Neglected or Misunderstood Page 10
Such arrangements would achieve the second of Firestone’s structural demands, for the ‘economic independence and self-determination of all’:
Under a cybernetic communism, even during the socialist transition, work would be divorced from wages, the ownership of the means of production in the hands of all the people, and wealth distributed on the basis of need, independent of the social value of the individual’s contribution to society. (214)
How feasible is all this? Can all wearisome or unpleasant work be automated? I’m not sure that it matters if Firestone is being a little too optimistic about the capacity of cybernation to do away with work that has “social value” but no “personal value” (in other words, it needs to be done, but no one particularly likes doing it) because it seems to me that in some ways her most radical proposal occurs in relation to her supposedly transitional aim – that if unpleasant and alienating work remains, then it should be equitably shared.
Let’s imagine that insufficient numbers of people enjoy being responsible for cleaning hospitals (despite whatever gadgetry exists to alleviate its burden). Then this work would be distributed between people for whom the other 90 per cent (let’s say) of their working time is spent on activities that for them are personally rewarding as well as socially valuable. Somebody might object that it would be hugely wasteful of individual talent to have for example, a medical doctor, spend 10 per cent of her time doing work that “anybody could do.” But the point of this arrangement would be to develop the currently under-utilized talents of those who spend 100 per cent of their working time on unpleasant labor in the direction of work that is of personal as well as social value (no doubt some current hospital cleaners, given the opportunity, would become doctors). Another benefit of this arrangement would be to change the collective value placed on such labor – to reveal to everybody through direct personal experience the care, attention, patience and effort involved in the indispensable function of keeping hospitals clean.
Alternatively, if this is too radical, what about a fundamental revaluing of different kinds of work in terms of the wages attached to them? A university certainly cannot function without cleaners, caretakers, administrators and lecturers, and possibly not without a vice chancellor. And yet the lecturer typically earns at least twice that of the caretaker, and the vice chancellor perhaps ten times as much as the lecturer. This is surely an unwarranted disparity. Perhaps, while there remains less personally rewarding work that society nonetheless needs to be done, the wages of such jobs could be increased by way of compensation; paid for, perhaps, by higher taxation of well-paid and/or personally fulfilling jobs.
While Firestone’s speculations might in 1970 have looked far-fetched, the decades that have elapsed have in fact seen proposals similar to hers emerge in the arena of “serious” political and economic debate. “Technological unemployment” is the term given today to what many believe will be the increasing levels of structural unemployment – permanent, because produced by the fundamentals of the system itself – brought about by the automation of jobs. (Economists in fact debate whether permanent unemployment will result from automation: some argue that, as in the past, automation will produce new kinds of jobs; others counter that in this respect the future will not be like the past, since where formerly people gained work servicing the machines that had eliminated their jobs, now machines will build, service and repair other machines.)58 This has contributed to calls for the introduction of a universal basic income (UBI) – a non-means-tested income paid by governments to citizens regardless of whether or not they are in paid employment. Such calls have come from across the political spectrum, from voices on the Left seeking to eliminate poverty and reduce inequality, as well as those on the Right, for whom a basic income promises to reduce the costs of welfare administration, or is key to enabling entrepreneurs to pursue their business ideas and to ensuring constant levels of consumer spending.59 In the UK today, the introduction of a basic income is official Green Party policy and is being seriously considered by the Labour Party.60 Pilot schemes have been launched in several countries and several have indicated that a basic income decoupled from one’s role in production does not significantly reduce people’s willingness to work (a frequent objection to UBI).61 But even if it did, if there is to be less work available – many argue that the five-day working week is facing obsolescence – then perhaps this is a benefit rather than a problem.
As Firestone herself would be the first to observe, the potential direction of any technological development is always highly uncertain, not least because it depends on what political choices are made. Of course, the automation of work could lead to an even more unequal society divided between an economic elite of CEOs, corporate managers and shareholders and an unemployed underclass (the majority) suffering ever-worsening poverty. But as Firestone points out, such a prospect is by no means inevitable. What we need is a fundamental rethinking of the value of work; of the relationship between work and the resources that people receive; and to devise radically new ways of distributing work and of utilizing leisure time.
Reproduction
We know that for Firestone, however, a revolution in production will fail to bring about emancipation unless it is unaccompanied by a transformation in reproduction. What then does she think needs to happen to reproduction itself?
