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Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security
J. Ann Tickner
Columbia University Press, New York
1992
3. Three Models of Man: Gendered Perspectives on Global Economic Security *
| The servant role of women is critical for the expansion of consumption in the modern economy. |
| J. K. Galbraith |
| Economic development, that magic formula, devised sincerely to move poor nations out of poverty, has become women's worst enemy. |
| Devaki Jain |
| The majority [of women] still lag far behind men in power, wealth and opportunity. |
| Javier Perez de Cuellar ** |
Since their birth in seventeenth-century Europe, states have engaged in political practices designed to promote their economic security. Trade and immigration barriers have been erected at national boundaries to protect domestic industry and domestic workers. Huge economic inequalities in the world are sustained through the protection of these state boundaries. Mercantilism, the leading school of economic theory in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, prescribed state intervention to promote economic self-sufficiency and favorable trade balances as a way of assuring nations' wealth, power, and military potential. With the establishment of economic liberalism as the leading school of economic theory in the nineteenth century, however, national growth and wealth were seen as fostered by freer modes of investment, migration, and exchange.
In the nineteenth century, politics and economics became separate academic disciplines. This separation, encouraged by the strong anti-Marxism of liberal economics, was an important influence on twentieth-century Western international relations scholarship, which largely neglected economic relations between states until the 1970s. When economic issues surfaced, they were relegated to matters of "low politics" as the "high politics" of national security and war took precedence.
In the 1970s, however, international political economy emerged as a more central topic of concern in mainstream Western international relations scholarship. The fact that economic relations were central to international politics, as well as the political implications of states' international economic behavior, could no longer be ignored. After thirty years of nuclear stalemate, military relations between the great powers were frozen; relations between advanced capitalist states, who were also partners in the Western alliance and therefore unlikely military adversaries, were defined primarily in economic terms.
The end of the post-World War II era of fixed exchange rates and international monetary management in the early1970s, the erosion of the dollar as the key currency in the international monetary order, which signaled the relative decline in the power of the United States in the world economy, and the rise of states such as Germany and Japan, whose power depended on economic rather than military might, caused renewed interest in political economy among scholars studying advanced capitalist states. A global recession that, it was believed, was connected to the rise in the price of oil in the early 1970s, and the demands for a New International Economic Order (N.I.E.O.) by Third World states put relations between North and South more centrally on the agenda of international relations. Contemporary Marxist theories about the unequal allocation of wealth in a capitalist world economy began to be taken more seriously by certain Western international relations scholars.
At the same time, peace researchers began to question whether the economic security of the state, so important to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mercantilists, was synonymous with the economic security of its citizens. In many parts of the Third World, the failure of development strategies to solve problems of poverty called for an examination of hierarchical political relations between North and South as well as the uneven distributive effects of the world capitalist economy. The legitimacy of states that failed to meet the basic material needs of their citizens began to be questioned. In many states, military budgets and arms purchases were taking priority over the economic welfare of individuals. The term structural violence was used to denote the economic insecurity of individuals whose life expectancy was reduced, not by the direct violence of war but by domestic and international structures of political and economic oppression. Peace researchers began to define security in terms of "positive peace," a peace that included economic security as well as physical safety.
Depending on their normative orientation and area of concern, contemporary scholars of international political economy have used different approaches to investigate these various concerns. These approaches fit broadly into what Robert Gilpin has described as the three constituting ideologies of international political economy: liberalism, economic nationalism, and Marxism. 1 Gilpin defines an ideology as a belief system that includes both scientific explanations and normative prescriptions. Since none of these approaches discusses gender, we must assume that their authors believe them to be gender neutral, meaning that they claim that the interaction between states and markets, as Gilpin defines political economy, can be understood without reference to gender distinctions. Feminists would disagree with this claim; as I argued in chapter 1, ignoring gender distinctions hides a set of social and economic relations characterized by inequality between men and women. In order to understand how these unequal relationships affect the workings of the world economy-- and their consequences for both women and men-- models of international political economy that make gender relations explicit must be constructed.
This chapter will analyze these three ideologies or models in order to see whether they are indeed gender neutral with respect both to their scientific explanations and to their normative prescriptions. The individual, the state, and class-- the central units of analysis for each of these models, respectively-- will be examined to see whether they evidence a masculine bias in the way they are described and in the interests they represent. If this is the case, then it is legitimate to ask whether and how gender has circumscribed each model's understanding of the workings of the world economy; if a masculine bias is apparent in these representations, we must ask whether the normative preferences and policy prescriptions of each of these perspectives will promote the economic security of men more than women.
Having critiqued each model from the perspective of gender, I shall offer some feminist perspectives on international political economy. Just as women have been absent from the field of international relations, the few feminists who write about economics claim that their discipline has rendered women completely invisible. The field of economics has shown little interest in household production and volunteer work, or in women's particular problems and accomplishments in a market economy. 2 A growing literature on women and development has been marginalized from mainstream theories of political and economic development. Since very little literature on women and international political economy exists, once again I shall be drawing on feminist literature from other disciplines and approaches. Common themes in these various feminist approaches suggest that feminist perspectives on international political economy would start with assumptions about the individual, the state, and class that are very different from those at the foundation of Gilpin's three ideologies.
Liberalism
Economic liberalism, while it has distanced itself from political issues, has served as the foundation for the dominant approach to Western international political economy in the twentieth century. Its beginnings as a school of thought are associated with the work of Adam Smith whose Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, first promoted the idea of the efficiency of the market in the allocation of goods and services and the division of labor as the best way of increasing productivity and wealth. Critical of mercantilism, which supported government involvement in the economy, liberals believe that politics and economics should be separated. Goods and services are best distributed through the price mechanism and the laws of supply and demand, free from government interference. Smith's arguments about the benefits of the division of labor were carried into the international sphere by nineteenth-century British economist David Ricardo, who claimed that countries could best promote their economic welfare by specializing in goods they could produce most cheaply or "efficiently" and trading them on the international market. Liberals believe not only that free trade will result in the maximization of global wealth and human welfare but also that it will lead to peace and cooperation between states.
