarity – an emerging consensus? Conclusions
51 51 54 56 59 62 65
iii
Gender and the politics of time five
Public and private in feminist political thought Feminist critiques of the public/private distinction Public and private work Citizenship in public and private Justice, time and the public/private distinction Conclusions
67 67 68 73 78 82
six
Feminist politics and welfare states Feminist perspectives on welfare states Welfare regimes, feminism and time Women, time and political representation Welfare states, globalisation and time Conclusions
83 83 87 91 93 95
Part 3:Towards a feminist politics of time seven Time and temporality in feminist political thought Time and temporality in recent feminist thought The role of utopian thought Locating feminist theories of time in time History matters for feminists Mainstream theories revisited: Marx, Giddens and Pierson Conclusions
105 106 108 109 110 114 118
eight
‘Women’s time’ Biology and ‘women’s time’ Caring and ‘women’s time’ ‘Women’s time’ in patriarchal capitalist societies Conclusions
121 122 129 138 141
nine
Women and time use in contemporary capitalist societies Feminist claims Time-use studies Time-use studies under scrutiny Time-use studies: recent developments and results Political consequences and conclusions
145 145 152 156 160 166
ten
The time(s) we want and the time(s) we’ve got: political implications and conclusions Uchronia: the time(s) we’d like The time(s) we’ve got Getting from here to there Concluding observations
169
iv
169 173 177 185
Contents References Index
187 215
Gender and the politics of time
Acknowledgements As with my earlier books, the publication of this work owes much to the support and encouragement of the late Jo Campling. I would like to thank Ruth Lister, whose own work provided the book’s initial inspiration, for her constructive and supportive feedback on early chapter drafts, and Vicky Randall for her encouraging and helpful comments on the full draft. Any faults remain entirely my own. Thanks too to Georgina Blakeley for being the best colleague anyone could possibly have, to the University of Huddersfield for providing me with sabbatical leave and to Lucy Bryson for checking my references. Thanks of a very different kind to my sister, Fran Lambert, who made it possible for me to continue writing at a period of prolonged family crisis, and to my friends for all their support. If Alan Pearson didn’t dislike being thanked, I would of course thank him too – for helpful feedback on the first draft, as well as everything else.
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Introduction This book is motivated by the hope that political theory can improve our understanding of the societies in which we live and thereby contribute to policies aimed at reducing exploitation and enabling more people to realise their human potential. More specifically, it is grounded in feminist political theory and the belief that unequal power relationships between women and men are real, important and unjust. Focusing on Western welfare states, it rejects the widely articulated claim that feminism is now redundant, and it treats naming and contesting gender inequalities as a matter of political priority. It sees feminist politics as inseparable from other ‘progressive’ movements, as the needs of women cannot be addressed in isolation from other socio-economic inequalities, while attempts to address these will be incomplete if women are excluded. The book also argues that the variable ways in which time is used, controlled and understood raise profound and increasingly urgent political issues.We need to address these if we are to understand politics in general and the nature of gender inequalities in particular; failure to do so will have negative consequences, not only for women but also for society as a whole.
The political importance of time The politics of ‘who gets what, when and how’ involves access to disposable time as well as other scarce resources. Such time is both a primary good in itself and a key political resource that citizens need if they are to contribute to their communities and express their interests and views.This book argues that its current distribution is both unjust and a source of political inequality. It further argues that long hours in paid employment, particularly in the UK and US, are having damaging effects on individuals, their families and society, contributing to a ‘care deficit’ and a decline in economic effectiveness and civic engagement. Enabling citizens to find a healthier balance between paid employment and other aspects of life should therefore be a political priority. This ‘politics of time’ is linked in complex ways with women’s changing and variable domestic, economic and political situation. A moment’s reflection shows that societies would collapse if women were to abandon their traditional and time-consuming domestic and caring responsibilities. However, far from being valued and rewarded, these responsibilities are usually treated as a source of disadvantage
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that prevents women from behaving like ‘proper’ workers (that is, like men), and therefore denies them rewards such as good pay or a decent pension in old age. Women’s unpaid responsibilities also often limit their access to both leisure and political opportunities. Nearly a hundred years ago the British suffrage campaigner and socialist Hannah Mitchell complained that: “No cause can be won between dinner and tea, and most of us who were married had to fight with one hand tied behind us, so to speak” (1977, p 130). This book shows that women’s ‘time poverty’ continues to act as a constraint on their citizenship today. Inequalities in the ways that time is used and valued are therefore part of a vicious circle that leaves many women economically dependent and vulnerable to exploitation and domestic abuse, while lack of free time makes it difficult for women to gain a political voice and express time-related experiences and needs. In recent years, feminist analyses and campaigns have combined with women’s increased labour market participation and wider concern about the damaging effects of long-hours working to push workingtime issues up the political agenda in many Western nations.This sense of urgency is encapsulated in a recent report from the UK’s Equal Opportunities Commission, that begins: The way we work no longer fits the world we live in. If it is changed, we could all win. If it isn’t, we will all face a bleaker future: wasted potential, less time for caring, more stress-related problems and illnesses, continuing low pay for women and their families, reduced competitiveness for individual businesses and for the economy, and, even, greater traffic congestion and environmental damage. (2007, p 3) This book confirms these arguments. It also argues that the politics of time goes even deeper, and it investigates complex sets of questions around the significance of history for political practice, the impact of time use on gender identity, the relationship between different ‘time cultures’ and patterns of power, and the ways that time is measured and valued. Its central policy-related arguments, developed throughout the following chapters, are that we should value and reward time spent caring for others as an important economic and civic activity, that this time should be shared with men and supported by the wider society, and that paid employment and welfare provision should be organised accordingly. It also asserts the need to recognise the importance of temporal rhythms outside the commodified clock time of the capitalist
Introduction
economy, in which time is equated with money and the time needed to develop human relationships has no place. These arguments are based on the assumption that members of a society have collective as well as individual needs, interests and responsibilities. Because these will not be delivered or met through market forces alone, the book also argues that states will have to support or provide caring services, and regulate paid work to enable both men and women to meet their caring responsibilities. Such policies run counter to the liberal individualism of the US, where the book finds that time-related problems are particularly acute; they are much more in tune with the social democratic assumptions of the Nordic nations, where the book finds much that is positive, although significant problems do remain. An effective feminist politics of time needs to recognise these different starting-points, and the book argues for the importance of time in the very different sense of an attention to historical development and contexts that recognises the need to balance long-term aims with more immediately realisable policy proposals. Here, it finds that revising Marx’s theory of history to include ‘(re)production’ in the private sphere can helpfully identify changes that make a radical challenge to traditionally gendered patterns of time use increasingly possible. While the book argues that time should be central to feminist theory and political practice, it does not claim that it holds ‘the key’. Rather, the politics of time should be seen as part of an interlocking circle through which different forms of power and disadvantage reflect and sustain each other, but within which they can also be challenged and feminist values affirmed.
The chapters The book is divided into three main parts. The first three chapters focus on existing mainstream theoretical work on the politics of time; most of this has been written by men. Although the book finds valuable insights from which feminists can learn, these are limited by a widespread and unreflective assumption that male experiences of work, family life and ‘free’ time are ‘normal’. From this dominant perspective, the temporal experiences and needs associated with women’s traditional domestic and reproductive roles are ignored or marginalised as ‘different’. In contrast, Part 2 (Chapters Four to Six) shows how feminist perspectives that take women as a central or equal starting-point can reframe the issues to provide a more comprehensive understanding. Part 3 (Chapters Seven to Ten) seeks to combine the
Gender and the politics of time
findings of Parts 1 and 2 to explore both imaginative possibilities and realistic proposals for a feminist theory and politics of time that is in the interests of all citizens. Because the book draws on a very wide range of approaches, it is unlikely that many readers will be familiar with them all. It therefore combines the development of its own arguments with the exposition of existing ideas, pulling out their implications for gender and the politics of time. Chapter One draws on the ideas of Karl Marx and the more recent contributions of Antony Giddens and Paul Pierson to argue that if we are to understand the present and shape our political future, we need a sense of time and historical context. It applies this to the development of welfare policies. It also identifies changes in the understanding of time itself, linking these to changes in both political theory and practice. The idea that time has variable meanings leads into Chapter Two’s more detailed discussion of time culture(s) and the establishment of the commodified clock time of capitalist societies.While this operates as a form of control on a global scale, the chapter also finds that ‘other’ times persist, and that resisting the dominant time culture can be an important political act. This theme is continued in Chapter Three, which looks at how people spend their time in capitalist societies today. Focusing first on free time as a scarce resource, it considers how this should be distributed and whether citizens’ lack of time is damaging political life, before exploring recent research on ‘time-use regimes’. Its final section considers whether long-hours working is an inevitable product of capitalist competition or whether it can be resisted; despite the increased pressures of global competition, it finds some grounds for optimism. Chapter Four prepares the ground for later discussion by asking how we are to think about ‘women’ and ‘men’ in the light of recent feminist understandings of both differences among women and the precarious and constructed nature of gender identities. Linking its discussion to wider feminist critiques of hierarchical dichotomous thought, the chapter challenges the privileged ‘normality’ of male qualities, interests and perspectives. It supports the idea of a ‘solidarity in difference’ that recognises temporal differences and divisions as well as commonalities among women and reaches out to disadvantaged groups of men; it also argues that the situation of the most disadvantaged is likely to provide the best starting-point for analysis. Chapter Five develops the idea of moving ‘beyond dichotomy’ to focus on feminist critiques of the conventional distinction between the public sphere (the sphere of politics and paid employment) and the
Introduction
private sphere (the sphere of the family and personal life). In revealing the interconnections that blur the public/private distinction, these critiques reveal both the domestic bases of men’s privileges in the public sphere and the economic and civic importance of many community and domestic activities.The chapter argues that feminist politics should not only expose and challenge the current distribution of paid work, unpaid work and free time but should also insist that unpaid work, particularly time spent caring for others, must be properly valued and rewarded as a key contribution to the welfare of society. The questions of how this might be done and the form feminist politics might take are bound up with the feminist perspectives on the welfare state that are the subject of Chapter Six. In line with the general rejection of either/or thinking identified in Chapters Four and Five, it finds that effective feminist politics requires both engagement with the state and autonomous activity and that the global context within which policies are developed provides both constraints and new opportunities.While there have been some encouraging developments, particularly in the Nordic states, the chapter also draws on the findings of Chapter One to argue that policies cannot simply be exported from one country to another, but must be based on a realistic assessment of particular circumstances and traditions. Chapter Seven links recent feminist work on the multiple and fluid nature of human times to feminist rejections of dichotomy. It also applies the ideas discussed in Chapter One to identify the changing temporal assumptions that underlie feminist theory itself and the role of history in feminist politics. Revisiting Marx, Giddens and Pierson it finds that changes in the material conditions in which people produce and reproduce are combining with the cumulative effects of small-scale changes in attitudes and behaviour both to open up the possibility of more egalitarian patterns of time use between women and men and to make current arrangements increasingly unviable. The result could be a paradigm shift in welfare policy to recognise the importance of the work traditionally done by women while seeking to share it with men. Chapter Eight develops Chapter Two’s discussion of the social nature of time to consider whether women’s bodies and/or social roles give rise to a specifically female ‘time culture’ and, if so, the place of such ‘women’s time’ in patriarchal capitalist societies. In line with the arguments of earlier chapters, it rejects any claim that ‘women’s time’ and ‘men’s time’ can be seen as closed and exclusive categories. However, it agrees with those writers who argue that women’s traditional roles and responsibilities give rise to temporal rhythms and needs that are
Gender and the politics of time
often in conflict with the logic of commodified clock time to which they are often forced to conform; it also finds that the inappropriate imposition of clock time on caring work and relationships can be damaging and counter-productive. Chapter Nine applies this analysis to consider whether quantitative time-use studies support feminist claims that women’s unpaid work represents a major economic contribution in capitalist societies, that they continue to do significantly more of this work than men, that women have less ‘free’ or disposable time than men, and that policies in the Nordic nations are producing a more equal distribution of time use. It reports that the evidence clearly supports the first two claims, but at first sight it undermines the third and fourth. However, the chapter also finds that the studies have been based on particular temporal assumptions that cannot capture important aspects of many women’s time use and that seriously misrepresent their experience of ‘free’ time. It finds that more detailed studies largely confirm feminist claims about women’s disadvantage and the negative consequences of this. Chapter Ten brings together the theoretical and empirical findings of earlier chapters to outline the main features of a feminist temporal utopia or ‘uchronia’. It provides a contrasting assessment of existing time cultures and temporal orientations in contemporary Western welfare states, and a comparative summary and discussion of policies around working time and caring responsibilities. It ends with a discussion of how and whether we can get ‘from here to there’, identifying some forces for progressive change while recognising the likely strength of opposition. It concludes by restating the book’s central argument: that the politics of time should be at the heart of feminism and that the feminist politics of time highlights political issues that are of profound importance for us all.
Part 1 Time, politics and society: mainstream perspectives
one
Time, temporality and political thought To think about our relationship with time is to raise profound questions around mortality, transience, memory, continuity and identity. Even the most cursory reflection suggests that we do not experience time in any straightforward, externally measurable way; rather, our sense of time changes over our life span (so that the days of childhood seem endless, but months and years rush past in later life), while time can appear to stretch out or speed up in the course of a day, and the transitory moment of the present can acquire significance through anticipation, or a retrospective importance that becomes frozen in the individual or collective memory (that glance across a crowded room, that shot fired in Dallas ...). We are also likely to perceive and experience the significance of time’s passing differently according to whether we see human time on earth as ending in death or as a prelude to eternal life, whether our daily activities are dictated by the natural rhythms of the seasons or by the demands of the clock, whether our experiences are recorded in diaries or digital photographs, and whether or not we understand Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Such differences are not simply individual, but are to varying degrees socially and culturally produced. They also have important political implications. For example, a belief that the social, political and economic world in which we live is unchangeably ‘natural’, or that history is the inexorable unfolding of God’s will, is less favourable to a sense of political efficacy and the development of movements for political change than a belief that the world is the product of human agency and that we can change it for the better. Addressing the psychological, philosophical, scientific and theological implications of our human relationship with time is well beyond the scope of this book. The aim of this and the next two chapters is much more modest and prosaic: to assert the importance and assess the implications of a temporal perspective for political analysis and action; to explore the political implications of different ‘time cultures’; and to investigate the relationship between patterns of time use and systems of power and inequality in contemporary capitalist societies. In addressing these issues, it is not possible to draw on any ready-made
Gender and the politics of time
body of political thought for, as a glance at the index entries of any politics textbook makes clear,‘time’ is notable only for its absence, and there is no sustained or readily identifiable tradition of temporal analysis within the discipline. However, much work has been done elsewhere in the social sciences, and the chapters are able to draw on the work of sociologists, historians and anthropologists as well as on the handful of political scientists and theorists who have self-consciously addressed the political significance of time. This opening chapter initially steps back from immediate political concerns to explore the temporal assumptions that frame political theory and practice. It provides a brief exposition of the temporal ideas shared by Marx, Giddens and Pierson, and draws on these to argue against a static, ‘snapshot’ approach to political analysis in favour of a historical perspective. It then applies this to the analysis of human agency, political change and the development of welfare policies. It also argues that changing perspectives on time itself are a key part of the historical context of political ideas and opportunities.The final section briefly identifies the potential for feminist development in Marx’s materialist conception of history, Giddens’ theory of stucturation and Pierson’s analysis of self-reinforcing patterns of behaviour. It concludes that the development of effective political strategies requires a balance between the imaginative exploration of alternative futures and a realistic appraisal of both the constraints and the opportunities that are present in any historical moment.
Temporal perspectives: why history matters Colin Hay has recently observed that there is today a “highly influential tendency to confine political science to an analysis of a present from which all temporal traces have been removed” (2002, p 137). This means that much contemporary sociological and political thought is concerned with obtaining a ‘timeless snapshot’ of how societies and political systems function, with political choices often analysed in isolation from their historical context, institutions and social structures treated as given entities rather than ongoing processes, and time itself treated as noteworthy only when discussing the rare moments of sudden change. In contrast to such static approaches, this book agrees with those past and contemporary writers who have argued that political choices are inevitably framed by long-term historical processes and cannot be understood in isolation from these, and that stability as well as change necessarily and by its very nature implies the passage of time. Indeed, “stable entities”, including individuals, identities, institutions 10
Time, temporality and political thought
and ideas, may best be seen as “events that keep happening”, while “social systems exist as systems only in and through their ‘functioning’ in time” (Abbott, 2001, p 256; Giddens, 1995, p 17).
Marx and Giddens It is appropriate to start with Marx, as time is in many ways central to the whole of his thought, and his ideas provide a link to both later theoretical work on time and the practical politics of time-related issues. He rejected the claim that existing social, economic or political arrangements are natural or inevitable, that there are any eternally given economic laws or that the ‘human nature’ of capitalist society reflects some eternally given essence. Rather, Marx insisted that in order to understand the world as it is we must understand that it has not always been like this and that it will be different in the future; this means that it is only by analysing both the processes that have brought societies into being and those that are contributing to change that we can develop effective political strategies. Political activists therefore cannot simply cast off the weight of history to change the world at will, for the effectiveness of any political action is inevitably bound up with the context in which it occurs, so that “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” (1968 [1851-52], p 97). In Marx’s original theory, these general points were of course bound up with the particular claim that the driving force in human history is not ideas, but the development of productive forces. This means that the way people produce their living, the tools and technology they work with and the scientific knowledge they possess give rise to particular social arrangements and to conflicting class interests, whereby dominant political institutions, laws and ideas reflect the interests of the economically dominant class. In other words, any society is organised around the requirements of its particular material conditions of production and the maintenance of exploitative class rule. However, Marx also argued that these conditions of production are never static, and that as they develop they create new classes with new class interests, leading, after a period of class struggle, to new forms of social and political organisation. This means that the state and belief systems should be understood as the constantly evolving product of class society that reflects particular class interests and formations. Applying his general approach to the analysis of capitalist class society, 11
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Marx famously claimed that this was creating the conditions for a working-class revolution that would bring about a classless, communist society. From this perspective, capitalism was not only an exploitative and oppressive system, it was also a progressive stage in human history, producing both the material conditions necessary for a free and equitable society and the class that would bring this about. Such claims are highly complex and contested, there are clear problems with Marx’s particular predictions and conclusions, and Marxist scholars have long disputed the extent to which his theory implies economic or even technological determinism (for recent discussions see Blakeley and Bryson, 2005). It is, however, possible to disentangle these issues from his underlying temporal principles, and a number of writers with a range of political interests and orientations have recently either explicitly developed Marx’s ideas on time or developed perspectives in tune with them. For example, while the leading British sociologist Antony Giddens firmly rejects any kind of teleology or economic determinism, or the claim that history is the history of class struggle, he has drawn explicitly on Marx’s insight that society and its institutions should be seen as a process, rather than a fixed state, and that it should be understood as a product of the past that sets conditions for the future. As discussed in Chapters Two and Three, he also accepts much of Marx’s analysis of time as a scarce resource and its commodified nature under capitalism. Giddens claims that his own theory of structuration “brings temporality into the heart of social theory”. Rejecting the conventional classification of social theories as either diachronic (focusing on processes of historical development and change) or synchronic (concerned with understanding the world as it exists), he aims at understanding both how social systems are maintained in and across time-space and their inherent vulnerability to change: “To study the structuration of social systems is to study the conditions governing their continuity, change or dissolution”. Giddens is particularly interested in the ways that power is generated in and through structures of domination, and he argues that these do not simply ‘exist’, but are constantly reproduced or modified through social practices. This in turn gives a central role to human agency, as it is the repetition of individual acts that accumulates as social practices (or the failure to repeat these acts that causes disruption); from this perspective, agency should therefore be understood as constitutive of rather than in opposition to social structures. While Giddens sees that social structures constrain the actions of human agents in many ways, he does not believe that these actions are predetermined. This means that the social practices and the social structures they maintain 12
Time, temporality and political thought
are not immutable; indeed, while they may “stretch” across long spacetime distances, “the seeds of change are present in every moment of the constitution of social systems across time and space” (1995, pp 29, 27).
The path-dependence approach Although the theoretical premises and literatures are quite distinct, Giddens’ rejection of a static ‘snapshot’ approach to understanding society is shared by some other contemporary writers who have drawn on the economic concept of ‘path dependence’, defined by the economist Douglas North as “a term used to describe the powerful influence of the past on the present and future”. Rejecting the neoliberal assumption that time does not matter and that economic decisions can be abstracted from their cultural context, North argues that to study economics is to study change, and that this change is brought about by choices that are themselves inevitably shaped by “ideas, ideologies, myths, dogmas, and prejudices” that reflect “the cumulative experiences of past generations that is embodied in culture” (1994, pp 364, 362). By analysing the ways in which this culture provides positive reinforcement and feedback for certain kinds of decision and action, North says that we can see how patterns of behaviour become embedded in society, rather than chosen from scratch by rational decision makers. These ideas have clear implications for political decision making and outcomes, and they have been applied and developed by a number of political scientists, most extensively by Paul Pierson in Politics in Time (2004; see also Putman, 1993 and the overview and discussion in Greener, 2005). Pierson’s starting-point is the claim that ‘history matters’, and that a moving picture provides a better basis than a snapshot for understanding political events, institutions and outcomes. Like Giddens, he insists that the analysis of stability cannot be separated from the analysis of change, and that the temporal dimensions of social life must be placed at the centre of political analysis. This means that if we are to understand particular possibilities and outcomes we need to look beyond the immediate circumstances to slow, long-term processes (such as the rise of literacy or demographic change) whose effects build up over time, while path dependence’s ideas of reinforcement and positive feedback can help us explore the ways in which early choices can limit future possibilities: Once established, patterns of political mobilization, the institutional ‘rules of the game’, and even citizens’ basic ways 13
Gender and the politics of time
of thinking about the political world will often generate selfreinforcing dynamics. Once actors have ventured far down a particular path, they may find it very difficult to reverse course. Political alternatives that were once quite plausible may become irretrievably lost. (Pierson, 2004, pp 10-11) Again like Giddens, Pierson links his analysis to power, and he claims that path dependence provides a way of exploring the ways that power structures can develop, as “inequalities of power, perhaps modest initially, can be reinforced over time and often come to be deeply embedded in organizations and dominant modes of political action and understanding, as well as institutional arrangements” (2004, p 11). Far from outcomes being the straightforward consequence of particular decisions, a path-dependence analysis suggests that the timing of these decisions is critically important, with early decisions setting up patterns that become increasingly difficult to change. The analysis of path dependence is also linked to the recent development of ‘historical institutionalism’. In contrast to functional approaches that explain institutions in terms of their role in maintaining existing systems and power relationships, this analyses institutions in terms of change as well as stability, and seeks to explore “which specific elements of a given institutional arrangement are (or are not) renegotiable and why some aspects are more amenable to change than others” (Thelan, 1999, cited by Kenny, 2006, p 1, emphasis in original). It stresses that institutions are not unitary, and that the interests and alliances on which they were originally based themselves evolve over time, opening up opportunities for marginalised groups to effect change (see Thelan, 1999).
Temporality, agency and strategies for political change Despite their very different political orientations and assumptions, Pierson, Giddens and Marx all agree that political analysis should focus on processes rather than moments or actions, and that choices and outcomes are inevitably constrained by their political context. This does not mean, however, that any of them see actions as either predetermined or pointless. Thus Pierson argues that, although path dependence shows the ways in which policies, beliefs, institutions and patterns of behaviour become change resistant, this does not mean that change cannot occur or that the approach cannot understand it. Rather, the approach helps 14
Time, temporality and political thought
us see how pressure for change can build up, so that a self-reinforcing trajectory may become vulnerable to particular ‘downstream’ challenges, and radical upheavals can be triggered by relatively minor events.This implies that the political strategist should seek to identify potential turning points or ‘critical junctures’ and concentrate their energies here, rather than attempting to swim against the stronger tides of history, and that they are more likely to achieve their goals if they identify existing patterns of thought and behaviour rather than wishing them away. Giddens’ theory of structuration also opens up the possibility of change by drawing attention to the practices that maintain even the most long-standing institutions or social arrangements, as it is in principle always possible that these practices may not be repeated. For Marx, the whole point of theory was to understand history in order to take conscious control of it, and to realise the potential for human progress that he believed the present contained. While he notoriously refused to predict in detail what a socialist society might be like, he was clearly motivated by a vision of the future. The mass proletarian revolution that Marx expected to occur in the advanced capitalist states has, of course, never taken place, and, although his vision has inspired political activists around the world, the outcomes have at times been horrendously far from the society of freedom and equality that he had envisaged. In this sense his work illustrates both the unpredictable potency of a vision of the future to generate political activism and the potential dangers of any claim to have discovered the necessary solution to all the problems of society (for the classic critique of such ‘historicism’, see Popper, 1957). Although Marx’s own appeal to history was unsuccessful, a sense of history is often important in the development, articulation, (re)production or erosion of collective identities, and these identities frequently involve explicit references to a shared past.When dominant groups (often unconsciously) present their own experiences and perceptions as the definitive record of ‘what happened’, ‘others’ are marginalised or written out of history, victims of a ‘cultural imperialism’ that renders them “… invisible as subjects, as persons with their own perspective and group-specific experience and interests” (Young, 1990, p 123; see also Griffiths, 1999, p 150).As the record of whole civilisations (such as ancient kingdoms of Africa) or the achievements of outstanding individuals (for example, by women artists) have been erased from the collective memory, members of subordinate groups have also been denied the pride and self-belief that can encourage political activism. In other words, to deny people a history is to deny them the sense of temporal existence that may be critical to group identity and a sense 15
Gender and the politics of time
of agency. Conversely, self-conscious attempts by some groups (such as women and minority people in the West or indigenous people in colonised nations) to (re)claim their own past can provide a source of empowerment and a basis for political mobilisation.
Welfare states in time A sense of historical context is particularly important if we are to identify policy options that are capable of being implemented in today’s welfare states. Pierson himself has applied a comparative pathdependence approach to the analysis of welfare policies. Like many commentators, he identifies changes in family structure, a falling birth rate and ageing population, the increased workplace participation of women and global economic competition as linked sources of a growing crisis. He argues both that these common pressures “have rendered the maintenance of the status quo an increasingly unrealistic option” in mature welfare states, and that states respond differently as pre-existing institutions, policies and ideas constrain the policy options available (Pierson, 2001a, p 416; see also the other chapters in Pierson, 2001b and the critical review by Byrne, 2003). These ideas build on Gøsta Esping-Andersen’s influential The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990), which seeks to identify the different policy trajectories produced by different types of ‘welfare regime’. While he acknowledges that there are overlaps and inconsistencies, Esping-Andersen identifies three main types of regime: liberal (Australia, the US, Canada and, although it is something of a hybrid, the UK), corporatist/conservative (most of continental Europe) and social democratic (Scandinavia).These vary according to the extent to which welfare is decommodified and universal, with state welfare in liberal regimes providing means-tested, stigmatising, low-level benefits for those unable to meet their needs in the market, the state replacing the market via workplace-based insurance as the main provider of welfare in corporatist/conservative regimes, and social democratic regimes providing high-level benefits as a universal citizenship entitlement to which all contribute. Esping-Andersen’s classification is not simply a matter of policies, but also of underlying class formations and political culture, through which variations in regime type both reflect and actively shape class formations – so that, to take the two extremes, Scandinavian regimes are a product of a strong labour movement and have the effect of reducing class differences, while in the US trade unions are much weaker and welfare policies maintain class inequalities. Although Esping-Andersen himself does not really address it, the 16
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organisation of time is also a key aspect of any welfare regime; this is discussed later in Chapters Three and Six. Such classification can help us understand how different welfare states respond to shared pressures (see Esping-Andersen, 2002a). It can also identify continuing differences behind apparently similar responses. For example, although ‘workfare’ welfare policies have been introduced in a number of European countries as well as the US, the former are concerned with social inclusion as well the anti-dependency ideology that is the overriding force in the latter (Byrne, 2003). This does not, however, imply that responses are determined by pre-existing ideologies and regime conditions in any straightforward way. For example, as Robert Cox (2004) notes, although the Scandinavian welfare states have retained a distinct trajectory in line with core values of universalism, solidarity and decommodification, these values themselves at times conflict and they can be interpreted in a range of ways, opening up a range of possible policy options. Conversely, Stuart White (2003) argues that a shift to more egalitarian policies in the US and UK based on norms of reciprocity is possible because it resonates with some aspects of values that are already widely held, such as freedom and selfdevelopment; although he wants these to be understood in new ways, these existing points of contact are a necessary precondition for the kind of reassessment of civic rights and obligations that he advocates. The possibility of such radical change increases if, as Pierson argues, mature welfare states have indeed reached a ‘critical juncture’ at which existing policies are increasingly unviable.
Political theory, political movements and changing perspectives on time The approaches of Giddens, Pierson and Marx all logically imply that ideas about time are themselves bound up with the historical contexts in which they are formulated and interpreted. However, although Giddens’ ideas are clearly rooted in European sociological and philosophical traditions, including Marxism, he does not directly address the ways in which temporal perspectives have developed, while Pierson makes no attempt to apply the path-dependence approach to the origin or development of his own ideas. In contrast, Marx was clear that his ideas could only have been produced at a particular stage of human development (that is, a stage by which both the contradictions that would destroy capitalism and the revolutionary role of the proletariat could be discovered). He claimed that it was this historical location that enabled him to understand the forces that would bring socialism about, 17
Gender and the politics of time
so that his theory was unlike earlier ‘utopian’ forms of socialist thought, which could only envision socialism as a timeless, ethical ideal. It is also clear that Marx’s belief in human progress and his confident optimism reflected the general spirit of the Enlightenment philosophy that dominated in Western political thought from the late 18th century, and that held that the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom would enable people to radically improve the societies in which they lived (see Bury, 1960; Foley, 1994). This period saw the birth of the new belief that revolution might represent a radically new beginning, rather than a phase in an endlessly revolving cycle (see Kamenka, 1966; Walzer, 1966), and the ideas of the Enlightenment were bound up with a series of radical and revolutionary events and movements, most notably the 1776 American Declaration of Independence and the 1789 French Revolution. The forward-looking secularism of most Enlightenment thought was in marked contrast to the kind of temporal mindset that dominated in earlier periods of European history. Pre-Christian thought, including that of the great classical Greek philosophers, had seen history in terms of cyclical decay and renewal rather than linear development; as such, it was hostile to both a belief in progress and the claim that history was moving towards a final goal. Although both these newer ideas were present in early Christian thought, which provided a vision of linear progress from the Creation through the Fall to the Day of Judgement (that is, to an end to history, a triumphant future following a final battle between the elect and the forces of evil), this process was seen as completely beyond mortal control. As Robert Pocock, one of the few writers to have self-consciously theorised about the relationship between time and political theory, has argued, such medieval beliefs left little scope for the rational pursuit or understanding of secular political change.Writers of the period therefore focused their intellectual efforts on the attempt to understand God’s purposes and timeless truths, rather than on what they saw as the transitory, irrational world of human activity, and Pocock argues that this restricted the imaginative possibilities of political thought well into the 17th century (1973; see also Bury, 1960; Wolin, 1961; Lane, 2000). Ruth Levitas makes the related point that it was not until the 17th century that utopia, which she defines as “the expression of the desire for a better way of being”, could be located in human time and provide motivation for political action (1990, p 191). While medieval Christianity did not encourage either the intellectual exploration of political possibilities or the short-term pursuit of secular goals, it provided fertile ground for the millenarian movements that 18
Time, temporality and political thought
periodically broke out in a number of European countries, with people abandoning the routines of life to follow charismatic messiahs who proclaimed the imminence of the Day of Judgement or Christ’s return to earth. Despite the apparent displacement of such eschatalogical scenarios by the rationality of Enlightenment thought, Norman Cohn has argued that the totalitarian movements of the 20th century showed that these “ancient imaginings are with us still”, while other writers have claimed that Marxism itself retained the medieval framework in secular form (1957, p 308 and 1962; Talmon, 1962; Olssen, 1968). The secular and optimistic assumptions of the Enlightenment were themselves never universally held, and the increasing political influence of fundamentalist Christianity and Islam in the early years of the 21st century has meant that political actions and decisions today can still be affected by temporal assumptions whose logic lies outside the framework of human, earthly time: for example, significant numbers of US citizens hold a belief in the imminence of the Day of Judgement that is likely to affect their attitude to global warming or conflict in the Middle East. Optimism is also hard for secular thinkers to sustain today, for recent Western thought has inevitably been shaped by the horrendous political experiences of the 20th century and by the possibility that increased scientific knowledge will lead, not to human progress, but to environmental or military catastrophe on an unprecedented scale. As Levitas (1990, 2001) says, such a sense of irreversible decline is more conducive to dystopian than utopian thought, and she identifies a widespread sense of fatalism that makes it difficult to think positively about the kind of society we might want to achieve. Uncertainty about the future has been reinforced by developments in natural science that appear to show that time itself is relative, and has found philosophical expression in poststructuralist/ postmodernist critiques of the idea of progress, certainty and objective knowledge. While such ideas do not rule out political activism, they seem to point to reform rather than revolution, or to localised forms of resistance rather than large-scale change. It is important not to over-simplify the causal relationship between political activity and temporal beliefs, or to over-schematise general patterns and trends (see Lane, 2000), for a number of distinct temporal mindsets are likely to coexist within a particular society, or even be held by one individual, and the time-line of ideas about time is itself one of continuity and recurrence as well as change. Nevertheless, it is likely that changing orientations to time have an impact on people’s sense of political possibility and efficacy and on the political decisions they make. 19
Gender and the politics of time
Political implications and conclusions The key writers discussed in this chapter had little to say about women or gender issues, and many of their ideas may seem remote from everyday life or practical politics. However, as discussed later in Parts 2 and 3, some have the potential to address feminist concerns, and in general they are highly relevant to the development of effective policies and political strategies. In particular, later chapters will argue that a radically reformulated version of Marx’s materialist conception of history to include women’s traditional domestic and ‘(re)productive’ activities reveals a clash between contemporary conditions of production and reproduction that makes existing arrangements unsustainable. Giddens’ theory of structuration further implies that gender, like any other social institution, is in principle vulnerable to the non-repetition of the acts that have sustained it over time.These acts include conformity to gendered time norms that maintain an unequal division of domestic and workplace labour.This means that individual or state-led challenges to traditionally gendered behaviour can disrupt the institution of gender itself, with small-scale changes having significant cumulative effects. While Pearson’s analysis of self-reinforcing patterns at first sight suggests that gendered behaviour will not readily be transformed by appeals to rational choice, his theory also encourages us to recognise potential sources of conflict and pressure at both the individual and collective level. Here it seems likely that we are approaching a ‘critical juncture’ in terms of gendered welfare policies, opening up both the possibility and need for radical change. Most generally, the kind of historical perspective advocated throughout this chapter reminds us that we are inevitably ‘starting from here’, not from some ideal situation, and that we should identify political opportunities and obstacles in this real context. It also shows that, although our options can be limited by current institutions, ideas, ascribed identities and structures of power, these are neither eternally given nor monolithic. Rather, they are historically produced and maintained by human agents over time, they often develop in unintended and contradictory ways, and they are potentially open to challenge and change. In helping to identify the long and shortterm processes involved, the analysis of the past can therefore inform understanding of the present and guide attempts to shape the future. To shape the future, we also need a sense that this can be different from the present; in this sense utopian thinking can be an important precondition for the development of radical policy alternatives (Levitas, 20
Time, temporality and political thought
2001). Here the trick is to balance a realistic appraisal of political possibility with the understanding that this is not bounded by what currently exists, and that we are neither the passive playthings of history nor entirely free agents.This balance is not easy. It is, however, perhaps made easier if we self-consciously reflect on the historical nature of our own temporal mindset, the implications of this for our sense of political purpose and agency, and the extent to which it is shared by potential allies and opponents.Thus, my own belief in the mutability of gender arrangements involves a clash with the temporal assumptions of those who hold that these are fixed by God or nature. My assertion that they are unjust also implies an a-temporal notion of justice that transcends particular societies, and that is disputed by some other contemporary feminists. Meanwhile, although I try to hold to the Enlightenment belief that individual and collective acts can improve the world, my increasing difficulty in sustaining optimism about the future perhaps reflects both my biological age and the dominant assumptions of today’s ‘postmodern times’, while this sense of the specificity of my own temporal beliefs is itself in line with the postmodern stress on relativity. It is also supported by the work on ‘time cultures’ that is discussed in the next chapter.
21
two
Time culture(s) and the social nature of time Chapter One included a discussion of the changing temporal assumptions that underlie political thought.Although the literatures are largely distinct, the idea that our understanding of time is historically and socially variable is also supported by a growing body of work elsewhere in the social sciences. After providing a brief overview of the ideas of anthropologists and sociologists, this chapter considers the development of distinctive ‘time cultures’ associated with the shifts from traditional to modern and postmodern times. It relates these changes to issues of power and control, and the final section of this chapter identifies sources of resistance to the commodified clock time of the capitalist economy.
Durkheim and beyond: the social functions of time The starting-point for much sociological and anthropological thinking on time is Emile Durkheim’s claim that human awareness of time is neither innate nor a straightforward reflection of the rhythms of nature. Rather, it is socially created, a variable ‘social institution’ that comes to be “… objectively thought of by everybody in a single civilisation” and that links the individual to the collective in a way that meets the particular needs of a given society (1971 [1912], p 10; for overviews of work building on this perspective, see Starkey, 1988; Hassard, 1990; Gell, 1992; for more critical discussion, see Gell, 2000). Many later sociologists have supported and developed Durkheim’s idea, arguing, for example, that time is “… a socio-cultural construction which aids people in their efforts to collectively orient themselves in the world and to co-ordinate their activity” (Goudsblom, 2001, p 20), and that “time-reckoning is basically dependent upon the organisation and functions of the group” (Sorokin and Merton, 1990 [1937], p 60). From this perspective, different societies (or different groups within a society), with different patterns of social interaction, will have different perceptions of time, meeting different collective needs. Some writers have extended this functionalist analysis to claim that even ‘deviant’ time cultures may serve the interests of society as a whole. 23
Gender and the politics of time
For example, in the 1960s Lewis Coser and Rose Coser argued that although the unwillingness of ‘lower-class’ and Spanish Americans to work hard and plan ahead seems contrary to the future-oriented time culture of the US, it could usefully help maintain the class distinctions necessary for a stable society and reduce competition for upper status positions (!) (1990 [1963]). Others have drawn on Julius Roth’s classic work on patients in a tuberculosis hospital to argue that people have a psychological need for ‘timetables’ to structure the passage of time and make sense of their experiences. Here Roth found that patients developed group norms as to how long each stage of treatment should last, and saw their medical progress “largely in terms of putting in time rather than in terms of the changes that occur in [their] lungs” (1963, p xv; see also Frankenberg, 1988). Similarly, workers may create artificial time structures to relieve the monotony of boring jobs (Roy, 1990), while in contrast a lack of time structure can have damaging effects: a widely quoted study of an Austrian village in the 1930s in which nearly all men were unemployed found that most men were left drifting aimlessly, walking more slowly than before and incapable of turning up to meals on time (discussed in Johada, 1988). Meanwhile, anthropologists have treated variations in social time as central to the investigation of how societies function; indeed “the ‘problem of time’ has been more or less central to anthropology since the discipline’s beginnings” (Greenhouse, 1996, p ix). Following important studies by Malinowski of the Trobriand islanders in the 1920s and by Evans-Pritchard of the Nuer people of southern Sudan in the 1930s, it has been widely argued that time in ‘traditional’ or ‘primitive’ societies was understood and reckoned in relation to natural processes (such as the phases of the moon), to the patterns and activities of daily life (such as milking times or meal times) or to other particular events (such as ‘before the great storm’). In such societies historical memory was said to be vague and often myth-like, and the future was seen as a continuation of the present, part of an endless cycle, rather than opening up the prospect of innovation or change.Thus, in contrast to modern Western societies, Evans-Pritchard found that the Nuer had no words for or conception of time as an abstract entity or resource that passed independently of their activities, that could be measured and that could run out. Their lives were therefore not structured by any external timetable, and they needed no timepiece other than “the cattle clock, the round of pastoral tasks”; he famously concluded that in this “Nuer are fortunate” (1940, pp 101, 103; see also Malinowski, 1990 [1926-27]) More recently, Edward Hall (1989) has made a distinction between ‘monochronic’ time, in which events are scheduled as discrete, 24
Time culture(s) and the social nature of time
separate items, and ‘polychronic’ time, in which several things are done simultaneously. He claims that the former is characteristic of North Europe and the US, and the latter of Mediterranean nations, Latin America and the Middle East. Lane also argues that monochromic time is artificial, and that in all societies polychromic time (which he also describes as female time) takes over in the home.
From traditional to modern time The idea that ‘other’ societies may have a relationship to time very different from ‘our own’ has been reinforced by the work of a number of recent historians who have identified a significant change in human relationships with time in Western societies between the 15th and 19th centuries, coinciding with the advent of capitalism and factory production; this has often been described as a shift from a traditional to a modern time culture (see in particular,Thompson, 1999 [1967] and Thrift, 1988, 1990; for overviews and critical discussion, see Adam, 1990, 1995, 2004; Nowotny, 1994; Macnaghten and Urry, 1998). According to these accounts, traditional time was based on the natural rhythms of the seasons and tasks that had to be done: people got up when it was light, went to bed when it was dark, did their work according to the demands of the season and then rested, in a timeless, endless cycle, so that their relationship to time was local, task-oriented, seasonal and repetitive. With the development of capitalism and industrialisation, this traditional time gradually gave way to the modern time of waged workers who were paid, not for performing particular tasks or for what they produced, but according to how long they worked, and whose hours and pace were standardised according to the needs of the mechanical production process and the maximisation of profit, rather than variable with the season, an individual worker’s inclination or the observation of ‘St Monday’ (a day traditionally dedicated to drink and relaxation; see Thompson, 1999 [1967]). The commodification of labour was therefore bound up with the commodification of time, and depended on a view of time as an abstract, quantifiable, divisible resource that could be bought and sold. In this sense, time became equated with money and could also be invested, wasted or saved; indeed, in searching for a quotation to sum up the ‘spirit of capitalism’ Max Weber decided on an extract from Benjamin Franklin’s famous admonition to hard work and industry that begins precisely “Time is money” (Weber, 1965 [1904-05], p 48).
