#sandra lee bartky

[liberashen]

‟What distinguishes human 'species being' from the being of other species is our distinctive laboring activity: This Marx regards as the free, self-aware, and creative transformation of nature in accord with human needs. But under capitalism, work is degraded. Most workers lack any opportunity for artistic or intellectual development; far from allowing workers to affirm or to augment their essential human powers, work under capitalism is forced labor to which the worker goes each day like a prisoner condemned, a mere drudgery which 'mortifies the body and ruins the mind.' ”

— Sandra Lee Bartky

[haggishlyhagging]

Several years ago, I taught an upper-level extension course in a suburban high school. The students were mostly high school teachers, required by their school district to earn periodic graduate credit as a condition of continuing employment. None of the students was very young: Most were in their forties and fifties. Women outnumbered men by about two to one. The women, who tended on the average to be somewhat better students than the men, displayed far less confidence in their ability to master the material. I found this surprising, since the female teachers, authorities in their own classrooms, did the same work as the male teachers, had comparable seniority, similar educational credentials, and, I assume, pay equity. The school in which both men and women taught had an excellent reputation. There is nothing unique about the classroom I am about to describe: I have observed in other classrooms what I observed there. I select this particular class as an example because male and female students were mature and well-matched professionally and because their relationships seemed to be free of the sexual tensions and courtship games that sometimes complicate the relationships of younger men and women.

Though women were in the majority, they were noticeably quieter in class discussion than the men. The men engaged freely in classroom exchanges and seemed quite confident—in view of the quality of some of their remarks, over-confident. Women who did enter discussion spoke what linguists call "women's language": Their speech was marked by hesitations and false starts; they tended to introduce their comments with self-denigrating expressions (“You may think that this is a stupid question, but . . . “); they often used a questioning intonation which in effect turned a simple declarative sentence into a request for help or for affirmation from without; they used "lag" questions which had the same effect (“Camus's theme in The Myth of Sisyphus is the absurdity of human existence, isn't it?”) and excessive qualifiers (“Isn't it true that sometimes, maybe . . . “). This style of speaking, whatever its substance, communicates to listeners the speaker's lack of confidence in what she is saying, and this in turn damages her credibility.

In addition to their style of speech, I was struck by the way many female students behaved as they handed me their papers. They would offer heartfelt apologies and copious expressions of regret for the poor quality of their work—work which turned out, most of the time, to be quite good. While apologizing, a student would often press the edges of her manuscript together so as to make it literally smaller, holding the paper uncertainly somewhere in the air as if unsure whether she wanted to relinquish it at all. Typically, she would deliver the apology with head bowed, chest hollowed, and shoulders hunched slightly forward. The male students would stride over to the desk and put down their papers without comment.

Now every female student did not behave in this way all of the time. Nor is this all that the women communicated. To the casual observer, the atmosphere in the classroom was both relaxed and stimulating: Both men and women took an evident interest in the material and managed a lively exchange of ideas. But, like an organ-point that sounded faintly but persistently all term, something else was detectable too: It became clear to me that many women students were ashamed of their written work and ashamed to express their ideas in a straightforward and open manner. Indeed, it would not be unusual for a student just to say, "I'm really ashamed of this paper," while handing it to me. I have no doubt that these utterances were accurate reports of feeling. At the same time, I suspect that they were rituals of self-shaming undertaken in order to bear more easily a shaming they anticipated from me: An ordeal is often easier to endure if we can choose its time and place. These apologies served also to underscore the students' desire to do well in the course, hence, to get into my good books and, by arousing pity in me for such evident emotional distress, to soften my judgment of their work. Behind a facade of friendliness and informality, two very different dramas of relationship to the teacher were being enacted: The men regarded me as a rival or as an upstart who needed to prove herself; the women, as potentially a very punitive figure who needed to be placated and manipulated.

-Sandra Lee Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression

[femalethink]

Marx's theory of alienation, focused as it is on that fragmentation of the self which is a consequence of the organization of material production under capitalism, may well apply to women insofar as we are workers, but not insofar as we are women. Women undergo a special sort of fragmentation and loss of being as women: Women suffer modes of alienation which are absent from Marx's account and which can be distinguished from the ways in which all workers, men and women alike, are alienated under the prevailing system of material production. ....

The cultural domination of women, for example, may be regarded as a species of alienation, for women as women are clearly alienated in cultural production. Most avenues of cultural expression—high culture, popular culture, even to some extent language—are instruments of male supremacy. Women have little control over the cultural apparatus itself and are often entirely absent from its products; to the extent that we are not excluded from it entirely, the images of ourselves we see reflected in the dominant culture are often truncated or demeaning. Human beings begin to distinguish themselves from animals not only, as Marx says, when they start to produce their own means of subsistence, but when they begin to invent modes of cultural expression, such as myth, ritual, and art, which make possible the bestowal of meaning upon their own activity. If this is so, then the prohibition on cultural expression denies to women the right to develop and to exercise capacities which define, in part, what it means to be human.