Although its proponents present it as a scientific theory with universal and timeless applications, liberalism has generally been the approach preferred by scholars and policymakers from rich and powerful capitalist states. Just as Britain was committed to economic liberalism during its period of hegemony in the nineteenth century, the United States was the strongest proponent of liberalism in the post-World War II era during its period of political and economic supremacy.
Liberal theory takes the individual as the basic unit of analysis: according to liberals, human beings are by nature economic animals driven by rational self-interest. "Rational economic man" is assumed to be motivated by the laws of profit maximization. He is highly individualistic, pursuing his own economic goals in the market without any social obligation to the community of which he is a part. 3 Liberals believe that even though this instrumentally rational market behavior is driven by selfish profit motives, it produces outcomes that are efficient or beneficial for everyone-- though they acknowledge that not everyone will benefit to the same extent. Economic security is best assured by economic growth, the benefits of which will trickle down and increase the income of the entire population. The detrimental effects of economic growth and market behavior, such as dwindling resources and environmental damage, are generally not considered.
Feminist Critiques of Liberalism
Feminist critiques of liberalism should begin with an examination of "rational economic man," a construct that, while it extrapolates from roles and behaviors associated with certain Western men and assumes characteristics that correspond to the definition of hegemonic masculinity discussed in chapter 1, has been used by liberal economists to represent the behavior of humanity as a whole. Nancy Hartsock suggests that rational economic man, appearing coincidentally with the birth of modern capitalism, is a social construct based on the reduction of a variety of human passions to a desire for economic gain. 4 Its claim to universality across time and culture must therefore be questioned. For example, Sandra Harding's African worldview, discussed in chapter 2, in which the economic behavior of individuals is embedded within a social order, is a communal orientation seen as "deviant" by neoclassical economic theory; yet it is one that represents a different type of economic behavior specific to other cultures. As Harding claims, it also contains some striking parallels with the worldview of many Western women. 5
Hartsock and Harding are thus claiming that the highly individualistic, competitive market behavior of rational economic man could not necessarily be assumed as a norm if women's experiences, or the experiences of individuals in noncapitalist societies, were taken as the prototype for human behavior. Women in their reproductive and maternal roles do not conform to the behavior of instrumental rationality. Much of women's work in the provision of basic needs takes place outside the market, in households or in the subsistence sector of Third World economies. Moreover, when women enter the market economy, they are disproportionately represented in the caring professions as teachers, nurses, or social workers, vocations that are more likely to be chosen on the basis of the values and expectations that are often emphasized in female socialization rather than on the basis of profit maximization. If this is the case, we must conclude that many women's, as well as some men's, motivations and behavior cannot be explained using a model of instrumental rationality; rather, these behaviors call for models based on different understandings of the meaning of rationality.
Rational economic man is extrapolated from assumptions about human nature that originate in British liberal political theory of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rational economic man bears many similarities to Hobbesian man, whose aggressive passions have been tamed by the rational pursuit of profit. Liberal contract theories about individuals' origins, such as that of Hobbes's, depict a state of nature where individuals exist prior to and apart from the community; they come together, not out of any desire for community, but out of the need for a protected environment in which they can conduct their economic transactions more securely without the threat of physical violence. Hartsock argues that, given its dependence solely on economic exchange, any notion of community in liberal theory is fragile and instrumental. She claims, however, that this liberal assumption, that the behavior of individuals can be explained apart from society, is unrealistic since individuals have always been a part of society. 6
Although early liberal theorists were explicit in their assertion that their models of human behavior applied to men, not women, this distinction has since been lost, because contemporary liberals assume that humanity as a whole behaves in the same way. Feminist critics take issue with this theory of human behavior, asserting that it is biased toward a masculine representation. Harding claims that, for women, the self is defined through relationship with others rather than apart from others. 7 Alison Jaggar argues that liberalism's individualistic portrayal of human nature has placed excessive value on the mind at the expense of the body. In our sexual division of labor, men have dominated the intellectual fields while women have been assigned the "domestic" tasks necessary for physical survival; Jaggar concludes that, given this traditional sexual division of labor, women would be unlikely either to develop a theory of human nature that ignored human interdependence or to formulate a conception of rationality that stressed individual autonomy. If the need for interdependence were taken as the starting point, community and cooperation would not be seen as puzzling and problematic when we begin to think about alternative ways to define rationality. 8
Generalizing from rational economic man to the world economy, liberals believe that world welfare is maximized by allowing market forces to operate unimpeded and goods and investment to flow as freely as possible across state boundaries according to the laws of comparative advantage. Critics of liberalism question this belief in openness and interdependence, claiming that it falsely depoliticizes exchange relationships and masks hidden power structures. They challenge the notion of mutual gains from exchange by focusing on the unequal distribution of gains across states, classes, and factors of production, and argue that in fact gains accrue disproportionately to the most powerful states or economic actors. For example, critics of liberalism would argue that liberal economic theory obscures the unequal power relations between capital and labor: since capital is mobile across interstate boundaries and controls strategic decisions about investment and production, it is being rewarded disproportionately to labor, a trend that was on the rise in the 1980s when labor was becoming increasingly marginalized in matters of economic policy. 9
If capital is being rewarded disproportionately to labor in the world economy, then men are being rewarded disproportionately to women. A 1981 report to the U.N. Committee on the Status of Women avers that while women represent half the global population and one-third of the paid labor force and are responsible for two-thirds of all working hours, they receive only one-tenth of world income and own less that 1 percent of world property. 10 While much of women's work is performed outside the formal economy, these data suggest that women are not being rewarded to the same extent as men even when they enter the market economy. Although no systematic data on men's and women's incomes on a worldwide scale exists, an International Labor Office study of manufacturing industries in twenty countries, conducted in the mid-1980s, showed that women's wages were less than men's in each case. 11 Earning lower wages and owning an insignificant proportion of the world's capital puts women at an enormous disadvantage in terms of power and wealth and thus contributes to their economic insecurity.
