Practice exam question: citizenship, gender, and Wollstonecraft's dilemma

In what ways can policies that seek to address the distribution of unpaid and caring work be seen as an attempt to solve Wollstonecraft's dilemma by requiring both women and men to be "citizen workers"?

Ok, I'm a bit shaky on this material right now, but the purpose of this practice question is to get me up to speed with the key concepts and contributors. So here goes a kitchen skink approach, which I'l clean up later.

What I will do in this essay is to define Wollstonecraft's dilemma, then discuss the concept of citizenship in relation to paid and unpaid labour. I'll then look at some policies designed to address the distribution of unpaid labour, looking both within the home and at policies aimed at moving the "burden" of unpaid labour outside the home, eg through publicly subsidised childcare. I will then critically evaluate whether or not reuqiring both men and women to be citizen workers is enough to solve wollstonecraft's Dilemma. Spoiler alert: it's not. What are needed are policies to make both men and women into citizen worker carers. My focus will be on western European countries and those in the Anglosphere.

Wollstonecraft's dilemma, as coined and characterised by Carol Patemean in (I think) 1979, refers to the conundrum faced by women seeking to realise full social citizenship. [if i wanted to be good I could discuss the notion of social citizenship, but I think i'll save that for later - it's something i could certainly get by without doing.] As Pateman saw it, within a patriarchal society, women are presented with two routes to citizenship: as carers and as workers. Unfotunately, both routes lead to second class citizenship. For the carer route, this is because paid labour is much more greatly valourised than unpaid labour - the latter of course being the traditional domain of women. However, for the woman who comes to two roads that diverge in the patriarchal wood, both paths open to her are less than ideal. Should she seek to attain her full citizenship by virtue of her status as a worker, she (or women on aggregate) will be hampered by women's higher burden of umpaid and caring work. That is, she can become a citizen worker, but, on the whole, women are less likely to "succeed" in paid labour and as citizen workers than men are, because women are more likely to have extensive unpaid laobur and caring responsibilities. In a patriarchal society, the ideal citizen worker is the ideal worker, and it is much easier for men to attain this status than for women to do so.

Ok, so now I've said I'm going to look at policies to address the distribution of unpaid labour. In order to enable women to more fully become citizen workers, then, it would appear necessary to alter the distribution of unpaid labour. One route to doing this is to alter the distribution between men and women. Another way is to alter the distribution between women and the state - for instance, by still expecting women to be the main carers when children are at home, but providing sufficient childcare to enable those women to do substantive work outside the home and to have substantive careers. In practice, this has been the primary means through which western states have sought to redistribute unpaid caring labour. However, wht this question seems to be getting at is the distributino within the home between men and women, so I'll look at that too. Perhaps I'll look at it first. No, second?

With regard to redistribute the burden of unpaid labour, particularly in the form of caring work, away from women and onto the state, policies have had some success in enabling women to become citizen workers. It would be handy to dump in some stats here, but for now I'll just motor through. Particularly in the Scandinavian countries, state-provided childcare and preschool have enabled mothers to have a stronger attachment to the paid labour market than in the countries classified by Esping Andersen (1990) as liberal democracies - eg the UK and US - or corporatist/conservative countries such as Germany. (It should be noted that EA's typology of welfare regimes has many weaknesses for dealing with gender issues in welfare states.) Here I can go into some stats, eg the very high drop-off rates when women become mothers in the UK, the high rates of staying on in work for mothers in Sweden and Denmark. As Bradshaw argues, the key to allowing mothers to work is providing an excellent childcare package. In his analysis of 22 OECD countries, I recall that the UK has moved up from 15th in the early 1990s or late 80s to about 7th in the early 200s. All of these policies allow women to join men in becoming citizen workers.

However, the key to Wollstonecraft's Dilemma is the inability of women to become as "good" at being citizen workers as men - women's inability to adhere as fully to the citizen worker model as men. Analysis of the distribution of paid and unpaid labour confirms this. If i do the question on regime types and gender I will discuss the differences between men and women both within regime types and across them, using the article on Finland and Oz. What those authors found was that while there are great differences across regime types in how much paid and unpaid labour women do, these differences were small in comparison to the differences in paid and unpaid labour within countries. That is, while regime matters for distribution, gender matters far more. Women in Finaldn did more paid and less unpaid labour than those in Oz, but were still much closer to their levels than to the levels for men in Finland. This is true in all countries, I believe. 

