Locke and Women
(Lecture notes)
It is difficult to comprehend the implications of Locke’s thought for traditional women, who took on the job of the family and the private sphere generally in his thought, because it is not explicit in the text. Nevertheless it is significant and important to do so because Locke’s thought so much reflects the self-consciousness of contemporary liberal societies, and as such had an enormous impact on the 2nd wave of the feminist movement that sought to integrate women into the public on Lockean terms. To understand this we have to analyze Locke’s views on women and citizenship generally and what they imply.
Locke’s statements about the family in chapter six of The Second Treatise, “Paternal Power,” have as their primary motivating impetus the desire to distinguish political power clearly from that of paternal or patriarchal power. That is, the whole chapter is motivated by his fight with Filmer and the other monarchists who wanted to sustain the patriarchal privileges of the monarch according to the model of political power as deriving from the original paternal power of Adam. On the contrary, Locke and his friends wanted to assert the idea that individuals are born free and only consent to political power for their own interests, and as thus are all equal to one another. Hence Locke’s main concern in this chapter is not with the family or women per se.
The break that Locke seeks to establish between a patriarchal system and a social contract one is violent in his thought. That is, he wants radically to reject a traditional community rooted in an old conception of nature with a fixed hierarchy and an absence of choice or freedom. Instead he wants to conceive of a society as a community of free and equal individuals who come together by choice and institute political power as instrumental to the achievement of their own ends. In making this move, which is the move that we have inherited with our modern liberal democracies, he must thus radically reject the nature of the old political community, including its conception of the individual as part of a larger organic whole, the sense of identity one gets from this, the connection to nature, the hierarchy, the dependence vs. the independence, the sense of community vs. the atomism, the attachment to tradition and custom vs. the idea of a community founded on abstract reason. We are talking about nothing less than the establishment of a whole new order (the same has been true for Hobbes).
The fact that this transition is violent in Locke’s thought, that it involves the radical rejection of earlier traditional forms of political community, becomes clear in his particularly narrow and instrumental understanding of the family, as expressed in chap. 6 and even more so in chapter 7. And this is because he is construing the family according to the narrow functionality of his understanding of the new political community, and the exclusion from it of all that is traditional and “patriarchal”.
The sole function of the family, including the relationship between husband and wife, is to generate new individuals for the preservation of the species and to bring them up to be free and independent in Locke’s sense, to leave the family and be actively productive, and begin new families of their own (65). The obligation of the parent to the child lasts only until the child can fend for himself (79). Love and tenderness are significant only in terms of their capacity to temper the power of the parents so that educative practices entail persuasion as much as force (63). “Conjugal society” consists “chiefly in such a communion and right in one another’s bodies as is necessary to its chief end, procreation” (78). To the extent that it goes beyond this and “draws with it mutual support and assistance, and a communion of interests too” is only because these are instrumental “to uniting the parents in their tasks and are necessary to help them care for their offspring (78). The real end of marriage is summarized as “the continuation of the species,” which requires a long period of partnership due to the long period of dependency of children in the human species. The whole undertaking of the parents is the task of “reproduction” in order to generate “productive” citizens who will then be formally independent of the family of origin. They are a stage on the way to the telos of the Lockean citizen.
This rejection of the past and embracing of the narrow and instrumental understanding of self and community in Locke’s thought thus accounts for what is left out in his understanding of the family. The idea of love as itself an end in the family, or of companionship between men and women as such an end, has no recognition. The idea of sex as being part of this or an expression of this also has no recognition—sex is only for procreation. The attention to embodied needs as an end in themselves has no recognition—the fact of our deeper imbeddedness in nature and the attention paid to that in terms of eating, sleeping, aesthetics, cleanliness, clothing, sex, affection. The idea of attachment as an end in itself is also not considered. The experience of a communal identity in the family is not recognized, because it is too associated with the paternal community. The idea of interdependence and mutual need and functionally differentiated roles (man, woman) which characterized the traditional community and the traditional family is also not recognized. (men and women are equal partners who are “assisting” one another.) The only thing that is recognized that is outside the Lockean self is the immaturity of the child, who is not yet rational. But this is only temporary—the child will eventually reach this age and parents are stewards of them until then. The idea of our common vulnerability is not really recognized or the idea that parents should be looked after when they’re elderly (also part of traditional societies).
