A Thermodynamic Interpretation of History: Division 2 An Archaeology of the American Feminist Intraworldly Messianism CHAPTER 10: The Feminist Work Ethic and the Spirit of Consumerism The case of Betty Friedan (1) The problem: "The problem that has no name" ACADEMY | previous section | Table of Content | next section | GALLERY

Copyright © 2004 by Lawrence C. Chin.

In macroeconomics we learn that the living standard of a society depends, not on union efforts, political forms (democracy or dictatorship), Democrat or Republican policies, etc., but directly and only on the productivity of its population -- productivity meaning the amount of goods and services produced by each increment of labour-input -- which itself depends on the amount of capital, labour, and natural resources available to the system (society). ("Living standard" then means the amount of goods and services consumed by the population.) Here we concentrate on labour. Now the budding capitalism during the 1600s in Europe encountered the problem of how to increase productivity. Max Weber explains the dilemma in Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist der Kapitalismus:

We must also add that the correlation between low wages and high profits only holds during the formative period of capitalism when the infrastructure of a market is being laid down (railroads, telecommunication networks, steel and oil industries, etc.), but as soon as profit becomes directly dependent on the rate of consumption of its workers (the mature or saturation period of capitalism, i.e. consumerism) then low wages -- translating into weak buying power -- will only hurt profits. For our purpose it is important to understand the difference in the following between the formative capitalism meant here by Weber and the mature capitalism which is consumerism: That the shift from this formative capitalism to its mature phase of consumerism entails a shift of economic focus from these macro-, heavy industries to the production and consumption of micro- consumer products (computers, videos, home entertainment systems, plus the traditional household products, clothing, etc.); a replacement of production by consumption as the most important determinant of profits (Roy Baumeister, The Meanings of Life, 1991, p. 132; "Earlier, society had needed people to work and produce more, but now it needed them to buy more."); and a consequent shift of "such traditional American values as thrift, hard work, and self-denial... to 'consumer' orientations". (Kirkpatrick, Dictatorships and Double Standards, p. 116; a "leisure ethic", in Baumeister's words, the implication of which will be seen below.)¹

The traditional value is that work is a necessary evil, and that one only works as much as is necessary to take care of one's natural needs -- the need to eat or consume just to live which, together with death and disease, constitutes the primary "evil suffered" and which should never have been there in the first place. The dream of "liberation" is always a paradise where one no longer has to labor. (See Hesiod's Work and Days.) "Work ethic" -- that one should pursue work for its own sake and as a matter of moral virtue, a building or fulfillment of one's inner moral character (or in the East, one's honor) -- is an invention of modernity (capitalist era). (Baumeister, ibid., p. 129) Capitalism -- and consumerism afterwards -- thus requires the reversal of this traditional value system, so that one will want to work as if work were an end in itself, some sort of a very purpose of human existence. Reformation has achieved (the preliminary phase of) such reversal, by making people want to work simply for the sake of working -- because a "job" (profession) is a task God gives people to do as a "calling" ("Beruf, die einer von Gott gestellten Aufgabe", p. 63): now working, or the love and "responsibility" there-for, becomes an ethical virtue, even an index of one's salvation (of whether or not one enters heaven after life). Hence the Protestant work ethic and the spirit of capitalism. As soon as such sentiment has sunk into the general population for the benefit of the capitalist, the original religious garment is abandoned and the work ethic becomes a secular value system. Today the resultant attitude is evident even among the "entrepreneurs" of the consumerist economy: a man founded his own, say, computer chip company from scratch, its annual profit margin now exceeds this much billions of dollars, he himself is worth this many billion dollars, but he works incessantly, every waking moment of his life, he is glued to his cell phone even while a spectator to his son's baseball game, he has so frequently missed his family occasions, even Thanksgiving or Christmas, that his wife is now filing divorce because of his complete neglect of his family. Workaholic.

"Man exists for the sake of his work" is the ultimate slavery, considering that not a cent of his earning will he carry with him after his life is over. But this sort of slavery is what the formation and maintenance of capitalism, and definitely consumerism, i.e. the massive open dissipative structure called the modern mass-economy, requires of its members.