While feminist economists are just beginning to explore the differential effects of the operation of the market economy on men and women, one area where these effects have been examined in some detail is in studies of Third World women and development. 12 Liberal modernization theory, a body of literature that grew out of assumptions that free markets and private investment could best promote economic growth in the Third World, saw women's relative "backwardness" as the irrational persistence of traditional attitudes. For example, the United Nations' Decade for the Advancement of Women (1975-85) assumed that women's problems in the Third World were related to insufficient participation in the process of modernization and development. In 1970, however, Esther Boserup, the first of many women scholars to challenge this assumption, claimed that in many parts of the colonial and postcolonial world, the position of rural women actually declined when they became assimilated into the global market economy. 13 Women's marginalization was exacerbated by the spread of Western capitalism and culture. In the preindependence period, Western colonizers rarely had any sympathy for the methods women used to cultivate crops; assuming that men would be more efficient as agricultural producers, they attempted to replace women's cultivation practices with those of men.
Boserup and others claim that development aid in the postcolonial period has actually reduced the status of women relative to men. After World War II, Western development experts taught new techniques for the improvement of agriculture to men who were able to generate income from cash crops. When land enters the market, land tenure often passes into the hands of men. Hence women's access to land and technology actually often decreases as land reform is instituted and agriculture is modernized. Land reform, traditionally thought to be a vital prerequisite for raising agricultural productivity, frequently reduces women's control over traditional use rights and gives titles to male heads of households. During the early years of development assistance, the concept of male head of household was incorporated into foreign assistance programs; according to the traditional Western sexual division of labor, imposed on societies with quite different social norms, women were seen as child rearers and homemakers, thus further marginalizing their productive activities.
The mechanization of agriculture in the Third World has also reduced women's control over agricultural production as men have taken over the mechanized part of the production process. The modernization of agriculture, which often leads to a dualism in agricultural production, tends to leave women behind in the traditional sector. 14 But in spite of mechanization, which remains largely in the hands of men, women continue to produce more than half the world's food: in sub-Saharan Africa, women are responsible for more than 80 percent of agricultural production. While women make up the majority of subsistence farmers, their activities have become less socially valued as cash cropping increases. Women's agricultural knowledge has generally been considered "unscientific" and therefore neglected in development programs. 15 Development experts talk to men, even when projects being designed may be more relevant for women's productive activities. 16
While agriculture became more central to development planning in the 1970s, early Western liberal development strategies focused on industrialization, claiming that the economic growth it generated would trickle down to all sectors of the economy. As women were channeled into low-paying activities in industrial sectors of the Third World, the urban division of labor along gender lines became even more hierarchical than in subsistence agriculture. Since women are rarely trained as skilled industrial workers, the skills gap in many urban areas has increased, with women taking up domestic service or unskilled factory jobs. States that have adopted successful export-oriented industrial policies, such as South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, have relied to a considerable extent on unskilled women workers. Certain states have attracted overseas corporations by offering a large pool of docile young female laborers; these young women are frequently fired when they marry, try to unionize, or claim other benefits. 17 Cynthia Enloe claims that as long as young women working in "Export Processing Zones" are encouraged to see themselves as daughters or prospective wives earning pin money rather than as workers their labor will be cheapened and women will have little opportunity to move into more skilled positions. 18
Liberals, believing in the benefits of free trade, have generally supported export-led strategies of development. But since states that have opted for export-led strategies have often experienced increased inequalities in income, and since women are disproportionately clustered at the bottom of the economic scale, such strategies may have a particularly negative effect on women. The harsh effects of structural adjustment policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund on Third World debtor nations fall disproportionately on women as providers of basic needs, as social welfare programs in areas of health, nutrition, and housing are cut. When government subsidies or funds are no longer available, women in their role as unpaid homemakers and care providers must often take over the provision of these basic welfare needs. 19 Harsh economic conditions in the 1980s saw an increased number of Third World women going overseas as domestic servants and remitting their earnings to families they left behind.
These feminist studies of Third World development and its effects on women are suggesting that liberal strategies to promote economic growth and improve world welfare that rely on market forces and free trade may have a differential impact on men and women. Since women's work often takes place outside the market economy, a model based on instrumentally rational market behavior does not capture all the economic activities of women. Therefore we cannot assume that the prescriptions generated by such a model will be as beneficial to women's economic security as they are to men's.
Economic Nationalism
The intellectual roots of the contemporary nationalist approach to international political economy date back to the mercantilist school of sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century Europe, the period that coincided with the rise of the modern state. The contemporary version of economic nationalism is quite similar to the realist school of international relations discussed in chapter 2 in terms of its assumptions about the international system and its explanations of the behavior of states. Just as liberalism is the ideology of rich and powerful states, economic nationalism became popular in the United States in the 1970s, at the same time its proponents became concerned with what they perceived as America's hegemonic decline. 20 The economic nationalist approach takes the state and its behavior in the international system as its basic unit of analysis. All economic nationalists subscribe to the primacy of the state, of national security, and of military power in the organization and functioning of the international system. While not denying that an open world economy could be mutually beneficial if all states adhered to liberal principles, economic nationalists, like realists, believe that states must act to protect their own economic interests lest they fall prey to others' self-seeking behavior in a conflictual international system lacking any international governance.
While contemporary economic nationalism became popular in the United States as a critique of the impracticality of liberal strategies in an illiberal world, its explanations for the behavior of states are quite similar to liberals' explanations of the behavior of rational economic man. States are assumed to be behaving as instrumentally rational profit maximizers, pursuing wealth, power, and autonomy in an international system devoid of any sense of community. In a conflictual world, states are striving to be economically self-sufficient. Their participation in the world economy is an attempt to create an international division of labor and resource allocation favorable to their own interests and those of groups within their national boundaries. Arguments against extensive economic interdependence are justified in the name of national security. Strategic domestic industries are to be given protection especially when they produce military-related goods. National security and national interest are thus the overriding goals of policy. 21 Like their seventeenth-century mercantilist predecessors, contemporary economic nationalists believe that, where necessary, the workings of the market must be subordinated to the interests of the state.
