Schoolmarm capitalism?
Is it women's 'turn' to take economic leadership – because they are more virtuous? Women professionals, the gift economy and managing the interface between households.
This morning I received a text message from my friend Emily, thanking us for dinner on the weekend.
There is reason to wonder why she texted me, for I did not cook. In fact, I hardly ever do.
When I was reading Anna Funder’s Wifedom recently I felt like a fraud. In fact, at least until I quit this academic malarkey, I was more like the bad husband than the wife whose household and emotional labour goes unseen.
In fact, my work was almost all that there was to see. Household effort was all directed at sustaining my work. The family calendar really only contained my travel obligations. As I was finishing Virtue Capitalists my beloved not only did all the cooking, which he loves, but he also did everything else.
In the acknowledgments I stop barely short of #thanksfortyping him - mostly because there is no distinction between typing and writing these days, so I had to do that myself. But. My beloved - twice as clever as me, a thousand times more creative – he formatted my footnotes.
And yet, when it comes to the interface between our household and others’, I am responsible. And so too is the woman, if there is one, of the related household. Our annual Christmas catch-up I organised with my son’s wonderful step-mother, just as together we did most of the scheduling when he was growing up. I’m looking after twin toddlers tomorrow, and every time I do I communicate with their mother, though their father is mainly at home with them.
I have often done this instinctively, though sometimes I have tried to avert the inevitable invisible work of all these women by including the male partner in the communication. Almost always he ‘doesn’t check’ messages or ‘needs to check’ with partner (of course women do that too…but don’t usually hand over the task) and we end up back where we started.
Image: Miss Stacy in Anne with an E, source https://www.cbc.ca/anne/m_characters/miss-stacy
I don’t really mind, particularly since I’ve been let off many other hooks. But during the season of gift-giving, I was struck by the ways that women seem to be the only ones who are really conscious that there even is a gift economy.
I started thinking about gift economies for my first book, since academia relies on gifting very heavily. When I was just finishing my PhD, I was gifted with a lot of professorial support, job references, and much draft-reading. The implicit expectation was that as I ‘grew up’ I would do likewise. Certainly I feel that I owe junior scholars the gifts that I received.
It is not only about seniority. Peer review, speaking when asked, coordinating events, editing collections: they all deposit gifts into the scholarly community that are returned often via some other route (except for a handful of senior male professors who don’t notice anything like this going on - and also don’t seem to know or care that they are the reason a concept like ‘dickhead professor’ exists).
Gift economies also operate in communities where there are lots of children, in large families and between households in a local area.
In all of these, women remember whose turn it is to host - or if turns are how these relationships are managed. She remembers to ask what to bring and goes out of her way to find an appropriate thing to bring anyway, even when ‘nothing’ is expected*.
* may be a trick, sometimes.
It is also about literal gifts, which is why I was alerted to it at Christmas.
Some women spend much of the year accumulating gifts for the family Christmas, so all the time and expense doesn’t fall on them at once.
If mothers want their children to be invited to birthday parties, they know they need to participate in the gift economy in this way. I remember (but can’t be bothered finding) the awful shit in a friend’s Twitter when someone suggested dads could also do this. OMG my wife would *never* want me to interact with the other mothers, I’d look so unfaithful. Also she *loves* doing this. And it isn’t even important, so if she wants to do it that is totally up to her.
Why is the gift economy so important? Well, the household economy doesn’t actually just operate independently. And the places they intersect, the ways we all owe one another, is a key part of what keeps us safe, emotionally and materially, together.
If anything goes wrong, for any member of the family, we need this. Also when things go right – lets think of the men who would quite like a party for a significant birthday. Well, if they have a female partner, chances are that she will be leveraging all the gifts she’s owed for a decade to make it happen, possibly relinquishing a similar party of her own in the process.
The gift economy is not the horrors of commodified exchange, but it is work. To paraphrase what the anthropologist Marcel Mauss quoted when he wrote his famous book on the gift, the thing a miser dreads most is being given gifts. When we receive gifts, we owe, in turn. Mauss saw this as violence, which sometimes it is. But mostly it is a matter of managing emotions and relationships, and promoting healthy resilience.
This is not just a household thing. In workplaces, women mostly do the emotional labour, regulated by an intuitive monitoring of the gift economy, at work too. Their effort is almost always invisible to performance management systems. It is one of the reasons women tend to need to work much harder for equal recognition.
Are expert women taking charge, now?
Women were always more important to the professionalisation of the economy than was commonly believed.
This was, I will admit, a shock to me.
It was my first time working with census data. I entered page after page of numbers of professionals into a spreadsheet only to find women were everywhere, right from the start.