There are, she states, ‘many degrees of this’ (185). Her first call often escapes attention but is perhaps one of the most important: that reproduction cease to be considered ‘the life goal of the normal individual’ (206). In a culture that makes having kids a virtual imperative, this is in itself a radical demand. Still today, the family is given sacrosanct status and those who live outside this structure are often regarded with pity or distrust (the very term “childless” of course suggests lack; while the rejoinder “childfree” has a testiness about it that points to the weight of ideological pressure being resisted). Firestone’s first demand is to open up possibilities for non-reproductive lifestyles, and for these to be accorded equal value and respect. Two possible forms of such lifestyle, she notes, already exist: the ‘single life,’ in which an individual’s ‘social and emotional needs’ are satisfied through their professional occupation; and ‘living together,’ in which ‘two or more partners, of whatever sex, enter a nonlegal sex/companionate arrangement the duration of which varies with the internal dynamics of the relationship’ (205). She observes that the problem with these arrangements, however, is that they are still considered to be outside the mainstream, and are accepted only ‘for brief periods in the life of the normal individual’ (205). Quickly enough, demands emerge to marry and have children. There is a need, therefore, to ‘broaden these options to include many more people for longer periods of their lives,’ to transfer to them ‘all the cultural incentives now supporting marriage’ and to make such alternatives ‘as common as and acceptable as marriage is today’ (205). The first step in securing women’s freedom, then, is to make motherhood optional; and it is only truly optional if the alternative is culturally valued and materially supported. But Firestone is clear that this applies as well to men, for whom fatherhood may not entail the same sacrifices as motherhood does for women, but who also need being a parent to become a choice and not a compulsion.
A second important staging-point for Firestone in freeing women from the demands of reproduction are the calls being made by feminist activists at the time for freely available contraception and abortion (see Chapter 2 and Chapter 10). But for Firestone, while these are extremely important – indeed, basic conditions of women’s freedom – they comprise only some of the reproductive technologies that she sees as promising women’s delivery from their biological burden. We now come, then, to the proposal for which she is most famous, and most ridiculed: that biological reproduction itself be eliminated in favor of artificial reproduction.
Firestone doubts that there is such a thing as a natural instinct for pregnancy (as opposed to an instinct for sex, the res
ult of which may be pregnancy). Indeed, she also puts into question the existence in either men or women of an instinct for parenthood. Parenthood is often frequently genuinely desired, she admits, but she believes that this is due at least partly to the cultural superstructure that creates inducements to begin a family, and often as a ‘displacement of other needs’ (205). For the man, these include the opportunity to extend his ego into the world (to continue his name and lineage), and for the woman, justification of her existence in a world that otherwise attributes her little worth. It is only when such ‘false motivations’ have been eliminated – by valuing equally non-reproductive lifestyles and dismantling patriarchy’s pathologies – that it will be possible to see the true extent of an authentic desire to raise children, which Firestone speculates would take the form of ‘a simple physical desire to associate with the young’ that is likely to be experienced by men just as much as women (206).
The importance of creating an alternative to traditional reproduction is, for Firestone, manifold. As we have seen in previous chapters, part of her concern is for the pregnant woman herself, and is to do with relieving women of the physical suffering, incapacitation and threat to health that accompany both pregnancy and childbirth. But her concern lies also with the child:
A mother who undergoes a nine-month pregnancy is likely to feel that the product of all that pain and discomfort ‘belongs’ to her (“To think of what I went through to have you!”). But we want to destroy this possessiveness along with its cultural reinforcements. (208)
We return here to one of the key themes of the book: that the understanding of human relationships in terms of property is detrimental to all those within them. To relate to a child as an aspect of one’s self, to charge it with the task of representing oneself, fulfilling oneself or justifying oneself, is to establish for it an impossible burden and for oneself an inevitable disappointment. Firestone wants children to ‘be loved for their own sake,’ as independent and autonomous beings, not as possessions over which parents retain proprietorial control (208). And the flip side of this idea of the child as parental possession, she thinks, is that other children (those who are not anybody’s child in particular) are relegated in their importance, their claims on the social body for protection and nurturing going insufficiently acknowledged, as responsibility for children is privatized around the biological unit of the family. Firestone suggests that to see the truth of this one need only look at the orphanage of 1960s America, which is the ‘underside of the family,’ in which ‘unclaimed children suffer’ (188–9). But it would not be difficult to find examples in our own time, in the conspiracies of silence surrounding the abuse of children in the Church or the care system, or the abuse and neglect of unaccompanied child refugees in Europe.
This sets up an unresolved equivocation in the Dialectic. On the one hand, Firestone claims that she is not in fact seeking necessarily to eliminate biological reproduction, but only to make of it one possible route among others for a woman who wishes to mother. ‘At the very least, development of the option [of artificial reproduction] should make possible an honest re-examination of the ancient value of motherhood,’ she says, arguing (reasonably enough) that one cannot really assess the value of biological reproduction until one has had experience of the alternatives (181). The argument about the child-as-property, however, inclines toward the conclusion that biological reproduction really cannot be maintained if women and children are to be free, since biology plays such a key role in the idea of the child as belonging to the parent. This is not only because of the aforementioned pain of labor (‘to think of what I went through …’) but also, Firestone seems to imply, because the notion of biological kinship is so central to this idea of the child as adjunct of the self. Firestone’s goal therefore, in proposing a radically different structure within which to raise children, is to replace ‘psychologically destructive genetic “parenthood”’ (214) altogether.