Feminist Critiques of Economic Nationalism
Feminist critiques of the economic nationalist approach should begin by examining the state, the central unit of analysis. If, as I argued in the previous chapter, the state is a gendered construct with respect both to its historical origins and to its contemporary manifestations, we might assume that prescriptions for maximizing state power could work to promote the economic welfare of men more than women.
The consolidation of the modern state system and the rise of modern science, from which the Western social sciences trace their origins, both occurred in the seventeenth century-- a time of dramatic social, economic, and political upheaval well documented in Western history. Less well documented is the fact that the seventeenth century was also associated with the intellectual origins of Western feminism. According to Juliet Mitchell, this is not coincidental; women in the seventeenth century saw themselves as a distinct sociological group completely excluded from the new society that was rising out of the medieval order. She cites seventeenth-century feminists such as Mary Astell, who lamented that the new spirit of equality did not apply to women. 22
Economic historians have similarly celebrated the rise of a new economic order, the beginnings of the drive to modernization and a market system that was to generate the unprecedented wealth of modern capitalism. But at such moments of great historical change usually identified with progress, feminist historians claim that women are often left behind economically or even made worse off. Just as Third World women have been marginalized through the infusion of Western gender roles into non-Western cultures, concepts of gender and the gender linking of productive roles were shifting in the seventeenth century in ways that were marginalizing women's labor in Europe itself. In the seventeenth century, definitions of male and female were becoming polarized in ways that were suited to the growing division between work and home required by early capitalism but not necessarily to the interests of women. The notion of "housewife" began to place women's work in the private domestic sphere as opposed to the public world of the market inhabited by rational economic man. According to R. W. Connell, the notion of the "home" did not exist in Europe before the eighteenth century. As a combination of technology and industrial politics gradually pushed women out of core industries during the Industrial Revolution, gendered concepts of the "breadwinner" and the "housewife" were constructed, concepts that have been central to the modern Western definition of masculinity, femininity, and modern capitalism. 23 The concept of housewife has continued to allow for the provision of women's labor as a free resource until the present day.
While these new economic arrangements were synonymous with the birth of the Enlightenment, femaleness became associated with what Enlightenment knowledge had left behind. The persecution of witches, who were defending female crafts and medical skills of a precapitalist era against a growing male professionalism, reached new heights in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Jean Bodin (1530-96), a French mercantilist and founder of the quantitative theory of money as well as the modern concept of national sovereignty, was one of the most vocal proponents of the persecution of witches. According to Bodin's mercantilist philosophy, the modern state must be invested with absolute sovereignty for the development of new wealth necessary for fighting wars; to this end the state needed more workers and thus must eliminate witches who were held responsible for abortion and other forms of birth control. 24
Sovereignty and rationality were part of an Enlightenment epistemology committed to the discovery of universal objective or "scientific" laws, an epistemology that also discredited superstitions often portrayed as "old wives tales." 25 As discussed earlier, notions such as objectivity and rationality, central to the definition of the modern natural and social sciences in the West, have typically been associated with masculine thinking. According to Evelyn Fox Keller, Western cultural values have simultaneously elevated what is defined as scientific and what is defined as masculine. 26 In her study of the origins of modern science in the seventeenth century, Keller claims that modern scientific thought is associated with masculinity. Keller bases her claim on psychological theories of gender development, which argue that the separation of subject from object is an important stage of childhood "masculine" gender development. As infants begin to relate to the world around them, they learn to recognize the world outside as independent of themselves. Since an important aspect of this development of autonomy is separation from the mother, it is a separation that is likely to be made more completely by boys than by girls.
Whereas the Greeks had relegated the economy largely to the world of women and slaves, in seventeenth-century Europe the economy was elevated to the public domain of rational scientific knowledge, a domain composed mostly of men. The economic nationalist approach has taken the liberal concept of rational economic man, which grew out of this Enlightenment knowledge, and used it to explain the behavior of states in the international system. Using game theoretic models, such explanations of states' behavior draw on the instrumentally rational market behavior of individuals. Since international economic interactions rarely result in winner-take-all situations, economic nationalists have focused on Prisoner's Dilemma games, similar to those used by neorealists to explain the strategic security dilemma, to explain states' economic behavior in the international system. Where international economic cooperation is seen to exist, it is explained not in terms of international community but rather in terms of enlightened self-interest in an environment that is essentially anarchic. 27
In her feminist critique of game theory, Birgit Brock-Utne cites recent research to support her claim that men and women exhibit different types of behavior when playing Prisoner's Dilemma games. Challenging a research finding that suggests that men may be more cooperative than women since, in single-sex Prisoner's Dilemma games, men choose a cooperative strategy more often than women, Brock-Utne claims that this is because men are more interested than women in strategic considerations of winning the game. When given a choice, men prefer games of skill, while women prefer games of chance. Since Prisoner's Dilemma is a game of skill, this may explain why women tend to lose interest when playing such games and fail to figure out the best strategy to maximize gains. 28 If, as Brock-Utne suggests, women tend to find this type of game based on instrumental rational behavior uninteresting, it is unlikely that they would have selected this methodology for explaining the behavior of states in the international economic system.
Using game theoretic models to explain states' behavior in the international system, economic nationalists, like the neorealists discussed in chapter 2, often portray states as unitary actors; concentrating at the interstate level, economic nationalists do not generally focus their attention on the internal distribution of gains. But if, as I have argued, women have been peripheral to the institutions of state power and are less economically rewarded than men, the validity of the unitary actor assumption must be examined from the perspective of gender. We must question whether women are gaining equally to men from economic nationalist prescriptions to pursue wealth and power. In all states, women tend to be clustered at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale; in the United States in the 1980s, 78 percent of all people living in poverty were women or children under eighteen. 29 In the United States, certain feminists have noted a trend toward what they term the increasing feminization of poverty: in the 1970s and 1980s, families maintained by women alone increased from 36 percent to 51.5 percent of all poor families. 30 In societies where military spending is high, women are often the first to feel the effects of economic hardship when social welfare programs are sacrificed for military priorities. As I have mentioned before, for economic nationalists the military-industrial complex is an important part of the domestic economy entitled to special protection. For poor women, however, the trade-off between military and economic spending can pose a security threat as real as external military threats.