—Sandra Lee Bartky, "Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression."

[josieandthepussycatsofficial]

In the language of fashion magazines and cosmetic ads, making up is typically portrayed as an aesthetic activity in which a woman can express her individuality. In reality, while cosmetic styles change every decade or so and while some variation in make-up is permitted depending on the occasion, making up the face is, in fact, a highly stylized activity that gives little rein to self-expression. Painting the face is not like painting a picture; at best, it might be described as painting the same picture over and over again with minor variations. Little latitude is permitted in what is considered appropriate make-up for the office and for most social occasions; indeed, the woman who uses cosmetics in a genuinely novel and imaginative way is liable to be seen not as an artist but as an eccentric. Furthermore, since a properly made-up face is, if not a card of entrée, at least a badge of acceptability in most social and professional contexts, the woman who chooses not to wear cosmetics at all faces sanctions of a sort which will never be applied to someone who chooses not to paint a watercolor.

Sandra Lee Bartky, “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power” Writing on the body: female embodiment and feminist theory

[sisyphean-revolt]

As long as their situation is apprehended as natural, inevitable, and inescapable, women's consciousness of themselves, no matter how alive to insult and inferiority, is not yet feminist consciousness. This consciousness...emerges only when there exists a genuine possibility for the partial or total liberation of women.

Sandra Lee Bartky - Femininity and Domination

[haggishlyhagging]

“Disempowerment, then, may be inscribed in the more prominent features of women's unreciprocated caregiving: in the accord of status and the paying of homage; in the scarcely perceptible ethical and epistemic “leaning” into the reality of one who stands higher in the hierarchy of gender. But this is only part of the story. In this section I want to identify some countertendencies, ways in which women's provision of emotional sustenance to men may feel empowering and hence contradict, on a purely phenomenal level, what may be its objectively disempowering character.

Tending to wounds: this is a large part of what it is to provide someone with emotional support. But this means that in one standard scenario of heterosexual intimacy, the man appears to his female caregiver as vulnerable and injured. Fear and insecurity: for many men, these are the offstage companions of competitive displays of masculinity, and they are aspects of men's lives that women know well. To the woman who tends him, this fellow is not only no colossus who bestrides the world, but he may bear little resemblance to the patriarchal oppressor of feminist theory. The man may indeed belong to a more powerful caste; no matter, this isn't what he seems to her at the moment. One imagines Frau Stangl's tender clucks of sympathy as the harried Fritz rehearses, greatly edited, the trials and tribulations of his day at work: How put upon he is from above and below, how he suffers!

Why isn't every woman a feminist? (See Chapter 5 above.) Feminism tells a tale of female injury, but the average woman in heterosexual intimacy knows that men are injured too, as indeed they are. She may be willing to grant, this average woman, that men in general have more power than women in general. This undoubted fact is merely a fact; it is abstract, while the man of flesh and blood who stands before her is concrete: His hurts are real, his fears palpable. And like those heroic doctors on the late show who work tirelessly through the epidemic even though they may be fainting from fatigue, the woman in intimacy may set her own needs to one side in order better to attend to his. She does this not because she is "chauvinized" or has “false consciousness,” but because this is what the work requires. Indeed, she may even excuse the man's abuse of her, having glimpsed the great reservoir of pain and rage from which it issues. Here is a further gloss on the ethical disempowerment attendant upon women's caregiving: In such a such a situation, a woman may be tempted to collude in her own ill-treatment. . . .

An apparent reversal has taken place: The man, her superior in the hierarchy of gender, now appears before the woman as the weaker before the stronger, the patient before his nurse. A source within the woman has been tapped and she feels flowing outward from herself a great power of healing and making whole. She imagines herself to be a great reservoir of restorative power. This feeling of power gives her a sense of agency and of personal efficacy that she may get nowhere else. We read that one of Kafka's mistresses, Milena Jesenka, “believed she could cure Kafka of all his ills and give him a sense of wellbeing simply by her presence—if only he wanted it.”

While women suffer from our relative lack of power in the world and often resent it, certain dimensions of this powerlessness may seem abstract and remote. We know, for example, that we rarely get to make the laws or direct the major financial institutions. But Wall Street and the U.S. Congress seem very far away. The power a woman feels in herself to heal and sustain, on the other hand—“the power of love”—is, once again, concrete and very near: It is like a field of force emanating from within herself, a great river flowing outward from her very person.

