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9. The Absent Presence
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9 The Absent Presence Patriarchy, Capitalism, and the Nature of Teacher Work Patti Lather Ohio State University Through the questions it poses and the absences it locates, feminism argues the centrality of gender in the shaping of our consciousness, skills, and institutions as well as the distribution of power and privilege. The central premise of feminism is that gender is a basic organizing principle of all known societies and that, along with race, class, and the sheer specificity of historical circumstance, it profoundly shapes/mediates the concrete conditions of our lives.1 The last fifteen years of feminist scholarship argues strongly that if what we are about is understanding the intersection of choice and constraint in human experience, the relationship of social structure and consciousness, then gender cannot be ignored. This is especially true in an occupational field as tied to women’s social position as is public school teaching. As Michael Apple notes (1983b, 1985), the history of teaching is the history of a gendered work force. Yet Apple calls gender “the absent presence” in most research on teaching (1983b, p. 625). Even within leftist work, where one might expect more attention to the interactive dynamics of all forms of oppression, the marginalization of gender in neo-Marxist sociology of education is well noted (O’Brien, 1984; Connell et al., 1982; Walker and Barton, 1983; McRobbie, 1980; Macdonald, 1981; Clarricoates, 1981). It is the purpose of this paper to argue the centrality of gender in understanding and changing the work lives of teachers. After sketching the history of the stormy relationship between feminism and Marxism, I will explore what opens up both theoretically and strategically once we do pay attention to gender in our efforts to understand the nature of teacher work. 151 152 / Patti Lather The Unhappy Marriage of Feminism and Marxism Our subordination to men is not theorized in terms of the benefits that accrue to them and the vested interests they have in maintaining those benefits but in terms of the benefits to capitalism. —Mahony, 1985, p. 66 In the case of women, their definition as a group and the subsequent collapsing of the group into the general category of the exploited have more to do with patriarchal astigmatism than with social reality. . . . The highlighting of the economic exploitation of women by capital and the obscuring of their oppression by men is an ideological practice—in life and in research. —O’Brien, 1984, p. 44 Traditional Marxists acknowledge the existence of male dominance, but their recognition is not central to their theory or their practice. —Jaggar, 1983, p. 239 “The feminist project” (Mazza, 1983) has moved from being accused of factionalism and bourgeois selfishness by male Marxists through what Rowbotham terms the “ominous politeness” of the 1970s (1981, p. 101). We are presently witnessing the “and women, of course” phenomenon, which Mary O’Brien terms “the commatization of women”: Gender is tacked on to an analysis in a way that makes women’s straggles tactically rather than theoretically present in neo-Marxist discourse. O’Brien argues, furthermore, that such marginalization is “not mere patriarchal prejudice but rather a consequence of serious defects in Marxist theory” (1984, p. 43). Bringing women’s capacity for dissent to the center of our transformative aspirations has theoretical and tactical implications for neo-Marxist praxis that will be dealt with later in this paper. But first I want to explore the nature of the relationship between feminism and Marxism by looking at the gender blindness of so much neo-Marxist sociology of education. While I am aware of MacKinnon’s warning against the anxiety that lurks under most efforts to justify women’s struggle in Marxist terms, “as if only that would make them legitimate” (1982, p. 524), I argue that Marxist thought is as essential to save feminism from its tendencies toward partiality and privatism as feminism is to save Marxism from its abstraction and dogmatism (Eisenstein, 1979; Smith, 1979; Kuhn and Wolpe, 1978; O’Brien, 1981, 1984; Sargent, 1981; Rowbotham, 1981). Feminism that disregards the workings of economic privilege and the force of material circumstance disempowers itself. Marxism that loses connection with concrete individuals living contradictory and phenomenologically dense lives abstracts itself out of the realm of the useful. A core feminist belief is that patriarchy,2 the socially sanctioned power of men over women, operates in both the private and public spheres to perpetuate a social order that benefits men at the expense of women (Sokoloff, 1980; O...