I have shown that the economic nationalist explanation of states' behavior in the international system, which focuses on instrumental rationality, is biased toward a masculine representation. Moreover, the evolution of the modern state system and the capitalist world economy changed traditional gender roles in ways that were not always beneficial to women. Contemporary economic nationalist prescriptions for maximizing wealth and power can have a particularly negative impact on women since women are often situated at the edge of the market or the bottom of the socioeconomic scale.
Marxism
Contemporary Marxist approaches to international political economy come out of the perspective of the weak and powerless on the peripheries of the world economy. Like economic nationalism, contemporary Marxist approaches also arose as a critique of liberalism; unlike economic nationalists, however, Marxists deny that economic openness, even if it were adhered to by all states, could ever result in mutually beneficial gains. Writers in the dependency and world systems schools, not all of whom are Marxists but all of whom owe an intellectual debt to Marxism, argue that the capitalist world economy operates, through trade and investment, in a way that distorts the economies of underdeveloped states in the Third World and condemns them to permanent marginalization; their participation in the world capitalist economy is seen as detrimental to their development and as exacerbating both domestic and international inequalities between the rich and the poor. 31 Concepts of core and periphery, which exist both in the world economy and within the domestic economies of states themselves, are used to explain these inequalities: class alliances between capitalists in the Third World and transnational capital contribute to the further marginalization of peripheral sectors of Third World economies. 32 Therefore, according to these writers, both the domestic and international political and economic relations of Third World capitalist states are embedded in the exploitative structures of a capitalist world economy. Authentic, autonomous development, which meets the economic security needs of all people, can be achieved only by a socialist revolution and by the very difficult task of breaking detrimental ties with the world economy.
Feminist Critiques of Marxism
Since they speak for the interests of the least powerful in the international system, Marxist theories would appear to be more compatible with feminist perspectives. In fact much of recent feminist theory owes a strong intellectual debt to Marxism. Like Marxists, radical, socialist, and postmodern feminists see knowledge as historically and socially constructed. Marxists and feminists would agree that knowledge is embedded in human activity. Like much of feminist theory, many Marxists reject both the notion of a universal and abstract rationality and the claims of "objectivity" upon which both the liberal and economic nationalist approaches to international political economy depend so heavily.
For feminists, the Marxist understanding of knowledge is helpful because it supports their claim that knowledge has been constructed in such a way that it denies a voice to women. Nevertheless, feminism is often critical of Marxism; feminists who claim to be Marxists acknowledge that Marxist theory is in need of considerable revision if it is to speak to the various interests of women. Feminists criticize Marxist theories for ignoring women in their reproductive and domestic roles and for assuming that class-based capitalist oppression is synonymous with women's oppression.
Contemporary Marxist approaches to international political economy take class as their basic unit of analysis. In classical Marxist theory, women were subsumed under this class analysis rather than discussed as a group with particular interests and needs. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Frederick Engels tied women's oppression to male ownership of private property under capitalism and to women's dependence on men for their subsistence. Engels and other Marxists believed that when women entered the labor market, they would be made economically independent and could join with working-class men in the overthrow of capitalism, thus leading to liberation for both men and women under socialism. 33
Socialist feminists argue that this type of class-based analysis ignores two important factors: first, that women are oppressed in specific ways that are attributable to patriarchy rather than to capitalism; and, second, that class analysis ignores women's role in the family. These feminists maintain that women do not have the same opportunities as men when they enter the work force in any society, socialist or capitalist. As discussed earlier, women worldwide earn less than men on an average, even when performing similar tasks. The problem of child care hinders women's entry into the job market and when they do enter the labor market women tend to be ghettoized in low-paying jobs or to face wage discrimination. In all societies, jobs that are predominantly occupied by women are considered less prestigious and therefore less well paid than those occupied by men. Women frequently experience harassment and intimidation in the workplace, and taking time off to bear and raise children may threaten job security and impede opportunities for promotion.
However, it is Marxism's tendency to ignore women in their reproductive roles that feminists criticize the most. For classical Marxists, procreation was seen as a natural female process, fixed by human biology. Therefore a division of labor, whereby women are primarily responsible for the rearing of children, was also seen as relatively fixed. 34 Since it assumed that women's role as caretakers of children was "natural," an assumption now questioned by many feminists, classical Marxism omitted women's roles in the family from its analysis. Feminists argue that ignoring women in their reproductive and child-rearing roles, an omission common to all approaches to political economy, leaves all the unpaid labor that women perform in the family outside of economic analysis. 35 By ignoring women in their domestic roles, Marxists and non-Marxists alike neglect certain issues that are peculiar to women, regardless of their class position. When married women move into the labor force they usually continue to be responsible for most of the housework and child rearing. 36 Besides the lack of respect for unpaid housework and the dependence of full-time housewives on the incomes of their husbands, women, including those in the work force, usually suffer a severe decline in income should their marriage end in divorce. Economic dependence may force women to stay in violent and abusive marriages.
Gender ideologies, which dictate that women should be mothers and housewives, justify discriminatory practices in the labor market and place a double work burden on women. Maria Mies suggests that the historical process of the development of the gendered role of housewife in early modern Europe was an important part of the evolution of the capitalist world economy. She argues that the "nonproductive" labor of women was the foundation upon which the process of capital accumulation got started on a global scale. Mies claims that the processes of imperialism and "housewifization" were causally interrelated in nineteenth-century Europe: housewifization encouraged the demand for luxury items produced in the colonies to be consumed by European women, thus moving the display of luxury from the public to the private domain. Housewifization also produced the Victorian image of the good woman withdrawn from war, politics, and money-making, with the consequence that women's labor became a natural resource that was freely available outside the wage economy. Mies ties all these historical practices to the workings of the contemporary global economy in which former colonies are still producing consumer goods for the First World, production often undertaken by poorly paid women whose low wages are justified as supplementary income for future mothers and housewives. 37
If Marxist theories have paid insufficient attention to the historical evolution of women's private roles in households, feminist writers also claim that contemporary Marxist analysis, which focuses on the structural problems of Third World economies, does not deal adequately with the position of marginalized women in these areas. Although they often play a crucial role in subsistence production, women in the Third World are increasingly being defined as dependents, which further reinforces their marginality and denies them access to the monetary economy. 38 While dependency theory claims that the continued marginalization of those in the subsistence sector is a structural consequence of the dualisms produced by capitalist development, it does not acknowledge the disproportionate numbers of women among the marginalized, nor the fact that the status of women relative to men has been declining in many parts of the Third World.
