The lot of women has clearly improved since they now perform labour in the economy, but society is still riven by an unspoken silent war in which women’s bodies are the possession of those who have the final word, the upper hand.
The prolonged historical experience of women did not ease radically until the modern era despite all individual instances of women asserting freedom and their high personal achievement, even becoming accomplished rulers. Their predicament may have varied in time and space, but the condition of women remained essentially similar everywhere.
The first stirrings occurred in the 18th and 19th centuries with the issue of women’s education surfacing and an attempt to affirm their humanity, if not equality. It was really only a hundred years ago that the issue of civil rights and the demand for political participation arose. It might be hazarded that the modern post-WWII feminist movement, gaining major rights and personal freedoms in the 1960s and beyond, is rooted in this earlier struggle for basic political and human rights, but they are dissimilar as well owing to a radically changed socio-economic context. This latter situation is amenable to a materialist analysis, with due homage to a Marxist tradition and perhaps the astringent analysis of the French doyenne of orthodoxy, Louis Althusser.
Ultimately, the direction in which women and society as a whole were headed was due to the development of the modern capitalist economy. The global convergence of the economic dynamics of capitalism is remarkable though a perfectly predictable outcome. It was the two world wars of the 20th century that required the participation of women in the work force on a massive scale, as employment statistics from the 1950s indicate. Even as war and carnage engulfed vast civilian areas others remained in the rear to allow organised economic life and production for war, in which women played a pivotal role.
In the post-WWII period, the demand for labour in advanced economies remained high and the participation of women essential for economic growth despite the eventual entry into advanced economies of large numbers of immigrants. The issue of the demand for labour is more complex, but at any given point in time there has been a shortage of labour in modern advanced economies despite the existence of a level of apparent unemployment.
The issue of women’s competence in undertaking various forms of work has now been laid to rest though there are a few areas of manual work in which men may have greater proficiency owing to their physical attributes. Yet, in other vast areas of especially professional work, the evident diligence and patience of women workers are allowing them to dominate increasingly. Of course a wage-gap remains, though at the highest professional levels many women seem to lose interest in careers because the issue of family life and children is dictated by the constraints of the biological clock.
Discrimination at the level of boardrooms alone does not explain the withdrawal of women from the competitive arena of senior professionals. Of all the developments and raft of legislative intervention enacted to ensure a more level playing field, one technological advance was of paramount importance for the work participation of women in the workforce, which is birth control. Its development is clearly associated with the imperative of creating a reliable workforce and the resulting enabling of sexual freedom is an overrated incidental outcome.
Capitalism and markets have come to be regarded as an almost naturalistic phenomenon but they have innate and unavoidable internal contradictions that guarantee they will routinely experience serious setbacks and indeed threaten the very existence of society. On the one hand, competition is a supposed inherent feature of capitalism in markets though its modern evolution has been challenging that assumption.
But at the same time, capitalists need to cooperate with each other through a third party, the empowered legislative authority, to ensure the societal conditions of their own survival. This is a virtually insurmountable contradiction in the heart of capitalism, between a virtually Darwinian struggle between capitalists themselves in which legality is constantly subverted and the need to suspend it for collective survival. The predicament challenges the Enlightenment conviction of linearity and progress in history, dialectical or otherwise. This is where the biological reproduction of the species has collided with the imperatives of capitalism and its need for a growing labour force, increasingly composed of women.
No moral judgement is insinuated to point out the inevitable consequence of women in the labour force. The ideological and human argument in favour of it are compelling because without personal resources women will forever remain vulnerable to the caprices of men and unavoidably subaltern. Yet, the unintended consequence, though often an outcome welcomed by some feminist ideologues, is the collapse of family life as the principal mode of social organisation. What inevitably follows is a progressive decline in the birthrate as well.
An obvious answer to the problem might be quality child care which is pretty much unaffordable privately for most families in advanced economies. The cost of adequate provision by the state is also potentially very high. It may be estimated that a woman having three children would need to be out of the workforce for approximately a decade and the cost to family finances during her period of voluntary unemployment is in any case unsustainable in all contemporary advanced economies.
The significant cost of childcare cannot automatically be passed on to private enterprise through taxation in a globalised economy in which competitors abroad don’t incur it. The financial commitments that would be required are also very large. In any case, most women are apparently declining to bear children at the rate required for demographic stability. As a result, a demographic challenge is now overtaking many advanced countries and cannot be overcome at all by some, having reached a point of no return. The birthrate in the latter has already declined to a level in which the already anticipated level of future births is below replacement ratios. This is the contradiction between the imperatives of competitive survival of capitalism and the imperative necessity of collective action not to destroy the societal conditions for the survival of the economy itself.
It seems the world is heading towards a dénouement, in which capitalist advance is stalling in advanced economies though it may inadvertently mitigate the feared ecological checkmate as a result. But emerging economies will continue to advance until they also encounter comparable challenges of labour force participation and its wider societal consequences for family life and biological reproduction. There may be a respite because of technological advances like artificial intelligence but it is too early to predict exactly where it will lead humanity and what negative consequences may follow in their train. In a globalised competitive economic system, with irreducible political cleavages that prompt serious violence, collective measures to address common interests seem problematic. In the meantime, virtually all professional, highly gifted and successful women among my own contemporaries remain childless.
Yet, the cosmic tragedy remains that women are failing to achieve ontological autonomy and dignity despite the mitigation of their predicament in at least segments of society, in some parts of the world. Yet, the underlying ancient conceptualisation of women as war booty remains an underlying societal psyche though infinitely more nuanced and mostly less virulent. Such niceties collapse the moment there is an outbreak of conflict. It may be apposite to conclude this excursion into a difficult subject by resorting to the irrepressibly insightful intellectual malcontent, Michel Foucault’s observations on essential societal dynamics. He regarded war as the template for all social dynamics and politics, a continuation of war by other means. This is why the discourse on gender remains enigmatically contradictory.
The lot of women has clearly improved since they now perform labour in the economy, but society is still riven by an unspoken silent war in which women’s bodies are the possession of those who have the final word, the upper hand. Women inevitably gravitate towards the ascendant males of the species, but those who lose in this deadly game of possessing women become misogynistic incels, involuntary celibates.
(This is the second part of the two-part series. Click here to read the first part.)