Betty Friedan, in the opening chapter of The Feminine Mystique, writes of "the problem that has no name":

This "problem" is a problem of self-fulfillment: the middle-class white women of America at the time were finding their boring housewife life meaningless. This is, in Heidegger's words, der Ruf des Gewissens, "the Call of Conscience". Existentially but superficially, it is the "call" that reminds that one is failing to become oneself. This is the level at which Friedan operates -- and thus flunders. Existentially but deeply, it reminds of the fundamental flawness of the structure of human existence by which one can never completely be oneself: das urspruengliche Schuldigsein des Daseins ("the primordial being-guilty of Dasein". C.f. Heidegger on the structure of guilt.) In our simplified thermodynamic framework, it really is a spiritual calling, to the attention of the meaninglessness and fundamental flawedness of the material meaning of life, i.e. the mindless cycle of production, consumption, defecation, and reproduction. But for reason to become clear soon, this is not how Friedan is going to put the matter. In fact, she is about to reverse the matter. But this meaninglessness of living at the mere level of life-processes (metabolism and reproduction) is precisely the dominant theme running through all the following testimonies that Friedan has amassed.

This is the "problem", but its epidemic nature is not yet noticed.

Boredom means unsatisfaction with the mere maintenance of life-processes. In the end Betty Friedan concludes: "If I am right, the problem that has no name stirring in the minds of so many American women today is not a matter of loss of femininity or too much education, or the demands of domesticity. It is far more important than anyone recognizes. It is the key to these other new and old problems which have been torturing women and their husbands and children, and puzzling their doctors and educators for years. It may well be the key to our future as a nation and a culture. We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: 'I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.'"

We are inclined to disagree with Friedan on a minor point, in that this "problem" did probably have much to do with the increase of college education among women, which opened their mind somewhat to the larger horizon in which femininity -- the housewife fairy tale -- lost its attraction and became a trap. "Many young women--certainly not all--whose education plunged them into a world of ideas feel stifled in their homes. They find their routine lives out of joint with their training..." So she cites one of the "authorities" at the time. Ignorance is bliss. Someone else has told me that the isolation of a suburban life may also have contributed to the inner emptiness of someone who stayed at home all day. In the city, after all, as soon as one stepped out of the home in mid-day, there were tons of people rushing about, shinning neon lights and fancy shops. But these minor points do not matter here. What does matter is Friedan's cure to this "problem": work, in the proper sense of "profession" (Beruf).

She has certainly not paid much attention to the same "problem" which many working men also suffer: the 9 to 5 (or even later) office life, much of which is just robotic routines that they do not particularly enjoy nor for which their trained skill is tailored, day after day, year after year, has had some men wonder, "is this all?" They, of course, try to find comfort in the thought of the nobility of "their feeding their family"; and if their profession is particularly high-notched, they may feel pride in their work, like an artist who takes pride in his creation -- but even this is only rationalization and imitation, for consumer products and services are by nature temporal, unlike master pieces of classical art.

From the standpoint of traditional value, what the pioneering feminist advocates is ludicrously funny and laughable, these well-fed femmes oisives were "itchy for work", they wanted to work so much that they "suffered" depression and psychosomatic disorders. Without work they were literally in pain, twitching and dying. It immediately emerges that this can only be a middle-class problem, for no woman in her right mind would prefer toiling in MacDonalds to sewing and cooking and cleaning and running after kids in her own comfortable house. People in the past didn't want work because work meant back-breaking toil in the field.

Here then is the preliminary form of the real problem: the maintenance of mere life-processes of consumption and reproduction is meaningless, and its meaninglessness becomes all the more conspicuous in the suburban life; yet for Friedan the solution to this problem is not through the pursuit of the spiritual meaning of life (the negation of life-processes, e.g. Buddhism) which has been the solution offered in traditional societies, but through more of this maintenance and even augmentation of life-processes by getting into a "profession", i.e. participation in public production (of consumer products and services); she can do this -- offering more of the poison as the cure to the same poison -- and get away with it because the spiritual depravity of Western modernity has left her and everyone else oblivious to the possibility that there may be more to life than just production and consumption, and because correlatively the middle-class, "professional" production and consumption is so advanced by this time as to be centered virtually entirely around "substitute food" -- consumer products and services whose fanciness deludes people so that their production and consumption seem -- and only seem so -- more meaningful than that of foodstuff, and whose production no longer involves sheer physical labour.³ The double blind-sightedness thus created causes Friedan to fall into the operation of power and to accordingly pronounce an ideology of which power is in terrible need at this crucial juncture in history.