For example, if we look at the Scandinavian countries, where, it has been claimed by many, including NAME, that women appear to have attained the greatest rights as citizen workers, we find that in comparison to men, they are still second tier citizen workers. Here what I want to do is talk about how in Sweden women are first seen as workers, at least to a degree. Well, they gain some of their rights as workers. For instance, women are granted extensive, very well paid (90%?) maternity leave in Sweden, but only if they were working. They do not get nearly as extensive financial support when they become mothers if they were not first workers. And Lewis rights of how mothers' rights in Sweden are predicated first on their role as equals as citizen workers, with an equality in difference perspective grafted onto that, so that they then get additional rights based on their higher burden of unpaid childcare work.

Getting back to the fact that they are still second class citizen workers... Examples... Mothers are much more likely to work in the public sector. Something like 80% of Swedish mothers do, as do more than 60% of Danish mothers. They do this because the public sector offers family friendly work hours and leave packages. The private sector is dominated by men, working longer hours and, on aggregate, making more money. One piece of research showed that in Sweden, class differences in wage packets were less than gender differences. In the industrial sector, women earned less as a percentage of men's wages than the working class earned as a percentage of their bosses'. However, this should be contrasted with teh fact that Sweden has a smaller wage gap than any other country (10%, I believe), and mothers here and in Denmark have greater attachment to the labour market than in any other. In times of financial crisis, the public sector cutbacks penalise these women through lost jobs and wages, weakening their positions as citizen workers.

The differences in status as citizen workers are most apparent when looking at time use data that shows the distribution of paid and unpaid labour within households. As Gershuny and Sullivan show, even though Sweden perform approximately the same amount of total labour per day (521 minutes for men, 517 for women), the distribution is skewed towards unpaid labour for women: men devote 41% of their work time to unpaid labour, while women devote 47% of their work time. A few points to note here. One, there is other work indicating that women in Sweden and everywhere else actually perform at least a few more hours per week of total labour than men do. So Gershuny and Sullivan's numbers are contested. [Another point is that I would very much like to see these numbers broken down based on age of child. For example, during the child's first year, Swedish leave policy means that the woman is going to account for almost no paid labour and a massive % of the couple's unpaid labour time, and this is going to skew the total. I'd like to see a more sophisticated breakdown, so we could get a picture, eg, of what the distribution of paid and unpaid labour is like when the kids are, eg, 3, 7, 10, 14.] In the UK, men devote 40% of their total work time to unpaid labour; in the US, the figure is 38%. What we see, in all countries and regardless of regime type, is that women, even when working full-time, do more of the unpaid labour. Hochschild documted this ethnographically in The Second Shift, a study looking at two-earner households in the US, where she found that women in these households bore an unfair burden. Daly I think has written that men have leisure after work, women have unpaid labour.

What we see across all countries is that women on aggregate do not become citizen workers, they become citizen worker carers. Whose terminology is this. And here we come to the rub in this exam question: as Pateman argued, women cannot solve Wollstonecraft's dilemma by becoming citizen workers, because while men maintain the identity of citizen workers, women will bear the burden of care, and thus the best they can hope to become (as a gender) are citizen worker carers. While men are merely citizen workers, this means that women will suffer from reduced chances to be ideal workers, and will suffer greater time poverty. Re the reduced chance to become ideal workers, we see in the UK that mothers are so much more likely to work part-time. Motherhood, the EOC finds, confers the biggest employment penalty of any other charactersitic, including any type of ethnicity.

Fraser has made a very persuasive argument that women have become more like men (ie citizen workers), but that while beneficial to women, this has proved to not be nearly enough. For gender equity to be attained, men need to become more like women. One is reminded of a line by Oscar Wilde, who wrote that 'every women becomes like her mother. That is her tragedy. No man does - that is his.' For Fraser and others, the only solution to Wollstonecraft's dilemma would be for the patriarchal division of paid and unpaid labour to be dismantled, for the gendered nature of work and care to be deconstructed.