25
Gender and the politics of time
To become money, time must also be measured; the development of modern time therefore required the development of more precise ways of observing and measuring its passing.As in many earlier societies, time in medieval society had been measured by sundials, hourglasses, candles and water clocks; it was also publicly announced through the ringing of church bells, while strict time keeping was central to the discipline of many monastic orders. However, it was only with the introduction of the mechanical clock from the late 13th century that time keeping became accurate and reliable, encouraging the perception and scientific investigation of time as a phenomenon in its own right, existing outside of human consciousness. By 1687, when Isaac Newton’s Principia was published, most parishes had a church clock and household clocks were becoming available; this made it easier for people to grasp the Newtonian concept of time as something objective, measurable, divisible and independent of any observer’s experience, activity, perception or memory. Treating units of time as quantifiable can also make them exchangeable; the clock therefore laid the foundations for the commodification of time as a decontextualised resource whose units can be exchanged and whose value is constant (the clock says that all hours are of equal length, however they may be perceived). In this sense, the idea that workers could be paid for their time depended on “the creation of a non-temporal time” (Adam, 1995, p 90; emphasis in the original). Clocks also made possible the later spread of factories whose operation depended on synchronised work times. This dependency was neatly illustrated by Marx in Capital, where he quoted a cotton magnate:“When a labourer lays down his spade, he renders useless, for that period, a capital worth eighteenpence. When one of our people leaves the mill, he renders useless a capital that has cost £100,000” (1946 [1867], p 404). To maximise profits, it was, of course, not sufficient for workers to turn up on time; they also had to work with maximum efficiency. Marx identified some of the processes of work intensification through which greater productivity could be achieved even when working hours were reduced by law; later ideas of ‘scientific management’ and time-and-motion studies associated with Frederick Taylor, whose Principles of Scientific Management was published in 1911, represent a logical extension of these processes. The processes of capital accumulation also required a sense of the future as something that could be different from the past, and that could be determined by activities in the present. This view was supported by the Newtonian perspective, that saw time’s arrow as pointing only forwards, but it appears to conflict with traditional, cyclical time cultures 26
Time culture(s) and the social nature of time
and with the medieval religious beliefs discussed in the previous chapter. It was, however, not only the sense of an earthly future that motivated owners of capital to invest rather than spend any profits they might make. As Max Weber argued in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, investment was also encouraged by some forms of protestant theology as these developed from the 17th century.These generated both a sense of profound anxiety and the twin beliefs that hard work was a sign of being one of the elect and that “Waste of time is … the deadliest of sins” (1965 [1904-05], p 157). Although the religious basis gradually died away, Weber argued that such ‘Christian asceticism’ remained an important motivating force throughout the 19th century. The belief that morality could be equated with hard work and that an individual who enjoyed luxury or leisure time was destined to burn in hell was not confined to the capitalist class. Employers clearly had a motive for attempting to inculcate it in the workforce via sermons and Sunday Schools, and for portraying leisure time as not only unprofitable but morally depraved: “In mature capitalist society all time must be consumed, marketed, put to use; it is offensive for the labour force merely to ‘pass the time’” (Thompson, 1999 [1967], p 395; see also Nowotny, 1994, pp 118-19). However, as the 18th-century economist Adam Smith argued, workers could also be motivated to work harder and longer if they could see a way of improving their lives (see the discussion in Nyland, 1990), and as living standards gradually improved, so attitudes to work changed: “No more would workers turn up to work only until they had enough money for the week. Not only present but future time was now money” (Thrift, 1990, p 119).As Nigel Thrift notes, such a change in mindset was dramatically illustrated by Pierre Bourdieu’s study of Algerian workers in the 1950s, who cut their working hours when wages rose slightly, but who sought to expand them when they were doubled:“It was as if … the individual suddenly discovered that he was capable of taking his own future in his hands” (Bourdieu, 1990 [1963], p 236). In contrast, Marx a hundred years earlier reported a “delightful yell of rage” from a “West Indian” critic of emancipation, who complained that former slaves downed tools as soon as they had produced enough for their own immediate consumption, saying “that sugar, and all the fixed capital laid out in the plantations, could go to hell” and treating idleness rather than the accumulation of wealth as the real luxury. These workers had, Marx said, “ceased to be slaves, but were not yet wage-earning labourers but only self-sustaining peasants” (1971 [1857-58], p 101). Marx saw commodified labour as central to the exploitation of labour under capitalist conditions of production, and he contrasted 27
Gender and the politics of time
the alienated time spent at work, which was experienced as a loss of humanity and freely chosen activity, with leisure time, which was the only time that workers felt themselves to be free. As Giddens notes, this meant that “‘working time’ and ‘one’s own’ or ‘free’ time became basic divisions within the phenomenal experience of the day”, neither in “organic relation to the rhythms of nature” (1995, p 137). However, capitalism now also increasingly requires that workers use their leisure time for consumption. Not only does it require a market for its products, but it requires the long hours that workers are willing to put in when motivated by the desire to consume more material goods (Thrift, 1990; Nowotny, 1994). The implications of this are discussed further in Chapter Three.
From modern time to postmodern times It seems clear that there was something new and distinctive about the commodified clock time that became the organising principle of industrial capitalist society. However, it is important not to misrepresent pre-industrial society as some kind of idyllic “bucolic dreamtime”, characterised by harmony with nature and “great temporal innocence” (Thrift, 1988, pp 57, 55), ignoring the rigours of agricultural life and the sense of future implied by the planning and building over generations of the great medieval cathedrals. The spread of clock time was also always uneven and it is still incomplete. At the most basic level, while the human experience of time seems indeed to be socially variable, no person can entirely escape the natural rhythms of biology that still influence the hour at which we are born and die, the times we are predisposed to sleep and eat and even the times of day at which we need to urinate most frequently (for an extensive and fascinating discussion, see Foster and Kreitzman, 2004). Some religious authorities support patterns of time use (such as frequent prayer or not working on the sabbath) that run counter to the demands of capitalist efficiency. Despite the increasing “commercialization of intimate life” (Hochschild, 2003, book title), family and personal relationships also often involve very different temporal rhythms from those in the workplace and, as discussed in later chapters, some feminists therefore argue that women and men inhabit different time cultures. More generally, the anthropologist Susan Greenhouse has rejected the idea that ‘whole’ societies can be defined by a single temporality, arguing that in any society “Meanings of ‘time’ are themselves variable and unsettled” (1996, p 93), while Barbara Adam argues that any individual in any society inevitably inhabits a multiplicity of time cultures and 28
Time culture(s) and the social nature of time
at any moment we are never simply in the present but also in the past and future, in a mesh of hopes, fears, memories, plans and predictions (1990, 1995, 2004). This sense of the multiplicity and coexistence of different kinds of time is reinforced by developments in the natural sciences that have overturned the Newtonian concept of natural time as invariant and objectively measurable (see Adam, 1988; Macnaghten and Urry, 1998; Bluedorn, 2002). It also resonates with some claims about the contemporary ‘postmodern condition’, said to be characterised by fluidity, indeterminacy and the rejection of binary classifications or the idea of linear progress (a view that itself seems to assume a form of classification and linear temporal development from modernism). In today’s society, time seems increasingly fragmented and incoherent, simultaneously global and local, with traditional timetables and calendars turned upside down in a 24/7 society in which Christmas begins in October and supermarkets never close. Time today is also both compressed and expanded, so that our lives are bound up both with the unimaginably fast speed of digital technology and the ‘glacial’, unimaginably slow pace of evolutionary change (Harvey, 1989; Macnaghten and Urry, 1998). While “[t]iming at the end of the twentieth century has achieved an unprecedented degree of precision, orderliness, range and relevance” that extends into the deep past and allows scientists to estimate when the universe began (Goudsblom, 2001, p 33), lack of certainty about the future now encompasses the question of whether there will be one (Adam, 1995), and Allen Bluedorn (2002) laments the lack of ‘temporal depth’ in US society, which lacks both a sense of the past and concern for the future. For Helga Nowotny, the logic of capitalism that made time a scarce commodity is now speeding up time itself, and she draws on the old myth of Cronos, who feared the future and devoured his young, to argue that “A present geared to accelerated innovation is beginning to devour the future” (1994, p 11). Some today see a world characterised by the quest for instant gratification, in which short-term profits are pursued at the expense of long-term prosperity, life-long marriage and commitment have given way to transient relationships, gardening has become a commercialised ‘makeover’, family meals are replaced by ad hoc grazing, older people are not wise but out-of-date, politicians are abandoned if they cannot deliver quick fixes to complex problems, and political debate is reduced to the ten-second sound-bite and the art of ‘spin’. Others see it as one in which commodified clock time is intruding into every area of life, as mobile phones and e-mails blur the boundaries between home 29
Gender and the politics of time
and work, busy parents struggle to schedule time with their children, and few have time for the unremunerated ‘third shift’ of political or community activism. However, if we remember that, as discussed above, “there is no one time, only times” (Macnaghten and Urry, 1998, p 143), it is possible to see that ‘older’ concepts of time and ways of being have not entirely disappeared, while new means of instant, global communication may offer positive opportunities for new forms of political mobilisation and engagement. If we also recognise that several time cultures may be dominant, or competing for domination, at particular times, we can analyse the ways in which these processes are bound up with wider issues of power and control, asking “… who structures whose life, what rules are being adhered to, and how these processes occur” (Adam, 1990, p 109). From this perspective, conflicts between time cultures are inherently political.
All times are not equal: issues of power and control Resistance to the idea that time should be measurable, and that this measurement should structure our daily lives, goes back at least to the 2nd century BC, when a character in a Roman comedy cursed the proliferation of sundials, that “cut and hack my days so wretchedly into small pieces”, and that dictated when he should eat, rather than allowing him to listen to his stomach (quoted in Foster and Kreitzman, 2004, pp 12-13). However, while this early imposition of measured onto natural time may have generated isolated grumbles, there seems no evidence of collective opposition to clock time until the early days of industrial capitalism. In an influential essay, first published in 1967, Edward Thompson argued that the imposition of commodified clock time on the British workforce did not take place without a struggle, and that later conflicts between workers and employers over hours of work were preceded by what he called a struggle against time – that is, against the whole idea that activities must be dictated by the clock rather than the task at hand, and that workers should turn up day in day out for a specified number of hours, regardless of any external considerations. While he argues that the process was more uneven than Thompson suggested, Thrift agrees with him that the time discipline of the clock had been successfully imposed on the British workforce by the 19th century through a mixture of sanctions, encouragement and indoctrination, and he argues that the very strength of 19th-century campaigns for a statutory limitation of working hours showed that workers were no 30
Time culture(s) and the social nature of time
longer fighting against the underlying principle of time: “From now on they would win battles, but the war was lost” (1990, p 117). In a throwaway line in his autobiography, the US singer-songwriter Bob Dylan makes the related point that the American Civil War was in some ways “a battle between two kinds of time”, as the agricultural rhythms of the South increasingly clashed with the factory time of the North (2004, p 86). Today, most Western children learn clock time discipline from an early age, when they encounter school timetables and are penalised if they are late.They also learn that some people’s time seems to be worth more than others, so that while adults may keep them waiting, children must not waste adults’ time. This message continues later in life, for example in doctor–patient relationships; indeed Ronald Frankenberg has claimed that hospitals should be understood as sites of power and authority “where the time view of others can be imposed” (1988, p 148; see also Roth, 1963). The link between control and time is, of course, particularly clear in employment, not only for those workers required to clock in and out, but also for those who are expected to show their commitment by working long hours, even when their presence does not increase productivity. Such time discipline involves more than the extraction of a greater surplus from workers’ labour, and is increasingly imposed on management-level workers, taking little account of other demands on their time (see Collinson and Collinson, 2004). As discussed later in Chapter Eight, it also applies to paid care work and often extends into private life, so that caring activities are forced to conform to the imperatives of clock time rather than their own rhythms. The hegemony of clock time has not been confined to industrialised nations, and its global spread has been bound up with the complex processes of colonisation, imperialism and globalisation. Symbolised by the adoption of Greenwich Mean Time in 1884 as the standard against which other time zones are measured, ‘world time’ has become synonymous with synchronised, linear, measurable, divisible, commodified clock time, with its accompanying insistence on punctuality, speed, discipline and hard work. As in Britain, this time has been resisted. For example, as discussed earlier, Marx recorded that former slaves preferred idleness to longer hours as soon as they had enough money to survive, while the Kabyle people of Algeria referred to clocks as “the devil’s mill” (Bourdieu, 1990 [1963], p 222). However, it seems largely true that ‘other’ (non-Western, pre-modern) forms of time have been “silenced through a form of temporal imperialism” (Fitzpatrick, 2004, p 202), with any deviation from dominant Western 31
Gender and the politics of time
time culture labelled as “backward, lazy, uncivilized” (Adam, 2004, p 136; see also Griffiths, 1999). As discussed in Chapter Eight, some feminists have argued that ‘women’s time’ has a distinct temporal rhythm that has similarly been forced into the ‘shadow’ of clock time. Academic writers on time may themselves be implicated in the processes through which hegemonic time cultures are sustained. Discourses around ‘development’ often involve both the idea that some nations are ‘backward’ and the related view of “a dynamic Western world characterized by linear development juxtaposed to a stagnant non-Western world caught in cyclical notions of time” (Schendel and Nordholt, 2001, p 11). Similarly, as Greenhouse argues, although anthropologists recognise the relative nature of time cultures, most also assume that linear, Newtonian time (Western time, ‘our’ time) is somehow more ‘real’ than other forms. As Greenhouse also points out, because Giddens’ conception of agency, discussed in Chapter One, sees this in terms of individual efforts “whose effects are caught and accumulated as ‘structure’”, it assumes a linear view of time (“the officialized temporality of the Western nation-state”) that is culturally specific rather than universally shared, but whose particularity Giddens fails to recognise (Greenhouse, 1996, pp 86, 80; see also Weston, 2002 and the discussion of Giddens in Chapter Seven, this volume). As discussed in Chapter Nine, the ‘reality’ of linear time is also uncritically assumed in most quantitative time-use studies.
Conclusions: resisting capitalist time The arguments of the previous sections indicate that the domination of clock time has not entirely eradicated other times, even though these have been marginalised, silenced or denied legitimacy. The assertion of the existence and needs of these ‘other’ time cultures is therefore a political act, as is the work of those writers discussed in this chapter who have analysed not only the artificial nature of dominant temporal assumptions but also the power relationships involved. As indicated earlier, resistance can be class-based; indeed Tony Fitzpatrick has claimed that “… class conflict consists of the powerful trying to impose their subjective times onto the powerless and the latter either surrendering to or resisting this process” (2004, p 210). Resistance to Western time measurement can also be tied in with resistance to Western colonialism. For example, Willem Schendel has analysed the existence of multiple constructions of time in Bangladesh to argue that these should be seen “… not just as ‘pre-modern’ survivals but as an expression and outcome of cultural and political struggles”. He further argues that “Time is not 32
Time culture(s) and the social nature of time
just imposed by a global world elite … time can also be a tool in the hands of local groups seeking to impose their own agency on history” (2001, p 38). Environmental campaigners also assert an oppositional time-frame, confronting capitalism’s pursuit of short-term profit with its long-term ecological impact. Most importantly for this book, resistance to the dominant time culture can also involve the assertion of the value of time that is not measured by money, a time that is neither committed to an employer nor simply set aside for leisure or consumption. Such time responds to human needs, whether these are to perform particular tasks in however long this takes, or to care for and communicate with others, or to build relationships. As Barbara Adam says, “Not all time is money. Not all human relations are exclusively governed by the rationalized time of the clock. Not all times are equal” (1995, p 94). Although Thompson and Thrift claimed that by the mid-19th century workers had abandoned the struggle against commodified clock time, the articulation of these ‘other’ times has surfaced intermittently in the British trade union movement: for example, Ken Starkey has shown that a dispute between skilled British railway workers and management in 1982 over ‘flexible rostering’ involved competing views of time, and that while the management saw it purely in terms of money, workers were concerned about the impact on their social and domestic lives; similar issues arose in the Liverpool dockworkers’ dispute in the mid-1990s (Starkey, 1988; Lavalette and Kennedy, 1996). Today, related concerns are widely articulated in debates around ‘work–life balance’ and ‘familyfriendly policies’, and Madeleine Bunting has identified a clash of “two different time frames: the timelessness required by their employer and the ‘timeliness’ required by intimate relationships”. Bunting also argues that the urgency of this clash stems from the “historic coincidence of a dramatic shift in the employment patterns of women and the acceleration of the overwork culture”, and she sees this culture as one in which workers are now ‘willing slaves’ prepared to work ever-longer hours in a society that equates busyness with success and status (Bunting, 2004, pp 16, 215-16 and book title). These arguments are at the heart of this book, and are discussed extensively in later chapters. At this point, it is important to note that, while contemporary policy debates around parental leave and flexible employment may appear to be just about the allocation of hours, they may also, as with the earlier struggles discussed by Thompson, represent a fight ‘against time’, that is, against the all-encompassing nature of commodified clock time. This in turn suggests that change is likely to be opposed by employers not only because it appears to threaten 33
Gender and the politics of time
short-term profitability, but also because it represents a threat to the underlying temporal logic of capitalism and the market economy. Similar issues underlie discussion in the next chapter, which explores how time is and could be used, distributed and controlled in capitalist societies, and it is important to remember that, while analysis of time use generally assumes the quantifiable nature of time, this does not exhaust its meanings.
34
three
Time use in capitalist societies This chapter considers how time use is and should be organised in today’s advanced industrial societies.The first section confirms that the distribution and availability of free time is a matter of political justice and legitimate political concern.The second section shows that welfare policies have significant effects on patterns of time use, and extends existing work to explore the value of identifying ‘temporal regimes’, based on variations in time culture and temporal orientation as well as time use. Here it finds that although there are identifiable patterns, these are often fragmented and contradictory.The third section addresses the extent and consequences of long-hours working, and similarly finds both pressures and counter-pressures. Although the chapter concludes that challenges to current patterns of time use are likely to encounter strong opposition, it does find some grounds for optimism.
Free time as a scarce resource Time is different from other scarce resources in that there are obvious limits to its accumulation. No-one can free up more than 24 hours a day and, although a few wealthy individuals are choosing to have their bodies frozen when they die in the hope that future scientific advances will one day enable them to be restored to life (Griffiths, 1999, pp 2546), no-one can yet live forever.Time is therefore still the ultimate scarce resource.While in a sense anyone who does not want to die values time in itself, most people also value time as a means to an end – whether this be money, political influence, creative work, the enjoyment of leisure activities, or the development of personal relationships. Their ability to pursue these ends is affected by how much free or leisure time they have – that is, time that is not either controlled by someone else or taken up by paid work, unpaid work or personal care. Such time is far from evenly distributed, as some have to work most of their waking hours to earn enough to live while others can live off inherited wealth; some take painful hours to walk a distance that others run or drive in minutes; and some have to cook and clean for family members while others do not even have to do this for themselves. To the extent that these inequalities are socially and politically produced, they should be seen as a matter of justice. 35
Gender and the politics of time
John Rawls’ influential A Theory of Justice (1971) famously concluded that the only inequalities that should exist in a just society are those that benefit the least well off.Although his book did not discuss leisure time, Rawls later identified this as a ‘primary good’, that is, something that “every man is presumed to want”, along with the “rights and liberties, opportunities and power, income and wealth” that “free and equal persons ... need as citizens” (1971, pp 92, 62). As such, the distribution of leisure time should be governed by principles of justice, and Rawls argued that if someone chose to go surfing rather than work a standard day (which he suggested might be eight hours), they could not expect to have their needs met by other people (2001, pp 60, 179). In other words, although Rawls did not argue that leisure had to be equally distributed, his just society allowed no place for either the idle rich or the work-shy welfare claimant, and those who chose leisure over work could expect to pay an economic price. Although Rawls has been criticised by commentators from the Right for supporting welfare spending and from the Left for defending capitalism, he argued that laissez-faire capitalism, welfare state capitalism and state socialism all violated his principles of justice, leaving only ‘property-owning democracy’, in which ownership of wealth and capital was widely dispersed, and ‘liberal socialism’ as the bases for potentially just societies (2001, pp 137-9; see also the discussion in Taylor, 2004). Tony Fitzpatrick has recently developed this position to argue that a just allocation of ‘meaningful time’, which he sees as a basic human right, would involve a more radical challenge to capitalist society than Rawls thought necessary. He contests Rawls’ notion of a ‘standard’ day and draws on Marx to argue that the apparently free choices available for citizens today are based on a limited, capitalist concept of freedom; this requires “a willing submission to the economic laws of private exchange”, and is the only kind of temporal freedom available in societies in which “Social time revolves around market imperatives that are made to resemble physical absolutes” and in which leisure is primarily time for consumption (2004, pp 206, 202). For Marx himself, the distinction between work and leisure was largely an artificial product of capitalist society, in which productive labour ceased to be an expression of human creativity and became merely a means to make money and acquire possessions (see in particular 1963 [1844]). Although he conceded that a “realm of necessity” would continue to exist in a future communist society, Marx believed that unfulfilling work could be reduced to a minimum and the “realm of freedom” expanded in an economy based on the satisfaction of human needs rather than the pursuit of profit (1971 [1867], p 820). He also 36
Time use in capitalist societies
argued that in the early stages of communist society workers should be rewarded according to the hours they put in, but that eventually such individualistic considerations could be transcended, so that work and rewards could be based on the principle “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” (1968 [1875], p 325). In such a society, labour time would no longer be exploited and commodified, so that time would be valued for itself, and “It is no longer labour time but disposable time that is the measure of wealth” (1971 [185758], p 168). As discussed in later chapters, the ideas of Rawls and Marx have been developed by feminists in relation to unpaid work within the home and the distribution of time between women and men. However, neither of these writers explored these issues themselves; indeed, by ignoring unpaid work they confirmed the capitalist assumption that the only productive time is that which is rewarded by money.
A political resource Fitzpatrick is particularly interested in the idea of free time as a democratic resource, “perhaps based on education for deliberation, where the task is to build new, discursive forms of democratic arrangements” (2004, p 214). His interest is unusual, however. Political philosophers have not generally been interested in the availability or distribution of disposable time, and, while economic barriers to political participation have often been recognised, the similar effects of ‘time poverty’ have until recently been ignored, and most political theorists simply seem to assume that the relevant people have time for political activity. In non-democratic or partially democratic systems this is indeed likely to be the case, as excluded groups do much of the work to ‘free up’ time for the politically active. Thus Athenian citizens had time to deliberate affairs of state because they lived in a patriarchal slave society, while Rousseau’s male citizens would be able to meet together and ponder the nature of the general will, secure in the knowledge that someone else was looking after their children and preparing their postpolitical supper. Later democratic theory has of course rejected both slavery and the exclusion of women. However, it has not addressed the resulting problem of how all members of society can have time to participate if democratic rights and obligations are extended to the whole adult population.The problem is particularly acute for advocates of participatory democracy. It also arises from the model of active citizenship that has been advocated by recent UK governments, and 37
Gender and the politics of time
that stresses citizens’ involvement in the provision of public services, as well as the importance of community involvement, responsible parenting and paid employment. A number of writers have expressed concern that there has been a decline in civic involvement in Western democracies, and that this is linked to lack of available time. The publication of Julie Schor’s The Overworked American. The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (1991) has generated widespread debate, as has Arlie Hochschild’s claim that long hours of work in the US are having a detrimental effect on family and community life, leading towards “not only the parent-free home, but also the participation-free civic society and the citizen-free democracy” (1997, p 243). This claim seems to suggest a causal link with Robert Putman’s identification of a decline in the social capital (the “connections among individuals – social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trust that arise from them”) that he sees as essential for a healthy democracy. However, although Putman has found that “Participation in politics is increasingly based on the cheque book, as money replaces time”, he does not see working hours or lack of time as the most critical factors, finding instead that those who appear busiest are also most likely to be socially and politically engaged, and that watching television “is the one activity most lethal to community involvement” (2000, pp 19, 40, 92). While the rhetoric of ‘time poverty’,‘time famine’ and ‘hurry sickness’ is now widely used, there is an ongoing debate as to whether leisure time in Western societies has in fact increased or decreased and what causal relationship this may have with the development of social networks and political engagement. Writers also disagree as to the nature and significance of class and gender-based differences in free time. Thus although some, including Putman, suggest that there has been a redistribution of leisure time from the more educated to the manual working class, it seems clear that the latter have less choice or control over their leisure hours, and do not have access to time-saving resources such as rapid transport, so that their time may be less useful and usable than that of ‘money rich, time poor’ groups (see Warren, 2003; Fenwig and Tausig, 2004; Presser, 2004). Similarly, although women may appear to have as much leisure time as men, this time is often more fragmented and constrained. These issues are explored in Chapter Nine.
38
Time use in capitalist societies
States, time use and temporal regimes Although issues around the distribution and availability of leisure time are now receiving some political attention, the planning and organisation of time is not normally an explicit responsibility of national or local government, and to the best of my knowledge no state has ever had a ministry of time. Nevertheless, states do pass laws directly governing our use of time, while many policies have intended and unintended effects on how we use and experience it. Even liberal welfare states affect our temporal identities and perceptions by legally defining key stages in our life course: for example, they determine how long young people must remain at school, the age at which they are deemed legally adult, the age at which older people may or must retire from paid employment, and the age at which they can receive a state pension. This means that they also contribute to distinct ‘life course regimes’ that “produce and sustain specific temporal structures of life by institutional definitions of events, phases, episodes and transition that are linked to individual expectations and ‘life plans’” (Leisering and Leibfried, 1999, p 6). States have also long attempted to regulate how people spend their time in the public sphere. They have, for example, restricted the times that shops, theatres and licensed premises can open, they have moved the clocks forward to make the most of summer daylight hours, and they have legislated to restrict or extend the length of the working day or week. Specific policies often reflect the outcome of conflicting pressures from social and economic groups, including religious leaders, workers’ organisations, employers and social reformers. While liberal states are ostensibly reluctant to interfere in the ‘private’ world of family life, their tax and welfare policies affect time use here as well. In particular, they have until recently assumed and supported a gender division of labour based on the norm of life-long marriage, the male ‘breadwinner’ and unpaid female domestic labour. In contrast, the social democratic Nordic states have adopted a range of educational, employment and social policies deliberately aimed at encouraging a more equal distribution of both household labour and paid employment between women and men. The 1975 Cuban Family Code, which legally obliged men to contribute to housework and childrearing, and the 2005 Spanish law, which included these responsibilities as part of the marriage contract at civil wedding ceremonies, appear to involve even more direct state intervention into how family members spend their time. There was, however, no real intention of enforcing men’s obligations in either case (Sloan, 2005;Tremlett, 2005). Similarly, while 39
Gender and the politics of time
feminist-inspired projects in Milan, Rome and Barcelona in the late 1980s and early 1990s attempted to plan time use in these cities not only to facilitate access to public services, but also to balance paid and unpaid responsibilities and to encourage a more equal distribution of housework, these plans went little further than some changes to the opening hours of government businesses (Perez-Molina, 1998;Tronto, 2003; Blakeley, 2004, p 193). In Changing Times, the leading time-use researcher Jonathan Gershuny draws on the increasing body of evidence available from quantitative time-use studies to explore some aspects of the relationship between state policies and everyday behaviour. He argues that “if we can measure how the members of a society spend their time, we have the elements of a certain sort of assessment of how that society works”. His aim is to “piece together, for developed countries, a comprehensive account that covers all daily activities, paid work, unpaid work, leisure or consumption time”, and to use this to assess levels of economic activity, to compare patterns of time use between and within nations, and to identify long-term social changes (2000, pp 1, 4). He argues that these forms of activity are interdependent (so that, for example, different kinds of consumption stimulate different forms of employment), and that they provide a much more meaningful picture of economic activity than conventional accounts, which focus only on paid work. More recently, he has combined older, money-based accounts with newer, time-based ones to show how calculations of national accounts can be used to produce a “comprehensive accounting of economic activity entirely in terms of time” (2005). This analysis of time use is clearly politically significant; indeed, Gershuny states in his book that “There is a political agenda to everything that is written here”, and that “The point of trying to understand what is troubling about the world, is to change it.” He argues that Western societies today face a choice of ‘time-use regimes’, that is, the ways in which states manage time use, both through shortterm policies such as the regulation of working hours or the provision of parental leave, and through long-term policies such as education or the provision of leisure facilities. He argues that, because consumption stimulates production, at the macro level “more leisure may mean more work” (emphasis in original), and he advocates both a reduction in working hours and policies, such as “education for consumption”, to encourage the kind of leisure activities that create a demand for high-value goods that involve skilled, well-paid and satisfying work. Here he says that if, for example, more people go to the opera, then it will be possible to pay opera singers enough to motivate them to 40
Time use in capitalist societies
spend long years in training; similarly, an appreciation of good food encourages people to eat at restaurants where food is prepared and served with care and skill, rather than in the “automated parodies of traditional services represented by the fast-food establishment”. In other words, social democratic time-use regimes can counter “the excesses of unconstrained Wild West capitalism”, and “support future economic growth by promoting the sort of leisure consumption that also provides good jobs, and leads to less time-stressed and pressurised, less unequal and happier societies” (2000, pp 10, 97, 37, 10, 10-11). As Gershuny says, his time-use regimes parallel Esping-Andersen’s classification of welfare regimes, discussed in Chapter One, and both feed into recent analysis of ‘the temporal welfare state’ by Goodin et al (2004) and Rice et al (2006).This work treats time as well as money as a measure of welfare, and explores the impact of welfare regimes on the distribution of ‘discretionary time’ among different groups. Its starting-point is a distinction between discretionary and leisure time that defines the former as the time people have left after deducting the time they need to spend in paid work, unpaid work and personal care if they are not to fall below the poverty line or minimal social standards. In practice, of course, many people work longer in order to earn more than this, so their leisure time is significantly lower.The researchers then attempt to measure how states affect temporal well-being both directly, through regulating working hours and leave entitlements, and indirectly, through the tax and benefit systems and the provision of services.Thus, “[t]he more it taxes people, the more hours of the day people have to ‘work for the government’.… Conversely, the more the state subsidises people’s necessities, the more time it frees up for them to use in ways other than earning money to pay for them” (Goodin et al, 2004, p 532). The calculations involved in measuring such effects are highly complex, but initial findings appear to confirm the researchers’ expectation that, as with other forms of inequality, the policies of the social democratic Finnish and Swedish states serve to reduce inequalities in discretionary time between different social groups, particularly “the time-penalties that would otherwise come from parenthood”, and provide temporal incentives for mothers as well as fathers to join the paid workforce (Goodin et al, 2004, p 544). In contrast, German and French state policies confirm the traditional values associated with corporatist/ conservative regimes by providing temporal advantages to families with a mother at home full-time and a father in full-time employment. As also expected, the less interventionist principles of the liberal US and Australian states mean that these have little effect on most people’s temporal autonomy; although lone parents benefit temporally from 41
Gender and the politics of time
targeted state intervention, they remain disadvantaged compared to similarly situated parents elsewhere (Rice et al, 2006).
Temporal regimes Between them, the writers discussed in the previous section provide a good basis for the identification of distinct ‘temporal regimes’. However, Chapter Two indicated that their equation of time with measurable, clock time is alien to some cultures while, as discussed later in Chapter Nine, time-use studies may be unable to capture patterns of time use particularly associated with women. A fuller discussion of temporal regimes would therefore go beyond measurable patterns of time use and the impact of state policies, to consider less tangible issues around the range of available temporal discourses and the extent to which societies acknowledge, value and support different kinds of time. As part of this, it would investigate the often fluid, overlapping and even contradictory ways in which different individuals and social groups conceptualise and experience time, and it would investigate the relationship between these differences and structured inequalities, including those between women and men. The idea of temporal regimes also raises broader questions about the temporal orientation of particular policies and political discourses, which may seek restoration of the past (real or imagined), support privilege in the present or look to a different future. However, rather than reflecting a unitary position, policy outcomes are often the product of a range of competing, conflicting and fragmented temporal imperatives, perspectives and processes, involving not simply different interests but also a clash between the short- and long-term interests of particular groups or of society as a whole. For example, as Fitzpatrick (2004) has argued, although a key temporal feature of welfare capitalism is a short-term focus on profit that makes it unable to deal adequately with environmental issues, it also assumes intergenerational responsibilities, while social insurance-based policies require a sense of temporal continuity. Similarly, politicians are often faced with a conflict between the acknowledged need to plan for the future and the drive to the short-term, low-cost policies that may win them the next election; some may also be concerned with their place in history. Recent ideas around the ‘social investment state’ illustrate the complex and sometimes contradictory nature of responses to such tensions (Lister, 2004; Kershaw, 2005). Particularly associated with the ‘third way’ policies of recent UK and Canadian governments, one of the central planks of the social investment state is investment in children, 42
Time use in capitalist societies
particularly in childcare, in order to produce the responsible, productive workers that society needs. In this, it is clearly future-oriented, although there are also short-term gains as childcare provision encourages women into paid employment. As critics have said, this constitutes an instrumentalist approach to children that loses sight of children’s present welfare and happiness. The market-based assumptions of the social investment state also mean that it sees no need to help people spend more quality time outside the workplace, it is not concerned with how time is distributed within the home, and it has no way of seeing the existence or value of temporal needs and rhythms outside of paid employment. While this suggests that the social investment state involves some identifiable temporal assumptions, there are also some counter-currents, shared with other state forms. In particular, its concern for the future is tempered by short-term pressures and the need to show quick, measurable results. For example, as Polly Toynbee (2006) reports in relation to the UK’s Sure Start programme for children, “Politicians’ need for instant gratification puts long-term programmes in constant peril”. Moreover, although its justification of present spending in terms of future gain seems to rule out state spending on older people or on those too disabled to contribute as paid workers, such spending does occur, however inadequately, and seems to rely on a more timeless notion of justice, or on recognition by the workers of the present that they too are likely to need support as they grow old.These ambiguities and inconsistencies illustrate the general point that although particular states may seem to have the kind of identifying features that constitute a distinctive time regime, this is unlikely to be a closed, unitary system. This means that the temporal assumptions bound up with any state can be opened up to challenge and interpreted in positive as well as negative ways.
Long working hours and the capitalist economy In many nations, trade unionists and feminists have long campaigned for the kind of legislation that writers such as Gershuny advocate, particularly reduced working hours and parental leave. However, Gershuny himself largely ignores the role of organised labour and the women’s movement in pursuing these, and he treats the state “almost as a self-contained institution separable from civil society” (Fitzpatrick, 2004, p 213). This is tied in with his general focus on the economy at the expense of politics and his apparent belief that leisure time is primarily valuable because it is consumption time.As Fitzpatrick notes, 43
Gender and the politics of time
this belief “reflects the welfare capitalist commodification of time more than anything else” (2004, p 213); not only does it devalue leisure that does not involve expenditure, but it also ignores its potential as a political resource. While Gershuny welcomes forms of consumption that will promote good employment, Schor sees consumption much more negatively as the driving force behind long-hours working, which, she says, is having increasingly damaging effects on the health and family life of workers in the US, trapping them in a “squirrel cage”, an “insidious cycle of work and spend” in which they are driven to work ever-longer hours to support a lifestyle that is always beyond their reach (1991, p 107). She argues that “[c]onsumerism is not an ahistorical trait of human nature, but a specific product of capitalism” that has reached dangerous new levels in recent decades (Schor, 1991, p 117). In The Overspent American (1999) she identifies two key causes of the increase in competitive spending. Firstly, she says that television leads viewers to treat the glossy lifestyles in series such as ‘Friends’ as their reference point for acceptable living standards. Secondly, greater economic inequality since the 1970s has left many middle-class North Americans lagging behind those at the top while still aspiring to their lifestyle, and therefore feeling poorer despite having more. Schor further argues that people now feel compelled to spend more on private education and other services because the pressures of competitive spending have made them increasingly unwilling to pay taxes, and public provision has declined (for related points, see Rebick, 2000). Schor claims that increases in productivity mean that US citizens today could enjoy the standard of living they had in 1948 while working half the hours, and that further increases could in principle enable people to work shorter hours without loss of output; indeed she suggests that this may have been achieved in parts of Europe. She identifies a package of government measures that could reduce working hours and consumption and encourage people to value time as a good in itself rather than simply in terms of its monetary value. These include legal restrictions on overtime, statutory entitlement to holiday pay and parental leave and tax policies to make advertising more expensive; she also advocates a more equal distribution of wealth and income as a means of reducing competitive spending pressures. She further claims that these changes would mean that people would “have to worry less about protecting their possessions, since fewer individuals would steal the things the culture says they must have to be whole” (1999, p 165).
44
Time use in capitalist societies
In her earlier book (1991), Schor stressed the role of trade unions in achieving a reduction in working hours from their peak in the 19th century, and linked the shorter hours now worked in many European nations to the greater strength of unions there. Despite her advocacy of some legislative measures, the general tone of The Overspent American is more individualistic, and is aimed primarily at middle- and uppermiddle-class North Americans, whom Schor exhorts to ‘downshift’ – that is, to reduce both their hours of work and levels of consumption, as a way out of the work–spend cycle. She offers nine principles “to help individuals, and the nation, get off the consumer escalator” (1999, p 145), including sharing large items of household equipment, working shorter hours, decommercialising Christmas and avoiding retail therapy. She claims that between 1990 and 1996 nearly a fifth of the adult US population made a voluntary change that involved a loss of income, and that most felt happy with their decision.While the last of her principles is ‘coordinated intervention’, probably by the government, she does not analyse why such intervention might occur. Like Gershuny, she makes no attempt to theorise the role of the state, and she does not seem to see that her proposed redistribution of wealth and income in favour of the poor is out of line with the ideological premises of the North American welfare state and likely to be opposed by powerful economic interests. It is also unlikely that individuals will be able to reject the pressures to consume as easily as Schor suggests.Thus, although in a recent study Peter Meiksins and Peter Whalley find that some ‘technical professionals’ in the US have found increased fulfilment at home and work, they also note that “a society dependent on private solutions to day care, retirement, college and transportation costs places strict limits on the expenditures that many middle- and low-income Americans can cut from their budgets” (2002, p 164) and that the kind of state support provided in much of Western Europe is unlikely to be achieved in the US. There are also deep-seated psychological reasons for apparently unnecessary consumption in a capitalist society in which people have come to be defined by money and possessions, so that consumerism “cannot be boiled down to a moral failing, it has become the arena where we develop our sense of self, and experience a sense of freedom” (Bunting, 2004, p 155). These psychological pressures are reinforced by capitalism’s structural need for high consumption, without which there is a danger of recession. However, Schor devotes only a four-page ‘Epilogue’ in The Overspent American to justify her conclusion that any adverse effects on the US economy of a reduction in consumption will not be insurmountable. 45
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Moreover, capitalism’s drive to profit allows no automatic trade-off between increased productivity and a reduction in working hours. Ultimately, as Marx saw, profit is simply the difference between the value of goods that workers produce and the wages that they are paid, and it can be maximised by lowering wages, lengthening the working day, increasing productivity or a combination of all three; any capitalist who chooses to treat their workers more humanely is likely to be undercut by their rivals and to go out of business. The conditions that constrain or encourage particular temporal policies are also increasingly international, and the hegemony of neoliberal assumptions at global level make it harder for states to intervene to reduce working hours. Although the impact of globalisation is highly uneven and the concept itself is contested (see Harrison, 2002), many agree that there are underlying structural reasons for longer-hours working in both the US and Europe, stemming from a complex combination of competition from the industrialising world and the newly deregulated economies of Eastern Europe; globalised poverty and opportunities for outsourcing; and low wages, job insecurity, a decline in unionisation and the pursuit of liberal policies in many Western nations. For example, Pietro Basso argues that “the tendency to institute ‘ancient’ hours in modern times ... is inherent in mature capitalism and its cultural and political institutions” (Basso, 1998, p 8; emphasis in original), and that the North American/Japanese model, which sees very long hours as a measure of loyalty and requires workers to commit “not only their muscular and mental energy but also their soul” is therefore likely to triumph over the kind of European model advocated by Schor (Basso, 1998, p 39). This kind of view is supported by a 2006 study for the International Labour Organization that found that “intense competitive pressures in an increasingly 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week economy are driving companies to tailor working time arrangements more and more closely to market demands”, making it increasingly difficult to sustain ‘family-friendly’ workplace conditions (see also Crompton et al, 2005; Heintz, 2006). This does not mean that better working conditions can never be achieved. Indeed, while each individual employer has an interest in maximising exploitation, capitalists also have a collective interest in maintaining a loyal and healthy workforce with enough purchasing power to buy the goods that are produced. They may therefore sometimes have an interest in state or international regulation of working conditions. For example, although many employers fought fiercely against legislation to reduce the working week during the 19th century, they also benefited from this in the longer term (see Marx, 46
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1946 [1867], Part III, and the discussion by Nyland, 1990), while many employers today gain from European parental leave regulations that help them retain good female workers without losing competitive advantage. Such benefits are, however, not always either apparent or achievable, and regulation is unlikely to be achieved without political campaigns. Here Basso believes that the long-hours model can be resisted through class struggle, and that the traditions of working-class struggle and human aspiration “are still alive beneath the ashes” (1998, p 9). Struggle is now also taking new forms in addition to traditional union and party-based activities. In particular, the negative effects of globalisation are being increasingly contested by a wide range of nongovernmental organisations, within supra-national bodies such as the United Nations and the European Community and through global social movements, most dramatically by international protests against the activities of the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (Harrison, 2002; O’Brien, 2005). Widespread access to e-mail and the internet has also dramatically increased the opportunities for new forms of global activism.
Conclusions This chapter’s claim that time should be organised in accordance with principles of justice rather than profitability has very radical implications and is likely to be strongly resisted by powerful economic groups. However, capitalism is not some fixed, monolithic fact of nature. Rather, it is a complex, variable and constantly evolving social institution, an ongoing product of human agency that sets conditions for the future but does not determine it. As the chapter has shown, state policies can have an effect on how we use and relate to time, although their outcomes are seldom clear-cut. While the logic of capitalist production points to long-hours working, it also generates counterpressures, and collective action can have an impact on policies and outcomes. Overall, the chapter suggests that significant change is not impossible. It therefore provides a relatively optimistic foundation for the discussion of the alternatives examined in the rest of this book.
47
Part 2 Feminist perspectives: reframing the issues
four
Women and men in feminist political thought The ideas about time discussed in Part 1 will be re-visited in Part 3, which seeks to develop a specifically feminist theory and politics of time. Part 2 sets the scene by showing how feminist perspectives can reframe our understanding and reveal aspects of our human relationship with time that are invisible in mainstream approaches. This chapter focuses on the vexed question of whether it is meaningful to treat ‘women’ and ‘men’ as groups that have distinct qualities, experiences or ways of knowing the world, and the implications of this for relationships with time. After a brief outline of ‘difference’based feminist arguments and their temporal significance, it considers the implications of recent developments in black and postmodern feminist thought. It agrees that ‘women’ and ‘men’ are not closed, stable or unified groups and that the meaning of being a woman or man is socially constructed and highly variable; it also endorses feminist critiques of the dichotomous thinking that underlies such classification. However, the chapter also argues that it is important not to lose sight of the stubborn ‘reality’ of male domination and women’s collective interest in opposing this; it concludes that a politics of ‘solidarity in difference’ can provide a basis for a feminist politics of time.
Women and men: a naturally and/or socially different relationship with time? A minority of feminists have long argued that many of the observable social differences between women and men have a natural foundation, and that there is a biological basis for both the ‘womanly qualities’ of nurturing, cooperation and conflict resolution and the male attributes of self-interest, competition and aggression. As discussed in Part 3, some writers claim specifically that women’s experiences of menstruation and childbirth give them a particular relationship with time that is ignored by ‘malestream’ theorists and often forced to conform to inappropriate male requirements. Others argue that hormonal differences are a source of different patterns of time use, leading most women to prioritise their family while most men prioritise their careers (Hakim, 2000, 2007). 51
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Against such claims, it is important to note that although men can never share the experiences of menstruation or childbirth, the significance and physical experience of these is in many ways socially produced, while many women do not menstruate and never give birth. It is also clear that the distribution of anatomical, hormonal and chromosomal characteristics does not always fit neatly into a two-sex model and that, even at the level of biology, men and women cannot be understood as unitary groups that can be compared or contrasted in any straightforward way. Far from reflecting natural difference, a binary classification can only be imposed in defiance of nature (Hird, 2000; Lorber, 2000); any claim that all women share a relationship with time based in bodily experiences is therefore untenable. In practice, most feminists have rejected such ideas of natural difference, agreeing instead with Simone de Beauvoir’s celebrated claim that “One is not born but rather becomes a woman” (1972 [1949], p 297), so that many of the existing differences between women and men are a socially produced matter of gender rather than a natural quality of sex; as such, they are open to challenge and change.This means that, although there may indeed be general differences, including differences in time culture, between women and men, these are a reflection of the roles they currently play rather than innate. It also implies not only that women are capable of doing ‘men’s work’ but also that men can play the roles and learn the qualities conventionally associated with women, including time-related qualities such as patience or the ability to multi-task. From this perspective, social policies that encourage men to spend more time in the home, for example by reserving a period of parental leave for fathers, are not going against nature; rather, they are supporting the achievable goal of a more equal division of domestic labour.