What we want to emphasize here, that is, is the way in which Betty Friedan has overcome the "traditional problem" encountered when the growth of capitalism demands an increase of productivity: people are by nature not interested in producing more than they need for the maintenance of their current life-style. This is a problem which the capitalism had to face again when it attempted to hypostatize itself into consumerism in the U.S. during the 1960s, as this country was already the richest in the world and no human needs were left unsatisfied: yet the essence of consumerism lies in people producing and consuming more than they will ever need to stay alive, in, namely, the production and consumption of all these extra fancy consumer products and services that are completely irrelevant to the sustaining of life: noospheric consumption (c.f. "The layered structure of the Universe"). The capitalists typically achieve this through creating "false needs", e.g. getting people (ironically, especially women) to believe that they need vacuum cleaners to keep their home clean -- and even this presupposes the "education" by the Protestant ethic that cleanliness is a moral virtue ("cleanliness is next to godliness") -- or that they need washing machines (moreover, their own washing machines, not just laundry shops) to wash clothes; or, more recently, that they need their own home entertainment system: today TVs, stereos, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, etc. have become "necessities" to life, whereas "primitive peoples" apparently had managed to survive without these. But making people believe that they need these is only one side of the story; a better strategy is to make people produce these and other hitherto "un-needed necessities" for some other reason than the satisfaction of needs so that, in the end, they end up consuming these any way simply because they have nowhere else to spend the extra earned but un-needed money. Friedan comes in quite handy for the capitalists in this respect. So she cites the society's (mis-)response to suburban white women's "problem", their growing discontent: "She is dissatisfied with a lot that women of other lands can only dream of." But she objects: "I do not accept the answer that there is no problem because American women have luxuries that women in other times and lands never dreamed of; part of the strange newness of the problem is that it cannot be understood in terms of the age-old material problems of man: poverty, sickness, hunger, cold. The women who suffer this problem have a hunger that food cannot fill. It persists in women whose husbands are struggling intern and law clerks, or prosperous doctors and lawyers; in wives of workers and executives who make $5,000 a year or $50,000. It is not caused by lack of material advantages; it may not even be felt by women preoccupied with desperate problems of hunger, poverty or illness. And women who think it will be solved by more money, a bigger house, a second car, moving to a better suburb, often discover it gets worse." She wants women to go to work, i.e. to join public production for its own sake, not because any insufficiently satisfied needs demand such increase of productivity. Let it be said at once: the most unlikely ally of the capitalists -- Betty Friedan -- is striving her best to advocate in their interest because she, due to the spiritual depravity of Western culture in which she grew up, has mistakenly identified self-fulfillment with "being a most productive member of society" -- the type of brain-washing peculiar to Western modernity. The most useful ideology ever for the industries interested in increasing productivity (and, correlatively, consumption) is this feminist ideology, feminist work ethic which demands those hitherto idle women to work, with their most intense effort, not for the sake of money, but for the sake of their "liberation". This is how the capitalists have at last convinced people to produce -- and thus by necessity, consume -- more than they will ever need to stay alive: it is a matter of liberation, obtaining an opportunity to fulfill oneself which has been unjustly denied one in the dark past. This is the final logical conclusion of the Protestant work ethic: Arbeit macht frei.

