Feminist Ethics and Social Policy
320
Feminist Ethics and Social Policy
320Paperback
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253211255 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/22/1997 |
| Series: | A Hypatia Book Series |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Read an Excerpt
Feminist Ethics and Social Policy
By Patrice DiQuinzio, Iris Marion Young
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 1997 Hypatia, Inc.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-21125-5
CHAPTER 1
Taking Dependency Seriously
The Family and Medical Leave Act Considered in Light of the Social Organization of Dependency Work and Gender Equality
EVA FEDER KITTAY
Dependents require care. They are unable either to survive or to thrive without attention to basic needs. Dependency needs range from the utter helplessness of a newborn infant to the incapacity of illness or frail old age. Dependency can be protracted (e.g., the extended dependency of early childhood) or brief (e.g., a temporary illness). An individual who is dependent may be able to function otherwise independently if only she is given needed assistance in limited areas, or she may be dependent in every aspect of her being, that is, utterly dependent. At some stage in the lives of each of us we face at least one period of utter dependency; and, with accident and disease forever a danger to the most independent of us, we are all, at least potentially, dependents. In our dependency, we not only require care, but require a sustaining relation with a care-giver who provides this care — for who does the caring is often as important as the care itself. These dependencies may be alleviated or aggravated by cultural practices and prejudices, but given the immutable facts of human development, disease, and decline, no culture that endures beyond one generation can secure itself against the claims of human dependency. While we are all dependent on some form of care or support, at least minimally, and although dependencies vary in degree, those that involve the survival or thriving of a person cut most deeply through the fiction of a social order presumably constituted by independent equal persons.
For the past two decades, feminists have argued that this fiction is parasitic on a tradition in which women attend to those dependencies. The labor has been seen as part of their familial obligations, obligations that trump all other obligations. Women who have been sufficiently wealthy or of sufficiently high status have sometimes had the option to confer the daily labor of dependency care to others — generally other women, mostly poor and ill-situated. Poor women who have had dependency responsibilities along with paid employment have often relied on female familial help. The gendered and privatized nature of dependency work has meant, first, that men have rarely shared these responsibilities — at least with the women of their own class — and, second, that the equitable distribution of dependency work, both among genders and among classes, has rarely been considered in the discussions of political and social justice which take as their starting point the public lives of men.
As women from many different classes increasingly participate in paid employment, adequate provisions for dependency care — child daycare, care for the elderly, time for family members to care for ill children, and so on — have surfaced as a major social concern. One response has been various kinds of social legislation that provide for leaves for parents with newborn children and for workers with family members who are ill or temporarily disabled. It is no secret that among industrialized nations, the United States, in spite of its early history of equal opportunity employment legislation, is especially primitive in its response to the concerns of dependency work. At long last, in 1993, a national piece of legislation, The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) (Public Law 103-3, February 5, 1993, 107 Stat., 6-29) provides for some parental leave and some leave time to take care of ailing family members. The act is a rare piece of social policy insofar as it recognizes a public responsibility for dependency care.
The standard liberal tradition that policymakers appeal to, most especially in the United States, but to varying degrees in other Western democracies as well, does not acknowledge the claims of dependency. The liberal political philosophy that supplies the idealizations and the utopian visions of which contemporary society is an (albeit poor) approximation have as little to say about dependency as do the policymakers. The result is particularly detrimental to women's aspirations to empowerment and equality. And this despite the pretensions to a gender egalitarianism in the rhetoric of Western democracies and in the presumed gender-blindness of liberal political philosophy.
This neglect suggests that the ability to incorporate dependency concerns serves as a criterion of adequacy for any theory of a just social order that purports to advocate gender equality. John Rawls's egalitarianism will serve as the case study for the adequacy of liberal philosophy in recognizing dependency concerns. Elsewhere I discuss the adequacy of Rawlsian contractual liberalism to dependency concerns in detail (Kittay, N.d.). Here I focus on the notion of social cooperation as a keystone of that theory. The egalitarian ideal informing and informed by the idea of social cooperation leaves no space for dependency concerns because it requires the idea of mutual reciprocity by cooperating members. But such reciprocity cannot always pertain to persons in a relation of dependency, that is, between dependent and care-giver. In order to include the fact of dependency and its impact on those who do dependency work, we are compelled to enlarge the concept of social cooperation to consider a form of social interaction that, without being exploitative or neglectful of the concerns of any party, does not presume equality in power and situation of all parties. In the FMLA, we find elements of the expanded notion of social cooperation I advocate. But it falls short of what the crisis requires, and its limitations can be attributed to its fundamental adherence to the liberal model that is being criticized. The inadequacy of the FMLA reveals the failure of liberal theories to conceptualize social cooperation in such a way that provides women with the gender equality they purport to endorse.