A different/better understanding of time? This book offers qualified support to the ‘feminist standpoint’ claim that, because women and men generally still play different social roles, they experience the world in different ways.To the extent that women remain a subordinate group, knowledge arising from their experiences is also potentially ‘better’ than dominant, man-made knowledge, in that women have an interest in exposing gendered power relationships, while men have an interest in concealing them. Feminist knowledge explicitly aimed at reflecting and improving women’s lives is therefore likely to be more accurate than the ostensibly gender-neutral knowledge produced by men who have never recognised the privileged particularity of their 52
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own experiences, although feminist knowledge may in principle be accessible to them (for the classic formulation of feminist standpoint theory, see Harstock 1985; for later developments and discussion, see Harding, 1986; McLaughlin, 2003; Harding, 2004). Part 3 applies this understanding to identify a specifically temporal standpoint arising from women’s traditional caring responsibilities and to recognise how this has been marginalised by the dominant time culture. Such analysis also reveals the male worldview that has until recently underpinned quantitative time-use studies; it therefore questions time-use researchers’ claim to provide an objective account of human behaviour. Related arguments about men’s and women’s temporal perspectives stem from Carol Gilligan’s (1982) claim that women and men have different ways of thinking about ethical issues and that, far from being a sign of emotional or intellectual immaturity as malestream theorists have assumed, women’s ‘different voice’ is at least as valid as men’s. This voice does not talk about abstract principles of justice or use the vocabulary of individual rights and contracts; rather, it treats issues in their particular contexts, and stresses human interdependence, relationships and caring needs and responsibilities. Gilligan also argues that while male ethical thinking is too individualistic, women have too little sense of self; a mature ethical theory would therefore combine female recognition of responsibility with male ideas of rights. As discussed in Chapter Eight, some feminist writers have developed this ‘ethics of care’ approach to argue that women’s caring responsibilities lead them to see time as inherently relational, something that is shared and negotiated with others, while men see it as something for individuals to own and use as they wish. While asserting the need to recognise this relational aspect of time, some writers also echo Gilligan’s point about the need to combine male and female perspectives, warning that if relational time is not contained by a sense of individual and clock time, women will be swamped by the demands of others and will lose any ability to control their lives. Contrary to some interpretations, Gilligan links differences in ethical thinking to upbringing and experience rather than biology. Similarly, whileVirginia Held (1994) identifies the relationship between ‘mother or mothering person’ and child as a source of moral thinking, she does not think this person need be a woman; Sarah Ruddick (1990) further argues that ‘maternal thinking’, which she says is based on ‘preservative love’ and conflict resolution, is a product of the experience of mothering young children that can and should be acquired by men. In arguing that forms of time use traditionally associated with women 53
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give rise to positive moral qualities, these writers add weight to more general arguments in favour of enabling and encouraging men to undertake caring responsibilities.
Which women, what woman? In line with most feminist theory, feminist ‘standpoint’ and ‘ethics of care’ approaches tend to assume that women and men are in some sense readily identifiable and mutually exclusive groups, that women are generally disadvantaged in comparison with men, and that they therefore have a collective interest in understanding and contesting gendered inequalities. However, it is important to remember that not all women are ever mothers or carers, while a range of social and physical differences among women, including class, ‘race’, age, marital status and sexual orientation, makes the meaning and experience of being a woman highly variable. Even women who appear to share a common background and important experiences can experience conflicts of interest, as in the so-called ‘mother wars’ in the US between middle-class mothers who are pursuing a career and those who are caring full time for their children (Buxton, 1998; Boyd, 2002). More often, differences are reinforced by other social divisions; indeed, rather than sharing a common worldview or interests, women often “come together as mistress and maid, employer and employee, across a great divide of privilege and opportunity” (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2003a, p 11). As many black feminist writers have forcibly argued, the assumption that women share the same interests and experiences is not only in many ways inaccurate, it is also a way of maintaining the privileged standpoint of middle-class Western white women, who have often equated their concerns and priorities with those of the whole of their sex and claimed a common sisterhood that ignores their own advantages and silences ‘other’ women (for a critical discussion of the assumptions underlying white feminism, see, for example, King, 1988; Lieu, 1994; West and Fenstermaker, 1996; Aziz, 1997). In contrast, recent black feminist thought has developed an increasingly sophisticated analysis of the ways in which gender, ‘race’ and class operate as dynamically interconnected systems of oppression, none of which can be understood in isolation from the others. Such analysis shows that individuals are positioned in a matrix of oppression and privilege, so that the experience of being a woman or a man is qualitatively different for people in different class positions and from different ethnic groups, while the experience of being black or white varies with gender and 54
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class (from a large literature, see, for example, King, 1988; Collins, 1990; Crenshaw, 1998). Combined with the standpoint theory discussed earlier, this suggests that, because they “occupy a position whereby the inferior half of a series of dichotomies converge”, black women have access to a particularly clear understanding of the multi-faceted and interlocking nature of class, ‘race’ and gender (Collins, 1990, p 70). As the black North American feminist Patricia Hill Collins argues, this also points the way to awareness of other systems of oppression, such as those based on age, physical ability or sexual orientation, and the need to understand these too as part of a larger, interconnected whole. Applying this approach to the politics of time suggests that the experience of a white professional woman worker with children is likely to generate a better understanding of the distribution of temporal resources and the conflicting time cultures of home and workplace than that of her husband. However, the experience of her childminder reveals more about the effects of economic resources on the usability of time, as the latter will not earn enough to ‘buy time’ by, for example, taking a taxi home or paying someone else to clean her house. If the childminder is a migrant worker who has left her own children behind, her experience will also reveal the existence and effects of the ‘global care chain’ that are invisible to her employer (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2003b). At the same time, workers (again often migrants) who look after older people or adults with disabilities are less likely than these care users to understand the needs and frustrations of those who take hours to perform tasks that a person without such disabilities does in minutes; although in some cases their needs could be alleviated with adequate resources, they are seldom publicly articulated and often constitute a primary source of disadvantage. It is also clear that the bad effects of excessively long hours are not confined to women, and that a focus on the least privileged groups shows that these are exacerbated for those who are also badly paid. Such considerations indicate both that a ‘view from below’ is likely to generate insights that it might be convenient for those more privileged to forget and that experiences of temporal privilege and oppression do not divide neatly along gender lines. Although the pressures faced by middle-class women attempting to juggle the demands of family and career have received most attention and public debate, an analysis of the needs and experiences of their cleaners and childminders, along with those of disabled or older adults and badly paid men, might tell us more about how societies function and human needs are met.
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The impact of postmodernism Black feminism’s stress on the multiple and cross-cutting nature of men’s and women’s experiences at times merges with the ‘deconstruction’ of ‘women’ and ‘men’ arising from recent poststructuralist/postmodernist feminist theory, and its related critique of binary thought.This section outlines some key elements of this theory for those unfamiliar with it, pulling out the implications for feminist political practice and temporal understanding.
Deconstructing sex and gender Poststructuralist theory claims that any link between words and the ‘reality’ they purport to describe is inherently provisional, relational and context-dependent, so that terms such as ‘man’ and ‘woman’ have no meaning in themselves.To describe someone as a ‘man’ may therefore be to distinguish them from a boy, a woman, or an animal, while a ‘real man’ is not a fictional character or a statue and, depending on hegemonic understandings of masculinity, is not gay, sensitive or weak … and not a person who spends his time cleaning the house, changing nappies or discussing his feelings. Although the words available to us determine how we see the world, the meaning of these words is itself always shifting and changing and understood differently by different people and at different times; the process of ‘naming’ or conferring meaning is therefore inherently fluid and open-ended rather than stable and closed. From this perspective, sex as well as gender is socially and discursively constructed rather than naturally existing, and masculinity and femininity acquire meaning in relation to one another rather than through their basis in sexed bodies.This means that to identify ourselves as female or male is not to accept our natural condition; rather, it is to accept a meaning imposed by a society that attaches particular significance to certain aspects of our anatomy (much as it may attach significance to the colour of our skin, but not to the colour of our eyes or the size of our ears). In contemporary society, masculinity and femininity are also constructed in relation to particular views of time: here Pamela Odih argues that “the discursive constructs of ‘masculinity’ resonate with the equally discursively constituted constructs of linear time”, while those of femininity encourage an embodied, “relational” understanding of time (1999, p 14). Because it insists that the attributes that society assigns to ‘women’ and ‘men’ are arbitrary, postmodern feminism retains and expands the 56
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liberating idea that anatomy need not be destiny; indeed, freed from any fixed dichotomous base, genders can be multiple, fluid and freely chosen, rather than the stable core of our identity. From this perspective, gender identity is also inherently fragile and liable to disruption; some writers therefore argue that it can only be maintained if it is constantly reaffirmed by gender-appropriate behaviour, so that gender is not something that one is but something that one does. This idea of ‘doing gender’ has interesting affinities with Giddens’ theory of structuration, discussed in Chapter One, and his idea that, because social institutions are constituted through practices that are repeated over time, they are always vulnerable. It means that if gender can be ‘done’ it can also be ‘undone’ by failure to behave in genderappropriate ways. Such thinking has famously led Judith Butler (1990) to the idea of ‘gender performance’ and to the claim that oppressive structures of gender and sexuality can be challenged by transgressive forms of behaviour, such as transvestism, that deliberately cross gender lines and violate conventional gender norms (for a discussion, see Grant, 1993; Segal, 1999; Squires, 1999; Weston, 2002). More relevantly for this book, some feminist writers also suggest that gender can be ‘done’ or ‘undone’ by our use of time, and that gendered time norms play a key role in maintaining oppressive gender differences. These ideas are discussed later in Chapter Seven.
Feminist critiques of dichotomous thought The idea that ‘women’ and ‘men’ are fluid and relational rather than stable and closed categories ties in with more general feminist critiques of dichotomous thinking (from a large literature, see, for example, Gatens, 1991; Barrett and Phillips, 1992; Coole, 1993; Squires, 1999; Zalewski, 2000; Prokhovnik, 2002; Lister, 2003). The gendered and hierarchical categories that frame conventional political thought (including the public and the private, reason and emotion, mind and body, equality and difference, civilisation and nature, autonomy and dependency, and the universal and the particular) make it difficult or impossible to think inclusively or positively about women and the qualities associated with them, as men remain the benchmark for full humanity, and women can only be treated as equals if they transcend those qualities that make them ‘different’. This framework also traps us into asking the wrong questions, and offers inappropriate, either/or answers, restricting imaginative possibilities and foreclosing debates; it means that the push for a kind of equality that does not take men
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as its starting point logically pushes against the very foundations of Western philosophy. In contrast, there is now widespread feminist agreement on the need for more open-ended forms of political debate that recognise the possibility of “creative tension” (Lister, 2003, p 68) rather than conflict between apparently opposing practices or ideas, and that stress dialogue and interconnections rather than boundaries and fixed positions. Such thinking reinforces the argument that there is no absolute distinction between ‘women’s time’ and ‘men’s time’. It helps us see that although time may be gendered, we all inevitably experience it in multiple ways. In particular, feminist critiques of the mind/body, reason/emotion splits suggest that subjective perceptions and bodily experiences of time are neither clearly distinct from nor inferior to objectively observed accounts; as discussed in Chapter Nine, they therefore call into question the supposedly ‘scientific’ nature of quantitative time-use studies.They further remind us that subjectivity and corporeality apply to men as much as to women, and that men as well as women are subject to natural and bodily rhythms (such as the effects of daylight or a decline in fertility). As Raia Prokhovnik argues, apparently abstract issues around the mind/body, reason/emotion and public/private distinctions also have very tangible implications for how time use is valued.Thus, time spent in paid work is seen as rationally chosen activity in the public sphere and valued because of its association with the mind, while time spent caring for family members is seen as emotionally driven, devalued because of its association with reproduction and the body and invisible as ‘work’ (although manual employment is also devalued within this framework, its contractual nature means that it is not seen as a purely ‘natural’ activity). This means, Prokhovnik says, that “Ultimately the narrow conception of work with which we currently operate deserves to be recognised as a problem which derives from a mind/body split” (2002, p 13). Moreover, the devaluation of activities traditionally associated with women within this hierarchical framework means that the temporal rhythms and needs associated with these are unacknowledged and forced into the ‘shadow’ of the dominant time culture (Davies, 1989); if women want status, economic reward or political voice, they therefore have to emulate male patterns of time use. Such understandings can fruitfully inform a feminist politics of time. However, postmodern critiques also seem to undermine the ontological basis of feminist politics, for if ‘women’ have no real existence, then a politics based on ‘women’s interests’ can have no meaning. In this context, the prime task of feminist theorists is not to understand and 58
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improve the social situation of women; rather, it is to uncover the linguistic, cultural and discursive processes through which gender is created and recreated.
And yet … And yet of course most of us do still think of ourselves as women or men. Indeed for most people, the language of sexual identity remains the most important discursive game in town, and “to exist at all means being a woman or a man” (Hird, 2000, p 349). Even at the level of biology, most women do give birth and most menstruate for at least part of their lives; however artificial such dichotomously defined identities may be, sex is also, unlike other characteristics, part of our legal identity. And of course when we know someone’s legal sex, we can make statistically informed predictions about their life chances and experiences, including their use of time. In particular, we know that most women will become mothers, that most will at some stage live with a male sexual partner, and that most will spend more time looking after their children and cleaning the house and less time in paid employment than their male partner. We also know that these different patterns of time use are not equally rewarded, that those who spend much of their time caring for others are financially penalised, and that they are less likely to have a political voice. Less tangibly, feminist analysis also reveals the extent to which we live in a world in which culture, values and priorities are still heavily skewed towards male perspectives, experiences and practices that are generally accepted as ‘normal’ or even ‘common sense’ rather than recognised as partial and potentially biased. In this context, although women are now legally entitled to compete with men in most areas, they generally do so on terms that men have already established, and if women do not behave like men they are seen as problematically ‘different’. From the perspective of male ‘normality’, women’s ability to give birth and their caring responsibilities are negative constraints that make it difficult for women to behave like men, rather than contributions to society that should attract status and economic reward; similarly, the time of male employment (that is, measurable, linear clock time) is seen as ‘proper’ time, in contrast to the more open-ended, relational, task-oriented time associated with caring for others. As discussed in the next chapter, an unreflective focus on male activities in the public sphere has also led many male writers on social capital or political participation to discount women’s 59
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community-based networks or activities, or to see these as an inferior form of involvement, while historians and political theorists have often treated domestic and family life as ‘natural’ rather than part of human history, denying women the temporal perspective that may, as discussed in Chapter One, be important for the development of group identity and a sense of political agency. Such inequalities and disadvantages support the claim that contemporary societies remain male dominated, and that although the manifestations of this domination “are sometimes horrifically violent and degrading, [they] are also subtle, mundane, ordinary, unremarkable, and, moreover, very deeply embedded in the psyches of individuals, and not just male individuals either” (Thompson, 2001, p 8). As Stevi Jackson has said, despite our awareness of the problematic nature of the category of ‘woman’, “The ‘things’ that feminists identified as oppressive in the 1970s – male violence, the exploitation of women’s domestic labour, and low-paid waged labour – continue to shape what it means to be a woman” (2001, p 287), so that gender remains not just a cultural distinction but also a hierarchical and oppressive social division. Margaret Andersen similarly says that while theoretical arguments about the fluid nature of gender may make it seem inherently unstable, it is also (along with ‘race’, class and sexuality) “remarkably (and frustratingly) stable over time” (2005, p 452).
Patriarchy As I have argued in more detail elsewhere (Bryson, 1999a), the radical feminist concept of patriarchy can usefully highlight such oppression by showing that apparently separate experiences are part of an interconnected whole, in which apparently trivial incidents and issues are connected to wider patterns of power and control that they both reflect and sustain, and in which the prioritising of men’s interests and perspectives is so ubiquitous that it is invisible. In contrast to empty or gender-neutral terms such as ‘gender regimes’ or ‘sex class’ this concept has the merit of naming men as the beneficiaries of gendered inequalities, providing a permanent reminder that they are the structurally dominant group, privileged not only materially but also by the centrality accorded to their particular perceptions and experiences. This awareness of interconnection highlights the knock-on effects of different forms of temporal inequality and the ways in which these both reflect and sustain other aspects of women’s subordination. It also means that, contrary to Judith Butler’s vision of freely chosen, ever-subverting 60
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gender performance, when people ‘do gender’ they cannot usually pick and mix gender attributes at will, for their behaviour is “hemmed in by the general rules of social life, cultural expectations, workplace norms and laws” (Lorber, 2000, p 83); these exercise a disciplinary effect and usually mean that ‘doing gender’ involves “producing relations of dominance and submission” (Sirianni and Negrey, 2000, p 65; see also West and Zimmerman, 1991). As mentioned in the previous section and discussed in Chapter Seven, a key way of ‘doing gender’ is through using time in gender-appropriate ways; gendered time norms therefore play an important role in maintaining an unequal division of labour within a dualistic framework in which “a male is worker/not carer, and a female [is] carer/not worker” (Boyd, 2002, p 466). This does not mean that time norms and patriarchy are unchanging, that women are simply victims or that men ‘possess’ power over women in some kind of zero-sum game. As discussed in Chapter One and later in Chapter Seven, social institutions do not simply ‘exist’; rather, they have a history and they are maintained and can be changed by ongoing social practices, and while they may powerfully constrain the future they do not determine it in any straightforward way. Because they are socially constructed, patriarchal norms can also be challenged and modified by changes in practice as well as discourse – for example by state policies that assume that ‘good fathers’ should spend time with their children and that ‘good mothers’ can spend some time in the workplace. It is also important to note that patriarchy is not a system in the same sense as capitalist class society, as it lacks any internal dynamic equivalent to the capitalist pursuit of profit. This means that while a well-intentioned capitalist will be driven out of business if they do not exploit their workforce by extracting surplus value from their labour, loving and egalitarian relationships between women and men can and do exist. However, patriarchy is also now tightly bound up with capitalism. As Lynne Segal has said, its changing nature therefore has to be understood in the context of economic exploitation and “the currently ever more totalizing control of a transnational capitalist market” (1999, p 34; emphasis in original). In this context, because they challenge the free market economy and the unrestricted pursuit of profit, apparently moderate feminist campaigns over issues such as parental leave and better rights for part-time workers are likely to meet with opposition from powerful economic interests (for the classic feminist debates over the relationship between capitalism and patriarchy, see Sargent, 1986; for more recent discussion see Bryson, 2003; Davis, 2005). 61
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From sisterhood to solidarity – an emerging consensus? While the concept of patriarchy can provide a politically useful shorthand for the non-random and interconnected nature of the inequalities between the sexes in public and private life, it should not be treated as the end of the gender story, for the problem remains of how to analyse and contest inequalities between women and men at the same time as recognising that the two groups do not have a natural existence, being attentive to differences among women and among men, and understanding that many men as well as women are profoundly damaged by hegemonic gender norms. As Wendy Brown says “[A]t this moment, we appear to have two powerful, mutually cancelling, truths in feminism: on the one hand, there is no stable sex or gender and on the other, women too often find themselves unable to escape their gender and the sexual norms governing it” (2003, p 366). This impasse has been addressed in recent years by a diverse range of writers. Although their backgrounds and theoretical starting-points differ, their conclusions increasingly point in similar directions. Thus, while Collins advocates a “both/and conceptual stance”, which she sees as characteristic of African thought (1990, p 225), Brown herself usefully suggests that if we borrow from the arts, we can hold two apparently conflicting “angles of vision” in “counterpoint”, so as to apprehend simultaneously both “gendered subordination, exploitation and violence, and … the instability of conventional gender norms and the vulnerability of their sites of enforcement” (2003, pp 366, 367). Maxine Molyneux’s distinction between “practical” and “strategic” gender interests (Molyneux, 1985, p 232) also begins with a recognition of differences among women. She warns that although the strategic goals of ending women’s subordination and the sexual division of labour are in women’s long-term collective interests, the pursuit of this may threaten the more immediate support that many women need in their traditional domestic role, while their interests are also shaped by class factors. The tricky task for feminists is therefore to politicise practical interests and transform them into “strategic interests that women can identify with and support”, understanding that unity around particular programmes “has to be constructed – it is never given” (Molyneux, 1985, p 234). Judith Squires makes a related distinction between identities that are imposed by oppressive power relations and those that are deliberately chosen by oppressed groups for political ends. In this context, she sees feminists’ self-identification as women as a strategic act that recognises the historical specificity 62
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of this identity and which is informed by gender theory that keeps us “continually aware of the contingency of claims to group sameness and mindful of the power relations which produced the conditions of identity” (Squires, 1999, p 73). Such approaches can allow for the development of a “strategic sisterhood”, as advocated by Sally Baden and Anne Goetz (1997) in their discussion of the 1995 United Nations World Conference on Women in Beijing, which they see as a basis for building alliances among women on a global scale without losing sight of the historical and cultural specificities of their different experiences. This in turn seems compatible with a politics of “as if [women] existed” as advocated by Denise Riley on the grounds that “the world behaves as if they unambiguously did”, even though her postmodern approach seems to have “deconstructed ‘women’ out of existence” (Riley, 1988, p 112; Lister, 2003, p 78). Combined with black feminist analysis of the interactive nature of different forms of oppression, these approaches open the way to the idea of solidarity among oppressed groups, for if different forms of oppression are interconnected, then so too are movements against them. In contrast to the idea of sisterhood, which stresses what women have in common, solidarity allows women to support each other in particular struggles without implying that their situation is the same; it also suggests that they can form alliances with oppressed groups of men, and that even though “[m]en are not exploited or oppressed by sexism, ... there are ways in which they suffer as a result of it” (hooks, 1984, p 72). The idea of solidarity means that white as well as black feminists should support anti-racist campaigns, and well-paid women should support movements and policies aimed at a more equitable economic system, not simply because these causes are just, but also because they challenge the principle that some groups of people are more fully human and inherently valuable than others; similar arguments apply to campaigns for the rights of people with disabilities, or for gay and lesbian rights. Such common interests can sometimes also take more concrete form: for example, a migrant childcare worker and the middleclass woman who employs her may both be disadvantaged if bringing up children is seen as an individual rather than collective responsibility, and both could gain from state policies providing greater financial support for this. In terms of the politics of time, feminist campaigns for parental leave or better conditions for part-time workers are most likely to succeed as part of a general campaign for better conditions of employment, probably through trade unions, and they imply a degree of state regulation incompatible with free-market capitalism.
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Such solidarity is, however, certainly not automatic and women’s interests and perceptions will often also diverge. As a number of feminists have recently argued, a politics of solidarity should therefore be that of solidarity in difference; this both refuses to reduce individuals to one aspect of their identity and stresses the importance of dialogue and deliberation between citizens as an important process in itself, not simply as a means to the development of consensus. Here Ruth Lister argues that feminist solidarity in difference seeks to “build in difference to the very fabric of the political project” (2003, p 82), while also recognising that women’s exclusion from full citizenship because they are women is a central shared experience. From this perspective, we can see that although women do not necessarily share attributes or an identity, they face “common structural constraints which may themselves be experienced differently” (Lister, 2003, p 78). For many women, these constraints include a shortage of time in political systems that assume that ‘normal’ citizens have someone to take care of their domestic responsibilities. As Lister recognises, dialogue between differently situated women can often be difficult.This is dramatically clear in societies that are divided by civil war or ethnic or religious conflict. However, some feminists have argued that even here dialogue is possible, and have developed the idea of transversal politics, a term taken from Italian women peace activists and developed by Nira Yuval-Davis. This approach does not assume that all conflicts of interest can be reconciled, but it refuses to see differences as exclusive or essentialist, or to see women from different groups “simplistically as representatives of their groupings”. Rather, it advocates a process of dialogue involving “rooting”, whereby political actors reflect on their own position and identity, and “shifting”, whereby they try to put themselves in the situation of those who are different, thereby discovering differences within as well as between groups, and “keep[ing] one’s own perspective on things while empathising with and respecting others” (Yuval-Davis, 1998, pp 184, 185; see also Cockburn and Hunter, 1999; Massey, 1999). According to Janice McLaughlin, the Beijing Conference and its follow-up Beijing+5 could be seen as “the operationalization of [such] transversal politics”; rather than allowing Western feminists to set the agenda, these highlighted the needs and activism of women in non-industrial nations, and secured acceptance of a “Platform for Action” in which the “articulation of rights sat alongside recognition of difference and community or collective identities” (2003, p 43). As discussed in later chapters, this Platform specifically recognised the economic importance of women’s unpaid work and required 64
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signatories to carry out time-use studies to calculate the value of this; despite the vastly different experiences of a woman who spends much of her time growing food for her family and one who juggles domestic responsibilities with a career, both are currently engaged in productive activities that have not been formally recognised.
Conclusions While the ideas discussed in this chapter highlight complexity rather than pointing to any neat solutions or straightforward guidelines, they suggest a number of conclusions that inform later chapters of this book. Firstly, it is clearly untenable to treat ‘women’ and ‘men’ as closed, uniform categories, let alone to attribute fixed qualities, experiences and interests to them. This means that we will not be able to identify universal sex differences in the use of time, or to treat ‘male time’ and ‘female time’ as stable, dichotomous and biologically based categories. Secondly, however, because the world often behaves as if women are a collective group and this is a source of collective oppression in a patriarchal society, it is politically necessary to act in the name of women’s collective identity even if the goal is to resist it. This means that women need to reclaim their history and to recognise and assert their time needs and interests, as these will otherwise be marginalised and bound up with a range of other disadvantages: in particular, the time spent on caring activities will be penalised rather than rewarded, and even women who have neither children nor a male partner are liable to be found guilty by association – that is, they will be assumed to have both domestic responsibilities that affect their commitment to employment and to be secondary earners supported by a male breadwinner (and if they do not, then they may be seen as unnatural or failing women). Men, in contrast, are assumed to be main breadwinners who have someone caring for them and their dependents, and who are therefore both motivated to prioritise their paid work and free to work long hours. Thirdly, while other forms of identity are also unstable and socially produced, they too produce systematic forms of oppression that interact with gender in complex ways and mean that some women may exploit both other women and some men. We are more likely to understand these inequalities if our primary focus is on the views and experiences of women who are oppressed by them than if we focus on those who are privileged. It also means that ‘women’s issues’ cannot be tackled in isolation: here it is particularly important to understand the wider
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economic context in which patriarchal power relations are sustained and the ways in which capitalism can benefit from these. Finally, we need to recognise not only that women have a range of very different experiences and needs but also that their interests may at times conflict. Rather than attempting to brush these aside, feminists should aim at forms of dialogue and understanding that respect difference while also identifying commonalities and developing forms of solidarity that can support collective political engagement. Such solidarity in difference offers scope for local, national and global networks and activities. Combined with earlier analysis, it also suggests both that a politics of solidarity will often include men and that women in mixed groups will have to consciously assert and defend the validity of their own needs and experiences against a slide into the ‘normality’ of male perspectives.
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Public and private in feminist political thought This chapter builds on the feminist critiques of binary, either/or thought discussed in Chapter Four to examine the temporal implications of feminist challenges to political theory’s conventional distinction between the public and the private.After outlining feminist arguments for those unfamiliar with them, it applies these to the time we spend as workers and citizens. Rejecting the mainstream view that women’s traditional responsibilities are simply a negative constraint on their ability to participate as full members of society, it insists that these are highly valuable in their own right. It also draws on feminist theories of justice to argue that men’s relative exemption from ‘private’ responsibilities is a key injustice that has negative consequences for society; it finds that a modified Marxist perspective can usefully inform discussion of this.
Feminist critiques of the public/private distinction Mainstream Western political theory has generally held that democratic states have no business interfering in the private lives of citizens and that domestic arrangements are beyond the remit of political enquiry. In contrast, this book supports the feminist claim that the public and private spheres are conceptually and practically interdependent and that, by ignoring the private bases of women’s disadvantages in the public sphere, the conventional distinction helps maintain them (from a wide literature, see Elshtain, 1981; Eisenstein, 1984; Pateman, 1987; Okin, 1990;Young, 1990; Phillips, 1991, 1993; Ackelsberg and Shanley, 1996; Landes, 1998; Lister, 2003; Zelizer, 2005). At a conceptual level, the distinction is bound up with a distinction between history and nature that “constructs the private sphere as having a timelessness associated with nature and reproductive cyclical time, which supposedly disconnects it from politics” (Holmes, 2002, p 40). This makes it difficult to see that private gender relations are culturally and historically variable and therefore potentially open to change.The notion of a superior public sphere of rational discourse, justice and impartiality also presupposes and requires the existence of an inferior 67
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private sphere to which the ‘messiness’ of passion, emotion and partial concerns can be relegated. Because women have been identified with the private sphere and the qualities associated with it, allowing them to enter the public sphere can never be straightforward: not only do ‘private’ needs still have to be met, but women’s close identification with “the world of nature, emotion, desires and private life” (Arneil, 1999, p 7) also means that their very presence in the public sphere both disrupts its boundaries and threatens its foundations. At a more practical level, the public/private distinction works to sustain the interests of men by concealing the interconnected nature of their public and private power. In particular, it forgets that domestic responsibilities (including cooking and cleaning for their male partners) often prevent women from entering the public sphere on the same terms as men, and that gender inequalities in economic and political life are therefore rooted in unequal time use within the home. This need not mean that feminists should abandon all claims to private and family life (for a discussion, see, for example, Phillips, 1991; Einhorn, 1996; Squires, 1999; Lister, 2003, 2007). It does mean, however, that the notion of the public/private distinction needs to be reformulated, and its fluid and context-dependent nature recognised.
Public and private work ‘Work’ in capitalist economies is conventionally understood as paid work in the public sphere, and economic activity is usually equated with participation in the paid labour market. However, a woman-centred perspective shows that the unwaged activities involved in cooking, cleaning and caring for family members are not simply ‘private’ matters but are central to the survival and well-being of any society; as such, they too constitute work (from a large literature, see, for example, Floro, 1995; Beneria, 2001; Campillo, 2003; Litt and Zimmerman, 2003; Pyle and Ward, 2003).This work is disproportionately undertaken by women and, because it is usually unpaid, it is a key source of economic dependency: over a quarter of women in France, Germany and the UK and a fifth of women in the US have no personal income, a figure that rises to over a third in the Netherlands and nearly half in Italy, where more women are full-time homemakers (Daly and Rake, 2003). Although Finnish, Norwegian and Danish parents (in practice usually mothers) who choose to stay at home with their small children can receive a cash payment from the state (Finch, 2006a; Leira, 2006; Salmi, 2006), this does not match the salary most could expect in the workplace (it is lowest in Denmark, at 36 per cent average earnings). Similarly, the 68
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cash allowance now paid in the UK to those who care for another adult for at least 35 hours a week is far below the minimum wage. In the US, ‘welfare to work’ policies that expect lone mothers to work when their children are very young have institutionalised the lack of importance attached to caring work. The feminist redefinitions of work to include many unpaid activities enable us to see that the gendered organisation of these activities can be analysed within a time-frame rather than treated as a constant fact of life; this in turn means that it can be opened up to challenge and change. More tangibly, measuring the time spent on these activities has become widely accepted as a way of estimating their value, and the “Platform for Action” resulting from the 1995 United Nations World Conference on Women in Beijing accordingly required signatories to conduct regular time-use studies to measure unpaid work. Such timeuse studies, discussed in detail in Chapter Nine, provide information on voluntary work and informal help to members of other households as well as work within the home. The resulting data is being used to estimate the total value of unpaid care (see Holloway et al, 2002); it is also feeding into attempts to measure ‘social capital’ in the UK (this term is discussed in the next section; see ONS, 2001; Gray, 2003; Ruston, 2003; Babb, 2005). Recognising that unpaid work is valuable is of course not the same as rewarding it, and the measurement of time use is, as discussed later in Chapter Nine, itself problematic. Nevertheless, such measurement is important for several reasons. Firstly, because time-use studies consistently find that most unpaid work is done by women, they immediately raise the question of why those who do so much work should so often lack economic independence and/or live in poverty. Secondly, in demonstrating the economic and social importance of unpaid activities, they can strengthen arguments for state support for ‘private’ work, whether this is through provision of services, financial support or ‘family-friendly’ regulation of working hours. Thirdly, by revealing the time-consuming nature of domestic tasks, they provide a warning against policies that forget this necessary work, and that encourage or even coerce women into paid work “as though there was a reserve of women’s unused labour just waiting to be tapped” (Himmelweit, 1999, p 3). Fourthly, they similarly show that if citizens are to help their neighbours or participate in voluntary organisations, this too can be seen as a form of ‘work’, and that the time needed for this has to come from somewhere. Finally, they therefore also highlight the absurdity of assuming that time left over from paid employment
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is necessarily ‘free’ or leisure time, available for workers to spend as they please.
Paid care The blurred nature of the boundaries between public and private life is thrown into sharp relief when domestic and caring work is undertaken as paid employment (see Hobson, 2000a). Such employment challenges the assumption that this work is women’s natural and private responsibility; it is often located in private homes; and the same activities can in some situations be paid and in others unpaid.The boundaries are further confused when paid care givers become emotionally involved in their work. Such emotional involvement is, however, often seen as problematic or unprofessional, and the potentially impersonal nature of paid care work throws into sharp relief the clash that Marx identified between commodified work and the satisfaction of human needs in capitalist society, in which work is experienced as an alien activity undertaken with the sole end of earning money. Because commodified workers are paid for their time, paid care work also highlights the general difficulty of fitting the more ‘natural’ temporal rhythms that caring activities often require into the rigid imperatives of clock time, that value ‘efficiency’ and ‘time management’ above the intangible development of human relationships, and require workers to ‘switch off ’ as soon as their shift is over. These issues are discussed later in Chapter Eight. The difficulty of providing adequate care in allocated units of time can be particularly acute for those providing care on their own in private homes: clearly, there is a qualitative difference between abandoning a machine that is malfunctioning and walking out on a child whose parent is late or an old lady who has just fallen, but the temporal implications of this kind of human responsibility are neither recognised nor financially rewarded; indeed such work is generally even less well paid than care work in institutions. While there is little new about payment for caring work (most obviously, wealthy families throughout history have generally employed others to look after their own children), its more general and visible extension into the wider population is currently generating widespread concern.This concern, which is effectively concern about how women spend their time, is encapsulated in Arlie Hochschild’s rhetorical question in The Commercialization of Intimate Life: “Are we okay with the fact that baby may say his first word to the childcare worker, and grandma her last word to the nursing home aide?” (2003: book title and p 3; for a critical discussion, see Zelizer, 2005).While conservatives have 70
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tended to blame women for abandoning their ‘natural’ responsibilities, this book agrees with those feminists, including Hochschild, who argue that the solution is to value care more highly, to encourage men to do more of it, and to change conditions of employment to support a more equitable balance between market and non-market time. This solution also represents a movement beyond dichotomous thinking that helps us to see that the options for women are not exhausted by the choice between spending their time like men, in the hope of reaping the same status and economic rewards, or asserting the value of their unpaid activities, in the hope that these too will somehow be rewarded. Rather, unpaid work is both an obstacle to workplace equality on the terms that this is currently offered and an activity that is often inherently valuable and important. This means that progress requires both/and solutions that challenge workplace conventions, particularly the normality of both long-hours working and men’s lack of commitment to domestic responsibilities, and that also value these responsibilities more highly.
Differences among women The growth in paid care work provides a clear example of differences among women. Some of the temporal implications of these differences are highlighted in Miriam Glucksmann’s widely cited oral history-based study of married, working-class women in the north of England in the 1920s and 1930s (1998); this has significant contemporary relevance and is worth considering in some detail. In comparing women employed as weavers (a relatively well-paid and secure occupation) with those with more casual and poorly paid work (often including cleaning and childminding for the weaver women), Glucksmann found significant differences not only in the way they structured their time and the degree of autonomy they appeared to have in doing this, but also in their temporal bargaining position in their own home and in their subjective perception of time itself. She sees these differences as a product of different relationships to the public and private spheres. In particular, although the paid hours of the casual workers were often long, they were also fragmented, irregular and often merged with their own domestic labour, leaving no clear perception of a distinction between working and non-working time. Their husbands made no contribution to work in the home, and they did not expect them to. As Glucksmann says, “whether [their time] was given, sold or exchanged they were on the losing side of any equation.Thus their work/time constituted a distinctive gendered temporality which was 71
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experienced as such”. In contrast, the weavers were able to buy time by paying others to do much of their housework and childcare; they also expected and received domestic help from their husbands. While their time in the mills was rigidly controlled, they treated their domestic arrangements as a private matter. Perhaps paradoxically, the hours of the casual workers, who might be assumed to have more overall discretion over how to structure their time, were very largely determined by strict community norms about the timing of domestic tasks, as well as by the public clock time of schools and their husband’s employment. Unlike the weavers, they therefore experienced no “neat temporal split between spheres”; indeed,“Many activities which weavers considered to be their own private business were undertaken ‘in public’ by the casual women”, whose “commodified time could not be distinguished from the noncommodified time within which it was embedded”.These differences in the time structure of daily life fed into different perceptions on the life course, again showing a different relationship to public and private time: whereas weavers were likely to use external events (such as “between the wars”) as their basic frame of time reference, casual workers were more likely to use their own personal experiences (such as “after I got married” (Glucksmann, 1998, pp 247, 252, 253, 253). Although Glucksmann did not explore this, differences among women can also give rise to conflicting interests. Unless domestic and caring services are subsidised by the state, the time of a woman providing services cannot be valued as highly as that of the woman who pays her out of her own earnings, and the latter has a clear economic interest in keeping her cleaner or childminder’s wages as low as possible. Some well-paid women, or women with well-paid partners, may choose to be more ‘generous’; low-paid women, however, have little choice. Although Western feminists have often been preoccupied by the problems facing career women with children, women may give and require other kinds of care at different stages in their life (Katz and Monk, 1993), and there may again be conflicts of interest between the needs of care givers and receivers. A more general problem arises when the ‘care deficit’ experienced by some communities or nations is displaced onto others, including the increasing numbers of women workers from Southern nations and Eastern Europe who leave their own families for “vulnerable and exploitable work in nursing homes, middle-class domestic households, and sweatshops” in the West (Litt and Zimmerman, 2003, p 157; see also Anderson, 2001; Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2003b; Pyle and Ward, 2003). There may also appear to be a clash of interests in the workplace between ‘working mothers’, who may be eligible for maternity leave or flexible hours, and other 72
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women workers, who may experience additional work pressures when colleagues are on maternity leave. While none of these conflicts is inevitable, their solution would require major changes in the role of the state, gender responsibilities and the workplace. In discussing the time taken by paid and unpaid work, it is also important to avoid an unreflective conflation of care with other domestic activities such as cleaning and cooking, that both obscures differences among women workers and sees all such work as equally valuable. Here, Mignon Duffy has drawn on US census data on paid care work to show that “women of colour” are concentrated in work involving physical drudgery rather than “emotional labour”, and to caution against “a theoretical focus on nurturance [that] privileges the experiences of white women and excludes large numbers of very-lowwage workers” (Duffy, 2005, p 79). As Bridget Anderson has argued, much domestic work may also be about maintaining status rather than performing necessary work, and she argues that many migrant women in Europe are involved in work that is “unnecessary, exploitative, and/or degrading” rather than socially valuable (2001, p 32). Such arguments suggest that, while measuring the time involved in ‘women’s work’ is an important way of estimating its monetary value, this should not be conflated with its social or civic importance, for while much of this work is essential, useful or positive for society as a whole, not all of it is.The same is of course true of many forms of paid employment. Nevertheless, governments and policy makers have tended to treat engagement in any kind of paid work as an unqualified good, a clear contribution to society that provides individual independence, social integration and self-respect, while disregarding the contribution of those working without pay in the home. This is particularly clear in relation to much recent rhetoric around citizenship, discussed in the next section.
Citizenship in public and private Citizenship today promises to transcend the particularities of our individual attributes, experiences, interests and beliefs. We may be rich or poor, black or white, able-bodied or wheelchair users, gay or straight, male or female, old or young, Christian, Muslim or atheist, but if we are citizens we all have equal status and, in T.H. Marshall’s classic formulation, we are all “equal with respect to the rights and duties with which the status is endowed” (Marshall, 1983 [1949], p 253). Although they remain excluded in some nations, women have formally achieved this equal status in most parts of the world. However, 73
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recent feminist writers have demonstrated that the apparently genderneutral terms on which they have been included remain “imbued with the stain of gendered assumptions”, and they have cast aside “[t]he universalist cloak of the abstract, disembodied individual … to reveal a definitely male citizen and a white, heterosexual, non-disabled one at that” (Lister, 2003, pp 71, 68). As with the previous discussion of work, the gendered assumptions behind dominant conceptions of citizenship are bound up with the public/private distinction and gendered patterns of time use. Citizenship has been seen as a quintessentially public matter, to which personal and domestic arrangements and activities are irrelevant. Most malestream writers have therefore ignored the ways in which these may affect the public role of ostensibly equal citizens and failed to consider that the responsibilities of citizens might extend into the home. They have also assumed that the qualities and attributes deemed part of the private sphere, such as emotion or dependency, have no place in and make no contribution towards the exercise and understanding of citizenship. In contrast, feminists have shown that gender differences in public citizenship have private foundations and that activities in the private sphere may be both a source of the qualities and values that good citizens need and a form of civic engagement.
Women’s lack of time Time, as “a highly gendered commodity that impacts on and is mediated by the public-private divide” (Lister, 2003, p 132), is often central to such feminist analysis, and raises a range of complex, contested and interconnected issues (for a classification of these issues that is broadly similar to that in the following discussion, see Herd and Meyer, 2002). Perhaps most obviously, women’s greater domestic responsibilities are likely to leave them less time than men for political activity. As Lister has said, “the notion of active citizenship [implies] an assumption about time: that people have time to be active citizens, be it as good neighbours or volunteers or as active participants in the political life of the community” (Lister, 1990, p 456), and women’s domestic responsibilities are therefore a barrier to their equal participation, as “the political participation of women with caring responsibilities remains in the gift of her partner or lies in her individual resources to manage conflicting demands” (Mackay, 2001, p 162; see also Holmes, 2002;Vromen, 2003). In this sense, greater domestic equality is a key condition for political equality between women and men in “any more substantial form than the equal right to vote” (Phillips, 1991, p 101). 74
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As discussed later in Chapter Nine, the claim that women have less free time than men is not uncontested. It is also complicated by differences among women: for example, some are much more able than others to ‘buy time’ by purchasing convenience meals and domestic services, and many do not have a male partner who could potentially share their work. Nevertheless, the available research does indicate that, even if their total disposable time is similar to men’s, women’s free time is generally more fragmented and therefore less politically usable than men’s.