As said, the power of the modern nation state and the strength of its modern consumerist economy depend on the mobilization of the other, "idle half" for public production. This is the only way to increase production and consumption (through the augmentation of the buying power of the population) since men are already working -- sapped -- to the maximum extent. What is needed is therefore an ideology which can increase productivity of the population by making the idle half strive for work at least as aggressively as the already working ("enslaved") half. This is how the nation state and modern economy (the "capitalists", if one will) can increase their power and competitive edge -- by exploiting the population resource at its disposal to the maximum degree possible. Friedan, interestingly, is aware of this: so "women's emancipation" (women joining public production to increase the Gross National Product) is "the key to our future as a nation and a culture"; "Concerned over the Soviet Union's lead in the space race, scientists noted that America's greatest source of unused brain-power was women." Just as the ideology called "patriotism" cultivated by modern nation state has solved the traditional problem, "how to get those peasants to go to war and die for the king's or emperor's self-aggrandizing interest but, evidently, against their own interest" -- now men, so stupid, volunteer themselves for the war effort of the dictator or the government -- so the Protestant work ethic solved the problem, during the formative period of capitalism, of making people produce more than their life required in order to increase the profits of the capitalists or -- concerning the capitalists themselves -- to expand the economy as a whole. "You might not see the need to produce these; but God wants you to be productive [working hard is a sign of one's being chosen by God for eternal salvation]!" These same brain-washing techniques were to be applied to women in America during the 1960s when men-power was not sufficient to expand traditional capitalism into an all-out consumerism immersed in the beginning formation of global consumerism. The funny thing is that this time women themselves were to push aggressively for their own exploitation by the state and the capitalists. Much of Friedan's pages are taken up by efforts to debunk those traditional male authorities in psychology who laid down that the fulfillment of women's psychology stopped with domestic reproduction: her goal is to show that women can, should, and want to work ("produce"). Friedan has painted a social atmosphere where, just before she wrote her pioneering book, the media gossip about the "emerging problem" of "the unhappiness of white suburban housewives" suddenly proliferated. From the world-historical standpoint the American society seemed to be making preparations for the mobilization of women for public production and for increased consumption by setting "mental conditions favorable to the subsequent mobilization of idle women." From this then Friedan seems only to be the natural product of such social context. Betty Friedan must have seemed to the capitalists to be a solution "one stone two birds": when they during the 1950s continuously bombarded white suburban housewives with advertisements of the new household consumer products ("washing machines" etc.)⁴, they must have thought it inefficient for these idle women to beg their husbands to buy these "new things"; besides, men only made so much money. It would be much more efficient if women would make money themselves and buy these, and this furthermore, if men continued working, would have increased the buying power of each household by almost two-fold, so that the couple not only buy these new things, but at twice the rate, and moreover that they buy these not even because they have been convinced of their need for these, but as a side-product of some enslavement which the wife believes to be her liberation. The old-fashioned male-chauvinist psychologists telling (white) women that their fulfillment lay in their womb and their hands that took care of the husbands (the feminine mystique) were clearly by this time becoming an impediment to the interest of the capitalists, who therefore summoned up Betty Friedan -- it's better, more believable, if they could get women to do this -- to demolish the progress-impeding "patriarchal" value-systems. While men, old and dying on their death bed, never say "I wish I had spent more time at work" but usually "I wish I had spent more time with my family" or occasionally, in the case of those who "got it", "I wish I had cultivated my spirituality so I'm prepared for my final departure now...", women who have been inculcated by the "Friedanian ideology", old and dying on their death bed, would presumably say "I wish I had spent more time at work [in order to increase the GNP of USA] -- for I am a modern, independent, liberated woman". This is how the work ethic started by the "Reformatoren" has completed itself with feminism and why Betty Friedan would be promoting women's further exploitation by society (in addition to their reproductive "duties") with a straight face: enslavement by work has become "liberation", whose traditional meaning -- free from work -- has thus been inverted. The capitalists no longer have to whip their workers in order to increase their productivity -- the women will strive of their own accord to increase their productivity and in fact will "suffer" if they aren't given the "opportunity"; the government (kings and emperors) no longer has to threaten its subjects with death in order to draft them and put them on the battle field for the sake of its territorial ambitions -- the women will of their own accord break down every obstacle barring them from the opportunities to "die for their country".

Again and finally, the reason why such irrational ideology could happen and become a wide-scale social force is the utter spiritual deprivation of Western society as its Christian faith gradually disintegrated. In the traditional society people did not suffer from "emptiness" because -- for one thing, they were too preoccupied by the misery of necessary toil -- but also, because they believed in God or the various religious, spiritual, and cosmological orders in which either the liberation from toil was promised after life or the meaning of life was given to understand during the "break" from toil. The "call" which people of modernity experience -- the suburban white female housewives included -- is the reminder of the non-exhaustion of human existence by the material meaning of life at an era when these religious, cosmological, and spiritual orders have lost their believability. A "profession" is successfully offered as a substitute because in the consumerist, high-tech and service-oriented economy it covers up its meaninglessness with a Schein of respectability and transcendence: suits and ties, the look of the "working women", the master degree in business administration and computer skills required for the production, marketing, and distribution of the "substitute foods" -- these producers look different from peasants. Certainly, if the "jobs" in the market were all farm works or lower level manufacturings Friedan could never have seen these as the therapeia of the "middle-class housewife syndrome". (Feminists typically regard as oppression the Third World women who have to sew shoes at low wages for the wearing of First World consumers.) But the substitute is not only just "fake cure", but also produces the alluring mindless consumer products such as junk movies, reality TVs, video games, fast and weighty cars, shallow styrofoam drinks and plastically packaged foods and junks whose accelerated consumption -- called high living standard -- not only destroys the human mind but also the environment and other species in it. The fault of feminism lies in its being the most powerful motor and reinforcement of this destructive consumerist order -- the biggest hoax in human history -- while eradicating the possibility of perception of this fault by coating it with the Schein of the nobility of "liberation".