Studies based on the contemporary situation in Europe and North America suggest that women make up a slight majority of the world's population; when women have similar nutritional standards and get similar medical treatment to men, they tend to live longer. On a global scale, however, women do not constitute a majority of the population. Mies argues that there has been a steady decline in numbers of women in proportion to men in India since the beginning of the twentieth century. She attributes this to a higher mortality rate of female babies and young girls as well as to a high maternal mortality rate. In instances where overall mortality rates have been reduced, studies show that women receive less adequate health treatment and have lower nutritional standards than men. 39
As reported in the New York Times of June 17, 1991, data from China's 1990 census reveal that 5 percent of infant girls born in China are unaccounted for. In a society where boys are strongly preferred, China's one-child-per-couple population policy may result in girls not being registered at birth or being put up for adoption. While infanticide is considered to be rare, ultrasonic testing to determine the sex of the fetus allows for the abortion of females, a practice that is increasing in many parts of the Third World.
Amartya Sen reveals that population studies in the Third World in general suggest that more than 100 million women are missing, a statistic that speaks of the inequality and neglect that leads to the excessive mortality of women. Economic development is quite often accompanied by a relative worsening of the rate of women's survival resulting from the fact that women do not share equally in the advances in medical and social progress. Calling it one of the "more momentous and neglected problems facing the world today," Sen asserts that, in view of the enormity of this problem, it is surprising that this issue has received so little attention. 40 Feminists would be less surprised than Sen; claiming that the negative effects of the world economy on women have been ignored by all schools of international political economy, they would say that the particular oppression of women evident in such data must be explained by gender-discriminating practices that include, but extend well beyond, the effects of capitalism.
If, as many feminists claim, women's oppression is due to patriarchy as well as capitalism, could the position of women be expected to improve under socialism, as Marxists believe? Socialist feminists agree that the condition of women in socialist states usually improves in the areas of social policies, welfare, and legal rights. 41 The availability of maternity rights, day care, and other institutional reforms may further improve the position of working women in socialist states. However, studies of women in the Soviet Union in the 1980s found that while women constituted 51 percent of the work force, they were disproportionately concentrated in unskilled jobs and continued to carry most of the domestic workload. 42 Although traditional Marxism saw women's entry into the labor force as a liberation, women in the former Soviet Union have seen it as an additional burden on top of demanding household duties in a state that chose to sacrifice consumer interests to state-centric heavy industrialization. 43
Since interference in the family as an institution is as much resisted in socialist states as it is in capitalist states, problems of powerlessness and violence, which women encounter in families, remain. Moreover, writers on women in socialist states generally conclude that, even if women's conditions in the work force are improved, women are as poorly represented in positions of state power and decision making as they are in capitalist states. These feminists argue that, although women may suffer from particular forms of repression under capitalism, the liberation of women through class struggle cannot be assumed. It will only come about when women are equal to men in both the public and the private spheres, a condition that would not necessarily obtain in a postcapitalist world.
Feminist Perspectives on International Political Economy
I have shown that the individual, the state, and class, which are the basic units of analysis for the liberal, economic nationalist, and Marxist approaches to international political economy, respectively, are biased toward masculine representations. Hence the prescriptions that each of these models offers for maximizing economic welfare and security may work to the advantage of men more than women. I shall now discuss how we might go about constructing feminist perspectives upon which to build less gender-biased representations of international political economy, perspectives that would include the various economic security needs of women.
The liberal and economic nationalist perspectives both rely on an instrumental, depersonalized definition of rationality that equates the rationality of individuals and states with a type of behavior that maximizes self-interest. These approaches assume that rational action can be defined objectively, regardless of time and place. Since most nonliberal feminists assume that the self is in part constructed out of one's place in a particular society, they would take issue with this definition of rationality: agreeing with Marxists, they would argue that individuals and states are socially constituted and that what counts as rational action is embodied within a particular society. Since rationality is associated with profit maximization in capitalist societies, the accepted definition of rationality has been constructed out of activities related to the public sphere of the market and thus distinguished from the private sphere of the household. Feminists argue that, since it is men who have primarily occupied this public sphere, rationality as we understand it is tied to a masculine type of reasoning that is abstract and conceptual. Many women, whose lived experiences have been more closely bound to the private sphere of care giving and child rearing, would define rationality as contextual and personal rather than as abstract. In their care-giving roles women are engaged in activities associated with serving others, activities that are rational from the perspective of reproduction rather than production.
A feminist redefinition of rationality might therefore include an ethic of care and responsibility. Such a definition would be compatible with behavior more typical of many women's lived experiences and would allow us to assume rational behavior that is embedded in social activities not necessarily tied to profit maximization. It could be extended beyond the household to include responsibility for the earth and its resources, a concern that is quite rational from the perspective of the survival and security of future generations.