From private care to public good The constraining effects of a lack of time are most acute for involvement in regional, national or international politics, where effective participation usually means extended time away from home. They are, however, more easily managed at community or local level, where women’s domestic activities can at times lead directly into informal collaboration with other citizens that can in turn merge with wider forms of community involvement and political participation: for example, shared babysitting arrangements between friends can be extended into a wider network, while those caring for older people might be motivated to campaign for better wheelchair access to public buildings. Mothers may also be concerned about their children’s physical environment, leading to efforts to clean up syringe-littered playing areas or establish safe pedestrian crossings near schools (for a discussion of such ‘activist mothering’, see Vromen, 2003).While such women-centred activities often stem from particular and immediate concerns and are usually below the radar of political commentators, they sometimes develop into more general and/or formal forms of political engagement, and can be seen as evidence of “a rich and inspiring nexus of citizenship-enhancing activities” (Lister, 2003, p 146; see also Dominelli, 2006). Many women are involved in voluntary organisations and in providing informal help to others in their community. Such activities can be seen as an important source of ‘social capital’, that is, the social norms and trust that result from informal interaction and relationships and that some writers have identified as an essential building-block for a socially cohesive and inclusive society. Much mainstream work on social capital has largely ignored social interactions and networks around care; indeed, one study of social capital “consider[ed] in detail trends in pub attendance in Britain (where men still spent twice as much time as women in 1984), whilst relegating to a footnote increases in time 75
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spent on childcare” (Lowndes, 2000, p 534; see also Blakeley, 2002; Lowndes, 2004). However, Herd and Meyer argue that even private caring activities can generate social capital, helping to “foster a sense of community, social trust, and strong participatory democracy” (2002, p 667). Even time spent ‘socialising’ can generate a sense of shared values and belonging lacking for those who go “bowling alone” (Putman, 2000, book title), while, as Jane Mansbridge has argued,“everyday talk” by those who are not politically active can be seen as “highly informal, unconscious, and aggregative processes”, providing “a crucial part of the full deliberative system that democracies need if citizens are, in any sense, to rule themselves” (1999, pp 215, 211). Meanwhile, although women’s local activities and networks can generate social capital, they further restrict the time they can spend on more formal politics; as Vivien Lowndes has shown, they can therefore represent both “a burden for female politicians and a resource for male politicians” (2004, p 59; see also Bruegel, 2005). It is also important to note that not all shared activities can be seen positively: as Lister cautions, “getting drunk and careering around the city centre on a Saturday night, making public space unpleasant for others, would count as socialising in a survey but it’s hardly citizenship!” (private communication, 2006). The civic importance of ‘private’ activities extends to care giving inside the home as well as in the community. As Pamela Herd and Madonna Meyer say, it is impossible to argue “that a hospice volunteer caring for a neighbour is engaged in a civic activity, while a woman caring for her elderly aunt is not” (2002, p 674), while the social importance of caring activities often extends well beyond the individuals involved and contributes to the public good: most obviously, raising the next generation of citizens and workers is not simply a private matter but an important contribution to the future of society. This means that parents’ obligation to bring up their children is not simply ‘natural’, but should also be “recognized and valued as ethicallygrounded ‘civic obligations’, as part of citizenship” (Prokhovnik, 1998, p 88; for a related point, see Dobson, 2003, p 136). The ‘ethics of care’ perspective introduced in Chapter Four further suggests that caring for others can give rise to positive values, such as an appreciation of human interdependence, which could improve the public sphere.These arguments have received some empirical support from Fiona Mackay’s research on women councillors in Scotland, many of whom spontaneously raised their experience as carers as a positive resource as well as a burden (Mackay, 2001). Here it is important to see that these values can and should be acquired by men too, rather
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than allowing an uncritical celebration of ‘womanly values’ to confirm traditional responsibilities (see Segal, 1987). These arguments do not mean that activities in the home constitute citizenship participation in exactly the same way as more overtly political activities. As Mary Dietz has warned, we need to recognise the political limitations of care-related values: in particular, maternal behaviour is necessarily “an intimate, exclusive, and particular activity” based on an unequal relationship between mother and child; as such, it cannot be a full model for democratic citizenship (Dietz, 1985, p 31). As Lister (2007) suggests, it is therefore helpful to distinguish between social citizenship, of which care is an important expression, and political citizenship, understood as active political involvement (see alsoVromen, 2003). From this perspective, time parents spend ensuring that their children eat nutritionally balanced meals at home can be seen as a positive contribution to the good of society, and therefore an expression of social citizenship. This may lead to a concern with what children eat at school and to campaigns to improve the quality of school meals; this counts as political citizenship.
Time and citizens’ rights and responsibilities Because time spent providing care is a form of citizenship contribution, it should give rise to citizenship rights, particularly pension entitlements, in the same way as time spent in paid employment. It should also be seen as a positive duty that citizens should be expected to perform (see Bubeck, 1995; Kershaw, 2005). Seeing care as a ‘normal’ responsibility of citizens turns on its head the political rhetoric that dominates Western political discourse today, and insists that the prime responsibility of citizens is to engage in paid work. While this dominant discourse implies that anyone who is not employed is feckless, work-shy and lacking a stake in society, a feminist perspective challenges the widespread failure of men to perform their caring responsibilities. It shows that, far from acting as model citizens, many men are ‘free riding’ on the work of women, who provide the domestic foundations for their political participation, not only by freeing them from the need to look after their own children or elderly parents, but also by looking after men themselves. In other words, many apparently independent and self-sufficient male citizens only have the time to perform some civic responsibilities because they neglect others, and because they are care receivers, dependent on the time of those who service their daily needs.
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These arguments raise complex policy issues that are discussed in more detail in later chapters. At this stage it is important simply to note the shift in perspective that a feminist analysis provides, that is, a shift away from the ‘normality’ of male experiences and perspectives on time use that also recognises the fluid and interdependent nature of public and private responsibilities.
Justice, time and the public/private distinction The previous sections have argued that time spent in the home or community is often economically and/or civically important. This means that, contrary to assumptions of the malestream theorists discussed in Part 1, the distribution of such time should be governed by principles of justice.
Susan Okin and temporal justice As discussed earlier in Chapter Three, the 20th-century philosopher John Rawls briefly recognised that the principles of justice should apply to the distribution of leisure time. However, he equated this with time left over from paid employment, completely ignoring the time needed for work within the home. Most of his work ignored gender issues and the relevance of justice to the family; even when he eventually addressed this in a late essay, he seemed to see the nuclear family as natural and pre-political, rather than as a politically and legally created institution to which his principles of justice should systematically apply (see the discussion in Nussbaum, 2002). In contrast, Okin’s Justice, Gender and the Family (1990) applies Rawls’ principles to argue that “Until there is justice within the family, women will not be able to gain equality in politics, at work, or in any other sphere”; this makes the distribution of time spent on unpaid labour within the family a central issue of justice, both in itself and because of its consequences (Okin, 1990, p 4; for related arguments, see Richards, 1982). While Okin argued that the economic interests of those who chose to work at home should be legally protected, she thought it preferable that paid work and care should be much more equally shared and open to both sexes, and she advocated state subsidies for childcare and much more flexible patterns of employment to support this. She believed that breaking the ascriptive links between sex and roles and responsibilities would not only help all citizens to fulfil their potential, but also enable men as well as women to develop “an increase in empathy, and in the combination of personal moral 78
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capacities, fusing feelings with reason, that just citizens need” (Okin, 1990, p 186). Although Okin did not draw on the literature, this idea is clearly in line with the ‘ethic of care’ arguments discussed earlier, and the related belief that enabling carers to participate in politics will enhance the quality of justice in public life. While this book broadly endorses these arguments, Okin’s liberal assumptions make it hard for her to address the self-interest of powerful groups in maintaining unjust arrangements. In earlier work, she accepted that her ideas were likely “to be resisted strongly by those with economic power and an interest in maintaining the status quo”; indeed she even questioned whether they were achievable within the structures of capitalism (1980, p 303). However, Okin did not explore the implications of this or attempt to discover why it is that women are at present treated unjustly, and although in Justice, Gender and the Family she argued that long-term financial benefits would outweigh shortterm costs, in practice economic ‘realities’ make it difficult for either politicians or entrepreneurs to take such a long-term perspective.
Socialism, justice and time Over a century-and-a-half earlier, some socialist writers had also seen relationships within the family as a central political issue, inseparable from justice in the public sphere. For example, Robert Owen argued that men’s power over their wives both reflected and maintained the wider systems of private property and religion, and William Thompson saw domestic equality as both a condition and product of a more egalitarian and cooperative society (for a discussion, see Bryson, 2003, Chapter 1). In contrast, although as discussed in Part 1 time was central to Marx’s theory of exploitation in capitalist society, he ignored the time needed for unpaid domestic labour. His vision of a just, fully communist society, in which technology would liberate people from toil and they would contribute according to their ability to the relatively small amount of necessary work that remained, is therefore problematic. In particular, as Diemut Bubeck (1995) has argued, his vision of free time and abundance ignores the time-consuming nature of caring work, which cannot be automated but is dependent on social interaction. Although later Marxists, including Engels, Trotsky and Alexandra Kollontai, saw collectivised housework and childcare as a necessary foundation for sex equality, they assumed that this would remain the responsibility of women, and generally saw changes in the family as a consequence of economic transformation rather than a
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political or economic priority to be addressed in its own right (for a discussion, see Bryson, 2003, Chapters 3 and 7). However, more recent Marxist feminists have analysed domestic labour and its relationship to the capitalist economy in more detail. As discussed further in Chapter Seven, I have argued that social reproduction should be understood as part of the economic basis of society rather than simply a product of this.This means that care work is not a constant fact of nature, but a part of human history that may have its own dynamics and power relationships, as well as interacting with other aspects of economic life. From this perspective, at this stage I would argue that, despite the many problems associated with a Marxist perspective, there are at least four advantages of drawing on it in any discussion of temporal justice for women. Firstly, because it argues that ideas of justice are not eternally given but historically produced and used to disguise or contest dominant interests, Marxism supports feminist critiques of the partial nature of male justice and the ways in which its focus on the public sphere conceals the private bases of unjust outcomes. Secondly, because it also recognises the historically specific and exploitative nature of commodified clock time, it can see the human value of the ‘other’ temporal rhythms that much caring work involves, rather than assuming that these should give way to the former; its vision of a non-exploitative future logically includes liberation from commodified time. Thirdly, while Marxism therefore encourages us to think beyond the confines of the present, it insists that our vision of a just society should not be free-floating, but must be linked with an understanding of existing conditions and the possibilities to which these give rise, thereby supporting the ‘balancing act’ between realistic and utopian thinking identified in Chapter One. In relation to the gender distribution of time, present conditions now include effective contraception, bottle feeding and fertility treatments that break the ‘natural’ link between women and infant care and between age and reproductive capacities; they therefore create an important material foundation for more equitable arrangements in the home. Finally, a Marxist perspective can help us see that substantive gender justice is unlikely to be achieved within a system based on the pursuit of profit, as state policies and the gender division of labour are not simply a matter of political choice, individual wishes or changing cultural preferences, but are bound up with the imperatives of a global economy in which, increasingly, “women are central to the compliant, low-paid workforce essential for contemporary capital accumulation” (Ward, 2002, p 139). The neoliberal assumptions of this economy also increasingly promote individual independence, marginalising caring 80
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responsibilities or assuming that these will be met by individuals without collective support. A just allocation of caring time and responsibilities is therefore likely to be opposed by dominant economic interests and is unlikely to be achieved in isolation from more general socio-economic change. While Marxism has historically focused on class and been less able to see patriarchal interests, recent feminist work on the interlocking nature of class and gender enables us to see that gender differences in the use and experience of time are an integral part of male privilege; to the extent that they threaten this, even minor changes are therefore likely to encounter strong resistance.
Nancy Fraser’s ‘thought experiment’ There can, however, be value in establishing a vision of a just and desirable future, even if that future is likely to be strongly opposed, as the articulation of alternatives to an unjust present can be both empowering in itself and a necessary precondition for even moderate reform. Here Nancy Fraser has provided an influential contribution that treats the gendered use of time as central. In a ‘thought experiment’ that takes existing conditions in post-industrial welfare states as its starting point, she attempts to step back and do some “systematic reconstructive thinking” about what a just future, based on principles of gender equity, would require. She sees gender equity as a complex compound of seven principles – anti-poverty; anti-exploitation; income equality; leisure-time equality; equality of respect; anti-marginalisation; and anti-androcentrism – and she finds that neither the “universal breadwinner” model, which expects all citizens to behave like men and therefore provides state support for caring responsibilities, nor the “care giver parity” model, which supports those who care in the home by providing allowance for carers or making part-time work an easier option, could fully meet these principles, even if they were achieved in ideal form. In place of these models, implicit she says in the current political practice of most US feminists and liberals and most Western European feminists and social democrats respectively, she advocates a “universal care giver” model.This would expect and enable all citizens to combine earning and caring as well as participating in community and political activity; far from expecting women to adjust to existing male patterns, this would “make women’s current life-patterns the norm for everyone” (Fraser, 2000, pp 3, 25). This model is of course very radical; indeed, as Fraser says, in “effectively dismantling the gendered opposition between breadwinning and caregiving” it would also effectively dismantle the entire gender 81
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order (Fraser, 2000, p 27). She therefore agrees that it is highly utopian and unlikely to be achieved in the immediate future. However, without such a vision we remain trapped in a present in which imaginative possibilities are limited by what we already do, and in which, for example, many women seem to accept the current domestic division of labour as just, because “the only conceivable alternative that [they] can imagine is not an equal division of labor, but a situation in which men do even less” (Baxter and Western, 1998, p 118; see also Baxter, 2000, and the discussion of utopian thought in Chapter Seven, this volume).
Conclusions This chapter has shown that the boundaries between the public and the private are decidedly permeable and fuzzy, bound up with other oppressive dichotomies and spanned by the patriarchal privileging of men’s needs and experiences and the assumption that these are ‘normal’. It has highlighted the domestic foundations of men’s political and economic privilege and stressed the economic and civic importance of the time spent in many domestic and community activities. While recognising its many problems, it identifies Marxism as an approach that can usefully inform feminist analysis. The chapter’s arguments imply three key goals for a feminist politics of time: to expose and challenge the distribution of paid work, unpaid work and free time; to value and reward time spent on care, rather than seeing this simply as a negative constraint; and to ensure a better balance between the natural temporal rhythms often required for personal and caring activities and the rigid requirements of commodified clock time. These goals are in line with Fraser’s vision of “a social world in which citizens’ lives integrate wage-earning, caregiving, community activism, political participation, and involvement in the associational life of civil society – while also leaving time for some fun”. They involve a profound challenge to the normality of current assumptions and lifestyles, and do not point to any easy policy solutions. However, as Fraser also says, “Unless we are guided by this vision now, we will never get any closer to achieving it” (Fraser, 2000, p 27).
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Feminist politics and welfare states Chapter Five indicated that the time-related problems and disadvantages faced by women require collective, political solutions.The form these might take depends on the extent to which the political processes and structures of contemporary welfare states are open to feminist intervention: this is the focus of this chapter. The first section draws on recent feminist state theory to argue that effective feminist politics requires both engagement with the state and autonomous activity. It also finds that policy outcomes can have an important long-term impact on gendered identity and time norms. The second section returns to the welfare regime theories discussed in Chapter One. After showing that a woman-centred perspective highlights temporal issues, it focuses on time-related policies in the Nordic welfare states, as although these are not uniform and have mixed impacts, they all recognise that citizens need time for their caring responsibilities. The third section links this to women’s political representation, finding that female politicians have a good track record of promoting ‘women-friendly’ work-time policies.The fourth section explores the mixed implications of globalisation for a feminist politics of time, identifying the potential for linking local, national and international concerns in a global politics of ‘solidarity in difference’. In drawing these issues together, the chapter’s conclusion reaffirms the need to recognise the historically specific ideological, political and socio-economic contexts that can facilitate or constrain the development of a feminist politics of time; it also identifies the individualistic liberal culture of the US as particularly hostile to feminist claims.
Feminist perspectives on welfare states Feminists have long debated whether man-made states are inevitably hostile to their goals, or whether they can be used to pursue them (for an overview, see Bryson, 1999b). Recent feminist state theory moves beyond such dichotomous thinking to see political institutions in terms of processes, fragmentation and discourse, rather than as stable and 83
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monolithic entities. Variously framed as ‘feminist comparative policy’ (Mazur, 2004; Mottier, 2004),‘comparative discourse analysis’ (Kantola, 2004, 2006) and ‘gendered or feminist institutionalism’ (Randall, 2000; Kenny, 2006), this work highlights the variable, dynamic, contextdependent and fractured nature of power and political processes. It indicates that, rather than attempting to analyse ‘the state’, we should focus on the comparative analysis and investigation of particular states. It also indicates that we can expect to find fluidity and variations both within and between structures, which may be more or less open to feminist interventions. From this perspective, “The state is no longer simply good or bad for women, but a more flexible and varying construct, and women are no longer either acted upon or actors, but both” (Mistra and Akins, 1998, p 277), while social policies “do indeed have contradictory effects for women. They cannot be understood in one-dimensional fashion, as instruments of oppression or of liberation” (Pascall, 1986, p 26; for good overviews and a discussion of recent feminist theories of the state, see also Pringle and Watson, 1992;Waylen and Randall, 1998; Charles, 2000). In stressing the political importance of discourse, recent feminist work also shows the impact of feminists’ perspectives on the state on their political practice: here Johanna Kantola (2006) has convincingly linked the different approaches to childcare and domestic violence in Finland and the UK to different attitudes to the state (with Finnish feminists assuming that the state can be used to promote sex equality, while UK feminists treat it with more suspicion). In practice, because power is patterned as well as fractured, those who try to enter manmade political institutions will often find it difficult to do so without conforming to the male rules they are trying to contest, while any apparently successful feminist policy initiatives will be implemented in the context of wider patriarchal structures. Similarly, while feminist demands may be conceded when they serve the interests of capital accumulation, apparent gains may be withdrawn if they threaten this. However, as argued in earlier chapters, patriarchy and capitalism are themselves fluid and variable, and may conflict both internally and with each other, opening up possibilities for feminist intervention – in particular, men’s interest in having a financially dependent wife to take care of domestic chores has often conflicted with capitalism’s need to draw women into the marketplace.The complex, cross-cutting nature of political processes and outcomes is illustrated by the welfare reforms introduced in most Western nations by the second half of the 20th century. Some critics have interpreted these negatively as a costeffective and politically convenient way of reproducing the workforce 84
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that disguised the direct and/or indirect exploitation of both women’s and men’s labour, produced a gendered, two-tier system of welfare and assumed and reinforced the ‘normality’ of women’s dependence on a male breadwinner. They can, however, also be seen as a feminist and working-class victory that radically improved the daily lives of many (see Wilson, 1977; Nelson, 1990; Connell, 1995; Mink, 1998; Brenner, 2000; Charles, 2000). In terms of policies on working hours, although the chances of feminist success depend on a number of factors, including pre-existing political ideologies and policies, states may most readily be persuaded to legislate for flexible workplace practices in periods when the economy requires women’s labour in paid employment as well as in the home. Similarly, individual companies may voluntarily provide ‘womenfriendly’ hours and conditions if these seem to be a way of retaining trained staff and therefore maximising profit. Although feminists are likely to have to fight to defend these conditions if economic, political and ideological conditions change, the experience of the Nordic nations, discussed in later sections of this chapter, shows that this can be done if women are well represented in the state machinery and feminist values are widely held and supported by a strong union movement. A more far-reaching recognition of the economic importance of women’s traditional work is, however, likely to be harder to achieve, while men are unlikely to willingly surrender their privileged exemption from unpaid work. As discussed in later chapters, more deep-seated changes to recognise that not all areas of life are amenable to considerations of cost-efficiency, and that good quality care in particular involves a slowing down of temporal rhythms, are likely to face even more opposition, as they represent a fundamental challenge to the time culture of capitalism itself. Awareness of the potentially hostile nature of state processes does not preclude engagement with formal processes, but can forewarn feminists and help them develop strategies based on a realistic assessment of political possibilities. It also means that if feminists are to work within state institutions without compromising their radical goals they are likely to need the support and encouragement of a wider women’s movement, while autonomous feminist groups at local, national and international levels can develop points of access and influence within state structures. In other words, as Shirin Rai has said, feminists need to work both “in and against” the state, seeing this as “a fractured and ambiguous terrain for women, needing complex negotiation and bargaining by those working within its boundaries as well as those on the outside” (2003a, pp 18, 19). 85
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Welfare states and the (re)creation of gender A positive view of the potential impact of state policies is reinforced by recent state theories that build on the understanding, discussed in Chapter Four, that gender is created and re-created rather than biologically given, to show that states can play an active role in these processes. Here Robert Connell argues that “Each empirical state has a definable ‘gender regime’ that is the precipitate of social struggles and is linked to – though not a simple reflection of – the wider gender order of society.” This regime includes discourses, values, practices, power relationships, the division of labour and family forms. While it affects what states can do, a gender regime is itself shaped by a range of state policies, so that counter-movements aiming at change can use state institutions to influence the making, meaning and ‘doing’ of gender (1995, p 151). This perspective enables us to see how taxation and welfare policies have helped shape gender identities, including notions of genderappropriate time use. Until recently, these policies have usually supported the normative assumption that a mother is someone who looks after her family while a father will spend his time in paid employment; and in Germany, Italy and Spain, taxation and family benefit provisions still strongly encourage mothers of small children to stay at home (although in practice significant numbers are in parttime employment; see Bittman et al, 2005). As discussed in the next section, policies in the Nordic nations have attempted to undermine this gendered construction, with Sweden providing a particularly explicit, top-down challenge to traditional masculinity and workplace practices, defining both fathers and mothers as active carers as well as employees (Hobson, 2002). Recent legislation in the Netherlands, a country with traditionally conservative attitudes to gender roles and no tradition of full-time female employment, also has the long-term aim of encouraging a dual earner/dual carer family model based on an equal sharing of paid and unpaid work (Pascall and Lewis, 2004; Bittman et al, 2005; Lewis, 2006).While UK fathers only gained a right to paid paternity leave (at a fairly low flat rate) in 2003, this has been accompanied by a clear shift in the understanding of fatherhood and a marked change in men’s aspirations and practices: 93 per cent now take some time off around the time of birth and 31 per cent work flexitime in order to balance their work and family commitments (EOC, 2006a, 2006b; Smeaton, 2006; Dex and Ward, 2007). In the US, the traditional assumption that mothers should stay at home with their young children has been radically overturned for lone 86
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mothers, who have been redefined as financial providers, expected to be in employment even when their children are very young.There is also an ongoing debate in the US about whether married women should spend most of their time with their family or in the workplace (Buxton, 1998; Boyd, 2002). However, the traditional view of US fathers remains largely unchallenged:“There is no debate among policy makers about men’s role – they should be employed, pure and simple” (Orloff and Monson, 2002, p 83).This means both that ‘normal men’ are expected to be breadwinners, and that ‘normal workers’ are assumed to be able to dedicate their lives to their employment: childcare arrangements are largely left to individual parents, there are no national restrictions on adult working time or any right to vacation leave, and the only form of statutory family or parental leave is 12 unpaid weeks around the birth or adoption of a child (with nearly half the workforce not even qualifying for this; although some employers offer paid leave, the poorest workers are least likely to be eligible; see Moen and Roehling, 2005).
Welfare regimes, feminism and time Understanding that the meaning of being a man, a woman, a worker or a parent is at least partly constructed by state policies gives a double significance to many feminist campaigns, which can be aimed at both immediate, practical results and long-term ideological change. It also feeds into the more general stress on fluidity and variability in feminist state theory, supporting the importance of comparative work and a sense of history and context, as advocated throughout this book. This section focuses specifically on the comparative analysis of welfare regimes, introduced in Chapter One. From a woman-centred feminist perspective, Esping-Andersen’s original classification of welfare regimes was flawed by its focus on paid work and male heads of household and its linked neglect of temporal issues. In particular, his focus on decommodification ignored women’s unpaid work, state provision of services such as childcare, the distribution of resources within the family and the often gendered bases of welfare entitlements (which, for example, many women in corporatist/conservative regimes access as wives and mothers rather than independently through workplace insurance). Esping-Andersen’s model also failed to see the different ways in which states distribute, regulate, value and reward particular patterns of time use, and it ignored women’s role as service providers and the extent to which welfare provision assumes the availability of their unpaid time. In his more 87
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recent work, Esping-Andersen (2002a, 2002b) identifies the need for ‘a new gender contract’, with universal childcare and flexible employment to make parenting and employment compatible. However, he tends to present these as ‘women-friendly’ policies of concern primarily to women. Although he talks about gender equality and the desirability of increasing men’s domestic role, he does not seem to see this as an end in itself, and he makes no attempt to systematically rewrite his model to address the interconnected and structural nature of gender inequalities. Feminist work on welfare regimes is more inclined than mainstream work to treat time as a central issue. For example, Gwennaele Bruning and Janneke Plantenga (1999) classify European parental leave and equal opportunities policies according to the balance and choice they offer between ‘time to care’ and the provision of childcare services; Gillian Pascall and Jane Lewis (2004) include time along with paid work, care, income and voice as a central aspect of the gender regimes that welfare states may reflect, sustain, create or challenge; while Mary Daly and Katherine Rake explicitly identify time as one of the resources that welfare states can distribute and organise, so that “The institutions of the welfare state exercise a formative effect on the temporal organization of life” (2003, p 22). Such thinking is also now having an impact on more mainstream work, including the work on the temporal welfare state discussed earlier in Chapter Three. Although a more extensive analysis of temporal regimes to include the variations in time culture and temporal orientation that may be associated with particular policies has not yet been developed, it is implicit in much feminist analysis, which generally stresses the complex, uneven and often contradictory effects of the processes it seeks to understand. More generally, a woman-centred approach to welfare states reveals that women are both the main users of welfare services and the majority of paid welfare workers; they also provide the bulk of unpaid care and mediate between welfare providers and family members. A focus on women’s experiences and priorities has suggested new criteria for the classification of welfare states; here feminist proposals cluster around the strength of male breadwinner ideology, how care is organised and rewarded, the extent of ‘defamilisation’ (“the degree to which individual adults can uphold a socially acceptable standard of living, independently of family relationships, either through paid work or through social security provisions and either inside or outside of a couple relationship” [Lister, 2003, p 172]) and the extent to which all citizens are expected to be in paid employment (the ‘adult worker’ model). (From a large literature discussing Esping-Andersen and 88
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alternative classifications, see, for example, Sainsbury, 1994, 1999; Daly and Rake, 2003; Pascall and Lewis, 2004; Kershaw, 2005; Jensen and Pfau-Effinger, 2005; Siim, 2005.)
Nordic welfare: time to care Most feminist classifications of welfare states find the US and Scandinavia (particularly Sweden) to be polar opposites. While the ‘adult worker’ criterion provides an apparent exception, with both the Swedish and US welfare systems now based on the expectation that paid employment is the main source of individualised citizenship entitlements for women as well as men, these two states provide strikingly different levels of support for those workers who have other demands on their time (Lewis, 2001).The US model is based on market individualism and a stress on paid employment that simply assumes that women can be economically self-sufficient, leaving unanswered the critical question: “if everyone is at the workplace, who will care for the children?” (Gornick and Meyers, 2003, p 8). In contrast, “Put simply, the Scandinavian adult-worker model recognizes care”, and as such it both enables citizens to spend time out of employment when needed in the home and provides supportive care services (Lewis, 2001, p 163). The Scandinavian approach is bound up with a long tradition of using the state to promote social justice. By the early 1970s, all the Nordic nations had officially recognised gender inequality as a collective problem that state policies should address; by 1980, all had some kind of Equality Council and had introduced a range of policy initiatives and legislation aimed at changing practices and attitudes in both public and private life. The development of time-related policies was central to this pursuit of gender equality from an early stage: unpaid maternity leave was introduced in Sweden in 1901, while the Danish state has been committed to supporting childcare from 1919 (Borchorst, 2006; Gupta et al, 2006). This does not mean that there is a single ‘Nordic model’ of time or gender policies, for the Nordic states provide a mixed range of flexible employment conditions (particularly around parental and family leave), cash payments for carers, and state-provided or subsidised services (particularly childcare). These different provisions in turn reflect important disagreements about whether new parents should be expected and enabled to return to paid employment after a relatively brief period of leave, as in Denmark, or after a significantly longer period (at 480 days, Sweden provides the most extensive paid parental 89
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leave entitlement, with 60 days reserved for each parent in two-parent families).There is also an ongoing debate over whether parents should receive financial support from the state if they choose to care for children at home (Finland provides a home care allowance for nonemployed parents of children up to the age of eight; in Norway, parents of children aged one to two who do not use subsidised daycare are entitled to a cash allowance). Nevertheless, these different approaches are based on the shared assumption that adult citizens should be both workers and carers, that women’s traditional caring work is important, that it does not disappear when they enter paid employment and that care is a collective, political issue that society as a whole should support, not just a private, individual responsibility. The Nordic nations all also go much further than others in recognising that gender equality in employment requires an equal division of domestic labour, that the behaviour of men must therefore change and that the state should both treat men as potential carers and encourage them to play a greater domestic role. Educational programmes since the 1970s have therefore been aimed at contesting gender stereotypes and encouraging boys to do more in the home, ‘family-friendly’ employment conditions have been available to men as well as women, and in Sweden, Norway and Iceland a part of the parental leave is now reserved for fathers (for overviews, see Ellingsaeter and Leira, 2006; Gupta et al, 2006). Although the adoption of the Swedish ‘Daddy month’ succeeded only when supported by wellplaced men (Bergman and Hobson, 2002), many of these initiatives were pushed for by both female politicians and autonomous women’s organisations. In practice, men’s domestic behaviour has been quite resistant to change, and the outcomes of some policies have not been as intended. Because women are more likely than men to take advantage of leave provision, its very generosity contributes to workplace inequality in most of the Nordic states (Alfredsson, 2006; Hook, 2006; Gupta et al, 2006), while Danish parents have little opportunity to care for young children at home without severe financial penalty, and the low level of the Finnish home care allowance means that it is taken up almost exclusively by women, perpetuating both the gender division of labour and women’s economic disadvantage.There are also major inequalities among different groups of women, and there are tensions between a rise in immigration and the values of universalism and solidarity (see Bruning and Plantenga, 1999; Ruuskanen, 2003; Haavind and Magnusson, 2005; Gupta et al, 2006; Leira, 2006; Lister, 2006).
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Nevertheless, political and economic inequalities are markedly less than elsewhere, and the Nordic nations consistently take the top positions in comparative analyses of gender equality (Claros and Zahidi, 2005; UNDP, 2006). In relation to how time is used and rewarded, the model of the ‘normal’ worker, free of domestic responsibilities, has been significantly modified and caring is increasingly recognised, supported and rewarded as a civic responsibility. In particular, the ‘Daddy quota’ goes much further than earlier paternity and maternity leave provision, which treated the father as a “visiting care assistant” and the mother as the prime carer; in Iceland, where three months’ leave is reserved for fathers, three out of four take their full quota, so that active fathercare “is no longer a minority phenomenon in Iceland; it has become hegemonic among families with young children” (LammiTaskula, 2006, pp 94, 97). Despite some early scepticism, by the late 1980s many Nordic feminists were arguing that a new form of partnership between the state and women was emerging, and that even if this were a ‘patriarchal partnership’ (Leira, 1989) rather than genuine equality, it was preferable to the personal dependency of women on men within the patriarchal family (for a range of feminist views as they developed in this period, see Holter, 1984; Haavio-Mannila et al, 1985; Sassoon, 1987; Jones and Jonasdottir, 1988; Bergman, 1991; Meehan and Sevenhuisen, 1991). By the mid-1990s, many believed that “political institutions and politics do make a difference”, and that “government can be an important actor in promoting women’s interests and the individual freedom of women in Scandinavia” (Karvonen and Selle, 1995, p 9). Today, there is a general consensus among feminist writers on the Nordic welfare states that, although they fall well short of full gender equality, the glass is at least ‘half full’ (Lister, 2006) and that they can be meaningfully described as ‘women-friendly’ states (see Sainsbury, 1994; Karvonen and Selle, 1995; Ellingsaeter and Leira, 2006).
Women, time and political representation The increasingly far-reaching nature of Scandinavian equality policies is linked to women’s relatively high level of political representation: by 2006, a general shift in gender norms and expectations had combined with the use or threat of positive action to produce a regional average of just over 40 per cent, led by Sweden with over 47 per cent. In contrast, women are slightly less than 20 per cent of the UK House of Commons, a figure reached in 1997 after positive action in the selection of Labour Party candidates. Numbers in the US, where no 91
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positive action has been taken, have risen even more slowly: by the beginning of 2007, just over 16 per cent of members of the House of Representatives and 16 of the 100 senators were women, although the figure rises to 23.5 per cent of state legislators (CAWP, 2006; www. ipu.org; for an overview and discussion of international differences, see Stokes, 2005). Women’s continuing under-representation in most national assemblies is itself a sign of women’s collective subordination and lack of resources, including time. It means that important areas of human temporal experience arising from women’s childbearing and their socially ascribed caring roles are excluded from the policy-making process. However, as discussed in Chapter Four, this does not mean that all women share the same temporal experiences and interests, and there is no guarantee that an increase in female representation will express the needs of the most disadvantaged. Indeed, because political career structures and selection processes generally favour those white, educated women who can most nearly match the behaviour of successful men, their temporal interests may conflict with those of their poorer constituents. For example, Gwendoline Mink argues that in the 1990s white, middle-class women in the US Congress supported welfare reforms that effectively denied lone mothers the right to spend their time looking after their children at home because they “conflated their own right to work outside the home with poor single mothers’ obligation to do so” (1998, p 26). Nevertheless, recent experience suggests that, as more women are elected into political office, they will have a wider and more typical range of interests and that these will feed positively into policy-making processes. While it is extremely difficult to disentangle the impact of women politicians on policy debates and outcomes from other causal factors, a significant increase in their numbers seems to be associated positively with a ‘feminisation’ of the political agenda that includes attention to many women’s temporal experiences and needs (for the now classic arguments on women’s political representation, see Young, 1990 and Phillips, 1995, and for an overview of recent debates, see Childs, 2007; from a wide literature on the impact of women politicians, see, for example, Karvonen and Selle, 1995; Bochel and Briggs, 2000; Lovenduski and Norris, 2003; Childs, 2004, 2006). The positive impact of women politicians on time-related issues seems clear in the Nordic nations, both in putting these on the political agenda and in defending leave and welfare provision in the less favourable economic and ideological climate of recent years. In the UK, the influx of Labour women members into Parliament in 92
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1997 included many who identified themselves as feminists (Childs, 2004), and three of the women appointed to Labour cabinets (Harriet Harman, Patricia Hewitt and Ruth Kelly) had a clear track record of interest in working hours and the implications for gender equality (see Coote et al, 1990; Harman, 1993; Hewitt, 1993; Kelly, 2000). More generally, women’s increased presence seems linked to some limited but significant measures designed to help mothers (and, to a lesser extent, fathers) balance the competing demands of family and workplace, and to the development of a national childcare strategy. Judy Rebick (2000) identifies similar effects from an increase in women’s representation in Canada. Even in the US, a gradual increase in women’s political presence is helping to raise the profile of work-time policy proposals: a recent attempt at legislation to provide state support for care work and to encourage ‘family-friendly workplaces’ (the proposed Family and Workplace Balancing Act of 2005), was introduced into the House of Representatives, where men outnumber women by nearly seven to one, by 20 women and 21 men (www.theorator.com/bills109/hr1589. html).
Welfare states, globalisation and time As discussed earlier in Chapter Three, the time culture of capitalism has an increasingly global reach, and state policies are often constrained by global economic pressures that have generally negative effects on working hours and conditions.While most of the mainstream literature ignores the gendered nature of these processes and outcomes, feminists have demonstrated the ways in which they both reflect and shape existing gendered hierarchies, ideologies and relationships (see, for example, Dalla Costa, 1995;Ward, 2002; Chow, 2003; Croucher, 2004). This generally works to women’s disadvantage, and it is those who are already most disadvantaged who suffer most, so that “Third World women’s labor … serves as the infrastructure on which First World economic expansion depends” (Litt and Zimmerman, 2003, p 157). However, globalisation “not only creates conditions that threaten women’s well-being, but also heightens women’s awareness of these conditions and of their shared interests with women in other parts of the world” (Croucher, 2004, p 179); as such, it “is a threat, but it is also a possibility and a promise” (Vargas, 2003, p 906). In particular, instant electronic communication opens up new possibilities for international feminist cooperation and activism, producing “intricate webs of interconnectedness between globalization and localism”, as feminists “have discovered, and are skilfully exploiting, new political 93
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opportunities in the transnational political spaces of our globalising world” (Chow, 2003, p 450; Fraser, 2007; see also Baden and Goetz, 1997; Ackerly and Okin, 1999; Ali, Coate and Goro, 2000; Rai, 2003b; Antrobus, 2004). Some of this activism specifically concerns the way that women’s time use is valued and rewarded. The International Wages for Housework Campaign, founded in 1972, has campaigned both within nation states and through international organisations for the recognition of women’s unpaid work, and has links with grass-roots groups throughout the world. Its demands have included child benefit, after-school childcare and recognition of unpaid domestic and caring work as a basis for pension entitlements, as well as pay equity in the workplace. It coordinates the International Women Count Network that, with the support of more than 1,500 organisations worldwide, successfully pushed at the 1995 United Nations World Conference on Women in Beijing for the measurement of the time spent on unwaged work. Its other campaign successes include a large childcare programme in Los Angeles in 1999, recognition of unpaid homemaking as a basis for pension entitlements in Argentina, recognition of the right to paid breastfeeding breaks at the International Labour Organization Maternity Protection Convention in 2000 and the inclusion of an article in the 1999 Venezualen Constitution that “recognises work in the home as an economic activity that creates added value and produces social welfare and wealth” and entitles housewives to social security benefits (although this has yet to be implemented in practice, President Chavez announced in 2006 that the poorest housewives would receive a monthly income equivalent to 80 per cent of the minimum wage in recognition for their work in the home; see www.allwomencount. net; www.globalwomenstrike.net). Such linking of global, national and local concerns illustrates the potential for a politics of solidarity in difference, as discussed in Chapter Four, that recognises both that the majority of women are directly or indirectly disadvantaged by the lack of value attached to their traditional work and that they experience these disadvantages in very different ways. A related source of solidarity stems from the recognition that the high levels of consumption and competitive spending that, as discussed in Chapter Three, drive damagingly long working hours in mature capitalist economies also involve the exploitation of people in Southern nations, both as badly paid producers of mass consumer goods and as the providers of domestic services and care that many Western workers are too busy to provide themselves. Although many Western citizens currently appear to benefit from forms of 94
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exploitation that sustain their high material standard of living, and nonindustrialised economies benefit in the short run from both new forms of employment (such as call centres) and the money transferred home by migrant workers (which the International Monetary Fund says is worth more than double the amount provided to poor countries in global aid [Balakrishnan, 2006]), the long-term effects on health and conditions of employment in the West and the possibility of sustainable development elsewhere are much less positive. It also seems increasingly probable that high levels of consumption in the West are driving the world to environmental catastrophe; from this perspective, changes in Western lifestyles are clearly a matter of international concern (see Rebick, 2000). Such global problems cannot be addressed by individual nation states in isolation from the international community, and progress is likely to require international campaigns by organised labour, feminist and other concerned groups. Nevertheless, it would be premature to write the obituary of the nation state or to abandon it as a site of feminist activism. As indicated in Part 1’s discussion of path dependence, states respond to similar pressures, including the threats and opportunities of globalisation, in a range of ways that owe much to the effects of different pre-existing political cultures and interests (Siim, 2005;Walby, 2005); although some states are more constrained than others, domestic policies are never entirely predetermined by external forces. States can also to varying degrees “act as agents of globalisation as well as being passive victims of it” (Harrison, 2002, p 19), and they play a key role in supporting or obstructing international agreements, such as on working hours, climate change or human rights, while domestic political pressures can influence the ways in which any resulting initiatives are interpreted and implemented.
Conclusions The feminist approaches discussed in this chapter suggest that states are not simply patriarchal or capitalist institutions, but nor are they simply neutral tools that feminists can capture to use as they please. Rather, they are complex sets of interlinked structures, discourses and processes that interact with patriarchal gender regimes and economic pressures but within which feminists can find points of entry and opportunity.The pursuit of effective feminist policies requires feminist presence, pressure and influence within the state and feminist activity and pressure from outside it. While there may at times be tensions or even conflicts between ‘sisters in suits’ and grass-roots activists, such 95
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activity both ‘in and against’ the state has at least the potential to keep the lines of communication open among different groups of feminists, so as both to guard against the deradicalising effects of power and to temper the idealism of radicals with a sense of political reality. One aspect of this reality is the extent to which national policies are restricted by global pressures. Another is the effect of existing domestic conditions, for, while existing welfare, gender and temporal regimes do not determine outcomes in any straightforward way, they are central to the political and discursive context within which policies are made. This means that policies developed in one context cannot be simply transferred to another without wider change. In particular, the introduction of Nordic-style policies around ‘work–family balance’ that are now being advocated by a number of US feminists, represents a profound challenge to US ideology and practice at many levels, as the liberal, individualistic ethos of the latter rejects the linked arguments that states can and should intervene to address collective inequalities of outcome, that caring rights and responsibilities involve public goods rather than simply lifestyle choices, that the state can legitimately regulate conditions of employment and provide services to support carers, and that citizens can expect to be taxed accordingly. It is in this context that the proposed Family and Workplace Balancing Act has been blocked, despite lobbying by the world’s largest feminist group, the National Organization for Women (www.now.org), and that positive action to increase women’s political representation is barely on the agenda. This kind of analysis can produce the paralysing sense that nothing can be changed without changing everything else on a global as well as a national level, and that the effects of path dependence rule out radical change. However, it can also suggest that small changes in one area can have incremental, knock-on effects in others, or that, as pressures for change build up, contemporary welfare states are reaching a critical juncture within which policy options can be opened up to wider debate. Moreover, while global pressures limit some policy options, global networks and organisations can also be used more positively, providing new opportunities for feminist international cooperation and new forms of ‘solidarity in difference’ between women and with men, in a range of political and labour organisations at local, national and international level.
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Part 3 Towards a feminist politics of time
seven
Time and temporality in feminist political thought Part 1 of this book considered three interconnected and overlapping areas: the temporal assumptions that frame mainstream political theory, the nature and significance of different time cultures, and the ways in which time is used and controlled in capitalist societies. Part 2 explored feminist theory at a general level to consider how this might reframe mainstream approaches.This third part draws these approaches together to focus directly on time in recent feminist political theory and practice, and the ways that this can inform policy debates in Western welfare states. Later discussion of whether women have a distinctive ‘time culture’ (Chapter Eight), how women use their time and whether this can be captured in time-use studies (Chapter Nine) and the policy options available to feminists in contemporary welfare states (Chapter Ten) are informed by this current chapter, which explores a range of feminist assumptions and debates around time and temporality. After an initial brief overview of the ways in which these have been treated in recent feminist thought and a discussion of feminist utopias, it returns to the themes of Chapter One to locate feminist temporal ideas in time and to consider the significance of history for feminist thought. The final section revisits the temporal ideas of Marx, Pierson and Giddens, which were also discussed in Chapter One. It finds that, despite their androcentric assumptions, these can fruitfully be developed to contribute to the exploration of gender issues, and it seeks to modify Marxist theory by introducing the concept of ‘(re)production’. As this chapter shows, feminists disagree over the relative importance of the past, present and future and the interpretation of history. Nevertheless, the chapter is able to draw on a wide range of ideas in support of the idea that times are multiple, interconnected and linked to power, and that feminist politics needs to be based in the awareness that past, present and future do not stand apart. In line with arguments about transcending dichotomy identified in Part 2, this means that we are neither entirely free agents nor the passive victims of circumstances, and that any plans for the future should attempt to think beyond what currently exists while recognising both the constraints inherited from 99
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the past and new options that are constantly opening up in a neverstatic present.