POSTSCRIPT: Readers familiar with The Feminine Mystique will have found the above characterization of Betty Friedan as a promoter of the "spirit of consumerism" unfitting, because, as the following review will show (and as ftnt. 2 has indicated), she, throughout her book, has shown little interest in capitalism and is in fact frequently anti-consumerist. Yet undeniably the "liberation of women" unto the "professional world" has greatly reinforced the iron cage (stahlhartes Gehaeuse) of consumerism in which we are caught, mindlessly producing and consuming all the attractive garbage products, not as if we need them, but simply for the sake of producing and consuming them, in the end destroying our mind and the environment surrounding us. This is the reinforced version of "that powerful cosmos of modern economic order, bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production, and which determines with overwhelming force the life-style of all individuals who are born into this mechanism, not just those directly involved in economic acquisition -- and will so perhaps determine it, until the last ton of fossil coal [today we may say, last gallon of fossil fuel] is burnt." (p. 123; "jenen maechtigen Kosmos der modernen, an die technischen und oekonomischen Voraussetzungen mechanisch-maschineller Produktion gebundenen Wirtschaftsordnung... der heute den Lebensstil aller einzelnen, die in dies Triebwerk hineingeboren werden -- nicht nur der direkt oekonomisch Erwerbstaetigen -- mit ueberwaeltigendem Zwange bestimmt und vielleicht bestimmen wird, bis der letzte Zentner fossilen Brennstoffs verglueht ist." p. 203) How to understand the contradiction? The same with Protestantism. After rejecting Luther as "traditionalistic" and deciding that the anti-traditionalistic spirit of capitalism be sought among the branches of Protestantism, Weber writes: "When we therefore, in our search for the relationship between the old Protestant ethic and the evolution of the capitalist spirit, start from the works of Calvin, of Calvinism, and of other Puritan sects, it should not be understood that we expect that with anyone of these founders or representatives of these religious organizations the awakening of what we here call the 'capitalist spirit' is to be found in whatever sense as the goal of his life work. We will not be able to believe that the strive toward worldly goods, considered as an end-in-itself, was to any of them of ethical value... The salvation of the soul and that alone was the center point of their life and work... We will therefore accept that the cultural consequences of Reformation were to a good part... unforeseen and actually unwanted results of the works of the reformers, often standing far removed from or even in contradiction to all that they had in mind." (p. 47 - 8. "Wenn wir demgemaess bei der Untersuchung der Beziehungen zwischen der altprotestantischen Ethik und der Entwicklung des kapitalistischen Geistes von den Schoepfungen Calvins, des Calvinismus und der andern 'puritanischen' Sekten ausgehen, so darf das nun aber nicht dahin verstanden werden, als erwarteten wir, dass bei einem der Gruender oder Vertreter dieser Religionsgemeinschaften die Erweckung dessen, was wir hier 'kapitalistischen Geist' nennen, in irgendeinem Sinn als Ziel seiner Lebensarbeit vorzufinden. Dass das Streben nach weltlichen Guetern, als Selbstzweck gedacht, irgendeinem von ihnen geradezu als ethischer Wert gegolten haetten, werden wir nicht wohl glauben koennen... Das Seelenheil und dies allein war der Angelpunkt ihres Lebens und Wirkens... Und wir werden deshalb darauf gefasst sein muessen, dass die Kulturwirkungen der Reformation zum guten teil... unvorhergesehene und geradezu ungewollte Folgen der Arbeit der Reformatoren waren, oft weit abliegend oder geradezu im Gegensatz stehend zu allem, was ihnen selbst vorschwebte." p. 81 - 2) In the same way, the transformation of classical capitalism into all-out consumerism was probably completely external to Friedan's intention, in fact probably flew over her head entirely without her notice. Her only concern is with women's search for self-completion and the meaning of life beyond the bounds of wife and mother; these roles cannot -- at least no longer in the modern context -- provide all (and probably not even most) women with this completion and this meaning: the secular version of the salvation of the soul, "substitute salvation" in the modern time of spiritual depravity. Let it be said preliminarily but at once: what accounts for the "side-product" is her persistent confusion between personal fulfillment and being useful to society (even while recognizing that the work of self-fulfillment has to be creative work, not mindless routines), this confusion related also to that between the spiritual and the material meaning of life -- all this under the unquestioned, and even unnoticed, presuppositions about the "de-genderized" persons, the substitution of existentialism for spirituality, and other aspects of "modernity-consciousness". The first of these (the confusion between self-fulfillment and "economic productivity") seems to be the most immediate cause for how Friedan's fundamentally anti-consumerist spirit behind her solution to suburban housewives' search for meaning in life could have transited into a promotion of consumerism. Note that the cause of this cause is the world-view taken for granted by Friedan and in which the fulfillment of the meaning of the life of an individual can only lie in being a "productive" -- and not even any longer reproductive -- member in society's machinary -- a world-view which is by no means naturally given, but in fact opposed to the most usual, traditional ones which may be classified as two. One is that which runs through all tribal humanity and cosmological civilizations and has been elevated to philosophical level by, e.g. Confucianism, and in which the fulfillment of an individual lies in being blended into the harmonious self-working of the cosmos -- a cosmos inclusive of the society as a microscopic component of itself and which stands static, so that participation in it (which is participation at once in nature and in the human society integrated within nature) involves only the conservational approach of maintenance of the current status quo, in contradistinction to the modern society of Friedan's world in which participation is a matter of progressive expansion and increase internally of the content and externally of the magnitude of this social machinary (the progressive world floating on top of nature); the second is that salvational order in which filfullment lies in complete rejection of participation in society and lies furthermore in participation in the cosmos only at the transcendental, otherworldly level. The instituting of this world-view -- when? perhaps during the Reformation, which effectively destroyed the previous two alternative world-views? -- is, together with the other factors, such as the differentiation of the (de-genderized) subject and the devaluation of reproduction to a "task" (how long has this been going on?), the pre-requsite for the false-dichotomy between reproductive housewife and productive public-husband as the only alternatives between which mobility from self-denial to self-fulfillment, from enslavement to liberation, can be imagined. (So housewife can only become a public-husband when they desire such mobility.)