THE DEPENDENCY CRITIQUE OF LIBERAL EGALITARIANISM
Contemporary liberal egalitarians tend to regard gender as a morally irrelevant category and endorse the ideal of sexual equality. Feminists, however, have asked not only what it will take for women to achieve equality but have interrogated liberal understandings of the ideal itself. Some feminists have evoked both women's difference from men and women's differences among themselves. Their difference critiques of equality have pointed to the implicit use of men — more specifically white middle-class men — as the standard against which equality is assessed. These feminists have argued that this norm is unfit for incorporating all whose identity is marked by their gender, race, class, and other socially salient difference. Other feminists, elaborating a dominance critique, have underscored the power difference between men and women. Men's entrenched dominance over women means that gender-neutral, equality-based policies either fail to address issues that specifically affect women or merely preserve the relations of dominance that are already in effect. The considerations to which I have alluded in the introductory paragraphs of this essay form still another critique of dominant views of equality. This I call the dependency critique. The dependency critique maintains that by construing society as an association of equals, conceived as individuals with equal powers, equally situated in the competition for the benefits of social cooperation, one disregards the inevitable dependencies of the human condition, thereby neglecting the condition both of dependents and those who care for dependents (see Kittay, N.d.).
The dependency critique looks beyond women's socially prescribed differences from and subordination to men by considering the difficulties in assimilating women to the liberal ideal of equality. Its focus is on the circumstances under which the ideal was conceived and, more specifically, on the presumption that inevitable human dependencies and the consequences of such dependency for social organization are outside the political sphere for which the ideal of equality was articulated. Traditional formulations of liberal equality which originated as a challenge to feudalism posited an ideal for male heads of household. The feudalistic dependencies inherent in political hierarchy were targets of liberal thinkers such as Locke and Rousseau. Yet by positing equality for the male heads of households the dependencies of human development and frailty can remain unaddressed, at least as long as the household can accommodate these needs — an accommodation made possible by the privatized labor of women. The dependencies that cannot be banished by fiat are sustained by a social organization that creates a secondary dependence in those who care for dependents. They remain outside the society of equals insofar as they cannot function as the independent and autonomous agents of liberal theory who are presumed to be equally empowered and equally situated to engage in a fair competition for the benefits of social cooperation. For the woman who cares for dependents, the dependency worker, is not so situated — not as long as her responsibilities lie with another who cannot survive or thrive without her ministrations. Her attention is directed to another's needs; even her understanding of her own needs are enmeshed with the needs of a vulnerable other whose fundamental well-being is entrusted to her. And yet, within a liberal doctrine of society as a contractual agreement between equals, she should be an autonomous and independent individual. Liberalism constructed an equality for heads of households (wherein dependencies exist within the household and are attended to by women), and then counted the head of household as an individual who is independent and who can act on his own behalf. The equality for individuals overlays the equality for household heads, creating the illusion that dependencies do not exist and that the extension of equality to all, not only heads of households, is easily accomplished.
The illusion sustains a fiction that society is composed only of independent individuals who come together to form associations of social cooperation and that an egalitarian notion of justice is served by considering those individuals to be free and equal (that is, self-originating sources of claims) who are equally situated and equally empowered. But social cooperation is required not only by autonomous and independently functioning individuals for the purposes of mutually improving life chances, but first and foremost for the purpose of sustaining those who are not independently functioning, those who are not equally situated, and those who are unable to benefit from an equal empowerment. They are persons who are too young, too ill, too disabled, or too enfeebled by old age to care for themselves and to speak for themselves. These persons are our children, our parents, our siblings, our companions, and, at some points in life, ourselves. In states of dependency, we are unable to discharge the responsibilities and carry the burdens of the equal citizen; we have to rely on our caretaker to fulfill our basic needs; and we have no public or political voice except the voice of the dependency worker charged with articulating as well as meeting our needs. These dependencies are part of a network of interdependencies that form the central bonds of human social life. The care and attention to the vulnerabilities of dependent persons on the part of the dependency worker and the trust invested by the dependent in the dependency worker are among the most essential of social interactions.