Time and temporality in recent feminist thought As Joan Tronto has observed, “many feminist notions are basically temporal: experience, identity, trust and empathy depend upon time for their meaning” (2003, p 134). Beyond this, feminists share the basic temporal assumption that gender relations are not immutable and can be different in the future; many also argue that they have been very different in the past. As with mainstream theory, feminist temporal assumptions are usually implicit rather than self-consciously theorised. However, in recent years a number of feminist writers have addressed them directly. Here the work of Barbara Adam (1990, 1995, 2004), widely acknowledged as one of today’s key writers on the social understanding of time, is particularly important; her ideas inform my arguments throughout this book. Although Adam does not generally highlight the feminist nature of her ideas (which were discussed briefly in Chapter One), they are clearly feminist influenced, and in a relatively early work she applied them to an analysis of feminist methodology. She argues that while feminism, as a movement committed to action for change, is inevitably future-oriented, it also seeks a form of understanding that is embedded in the ever-changing experiences and relationships of the present, and that is aware of the importance of circumstances that have been inherited from the past. She argues that feminists need to develop a theoretical perspective on time that “can genuinely connect experience, context, pattern, process and events; one that can simultaneously account for continuity and change, the influence of the past, the visions and interests of the future, and the constitution of the present, without losing sight of social relations of power” (1989, p 463). Adam’s call for such a theory is bound up with her prior analysis of the multiplicity of times, the coexistence of past, present and future, and a stress on the relationship between time and social control. She argues that in any society memory and expectation coexist in the moment of the present, while interdependent clock, seasonal, biological, human, natural, psychological, collective, individual, ecological and cosmic times jostle for priority. She illustrates this by exploring a moment in her own daily routine. Similarly, I write this thinking in the present about the words Adam wrote in the past for someone reading it in the future, while other times crowd in as I find that the coffee I made earlier is getting cold, that the telephone has not rung as I had been 100
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half-expecting, that because it is raining it is getting dark earlier than usual, that because my eyesight is deteriorating I will have to put on the light – and, even as I remember and look up Christina Hughes’ comment that, more than 10 years on, the theorisation Adam called for in 1989 “is still waiting to happen” (Hughes, 2002, p 133), an e-mail from my daughter pings in from a different time zone, and I realise that if I spend too long developing this illustration I won’t finish this chapter when I’d planned, and the book won’t be published in time for inclusion in the UK’s national Research Assessment Exercise.… While different times coexist, they are not all equal in status, and Adam sees time as inevitably linked to power. She argues that Western capitalist society is dominated by a “static, linear and dichotomising” temporal consciousness and that feminists must break with this if they are to develop the kind of embedded, multi-layered theory they need. She does not, however, see the dominant time as specifically male, for this would be to introduce a new male time/female time dualism. Rather, she adds her voice to feminist critiques of dichotomous thought, drawing out a specifically temporal dimension to these arguments – for if truth is an ongoing, context-dependent process arising out of the “infinite complexity of everyday experience”, then “timeless dichotomies become meaningless”. This means in turn that dualistic approaches that conceptualise time as cyclical or linear, natural or social, traditional or modern, relative or fixed, male or female are themselves transcended (1989, pp 462, 461). Adam’s insistence on the ongoing, interactive nature of human time means that she rejects any notion of the singularity or superiority of ‘modern’ Western time. Related points have been made by Helga Nowotny (1994), who argues that linear and cyclical conceptions of time both contain elements of each other; she too explores the ways in which different time needs and perspectives are bound up with power and authority to act as mechanisms of social control. Susan Greenhouse similarly asserts the coexistence of more than one meaning of time, challenging the idea that linear time is somehow more ‘real’ than other times and rejecting as a “mystification essential to modern Western political thought” the idea that “the meanings of time exist apart from logics of power and accountability” (1996, p 86). Some of the political implications for feminists of such a multi-layered temporal consciousness have been considered by Elizabeth Grosz, who stresses both the need to think and plan beyond the present to “futures yet unthought” (1999, p 15) and the essentially unknowable, unplannable, uncontainable nature of what is to come, even though this is conditioned by both the past and the present. She argues that we 101
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need to see the temporal nature of our own ontological commitments, and she seeks to develop a concept of temporality that is “directed to a future that is unattainable and unknowable in the present, and that overwrites and redirects the present in an indeterminacy that also inhabits and transforms our understanding of the privilege of the present”; this perspective sees the future as “neither irrelevant nor as directly manipulable, neither as the realization of current wishes or fears …, nor as simply speculative, utopian, impossible” (2005, pp 1-2, 72).
The role of utopian thought As the quotation above indicates, a sense of thinking beyond the confines of the present is characteristic of utopian thinking. While Grosz is dismissive of thought that is ‘simply’ utopian, a number of feminists have seen utopianism as a way of breaking with patterns of thought that have been established by men; as such, it can be used to critique current conditions by imagining radically different alternatives. Such utopian feminism is exemplified in fictional works such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1979 [1915]) and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), while Ruth Levitas and Nancy Fraser have sought to use utopian methods to open up feminist debate to “thinking in terms of the kind of society we want to achieve, rather than what seems immediately probable” (Levitas, 2001, p 449; see also Fraser, 2000). Although utopian thought is generally concerned with describing an idealised, non-existent place, Nowotny notes that writers have also described uchronias, non-existent ways of understanding and using time; this term could usefully be used to describe Fraser’s and Levitas’s imaginative reassessments of how time should be divided between paid and unpaid work, and is developed in Chapter Ten. As Levitas (1990) and Nowotny (1994) have observed, utopias are a response to contemporary pressures; Frances Bartowski similarly describes them as “the work of anticipation motivated by anxiety” (1989, p 10), with feminist utopias arising in a context of feminist activism and debate. As such, utopian visions are themselves located in time and, because they arise from changing needs, there is no universal utopia. However, as the quotation from Grosz also implies, if they are to make an effective contribution to feminist politics, they must make the difficult link between present dystopia and imagined alternatives; for this, they need a plausible basis in existing reality even as they hope to transcend it. Here Piercy’s vision seems to fail the test (see the discussion in Tong, 1989). Building on the ideas of the radical feminist Shulamith Firestone, 102
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her utopia depends on the assumption that reproductive technology can be used to eliminate power relations between the sexes. Feminist critics, however, say that in reality it is much more likely to be used to control women than to develop a more equal society, and Piercy’s ideas have had little impact on feminist political practice. In contrast, Fraser’s ‘thought experiment’ (discussed in Chapter Five) has directly inspired concrete policy proposals (see in particular Kershaw, 2005). The link between such imaginative proposals and political possibilities also seems at first sight to be shown in the opening paragraph of Janet Gornick and Marcia Meyers’ Families that Work (2003), that invites US readers to “imagine a world” in which parents would be given generous support in combining childcare and paid work, before showing that this utopian vision is already reality in parts of Europe. However, as discussed in earlier chapters, the varying nature and histories of welfare states means that transferring policies from one to another is unlikely to be a straightforward process. If it is to be effective, the shift from utopian thinking to policy implementation therefore needs to do more than show that a policy has been successful elsewhere, and should also involve an awareness of the historically produced circumstances that made it possible in one nation but may make it harder in another. At the same time, specific policy proposals need to retain the element of strategic thinking involved in utopian thought and balance shortterm practical gains against women’s longer-term strategic interests (Molyneux, 1985).
Locating feminist theories of time in time It is not only feminist utopias that are bound up with particular conditions.Although it is still rare, the self-conscious feminist theorising about temporality discussed above can itself be seen as a product of rapid social change linked to postmodern notions of uncertainty and flux. This suggests that, as discussed in Chapter One in relation to mainstream political theory, it may be possible to identify evolving temporal perspectives within feminism, or to locate the temporal disagreements that may underlie particular political disputes. The patterns are, however, not straightforward, for feminism has never fallen into clear strands, there is no neat fit between ‘type’ of feminism and temporal orientation and, as discussed in the next section, the nature of feminism’s history is itself contested. Thus within first and second wave Western feminism both the liberal, equal rights strand and the socialist and Marxist strand can be seen as ‘modern’ products of Enlightenment thought and its belief in the 103
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onward march of human progress. However, there are also temporal disagreements between these two strands, with liberal appeals to timeless notions of right and justice clashing with the Marxist belief that rights and justice have no existence outside of the human societies that produce them, and that they vary according to the interests of the dominant class. Similarly, while liberal feminists see sex equality as an immediate demand, Marxists see it as time bound, achievable only at a particular stage in human development, so that past history inevitably shapes both the present and the future. These modern, future-oriented feminisms are both very different from the strand within 1970s radical feminism that saw history as a record of timeless oppression rather than progress, and that attributed unchanging, biologically based qualities to men and women (with men seen as destroyers and predators and women as life-givers and nurturers). This in turn is very different from recent postmodern feminism that rejects both the ‘grand narrative’ view of history as progress and the notion of timeless rights, along with the idea that sex, gender, women or even the individual self exist as stable entities over time. For such feminists, history is unimportant, gender can be created and recreated at will and “the present [is] ... a prelude to the future rather than an extension of the past” (Tronto, 2003, p 141; see also Weston, 2002). However, while it might encourage some to neglect the past, a stress on fluidity and process can also lead others to look back in time, and to identify the patterns of ‘path dependence’ that condition these processes. Such analysis may also lead to the identification of ‘critical junctures’ at which large-scale change is likely. In terms of practical politics, this suggests that, while today’s dominant temporal perspectives do not generally encourage the pursuit of revolutionary change, some currently influential ideas see that radical change may at times be possible or even necessary. Because they see this as a product of the past, they also point to the political importance of studying history.
History matters for feminists Feminists are interested in history for a range of interconnected reasons. Many believe that the study of history can help us understand the present and the possibilities for change it contains. Many also find that recalling women’s past achievements and/or giving gender relations a history can provide a political weapon that undermines claims about women’s inferiority or the inevitability of contemporary arrangements and encourages the exploration of alternatives. Extending historical investigation into the changing circumstances of family and personal 104
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life also questions the public/private distinction that, as discussed in Chapter Five, underpins Western political thought and sustains male privilege. More generally, feminist rewritings of history with women and gender relations centre-stage expose the self-serving limitations of the kind of men’s knowledge described by Mary Astell over 300 years ago: “Histories are writ by them, they recount each other’s great Exploits and have always done so” (quoted in Perry, 1986, p 3). Beyond the quite widespread feminist agreement that reclaiming and rewriting history with women and gender centre-stage can be a politically important feminist task, feminists often disagree over the nature of women’s history and its political implications. Some stress the continuing nature of women’s oppression, some identify progress and others reject the notion of narrative continuity that this seems to imply. These issues are discussed in the rest of this section.
History and the oppression of women The view that history is little more than a record of man’s inhumanity to women is exemplified in two quotations. In 1848 the world’s first women’s rights convention (held at Senecca Falls, New York) announced that “the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man towards woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her” (in Rossi, 1973, p 416); in 1969 the New York Redstockings manifesto declared that “Male supremacy is the oldest, most basic form of domination. ... All men receive economic, sexual, and psychological benefits from male supremacy. All men have oppressed women” (in Morgan, 1970, p 598). By the 1970s, this view was linked with the radical feminist concept of patriarchy. Some feminists attempted to discover the historical origins of men’s patriarchal power, locating it variously in men’s ability to rape, their discovery of their reproductive role, the early development of hunting or the first private property (for an overview, see Bryson, 2003, Chapter 10). Many, however, agreed with Dale Spender that “We do not need definite evidence of the first cause to know that men have power, that they have had it for a very long time, that they seem to have had it in every known human society, and that they now use it to keep their power” (Spender, 1985, p 42). As discussed in Chapter Four, the naming of patriarchal power can be an important first step towards challenging it, and historical accounts of past atrocities, such as witch burning, can provide an empowering source of anger that leads to political activism. They can also guard against what Tronto has described as the “lure of amnesia”, that neglects 105
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the ongoing impact of men and women’s different pasts and overstates the opportunities open to women today (2003, p 140). However, as Tronto also argues, it is also important not to “transform women into the victims of men’s actions and … deny women any agency of their own” (2003, p 125). Lynne Segal similarly warns against an account that is essentially a-historical, so that “Women’s powerlessness, victimisation and lack of resources ... constitute women’s timeless history” (Segal, 1987, p xi), and any sense of progress over time or of differences among women gets lost. More careful use of the concept of patriarchy need not involve making such a-historical generalisations or seeing women simply as the passive objects of history. Rather, it directs attention to the contexts within which women live, so that a key task for feminist historians is to identify shifts in the nature of patriarchy and the changing ways in which it is experienced by different groups of women. For example, Sylvia Walby has identified a general shift in Western societies away from private patriarchy based on individual control within the household to a public patriarchy based on structures outside the home; more recently, she has combined this with an analysis of the complex patterns of gains and losses experienced by different groups of women in different areas of their lives (Walby, 1990, 1997). Such analysis does not see patriarchy as an unchanging and monolithic structure of oppression, nor does it deny women agency. It allows for the possibility that patriarchal power may be challenged and feminist victories won, while recognising the interconnected nature of both gains and ongoing constraints.
History as inspiration This understanding is compatible with attempts to use history to document women’s forgotten achievements. In periods when women are told that they are incapable of artistic creation, original thought or political leadership, the discovery of eminent foremothers can be highly empowering, supporting feminist claims that if women appear to be inferior, this is a product of society rather than nature. In a selfreferential twist, recent feminist history has shown that earlier feminists also used history in this way: for example, Christine de Pizan (1365c1430) appealed to the record of ‘great women’ in history to insist that, contrary to the religious authorities of her time, women could be the intellectual equals of men (Lerner, 1993). By showing that there is nothing new about women’s resistance to oppression, such rediscoveries can also inspire and legitimise feminist activities, contributing to an underlying sense of collective identity and political agency. In this sense, 106
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as Diana Coole says, the history of the women’s movement has been “part of feminism’s ideological arsenal, its own mythology of origin and victories in the face of adversity, which grants it continuity and identity over time” (2000, p 36).
Whose history? What history? At the same time, many feminist writers today, including Coole, are extending their awareness of the political nature of history to criticise feminist portrayals of feminism’s own history. Not only have some white, middle-class,Western women historians tended to write history with their own particular concerns and interests equated with those of women in general, but some have also misleadingly presented the history of feminisms and women’s movements as a continuous emancipatory project, imposing narrative continuity on ideas and events that are “pluralistic, heterogeneous and contingent” (Coole, 2000, p 38). Nevertheless, while they may change its nature, these criticisms do not rule out the political importance of history for feminism; indeed Coole says that it is by recognising the discontinuous, fragmentary nature of earlier feminisms that we can see that the apparent fracturing nature of feminist activities and identities today is not problematic, but only appears so from a “mass-movement, grand-narrative perspective” (2000, p 52). Increased awareness of difference and diversity can also open history up to a multiplicity of voices, strengthening the view that it is neither simply a catalogue of wrongs nor a record of progress. Not only do many feminist historians now draw on a far wider range of sources and methods than those used in the past, but many ‘non-academic’ individuals and groups, including immigrant groups, are writing their own family or community histories, and this can provide a validating sense of identity (Cowman and Jackson, 2003). Although few feminists now expect history to reveal ‘the truth’, most would probably agree with Krista Cowman and Louise Jackson that they have “a duty towards those women who inhabited the past: to ensure that their lives are evaluated with respect and hence ‘truthfully’”. As Cowman and Jackson say, the processes of “naming, remembering, re-telling and assigning meaning” involved in such evaluations are highly complex (2003, pp 43, 41). By revealing some of the specificities of past women’s experiences, they can help us see our own afresh; this recognition of the specificities of different women’s histories can also caution us against both any ‘one size fits all’ solution to contemporary problems or an over-generalised account of the past. 107
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Feminism and history today Such awareness of the partial and unstable nature of knowledge is often informed by postmodernism. It is of course not necessary to be a postmodernist to see that, because history inevitably involves selection, it inevitably also involves interpretation rather than an innocent record of ‘what happened’ – it was after all George Orwell, rather than a postmodernist, who said in his dystopian novel 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” However, postmodernist approaches confirm the political importance of history as an enterprise that is inevitably always being rewritten and that has the potential to be used by both feminists and their opponents to challenge or confirm hegemonic assumptions based on male experiences and interests. The discussion in this section suggests that feminist history should aim at balancing awareness of the continuing impact of past oppressions with the recognition of opportunities, and should seek to go beyond seeing history as either a record of progress or one of constant oppression, while acknowledging that it is not entirely random. Such history can contribute to a sense of agency by demonstrating the ability of some women to act in the most adverse circumstances, and by investigating the circumstances of past feminist gains and defeats it can inform the exploration of policy alternatives today. It can also recognise that, while women do not share a common history and they are divided by past experiences that continue to divide them today, this does not preclude the identification of commonalities as a basis for solidarity in difference. Underlying this, any feminist history insists on the centrality of gender, however this is conceptualised; it also opens up areas of life that historians have conventionally disregarded as ‘private’ or unchangeably ‘natural’ to historical scrutiny.
Mainstream theories revisited: Marx, Giddens and Pierson The feminist arguments discussed in the previous sections are basically compatible with the temporal perspectives of Marx, Giddens and Pierson. As discussed in Chapter One, these mainstream writers all in different ways assert the importance of temporality for the understanding of social and political phenomena, arguing that these should not be seen as static entities but as products of the past that set conditions for the future and that are constantly changing, sometimes dramatically, sometimes imperceptibly. While they all identify the 108
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constraining effects of circumstances, they all also insist on the role of human agency in the processes of historical change.Whether they see current institutions and structures of power as a reflection of economic forces and material conditions (Marx), the accumulation of individual acts as social practices (Giddens), or choices and patterns that have become self-reinforcing (Pierson), they also all agree that human possibilities are not bound by what currently exists, that the seeds of change are always present and that the future is neither entirely open nor predetermined. None fully explores the implications of their ideas for gender; nevertheless, all have been drawn on by feminists.This section explores both what feminists can take from the temporal analyses of these mainstream writers and how this may be modified if women’s perspectives are accorded equal status with men’s.
Marx: human history and (re)production Classic Marxist theory supports the basic feminist temporal perspective that women’s subordination is not the timeless reflection of innate sex differences, and that it can therefore be ended. It suggests that if we want to understand and change women’s current situation, we have to understand how it has come about and the forces that are working to change it. However, although mainstream Marxism thereby links women’s situation to human history, it treats it as a by-product of economic change without any independent dynamic of its own.Thus Engels argued that the “world historical defeat of the female sex” originated with the first private property (which gave men a motive to control women, so that they could pass property to their own heirs) and that women’s oppression would disappear in a propertyless, communist society (for a discussion, see Bryson, 2003, Chapter 3). Far from recognising women as makers of history in their own right, this perspective confirms the public/private split and leaves little scope for women to address sex oppression directly or to challenge the gender division of labour. This gap in understanding stems from Marx’s claim that the way people produce is the basis of social organisation and a driving force in human development. This theory rests on an unhelpfully narrow definition of productive economic activity that equates it with production in the public sphere. From this narrow perspective, reproductive, domestic and caring work are excluded from historical analysis or political struggle, and
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… [a]ll the labour that goes into the production of life, including the labour of giving birth to a child, is not seen as the conscious interaction of a human being with nature, that is, a truly human activity, but rather as an activity of nature, which produces plants and animals unconsciously and has no control over this process. (Mies, 1998, p 37) In contrast, if Marxism is combined with a feminist perspective that rejects the public/private distinction, we can see that women’s work in the home is a form of productive work. As such, it is a part of human history, and the conditions in which this work is done, including the gender division of labour and the variable ways that family life and sexual relationships are organised, are part of the material basis of society, rather than simply a reflection of it. Not only can they therefore be challenged directly, but struggles over conditions of work in the home can be central to more general economic change, and changes in this area can both limit and create possibilities for the future development of society. Such arguments have been developed by a number of recent feminist writers using an expanded notion of social reproduction to conceptualise ‘women’s work’ within a Marxist framework (see, for example, Vogel, 1983; Brenner and Laslett, 1991). However, technical issues around Marxist terminology can make this confusing, and I prefer the term (re)production, which I have defined as “those human activities (physical and emotional) which are more or less directly linked to the generational reproduction and maintenance of the population and the care of those unable to look after themselves” (Bryson, 2004, p 24).These activities include not only biological procreation, but also cooking, cleaning, the care of children, elderly people and people with disabilities or ill health, and the satisfaction of emotional and sexual needs. Beyond being disproportionately associated with women, these activities have been organised in a wide range of ways. Expanding on these points while retaining Marxist terminology, a focus on conditions of (re)production involves examining changes in the forces of (re)production, in the sense of knowledge and technological developments, and the impact of these on the relations of (re)production, particularly the gender division of labour and the shifting boundaries of paid and unpaid work. Such a feminist Marxist perspective gives a history to a central area of human life that has conventionally been marginalised and analyses it in its own terms. It shows in particular that, although for most of human history frequent pregnancy and prolonged lactation imposed a basic ‘natural’ division of labour that 110
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made women’s wider responsibility for (re)production an efficient use of resources, the recent development of effective contraception and bottle feeding means that this is no longer the case, while the widespread availability of labour-saving domestic appliances means that housework need no longer involve ceaseless toil. These changes have already facilitated women’s increased role in paid employment, a more limited increase in the domestic role of men and the provision of (re)productive services by the state or private sector.They also open up the possibility of more radical challenges to the gender division of labour and the division of (re)productive responsibilities between individuals, the wider community, the state and the market. Although recent changes in the conditions of (re)production make more equitable arrangements possible, the impact of these conditions is mediated by a range of factors, including religious beliefs and gender ideology, that are variable both between and within societies. (Re)productive conditions also interact in complex ways with wider aspects of economic and political life. Feminists will therefore have to campaign actively for the changes they want, such as greater state or community support for childcare, greater involvement by men in (re)productive work, ‘family-friendly’ conditions of employment, or a reallocation of economic resources to support and reward (re)productive activities more highly. As discussed in earlier chapters, such campaigns are likely to conflict with profitability and therefore to encounter strong opposition. Because in the short run most men benefit materially from the current gender division of labour and differential earnings, they too may oppose such change. Nevertheless, most men are also exploited as workers, it is in their interests too that (re)productive work is not neglected, and many could benefit from the wider choice that more fluid gender roles could offer. Partly for these reasons, trade unions in most Western nations now support campaigns for flexible working and parental leave, rather than defending men’s ‘family wage’ as in the past. A revised form of Marxism that combines his sense of temporal location with analysis of (re)production would recognise that women as well as men can make history. While it would see that they too do not choose their circumstances, it could find that in some ways the material circumstances of (re)production that currently exist make sex equality in principle more achievable than in the past, thus bridging the gap between utopian dreams and practical possibility. It would confirm the independent importance of attempts to change conditions of (re)production, while seeing that these cannot be addressed in
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isolation, but only in the context of wider socio-economic change, and that such change will involve alliances with some men.
Giddens: structuration and doing gender through time Like Marx, Giddens is interested in understanding both continuity and change. As discussed in Chapter One, he argues that institutions, identities, ideas and structures of domination do not simply ‘exist’, but are maintained or modified through time by the repetition of individual acts that accumulate as social practices. Because in principle these acts might not be repeated, any social structure is inherently vulnerable, and human agents have a capacity to make change. Similarly, as discussed in Chapter Four, some feminists have argued that gender is the unstable product of repeated acts rather than the stable reflection of pre-existing attributes or roles. Within this framework, some also see the doing of gender in terms of enacting domination and submission; Giddens too is interested in how structures of domination are perpetuated or overturned. Unlike Marx, Giddens explores ‘private’ issues in some of his work. In The Transformation of Intimacy (1992) he specifically attempts to give a history to current forms of sexuality, linking this to the longterm processes associated with globalisation and to the separation of sex from its reproductive function, as well as the influence of both feminism and the day-to-day activities of ‘ordinary women’. He argues that traditional local knowledge and expectations have increasingly been replaced by therapeutic ‘experts’ on personal relationships. These relationships are now judged in terms of their ability to meet individuals’ need for self-development and intimate communication, so that partners constantly scrutinise the state of their relationship and their own emotional health. Combined with women’s rejection of the domestic servitude involved in earlier forms of romantic love, this means that relationships are treated as a form of transaction between equals that either can terminate if their needs are not met. Although he says that the result can be a stressful degree of insecurity, Giddens welcomes new forms of intimate relationships as more democratic than those of the past. He also argues that they can have positive effects on the public sphere, as “the advancement of self-autonomy in the context of pure relationships is rich with implications for democratic practice in the larger community” (1992, p 195). Although this kind of discussion seems very much in line with feminist arguments about the historically produced nature of private arrangements and their broader implications, Giddens’ claims are 112
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problematic. Not only does he set continuing economic and political inequalities to one side, but as Lynn Jamieson (1999) has argued, he ignores the extent to which egalitarian expectations continue to be combined with highly unequal domestic practices. His underlying theoretical ideas around ‘structuration’ have, however, proved more fruitful, and have informed recent feminist work on ‘doing gender’. The following discussion takes his ideas as a springboard for more general discussion of how gender is constituted over time. It focuses on two key points: that gender is “an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts” (Butler, 1990, p 179, emphasis in original) and that these acts themselves involve the gender-appropriate use of time. As mentioned in Chapter Four, Judith Butler’s ideas on gender performance and the potentially disruptive effects of transgressive behaviour are highly contested; here the ideas of Kath Weston are particularly significant as they focus explicitly on her temporal assumptions. Weston concedes that the idea of ‘doing gender’ is an important corrective to earlier static views. However, she argues that the concept of repetition, which she says underlies both Giddens’ theory and the idea of gender performance, is itself based on a particular set of temporal assumptions – those of the mass assembly line that is, ironically, currently disappearing in Western societies (for a related criticism of Giddens, see Greenhouse, 1996). Weston claims that the current popularity of the idea of performance reflects the late capitalist commodification of time and globalisation, which focuses on free choice in the present, and in which individuals appear free “to present gendered representations of self that they assemble according to personal taste, from repertoires of commodities”. This, she says, overstates the malleability of gender and the freedom of people to behave as they wish. Paradoxically, it also sustains the illusion that masculinities and femininities are somehow ‘there’ to be reproduced, and it loses sight of the underlying assumptions that “entrench rather than dislodge gendered inequalities”. Echoing arguments about the importance of history and context discussed earlier in this chapter, Weston therefore argues for the importance of historical legacies and memories for the understanding of current gender relations, and she insists that we should “study gender as a social, material relation in time, not some already commodified thing” (Weston, 2002, pp 74, 134, 135). While both Butler and Weston are particularly concerned with sexual behaviour, other writers have identified time use as a key aspect of ‘doing gender’. Unlike Butler, these writers assume that people usually seek to reaffirm their gender identity, and that their behaviour is therefore 113
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conditioned by existing norms about appropriate behaviour, including gendered time norms, rather than deliberately transgressive. From this perspective, individuals are in effect making statements about their gender by the way they spend their time: “in addition to producing utilities, men and women divide up market time and household-labour time in such a way that they are also ‘producing gender’”; “her doing the laundry and his fixing the light switch not only produces clean clothes and a lit room, they also produce a reaffirmation of gender roles” (Sirianni and Negrey, 2000, p 65; Blumberg, 1991, p 20; for a related discussion, see West and Zimmerman, 1991; Bianchi et al, 2000). These gender time norms produce a disciplinary effect, making it: … difficult for individuals to cross the occupational and social boundaries associated with their sex … professional women with heavy workloads and men oriented to sharing childcare in the home each face social disapproval for spending ‘too much’ time at activities not regarded as their primary obligation. (Epstein and Kalleberg, 2004a, pp 1718; see also Gerson, 2002) This can have clear practical effects, and has suggested to some commentators that men’s reluctance to clean the house does not stem simply from an inherent dislike of the task, but from the threat that its performance might pose to their masculine identity.Thus Julie Brines has found that North American men who are economically dependent on their wives (and whose masculinity is therefore under threat) make a particularly low contribution to domestic work, even though they may have plenty of time available, and concludes that: “It appears that by doing less housework, economically dependent husbands also ‘do gender’” (1994, p 652). Paul Kershaw (2005) similarly suggests that Swedish men’s failure to take all the parental leave to which they are entitled is bound up with the symbolic meaning of masculinity, and that strong incentives will be needed if this effect is to be countered. Cynics might see such arguments simply as an excuse for laziness and the avoidance of tedious chores, and gendered time norms do generally maintain men’s privileges, particularly their freedom from domestic responsibilities. They also protect men’s higher earning capacity by introducing a new level of difficulty for women in particularly demanding but high-paid occupations, as working long hours is seen as ‘a heroic expression of masculinity’ that it would be inappropriate for women to display (Collinson and Collinson, 2004, p 240). As Cynthia Epstein puts it, conflicting gender norms mean 114
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that “If [women] put in extra hours at work they are not fulfilling the time norms that specify their primary obligation to the home. If they don’t put in the time, they cannot hope to fulfil the work norms that might lead to promotion and the freedom to delegate that comes with it” (2004, p 329). The result for many successful career woman can be guilt and pressure, while some time-use studies suggest that if a woman earns more than her partner she is “likely to invoke significant hyper-feminine displays aimed at neutralizing gender role deviance” (Bittman, 2004, p 165). While Giddens was interested in change as well as stability, the above accounts stress continuity in gender roles and identities over time, seeming to leave little scope for active agency or change. They can also lose sight of significant differences in women’s expectations, experience and behaviour. However, Oriel Sullivan has recently linked the idea of ‘doing gender’ to the limited changes in gender roles that have been identified in Western societies and to observable differences among different groups of women. Focusing on gender practices in the home, she seeks to link “the wider discursive environment and the micro-level interactions and negotiations that individuals engage in on a day-to-day basis”. She identifies the “potentially transformative” aspects of doing gender in a couple relationship “as part of a dialectic process, which involves both an interpretation of the other partner’s gender consciousness and an interaction with their respective doing of gender”, and which is also affected by the individuals’ “material and relational resources” and the wider discursive and ideological environment. In what is effectively a reassertion of both the radical feminists’ claim that ‘the personal is political’ and Giddens’ claim that social structures can be disrupted by the non-repetition of the acts that maintain them, Sullivan argues that “women’s everyday struggles around the domestic division of labour” should be identified as political, and that in the long term these can have a transformative effect (Sullivan, 2004, pp 219, 208, 216). Kristin Natalier makes the related point that “It is unlikely that Giddens … was imagining a stand off over the washing up when he described intimacy as ‘a transactional negotiation of personal ties by equals’ but this can in fact be an element of reflexively managing relationships, and an important one at that” (2004, p 17). As Sullivan also says,“[i]n the absence of determined policy changes in the area of the family” the changes she has identified will continue to be slow (2004, p 219). However, if such policies are in place they may have a double effect. As discussed in Chapter Six, states can help construct gender identity by assuming, supporting or challenging existing gender time norms, for example by assuming that only women 115
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need time off work to care for children, by reserving a period of parental leave for men or, as Kershaw suggests, making it financially attractive for men to take this leave. The above discussion suggests that neither gender nor the norms and actions that sustain it are stable over time, that the undoing of oppressive gender relationships requires not only individual acts but also state policies to support them, and that acts and policies around time use will be central to these processes. It recognises both that individuals are constrained by material and ideological factors when choosing how to behave in their daily lives and that their actions are not predetermined. It also shows that small changes can have important cumulative effects, linking personal to political change.
Pierson: gendered paths and junctures in time Pierson also makes the connection between small and large-scale change in his path-dependence approach.As discussed in Chapter One, Pierson seeks to analyse the self-reinforcing mechanisms that sustain existing patterns of power, politics and behaviour and mean that early decisions have a long-term effect; he also argues that pressures for change can gradually build up until they reach a critical juncture, and suggests that welfare states today may be at such a turning point.While some feminist work on welfare policies has fruitfully drawn on this approach, Pierson himself does not consider the significance of contemporary pressures on women, and he does not attempt to identify pathway-dependent gender norms and the ways in which these might affect policy responses. Rather, he seems to see changes in women’s role and behaviour, particularly their greater participation in paid employment, their declining fertility and their greater tendency to bring up children without a partner, simply as problems requiring potentially costly solutions. Although as far as I am aware path-dependence analysis has not been applied to gender itself, it opens up some interesting possibilities for analysis at the level of individual behaviour, collective norms and state policies, particularly in terms of gendered time use, enabling us to see how people can become locked into gendered patterns that become self-reinforcing. For example, the kind of gendered time norms discussed earlier mean that women are more likely than men to reduce their working hours to accommodate the needs of their family; they are also more likely to be enabled or encouraged to do so by state policies. Even if a couple start life together sharing domestic tasks and earning similar amounts, a woman who takes maternity leave is likely to acquire more domestic and childcare skills than her 116
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partner, and her career opportunities are likely to be reduced when she returns to work. Her lower earnings will then make it rational for her rather than her male partner to work shorter hours or to take parental leave; lack of financial independence may also reduce her negotiating power within the home. Meanwhile, her partner may feel obliged, as the prime wage earner, to devote more time to his career, and because he has someone to look after his domestic needs he will be enabled to do so. The male partner is also more likely to have his interests protected by a trade union and, because he has more money, contacts and usable time than his now economically dependent partner, he is more likely to gain a wider political voice. This in turn will reinforce the gender norms that frame welfare policies: these generally assume that family responsibilities are primarily the concern of women, and were established at a period when trade unionists had successfully fought for the male breadwinner wage, and basic housework was far more time-consuming than it is today. The analysis of path dependence is, however, not only the analysis of stability.The above example may indicate a number of potential sources of conflict and pressure for the individuals involved, for state policy and for gender norms; these may accumulate to reach a critical juncture and a change of direction. At such a critical juncture, a woman may decide to leave her partner if he does not contribute more at home, or a man may decide that high earnings are not an adequate compensation for never having time to see his own children, and downsize to a less well-paid job.The public policy agenda may shift to acknowledge that women can no longer be expected to work for free, and that men too have family responsibilities. Alternatively, a woman may abandon the attempt to combine employment and family, and devote herself to full-time domesticity, while welfare policies may encourage women to marry on traditional terms and make it harder for them to bring up children without the financial support of a husband. While there is nothing automatic about particular outcomes, a path-dependence analysis can in principle help us identify some of the long- and short-term processes involved in the maintenance or disruption of gendered policies and patterns of behaviour, and could usefully be combined with the analysis of both changes in conditions of (re)production and small-scale incremental changes in behaviour, as discussed earlier in this chapter.While recognising that gender pathways have their own independent momentum, this approach would also investigate how they interact with the more general pressures and processes identified by mainstream writers such as Pierson. Today, the cumulative impact of short- and long-term changes means that the 117
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gender norms and expectations that were dominant in many welfare states for most of the 20th century are increasingly out of kilter with people’s daily lives and experiences, and no longer provide a viable basis for welfare policy.This opens up the possibility of a paradigm shift that would both recognise the importance of the work traditionally done by women and seek to share it with men. Such a shift may already be apparent in some Scandinavian nations and it is increasingly the focus of feminist concerns elsewhere, although the chances of success may themselves be limited by less favourable conditions that have their own established paths.
Conclusions The discussions in this chapter indicate both the political nature of temporal assumptions and the temporal nature of political ideas in relation to gendered patterns of time use and power. They recognise both the constraining effects of past oppression and the powerful interests likely to oppose feminist goals. Nevertheless, they also offer some grounds for cautious optimism. Not only do they reiterate the role of human agency in the making of history, but they also suggest that underlying material conditions are potentially more favourable than in the past, that even small-scale changes can have cumulative effects and that gendered pathways may have reached a critical turning or tipping point at which new opportunities and paradigms are opening up. In this context, the ‘utopian’ imagining of alternatives can play a useful role, but also needs to be grounded in present possibilities as these have developed from the past.The chapter also argues that the analysis of history can itself be seen as a political project that challenges male paradigms and that, while it is unlikely to provide any straightforward ‘lessons’ for contemporary feminists, history can also serve as a source of motivation and inspiration that indicates both the diversity of women’s experiences and the complexity of the struggles they face. Although it discusses general and ongoing differences between women and men, the chapter does not see these in dichotomous terms, for the temporal nature of both truth and identity denies the secure foundations that dichotomous thought requires.This means that, while we can identify dominant gender norms and gendered patterns of behaviour, these are both fluid and variable, affecting different groups in a range of ways and allowing some individuals to diverge from the general patterns. It leads us to expect that there are identifiable gender differences in time use, that these will generate different ways of relating to and understanding time, and that those associated with men will be 118
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privileged. However, it also cautions against any simple identification of ‘men’s time’ and ‘women’s time’.These issues are addressed directly in the next chapter.
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‘Women’s time’ Regardless of circumstances, women are strangers in the world of male-defined time and as such are never at home there. At best, they are like guests eager to prove helpful; at worst they are refugees, living on borrowed time. (Forman, 1989, p 1) As discussed in Part 1, the dominant model of time in contemporary capitalist societies is the linear, goal-oriented, commodified time of the clock: time that can be individually owned, bought, sold, invested, spent or wasted, and that can be measured as a series of discrete activities. In this model, time is money, profitability requires long hours and/or the intensification of work time and we are constantly looking to clearly identifiable outcomes. However, this hegemonic understanding coexists with other ways of relating to time; in particular, human relationships and caring interactions may have a very different temporal pattern and logic, while our bodies have rhythms that we can never entirely escape. This chapter develops Chapter Two’s discussion of the social nature of time to consider whether there is a specifically female ‘time culture’ and, if so, the place of such ‘women’s time’ in patriarchal capitalist societies. The arguments of the book so far indicate that any distinction between women’s and men’s time should not be understood in dichotomous terms, both because our experience of time is inherently fragmented, fluid and multi-layered and because women and men are not closed, unitary categories. However, they do not rule out the possibility that general differences in physical and social experiences often give women and men a different relationship to time; they also indicate that, if so, then ‘men’s time’ will be privileged, and women’s claims to equality will require them to assimilate to male temporal norms. They further indicate that because the dominant time is also that of the capitalist market economy, any attempt to change the time culture cannot be isolated from wider economic and political issues. There is now a significant body of feminist thought analysing the gendered nature of time. Although writers disagree as to the nature, source and significance of any differences between male and female 121
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time cultures, there are a number of recurrent themes. In contrast to the male time of paid production, many describe ‘women’s time’ as cyclical, natural, task-oriented, relational and embedded, the time of reproduction, the family and personal relationships. A number of writers claim that ‘women’s time’ provides access to forms of knowledge and understanding that the dominant time culture suppresses; many argue that women’s daily lives give rise to particular temporal rhythms and needs, and that these are sacrificed to the requirements of commodified clock time. Some argue that while the dominant time culture sees time as a ready-made entity that individuals can possess and use, ‘female time’ shows its relational and created nature. However, some feminist writers also warn that such classifications can become essentialist, confirming dualistic, oppositional thinking and freezing categories in time. The chapter begins by considering whether, as some feminists have claimed, women’s biology gives rise to a distinct temporal consciousness. While it does not entirely discount such arguments, it treats them with caution, and places more stress on the link between socially ascribed gender roles and time cultures; this is explored in the second section. The subordination and marginalisation of ‘women’s time’ in patriarchal capitalist societies is both a running theme throughout the chapter and the subject of the third section. The chapter concludes that, although ‘women’s time’ and ‘men’s time’ should not be seen as fixed polarities, the terms can provide a useful political shorthand that highlights both a central aspect of patriarchal privilege and opportunities for resistance to this. It also argues that a reassertion of the needs and values associated with ‘women’s time’ is in the interests of the whole of society.
Biology and ‘women’s time’ As mentioned briefly in Chapter Four, some feminists have argued that women’s bodies, particularly their menstrual cycles and capacity to give birth, mean that they are more in tune with natural time and the long-term needs of the planet than men. Such arguments can be simplistic and essentialist, based on an artificial distinction between mind and body that forgets that men too have bodies, places women outside of human history and seeks to invert rather than move beyond man-made, hierarchical dichotomies. However, they have also been developed in more sophisticated ways.
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Menstruation Jay Griffiths claims that “the menstrual cycle gives women a differing experience of time” that varies with the moon and keeps them in touch with nature and pre-patriarchal religion, and that today “Masculine society seeks to homogenize women’s time, by mocking, hating or ignoring that exquisitely timeful cycle” (1999, pp 108, 109; see also Gottner-Abendroth, 1989). However, it is not necessary to go so far to acknowledge that the experience of menstruation, and the emotional and physical changes that often accompany the monthly cycle, can sometimes give women a relationship with time that is largely unacknowledged in contemporary society. For many women, this may involve a sense of repetition, or a personal calendar that operates independently from ‘official’ time and that a woman may use to plan her activities (choosing, for example, to avoid a holiday when she is likely to menstruate, or organising her work around anticipated peaks in creative energy). Menarche and menopause can also represent clear temporal milestones in a woman’s life; while of course a missed period can indicate pregnancy. Western society has generally seen menstruation as both shameful and private, a sign of women’s inferiority or impurity that exemplifies their association with the body, and that justifies their exclusion from many forms of paid employment or religious and political office. Although increasing numbers of women today are in paid employment and public office, the time discipline of modern society makes no allowance for the fluctuating rhythms that many will experience; indeed discussion of these, particularly in mixed company, remains largely taboo. Emily Martin has argued that this failure to recognise women’s bodily needs can itself be a source of pre-menstrual tension as “women, grounded whether they like it or not in cyclical bodily experiences, live both the time of industrial society and another kind of time that is often incompatible with the first” (1992, p 198). Although she does not go as far as Griffiths, she too suggests that menstruation can be a source of positive qualities, and she endorses Gloria Steinem’s witty essay ‘If Men Could Menstruate’ that asserted that if it were indeed men rather than women who menstruated, then menstruation would be celebrated as a sign of male superiority and society organised accordingly (Steinem, 1984; see also Shuttle and Redgrove, 2005 [1978] for a pioneering reassessment of menstruation). Breaking the silence around women’s bodily experiences, recognising and valuing the temporal rhythms and qualities associated with menstruation and demanding that mainstream temporal arrangements 123
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take these into account can be an important feminist step. However, there are a number of reasons why menstruation should not be seen as the source of a collectively held female time consciousness, as writers such as Griffiths and Martin claim. Firstly, such a claim tends to forget that fluctuating hormones also affect men, that they too experience changing bodily rhythms and mood swings over the working day and life course and that their fertility declines with age. It is therefore in danger of confirming the hierarchical mind/body, male/female dichotomy, forgetting that it is not only specifically female temporal needs but also more general human rhythms that get lost in societies and workplaces that are too rigidly controlled by the clock. The claim that women’s temporal sense reflects their menstrual cycle is also flawed by its basis in a particular stage in women’s lives that is never experienced by all; as such, it ignores the experiences of post-menopausal women and the minority who never menstruate. In contrast, a life-course perspective avoids the common feminist error of equating all women’s experiences with those who are of childbearing age (see Katz and Monk, 1993, particularly the chapter by Pratt and Hanson, pp 27-54). An analysis of changing conditions of (re)production, as suggested in Chapter Seven, confirms this point, as a rise in life expectancy means that more women spend a significant part of their life after the menopause, while menstruation itself is frequently regulated, eliminated or prolonged through use of the contraceptive pill or hormone replacement therapy. Developments in reproductive technology are also modifying the temporal imperatives of the ‘biological clock’ by enabling older women to give birth, while the significance of the menopause as a turning point in a woman’s life is also likely to be less for a woman with a career than for one valued primarily for her reproductive potential. In this context, claims that the menstrual cycle gives all women a distinctive and ‘natural’ temporal perspective become increasingly untenable.