In a way this false dichotomy -- to use feminist talk -- is like the situation where women of former Taliban Afghanistan who were then forced to veil all now take to be their liberation their new found freedom in the post-Taliban to walk in bikini in beauty-contests (transition to the West) which must have appeared to the Western feminists to be only a stepping into the modern form of "oppression of women". The same false dichotomy exists in America, the religious conservatives' objection to pornorgraphy out of a desire to veil women and the pornographers' defense of it out of a desire to have them bare all: neither are friends of the feminists. The alternative the feminists offer to either the veil or sexual objectification in nakedness, i.e. turning women's body into a productive instrument like that of men, is not really a "third" in the triangular, since the body as a productive instrument is the other of a binary dichotomy in opposition to either the veiled body in one binary or to the naked body in the other: the constant in two systems. What is to be noted is that in a primitive tribe where everyone is naked neither complete veiledness nor sexual objectification in nakedness can acquire any meaning of oppressiveness for women: the new system, new world-view based on clothing has to be instituted first before veiledness and then nakedness can serve any oppressive function for women -- a world-view, once come, cannot be reversed back to the primitive mode in order to completely destroy either the sexual objectification of women on the left or sexual repression (through veiling) of women on the right. Innocence, once broken, does not return. Hence, in the following, to trace the origin of the new world-view in which Friedan is caught, rather than criticizing the shortcomings in her thinking, shall be the proper task in the investigation of "the feminist work ethic and the spirit of consumerism".

veiled object ------------------- working subject
(private,              |          (public, the        
marked for             |             "owner")
the "owner")           |
                       |
            "true" feminist ideal
                   of women

Footnotes:

1. Dell deChant, in The Sacred Santa (The Pilgrim Press, 2002; of which more mention will come later), has also made the same distinction, but with different terms and different datings, between the formative and the mature phase of capitalism by following Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991): "Jameson's theory of postmodern culture follows Ernest Mandel's thesis in his Late Capitalism, and in a good Marxist reading, Jameson argues that cultural changes follow changes in modes of production and technology. [This our thermodynamic interpretation of history accepts as true only for the level of ordinary peoples.] Thus Mandel's market capitalism corresponds to the cultural period Jameson refers to as realism; Mandel's monopoly capitalism corresponds to Jameson's modernism; and Mandel's third stage (variously termed postindustrial capitalism, multinational capitalism, late capitalism, or consumer capitalism) corresponds to Jameson's postmodernism. This sequence of events in capitalism's evolution takes us from 1848 (Mandel's date for the beginning of market capitalism) to the present, with the 1940s cited as the beginning of the postmodern period. This evolution also measures the trajectory from the production-based economic system of the Industrial Revolution to today's consumption based economic system. During this period of approximately a century, technological advances and manufacturing capacity transformed the economic equation from one in which the social focus of capitalism was on production of commodities to one in which the social focus was on the consumption of commodities" (p. 25 - 6). Note that formative (production-based) capitalism, which is based on man-power and women's reproductive power, which therefore favours man (male-chauvinism as the dominant cultural form), and with which is thus correlated tighter but finer control of women in, and their restriction to, the monogamous domestic context, corresponds to the earlier "formative period of nation-state"; and that mature (consumption-based) capitalism, which is based especially on women's consumptive power, which therefore favours women (feminism, "woman-power" as the dominant cultural form), and with which are correlated single men and women living apart from each other (and from their parents), corresponds to the earlier "mature period of nation-state" (Ch. 4).

2. Alan Wolfe, in "The mystique of Betty Friedan" (The Atlantic Online, 1999), has pointed out the fundamental and thorough flawedness of the database from which Friedan drew her conclusions, and which not only holds for the authorities in psychology and sociology on which she based her book, but also for the "testimonies" of the common, white suburban housewives on the basis of which she identified "the problem that has no name". E.g. citing Martha Bayles in Feminism and Abortion (April, 1990): "When it comes to politics, feminists still claim today, as Friedan claimed in 1963, that the frustration of the few is shared by the many. Yet even back in 1963 this claim was mistaken, because the peculiarly stifling circumstances described in The Feminine Mystique simply didn't obtain for most women." Much of Wolfe's assessment is undoubtedly true, and un-surprising, since Friedan is an ideologue -- and the purpose of an ideologue is to invent an imaginary reality independent of the real reality in order to facilitate the introduction of new devices to reinforce the power structure -- and the definition of "ideology" as adopted here is precisely the imaginary (false) reality introduced to reinforce power: in this case, Betty Friedan serves as the propagandist for the capitalists whose mission is to aid the process of capitalism's transition into consumerism. To do this -- to translate into reality her ideal vision of "professional, working women" -- it is expected that she would invent a "problem that has no name" even when there is no such problem. But whether there actually exists or not this widespread "problem that has no name" does not concern us here, since our purpose is to exhibit what function the ideology plays in order to bring about the reinforcement of power (capitalism or more specifically supraorganismic metabolism) and not to determine whether the imaginary reality attached to it is true or not. My own feeling is that something like this "problem that has no name" probably existed to a limited extent among suburban housewives as among other peoples who were not busy enough to escape this existential anxiety over the lack of meaning in life which was really just a common human problem during modernity when the traditional spiritual meaning of life disintegrated and the vacuum left over could not yet be filled -- as the existentialists have demonstrated with their concerns. Ideology occurs when this common problem of modernity is distorted into a "women's problem" caused by suppression of "women's natural desire to work". Once again I want to emphasize that I am however not of the same camp as those ordinary critics of Friedan or feminists (like Wolfe himself) who, from their traditionalist, right-wing position, argue for an opposite, but still just as much an, ideology where women's natural desire is not to work but to have babies. Any position which maintains that women have a natural inclination toward either (professional, public) work (production) or motherhood (reproduction) or both or any of the two "according to their choice" (after feminists have spent much efforts advocating women joining the professional world, they usually immediately utter "if women want to stay home and raise children, that's okay too; feminism is about choice", in order to cover up their capitalist-propagandist track) is an ideological stance to which we do not subscribe here; although we maintain that an enlightened woman is most likely to see values in neither of the two.