There are policies that are seeking to do this. Before getting to that I suppose I should answer the question by saying that so far policies to get women more into paid labour have sought to enable women to become citizen workers, and this has proved partially but not fully successful, for the reasons Pateman cites. Even when working, women bear a greater burden of unpaid labour, and tend to be second class citizen workers. I really should put in some data here from one or more of Ania's charts. However, there are some supporters of a citizen worker pathway to social citizenship for women. In the US, for instance, Linda Hirshman recently published Get to Work, a manifesto arguing that in the US, the only way that women will attain equal power to men is to actively forego their role as citizen worker carers, placing much more emphasis on being citizen workers who also do some caring, along the lines of men. Thus Hirshman recommends that women pursue higher paying careers (as in the UK, has the EOC), and that they adopt the masculine pattern of seeking partners who are more committed to care and less committed to career than they are. Here in the UK, Alison Wolf has argued that there are no barriers to a woman having the career she wants. In large part, she is right. There is no law saying that because someone has female reproductive organs, she cannot rise to the top in her chosen profession. However, there is the very real fact that should she use those reproductive organs, her chances of workplace success slip hugely. This is in stark contrast to men, where fathers are likely to work more and be more successful than non-fathers. It could be argued that in a liberal democracy with very limited legislation rewarding mothers rights on an equality in difference principle - the US is, for example, the only developed nations without statutory maternity leave - following the citizen worker route is the only realistic route to an even partial realisation of Wollstonecraft's Dilemma.

However, most feminist scholars seek a citizen worker carer model. Joan Williams, for instance, calls for a reconstructive feminism in which women can have great careers while being great carers. The next key to the realisation of this would appear to be redressing the "private" balance of paid and unpaid labour. One note on the public redressing of it through childcare. Crompton has found that in France, childcare has allowed women to do more paid work, but among the unpaid laobur that remains, they still bear and overwhelming burden, despite the short working hours of French men in comparison to men of other nations.

So how can policies to address the distribution of paid and unpaid labour be seen to solve Wollstonecraft's dilemma? In effect, they can't. They just allow women to follow one tainted grail - albeit admittedly a better one than the women as carers alone model does. [What would be required would be policies to redress the amount of paid work done. This is what WHO IS IT recommends.]

Do I need to discuss some of these policies? Yes. How about parental leave? First, I should say that as Waldfogel has noted when writing about childcare, policy that affected the private sphere would be much more powerful it could be enacted, but behind the closed doors of the home it is much more difficult to pull policy levers. So what are the policies designed to get men to do more caring? Parental leave is pretty much the main one, right? And what do we find with that? We find that in Scandinavia uptake has been patchy, with the biggest barriers appearing to be the culture of indespensability of male paid work, and social pressure not to take the accepted time off. However, it has made some difference, but has it made that much difference in how paid and unpaid labour are divided up on the whole? I haven't seen any evidence to indicate that it has. Again, I think it comes down to work hours culture, and this is argued by a couple of feminist scholars. Get there names.

So, here it's time to sum up. What I want to say is that men are already citizen workers, and that, as predicted by Pateman, policies to enable women to become citizen workers have not succeeded in solving Wollstonecraft's dilemma: women still bear the burden for most caring. However, in homes where women work, men do more of the unpaid labour so perhaps earlier on I should have cited these stats. Crompton will have them, I'm pretty sure. But I don't think there's any evidence that the causality pushes in the direction of policies to get men to do more unpaid work, then women will be freed to become better citizen workers. It's that women get paid employment, then their partners do more unpaid labour. And it would be worth citing stats on how much unpaid caring and labour men do now compared to 40 and 30 years ago. I think it was 20 minutes per day in 1975, and now its up to 120 per day. So this does enable women to do more working, but I don't think it solves Wollstonecraft's Dilemma. What is needed are policies to enable/force both men and women to become citizen worker carers. This would mean persuading men to do more unpaid labour and dissuading them from doing as much paid. Because as one scholar notes, it is impossible to do significant caring if one spends so much time at paid work.