Liberal, economic nationalist, and Marxist perspectives have all tended to focus their analysis at the systems level, whether it be the international system of states or the world capitalist economy. Feminist perspectives on political economy should be constructed from the bottom up, from the standpoint of those at the periphery of the world economy or the international system. Feminist perspectives should take the individual as the basic unit of analysis, but an individual defined differently from rational economic man. Since feminists claim that the liberal assumption of individual autonomy and self-sufficiency is unrealistic, feminist perspectives would assume a connected, interdependent individual whose behavior includes activities related to reproduction as well as production. In order to capture these productive and reproductive activities, the artificial boundaries between the world of instrumentally rational economic man in the public sphere of production and the socially rational activities that women perform outside the economy as mothers, care givers, and producers of basic needs must be broken down. Destroying these barriers would help to reduce the differential value attached to the "rational" or "efficient" world of production and the private world of reproduction. Were childbearing and child rearing seen as more valued activities, also rational from the perspective of reproduction, it could help to reduce the excessive focus on the efficiency of an ever-expanding production of commodities, a focus whose utility in a world of shrinking resources, vast inequalities, and increasing environmental damage is becoming questionable. A perspective that takes this redefined individual as its basic unit of analysis could help to create an alternative model of political economy that respects human relationships as well as their relation to nature. 44
This feminist redefinition of rationality allows us to take as a starting point the assumption that the economic behavior of individuals is embedded in relationships that extend beyond the market. Maria Mies argues that the production of life should be defined as work rather than as unconscious natural activity. Labor must include life-producing work and subsistence production rather than being restricted to surplus-producing labor. Instead of accepting the sexual division of labor as natural, feminist perspectives should place the production of life as the main goal of human activity and work toward breaking down the artificial division of labor created along gender lines that perpetuates the devaluation of women's work. 45
To make women's work valued by society, the barriers between public and private must be broken down. Subsistence labor, volunteer work, household work, and reproduction are among the economic activities performed primarily by women that are not counted as economically productive. Marilyn Waring claims that women have been rendered invisible in national accounting data. Since these kinds of women's work are not included in the annual reports of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, or the development agencies, projects are not planned with women in mind. While economists have claimed that nonmonetary labor is too hard to count, Waring suggests some ways, such as time-use data, which would make this possible. 46
If a substantial portion of women's productive and reproductive activities are taking place on the peripheries of the world economy in households or in the subsistence sector of Third World economies, feminist perspectives must be concerned with achieving economic justice in these particular contexts. While agreeing that women's domestic labor should be recognized as work, feminists caution that economic security for women in households cannot be guaranteed in the family as it is presently constituted. Although the family has been designated as the private sphere of women, the concept of male head of household has ensured that male power has traditionally been exercised in the private as well as the public realm. Susan Okin argues that families are not just to women or children as long as women continue to bear a disproportionate share of child rearing, have lower expected incomes than men, and are left with primary responsibility for supporting and caring for children if families break up. Okin claims that only when paid and unpaid work associated with both productive and reproductive labor is shared equally by men and women can the family be a just institution and one that can provide the basis for a just society. 47
As I have already discussed, Third World development strategies have tended to ignore the subsistence sector where much of women's labor is being performed, with the result that modernization has had a differential impact on men and women and has in certain instances actually reduced the position of women. Due to the virtual absence of women from local and national power structures, development programs have tended to support projects in areas of production that are dominated by men. To achieve economic justice for rural women in the Third World, development must target projects that benefit women, particularly those in the subsistence sector. Improvements in agriculture should focus on consumption as well as production; in many parts of Africa, gathering water and fuel, under conditions of increasing scarcity and environmental degradation, are taking up larger portions of women's time and energy.
Since women are so centrally involved in the satisfaction of basic needs in households and in the subsistence economy, feminist approaches to international political economy must be supportive of a basic needs approach where basic needs are defined inclusively, in terms of both material needs and the need for political participation. I have argued that export-oriented development strategies have tended to contribute to domestic inequality and, in times of recession and increasing international indebtedness, have had a particularly detrimental impact on women; a strategy that seeks to satisfy basic needs within the domestic economy may thus be the best type of strategy to improve the welfare of women. Local satisfaction of basic needs requires more attention to subsistence or domestic food production rather than to growing crops for export markets. A more self-reliant economy would also be less vulnerable to the decisions of foreign investors, whose employment policies can be particularly exploitative of women. 48 Basic needs strategies are compatible with values of nurturance and caring; such strategies are dependency-reducing and can empower women to take charge of their own lives and create conditions that increase their own security.
As Anne Marie Goetz claims, women have been completely absent from the process of setting national development priorities. I argued previously that women must be seen as agents in the provision of their own physical security; creating conditions under which women become agents in the provision of their own economic security is also imperative. Just as women are seen as victims in need of protection in the protector/protected relationship, when women become visible in the world economy, they tend to do so as welfare problems or as individuals marginalized from mainstream development projects. Separating women from men, often as an undifferentiated category, ignores the importance of relations between men and women and the detrimental effects of hierarchical gender relationships on women's economic security. It also ignores the ways in which women's varying identities and development interests as farmers, factory workers, merchants, and householders bear on gender relations in different contexts. 49 To overcome the problems of essentialization as well as the perception of victimization, women must be represented at all levels of economic planning, and their knowledge must be seen as valuable rather than unscientific.
At a time when existing political and economic institutions seem increasingly incapable of solving many global problems, feminist perspectives, by going beyond an investigation of market relations, state behavior, and capitalism, could help us to understand how the global economy affects those on the fringes of the market, the state, or in households as we attempt to build a more secure world where inequalities based on gender and other forms of discrimination are eliminated. Looking at the world economy from the perspective of those on its fringes can help us think about constructing a model concerned with the production of life rather than the production of things and wealth. Maria Mies argues that the different conception of labor upon which such a model depends could help us adapt our life-style at a time when we are becoming increasingly conscious of the finiteness of the earth and its resources. 50
I shall now turn to a consideration of conditions necessary for the security of our natural environment and to an examination of how feminist perspectives could also help us to think about the achievement of ecological security.
Endnotes
*: An earlier version of this chapter appeared in Murphy and Tooze, eds., The New International Political Economy. Back.
**: Galbraith epigraph quoted in Waring, If Women Counted, p. 277; Jain epigraph quoted in Pietil;aua and Vickers, Making Women Matter, p. 35; Perez de Cuellar, secretary general of the United Nations, quoted in the New York Times, June 16, 1991, p. A7. Back.
Note 1: Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations, ch. 2. Gilpin uses the term nationalism rather than economic nationalism. I shall use economic nationalism to distinguish this approach from the international relations literature on nation building. Back.
