Starting Over: Feminism and the Politics of Cultural Critique

Sex and Political Economy in the Edinburgh Review

Sex and Political Economy in the Edinburgh Review Cultural Revolution The 1830S in Great Britain were marked by struggles to increase the political and social power of middle-class men, by pressures from radicals and feminists to extend political and social authority more widely, by the social dislocations and increasing militancy of the working class, and by the gradual refashioning of "society" to include , under conditions of carefully negotiated control, male laborers and the poor. Not surprisingly, this decade is often characterized as a time of transition, deeply informed by a sense of history, a heightened consciousness that the past was distinctly different from the present and that the future was liable to be marked by greater difference yet.1 Public written representations of society and social relations , whether structured as novels, as narratives of the past, or as accounts of the principles of historical development, offered a sense of control over time and change while extending to those who could interpret the flux a superior cultural authority.2 Writing history, indeed , in which self-interested norms and values implicitly governed "disinterested" accounts of the "laws" by which society as a whole progressed, was an important means by which struggles for cultural authority took place. It was through struggles for cultural authority, in part, that "some values, norms, and qualities (appropriate to the life situation of some social groups) were elevated to become value, normality, quality of life itself" and that "a revolution in government" took place (Corrigan and Sayer 1985, 123).3 Although this "revolution" signaled no simple triumph of the "middle class," essentially bourgeois and capitalist groups of men were incorporated into the English ruling class, forming an alliance with older aristocracy. At the same time there was "a concerted attempt to disentangle 'the state' from inter97 98 Starting Over ests, from clientage, from its previously more overt class and patriarchal register," so that the "state" came to represent "a neutral, natural , obvious set of institutionalized routine practices" that successfully laid "claim to the legitimate monopoly of national means of administration" (Corrigan 1980, 123).4 The construction of an efficient , centralized, and depoliticized state, in turn, supplied necessary conditions for the justification of English imperialism (194). Much has been made in accounts of British state or "cultural" revolution of the role played by professional middle-class men. Half in the market and half out of it, ambiguously related to the status of gentleman as well, their indeterminate social identity made them well placed to promote values and forms of social authority seemingly unbound to rank or wealth-the value of expertise, for example , and most particularly the value of "disinterested" social knowledge. On the one hand, of course, professional ideals intersected with the entrepreneurial. The emphasis placed upon expertise , for example, overlapped with entrepreneurial celebrations of competition based on talent so that, in the process of offering their own values as the quality of life itself, male professionals may have shored up entrepreneurial values by displacing them onto higher ground.5 But on the other hand, by emphasizing the disinterested nature of their expertise and by proposing that expertise as a basis for state operations as well, professionals helped construct the state as a neutral set of routine practices seemingly divorced from the interests of class (Corrigan and Sayer 1985, 123; Perkin 1968, 429, 261; Weiner 1981, 8-30). At the same time, of course, male professionals helped secure their own cultural capital as "experts." As with many accounts of the middle class, in which middle class is largely masculine, cultural or state revolution is often conceived of as a "struggle over signs," conducted for the most part by sets of men.6 And yet middle-class women, particularly women of letters, entered into these struggles too, forming their own "counter publics" (Fraser 1990). Women of letters articulated their own versions of the laws of historical development, offered their own values as "value" and the "quality of life itself," and in this way struggled for cultural space and social authority. Their more marginal position in relation to the market and the professional "public" world made them even better placed than professional men to enact the role of social "crank,"7 to offer social analyses and critiques of the very market or Sex and Political Economy in the Edinburgh Review 99 social relations on which their class position to some degree hinged. Like their male peers, women...