Then I compared the percentages of male professionals to men in the workforce: it was tiny, about 2% in the late 19th century growing to 10% by 1933. But women professionals made up a much higher percentage of the female workforce: 5% growing to 25% by the 1930s. These %s dropped again, but still women were central.
Image: graph of professionals as percentage of workforce, by gender. Data: Australian census
I wrote an academic article about this for what is now Asia-Pacific Economic History Review, and a short version for The Conversation (link below). I make it a general rule not to read the comments, because that gives power to the many dickheads who make them, but I did glimpse one that I found interesting.
This commenter thought that the presence of women professionals explained something about the
“overbearing, patronising (or should that be matronising?), school-marmish flavour of the nanny state”.
This is just insulting, but it is interesting that the commenter made the connection between their idea of a school-marm and the wider system, between professional femininity and the regulatory state.
IMAGE: comment as quoted above.
In a less sexist vein, the Saul Griffith essay I quoted from last week implies something similar:
“It was men in grey suits who broke everything. If it’s true that you cannot solve a problem with the same thinking that created it, then we need a different kind of leadership this time. While men absolutely must be part of the solution to climate change, this time women must lead. The good news: they are already doing so.”
Why exactly must women lead this, do we infer? Griffiths makes explicit a connection between masculinity and the broken, environmentally harmful economy. Women, he suggests, will not do the same.
Are Women More Virtuous?
Everything about this is wrong, isn’t it? How on earth could women be - what, born - more virtuous? Or socialised into school-marm bossiness which will somehow make a better economy?
Relevant aside: in 2015 Michelle Arrow wrote a re-appraisal of Anne Summers’ Damned Whores and God’s Police, then 40 years old: check it out.
Even worse, by making the cause of the problem ‘men in grey suits’ it fails to see the ways the system is coercive. When a whole lot of corporate managers, CEOs and capitalist robber barons behave the same way we need not just to look at the colour of their suit or point to the moral failings of their gender, but instead consider the ways that the decisions they all shared were performed because they felt that was their only choice. That is, the system coerces.
Replacing men with women in a system that otherwise doesn’t change will only coerce those women into similar behaviour.
Image: Johnson & Johnson Advert showing a uniformed nurse holding her diploma while light from heaven shines on her face. I can’t remember where I found this, it was ears ago. God though, huh?
And yet. Setting aside the improbability that women are born more virtuous than men, it is nevertheless the case that women have had a considerable role in moral crusades, and in building professions based on virtue.
And at work this continues, because they perform the bulk of emotional labour. This is about ‘the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display…sold for a wage’. See more about that here.
In the 1990s, women entered professions in massive numbers, flooding the segment of the labour market most responsible for healthcare, accuracy, audit, science and education. And which relied on virtue.
This expert work has all been under attack from the far right, who are also targeting causes supported by feminists, including abortion. It is hard not to see their opposition to virtuous expertise as an expression of patriarchy.
Managers are not mostly from this far right, at least as far as I know, but the logic of management, which since the 1980s has grown considerably, has valorised hard, tough decision-making on one hand and sought to control professional expertise on the other. This places them, strategically at least, alongside others who are skeptical of expert autonomy and who desire, or think it is their right, to control them.
Of all the developments in historical capitalism in the past fifty years, the intensification of managerial capitalism (and the growth of casino capitalism, or the finance sector) is most interesting - and worrying. More another day, I am sure.
The split between professionals and managers - who in the 1990s remained mostly men, while women grew the professions – was moral as well as procedural. Professions, now dominated by women, retained moral purpose, which often enough management wanted to overturn.
The gender war that emerged is reflected in politics. It was present at Trump v Hilary, and Tony Abbott v Julia Gillard. And it is there in the rise of the Australian Teals that Saul Griffith found so inspiring, and who sit in quiet (and sometimes less quiet) judgment on the bloke-dominated, dog-whistling Liberal Party led by a former Queensland cop whose credentials seem to be entirely embodied in his masculinity.
Can you help my student’s family escape Gaza?
It was not my intention to use my substack to draw attention to causes, though perhaps that should change. This one is political, which will likely surprise no one, but also personal.
My former student Ayah and her sister, both from Gaza and living in Sydney, really need to get their family out of danger. They are fundraising as best they can. This is difficult when you are relatively new to a society. They have all my support.
If you can help them, please do. Every small donation helps them get closer to the goal of supporting all eight of their family members to get out of Gaza.
Image: this is my former student Ayah and her baby when I saw them recently. Ayah was due to finally see her family, and introduce the baby, in a small window of time that began on October 8. Then October 7 happened. Now her family is in mortal danger. Here is the link again to the page where you can help: https://gofund.me/be9b0f2d
Emotional Deskilling?
Deskilling occurs when work tasks are broken down into smaller, less skilled tasks. Managerialism has done this to the virtue professionals need to do their job (often with professionals helping them, actually).
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