When the fact of dependency and its social dimensions within the political conception of society is omitted, the secondary dependence of the dependency worker and the contribution of even the most dependent to the fabric of human relations is missed. The dependency worker acquires a dependence on others to supply the resources needed to sustain herself and the dependents who are in her charge. The dependency relation is a cooperative arrangement sustained by these resources, the labor of the dependency worker, and the responsiveness to care on the part of the cared-for. The dependency worker may be unpaid, caring for familial dependents, or paid, caring for dependents in an institutional or home setting. Whether her work is done for pay or as a familial obligation, the dependency worker attends to and voices the needs and desires of her charge in addition to, and sometimes at the expense of, her own; she assumes the same responsibilities other citizens have to each other and to themselves and assumes the added responsibility on behalf of one who cannot meet these responsibilities alone. In the distribution of burdens and benefits, most liberal egalitarian theories count each person as one. The incapacity of the dependent — to sustain her share of burdens and claim her share of benefits — and the obligation of the dependency worker — to assume the burdens of more than one and, at times, to put the benefits to her charge ahead of her own — ill-suits an economy of social cooperation presumed for an association of equals: that each will equally assume a share of the burdens and each will claim her own share of benefits. That women historically and customarily assume the role of dependency worker means that such an account of equality leaves out many women who retain their role and status as dependency workers. Because a redistribution of dependency work has too often exploited the situation of poor women, the dependency critique provides a framework for investigating theories and policies of equality across race and class as well as gender, and looks toward a more adequate understanding of gender equality.
PRESUPPOSITIONS OF RAWLSIAN EQUALITY
Rawls identifies society "as a fair system of social cooperation" and looks for "principles specifying the basic rights and liberties and the forms of equality most appropriate to those cooperating, once they are regarded as citizens, as free and equal persons" (Rawls 1993, 27).
Free and equal persons come together in the initial situation to choose principles of justice they can accept when they do not know their own status in life, their own conception of the good, their own particular dispositions and psychological propensities, and to what generation they belong. In Political Liberalism Rawls again characterizes the modeling of the equality of citizens: "To model this equality in the original position we say that the parties, as representatives of those who meet the condition, are symmetrically situated. This requirement is fair because in establishing fair terms of social cooperation (in the case of the basic structure) the only relevant feature of persons is their possessing the moral powers ... and their having the normal capacities to be a cooperating member of society over the course of a lifetime" (Rawls 1993, 79). He speaks of the "representation for equality" as "an easy matter" of situating the parties to the original position symmetrically to one another and describing them identically. And yet in this easy and seemingly transparent move, so much is presumed.
First, all citizens are idealized as "fully cooperating members of society ewer the course of a complete life" (Rawls 1980, 546; emphasis mine). Rawls continues, "The idealization means that everyone has sufficient intellectual powers to play a normal part in society, and no one suffers from unusual needs that are especially difficult to fulfill, for example unusual and costly medical requirements" (1980, 546; emphasis mine). The theory is constructed for the "normal" situation and only afterwards made to accommodate unusual circumstances. But if the normal situation is not that of a fully functioning person who is a cooperating member throughout his or her lifetime, if we are instead all potential dependents and the "unusual" needs are an inevitable feature of any human community, and if these needs demand dependency workers constrained in the degree of their full cooperation as independent citizens, then the idealization does not merely grease the wheels of the Rawlsian construction but renders it of questionable value in providing a theory that will deliver justice for dependents and dependency workers.
Second, the symmetry that Rawls posits for the representatives in original position is bound to a notion of persons as free and equal. For a person to be free means here, in part, to view oneself as a "self-originating" or "self-authenticating source of valid claims." But can the dependency worker be seen as "a self-originating source of valid claims"? She is as likely to put forward the claims of her charge as she is to put forward her own. Furthermore, there is often no clear separation between claims that she makes on her own behalf and those that originate with the charge — even though the conflict between these sets of claims can sometimes be palpable. If there is an important notion of freedom for the dependency worker, it is often one that recognizes the bond she shares with her dependent, even as it recognizes her own independent personhood.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Feminist Ethics and Social Policy by Patrice DiQuinzio, Iris Marion Young. Copyright © 1997 Hypatia, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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