Note 2: Marianne A. Ferber and Michelle L. Teiman, "The Oldest, the Most Established, the Most Quantitative of the Social Sciences-- and the Most Dominated by Men: The Impact of Feminism on Economics," ch. 9 in Spender, ed., Men's Studies Modified. The authors note that in the U.S. in 1980 only 8 percent of Ph.D.'s in economics were awarded to women and that women made up only 5 percent of full-time economics faculties in institutions of higher learning. Back.
Note 3: Just as I used the term political man in chapter 2, I shall use the term economic man or rational economic man in this chapter. Since liberal economics has constructed rational economic man out of activities historically associated with men in the public sphere of production, I shall retain this Back.
Note 4: Hartsock, Money, Sex, and Power, p. 47. Back.
Note 5: Harding, The Science Question in Feminism, pp. 167-179. Back.
Note 6: Hartsock, Money, Sex, and Power, p. 41. Back.
Note 7: Harding, The Science Question in Feminism, p. 171. Back.
Note 8: Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature, pp. 40-48. Back.
Note 9: Gill and Law, The Global Political Economy, p. 364. Back.
Note 10: Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature, p. 138. Back.
Note 11: Connell, Gender and Power, p. 7. Some results from the study quoted in Connell were as follows: for West Germany, women's wages as a percentage of men's were 73 percent; for Japan, 43 percent; for Egypt, 63 percent; for El Salvador, 81 percent; and for Poland, 67 percent. In the United States in 1987 women who worked full time made 71 percent of what men earned (Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family, p. 144). Back.
Note 12: For a review of this literature see Jaquette, "Women and Modernization Theory." The marginalization of this literature from mainstream development theory tends to reinforce women's isolation and their characterization as victims rather than agents. Back.
Note 13: Boserup, Women's Role in Economic Development, ch. 3. Back.
Note 14: Sen and Grown, Development, Crises, and Alternative Visions, p. 34. The DAWN group, founded by Devaki Jain, comprises twenty-two Third World women researchers and activists who decided to prepare an independent report of world development for the Nairobi Conference from a Third World women's perspective. This report is the result. Back.
Note 15: Dankelman and Davidson, Women and Environment in the Third World, ch. 2. Back.
Note 16: A 1991 Report of the U.N. International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) reported that the number of rural women living in poverty in Third World countries increased 50 percent over the last two decades and that women far outnumber men in such straits. This increase has occurred despite economic gains made by many of these countries. The report claims that, while women form the backbone of agricultural labor in many areas, their contributions remain invisible. Reported in the Boston Globe, July 29, 1991, p. 2. Back.
Note 17: Pasuk Phongpaichit, "Two Roads to the Factory: Industrialization Strategies and Women's Employment in South-East Asia," in Agarwal, ed., Structures of Patriarchy, pps. 151-163. Back.
Note 18: Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases, ch. 7. Back.
Note 19: For a detailed analysis of the effects of the International Monetary Fund's policies of structural adjustment on women see Vickers, Women and the World Economic Crisis, ch. 2. Back.
Note 20: See, for example, Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations, and Stephen Krasner, "American Policy and Global Economic Stability," ch. 2 in Avery and Rapkin, eds., America in a Changing World Political Economy. Back.
Note 21: Gill and Law, The Global Political Economy, p. 367. Back.
Note 22: Mitchell, "Women and Equality," ch. 1 in Phillips, ed., Feminism and Equality, p. 31. Back.
Note 23: Connell, Gender and Power, p. 153. Back.
Note 24: Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, p. 83. Back.
Note 25: Leonore Davidoff, "Adam Spoke First and Named the Orders of the World: Masculine and Feminine Domains in History and Sociology," in Corr and Jamieson, eds., The Politics of Everyday Life, p. 234. Back.
Note 26: Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science, chs. 3 and 4. Back.
Note 27: See for example Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation, and Keohane, After Hegemony, pp. 67-84. A Prisoner's Dilemma game is derived from a story about two imprisoned suspects allowed to negotiate their pleas only with a powerful district attorney. Particular configurations of utility payoffs derive from this story. Specifically, it is assumed that for each player T (temptation payoff associated with his or her defection and the other's cooperation) > R (the reward individually received for joint cooperation) ;mt P (the individual penalty of both players' defection) > S (the "sucker"payoff associated with his or her cooperation and the other's defection). Sometimes the simplifying constraint that 2R > S+T is also assumed. Back.
Note 28: Brock-Utne, "Gender and Cooperation in the Laboratory." BrockUtne cites other recent research that suggests that women may be more influenced by the interpersonal situation, such as getting along with other players, than by strategy considerations associated with winning the game. This is consistent with Deborah Tannen's claim that women in conversation prioritize relationships. See Tannen, You Just Don't Understand. Back.
Note 29: Seager and Olson, Women in the World, p. 28. Back.
Note 30: Pierce, "The Feminization of Poverty," p. 1. Back.
Note 31: Gill and Law, The Global Political Economy, pp. 54-69. Back.
Note 32: This is one of the central claims of Galtung's analysis in "A Structural Theory of Imperialism." Back.
Note 33: Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature, pp. 63-69. Back.
Note 35: For an extended analysis of this issue, see Waring, If Women Counted. Back.
Note 36: Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family, p. 153. Back.
Note 37: Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, pp. 100-110. Back.
Note 40: Sen, "More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing," p. 66. Back.
Note 41: Molyneux, "Mobilization Without Emancipation?" Back.
Note 42: Moore, Feminism and Anthropology, pp. 141-142. Back.
Note 43: Hansson and Liden, Moscow Women. These interviews suggest that these women preferred the traditional role of housewife to the double burden of working outside the home as well as taking care of a family. Back.
Note 44: Kaldor, "The Global Political Economy," p. 454. Back.
Note 45: Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, ch. 2. Back.
Note 46: Waring, If Women Counted, ch. 11. Back.
Note 47: Okin, Gender and Justice, pp. 171ff. Back.
Note 48: For an extended analysis of such a self-reliant development strategy see Tickner, Self-Reliance Versus Power Politics. Back.
Note 49: Goetz, "Feminism and the Limits of the Claim to Know," pp. 482-483. Back.
Note 50: Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, pp. 211ff. Back.
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