3. The process of how Friedan arrives at this even though she is anti-consumerist in spirit is actually more complex than this but for this reason very instructive about the operation of power. Since her concern is with self-fulfillment, and yet she makes the mistaken assumption that self-fulfillment is accomplished by being a part, or recognized productive and useful member, of the social collective, she sees the cure to the "problem that has no name" as doing, of course not just mindless maintenance work like cleaning the street, but creative and intelligence-oriented work within the community which respects, and even needs, it. She thus certainly does not value only "business work" which brings in money and does not dismiss "work" of pure artistic and intellectual value (artists, amateur astronomers, writers) just because it does not do so. In fact she values these works greatly. Thus she also values greatly community-service works such as in mental health clinics, art centers, and day camps. But these formerly non-paid, volunteer works in which married women have been frequently engaged up til now, are becoming by her time "professionalized", i.e. paid jobs done by "experts" "educated" in these fields, and have therefore become closed to the non-professional class such as married women. Consequently "[i]n some suburbs and communities there is now little work left for the nonprofessional that requires intelligence -- except for the few positions of leadership which most women, these days, lack the independence, the strength, the self-confidence to take... This is not to say that being a den mother, or serving on a PTA committee, or organizing a covered-dish supper [the only things left] is not useful work; for a woman of intelligence and ability, it is simply not enough." (p. 333; emp. added.) She cites from a mother that "community activities are short-terms goals... you need real work." (p. 334.) Real work means a "jump from amateur to professional": "if a woman does not have to work to eat, she can find identity only in work that is of real value to society [the mistaken identification of self-fulfillment with usefulness again] -- work for which, usually, our society pays. Being paid is, of course, more than a reward -- it implies a definite commitment." (Ibid.) Making money not because one needs money but for self-fulfillment: this is how capitalist interests are able to hijack one's otherwise anti-capitalist sentiment for their benefits, when the mistaken identity between the self and the collective is made and when that identity (societal recognition of oneself) is established only by money (the exchange network). Friedan's encouragement for women to commit themselves to "work, paid or unpaid, requiring initiative, leadership, and responsibility" -- which by itself is an anti-consumerist attitude -- then transits into one for them to get a job that pays, even if one does not need money at all -- a pro-consumerism stance. "The women I found who had made and kept alive such long-term commitments did not suffer the problem that has no name." (p. 336) But commitment comes not only from being intellectually and creatively challenged but also from being paid. "But I have noticed that when women do not take up painting or ceramics seriously enough to become professionals -- to be paid for their work, or for teaching it to others, and to be recognized as a peer by other professionals -- sooner or later, they cease dabbling; the Sunday painting, the idle ceramics do not bring that needed sense of self when they are of no value to anyone else. The amateur or dillettante whose own work is not good enough for anyone to want to pay to hear or see or read does not gain real status by it in society, or real personal identity." (p. 336) Friedan now ends up advocating the shallow materialism that nothing is worthwhile unless it brings in money -- professionalism (Beruf). And professionalism really just means production for the purpose of exchange, i.e. "work" with Friedan finally becomes production in the production-consumption cycle of the consumerist economy. And this identity between recognition and getting paid is the specifically American but more generally consumerist value that people of traditional culture did not have: Hsuang-Tsang (Tang dynasty, famous for going to India to retrieve Buddhist texts in the original tongue) wanted people to read his translations but did not care if they paid for them; neither did Plato, St. Augustine, or St. Thomas Aquinas -- nor even Descartes -- worry about people paying to read their works, but only about reading their works -- and, in the case of latter, about not getting killed by the Church afterwards. In other words, because Friedan has to work within the consumerist cultural framework, what she advocates in the spirit of anti-consumerism ends up reinforcing consumerism. Finally the identity between recognition/self-fulfillment and getting paid merges with that need to be "useful" to society. "These women [in a survey] were not driven to go to work by economic need but by what the anthropologist who made the survey called 'the psychological need to be economically productive'." (p. 335) Why do they feel this need? Because Friedan is dealing with the female masses, as feminism is a mass movement. The majority of the human population simply cannot do the super-high level creative and intellectual work such as Plato, Buddha, or Zhuangzi did which necessarily transcended the economic network of the society and became completely useless to society. Only lower-level creative, intellectual works will have any function whatsoever in society's metabolic network. Hence the reason why Friedan, as an anti-consumerist, can end up promoting consumerism is that she is a mediocre, confused thinker trying to appeal to the masses. This is the preliminary answer provided to the question posed in the Postscript.

4.