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Domesticity as the Dangerous Supplement of Liberalism Joan C. Williams Anti-essentiaUsm is a major agenda in current feminist theory. After a decade of writing dominated by studies that explored "women's culture" or "voice," a broad range of theorists and historians are exploring the diversity of women's voices and arguing that women do not share a unified "essential" womanhood. Nancy Hewitf s influential "Beyond the Search for Sisterhood" crystallized this trend in women's history in 1985;1 a recent installment is Elizabeth Spelman's Inessential Woman, in which she argues that the search for sisterhood universalized the voice of privileged white women.2 If feminists are to be successful in moving "beyond difference," we must not only explore the limitations of essentiaUst formulations of womanhood; we must also explain their stunning popularity. This article begins by discussing a pivotal work in the "difference" canon: Carol GilUgan's In a Different Voice. Why did GiUigan's work resonate so deeply with so many women?31 argue that Gilligan identified, not differences in women's actual behavior, as she assumed, but instead women's "voice" in a much more Uteral sense: she gave a status report on female gender ideology in the late twentieth century. Her work suggests that contemporary women feel torn between the mandates of two inconsistent ideologies—domesticity and UberaUsm.4 This internal conflict suggests that these ideologies are defined in complementary and mutuaUy exclusive terms, setting up women's selflessness against men's pursuit of self-interest . To use Jacques Derrida's terminology, domesticity is the "dangerous supplemenf ' of UberaUsm.5 Domesticity is "dangerous" in that its enshrinement of humane and communal values articulates a chaUenge to the legitimacy of self-interest as the guiding principle of social Ufe. At best, GiUigan's celebration of domesticity promises to resuscitate a rhetoric in which Americans traditionaUy have expressed their misgivings about a society out of touch with human motivations other than self-interest. If domesticity is dangerous in this positive sense, however, it also is dangerous in another way. While one message of domesticity is that the "ethic of care" is better than the values of the mainstream UberaUsm, another message is that people who choose humane values are making a personal choice to eschew the self-interested behavior necessary to achieve status and success. In this way, domesticity ultimately subverts its implicit message that communal values should guide civic Ufe. © 1991 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 2 No. 3 (Winter) 70 Journal of Women's History Winter The analysis of domesticity as the dangerous supplement of UberaUsm suggests the need for two revisions of the history of poUtical discourse. Recent work on poUtical discourse has identified two complementary Unes of inquiry, both of which chaUenge Louis Hartz's description of the American poUtical tradition as an unbroken chain of tiberal thought. One group of scholars has undermined Hartz's imagery by exploring the persistent use of repubticanism as a language of opposition to UberaUsm. Other historians seek to recover the "virtues of UberaUsm" by exploring versions of UberaUsm that combine elements from the Uberal tradition with concepts of virtue drawn from repubUcanism and/or reUgion.6 My analysis of domesticity as dangerous supplement suggests that UberaUsm flattened out into a celebration of self-interest as part of a dynamic in which UberaUsm's virtues were re-gendered female and were pushed out of the pubtic sphere of manly civic virtue into the private, domestic, ferninine sphere. My analysis of domesticity also suggests that complex relationships exist between repubUcanism and domesticity as alternative (though related) critiques of possessive individualism. Domesticity's strength (and its weakness) is its ability to offer a "Marxism you can bring home to mother."7 It is odd that In a Different Voice rings so true. Güligan herself acknowledged the study's methodological limitations (126, 3); others have explored them in depth throughout the period of the book's greatest popularity. The book, in the words of one critic, draws conclusions about women in general based, first, on an analysis of two eleven-year-olds and a study of a smaU sample of Harvard students—neither group representative of society...

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