‘Women’s time’ and the creation of life Related issues arise from more general feminist claims about the temporal significance of women’s reproductive capacities. At the most basic level, some feminists claim that women’s life-giving powers give them a consciousness of time that is existentially different from that of men.Thus Mary O’Brien argues that, whether or not they become mothers, women share a reproductive consciousness of continuity, in contrast to men who are “isolated in their individual historicity, the 124
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dimensions of their own lifespan” (1981, p 53; see also O’Brien, 1989a, 1989b). Similarly, Frieda Forman, quoted at the opening of this chapter, argues that Heidegger’s influential vision of life lived in the knowledge of death treats life as a linear progression and thereby excludes women’s experience of giving time: … for us the future as generative is as much a determinant in our lives as is our mortality.… As a collective, women do not only live in time (from birth to death), they also give time and that act makes a radical difference to Beingin-the-World … for women, the giving of time, ie birth, is prior to and takes both ontological and temporal priority over the taking away of time, ie, death. (Forman, 1989, p 7; see also Gottner-Abendroth, 1989) Neither O’Brien nor Forman sees reproduction as simply natural: O’Brien insists that it is part of human history and increasingly amenable to conscious control, while Forman says that women’s “generative temporality” can go beyond nature to provide a basis for transcendence via care “that existential which unifies the future, past and present, … grounded in Being-toward-birth and life” (1989, pp 8, 7). Nevertheless, they seem to think both that women who have no intention or expectation of ever having children, including those who are infertile, somehow share a reproductive consciousness with women who are pregnant for most of their adult lives, and that this consciousness is denied to men.This view is particularly hard to sustain in the light of the recent decline in fertility in Western societies and the extension of life expectancy well beyond childbearing years. Some related problems arise from Julie Kristeva’s famous essay Women’s Time, first published in 1979. In an ambitious attempt at combining psychoanalytic, philosophical and political analyses, Kristeva links ‘women’s time’, based, she says, in both monumental time (eternity) and cyclical time (repetition), to reproduction, motherhood and the unconscious; she contrasts this with the linear time of history, politics and language from which women have been excluded. She argues that the first phase, or generation, of feminism was an attempt to join historical time by claiming equal rights, while the second, radical, phase rejected it, placing women outside male culture and celebrating their ‘difference’. Both these phases remained defined by masculine time, and Kristeva says that the task for feminists now (that is, in the late 20th century) is to move beyond the dichotomy between masculine
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and feminine to a third stage that recognises the contemporaneity of all three generations. Kristeva’s attempt at articulating imaginative possibilities outside the structures of existing discourse is inherently complex and can appear self-contradictory. As Elizabeth Ermarth says, her analysis of women’s exclusion from time means that it is questionable whether “there [can be] any idea of time possible now that is not phallogenic”, so that ‘women’s time’ itself appears to be a “contradiction in terms”, existing only “as an exile or an absence of time” (Ermarth, 1989, p 37, emphasis in original).Although – and because – Kristeva’s argument depends on a postmodern articulation of sexual difference “precisely in the name of a heterogeneity that is associated with the feminine” and opposes “modern, binary notions of sexual difference” (Coole, 1993, p 212), it can also seem that any talk of ‘women’s time’ “merely re-inscribe[s] a binary definition that divides without equalizing” and that many contemporary feminists, as well as Kristeva, reject (Ermarth, 1989, p 37). Similarly, although Kristeva identifies three phases of feminism, she simultaneously rejects the idea of narrative chronology that this seems to confirm, treating them as signifying spaces rather than linear stages, while never entirely abandoning the idea of periodisation (Watts, 1998). Particular problems arise from what appears at first sight to be Kristeva’s essentialist equation of ‘women’s time’ with the time of maternity and reproduction, the “eternal recurrence of a biological rhythm which conforms to that of nature”. As with claims around menstruation and women’s ‘generative temporality’, this seems to define women by particular experiences that not all share and loses sight of changes in conditions of (re)production. However, Kristeva also argues that eternity and repetition have been “the fundamental, if not the sole” conceptions of time in many civilizations and in mystical experiences; as such, they are not reducible to women’s reproductive experiences and can be accessible to men too (Kristeva, 1986 [1979], pp 191, 192). Kristeva’s essay clearly raises more questions than it answers. However, her stress on simultaneity resonates with the other feminist work on time, as does her identification of the clash between women’s and men’s time cultures and the suppression of the former, while her attempt to move beyond difference and equality echoes the more general trend in feminist thought discussion in Chapter Four. Kristeva’s analysis of the deep-seated psychic bases of the conflicting time pressures experienced by women when they become mothers can also inform more practical discussion. However, the location of her ideas in the 126
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French poststructuralist philosophy of which she is a key exponent means that for those of us outside this strand of thought her ideas often seem infuriatingly a-political and wilfully obscure, and at best only patchily illuminating. As Carol Watts argues in a philosophically sophisticated and generally sympathetic discussion of Kristeva’s essay, her post-political stance and focus on the symbolic mean that she fails to engage with issues of power and social practices that result from women’s work as both producers and reproducers. As Watts also says, because Kristeva insists on women’s structural location outside of history, she is unable to make the sphere of reproduction visible or to analyse the ways in which “working mothers” experience the particular temporal pressures and contradictions of late capitalism.Watts therefore concludes that, “[d]espite its polytopic hope, ‘Women’s Time’ is a disabling manifesto to take into the new millennium” (1998, p 16).
Childbirth and lactation Even if ‘women’s time’ cannot be equated with a unifying reproductive consciousness shared by all women, most women do give birth, and childbirth can itself be seen as a particular and complex temporal experience, process or event. At an abstract level, childbirth both generates time for the child that is born and links each mother to the continuing reproduction of the species. As such, it may also challenge her sense of individual time and autonomy and provide a source of temporal understanding that goes beyond linearity; O’Brien therefore argues that, as women are increasingly able to control the processes of reproduction, “There is an ancient base for a new knowledge of the world in the concrete, non-objectified female experience of the unity of continuity in the practical act of birth, the experience of species persistence” (1989b, p 17). Certainly, many women report that the experience of giving birth changes their priorities and view of the world. For some, childbirth can generate a concern for the future that is directly translated into political action: for example, many of the women protesting against the nuclear weapons base at Greenham Common in the UK in the 1980s did so explicitly as mothers concerned with preserving the planet for their children. However, many mothers do not identify with such issues, while men too can find that parenthood motivates them to act for the future of both their own children and the wider society. It is also clear that parents do not have a monopoly of such concerns, and many nonparents are active in environmental and anti-war campaigns.
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The context and physical experience of giving birth are also highly variable. Although they may still be ambushed by unforeseen physical or emotional reactions, some women today are able to plan the timing of both their pregnancy and delivery, and the latter may take the form of an elective Caesarean; for such women, any link with ‘natural’ processes and rhythms seems tenuous. Others may be unwillingly or unwittingly pregnant, with little control or choice over the conditions in which they give birth: for some, birthing may be experienced as a natural and uncontrollable process to which their bodies are submitted, but in Western society it is likely to be subject to forms of medical management that impose their own temporal logic. Here some feminist writers have identified a clear temporal conflict between the physical needs and experience of a woman giving birth and the demands of medicalised labour. Medical intervention in childbirth has of course saved the lives of many women and their babies. However, as Meg Fox says, modern hospital birth can seem like a form of “assembly line manufacture”, a process that is expected to be “effective, productive, time-saving” and in which “Waiting for the baby becomes a discrete, temporally precise, event” whose timing is imposed on the erratic emotional and physical processes of labour. Nevertheless, Fox also argues that “If a woman becomes an active participant in labor, embracing the experience as subjective and meaningful, then she has another source of time orientation available to her, body time, the rhythm of her vital functioning” (1989, pp 128, 129, 131, 133; see also Adam, 1995). Robbie Kahn similarly argues both that clock time is imposed on the processes of pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding, and that these, nevertheless, still give women in industrial societies access to a slower, more natural, organic kind of time. She describes how, returning home from the schedules and deadlines of part-time employment when her child was young, “I would float with him into a different kind of time … more cyclical, like the seasons, the tides, like the milk which kept its own appointment with him without my planning it out” (1989, p 21), a description that has affinities with Kristeva’s claim that the arrival of a child leads the mother into “the slow, difficult and delightful apprenticeship in attentiveness, gentleness, forgetting oneself ” (1986, p 203). While some women may recognise Kahn’s description, many others have an overwhelmingly negative experience of hospital birth that does not include access to natural rhythms. Some also prefer the convenience of being able to time their births by the clock and calendar (although media reports that busy career women are disproportionately electing for Caesareans in order to fit childbirth around the demands of their 128
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job are not confirmed by the statistics in the UK; see Laurance, 2006). Many mothers do not breastfeed their babies (either because they cannot, or for a range of social reasons).Those that do are often taught to time their feeds by the clock rather than responding immediately to their baby’s cry, while advice books and manuals often set out an hourly regime of feeding, sleeping, bathing and feeding. Many new mothers also lack the opportunity to work flexibly and to relax with their child when they are at home as Kahn did. Not only do many have to work outside the home for far more hours than they or their children want, arriving home exhausted to begin the ‘second shift’ of childcare and domestic work, but they may also have large and demanding families rather than just one child to focus on (while most advice books tell them that, if they have a partner, they must make sure he does not feel neglected). For such women, the time of childbirth and infant care may be experienced as a time of exhaustion, in which their own physical and emotional temporal needs are in conflict with both the needs of their family and the dominant time culture, rather than a return to ‘natural’ time. While many experience this as an individual problem, some have identified the collective nature of the difficulties encountered by many women when they become mothers, and the failure of contemporary societies to accommodate their needs. Such awareness is in turn linked to some practical political campaigns to increase women’s control over the birthing process, by groups such as the National Childbirth Trust or the Association of Radical Midwives in the UK, and to a wide range of campaigns for maternity leave and ‘family-friendly’ working conditions. It is also clear that the clash of time cultures that childbirth can involve extends well beyond the biological processes of reproduction to include not only the care of infants but also the more general provision of emotional and physical care for both children and adults. The implications of this are explored in the next section.
Caring and ‘women’s time’ In practice, men can provide care for others and many do. However, care remains bound up with gendered qualities and values, it is still disproportionately the responsibility of women and some feminists argue that it involves a distinctive temporal consciousness that is in many ways at odds with the dominant time culture of contemporary capitalist societies.This section focuses on the alleged contrasts between
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clock and process time, individual and relational time and linear and cyclical time.
Clock and process time Edward Thompson’s influential discussion of the time discipline of industrial capitalism, discussed in Chapter Two, noted in passing that the lives of women looking after small children at home remain structured by a form of temporality outside of the ‘time is money’ rationality of capitalist society: “the rhythms of women’s work in the home are not wholly attuned to the measurement of the clock.The mother of young children has an imperfect sense of time and attends to other human tides” (1999 [1967], pp 381-2). Edward Hall, also mentioned in Chapter Two, similarly argues that time in the contemporary US workplace is organised according to ‘monochronic time’ – that is, on the ‘one thing at a time’ assumption that tasks and events can be scheduled as separate items. While he sees this as the dominant time culture of US society, he also says that ‘polychronic time’, time that is oriented to people and in which several things are done at once, takes over in the home, “particularly the more traditional home in which women are the core around which everything revolves”. He further argues that, “The two systems are logically and empirically quite distinct. Like oil and water, they don’t mix”, that at “the pre-conscious level” monochronic time is male time and polychronic time is female time, and that women are suffering because they increasingly have to conform to an alien time culture (1989, pp 52, 45-6, 52). Much recent feminist work confirms and extends the idea that caring for others, adults as well as children, involves an attention to ‘human tides’ that is very different from the temporal logic of capitalist production. Clearly, many of the tasks involved in the provision of good physical or emotional care are determined by needs whose timing cannot be predicted in advance with any precision: nappies need to be changed when they are dirty, not because it is four o’clock; a confused elderly person needs help when they decide to light the gas stove, not when their carer arrives; and children need someone to listen when they have something to say, not two hours later when their parents come home and their favourite television programme is on. Despite recent technological developments, such as mobile phones that parents can use to monitor their children’s safety, or electronic buzzers that an elderly person can use to call for help, there is still a “stubborn residue” of interpersonal care that involves a carer’s physical presence; such care often takes the form of simply ‘being there’, rather 130
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than constituting a set of discrete and identifiable activities (Nowotny, 1994, p 124; Boyd, 2002). Karen Davies has introduced the concept of ‘process time’ to describe the plural, relational and context-linked nature of the time that caring for others involves. Process time emphasises that “time is enmeshed in social relations” (emphasis in original), and it seeks to capture something of the experiences involved in ‘caring about’ as well as ‘caring for’ other people. Davies gives the example of the time she spent intermittently thinking about a sick friend and sending her a card (bought while doing the family shopping; written while listening to music): this kind of care, she says, does not constitute an activity undertaken in a discrete period of time. It is “neither linear, continuous nor entirely measurable. Rather, it is part of several different ongoing, non-abstract processes” (emphasis in original). She distinguishes such time from both task-oriented time, that “tends to stress the task per se and risks separating the activity, at least conceptually from its context”, and “the dominant temporal consciousness in our society: the linear hand of the clock” (1994, pp 280, 281, 278). She also argues that the intangible nature of process time raises particular difficulties when care is provided by waged workers. Here Davies identifies a clash between the ‘nurturing rationality’, rooted in process time, that good care requires and the ‘technicaladministrative rationality’ that controls the organisation of paid care work in capitalist societies. Another way of expressing this would be as a conflict between an ‘ethic of care’, with its stress on contextualised relationships and responsibilities, and an approach based on the abstract needs and rights of the individual, as discussed in Chapter Four. While care workers are often motivated by non-economic as well as economic considerations, the dominant rationality “means simply that costs should be kept down and that the largest possible amount of care work should be carried out in the least possible time” (Davies, 1989, p 107).The result can be attempts to improve efficiency that are stressful, inappropriate and counter-productive for both care givers and care receivers: for example, policies based on the assumption that students go into crisis only during designated ‘office hours’ are likely to increase drop-out rates compared with an apparently time-consuming open-door approach, while an isolated elderly person may be able to remain outside residential care for longer if their home help ‘wastes’ time chatting to them rather than focusing only on the housework. Davies’ empirical studies of women care workers in Sweden document the emotional and practical conflicts experienced when workers are unable to reconcile the needs of their clients with the 131
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demands of a system that treats the provision of care as a form of assembly-line production, or when day nurseries are organised around a rigid time structure that cuts short play activities and forces staff to hurry a child who has begun the laborious construction of a long sentence. She finds that staff shortages contribute to stress and practical difficulties. However, she also argues that such problems are a product of inappropriate temporal values that focus on measurable outcomes and activities, and lose sight of the intangible and often necessarily slow processes involved in the provision of good quality care, such as listening and providing reassurance. Similar arguments can be applied to the way that nurses use their time: a recent report links malnutrition among elderly hospital patients in the UK to the inability of over-stretched nursing staff to sit with patients and help them eat, while another report finds that nurses have to spend much of their time completing paperwork (Revill, 2005; Age Concern: 2006; Boseley, 2006). Davies does not argue that clock time planning has no place in paid care work, and she stresses that she is not attempting to introduce a new ‘clock time versus process time’ dichotomy. Indeed, she argues that open-ended and unmediated process time can be just as oppressive as over-rigid adherence to clock time, and she suggests that the clock be used to structure ‘time out’ periods that allow workers to reflect on their activities, including the ways they use and think about time. However, she insists that clock time must not be seen as the only time, and argues that ‘naming’ process time may help us understand and thereby control the problems that arise from conflicting temporal logics, helping workers to navigate and adjust their temporal framework as the need arises and recognising the skills that this involves. As Davies says, these skills are often also employed by care workers in their own homes, for the need to juggle clock and process time is not confined to paid employment. Thompson noted that the more ‘natural’ time of mothers caring for small children is also structured by television and school time; the subsequent increase in women’s (including mothers’) participation in paid employment means that the time discipline of the workplace is increasingly felt in the home. Because this discipline requires that time is used efficiently, it can suggest that the principles of ‘time management’ should be applied to personal life, and that the emotional and physical needs of partners, family and friends can be organised into a tick list of tasks to be performed in pre-allocated time slots. Such thinking was taken to an extreme in the early 20th century by the time-and-motion expert Frank Gilbreth. As recorded by two of his 12 children in Cheaper by the Dozen, Gilbreth’s attempt to apply his principles to domestic life included buttoning 132
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his own vest from the bottom rather than the top, as this took three rather than seven seconds, and using dinner as an instruction period on the grounds that “eating was a form of unavoidable delay” (Gilbreth and Carey, 1948, p 53). Today, related principles are expressed in a number of ways, including the provision of designated sessions of ‘quality time’ to their children by working parents, the growth of ‘speed dating’, and the ‘count-down to Christmas’ articles that appear in some women’s magazines. In an echo of Gilbreth, a report from the Future Foundation in the UK in 2006 commended the increasingly ‘professionalised’ approach that parents bring to the raising of children and the organisation of their time. Such thinking rests on the assumption that “the domestic sphere can be ordered by the same temporal logic as the market place” (Everingham, 2002, p 329). However, the personal needs of children and adults cannot always be reduced to a list of activities and made to conform to the logic of the clock: dropping a child off at nursery is not the same as dropping the car off at a garage, ‘quality time’ can feel like “the McDonaldisation of love” (Boyd, 2002, p 466, quoting Anne Manne), and adult relationships too have their own, frequently unpredictable, rhythms. Although the tenor of Gilbreth’s children’s discussion of their father is very affectionate, they clearly saw his behaviour as eccentric rather than entirely rational; many readers will find that he simply missed the point of human relationships and the time these necessarily involve. Nevertheless, providing a temporal structure for domestic and caring activities is often both necessary and valuable. Indeed, much of women’s work in the home involves generating time for family members by coordinating their activities with the external timetables of schools, dentists, transport and other households (Davies, 1989; Everingham, 2002; Gray, 2003), while Laura Balbo (1987) showed in a pioneering article that welfare states could not operate without the temporal work of women in ‘sorting’, ‘stitching’ and ‘patching’ their provisions together. Although the processes involved in care are often intangible and without identifiable outcomes, they are therefore often also highly organised and focused, involving both process and clock time. This means that, as Christine Everingham says, “Portraying mothering as responsive only to nature’s rhythms obscures the reflexive, deliberative aspect of mothering that Sarah Ruddick has called maternal thought” (see Chapter Four, this volume). As with caring responsibilities more generally, Everingham says that we should therefore reject as a false dichotomy “The attempt either to translate mothering and its associated
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activities into units of duration or represent it as a purely natural act outside of social time” (2002, pp 340, 343, emphasis in original). Such a movement beyond oppositional thinking enables us to see that women have to “straddle multiple temporalities” (Everingham, 2002, p 338) if they are to reconcile the often unpredictable and unquantifiable needs of their families with the demands of employment (not to mention their own emotional needs and the biological rhythms of their own bodies). By raising the visibility of ‘being there’ time and women’s temporal work in the home, it warns against the assumption that the apparently unproductive time spent by many women in the home is necessarily available for paid employment. It also shows that the temporal tensions and pressures experienced by many women cannot be captured by simply measuring the hours that women’s caring responsibilities appear to involve: here it is not simply that women are pressed for time, and therefore find it difficult to care for others as they often wish (although this is very important), but that their activities are being forced into an inappropriate temporal straitjacket that is based on the logic of market capitalism and its considerations of costeffectiveness. (From a wide feminist literature discussing these issues, see in particular Hernes, 1987; Nowotny, 1994; Franks, 1999; McKie et al, 2002; Jacobs and Gerson, 2004; Carrusco and Mayordomo, 2005.) As discussed above, the sacrifice of process time to clock time is also damaging when applied too rigorously to paid care; here, the apparent inhumanity involved in applying considerations of cost-effectiveness to care work is a particularly clear example of the more generally dehumanising effects of an economic system based on the pursuit of profit rather than the satisfaction of human need or the expression of creativity.
Individual and relational time Capitalist time culture assumes that time is a ready-made commodity, a naturally existing scarce resource that can be owned, used, bought and sold by individuals. Such a view is bound up with the abstract individualism that underlies much Western political thought and that fails to see that nurturing and interdependence are central to the human condition; men have been able to ignore this only by ignoring their dependence on the emotional and physical labour of women. As discussed above, feminist analysis shows that this labour often includes women’s work in generating time for other family members by the planning and coordination of activities. From this feminist perspective, time is not simply an individual resource to be spent or saved as one 134
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person decides; rather, it “must first be made before it can be spent” (Everingham 2002, p 340), and it is often bound up with communal rhythms and needs. In contrast to the capitalist time of the workplace, many feminist writers see caring time as essentially relational, embedded in its social context and based on a rationality that takes other people into account: “Mediated through significant others, relational time is shared rather than personal and thus sensitive to the contextuality and particularity of interpersonal relations” (Odih, 1999, p 10; see also Davies 1989; Leccardi and Rampazi, 1993; Carrusco and Mayordomo, 2005).While women who see themselves as carers, or potential carers, are therefore unlikely to see time in terms of individual ownership, this does not mean that all women, or even all carers, necessarily share the same temporal perspective. Here Pamela Odih draws on Foucault to argue that ‘relational time’ is not inherently associated with women. Rather, it is bound up with the shifting discourses and social practices of ‘femininity’ through which subjectivity is constituted; as such, it is “a form of time experienced by those whose identities are discursively constituted as ‘feminine’”. Today, Odih says, the ‘feminine ideal’ is represented in terms of “behaviours which deny the value of self and autonomy, and define meaningful existence as achieved through the care of others”; it therefore finds expression “in the subordination of self to the ‘needs’, demands and desires of significant others” (1999, pp 11, 17). Odih is critical of such self-sacrifice. She also argues that, although this hegemonic ideal and the relational conception of time to which it is linked are disproportionately exhibited by women, they are neither held by all women nor exclusive to them. Nor, she says, are they a necessary or inevitable component of good mothering: here she argues that, rather than being natural, the expectation that a mother subordinates herself to the perceived needs of her child is socially and discursively constructed “through power/knowledge relations which encourage women to become mothers and practise motherhood in historically specific, narrowly defined ways” (Odih, 1999, p 23). From this perspective, the loss of ‘own time’ associated with motherhood is a product of particular and shifting expectations around, for example, whether babies should be left to cry or the extent to which good mothering involves intellectual stimulation as well as physical care. Expectations about children’s caring obligations towards elderly parents or to other members of their community are similarly variable; for example, constructions of masculinity and femininity often construct
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a ‘good son’ as one who ensures his parents are cared for, while a ‘good daughter’ is expected to do this caring herself. While there is no necessary or natural match between women, femininity and care, in practice of course, as Odih recognises, “experiences of time as relational tend to be disproportionately exhibited by female subjects” (1999, p 11), and the daily reality of many women’s lives is that their caring responsibilities leave them with little control over time or a sense that they have time that is specifically ‘theirs’.This means that the idea of ‘free time’, conventionally equated with time out of paid employment, is also alien to many women’s experience. The sense that their time is not their own is particularly acute for those carers who are permanently ‘on call’, even when apparently at leisure or asleep, and for those whose ‘second shift’ of caring for their family occupies all their time out of paid employment. Gendered expectations about our responsibilities to others may also affect how women think about the future and affect their ability to plan beyond the short term. Here, in a qualitative study of young Italian women’s temporal perspectives, Carmen Leccardi and Marita Rampazi have drawn on the ideas of Carol Gilligan (see Chapter Four) to argue both that young women’s “openness to emotions, feelings and the needs of others acts as a deterrent to the making of long-term selfcentred plans” and that that their way of governing uncertainty (which is to avoid long-term plans that may be disrupted by unpredictable events such as falling in love) resembles “an awareness of the intrinsic limits of self-direction” (1993, pp 371, 370). They do not argue that such ‘women’s time’ is purely relational, but that young women are caught between the other-directed ethic of care and their own wish for independence and satisfying work outside the home; reconciling these involves a delicate balancing act between competing and shifting temporal priorities.
Linear and cyclical time The difficulty that young women may experience in planning for the future is bound up with what many feminist writers see as a more general incompatibility between the linearity of the dominant time culture and women’s caring time, although many insist that these are also inherently interconnected.At its most basic level, the linear/cyclical distinction sees the former as the goal-oriented time of history and production in the public sphere, in which events and processes unfold one after another and time’s arrow points irrevocably to the future and to each individual’s death. Cyclical time, in contrast, is seen as the 136
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time of reproduction and caring in the private sphere, characterised by repetition and the here and now as the wheel of time endlessly revolves. Within these cycles, the work of feeding, cleaning, bathing, cooking or comforting are not one-off actions, but processes that have to be repeated over and over again without ever reaching an identifiable end point, so that “a woman’s work is never done” (or, as the US comedian Joan Rivers famously put it “You make the beds, you do the dishes – and six months later you have to start all over again”). Domestic and caring tasks are also often fragmented and woven into other processes rather than being ‘done’ as identifiable and discrete activities; as such, they often involve multi-tasking, and are an expression of polychronic rather than monochronic time (Hall, 1989). Caring and domestic work is also in many ways focused on the present and the contextualised specificities of the task in hand. In contrast, linear time “by definition involves a kind of transcendence that trivializes the specificity of the finite moment. It requires a kind of estrangement from the present that entails dematerialization, abstraction and disembodiment” (Odih, 1999, p 16). For some feminist critics, this ‘estrangement’ manifests itself in the principles of the ‘social investment state’, which, as discussed in Chapter Three, can seem less concerned with the present welfare and happiness of children than with the instrumentalist goal of producing good citizens for the future. Men’s orientation to the linear time of the workplace may also be carried into the private sphere, helping to explain why their involvement in domestic tasks is more likely to take the form of big projects (cooking for a dinner party, organising a family outing, building a rockery) than routine responsibility for daily chores (preparing the children’s supper, clearing away the toys, weeding the vegetable plot). In an echo of earlier discussion of biological reproduction, Davies traces the evolution of dominant linear Western temporality back to early Judaism to argue that “historically male time and male religion point to the future but also to death, while women are concerned with life and the here and now” (1989, p 23). However, care too inevitably has a forward-looking element. This is particularly clear in the case of childcare, which can involve a concern for the future that is more long-term than that produced by the temporal imperatives of profit maximisation or electoral success. Moreover, as Davies also insists, it is “the here and now [that] make the future possible” (1989, p 23), while apparently cyclical or ‘natural’ activities can never be repeated in exactly the same form – a perception encapsulated in Heraclitus’ famous claim, made over 2,000 years ago, that it is impossible to step into the same river twice. 137
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As with the biological processes of menstruation and childbirth discussed in the first section of this chapter, such understanding of the interconnected nature of present and future, and of continuity and change, warns us against treating care as a constant human need that is felt and met outside of human history and it draws attention to the changing material and ideological conditions within which care is provided and received. It also reminds us of the illusory nature of apparently linear progression, which inevitably includes elements of continuity, retreat and fragmentation, and it reinforces Chapter Seven’s argument that future plans must be based on the understanding that the present and the past cannot be simply cast aside to make the future from scratch. Such understanding in some ways challenges the temporal foundations of ‘modern’ society and the Enlightenment idea of progress. It is, however, more in line with conditions of ‘postmodernity’, discussed in Chapter One, as the ideas and experiences of uncertainty, instantaneity, fragmentation, indeterminacy and simultaneity in the post-Fordist economy undermine both abstract notions, such as progress, and practical expectations, such as a job for life. In this context, the individualistic, linear, clock time assumptions of commodified time are increasingly being questioned in theory, and they are becoming increasingly problematic in practice. Nevertheless, they remain extremely powerful. For example, despite changes in the employment market, career structures are still often based on an assumption of continuous full-time employment that is “androcentric in its requirements of linearity and continuity” (Sirianni and Negrey, 2000, p 66); because many women’s employment is fragmented and discontinuous, they therefore “live out of time in respect of this predominant model” (Hughes, 2002, p 132; emphasis in original). More generally, as discussed earlier in this chapter, the impact of commodified time on family life and personal relationships is becoming increasingly evident.To understand why this should be, we need to see the dominant time culture in the context of wider social structures, within which it both reflects and sustains existing patterns of inequalities, but within which it may also be resisted.
‘Women’s time’ in patriarchal capitalist societies This chapter has not argued that all women or all men share the same temporal consciousness. On the contrary, it is premised on the understanding that multiple times coexist, overlap and jostle for priority in the lives of individual women and men and in society as a whole, 138
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and that the meaning of being a woman or a man is highly variable. Nevertheless, it has found that gendered differences in biological and social roles and experiences can involve distinct and sometimes conflicting temporal logics. In patriarchal societies, these differences are bound up with wider inequalities between women and men, and typically female needs, perceptions and priorities are generally marginalised or sacrificed to those held by men. In this context, the chapter argues in favour of using the terms ‘men’s time’ and ‘women’s time’ in order to explore the relationship between differences in time culture and other aspects of inequality. This view builds on that of Davies, who uses the term ‘male time’ to refer to the time culture that dominates Western society today: “By inserting the adjective male, [the term] stresses and draws attention to the patriarchal character of the groups and classes that have been able to influence this concept and measurement of time.” Davies argues that the domination of male time involves women in a double disadvantage. Firstly, women’s experiences of time are forced into the ‘shadow’ of male time where their rhythms and needs are largely disregarded. Secondly, women’s subordinate status both at home and in the workplace affects how their time is used and negotiated, so that “they have little to say over how their time is used at the workplace”, while at home “their time – more than any other family member’s – becomes others’ time” (1989, pp 17, 38). As discussed in earlier chapters, women’s temporal disadvantages are also bound up with the invisibility of the private sphere and women’s political under-representation, and this has knock-on effects on conditions of paid and domestic work. Although not all women are affected in the same way and there are counter-currents, this means that men’s temporal privileges should be understood in the wider context of the unequal distribution of resources and power between women and men and that “The lack of recognition for different definitions of time other than quantifiable time represents yet another manifestation of inequality between men and women” (Carrusco and Mayordomo, 2005, p 233). Although Davies’ ideas have been influential, they have also been criticised by other feminist writers, and I am aware that similar criticisms might be made of me. Some writers are particularly concerned that Davies’ analysis maintains a dualistic mode of thought that seeks to affirm the value of the subordinate category rather than recognising the multiplicity of human times. Thus Adam warns that the “important feminist deconstructions of social time are in danger of being reabsorbed into the very framework of analysis they make problematic as long as women’s time is conceptualized dualistically, that 139
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is, in contradistinction to men’s time and the commodified time of the market” (1995, pp 8-9), while Odih similarly rejects what she sees as a simplistic opposition that risks transforming “heuristic categories into reified ontological realities” (1999, p 33), and Elizabeth Silva points out that “When one acknowledges that gender identities are potentially multiple, unstable and contingent, the dualist opposition between a female time and a male time is dissolved” (2002, p 186; see also Hughes, 2002). However, Davies explicitly states both that male time is not the time of all men, and that some men are oppressed by it; she also insists that she is not seeking to introduce a new dichotomy (a point that she reaffirms in her 1994 article). It should also be clear that my use of the term ‘women’s time’, like that of ‘patriarchy’ as discussed in Chapter Four, is similarly intended as a descriptive starting-point that draws attention to interconnections and patterns, rather than a definitive, one-dimensional or static equation of ‘women’s time’ with all women. As Silva concedes, “the argument that women and men use time differently because of their distinct life situations is powerful and has real grounding” (2002, p 186). Odih similarly acknowledges both that, although gender differences are a product of discourse rather than biology that should not be seen in terms of dualistic oppositions, “experiences of time as relational tend to be disproportionately exhibited by female subjects”; she also argues that such discursively constructed feminine time has “a tendency to be incompatible, or in conflict with, the clockwork, disembodied precision of linear time” (1999, pp 11, 18). Although Adam rejects a male time/female time dualism and insists that both men and women are caught up in multiple times that “interpenetrate and affect each other’s quality and meaning”, she too agrees that time is not gender-neutral and that “many women’s times … are … constituted in the shadow of the market economy” (1995, p 8). She is also clear that the domination of a particular time is bound up with wider dimensions of power, and her analysis suggests that while the label ‘women’s time’ does not apply to a distinct, selfcontained time (let alone the time of all women and no men), it can usefully draw attention to both the particularity of the dominant time culture and its inability to see or value many women’s time. As such, while her analysis is more theoretically sophisticated, it does not seem incompatible with Davies’ or my own, and it usefully draws attention to the particularity of the dominant time culture. As Adam also stresses, this dominant time is of course also the time of capitalism (see also Odih, 1999, p 22).
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Resistance Recognising the socially created nature of the dominant time culture, identifying its key features and articulating alternatives are important first steps towards resisting it; here feminist work is critically important, “offer[ing] a concrete challenge to androcentristic knowledges” that can “draw attention to linear time as grounded in gendered power relations” (Odih, 1999, pp 31, 33). Beyond this, the arguments of this chapter suggest that resisting the hegemony of commodified clock time involves a balance between asserting the value of other kinds of time and recognising that these too may have their limitations. It also involves recognising the temporal needs and integrity of carers as well as those cared for, while acknowledging the fluid and relational nature of these categories and challenging the naturalness of the link between women and care. In practice, as Davies found, some women may reject male time assumptions by prioritising unpaid time over money, for example by deciding to work part-time. Others may seek to negotiate paid and unpaid time use with their partner in a way that meets the caring needs of their family, even if it does not maximise household income. Because these individual solutions feed into and reflect changing cultural assumptions and practices, they can have an effect on the wider society. However, they will have more effect if they are also linked to collective campaigns to promote workplace flexibility, to encourage men as well as women to take family leave, and to ensure that paid care workers are resourced well enough to allow scope for the noncost-effective demands of process time. While there are strong economic interests opposing such change, some writers argue that changes in advanced capitalist economies are making them more likely. Thus Davies (1989) and Leccardi (1996) both argue that post-Fordist conditions of employment encourage a more flexible relation to time. According to Davies, this “could lead to the dissolution of the dominant temporal structure”, and she argues that women can play a key role in such change because they have the important experience of not being “tightly assimilated into linear and clock time” (1989, p 247). Leccardi similarly claims that we are now seeing “the displacement of the dominant temporal paradigm, grounded in the hegemony of commodified, economically valued time”, and that feminist theories of time are playing a vital role in this process (1996, p 175). Such claims seem over-optimistic, ignoring the counter-pressures to work intensification in the globalised employment market. The kind 141
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of instant, abbreviated messaging that new technology encourages is also very different from the grounded, relational time that caring relationships may require. Nevertheless, some economic changes do point to pressures on the old paradigm that may open up more positive possibilities, while it is becoming increasingly clear that, far from being cost-effective, long hours and tight deadlines that ignore bodily or emotional rhythms are key sources of stress-related absences (these cost the UK economy £3.7 billion a year; see Health and Safety Executive, 2006). Similarly, the pressures on Western welfare states discussed in earlier chapters are in part a product of the general incompatibility between the temporal imperatives of the marketplace and those of caring and intimate relations; the greater employment of women throws this into sharp relief.
Conclusions Women do not all share a common temporal consciousness based in either biology or social experience, and feminist analysis does not indicate that we can talk about ‘women’s time’ if this is defined simply in opposition to men’s. As with the public/private dichotomy with which it is intertwined, the contrasts and conflicts between clock and process, individual and relational, linear and cyclical and men’s and women’s time are not absolute; rather they are interactive elements and aspects of an infinitely complex whole. Nevertheless, feminist analysis indicates both that women’s socially ascribed caring roles and, to a lesser extent, their physical role as reproducers, are linked to a range of temporal perceptions and logics very different from those that drive the labour market. In this limited sense, it is meaningful to talk about ‘women’s time’. This label also helps make the connection between the suppression of women’s ‘different’ temporality and their subordinate status in a society in which value is defined in monetary terms, thereby linking campaigns around time to other dimensions of inequality and resistance. Today, many feminists are calling for a redistribution of time so that men play a greater role in the home, and for the time spent by women in unpaid domestic work to be measured. These are vitally important goals. However, it is also important to retain the understanding that women’s temporal disadvantages go deeper than this and that they are often by their nature unquantifiable. As discussed in Chapter Two, Thompson described the struggle by workers in the early days of the industrial revolution as one ‘against time’ (that is, against the discipline of clock time); once lost, this became a struggle ‘about time’ (that is, 142
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about hours of work). Similarly, when feminists use existing tools such as time-use studies, they must take care to recognise their limitations and their basis in the temporal logic of commodified clock time. Feminist analysis indicates that many men as well as women will gain if the suppressed temporal needs and perceptions that are disproportionately associated with women are given more status. Caring is not the only human activity that is hard to reconcile with clock time, and many readers of this book will know that creative work, including academic writing, has its own organic processes that resist the ticking clock of publishers’ deadlines and Research Assessment Exercises. More generally, men too suffer directly or indirectly if they are treated as disembodied units of production with no fluctuating physical or non-quantifiable needs and if they live in a society in which all time is reduced to a monetary value. As Adam says, “We need to de-alienate time: reconnect clock time to its sources and recognise its created machine character. As such, concern with the multiple time dimensions of our lives is no mere theoretical, academic exercise; rather, it is a strategy for living” (1995, p 54).
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Women and time use in contemporary capitalist societies Earlier chapters in this book indicated that time has many meanings, but that in capitalist societies it is primarily treated as a commodity, something that can be bought and sold. In this context, free time is an unevenly distributed and increasingly scarce resource, valuable both in itself and as an important resource for democratic participation. As discussed in Chapters Four to Eight, many feminists argue that women have less of this scarce resource than men, that this is bound up with other forms of temporal disadvantage, and that gender differences in the experience and use of time are central to the subordination of women. This chapter begins with an overview of feminist claims about the unequal division of domestic work and women’s subsequent lack of time. It assesses these claims against the available empirical evidence from quantitative time-use studies before subjecting the studies themselves to critical scrutiny. Its main focus is the US and the UK, as nations where time pressures appear particularly acute; it also draws on Australian time-use data, as this is particularly detailed. It finds that although time-use studies support feminist arguments about the value of unpaid work and women’s disproportionate responsibility for this, they at first sight undermine other feminist claims around women’s ‘time poverty’, men’s ‘domestic absenteeism’ and the effects of feminist-inspired policies on men’s behaviour. However, a closer investigation shows that the studies have been distorted by their basis in unreflectively ‘male time’ assumptions; recent, more sophisticated, research is more supportive of feminist claims. The chapter concludes that gender differences in time use do indeed remain a significant source of disadvantage for women, with negative social and political consequences for the whole of society.
Feminist claims Women’s ‘time poverty’ Most women have always known and feminists have long argued that running a home and caring for a family takes a lot of time, and that 145
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even if it is enjoyable it is a form of work. Although a trend to smaller families has combined with the widespread availability of labour-saving household equipment to reduce the burden of such work for many Western women, it remains particularly time consuming when young children are involved. Even when children are older, ‘good mothering’ remains a time-consuming occupation, with mothers increasingly expected to attend to the psychological and educational as well as the physical needs of their children, and to provide them with a constant round of stimulating activities (Hays, 1998; Epstein, 2004). Caring for elderly or disabled relatives also takes up a great deal of many women’s time – as with childcare, such caring responsibilities mean that some women have no time available to spend as they wish. Caring and domestic responsibilities do not disappear when women enter paid employment, but women’s move into the workplace has not been matched by an equivalent rise in men’s work in the home. One result is that many employed women face an exhausting ‘second shift’ of unpaid work, and Arlie Hochschild has influentially argued that lack of family time and attempts to organise this more efficiently now make it necessary to do a ‘third shift’, “the emotional work necessary to repair the damage caused by time pressures at home”. She further claims that the difficulty of doing this has set in motion a vicious circle whereby home comes to seem like a place of work that is less attractive than the paid workplace, further encouraging long-hours working as “the tired parent flees a world of unresolved quarrels and unwashed laundry for the reliable orderliness, harmony and managed cheer of work” (1989, book title; 1997, pp 51, 44). Hochschild’s arguments are based on her research in the US, where hours of work are particularly long and parents can expect little state support. However, similar effects are claimed elsewhere, as increased job insecurity in the competitive global economy “effectively places almost everyone in something akin to a secondary-labor market” (Moen and Roehling, 2005, p 7), so that widespread trends towards “[i]nsecure and casual work, short-term contracts, antisocial hours or long hours … make it more difficult than ever to fulfil the expectations of parenting and community” (Franks, 1999, p 212). It is not only parents and children who are affected by a lack of time to care. As Trudi Knijn says, feminist reconceptualisations of care show that it is a normal part of the human condition, something that we all need to give or receive at some stage in our lives. However, this understanding is lost in contemporary Western societies, in which “the rationalized marginalization of daily care in the public and the private sphere seems to be an ongoing process” (Knijn, 2000, pp 201-2). As 146
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citizenship is increasingly equated with self-sufficient independence, those who receive care are stigmatised, and those who provide it are financially penalised. Women are expected to fill the gap as state provision in many nations is being cut and replaced by unaffordable or inadequate market services; they are also increasingly required as unpaid carers, as demographic trends increase the ratio of elderly people to their adult children (in the UK, for example, the number of people aged 85 and over is expected to double by 2028; see Brindle, 2007). However, conditions of employment often involve geographical mobility and commuting as well as long-hours working, making it difficult to provide such care; older mothers are often also ‘sandwiched’ between the competing needs of their parents and children (Spillman and Pezzin, 2000; Casey, 2004). The result is not simply a problem for individual women, but “mainly a social problem related to the undervaluing of care” in increasingly market-led welfare states (Knijn, 2000, p 205), in which care givers and care receivers (other than male breadwinners) have little political voice and little time for involvement in formal political processes or civic activities. Feminists further argue that the stress experienced by busy women is not simply a matter of total hours of paid and unpaid work, but is exacerbated by the intensity of their time use, as they often have to force a number of activities into the same period: here Dale Southerton (2003) has coined the useful term ‘harriedness’ to convey women’s sense of being both harried and harassed by the seemingly incompatible demands on their time and the need to coordinate a host of fragmented activities. In this context, leisure time cannot be planned in advance, but can only be snatched in unpredictable fragments (15 minutes here if the baby doesn’t wake; half an hour there if the children don’t get bored in the garden …), and it cannot easily be used to engage in activities outside the home. For many women, time stress is also compounded by a sense of guilt as they miss important family events or have to rush activities, such as listening to an elderly relative or putting a child to bed, that should be driven by a slower temporal rhythm; indeed, Jayne Buxton says that “The word ‘guilt’ has become synonymous with the term ‘working mother’” (1998, p 23). Even in Sweden, where state support for working mothers is much higher, women “are overwhelmed by guilt for not coping well with the burden of combining their career with motherhood” (Skevik, 2006a, p 245, quoting Lindvert; see also Cousins and Tang, 2004; Strandh and Nordenmark, 2006). As discussed in the previous chapter, these pressures are bound up with a general clash between the dominant time culture and the needs of those who give and receive care, and 147
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between the workplace and the home, creating “unbearable tensions” for many women (Franks, 1999, p 6).