She calls the structure that she proposes for this the household, rejecting the term ‘extended family’ as being still too tied to the old ideologies. She describes it like this:
A group of ten or so consenting adults of varying ages could apply for a licence as a group in much the same way as a young couple today applies for a marriage licence, perhaps even undergoing some form of ritual ceremony, and then might proceed in the same way to set up house. (207)
The children raised within the household would probably be born through artificial reproduction (conceived, gestated and “birthed” in artificial wombs). It is a structure intended to facilitate collective parenting, in which responsibility for children is diffused rather than concentrated. The chief advantages of such an arrangement, for Firestone, ought by now to be clear: with biological childbearing eliminated, and responsibility for child nurture collectivized, shared across a number of adults (and older children) of both sexes, the age-old sexual division of labor and hence its ‘traditional dependencies and resulting power relations’ will have been eliminated (207). Women as well as men will be able to retain a sense of their preparenthood identities and continue whatever projects, work or interests they previously had alongside being a parent. The child will not be considered the possession of any individual. Since the household exists within Firestone’s cybernetic communism (with resources provided according to need) there will be no economic dependence of women upon men, and no economic precarity to threaten the stability of the unit. Indeed, Firestone holds that the household will be a more stable structure for the rearing of children than was the traditional family, since ‘all participating members’ will have ‘entered only on the basis of personal preference’ (and not through cultural or familial pressure – the ‘shot gun’ wedding, for example) (207). Firestone also observes that this is an arrangement that ‘allows older people past their fertile years to share fully in parenthood when they so desire’ (207), and she notes the likely benefits to the child of being exposed to a range of ages, perspectives and personalities. The household is to be an unprecedentedly democratic organization: chores (made more efficient anyway by the household’s larger scale) would be distributed equally until cybernation did away with most of them; women ‘would be identical under the law with men,’ while children ‘would no longer be “minors,” under the patronage of “parents” – they would have full rights’ (209).
Children
Although she cites having and raising children as the chief source of women’s oppression, Firestone is not anti-children. In fact, and as Alison Jaggar and Stevi Jackson have both pointed out, she is important as one of the earliest feminist thinkers to put the interests of children firmly at the forefront of feminist politics.62 The frequent yoking of adult women with children (“women and children first!”) is not only a consequence of how women are infantilized in patriarchal culture, she believes, but also an oblique recognition of their shared condition as an oppressed class. Children, just as much as women, have everything to gain from the dismantling of the patriarchal nuclear family – and that means that in a particular but very important sense, men do as well. While Firestone never denies that men gain all kinds of benefit from their dominance in society, she also sees them as (like women) having been psychologically deformed through their upbringing in the patriarchal family; many of the male attitudes of which she is highly critical she considers as developing out of understandable adaptations on the part of the male child to his circumstances. What then might childhood be like, were those and other circumstances to be different?
Her description of the household is predicated on the assumption that under such radically transformed conditions, childhood itself will have changed; children will develop much more quickly the faculties now associated with adults. This accounts for what might otherwise seem to be the surprisingly short duration that she proposes for the contracted period of the household (for as long as a legal contract is necessary, which she imagines as being only a temporary stage): ‘perhaps seven to ten years, or whatever was decide
d on as the minimal time in which children needed a stable structure in which to grow up’ (207–8). This will be ‘probably a much shorter period than we now imagine’ (208), since childhood (in the sense of dependency) is currently artificially extended by adults who have an interest in doing so. Since children will be capable of rational, autonomous decisions much sooner than is presently the case, one of their rights will be ‘the right of immediate transfer: if the child for any reason did not like the household into which he had been born so arbitrarily, he would be helped to transfer out’ (209). One might expect the teenage years to be eventful.
But Firestone would no doubt claim that the period of frequent conflict we call adolescence is itself a product of the malformations of the traditional family: that without the need to detach herself from a mother or father attempting to live vicariously through her, the familiar (pun intended) crises of the teenage years would be eliminated, or at least reduced. This optimism about the future shape of childhood bears considerable weight in Firestone’s proposals, as is evident in other aspects of her account of childhood in the household.
Education is an example. Compulsory schooling will have been replaced with optional ‘“learning centres,”’ open to both children and adults wishing to develop both ‘rudimentary’ and ‘higher’ skills (211). Once again, technology plays a key facilitating role here. Firestone believes that children will want to learn since education will have been transformed: the need for the ‘traditional book learning, the memorizing of facts’ which forms the substantial part of the current school system will have been largely obviated by the ‘further development of modern media for the rapid transmittal of information,’ freeing up learners to concentrate on the particular skills required for whatever specialized discipline they have chosen as their focus (211). Marge Piercy, in Woman at the Edge of Time, re-imagines Firestone’s vision of ‘computer banks within easy reach’ (211) as kenners – small computers that people carry on their arms and turn to for instant information. In 1970, when the first IBM computers cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, existed only in universities or specialized institutes where they took up most of a large room, and had a tiny fraction of the processing power of today’s laptops, these ideas might well have seemed like science fiction. Now, of course, they look like anticipations of the Internet, the smartphone and the smartwatch. Quite how these information technologies will impact education is still being determined. That e-learning is all too often embraced by schools and universities as an inferior substitute to more costly face-to-face teaching, shows once again how the technologies Firestone welcomed could be used for the worse. But of course, it doesn’t have to be like this. Firestone was prescient in foreseeing both that such technologies would arise, and that they would bring to ‘the apparatus of culture at least as significant a change as was the printing press’ (211).