Thus, a complex and contradictory female subjectivity is constructed within the relations of caregiving. Here, as elsewhere, women are affirmed in some ways and diminished in others (see Chapter 6, p. 94), this within the unity of a single act. The woman who provides a man with largely unreciprocated emotional sustenance accords him status and pays him homage; she agrees to the unspoken proposition that his doings are important enough to deserve substantially more attention than her own. But even as the man's supremacy in the relationship is tacitly assumed by both parties to the transaction, the man reveals himself to his caregiver as vulnerable and insecure. And while she may well be ethically and epistemically disempowered by the care she gives, this caregiving affords her the feeling that a mighty power resides within her being.

The situation of those men in the hierarchy of gender who avail themselves of female tenderness is not thereby altered: Their superordinate position is neither abandoned, nor their male privilege relinquished. The vulnerability these men exhibit is not a prelude in any way to their loss of male privilege or to an elevation in the status of women. Similarly, the feeling that one's love is a mighty force for good in the life of the beloved doesn't make it so, as Milena Jesenka found, to her sorrow. The feeling of out-flowing personal power so characteristic of the caregiving woman is quite different from the having of any actual power in the world. There is no doubt that this sense of personal efficacy provides some compensation for the extra-domestic power women are typically denied: If one cannot be a king oneself, being a confidante of kings may be the next best thing. But just as we make a bad bargain in accepting an occasional Valentine in lieu of the sustained attention we deserve, we are ill advised to settle for a mere feeling of power, however heady and intoxicating it may be, in place of the effective power we have every right to exercise in the world.”

-Sandra Lee Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression

[haggishlyhagging]

“There is something obsessional in the preoccupation of many women with their bodies, although the magnitude of the obsession will vary somewhat with the presence or absence in a woman's life of other sources of self-esteem and with her capacity to gain a living independent of her looks. Surrounded on all sides by images of perfect female beauty—for, in modern advertising, the needs of capitalism and the traditional values of patriarchy are happily married—of course we fall short. The narcissism encouraged by our identification with the body is shattered by these images. Whose nose is not the wrong shape, whose hips are not too wide or too narrow? Anyone who believes that such concerns are too trivial to weigh very heavily with most women has failed to grasp the realities of the feminine condition.

The idea that women ought always to make themselves as pleasing to the eye as possible is very widespread indeed. It was dismaying to come across this passage in a paper written by an eminent Marxist humanist in defense of the contemporary women's movement:

There is no reason why a woman's liberation activist should not try to look pretty and attractive. One of the universal human aspirations of all times was to raise reality to the level of art, to make the world more beautiful, to be more beautiful within given limits. Beauty is a value in itself; it will always be respected and will attract—to be sure various forms of beauty but not to the exclusion of physical beauty. A woman does not become a sex object in herself, or only because of her pretty appearance. She becomes a sexual object in relationship, when she allows a man to treat her in a certain depersonalizing, degrading way; and vice versa, a woman does not become a sexual subject by neglecting her appearance.

It is not for the sake of mere men that we women—not just we women, but we women's liberation activists—ought to look ‘pretty and attractive,’ but for the sake of something much more exalted: for the sake of beauty. This preoccupation with the way we look and the fear that women might stop trying to make themselves pretty and attractive (so as to ‘raise reality to the level of art’) would be a species of objectification anywhere; but it is absurdly out of place in a paper on women's emancipation. It is as if an essay on the black liberation movement were to end by admonishing blacks not to forget their natural rhythm, or as if Marx had warned the workers of the world not to neglect their appearance while throwing off their chains.

Markovic's concern with women's appearance merely reflects a larger cultural preoccupation. It is a fact that women in our society are regarded as having a virtual duty ‘to make the most of what we have.’ But the imperative not to neglect our appearance suggests that we can neglect it, that it is within our power to make ourselves look better—not just neater and cleaner, but prettier, and more attractive. What is presupposed by this is that we don't look good enough already, that attention to the ordinary standards of hygiene would be insufficient, that there is something wrong with us as we are. Here, the ‘intimations of inferiority’ are clear: Not only must we continue to produce ourselves as beautiful bodies, but the bodies we have to work with are deficient to begin with. Even within an already inferiorized identity (i.e., the identity of one who is principally and most importantly a body), I turn out once more to be inferior, for the body I am to be, never sufficient unto itself, stands forever in need of plucking or painting, of slimming down or fattening up, of firming or flattening.”

-Sandra Lee Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression

[liberashen]

“Women workers who are not feminists know that they receive unequal pay for equal work, but they may think that the arrangement is just; the feminist sees this situation as an instance of exploitation and an occasion for struggle. Feminists are no more aware of different things than other people; they are aware of the same things differently.”

— Sandra Lee Bartky