Differences among women Ultimately all women and men are adversely affected if care is undervalued and forced to conform to an inappropriate time culture. Nevertheless, a minority of women are able to opt out of most caring responsibilities and, in effect, to behave as men have traditionally done. Variations in conditions of employment and support for carers mean that the stress of combining paid employment and family responsibilities is much greater in some nations than others, and it is experienced very differently by different groups of women. Most media attention has focused on the stress experienced by highpowered professional or executive women, as has much of the academic literature, some of which suggests that this group experience greater difficulty in balancing work and family commitments than those who are middle or working class (see Warren, 2003; Selmi and Cahn, 2006). Such stress is caricatured in Allison Pearson’s novel I Don’t Know How She Does It (2002), which opens with a high-powered career woman, “distressing” bought mince pies at 1.37am (sic) in order to make them look home-made for her daughter’s school Christmas party (p 3). Certainly, women with successful professional or executive careers often work extremely long hours, and have limited time left for their families, as workplace loyalty and commitment are equated with long hours and they face heavy career penalties if they take a significant career break or opt for flexible working arrangements, if these are formally available. Their partners also tend to work very long hours (Buxton, 1998; Dex, 2003), and professional families are additionally stressed as the group most receptive to childrearing norms that stress children’s need for “sustained, attentive nurturing, preferably from their parents” (Craig, 2006a, p 554). However, high-earning women can afford good quality childcare and domestic help, and can further ‘buy time’ by eating out rather than cooking and by using taxis, private cars and planes rather than public transport. Although high earners usually work longer hours than those in more subordinate positions, many badly paid women workers also work very long hours. The hours of low-paid workers are usually also less flexible, while their partners are less likely to believe that domestic responsibilities should be shared and less likely to be able to afford to take paternity leave when this is available (Gornick and Meyers, 2003; Warren, 2003; McCrate, 2005; EOC, 2006a; Selmi and Cahn, 2006; Smeaton, 2006). 148
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One way of bypassing some work–family time conflicts is to delay or avoid having children – a ‘choice’ that an increasing minority of well-educated women are making in many Western countries, although less so in France and Scandinavia, a pattern that many feminists link to shorter working hours and higher levels of support for working parents in those countries. (See Finch, 2006a; Forrsen and Ritakillio, 2006; Hageman, 2006; for a more critical discussion of Scandinavian policies, Ronsen and Skrede, 2006.) The negative social consequences of a declining birth rate include a lack of future workers and of people to care for the increasing number of elderly citizens. Other well-qualified women are rejecting a career on the terms currently available, either dropping out of employment entirely or taking the ‘Mummy track’ of less demanding and/or part-time work to accommodate their caring responsibilities. For some, this represents a highly satisfactory balance. For others, it is a reluctant compromise that confirms their domestic responsibilities while reducing the time available for these, leaving them without the time, energy or financial resources for activities outside the home. While women’s relationship with the labour market generally weakens when they become parents, the reverse is true for men, and fathers are both more likely to be in employment and more likely to work long hours than other men, with two in five UK fathers working 48 hours or more a week (EOC, 2006a). The resulting division of marketplace and domestic work maintains a woman’s status as a financial dependant, reducing their ‘negotiating power’ with their partner and creating particular problems if their relationship breaks down. In all cases, support for carers of adults is much less well developed, and older people and those who need help to go about their daily lives remain generally poorer than the average citizen. Many women of course have little option but to take the kind of local, part-time employment that requires few formal qualifications and that they can schedule around domestic commitments. Such employment includes caring for children and for older or disabled adults in private homes, nurseries and residential care. Although often involving major responsibilities, this care work is often insecure and generally badly paid: Gornick and Meyers cite research showing that workers in childcare centres in the US earn about the same as parking lot attendants (2003, p 54), while UK social care workers are in the bottom 10 per cent of earnings distribution (Land, 2006, p 258). For women with a badly paid partner, part-time employment often provides an essential supplement to the family income, but it leaves the balance of earning and caring responsibilities largely unchallenged. Women’s 149
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time poverty is particularly acute in low-income households without private transport or the kind of labour-saving household equipment that many other families take for granted; in such families “women’s financial poverty interacts with their time poverty, as they take on the main burden of managing poverty and debt and of mediating with welfare institutions, as part of their general responsibility for money and household management” (Lister 2003, p 141; see also Mink, 1998). Time pressures are often particularly acute for lone mothers, especially those without career prospects or financial support from their children’s fathers, as ‘welfare-to-work’ policies adopted by many states in the 1990s expect them to be available for full-time employment (Knijn and van Wel 2001; Millar and Rowlingson, 2001; Skevik, 2006a, 2006b). Such policies have gone furthest in the US, where many women have “simply moved from the ranks of the welfare poor to the working poor” and are now “doing the work of two parents on less than half the income of two-parent families and with only half the time” (Waldfogel et al, 2001, p 59; Mink, 1998, p 27; Kershaw, 2005). Because lone parents are disproportionately African-American, these double effects of income and time poverty are often compounded by those of ethnic disadvantage. Although UK policies have been much less harsh, they too seek to increase the employment rate of lone parents, losing sight of the important childcare work that they are already doing and the difficulty of combining this with paid work (for similar findings in relation to Australia, see Craig, 2005). In the Nordic countries, lone parents receive much more state support and they are less likely to live in poverty than other families (Daly and Rake, 2003; Ellingsaeter and Leira, 2006; Skevik, 2006a); however, their high rate of full-time employment means that here too they generally have less time than mothers with partners to spend with their children or on leisure activities (Hobson and Takahashi, 1997). The problems facing lone mothers throw into sharp relief the more general tension between women’s family and employment roles and the invisibility of women’s unpaid work in market-led economies. Similarly, women’s role in socialising children is “a key but underacknowledged issue in social capital thinking” (Edwards, 2004, p 5), while although women’s involvement in community networks can provide local activists with “community-based information, knowledge and contacts”, it leaves women themselves little time for political engagement, so that “women may earn social capital that is subsequently spent by men” (Lowndes, 2004, p 59). Because women’s work has not been identified as such, men’s failure to do it has not been identified as a problem, and
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the ‘normal’ worker or politician remains one who is free from active domestic and caring responsibilities.
What about men? As argued in previous chapters, men’s failure to do more in the home is both a key source and a reflection of their privileged position in the public sphere, as men’s relative freedom from domestic responsibilities gives them a competitive advantage over women in politics and employment, while their economic resources give them greater ‘bargaining power’ within the home. From this perspective, the issue is not “one of men’s inability to shake off social conditioning, but of men’s refusal to give up a great deal.This is about power” (Benn, 1998, p 247, quoting Suzanne Moore). Nevertheless, men generally do more in the home than in the recent past, and they too face powerful external constraints and normative pressures when allocating their time. In many families, men’s higher earnings mean that prioritising their career while their partner spends more time at home is simply a rational allocation of responsibilities, and these arrangements are reinforced by gender norms that expect a man to be the primary breadwinner and a woman to be primarily responsible for the home (Layte, 1999). Catherine Hakim (2000, 2007) has argued that the resulting gender division of labour reflects genuine choice and natural sex-based differences in abilities and motivation. There are, however, clear national variations in household ‘choices’, suggesting that these are linked to working-time policies rather than nature (Crompton and Lyonette, 2005).There is also plenty of evidence to show that both men and women are dissatisfied with the balance between the time they are expected to spend at work and the time left for the rest of their life (see, for example, Dex, 2003; Jacobs and Gerson, 2004; EOC, 2006a, 2006b). Although gender time norms remain powerful, there is also some evidence that they are weakening in many nations, particularly in relation to fatherhood (Gerson, 2002; Crompton et al, 2005; Bianchi et al, 2006). More egalitarian attitudes appear strongest among young people and those with most education. In practice, however, the long hours expected of professional men leaves them little time for their families (Dex, 2003), while many working-class men still see doing ‘women’s work’ as a loss of masculinity and the status attached to it; as discussed in Chapter Seven this can make unemployed men particularly reluctant to do domestic work. Here it is important to note that while for women transgressing gender norms means taking on the attributes 151
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of a privileged group, for men it often involves a loss of status and financial privilege.
Time-use studies The lack of status and economic reward attached to work in the home compounds both its unattractiveness to men and a general failure to understand its importance in capitalist societies that can see value only in terms of money.To become visible, unpaid work must therefore be measured, and feminists have successfully campaigned for quantitative studies to measure the time spent on unpaid work, so as to accord it a monetary value and to identify its distribution between women and men. Feminists have expected the results to confirm their claims that unpaid work is indeed economically valuable, that women continue to do more of it than men and that within a general trend to long-hours working and a decline in leisure women have less leisure time than men. Many also assume that gendered patterns of time use are less unequal in the Nordic nations, where there is a range of state policies aimed at both supporting women’s caring work and encouraging men to play a greater domestic role, than in the US and UK, where such policies are lacking or underdeveloped. If these expectations are confirmed, the studies will also confirm feminist claims that women’s labour is exploited, that private responsibilities disadvantage them in the workplace, that they have less time than men for political activities and that state policies can make a difference. These claims are central themes of this book. After a brief description of time-use studies, this section assesses them against the findings of the studies.
The studies The study of how we spend our time goes back to the early 20th century, and today constitutes a rapidly expanding and politically influential area of research. Although some of the research is qualitative, much is quantitative, using interviews, questionnaires and/or time-use diaries to measure what people do with their time throughout the day and night.There is a widespread consensus among time-use researchers that time diaries, in which respondents are asked to record their activities (and sometimes additional contextual information) at fixed intervals throughout a period of time, provide the most accurate and objective source of information. Diary-based data is available from more than 20 Western nations since the 1960s, and in recent years from a number of non-industrialised nations as well. Researchers claim that this body of 152
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research represents “hard, replicable data”,“a rather impressive and solid base for measuring long-term societal changes”, and “an important scientific innovation, something akin to a social microscope” that covers the “complete range of human behaviour” (Harvey and Pentland, 1999, p 8; Robinson, 1999, pp 53, 47, 48; for overviews of diary-based research, see Pentland et al, 1999; Gershuny, 2000; Michelson, 2005; for details of the range of national and international research and the accumulating data bases, see the websites of the International Association for Time Use Research [IATUR] and Multi National Time Use Study [MTUS] at www.iatur.org/ and www.timeuse.org/mtus/). This ‘complete range’ has always included the non-market and domestic activities that are ignored in conventional economic analysis precisely because they are unpaid and unvalued (as in the classic example of a housekeeper who marries her employer and whose work then disappears from national statistics).The 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women therefore saw time-use studies as a critical step towards recognising women’s unpaid work and its call for governments to conduct such research provided much of the initial rationale for subsequent government-sponsored studies, including the first nationally representative US survey, conducted for the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2003 (Gerencher, 2001; US Department of Labor, 2004) and the biggest UK survey, carried out in 2000 as part of a Europe-wide project. The latter is feeding into a Household Satellite Account in the Office for National Statistics intended to estimate the value of unpaid household production (Short, 2000; www.statistics.gov.uk/hhsa). Unpaid work is identified in time-use studies according to the ‘third person criterion’, so that “an activity is deemed productive if it could be delegated to someone else while achieving the desired result” (Joyce and Stuart, 1999, p 4). This means, for example, that preparing a meal is seen as work, but eating it is not. Leisure or free time is defined as that left when paid work, unpaid work, personal care and sleep have been accounted for. In principle, the studies can also identify time spent on political and civic activities. However, explicitly political activity has so far received little attention, perhaps because the average time involved is so low. In the US national study it is recorded under ‘organised civic and religious activities’, and in the UK 2000 study as ‘voluntary work’.These categories are themselves treated as a subset of ‘free time’. Similarly, time-use studies are as yet “an under-utilised tool in the measurement of social capital” (Ruston, 2003, p 2), although work in this area is expanding.
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Findings The claim that unpaid work is valuable is clearly confirmed by timeuse studies throughout the world.While the economic value of unpaid work has been calculated in a number of ways (Joyce and Stewart, 1999; Short, 2000), the studies consistently find that it represents a significant part of domestic production in both industrialised and non-industrialised nations (for an early overview, see Floro, 1995). The studies also unequivocally confirm that women continue to do significantly more unpaid work than men, and that men have not matched their increased time in employment with an equivalent contribution in the home.This means that many mothers in full- and part-time employment do indeed experience a ‘double burden’ and work significantly longer (paid plus unpaid) hours than their male partners (Gershuny, 2000). However, the average overall gap is narrower than many feminists expected. Not only have men increased their domestic role significantly since the 1960s while continuing to put in longer hours of paid work than women, but the overall time spent on housework has dramatically fallen – so that much of the work previously done by unpaid women is simply not done.As a result of these trends, leading time-use researcher Jonathan Gershuny has identified a pattern of “gender convergence” in time use in Western societies; he expects this to continue as a “strain to fairness” encourages a more equitable distribution of household labour and a reduction of women’s double burden (2000, pp 9, 69). In the UK, Oriel Sullivan further reports that although there is evidence of a double burden, “the overload is not perhaps as high” as Hochschild and others have suggested; indeed she finds that in nearly a third of households where both partners work full time, the man does more domestic work than the woman (2000, p 451; for an overview of the evidence on UK men’s domestic role, see Pilcher, 2000). The findings of time-use studies also appear to undermine the general claim that hours of paid work are generally rising while leisure time is declining in many Western societies. Here Gershuny (2000, 2002) draws on the multinational longitudinal data to find that recent short-term fluctuations and changes in the distribution of working and leisure hours conceal a long-term decline in the former and a rise in the latter for most social groups; he argues that the concentration of long-hours working among the professional and managerial middle classes has produced a distorted picture that wrongly equates the experience of this vocal group with that of society as a whole. More recently, Norman Bonney (2005) finds that, despite a widespread perception that British 154
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people are working increasingly long hours, the long-term downward trend in paid work hours has continued into the 21st century, while Esther Dermott (2006) shows that the particularly long hours worked by British fathers reflect their stage in the life course rather than a causal connection. In the US, Bianchi et al (2006) find that a trend to long-hours working in some groups is countered by growing numbers of employees working relatively short weeks. The data also indicates that, contrary to Hochschild’s claim that family time is being crowded out by long hours of paid work, both mothers and fathers are spending more time with their children than ever before (Sullivan and Gershuny, 2001; Bianchi et al, 2006; Craig, 2006b, 2006c, 2007a). Gershuny is clear that the studies also refute the feminist claim that women have less leisure time than men. He categorically rejects … the feminist position which holds that the patriarchal nature of Western societies means that gender inequality will be endemic, and that this will show up in working hours as in much else: it must straight away be said that this is simply not borne out in terms of work- and leisuretime totals which really do seem generally similar between women and men in each country. (2000, pp 8-9) Although later findings indicate that men in the US, the UK and much of Europe have on average about 20-30 minutes a day more free time than women (Sayer, 2005; Aliaga, 2006; Lader et al, 2006), this is largely a product of gender differences in personal care time and sleep rather than work, and the figure is significantly less than feminists have generally assumed. In the US, Bianchi et al find that among parent couples who both work full time “there is remarkable gender equality in total work loads” (2006, p 117), with men spending more of these hours in paid employment and women more on domestic work. In the UK, the most recent (2005) survey finds that “[m]en and women in partnerships have similar totals of work and leisure time” (Lader et al, 2006, p 25; for a recent overview of international data, see Michelson, 2005; on Europe see Aliaga, 2006; on the US see US Department of Labor, 2004). Although the studies confirm that mothers in full-time employment are very busy, they therefore appear to indicate that they are now no more overburdened than their partners. Gershuny and Sullivan (2003) also find that, contrary to the expectation that policies promoting gender equality inside and outside the home would lead to a more equal gender division of labour in Scandinavia, men in Denmark, Finland and Sweden do not do more 155
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domestic work than those in Canada, the US and the UK. Naomi Finch (2006b, 2006c) similarly finds no clear division between Nordic and non-Nordic European countries in relation to the time spent by men on unpaid domestic work and childcare. Overall, therefore, while the evidence from time-use studies supports some feminist claims, it seems to throw significant doubt on others. This may suggest that feminists should revise their claims. Alternatively, it may suggest that the underlying assumptions and methods of the studies should be investigated more closely.
Time-use studies under scrutiny Time-use studies undoubtedly provide a fascinating and informative insight into people’s daily lives. However, the findings of earlier chapters suggest that they may distort people’s experiences in a number of significant ways.
Underlying issues Like other academic areas, until recently the time-use research community has been dominated by men, and they have generally treated their own temporal assumptions as unproblematically normal, rather than as gendered and potentially partial. From the perspective of the ‘women’s time’ culture discussed in Chapter Eight, however, the studies rest on a particular concept of time that reflects and sustains men’s privileged standpoint. In particular, time-use studies equate the human experience of time with that of commodified clock time, taking it as given that time unfolds as a series of discrete episodes that can be objectively measured and valued, that all human activities are susceptible to such abstract quantification and that ‘free time’ is a scarce resource that individuals can possess. Although the studies claim to provide a comprehensive account of time use that includes activities in the private sphere, they therefore do so in terms of the language associated with the public sphere. This means that, while they claim to show the value of women’s time, they interpret this value narrowly as exchange value or price rather than human worth or importance, bringing to mind Oscar Wilde’s definition of a cynic as someone who “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”. The studies are especially likely to misrepresent the time involved in caring for others. Time diaries cannot capture the ‘being there’ nature of many caring responsibilities, which are often embedded in more directly recordable ‘activities’ and can feel more like a jumble of 156
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experiences than a recordable series of events. In treating care as an ‘activity’, they assume that an episode of care can make way for one of paid employment or leisure, while in reality caring for someone can permeate the whole of a carer’s life, constraining how they spend their time even when they are not actively providing care. Studies are also unable to record the intermittent worrying, guilt and stress individuals may experience around what they are not doing while they are doing something else. Particular problems arise in relation to the measurement of ‘free time’, which many writers treat as a term interchangeable with leisure. As Adam argues, this concept gained its meaning in relation to capitalist employment: “‘free time’ and its correlate leisure-time are derived from commodified work time.They are produced time, time that exists only in relation to the time of markets and employment” (1990, p 96, emphasis in original).Although time-use studies seem to represent an important advance in also subtracting unpaid work from their calculation of free time, the idea that free time and work are mutually exclusive is therefore the product of a specific time culture that ignores both the fluid and socially constructed nature of these categories and the ever-present nature of some caring responsibilities. For example, Ken Roberts’ assertion that “all people will have substantial time sovereignty in respect of many of their leisure activities, especially in these days of twenty-four hour cities and the video-recorder” (2002, p 177) is quite alien to many carers. As Christine Everingham reports, “[the] experience of time as either ‘free’ or in some way ‘taken’ was to come to a sudden halt … with the birth of my first child. Overnight, I lost all of my free time…. The abstract time of the clock cannot be imposed directly onto a newborn child” (2002, p 335). The quantification of free time also ignores its relational nature, seeing time in terms of individual ownership, rather than something bound up with more communal rhythms that is often dependent on women’s domestic ‘temporal activity’ in planning and coordinating household timetables so as to enable family members to participate in school, work and social life outside the home (Everingham, 2002, p 340). These issues are bound up with the underlying problem of how diary respondents decide what to select as their recorded activity in any given period. While Andrew Harvey claims that “[b]y its nature, the diary provides a record of all activities during a specified period” (1999, p 19), other time-use researchers are aware that making such a record is far from straightforward. Thus Gershuny, whose rejection of feminist claims about leisure time was reported earlier, considers at some length the complex processes through which people completing 157
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time diaries “select what [they] consider salient out of the mass of [their] sense impressions” and edit “a complex and multiplicitous reality in which many things are happening simultaneously, into a simple sequence of single activities”. He concludes that “we can achieve this editing process, we know that we can ‘tell the day’” (2000, pp 254, 260). However, ‘we’ might also be able to ‘tell the day’ in a number of very different ways, not all of which can be forced into the straightjacket of a diary account. Indeed, from a feminist perspective, respondents’ ability to conform to the expectations of time-use researchers might be seen as an ability to conform to a model required by hegemonic masculinity that marginalises ‘other’ experiences and ways of knowing, rather than as a vindication of the diary method. Gershuny also acknowledges that the accuracy of the findings of the studies can be affected by changes in social norms that in turn affect how activities are recorded. Thus he and Sullivan suggest that the apparent upward trend in time spent on childcare may partly reflect changes in reporting rather than behaviour, as parents are expected to engage in activities with their children more than in the past, so that while someone in the 1950s might have recorded ‘went to football with son’, today this might appear as ‘took son to football’; the former would be classified by researchers as ‘attendance at a sporting event’, the latter as a ‘childcare-related activity’ (Sullivan and Gershuny, 2001, p 342). Because these social norms are also gender norms, men and women may perceive and record the same activities differently – in other words, gender can be ‘done’ not only through the performance of particular activities but also by the ways that these are remembered and interpreted. Because dominant gender norms vary over time and between societies, the gender that may be ‘done’ by participants in a time-use study is itself variable, making it difficult to disentangle genuine from reported differences in behaviour. These problems do not invalidate time-use studies, but they suggest that they should be approached with caution and that their limitations should be recognised. Some of the practical issues arising from these general problems are discussed in the rest of this section.
Practical issues Until recently, the measurement of unpaid work has focused on an analysis of ‘main’ or ‘primary’ activities. This provides no way of accounting for activities that are done simultaneously, and it is now widely accepted that such studies are particularly likely to underestimate the time parents spend caring for children: for example, someone may 158
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describe their activity as ‘watching television’ or ‘cooking the dinner’, even if there are small children in the room and no other adult in the house (Robinson, 1999; Ironmonger, 2004). Even when secondary activities are included, childcare time may still be under-recorded as a parent may be both cooking the dinner and talking to a friend as well as being responsible for children, but can record only two activities; indeed, a mother at home with small children may see her full-time childcare responsibility as a background fact of life, rather than an ‘activity’ to record in her diary. Most studies have also recorded only ‘active’ childcare, ignoring the ‘passive’ care provided when an adult is ‘on call’ and cannot leave the house, or when they rush to be home when a child returns from school but then cook the dinner while their child watches television. They also ignore the time-consuming tasks associated with taking care of children, coding these separately as ‘cleaning’, ‘washing’ and so on.This means that they do not provide a reliable guide to the ‘time costs’ of childcare or their distribution between women and men. A focus on primary activities also underestimates the time spent on other forms of care provision; indeed, the underestimation of time spent caring for older people is probably even greater. As Bernard Casey (2004) argues, this is partly because time-use researchers have shown little interest in the area, and have provided far fewer categories for activities related to eldercare than to childcare; this lack of interest perhaps reflects the age profile and experiences of the researchers themselves. Lack of appropriate categories makes it difficult to identify such care: for example, cleaning or shopping for an elderly parent usually appears simply as ‘cleaning’ or ‘shopping’, while keeping them company disappears under the activity that accompanies this, such as having a meal or watching television. Childcare provided by (usually female) relatives has also received little attention (Folbre et al, 2005). As the example of watching television with either children or an elderly parent also shows, a focus on main or ‘primary’ activities creates problems for the measurement of free time. Not only is an individual’s choice of programme and the attention they can give it affected, but the choice of activity itself may reflect the constraining effects of caring responsibilities. As discussed in Chapter Three, Putnam saw increased television viewing as the prime cause of declining social and civic activities in the US; this analysis forgets that many viewers may be unable to use this ‘free’ time outside the home.The nature and distribution of leisure time is obscured even more by a focus on total hours that loses sight of the ‘usability’ of such time, for, as anyone who has been a full-time carer knows, time ‘free’ of caring activities is by its 159
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nature often both fragmented and unpredictable. Studies that report only the weekly total of work and leisure hours and fail to take these factors into account can, therefore, tell us little about the existence or extent of male privilege in relation to leisure time. Contrary to Gershuny’s claim, they do not refute feminist arguments. Rather, they distract attention from other issues that affect the utility and quality of leisure time, largely to the benefit of men. Even time recorded as sleeping can be misleading. While Gershuny claims that “We know that people asleep cannot be ‘doing’ anything else” (2000, p 264), many people’s experience of the fitful doze that passes for sleep when caring for a sick child or waiting for a teenager to come home suggests that reality is more complex, while Hislop and Arber argue on the basis of qualitative research that “as provider of physical and emotional labour in the home, a woman is always considered as ‘being available’ and ‘on duty’ … the bedroom becomes an ‘invisible workplace’, a control room from which the well-being of the family is managed” (Hislop and Arber, 2003, pp 701, 703). It is clearly difficult to quantify such responsibilities; they may, however, qualify the recent finding that women in Europe, including the UK, spend longer hours than men asleep (Aliaga, 2006; www.statistics.gov. uk/timeuse/summary_results). All this suggests that, even within their own terms, diary-based studies that omit secondary activities and passive care, as most have done, are significantly less ‘scientific’ than some of their more enthusiastic proponents claim. This means that they cannot meet the objective of accurately measuring the economic value of caring work; in the case of childcare this would be the market costs of being responsible for small children for 24 hours a day (Holloway and Tamplin, 2001). They are also unable to recognise whether time is genuinely ‘free’ and available for voluntary and political activities, or whether caring responsibilities confine respondents to their home.
Time-use studies: recent developments and results In recent years, many time-use researchers have shown much more awareness of the limitations of the studies, and some of the more practical problems involved in measuring productive activity, care and leisure time are being addressed.Thus, in contrast to previous national studies, the UK 2000 survey asked respondents about secondary activities specifically in order to “provide important information about the known under-recording of childcare” (Short, 2000). It also asked about the presence of other adults and children during waking 160
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hours, making it easier to identify childcare responsibilities when these are not recorded as an activity. An assessment from the Office for National Statistics of the 2000 survey suggested that future surveys should investigate subjective feelings of time pressure; it also said that respondents should be asked to record when they are responsible for a child, even when not engaged in an activity with them, as this would identify their availability for other activities more accurately (Short, 2006; see also Lader et al, 2006). Similar considerations informed the 2003 US survey (Budig and Folbre, 2004; US Department of Labor, 2004), while the 2005 United Nations Guidelines recommended the inclusion of both secondary activities and a category for ‘minding’ children (UN, 2005). A few smaller-scale earlier studies were also very detailed, as were the national surveys conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 1992 and 1997. Because detailed results of national surveys are increasingly available online, researchers can now disaggregate information to provide a much more nuanced and contextualised picture than was formerly possible and to investigate differences within and between a wide range of social groups. As discussed later in this section, the new data goes some way to recognising the distinctive patterns associated with caring and to “investigate the lived experience of free time” (Bittman and Wajcman, 2000, p 169). However, some gaps remain. Respondents to the 2000 UK survey were instructed that they need not fill in a secondary activity or ‘with whom’ details for time asleep, making it difficult to calculate time ‘on call’ with caring responsibilities or to explore the implications of ‘contaminated’ sleep for health or workplace performance; it also obscures the extent to which some people are excluded from paid work or political activity requiring overnight time away from home. Although the US survey goes further in recognising passive care (such as “keeping an eye on my son while he swam in the pool”) as a primary activity, it codes “watching television with my child” as a leisure activity, not as childcare, and it too excludes on-call responsibilities when the respondent is asleep (US Department of Labor, 2004). It also systematically collects information on secondary activities only for childcare. This excludes other forms of housework done at the same time as a primary activity (such as ironing while watching television). It also reinforces the neglect of other forms of care.Although in principle the diaries of adult care receivers might cast light on the time use of people with disabilities as well as their carers, little research has been done in this area.
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More generally, because the data is so complex, any ‘evidence’ is inevitably partly a product of selection and interpretation. While the findings to date seem much more supportive of feminist claims than earlier results, they should therefore be seen as indicative and suggestive rather than ‘hard’ facts.
Domestic work and childcare New data that includes secondary activities and ‘with whom’ information strengthens the basic feminist claim that much of women’s unpaid time is ‘productive’, and suggests that earlier valuations may have underestimated the economic value of unpaid work (Floro and Miles, 2003). For example, women in the US are increasingly spending their leisure time in the company of their children with no other adult present (Mattingly and Bianchi, 2003; Bianchi et al, 2006). Because someone else would have to look after young children if their mother were absent, this can be seen as a previously unrecorded period of unpaid work. Similarly, when US adults are asked to record when children are ‘in their care’, the figure is three times higher than if they are asked only to record ‘activities’ (Folbre, 2006, pp 193-4). Recent research also reinforces feminist claims about women’s disproportionate responsibility for housework, by showing that any trend to gender convergence in this has stalled. In the US, Bianchi et al find that men have not increased their contribution since 1985; the most recent UK survey indicates both that the overall time spent on housework continued to fall between 2000 and 2005 and that this fall was greater for men than for women (Lader et al, 2006). Lyn Craig (2007a, 2007b) has also used the more detailed Australian data to show that, contrary to earlier findings of roughly equal total workloads, the total workloads of employed mothers are significantly greater than those of men if secondary activities are taken into account. Focusing on childcare, Craig and others also find evidence that men’s increased involvement does not give women any more time to spend outside the home. Men’s childcare typically involves ‘activities’ with their children, such as reading and playing, leaving women responsible for time-consuming routine tasks such as feeding and bathing. One result is that men’s childcare is less time-constrained than women’s, as fathers’ activities are a desirable supplement to rather than a necessary part of children’s daily care (Craig, 2002; Bianchi et al, 2006). Rather than fathers replacing mothers’ time, Craig also finds that mothers are present for 90 per cent of the time that fathers are caring for their children. She concludes that, far from ‘freeing up’ time for women 162
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to enter the workplace, they are often left “inadequately assisted in the challenge of balancing work and family commitments” (2006b, p 262). While later studies also generally confirm that parental time with children has increased, they also show that parents, particularly mothers, partly achieve this by combining the time they spend with their children with other activities, including leisure activities. Such ‘multitasking’ can be seen as a form of work intensification that would be seen as increased productivity if it were paid. It also increases time pressures, particularly when it involves competing temporal rhythms (for example, combining ‘eating breakfast’ with ‘giving children breakfast’ is not inherently stressful, but is likely to be so if it is a prelude to getting a small child to nursery, older children to school and the diary respondent to an early morning meeting). Moreover, as noted earlier,‘multi-tasking’ for US mothers increasingly includes combining childcare with leisure; while many enjoy this, many will find it less relaxing than leisure time free of childcare responsibilities.
Leisure These factors help explain why people perceive themselves to be increasingly time pressed, even though the studies indicate that leisure time has generally increased. Although Gershuny (2005) has argued that perceptions of ‘busyness’ are socially constructed, and that its new association with high status encourages people to report it more than in the past, it seems that time pressures are real and widespread, although not experienced in the same way by all groups. As Jacobs and Gerson (2004) have influentially argued, although individual workers generally spend less time in employment, the rise in women’s employment means that the time available for work in most households has shrunk. Looking behind the average figures and focusing on households rather than individuals, Jacobs and Gerson show that time pressures are particularly associated with dual-earning families, lone mothers and employed mothers, and that all of these groups have been increasing in numbers in the US in recent years. Bianchi et al similarly conclude that “there has been a significant ratcheting up of time pressures in American families – especially in single-parent and dual-earner families” (2006, p 57). In Australia, Michael Bittman (2004) confirms Jacobs and Gerson’s claims and argues that time pressures are most acute for mothers of very young children who work full time and have partners who also work full time. As Warren (2003) notes, the timing as well as
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the length of working hours can be a source of stress; such stress has been increased by the recent growth of non-standard working hours. Bittman’s research also provides empirical evidence in support of feminist claims that women’s childcare responsibilities give them a different experience of time and a lower quality of leisure time. In an influential article, he and Judy Wajcman use the detailed Australian data to show that women’s leisure time is more likely to be combined with other activities than that of men, that it is more fragmented and liable to interruption, and that it is less likely to take the form of pure adult leisure without children present. Bittman and Wajcman conclude that women’s leisure time is in general “less leisurely” (2000, p 169), and that it is this qualitative difference that makes women more likely than men to report time stress. Later analyses of the Australian data have produced similar findings (Floro and Miles, 2003; Craig, 2007a, 2007b), as has an analysis of women’s leisure using the UK 2000 survey (Ruston, 2003).Although when Mattingly and Bianchi tested Bittman and Wajcman’s arguments against some new US data that they found that women’s time was not more fragmented than that of men, they also found other differences that led them to conclude that: A triple burden is apparent.Women have less free time.The free time they have is often contaminated by other activities or the presence of children, and their free time is not as beneficial to them as men’s in terms of reducing feelings of time pressure. (Mattingly and Bianchi, 2003, pp 1022-3) The repeated finding that much of women’s leisure time is combined with childcare and other domestic activities means that this is not freely disposable and available to use for other purposes such as political activity. Ruston (2003) makes the related point that policies promoting voluntary work in the UK need to be aware of these constraints on women’s time. Much recent research also distinguishes among different groups of women. It consistently finds that women have more free time if they do not have a partner, but that there is no similar effect for men. While becoming a parent significantly reduces the leisure time of both women and men, the impact on women is greater, and it also produces an increase in the gender division of labour, with men increasing and women reducing their paid work when they become parents. Perhaps surprisingly, Bittman (2004) finds that lone mothers, the group most likely to report time pressures, have a somewhat shorter total of paid and unpaid working hours than mothers with a partner. However, as 164
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Bittman also notes, their sole responsibility for children is in itself likely to produce pressures, while their leisure time is particularly likely to be constrained; as discussed earlier, lone mothers are also unlikely to be able to compensate for lack of time by buying time-saving goods and services. Similarly, while non-professional families may appear relatively ‘time rich’ in terms of total hours, they are less likely to be able to control their hours of paid work, more likely to work anti-social hours and less able to coordinate the leisure time of family members. If we take these factors into account, working-class dual-earner couples are more likely to experience time poverty than their middle-class counterparts (Warren, 2003).
Policy effects Recent research finds more support than earlier work for the expectation that the sex equality programmes of the Nordic nations will have had an impact on the gender division of unpaid labour. While harmonised European data shows Scandinavian men doing only slightly more domestic work than those in the UK (with Finnish men actually doing two minutes a day less), it also shows that, because Scandinavian women do significantly less unpaid work than those in the rest of Europe, men there do a greater share: the average daily gender gap between women and men is less than one-and-a-quarter hours in Sweden, but nearly two hours in the UK (based on figures in Aliaga, 2006). Some US researchers have also claimed that Swedish men do more housework than those in the US (University of Michigan, 2002). Swedish educational programmes aimed at countering gender stereotypes may also be having some practical effects: unlike their counterparts in the US, Swedish women whose husbands are to some extent economically dependent on them do not compensate for their spouses’ “presumed gender deviance” by increasing their own contribution to housework (Evertsson and Nermo, 2004, p 1284). Other researchers have unpacked Gershuny and Sullivan’s claim that policies have little impact to find “a more complex story” (Hook, 2006, p 651). Clearly, women at home on parental leave need less domestic help from men than those who have no option but to return to work when their children are small; it also seems that when good quality childcare is provided or subsidised by the state, as in Denmark and France, fathers are likely to do less. Conversely, it may be North American women’s long hours in paid work and a lack of childcare alternatives, rather than a commitment to domestic equality, that drives US fathers to spend as much time in domestic work as their 165
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Danish, Swedish or Norwegian counterparts. As discussed in Chapter Six earlier, a period of parental leave is now reserved for fathers in Sweden, Norway and Iceland; although the effects have not yet shown up in time-use studies, their involvement has clearly increased, while the vast majority of new UK fathers are taking advantage of their new leave entitlements. Looking beyond Gershuny and Sullivan’s narrow focus on hours, it is also clear that even though a Swedish and a North American woman at home full time with small children may appear to be in the same situation, the former is likely to be on paid leave while the latter will be taking an unpaid break from the labour market. The Swedish woman will be able to work reduced hours and take time off for family emergencies when she returns to work without sacrificing her conditions of employment, while the North American woman will have to choose between long hours and poorly paid, insecure part-time work.The former will also have more access to affordable good quality childcare, if she has a partner he too will be eligible for paid parental leave, and his working week is likely to be significantly shorter than that of the North American woman’s partner. Recent findings also seem to suggest that the ‘family-unfriendly’ conditions of employment in the US are having a detrimental knockon effect on many women’s political and community involvement. Here Bianchi et al report a decline in civic activities by employed mothers that raises “global concerns about how the quality of civic and social organizations is affected, or perhaps diminished by, the demands placed on employed mothers’ time” (2006, p 109). Andersen et al (2006) agree, finding also that this decline does not appear to occur among other groups in the US or amongst women in Canada, the Netherlands or the UK; they suggest that the ‘special case’ status of the US may be due to a lack of state support for childcare or restrictions on long working hours (for international comparisons similarly finding a decline in social capital in the US but not the UK, see PIU, 2002).
Political consequences and conclusions Time-use research does not reveal straightforward patterns or causal connections. Rather, it confirms the argument of earlier chapters that the impact of any particular policy is context dependent. It also indicates that the effects of workplace regulations, work/family policies and gender equality initiatives will frequently be contradictory (Crompton et al, 2005; Finch, 2006b, 2006c; Hook, 2006), and it confirms that any simple Nordic/non-Nordic typology conceals important national 166
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variations.Any findings also remain limited by the nature of the available data; this still allows systematic international comparison of primary activities only and does not provide a basis for comparing subjective experiences. Nevertheless, recent research does seem to confirm that many people are indeed highly time stressed and that in general the pressures are particularly acute for women, whose time remains disproportionately constrained by domestic responsibilities. Many women cope by reducing their hours of paid employment, confirming both the traditional division of labour and their economic disadvantages. In line with Marx’s claims about capitalism’s drive to increased productivity (discussed earlier in Chapter Three), many also cope by using their time more intensively. This multi-tasking includes combining leisure time with looking after children. Such leisure time is heavily constrained and not usable for other activities; women’s lower earnings mean that they often lack either the financial resources or the domestic bargaining power that would ‘free up’ more time. The research also confirms both that the negative effects of time pressures are felt particularly strongly in the US and that they are a more general consequence of a failure to recognise, value or reward the importance of the domestic and community responsibilities traditionally associated with women.With all their limitations, time-use studies have gone a long way in identifying these. In redefining them as ‘work’ or sources of ‘social capital’ recent research implicitly challenges both the public/private distinction and the assumption that only paid work is productive. In revealing the scale of women’s contributions, it raises the question of why those who do so much should receive so little status or reward, and why their voices are still under-represented and marginalised in political debate.
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The time(s) we want and the time(s) we’ve got: political implications and conclusions This final chapter draws on the theoretical and empirical findings of earlier chapters to provide an overview of political alternatives and possibilities. It uses a self-consciously temporal framework to identify some long-term goals and more immediate policy proposals, while recognising that these must be grounded in a realistic appraisal of particular historical circumstances. Focusing on three key areas (underlying temporal perspectives, time cultures and the ways that time use is organised and rewarded), the chapter considers what a feminist temporal utopia or ‘uchronia’ might look like, before providing a comparative overview of temporal values and practices in contemporary Western societies and assessing how these might be developed in more positive ways.
Uchronia: the time(s) we’d like Thinking about non-existent ways of understanding and using time opens up a range of radical alternatives outside the framework of patriarchal norms and the short-term logic of capital accumulation.The construction of a feminist uchronia can therefore represent a political challenge to existing practices and provide a set of criteria against which to assess them. Rather than encompassing absolute principles or final goals, however, a feminist uchronia is itself inevitably time-bound, reflecting the values and needs of existing societies as understood by particular groups or individuals. Its principles and goals are therefore provisional and open to negotiation; indeed discussion and dialogue are an integral part of the project. The rest of this section therefore represents a set of possibilities, a contribution to ongoing feminist debates, rather than an attempt at imposing a definitive ideal, and it is concerned with general principles rather than policy details.
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Temporal perspectives The arguments of earlier chapters indicate that a ‘good’ society should have a sense of temporality based on respect for the past, attention to the present and concern for the future. In such a society, policies would be developed in the awareness that ‘history matters’, and that the past can both constrain and open up possibilities for the future. This does not mean that we can learn from history in any straightforward way. However, if we are to conserve what is good in any society while seeking to improve it further, we need to look at the long- and shortterm social, cultural, political, demographic and economic processes that brought it into being; we also need to see that these processes do not stop at any given moment, but that they will continue to develop and generate further change in the future. While these processes are a product of human activities, they are also infinitely complex and our understanding of them can never be complete; attempts at improving society should therefore not attempt to impose any kind of blueprint, and should if necessary be adjusted in the light of fresh experience. Such a sense of history need not preclude the assertion of values that transcend particular periods and that hold, for example, that a society based on freedom and equality is preferable to one based on slavery and exploitation. For feminists, these a-temporal values include the belief that women and men are of equal human worth and that society should be organised accordingly. At the same time, a sense of history also enables us to see that our roles and identities as women and men are themselves historically produced rather than fixed by nature, and that they are therefore amenable to change. A ‘good’ sense of history should also involve a concern for the future that extends beyond our own immediate happiness or life span to encompass the welfare of future generations. Such a ‘generative temporality’ is at odds with the short-term pressures to profitability that characterise market capitalism and, in linking the individual to the collective, it transcends the Heideggerian vision of life lived in the knowledge of death. It also involves responsibility for the environment and an awareness of the potentially disastrous effects of current patterns of consumption and unregulated economic growth. As discussed in previous chapters, although some feminists have linked a sense of continuity and connection to the natural world to women’s reproductive capacities, men can also hold this temporal framework. In a feminist uchronia it will be ‘normal’, and such a society will acknowledge that planning for the future may involve some sacrifices in the present. 170
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This does not mean that the present welfare of citizens and their children is unimportant. Indeed, attention to the here and now is a necessary counter to both any kind of ‘final solution’ that sees individuals as expendable in the name of some future good and the relentless expansionism inherent in capitalist production. In a feminist uchronia, productive labour would therefore be useful and/or creative rather than simply a means to profit, income or status, while welfare spending would not be seen simply as an instrumentalist investment in future workers, but would also treat their current well-being as an end in itself. More generally, a responsible concern for the future would be balanced by an appreciation and enjoyment of what we have today.
Time culture(s) These considerations make it clear that the time culture needed in a feminist uchronia would not simply equate time with money, and it would not attempt to reduce all aspects of life to considerations of cost efficiency. Rather, it would recognise that human relationships and the provision of good quality care have their own, often slow, repetitious and unpredictable rhythms, and that caring responsibilities often take the form of intermittent processes or simply ‘being there’ rather than a set of activities leading to identifiable outcomes. Such a time culture would also see that time is not simply an abstract ‘thing’ that individuals can possess in abstraction from society; rather, it first has to be generated, and it is often bound up with communal rhythms and needs. This time culture would in many ways represent the ‘women’s time’ discussed in Chapter Eight. However, such a time culture can itself be oppressive, and clock time would retain an important place. In particular, it would offer protection against a ‘women’s time’ that treats all time as relational and assumes that care should never be answerable to the clock, and that leaves carers swamped by the needs of others, with no entitlement to time for themselves.What is needed, therefore, is not an uncritical celebration of ‘women’s time’, but a time culture that balances concern for others with a sense of self, and an awareness of human interconnection with a respect for individual integrity; we need also to recognise both the ‘natural’ rhythms that arise from human relationships and the need to coordinate public and private responsibilities by the clock. Such a culture sees time as a collective as well as an individual resource; as such, its distribution is accountable to principles of justice and may be regulated by the state accordingly.
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How time use would be organised and rewarded In a feminist uchronia, time use would be organised and rewarded in accordance with a number of interconnected underlying principles: that time spent caring for others represents a key contribution to society; that care is a normal responsibility for all citizens, along with employment and participation in voluntary, community and political groups; and that competent adults are normally responsible for their own domestic work. As in Nancy Fraser’s ‘thought experiment’ (see Chapter Five), all citizens would therefore be expected and enabled to combine earning and caring, as well as to participate in community and political activities. Unpaid housework would also be evenly shared. Such a society would in effect extend the classic socialist principle ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’ to the unpaid work traditionally done by women, thereby effectively ending the gender division of labour and breaking the links between care and economic dependency for both the providers and receivers of care. It would also see paid employment as something to be fitted around care, rather than the other way around (Williams, 2005).While some economic inequality might remain, this would be much less than that in the US or UK today.The ‘normality’ of care-giving experiences would also mean that these would be common among political leaders and policy makers, and that the values associated with care giving would inform political debate. These general principles could be supported by a range of policy alternatives, involving different roles for the state, the market, civil society, families and individuals. Although these would vary according to a society’s prior history, it is clear that in a feminist uchronia citizens’ right to give and receive good quality care will be too expensive to be delivered through the market alone. Not only will carers be economically well rewarded, but they will also be treated as responsible professionals who can be trusted to spend their time as their work requires; as discussed earlier in this section, this can involve intangible and slow processes that are not amenable to considerations of cost efficiency and the measurement of results. Because care is regarded as a collective as well as an individual responsibility, it will therefore have to be economically supported by the state, whether this is by paying a proper wage to those who provide care in their family, enabling adult care receivers to buy their own care, directly providing services, subsidising market provision, funding voluntary organisations or some combination of the above.
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The state will also regulate working hours on the assumption that workers are also carers who need time to look after relatives and friends, and who are involved in a range of voluntary associations and informal community groups. While some people may lack the inclination or skills to care for others, the incentive structure of society will encourage them to acquire these to the best of their natural abilities. In this society, someone who spends 60 hours a week in paid employment will be seen as an irresponsible citizen who is neglecting their social and civic duties and who is probably free-riding on the domestic labour of others. Similarly, careers will be structured around the linked assumptions that the balance of time spent by any individual on different forms of work, leisure and political engagement will vary over the life course, and that they will at some stage need or want to reduce their hours, take a break from paid employment or organise their paid work around the temporal demands of pregnancy, childbirth, lactation and menstruation. As caring work will be both economically supported and quite widely distributed, carers will not be a distinct group, and there will therefore be fairly equal access to ‘discretionary time’ that citizens can use either for leisure or to earn more money (see Chapter Three). Citizens will also be helped to use their time as they wish, as central and/or local authorities will coordinate the opening hours of schools, shops, banks and public offices at times most convenient to both their workers and the public. In accordance with the Rawlsean principle that any inequalities should benefit the least well off, particular attention will be given to the needs of lone parents and those caring for adult relatives, who will receive collective support for what is seen as a collective responsibility rather than being expected to cope on their own.
