Feminism for Everyone
| Publication year | 2011 |
Every idea has its time. Joan Williams's idea is that we need to re-frame debates about work and family by paying attention to how our gender system of domesticity harms everyone: women, men, privileged Americans, and working-class people. Williams defines domesticity as the gender system that organizes market work and family work around traditional gender roles through a set of entrenched narratives and institutional arrangements.(fn1) Her basic argument is that to achieve more family-friendly public policy in the United States, feminists and advocates need to pay attention to the impact of domesticity on men and working-class people as well as privileged women. In Williams's view, we also need to be more sophisticated about politics.
Like her formidable body of work on the subject, Williams's new book,
In this Essay, I offer an assessment of Williams's apparent reorientation in strategy: her decision to focus on masculinity and class in framing the problem of work and family conflict. Part I describes the book, reviewing its main theoretical and strategic innovations. Part II teases out the intellectual underpinnings of Williams's book, including Marxist-socialist inspired feminism and philosophical pragmatism. Part II also explores the reasons why this is the perfect moment for Williams's ideas and arguments, both in legal feminism and in national policy debates about work and family issues. Part III suggests that attention to the structural, macroeconomic issues contributing to work and family conflict might take Williams's analysis even further.
I. The Road to
Now, more than ever, is Joan Williams's moment. Historically, gender was the primary lens through which legal feminism analyzed the problem of women's workplace inequality. Feminists disagreed about strategy,(fn3) but gender was the focus. Beginning roughly in the 1990s, this relatively unified theoretical perspective began to break down as feminists paid increased attention to other types of diversity. Antiessentialism emerged as a robust working rubric as divisions within legal feminism developed over race and other axes of identity.(fn4) More recently, the national debate over same-sex marriage, the emergence of queer theory as an independent intellectual movement in law, and the global economic crisis have made even more encompassing perspectives possible. Today, masculinity,(fn5) sexuality,(fn6) and class(fn7) are as important as gender and race in legal feminist analysis.
Through all of these shifts, Joan Williams has remained a tireless advocate for restructuring societal institutions to address the tension between market and family work. Structural critiques of gender and economic inequality like Williams's have not been particularly influential in law or politics in the United States for at least thirty years.(fn8) American constitutionalism addresses economic inequality only weakly and indi-rectly.(fn9) Neoliberalism(fn10) and evolutionary biology,(fn11) ascendant in law while Williams was developing her ideas, naturalize economic and gender inequality. And yet Williams spearheaded a legal strategy to deploy her vision on the ground, theorizing,(fn12) securing grant funding for,(fn13) and implementing a litigation and public education campaign to end employment discrimination against family caregivers. Through the Center on WorkLife Law at Hastings Law School,(fn14) which Williams founded, she has developed legal theories(fn15) enabling plaintiffs to recover for discrimination on the basis of their caregiver status,(fn16) created model human-resources policies for employers,(fn17) developed a program to help law firms recruit and retain attorneys by offering meaningful reduced-hour schedules,(fn18) and convened a group of social scientists and lawyers to produce studies documenting workplace bias against adults with family responsibilities.(fn19) Indeed, she "has been instrumental in founding a new field in social psychology focused on bias experienced by mothers as opposed to women in general."(fn20)
In sum, Williams's extraordinary contributions to the work-family field and feminism more generally have been twofold. First, as Kathryn Abrams has previously observed,(fn21) Williams demonstrates that the problem of work-family conflict in America is more than simply a policy failure. The problem is not merely that we need more public supports for family care work such as subsidized child care and parental leave or expanded worker rights to flextime and comparable worth for part-time jobs. We do need all of those things. However, Williams has a larger point: for any meaningful progress to occur, we must disrupt the gender system of domesticity, which organizes market work around the ideal worker who works full time and marginalizes family caregivers. As such, Williams's work constitutes a visionary challenge to both gender ideology and free-market thinking.
Second, Williams's work represents a methodological innovation in her simultaneous vision of radical transformations and incremental changes. Through her academic writings, the Center for WorkLife Law, popular books,(fn22) and blogs,(fn23) she has made her theories available in a language which is that of both an activist and an academic. Indeed, Williams has literally created a new vocabulary for understanding the complex problem of work and family conflict. For example, Williams coined the term "ideal worker norm," which has appeared in newspapers and journal articles all over the world.(fn24) In short, she seeks nothing less than to transform the very way we talk about work and family conflict in America.
Second, Williams seeks to challenge the way we talk about gender when discussing work and family conflict. Here, Williams moves beyond her earlier work on domesticity to more explicitly examine the role of masculinity in producing a gender system that harms both women and men. According to Williams, "masculine norms underlie the social structures within which both men and women negotiate their daily lives."(fn30) As others have explored,(fn31) Williams argues that masculine norms create workplace pressures that make men reluctant or unable to contribute significantly to family life,(fn32) and they backfire for women in the form of a double-bind, which punishes women whether they conform with masculine workplace ideals or adopt a more feminine identity at work.(fn33)
Finally, Williams suggests that we need to shift away from a focus on gender and pay more attention to class dynamics if we are to make any headway in reshaping America's system of family supports. This shift will require us to understand class in new ways. Williams offers two innovations in this regard. First, she suggests that we need to focus not just on the poor, but also on the "Missing Middle"(fn34)-Americans who are "one sick child away from being fired."(fn35) Second, Williams asks us to see class divisions as a cultural problem as much as an economic one. She sees a gaping cultural rift between white working-class and professional-managerial class Americans that needs to be addressed, and she describes the rift in poignant detail. She argues that in order to recreate the New Deal coalition between workers, African Americans, and professional elites, we need to change the dynamics of everyday politics through cross-class cultural understanding and gestures of mutual respect.
II. Reading
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