This historical contextualization of Locke’s argument—as a polemic against patriarchal power–helps to explain why Locke cannot talk in broader terms about the work of traditional women, why he cannot even recognize it, because he is restricting everything to the terms of the new political community. In fact, however, historically women would have done much more than what Locke officially acknowledges here. Indeed, given that Locke’s subject is so ascetic and narrow and one-sided and repressed, it seems that the labour of traditional women in the family is even more significant than it would have been in a traditional community where these other needs are integrated into the public sphere (needs of connection to nature, belonging, mutual need, sense of community, sense of past/tradition). Now, the one-sided Lockean self must find the compensation for his one-sidedness in the private realm of the family. This is why the Lockean conception of the family gave way historically to the “sentimentalized” family in the history of political thought (Rousseau etc.). Let us look more closely at this idea of women as playing the role of compensation.
If the mature member of the Lockean moral community is rational, efficient, hard-working, active, independent, “moral” in the narrow Lockean sense, industrious, serious, and useful, then he can only be so if woman sustains this identity by carrying his implicit need for unity, compassion, forgiveness, dependence, softness, frivolity, love, sex, food, aesthetic satisfaction, recognition, and general emotional neediness, by looking after this neediness and having it projected upon her. In other words, the other within the Lockean self, which Locke himself doesn’t want to acknowledge (except in a very narrow sense in relationship to children) must be dealt with. It can be projected onto Natives and Africans and the working class as cultural others. Or it can be projected onto women within the Lockean society. (they are irrational, emotional, needy, frivolous, sensuous, soft, dependent, wasteful, etc., and thus the Lockean male can sustain the sense of himself against another). But, more importantly in the case of women, to the extent that he cannot simply repress and project this other, it is women in the family who must look after the many needs that go unacknowledged by the Lockean self, but which must be met anyway. It is she who cooks him meals, who decorates the house, who quiets the children, who listens to his problems, who buys and mends and irons his clothes. It is she with whom he has sex, who is tender and affectionate, who provides him with love and a sense of unity when he comes home from the competitive and individualistic public world, who is compassionate and forgiving towards his faults and failures. It is she who meets the needs that are implicitly denied in the public self and in the Lockean philosophy as a whole. It is she who acknowledges and tends to his real, embodied self. In short, she does the “labour” of the other that de Beauvoir talks about in Second Sex.
The harsh repressiveness and denial that has been necessary in order to undertake the violent shift from a traditional to a modern society has meant that women have shouldered the emotional and physical burden of this new modern subject. (Pateman, the social contract is a sexual contract). They must do the work of attending to what has been denied.
(to the extent that the white man is not as damaged in this society as the native has been, must be explained by the fact that women have done this work of making modern individuals feel all right, in spite of what they must constantly do to themselves. Traditional women have not acted like Lockeans but have focused on the material finite needs of the individual as the real task at hand)
Implications of this for liberal feminism:
-a rebellion against the sentimentalized family of the 1950s that accompanied the Lockean citizen. A total rejection of this family as contrived and patriarchal—designed to keep women in their place—tied to lots of pathologies (Salinger, Friedan, Women’s Room, Far from Heaven, The Hours, …..). Partly a rebellion against the contrived nature of this version of femininity. Partly a rebellion against the excessive weight that is put on traditional women in a Lockean world, a weight that is not even really recognized.
–a total rejection of this version of the family. And a Lockean embracing of the public world and pursuit of individual self-interest and self-development as the pathway to freedom. (influence of de Beauvoir’s idea of transcendence and her indictment of “immanent” activities here—the disembodied self becomes the model of freedom and the embodied self is to be left behind and rejected).
-problem with this—1) participate with Locke in a denial or eclipse of the real work/labour that is being done in the family. Denigrate and degrade traditional women and see them as merely oppressed.
2) an uncritical embracing (in case of liberal feminism) of male roles as the pathway to freedom—competitive, utilitarian (and presupposing somebody else to do the work of women).
Outcome of this:
Women in the public world. But now she (or in case of progressive families both parents) must do both jobs—the public and the private. But because the private isn’t adequately recognized anymore (partly under the influence of liberal feminism), (the work of traditional women is not recognized), the public realm hasn’t accommodated the fact that parents (women) are doing both. Hence the tremendous pressure on families today. Need to recognize the work of traditional women in order to understand what’s required to keep the public world functioning (e.g., Marx—the reproduction of the working class).