The time(s) we’ve got The kind of society imagined in the previous section is clearly incompatible with both the individualistic, market-led assumptions that dominate in liberal welfare regimes, particularly the US, and the traditionally gendered responsibilities and entitlements that have underpinned welfare provision in much of continental Europe.While the social democratic Nordic states share more of its values, they also contain counter-currents, and some policy outcomes have had unintended effects.These issues are explored further in the rest of this section.
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Temporal perspectives All capitalist societies contain an inbuilt momentum for change and innovation, fuelled by the need to maintain a competitive edge over rivals, that orients them to the short-term future. In this context, economic growth is an unquestioned good, any thought of slowing down to enjoy the present is impossible and the drive to profit maximisation requires an intensification of exploitation. As the speed of change accelerates, consumption too becomes an ongoing project disassociated from the satisfaction of particular needs, with the restless consumerism of the throwaway society epitomised in the slogan seen in a UK store: ‘You see it, you want it, you buy it, you forget it’. Although a sense of the past is still potent in many parts of the world, and is often invoked to fuel ethnic and religious conflict, this too runs counter to capitalist logic, which leaves no place for tradition and respect for the past so that, as Marx said in the Communist Manifesto,“All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all newly-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air …” (1967 [1848], p 125). As discussed in Chapter Three, Western states have experienced counter-pressures to crude capitalist logic, which has been modified over the years, partly in response to the demands of organised labour. Today, the Nordic states stand out in their resistance to a ‘race to the bottom’, choosing instead to maintain competitiveness by investment in a highly skilled and educated workforce. Similar recognition of the need to plan for the future underlies the ideas of the ‘social investment state’ (see Chapter Three). More generally, as the potentially catastrophic effects of climate change become more apparent and immediate, and as rich as well as poor are adversely affected, the need to take some control over the future is becoming increasingly recognised, even by conservative groups. These competing economic temporalities generate competing political pressures, and politicians have to balance their own understanding of what is needed against their wish to win the next election, and the interests of powerful economic groups against the perceived interests of the electorate. The political calculations made by voters themselves will also often involve conflicting long- and short-term interests, as, for example, the desire for low taxation and cheap flights runs up against the demand for security in old age and measures against global warming. In general, the collectivist ideology that underpins social democratic states is more favourable to the idea of 174
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future planning than the individualistic, and at times fatalistic, hostility to state intervention that underpins the liberal regime of the US and treats the market as an inevitable force of nature rather than a product of human history. While clearly not confined to secularists, the belief that we can and should plan for the future also runs counter to those religious groups that hold that God’s plans will be fulfilled regardless of human actions or that the Day of Judgement is at hand.
Time culture(s) In many areas of employment, the demands of the ‘time is money’ culture of capitalism are becoming increasingly rigorous, as the drive to make ‘efficiency savings’ combines with bureaucratic quality control mechanisms to leave little slack in the system and little opportunity for employees to set their own pace of work according to the task in hand or their own biological or social needs. Paid care work has not been immune from these pressures, which have been exacerbated by growing demand for care services, resulting from ageing populations, changing family structures and the increased employment of women.While patterns of delivery differ across regime types, there has also been a general movement towards the US model of market-led provision by profit-making organisations, while provision that remains with public providers is subject to increasingly strict financial constraints and controls (Knijn, 2000; Glendinning and Kemp, 2006).This means that the clash of time cultures inherent in paid care is becoming ever more acute, with the bureaucratic rationality of costeffectiveness imposed on the slow, intangible processes involved in caring for others.The result is stress and a reduction of job satisfaction for many service providers, and a lower quality of care.The continuing rise in women’s employment also means that the demands of clock time are also felt more strongly in the home, as family and personal life have to be organised around the workplace and more domestic tasks have to be slotted into any period of time. This extension of the time discipline of capitalism is exacerbated by increased job insecurity, with employees increasingly expected to work late at short notice, regardless of family responsibilities, or to work unsocial hours as part of their standard contract of employment, rather than as higher-paid overtime (Rubery et al, 1998; Crompton, 2005). The resulting tensions are experienced most acutely by women, so that contemporary ‘women’s time’ in the home and workplace are “an index of the experience of the contradictions of capitalist modernity” (Watts, 1998, p 14) and women today attempt “to combine within one person the activities 175
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that are regulated by both modes of time” (Boyd, 2002, p 469, quoting by Haavind and Andenaes). Although most Western states other than the US now have employment policies, such as flexible working arrangements and parental leave, to help workers combine family and employment policies, these do not challenge the priority attached to working time, and in practice flexibility is often on employers’ terms. Moreover, the rhetoric of ‘work–life’ balance, often used to legitimise such policies, itself epitomises the time culture of capitalism, which assumes that work is not a part of life, but merely a means of making money.
How time use is organised and rewarded While there are clear and major differences between and within societies, a visitor from Mars might be excused for thinking that time in today’s welfare societies remains organised around three basic principles: that women and men should specialise in different activities, that men’s time use should be the more highly rewarded, and that those who spend time caring for others should be economically, socially and politically penalised. Thus, although gender specialisation in Western welfare states today does not typically involve a simple male earner/dependent female carer model, this has generally been dented rather than overturned, with men still the main wage earners and women now the primary and partially dependent homemakers.While most women have some paid employment, they tend to fit this around their family responsibilities, while men do the reverse.This means that most part-time workers are women; there is also still a high degree of occupational segregation, with women disproportionately working in caring and service work and in the public sector. The unpaid nature of much of women’s work is an obvious source of economic disadvantage, producing a high level of dependency on either a male partner or state benefits.Within the employment market, occupations associated with women are generally less well paid than those dominated by men, fewer women than men are in senior positions, and part-time work is usually strongly linked to low hourly rates of pay, poor employment conditions and a lack of career prospects. Outside of the Nordic nations, state policies have not questioned the low value attached to paid care work, and have generally ignored the importance of unpaid care, an attitude epitomised by the expectation in the US that lone mothers should be in paid employment, even when their children are very young. More generally, failure to see that women’s traditional 176
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responsibilities do not disappear when they are in the workplace places great stress on women and their families. The lack of the financial resources that involvement in formal politics usually requires is most acute for full-time homemakers, few of whom have links to the networks (often work or union based) that facilitate access to decision makers. Many part-time workers share these political disadvantages, while low pay also restricts political opportunities for many full-time women workers. As argued throughout the book, the gender division of time also produces inequalities in disposable or discretionary time that leave women little time for political activity, interacting with their economic disadvantages to contribute to their political under-representation nearly everywhere in the world.
Getting from here to there The temporal assumptions, time culture and practices underlying Western welfare states today constitute a very different kind of temporal regime from that envisaged in a feminist uchronia, with those in the US diametrically opposed. Nevertheless, temporal regimes are never static or unitary, but constantly evolving and subject to complex and often contradictory pressures that may open up possibilities of progressive change. This section identifies some of these pressures and signs of change, before identifying the strategies that might build on them.
Sources of pressure and signs of change Some of the pressures facing welfare states today are based in material economic conditions, arising from tensions between the productive and (re)productive needs of society (see Chapter Seven for a discussion of these terms). The male breadwinner model that underpinned welfare states as these developed during the 20th century was able to reconcile these tensions at the expense of women’s economic independence and the under-utilisation of their skills. Today, women are an increasingly essential part of the skilled as well as the unskilled paid workforce, but societies obviously cannot continue unless a majority have children, while women’s traditional caring, domestic and emotional work still needs to be done. Here it seems that in societies where their traditional role is unsupported by affordable childcare and flexible employment arrangements, educated young women are increasingly disinclined to lose their economic independence or struggle to combine their career with a family, and are choosing not to have children, while those who do are increasingly stressed. 177
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The social and economic costs of workplace stress, population decline, the loss or under-utilisation of trained workers and the growing ‘care deficit’ mean that employers have a collective interest in providing more ‘family-friendly’ conditions of employment, and providing services, particularly childcare, for their employees. However, although some ‘good’ employers do provide such working conditions, others cannot afford the short-term costs, and they are likely to be undercut by less scrupulous or far-sighted competitors. State regulation of working conditions is therefore needed to force employers to act in their own long-term interests. As Marx said, “They grumble at the government whenever it restricts their freedom, and at the same time demand that the government prevent the inevitable results of this freedom” (quoted in Taylor, 2005, p 65). This means that the trend for Western welfare states to support employees with caring responsibilities, by providing or subsidising care services and/or providing ‘family-friendly’ workplace conditions, is partly driven by the needs of the economy, even when such measures are opposed by employers. In addition to the tensions between long- and short-term productive and (re)productive needs, the world today is facing a crisis as the shortterm logic of competitive capital accumulation takes no account of the longer-term environmental consequences of unrestricted growth, setting “capitalism against the planet” (Callinicos, 2003, p 21).Although capitalist enterprises have a collective interest in the reduction of climate-changing pollutants, they also have an immediate interest in cutting costs. Any significant reduction is therefore likely to require effective international agreements and regulatory controls; as with employment conditions, enterprises would eventually benefit from these controls, even though many oppose them as a restriction on economic freedom. More direct pressure for controls is of course coming from environmental groups. Some individuals are also attempting to ‘act local, think global’ by taking steps to reduce their own ‘carbon footprint’ or rejecting the stresses caused by the dominant ‘work and spend’ time culture by deliberately ‘downshifting’.While this is clearly not an option for those on or near the poverty line and the pressures to high consumption are not easily overcome, Meiksins and Whalley (2002) argue that such individuals can act as role models and add moral force to more abstract arguments. Their ideas are also finding more collective expression and support. For example, Juliet Schor, discussed in Chapter Three, is a co-founder of New American Dream, an organisation that “helps Americans consume responsibly to protect the environment, enhance quality of life, and promote social justice” 178
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(www.newdream.org), and the international Slow Movement seeks to reject the fast pace of modern life and enable people to reconnect with “the natural world and rhythms around us” (www.slowmovement. com/). In a parallel movement, LETS (local exchange trading schemes) and time banks, through which people can trade skills and time rather than money, are emerging as a significant new form of cooperative organisation on a national and international scale (www.letslinkuk. net; www.timebank.org.uk). These developments all challenge the ‘time is money’ culture, while more widespread public concern about pollution and climate change suggests at least a partial shift towards a more future-oriented temporal perspective. Politicians are responding to this, even in the US, and there is increasing recognition that, because most individuals are unlikely to prioritise the environment over their immediate convenience and welfare, any large-scale change in behaviour will require government action to provide concrete incentives and penalties (such as taxes on fuel and flying, and subsidies for energy-efficient cars or home insulation). There are similar signs that shifts in public opinion are in advance of workplace legislation in many nations, and that politicians are responding to popular concerns. In the UK, for example, a majority of citizens say that better support for working carers, particularly fathers, is a priority, and that party policies on this would influence their vote (EOC, 2006b). Electoral considerations may therefore have influenced the introduction of paternity leave (initially unpaid, now paid) by Labour governments since 1997 and helped Tony Blair decide to take two weeks’ paternity leave during his time as Prime Minister, an example followed by the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown. Today, even the Conservative Part supports ‘family-friendly’ working in principle, although the party leader, David Cameron (who has also taken paternity leave), appears to think this can be achieved through exhortation rather than legislation. Unsurprisingly, as women have been most adversely affected by traditional working time arrangements, it is women who have pushed most strongly for reform.The recent rise in women’s political representation and high-level employment means that their views are increasingly being heard during policy-making processes, producing an important source of pressure for change. Many women politicians also have links with feminist groups, including well-established organisations such as the Fawcett Society in the UK and the National Organization for Women in the US, which are now prioritising issues around work and time. Such groups are increasingly moving beyond an earlier focus
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on women’s needs, to challenge men’s time use and the overall time culture of the workplace. Although men too suffer if there is a ‘care deficit’ in society and some have long supported feminist campaigns, it is only in Scandinavia that the need to change men’s behaviour has been widely recognised. However, some are now organising independently in groups such as Fathers Direct (www.fathersdirect.com) to demand their own right to time to care. Men are now also increasingly working with women in trade unions, which in many countries now treat ‘work–life balance’ as an important issue relevant to men as well as women. For example, the ‘It’s About Time’ campaign by the Trades Union Congress in the UK “aims to put long hours and work/life balance at the top of the workplace agenda”, and looks beyond ‘family-friendly concerns’ to the need to enable workers to find time for learning or taking part in community life (www.tuc.org.uk/work_life/). Taken together, the economic, social, attitudinal, political and legislative developments discussed in this section constitute a powerful impetus to further change, and provide a new starting-point from which to challenge both the time culture of the workplace in general, and men’s long working hours in particular.They have generally gone further in Europe and the UK than in the US. Nevertheless, calls for change are growing even in the US, with a majority saying they want the government to do more to support working families and to enable fathers to play a more active family role.As Gornick and Meyers (2003) argue, such demands are strengthened by European legislation, that shows that conditions of employment that seem entirely utopian in the US are standard elsewhere.
Strategies for change Any feminist strategy for contesting the ways that time is used, understood and rewarded needs to start by recognising that that there is no one strategy, for different situations require different responses, different women have different needs, and no one approach can unlock the complex set of mutually reinforcing ideas and practices that sustain gendered inequalities. Beyond this, political possibilities in all Western societies remain constrained by interconnected patterns of cultural and material power and privilege that systematically privilege men as a group in both public and private life, and that depend on the exploitation of most people’s productive and/or (re)productive labour. Any proposals that threaten to disrupt these patterns are likely to face strong opposition. Nevertheless, these patterns and the interests 180
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to which they give rise are not fixed and uniform, but fluid, often contradictory, and inherently vulnerable. One consequence is that, although states generally serve dominant interests and are not neutral tools that can be used to achieve feminist ends in any straightforward way, they are never static or monolithically oppressive instruments of class or patriarchal oppression. Recognising that existing structures and institutions provide opportunities as well as obstacles, the rest of this section outlines some possible strategies, moving from general methods to consideration of more specific policy proposals. As long as women’s political representation remains low, increasing this will remain a key aim of many feminist groups. It will not, however, be an end in itself, and autonomous feminist organisations will continue to play a key role ‘in and against’ the state when numbers increase (see Chapter Six). Feminist organisations will not only help guard against the potentially corrupting and deradicalising effects of power, but they will also provide a resource and line of communication for women politicians, linking them to grass-roots activists and ‘ordinary women’. Although this book has argued that many temporal interests are widely shared among women, it also recognises significant differences and sources of conflict and argues that the white middle-class women who have so far had most political success may have little access to the experiences and insights of less privileged and more marginalised groups. It is therefore important to extend the range of women represented and to maintain links with local groups, not only as an issue of social justice, but also for the development of effective and workable policies. In many nations, trade unions will be an obvious site of feminist activity. As Neal Lawson says, “We don’t have to believe a class war is being fought to recognise that the interests of labour and capital can and will come into conflict and that collective organisation is a prerequisite of ensuring individual workers’ rights” (2006, p 4). Although historically unions have often equated the rights of ‘workers’ with the rights of male workers, they have become much more open to feminist concerns in recent years, and they constitute a key forum within which men and women can both identify common interests and express solidarity with those challenging specific forms of oppression. Because today’s labour market is increasingly global, defending and developing good workplace practices and legislation logically involves working to extend these internationally “[not only] in the name of solidarity, but also enlightened self-interest” (Lawson, 2006, p 5), as poor terms of employment elsewhere are likely to create a downwards pressure on pay and conditions. 181
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The development of the internet means that not only well-resourced unions but also small feminist groups have unprecedented opportunities for developing international links, dialogues and strategies (see Chapter Six). These are already feeding into transnational forums and supranational decision-making bodies around the European Union and the United Nations. Specifically feminist concerns, including global ‘care chains’, are also being articulated within global anti-capitalist movements; as discussed earlier in this chapter, the environmental campaigns in which many women are also involved inevitably question the dominant time-frame of global capitalism. While global problems cannot be addressed by individual nations in isolation from the international community, domestic initiatives and policies also have their own internal momentum and consequences. As argued throughout this book,‘history matters’, and policies that are successful in one society will be resisted in another, or have counterproductive effects. Most obviously, the kind of collective support for caring work that is provided in the Nordic nations is dependent on a long-standing social democratic tradition based in ideals of equality and solidarity, a belief that the state can be used to achieve these goals, and a commitment to generous and universal welfare provision funded through taxation. This tradition includes a long history of collective childcare and leave provision. In contrast, the dominant ideology in the US opposes state intervention, stressing individual effort and self-reliance rather than collective responsibility, and it “offers less governmental support for childcare than does any other industrialized nation” (Williams, 2000, p 49). Nevertheless, this book has also argued that institutions and ideologies are never uniform or static, so that a task for feminists is to recognise pressure points and vulnerabilities and the possibilities of change that these offer. The earlier part of this section attempted to do this. The recognition that we are ‘starting from here’ also indicates that, rather than trying to contest a hostile political ideology head on, feminists should seek to identify commonalities and points of contact that could be built on to develop ‘discursive bridges’ (Purkis, 2004) between feminists and other groups. For example, Gornick and Meyers argue that there have been three “overlapping but surprisingly distinct conversations about work and family life in the United States”. They argue that widespread concern about the well-being of children and the problems facing women workers can be brought into dialogue with feminist concern about gender inequalities in the home, so that different constituencies can agree on “an end vision that honors the importance of both earning and caring, both child well-being and gender equality”, 182
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and that would establish the principles that could eventually make a dual-earner, dual-carer society possible. More specifically, they say that “an expanded role for the US government can be justified both as an investment in the healthy development of children and as a means for more equitable sharing of the costs of caregiving” (2003, pp 2, 17). Similarly,White (2003) argues that existing beliefs in freedom and selfdevelopment can be used as a point of contact from which to develop his own idea of ‘reciprocity’ and the related belief that parenting should be supported as a form of civic labour (a view he appears to have reached independently from any engagement with feminist thought). A related tactic is suggested by Joan Williams (2000). Using the widely respected language of equal rights and opportunities, she argues that the marginalisation of mothers in an employment market that requires extensive overtime is a form of unlawful sex discrimination, and that “[w]hat we need is not a mommy track, but market work restructured to reflect the legitimate claims of family life … [and] a new legal theory that defines the current structuring of market work as discrimination against women” (2000, p 3). While their policies vary, it is clear that the Nordic states are generally much closer to the feminist uchronia advocated in this chapter than anywhere else in the world, and it could seem that feminists there are in the privileged position of fine-tuning a care-supporting and egalitarian society that others can only dream of. However, significant problems remain and, as discussed in Chapters Six and Nine earlier, some apparently progressive policies are having some unintended results. As immigration increases, universalistic policies that provide high benefits to all citizens are also becoming harder to maintain. In developing concrete policy proposals, or even a more distant ‘wish list’, feminists in all societies have to confront the problem of how to meet women’s immediate needs without treating them as a ‘special case’, and how to support and reward the work they have traditionally done, without assuming or confirming their responsibility for it. For example, many women have benefited from policies that allow them to take maternity leave without forfeiting their job, but have found that their career prospects have suffered, while employers may be reluctant to take on workers who are likely to take time out. It is also important to understand that policies can operate at a number of levels, and that they can have both short- and long-term effects as changes in attitudes, the law and individual behaviour interact. For example, reserving a period of paid parental leave for men not only provides practical support for families, it also redefines traditional understandings of fatherhood and masculinity while helping to ensure that caring time, and the values 183
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and perceptions associated with it, is not exclusively ‘women’s time’. As fathers ‘do gender’ in non-traditional ways, it may also encourage more egalitarian attitudes among the children cared for, generating a complex shift in gendered roles, identities and time norms. Bearing these considerations in mind, most feminists are likely to find the following proposals relatively unproblematic in principle, although some are clearly far more achievable in some societies than others. • •
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Conditions of part-time employment should be good, and such employment should be treated as normal for both men and women. All workers should be entitled to at least four weeks’ paid vacation leave, and working hours should be restricted to a maximum of 48 hours a week, with a view to further reduction. Current European Union regulations on this should be extended and enforced. Employees should not normally be expected to work late without notice. Parental leave programmes should follow the Icelandic model, in which three months of the nine months’ leave is reserved for men, and three for women. Employment policies and pension entitlements should be based on the assumption that workers will normally want to work short hours or to take leave at various points in their life.This will include study leave and time for civic and voluntary activities, as well as family responsibilities. Paid care workers will be treated as professionals, with a workload that recognises that good quality care cannot be delivered quickly, but involves the time-consuming development of human relationships. This means that the provision of care will not be profitable, but will have to be provided or subsidised as a public service. Good quality, affordable childcare will be provided for those who want it. While this will be flexible, it will not assume or facilitate long-hours working by parents. The state will support a right to both give and receive good quality care, so that neither care givers or receivers are forced into poverty and/or personal dependency. As part of this, it will recognise that some carers can be helped into the workplace, and that this will not always be appropriate. A high level minimum wage would do much to reduce the gender pay gap. Paid care workers in particular would immediately benefit from this.
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•
•
Central and local authorities need to do some ‘joined-up thinking’ around school hours, working hours, the opening times of government businesses, shops, banks and leisure facilities and the timing of public meetings. Time-use studies should continue to be conducted at regular intervals as a way of drawing attention to the value of unpaid work and monitoring changes in its distribution. However, their limitations would be fully recognised (see Chapter Nine).
These policy proposals are not original; they can only nibble at the edges of the problems identified in this book and they clearly leave many tensions unresolved. However, they represent an attempt at linking strategic and practical interests that challenge the normality of men’s life patterns, the value attached to their activities and the ways in which time is divided between paid work, unpaid work, civic activities, leisure and consumption.
Concluding observations This book has been underpinned by two linked arguments: that the ways in which time is used, valued and understood in contemporary capitalist societies are central to the maintenance of gender inequalities in public and private life, and that men as well as women are damaged in the process. As the productive and (re)productive needs of society come increasingly into conflict and the time culture of the former is subsumed ever more into that of the latter, the damaging effects of current practices are becoming clearer. The stress and sense of ‘time famine’, of always being rushed and ‘harried’ in a long-hours/high-spending culture, is, however, not an inevitable feature of society, but one that can be challenged and changed. To do this, we need to reassert the value of time that cannot be measured by the clock, the inescapability of natural physical rhythms and the value of human relationships. The cumulative nature of the pressures and tensions facing us today means that we may indeed be approaching some kind of critical juncture. If so, now may be a time for changing time.
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214
Index
Index 1984 (Orwell) 108
A
active citizenship 37-8 Adam, Barbara 26, 30, 33, 143, 157 male time/female time dualism 139-40 multiplicity of time cultures 28-9, 100-1 agency 12, 14-16, 32, 47, 106, 108, 109, 118 Algeria 27, 31 Andersen, Margaret 60 Andersen, R. 166 Anderson, Bridget 73 anthropology 24-5 Arber, S. 160 Argentina 94 Astell, Mary 105 Australia 161, 162, 164
B
Baden, Sally 63 Balbo, Laura 133 Bangladesh 32 Bartowski, Frances 102 Basso, Pietro 46, 47 Baxter, J. 82 Beijing World Conference on Women 63, 64, 69, 94, 153 Bianchi, S. 155, 162, 163, 164, 166 biology 28, 51-2, 53, 59, 122-9, 140 Bittman, Michael 115, 161, 163, 164-5 black feminism 54-5, 56, 62 Blair, Tony 179 Bluedorn, Allen 29 Bonney, Norman 154-5 Bourdieu, Pierre 27 breastfeeding 129 Brines, Julie 114 Brown, Gordon 179 Brown, Wendy 62 Bruning, Gwennaele 88 Bubeck, Diemut 79 Bunting, Madeleine 33 Butler, Judith 57, 60-1, 113 Buxton, Jayne 147
C
Cameron, David 179 Canada 93 capitalism 47
clock and process time 130 and environment 178 free time as scarce resource 35-8 from traditional to modern time 25 individual time 134 and long working hours 43-7 Marx 11-12 and patriarchy 61 temporal perspectives 174 time culture 175-6 and women’s time 138-42 working time and leisure time 27-8 capitalist time see clock time care, caring 125, 146-7 care deficit 1, 72, 178, 190 care givers and receivers 72 clock and process time 31, 130-4 differences among women 72, 73 Fraser’s thought experiment 81-2 global care chains 55, 182 individual and relational time 53, 134-6 linear and cyclical time 136-8 Marxism 79-81 men as care givers 53-4, 90, 91, 129, 162 men as care receivers 65, 68, 77, 134 social capital 75-6 social importance 76-7 state support for 3, 93, 96, 99-100, 172 in time-use studies 156-7, 158-60 uchronia 171, 172-3 value 68-9, 72, 77, 131-2, 160, 162-3, 176 and women’s time 1-2, 53, 70-1, 129-38 women’s time poverty 145-8 see also childcare; paid care Carrusco, C. 139 Casey, Bernard 159 Changing Times (Gershuny) 40-1 Cheaper by the Dozen (Gilbreth and Carey) 132-3 childbirth 127-9 childcare social capital 75-6 social investment state 42-3 strategies for change 184 in time-use studies 158-9, 160-1, 162-3 Christianity 18-19, 27 215
Gender and the politics of time citizenship 16, 73-4, 147 active 37-8 public and private 75-7 rights and responsibilities 77-8 women’s exclusion from 64 women’s lack of time 74-5, 166 class and free time 38 gender and race 54-5, 62, 81 Marxism 11-12, 81 and resistance 32, 47, 181 social time 24 and time poverty 148, 165 welfare regimes 16 clock time 26, 28, 143 and caring 70, 130-4 power and control 30-2 resisting 32-4 Cohn, Norman 19 Collins, Patricia Hill 53, 62 colonialism 31, 32-3 Commercialization of Intimate Life,The (Hochschild) 70 Communist Manifesto (Marx) 174 Connell, Robert 86 Conservative Party 179 consumerism 44, 45, 174 control 30-2, 53, 60, 100, 101, 108 Coole, Diana 107 Coser, Lewis 24 Coser, Rose 24 Cowman, Krista 107 Cox, Robert 17 Craig, Lyn 162-3 Cronos 29 Croucher, S. 93 Cuban Family Code 39 cyclical time 26-7, 32, 67, 101, 122-4, 125, 128, 136-8
D
Daly, Mary 88 Davies, Karen 131-2, 137, 139, 140, 141 Day of Judgement 18, 19, 175 de Beauvoir, Simone 52 de Pizan, Christine 106 democracy 37-8 Denmark 68, 89, 165 Dermott, Esther 155 dichotomous thought 57-9, 71, 101, 118 Dietz, Mary 77 domestic work activism 94 differences among women 71-3, 148, 150
216
gender performance 114-15 linear and cyclical time 137 Marxism 79-80, 111 men 39, 52, 82, 114, 151-2, 154, 156, 162, 165-6 path dependence 116-17 and political activity 68, 74-5, 77 in time-use studies 69, 153, 154, 161, 162-3 welfare regimes 39-40, 88, 90 women 1-2 women’s time poverty 145-6 Duffy, Mignon 73 Durkheim, Emile 23 Dylan, Bob 31
E
Ehrenreich, B. 54 Engels, Friedrich 109 Enlightenment 18, 19, 103-4, 138 environment 178-9 Epstein, Cynthia 114-15 Equal Opportunities Commission 2 Ermarth, Elizabeth 126 Esping-Andersen, Gosta 16-17, 41, 87-8 ethic of care 53, 76-7, 79, 131 ethnic conflict 64, 174 ethnic disadvantage 150 ethnic groups 54-5 Evans-Pritchard, E. 24 Everingham, Christine 133-4, 157
F
factories 25, 26 Families that Work (Gornick and Meyers) 103 family leave 89, 141 see also parental leave family-friendly employment 33, 46, 69, 90, 93, 129, 178, 179 fathers childcare 91, 151, 162, 165-6, 180, 183-4 employment 41, 61, 86, 87, 93, 149, 155 Fathers Direct 180 Fawcett Society 179 female time see women’s time femininity 56 feminism 52-3 and citizenship 73-8 and dichotomous thought 57-9 and history 104-8 and justice 78-82 locating theories in time 103-4
Index and mainstream temporal perspectives 109-18 and patriarchy 60-1 public/private distinction 67-8 and state 95-6 time and temporality 100-2 uchronia 169-73 utopian thought 102-3 welfare states 83-91 women and time use 145-52 feminist standpoint theory 52-3, 55 Finland 68, 84, 90 Firestone, Shulamith 102-3 Fitzpatrick, Tony 32, 36, 37, 42, 43-4 flexible employment 33, 78, 85, 88, 89, 111, 148, 176 Forman, Frieda 121, 125 Foucault, M. 135 Fox, Meg 128 France 68, 165 Frankenberg, Ronald 31 Franklin, Benjamin 25 Franks, S. 146 Fraser, Nancy 81-2, 102, 103, 172 free time 4, 5, 6, 35-8, 79, 136, 145 capitalist societies 27-8, 35-7 as political resource 37-8 in time-use studies 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 159, 163-5 women’s lack of 2, 38, 74-5, 136, 1458, 155, 157, 164 future 18, 20-1, 47, 99-100 in capitalist societies 26-7 feminism 100-2 Fraser’s thought experiment 81-2 Marx and Giddens 11, 12, 15, 80 planning for 174-5 postmodern times 28-9 traditional societies 24, 28 uchronia 170 welfare policies 42-3
G
gender 52 doing gender 57, 61, 112-16 gender division of labour 39, 61-2, 80, 109-12, 151, 156, 165 gendered time norms 20, 57, 61, 114, 117 postmodernism 56-7 and welfare states 86-7 gender performance 60-1, 113-15, 158 Germany 68, 86 Gershuny, Jonathan 40-1, 43, 44, 45, 155-6, 165
busyness 163 gender convergence 154 sleeping 160 time diaries 157-8 time-use regimes 40-1, 43 Gerson, K. 163 Giddens, Anthony 12-13, 15, 17, 20, 32, 57 and doing gender through time 57, 112-16 working time and leisure time 28 Gilbreth, Frank 132-3 Gilligan, Carol 53, 136 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 102 globalisation 31, 32, 46, 47 welfare states and time 93-5, 96 Glucksmann, Miriam 71-2 Goetz, Anne 63 Goodin, R. 41 Gornick, Janet 103, 149, 180, 182-3 Goudsblom, J. 23, 29 Greenhouse, Susan 28, 32, 101 Greenwich Mean Time 31 Griffiths, Jay 123 Grosz, Elizabeth 101-2
H
Hakim, Catherine 151 Hall, Edward 24-5, 130 Harman, Harriet 93 harriedness 147, 185 Harvey, Andrew 157 Hay, Colin 10 Heidegger, Martin 125, 170 Held,Virginia 53 Herd, Pamela 76 Herland (Gilman) 102 Hewitt, Patricia 93 Himmelweit, S. 69 Hird, M. 59 Hislop, J. 160 historical institutionalism 14 history 10-11, 15-16, 118 difference and diversity 107 and feminism 104-5, 108 as inspiration 106-7 Marx and Giddens on 11-13, 17-18, 20, 109-12 and oppression of women 105-6 path dependency 13-14 in uchronia 170 Hochschild, Arlie 38, 54, 70, 71, 146, 154, 155 Holmes, M. 67 housework see domestic work
217
Gender and the politics of time Hughes, Christina 101, 138
I
I Don’t Know How She Does It (Pearson) 148 Iceland 90, 91, 166 `If Men Could Menstruate’ (Steinem) 123 imperialism 31-2 individual time 134-6 International Wages for Housework Campaign 94 International Women Count Network 94 Italy 40, 86
J
Jackson, Louise 107 Jackson, Stevi 60 Jacobs, J. 163 Jamieson, Lynn 113 justice 35-6, 78-81 Justice, Gender and the Family (Okin) 78-9
K
Kabyle 31 Kahn, Robbie 128, 129 Kantola, Johanna 84 Karvonen, L. 91 Kelly, Ruth 93 Kershaw, Paul 114, 116 Knijn, Trudi 146 Kristeva, Julie 125-7, 128
L
Labour Party 91, 92-3, 179 lactation 129 Lawson, Neal 181 Leccardi, Carmen 136, 141 leisure time see free time LETS (local exchange trading schemes) 179 Levitas, Ruth 18, 19, 102 Lewis, Jane 88 life course regimes 39 linear time 31-2, 56, 59, 101, 124, 125, 126, 136-8 Lister, Ruth 64, 74, 75, 77, 88, 150 Litt, J. 72, 93 lone parents leisure time 164-5 liberal welfare regimes 41-2 Nordic nations 150 time pressures 150, 163, 164 UK 150 218
US 69, 86-7, 92, 176 Lorber, J. 61 Lowndes,Vivien 76
M
Mackay, Fiona 76 McLaughlin, Janet 64 Malinowski, B. 24 Mansbridge, Jane 76 Marshall, T.H. 73 Martin, Emily 123 Marx, Karl capitalism 174 commodified labour 26, 27-8, 70 former slaves 27, 31 and history 11-12, 15, 17-18, 20, 104 human history and (re)production 109-12 profit 46 state regulation 178 work and leisure 36-7, 79 masculinity 56 maternity leave 72-3, 89, 91, 116-17, 129, 183 see also parental leave Mattingly, M. 164 Mayordomo, M. 139 Meiksins, Peter 45, 178 men as care givers 53-4, 90, 91, 129, 162 as care receivers 65, 68, 77, 134 civic responsibilities 77 domestic work 137, 154, 162, 165-6 pressing for change 180 public and private sphere 68 relationship with time 51-4 time use 151-2, 155, 176 and welfare states 39, 86-91 see also domestic work, men men’s time 139-40 menstruation 51, 52, 59, 123-4, 173 Merton, R. 23 Meyer, Madonna 76 Meyers, Marcia 103, 149, 180, 182-3 minimum wage 184 Mink, Gwendoline 92 Mitchell, Hannah 2 modern time 25-8 Moen, P. 146 Molyneux, Maxine 62 monochronic time 24-5, 130 mother wars 54 mothers 53, 77 activism 75, 166 childbirth and lactation 127-9
Index clock and process time 130-4 and employment 61, 72-3, 86-7, 93, 147-8, 154, 155, 183 individual and relational time 135-6 lone 69, 86-7, 92, 150-1, 164-5, 176 multi-tasking 162-3 time pressures 126, 146, 147, 163 multi-tasking 52, 137,163, 167
N
Natalier, Kristin 115 National Organization for Women 96, 179 Negrey, C. 138 Netherlands 68, 86 New American Dream 178 Newton, Isaac 26, 29 Nordholt, H. 32 Nordic nations 3, 6, 182, 183 lone parents 150 temporal perspectives 174 welfare policies 86, 89-91, 152, 165 welfare state regime 16, 17 see also Denmark; Finland; Iceland; Norway; Sweden North, Douglas 13 Norway 68, 90, 166 Nowotny, Helga 29, 101, 102 Nuer 24
O
O’Brien, Mary 124-5 Odih, Pamela 56, 135-6, 140, 141 Okin, Susan 78-9 Orwell, George 108 Overspent American,The (Schor) 44, 45 overwork culture 33 Overworked American,The (Schor) 38, 45 Owen, Robert 79
P
paid care 69, 70-1, 134, 141, 149, 175, 176, 184 paid work 68 differences among women 71-3 in time-use studies 154-5 see also working hours parental leave 52, 86, 87, 115-16, 179, 183-4 feminist campaigns 61, 63 Nordic nations 89-90, 91 see also family leave; maternity leave; paternity leave part-time employment 61, 63, 149, 184 Pascall, Gillian 88
paternity leave 86, 91, 148, 166, 179 see also parental leave path dependence 13-15, 16, 20, 95, 96, 104 and gender 116-18 patriarchy 60-1, 105, 106 and women’s time 138-42 Pearson, Allison 148 Phillips, A. 74 Piercy, Marge 102-3 Pierson, Paul and gendered paths and junctures in time 116-18 path dependence 13-15, 17, 20 welfare policies 16, 17 Plantenga, Janneke 88 Platform for Action 64-5, 69 Pocock, Robert 18 political citizenship 77 political engagement 77, 91-3, 150, 153, 181 Politics in Time (Pierson) 13-14 polychronic time 25, 130, 137 postmodern time 28-30 postmodernism 29 and history 108 linear and cyclical time 138 sex and gender 56-7 poststructuralism 56 power 30-2, 101, 140 Giddens 12 Pierson 14 present 9, 10, 20 capitalism 26, 29 feminism 100-1 Marx 15 welfare policies 42-3 private sphere 67-8 citizenship 74 cyclical time 136-7 unpaid work 68-9 process time 130-4 (re)production 3, 15, 20, 99, 110-12, 117, 124, 126, 177, 178, 180, 185 Prokhovnik, Raia 58, 76 Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,The (Weber) 27 protestant theology 27 public sphere 67-8 citizenship 74 gender inequalities 59-60 linear time 136 paid work 68 state regulation of time 39 public/private distinction 67-8
219
Gender and the politics of time citizenship 73-8 justice and time 78-82 Putnam, Robert 38, 159
R
race 54-5 Rai, Shirin 85 Rake, Katherine 88 Rampazi, Marita 136 Rawls, John 36, 37, 78, 173 Rebick, Judy 93 relational time 53, 134-6, 157 reproduction 124-7 (re)production 3, 15, 20, 99, 110-12, 117, 124, 126, 177, 178, 180, 185 resistance 141-2 clock time 30, 32-4 Riley, Denise 63 Rivers, Joan 137 Roberts, Ken 157 Roehling, P. 146 Roth, Julius 24 Ruddick, Sarah 53, 133 Ruston, D. 164
S
Scandinavia see Nordic nations Schendel, Willem 32-3 Schor, Juliet 38, 44, 45, 46, 178 Segal, Lynne 61, 106 Selle, P. 91 sex 52, 56 Silva, Elizabeth 140 Sirianni, C. 138 sisterhood 54, 63 Skevik, A. 147 sleeping 160 Slow Movement 179 Smith, Adam 27 social capital 69, 75-6, 150, 153, 167 social citizenship 77 social investment state 42-3, 137 social reproduction 110 socialism 17-18, 36, 79-81, 172 sociology 23-4 solidarity 63-4, 66, 181-2 in difference 4, 51, 64, 94, 96, 108 Sorokin, P. 23 Southerton, Dale 147 Spain 39, 86 Spender, Dale 105 Squires, Judith 62-3 Starkey, Ken 33 states see welfare states Steinem, Gloria 123
220
strategic sisterhood 63 structuration 12-13, 15, 20, 32, 57, 112-16 Sullivan, Oriel 115, 154, 155-6, 158, 165 Sweden parental leave 114, 166 policy effects 165, 166 welfare system 86, 89, 90 women care workers 131-2 women’s political representation 91 women’s time poverty 147
T
taxation 86 Taylor, Frederick 26 temporal regimes 42-3, 88 Thelan, K. 14 Theory of Justice, A (Rawls) 36 Thompson, D. 60, 132 Thompson, Edward 27, 30, 33, 130, 132, 142 Thompson, William 79 Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism,The (Esping-Andersen) 16 Thrift, Nigel 27, 30-1, 33 time 9-10 agency and strategies for political change 14-16 and citizen’s rights and responsibilities 77-8 Fraser’s thought experiment 81-2 from modern to postmodern 28-30 from traditional to modern 25-8 justice 78-9 justice and socialism 79-81 Marx and Giddens 11-13 path dependence 13-14 political importance 1-3 political theory and political movements 17-19 power and control 30-2 recent feminist thought 100-2 social functions 23-5 uchronia 169-73 utopian thought 102 and welfare regimes 87-91 welfare states and globalisation 93-5 women and political representation 91-3 women’s active citizenship 74-5 women’s and men’s experiences 51-4 see also clock time; cyclical time; free time; individual time; linear time; process time; relational time; women’s time
Index time banks 179 time culture from modern to postmodern times 28-30 from traditional to modern time 25-8 power and control 30-2 the time(s) we’ve got 175-6 uchronia 171 see also men’s time; women’s time time poverty 74-5, 145-8, 165, 167, 185 lone parents 150, 163, 164 see also women’s free time, lack of time use differences among women 148-51 feminist claims 145-52 gender performance 113-14 the time(s) we’ve got 176-7 uchronia 172-3 and welfare policies 39-42 women’s time poverty 145-8 time-use diaries 152, 156, 157-8, 161 time-use studies 152-3, 185 findings 154-6 male worldview 53 political consequences and conclusions 166-7 practical issues 158-60 recent developments and results 160-6 underlying issues 156-8 unpaid work 69-70 Toynbee, Polly 43 trade unions 33, 45, 180, 181 Transformation of Intimacy,The (Giddens) 112 transversal politics 64 Tronto, Joan 100, 105-6
U
uchronia 102, 169 organising and rewarding time use 172-3 temporal perspectives 170-1 time culture 171 United Nations World Conference on Women 63, 64, 69, 94, 153 unpaid work 37, 68 in time-use studies 69-70, 153, 154, 158-60 see also care, caring; domestic work US caring work 69, 149, 175 childcare 94, 182, 183 Day of Judgement 19 downshifting 45
family-unfriendly employment 166, 180 lack of temporal depth 29 lone mothers 150, 176 long working hours 38, 44, 46, 146 men and domestic work 114, 165-6 mother wars 54 policy effects 165-6 television viewing 38, 159 time cultures 24, 25, 31, 130 time-use studies 153, 155-6, 161, 162, 163, 164 welfare system 16, 17, 41, 86-7, 89, 96, 152, 173, 175 women’s personal income 68 women’s political representation 91-2, 93 women’s time pressures 167 utopian thought 20-1, 102-3
V
vacation leave 87, 184 Vargas,V. 93 Venezuela 94
W
Wajcman, Judy 161, 164 Walby, Sylvia 106 Ward, L. 80 Warren, T. 163-4 Watts, Carol 127 Weber, Max 25, 27 welfare states feminist perspectives 83-7, 95-6 globalisation and time 93-5 policy effects 165-6 sources of pressure and signs of change 177-80 strategies for change 180-5 temporal perspectives 174-5 time culture(s) 175-6 time use organisation and reward 176-7 time use and temporal regimes 39-43 utopian thought 103 welfare regimes 16-17 welfare regimes, feminism and time 87-91 Western, M. 82 Weston, Kath 113 Whalley, Peter 45, 178 White, Stuart 17, 183 Wilde, Oscar 156 Williams, Joan 183
221
Gender and the politics of time Woman on the Edge of Time (Piercy) 102-3 women childcare 162-3 citizenship 64, 73-8, 166 differences among 71-3, 148-51 from sisterhood to solidarity 62-5 and history 104-8 inequalities 59-60, 65-6 leisure time 38, 163, 164-5 Marx 109-12 and men 51-4, 56-7 and patriarchy 60-1 political representation 91-3 pressing for change 179-80 public and private sphere 67-8 time poverty 74-5, 145-8, 167 time use 155, 176-7 unpaid work 1-2, 68-9 and welfare regimes 86-91 welfare states, globalisation and time 93-5 see also feminism women’s time 121-2, 142-3, 175-6 and biology 122-9 and caring 129-38 childbirth and lactation 127-9 and clock time 32 and creation of life 124-7 in patriarchal capitalist societies 138-42 uchronia 171 Women’s Time (Kristeva) 125-7 work see paid work; unpaid work working hours and capitalist economy 27-8, 43-7 control 31 differences among women 148-50 state policies 85 strategies for change 184 world time 31
Y
Young, I. 15 Yuval-Davis, Nira 64
Z
Zimmerman, M. 72, 93
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