Race, Sex, and the Division of Labor: a Comment on Joan Williams's Reshaping the Work-family Debate
| Publication year | 2011 |
| Citation | Vol. 34 No. 03 |
I. Introduction
Often, knowing the origin of a rule or practice is helpful in understanding its current operation and what one must do if one wishes to change it. Consider, for example, the sexual division of labor that is the main subject of Professor Williams's book.(fn1) Professor Williams describes in chilling detail how workplace practices, some of them having the force of law, disadvantage women, particularly those with children or elderly relatives.(fn2) Whether caregivers or not, women perform work below their ability level, encounter obstacles that do not afflict men, and perform a disproportionate share of housework and caregiving.(fn3) Even professional-class women experience glass ceilings and inadequate accommodations for motherhood.(fn4)
Where did these practices come from, and why are they so entrenched in the United States? European workers enjoy a shorter workweek, longer vacations, and more favorable family leave policies than their American counterparts.(fn5) Healthcare and disability policies are more generous there as well, and European husbands perform a higher percentage of the housework and child care than do similarly situated men in the United States.(fn6)
What accounts for these role differentiations, and why are they so resistant to change? Professor Williams, who, to her credit, aims to reform them, devotes relatively little attention to their origins, saying only that they seem bound up with capitalism and appeared with the advent of the factory system.(fn7)
II. Race and Sex
And what of that other source of social stratification, race? In our society, for example, Mexican Americans pick fruit and tend crops.(fn8) Blacks work in the service sector.(fn9) Asians tend computers.(fn10) And so on for each of the different groups. While this is not true of every member of those groups, America's workplaces are as sharply stratified by race as they are by sex.
Professor Williams explains that she will not be concerned about race in the division of labor;(fn11) it is a large problem that requires separate treatment of its own.(fn12) It is indeed a large problem; however, one cannot adequately account for the role of sex in the workplace without also considering that of race.
Men and women performed different roles beginning in early history. In hunter-gatherer societies, men were the hunters, while women skinned the animals, foraged, and prepared the food.(fn13) The Bible mentions specialized roles for men and women,(fn14) a practice that continued largely unchanged through the Middle Ages and Reformation.(fn15)
But role differentiations became even more deeply entrenched during the period of European colonialism.(fn16) Any account of present-day workplace stratification needs to proceed aware of this colonial period and how it created and reinforced social roles.
During the colonial period, most of the settling force consisted, at first, of men.(fn17) Conditions were arduous, and the natives required domination, then ruling.(fn18) Diseases, tropical heat, and wild animals posed constant dangers.(fn19) Accordingly, during the early stages of conquest and settlement, the colonial forces consisted almost entirely of men.
The women stayed behind, tending the home fires in London or Marseilles and waiting for the men to return or notify them that it was safe to join them in the newly conquered regions.(fn20) Until then, the women would remain chaste and virtuous. With ladylike, easily controlled libidos, they were expected to keep their minds on the finer things of life while waiting for the signal to join the men. In fact, many of the women did not remain true to their wayfaring boyfriends, but sought new romantic outlets of their own.(fn21)
For their part, the men spent their days putting down rebellious natives and imposing a new administrative order. At night, the men would enjoy the company of native concubines.(fn22) The medical science of the time held that male sexual abstinence could lead to insanity.(fn23) Thus, the men were under a kind of duty to find sexual outlets, which they did in the form of native concubines. During the day, these women worked as servants in the colonial master's household, doing his cleaning, cooking, and sewing. At night they slept in his bed.(fn24) The native woman emerged then, in the literature of the day, as a willing sexual servant, an empty vessel waiting to be filled, potentially impure and a source of disease.(fn25)
What of native men? These brown, black, or Asian men were the feared competitors. Seeing their women lying down with the colonial overlords could easily infuriate them, provoking a violent response.(fn26) The dark man, then, represented disorder, threat, and rebellion.
Colonialism thus gave rise to a two-by-two matrix in which race and sex both played a part. It provided separate, distinct roles for white men, white women, black men, and black women. These roles lasted, with some minor alterations, into the industrial era when Professor Williams believes they began.(fn27) But, as we have seen, they were in full force well before that. Moreover, the sexual roles on which she focuses grew together with roles that were expressly racial.
In the United States, sex and race roles followed a similar path. The Pocahontas myth, for example, depicted Indian women as awaiting the virile arrival of the white colonials,(fn28) while later, in the Southwest, Mexican women played similar roles during the period surrounding Anglo conquest and occupation of the region.(fn29)
In the South, these roles received new reinforcement when plantation society developed fine houses, with the slaves working the field and sleeping in rude shacks at a distance from the grand homes of the owner and his family.(fn30) The master's female children led lives of privilege, with piano lessons, instruction in French or Italian, and foreign travel. They learned to make polite conversation in anticipation of the well-born young men who would one day seek their hands in marriage.(fn31)
Yet their lives were sharply circumscribed. Young girls of plantation society could not climb trees or go for long rambles, especially ones that might take them near where the slaves worked and...
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