Powerless Women

I begin with a confession. It is difficult for me to think of women as powerless in any total sense. If one has seen either one's grandmother or mother drive a tractor, load cattle for market, organize a charity drive, run the household finances, kill a rattlesnake, start a small business, act as a midwife, make clothing out of flour sacks, can food, run for the schoolboard, get a high school diploma through an extension course, make determined stands on a number of issues, one shares with the writer Alice Walker a tradition that assumes women are capable. This is not the same as suggesting that women enjoy a parity of what is usually called "power" with men. But it is to insist that women have been historic agents--they have dreamed dreams, acted, reacted, served and empowered them-selves on the basis of various ideals--even within situations of constraint.

I begin, then, with a conundrum: women are and have been powerful; women are and have been powerlessness. There is no contradiction here. Instead we find a resonant paradox, an ambiguity that seeps through all reflective attempts to confront "the powerlessness of women", In recent decades, to be sure, important commentators reflecting various feminist positions often ignored or denied altogether associations of women with images of authority, potency and power, concentrating instead on women's historic oppression, 'second-class citizenship' and, in their view, universal victimization.

There were many rhetorical and political reasons for this focus on grim realities in the story of women in culture and history. But in telling only one side of the story these same commentators sometimes wound up portraying women as so uniformly and universally downtrodden, demeaned, infantilized and coerced that men came to seem invincible, individually and collectively terrifying in their power and their intent to oppress. It was hard to see how women might emerge from the shadows confronted, as they were, by such an implacably hostile external force.

Yet women themselves really knew--and know--better, whatever the reigning ideology might dictate. We know that we are not wholly without resources as we bring our personal and political authority to bear in complex social situations. We know that we have various 'means' to attain at least some of our desired 'ends'. We know that our foremothers deeded to us much more than a sustained tale of woe. We contemporary women are the heirs of centuries of women's stories and strengths, all the many narratives of perseverance and survival, of determination to 'go on' through tragedies and defeats. We know our mothers and grandmothers often had laughter in their hearts, songs on their lips and pride in their identities. Knowing this, we cannot accept any account that demeans women in the name of taking the measure of our powerlessness. Yet we also know that our foremothers did not--save for a few extraordinary and rare royal leaders--run countries, fight wars, explore and conquer new lands, make the laws and enforce them, nor determine the shape of official, bureaucratic arrangements in the modern world. They were neither industrialists nor generals, presidents nor judges, political theorists nor polity founders.

Our legacy is riddled with ambiguities. Our thinking about this legacy must grapple with a double-edge: power and powerlessness. I shall not go over by-now familiar ground, all the distressing data on earning disparities, sexual victimization, lopsided poverty, and institutional invisibility. I assume that we all know these social facts. I presume. the reader shares some general recognition of women's social and economic powerlessness. But this is just the beginning of the story. We locate them inside wider webs of meaning and significance. Our conceptual frameworks turn on t:1e way we define key terms, most importantly 'power' itself.

The definition of power developed initially in American political science got reduced to the formula: X has power over Y if X can get Y to do something Y would not otherwise do. We can observe Y's behavior and assess the force X brought to bear. The locus for such observations is extant "decision-making" or political institutions--national, state or local governing bodies or organized associations that aim to influence such bodies--corporations, unions, 'interest groups'. Power is a form of compulsion exerted by the already (relatively) powerful upon one another within official political institutions designed to promote the aims and interests of competing groups. It is of, by and for elites. Or, as my mother is fond of saying, "Them that has gets".

Power as a form of direct pressure on a social actor to take a specific action here becomes a "thing in itself", measurable like amps on an electric meter. Within the larger political vision presumed by a one-dimensional view of Power, women are construed as apolitical beings by definition. The argument is really quite simple. Women and men have different social roles. The social role of women promotes a value-system based upon women's "life experiences" inside non-political areas of social life--marriage, the family, religious and communal associations. Concerns which arise from their position in the private sphere, including the health, education, and welfare of children, are mere expressions of personal values and moralistic concern.

Neither women as a group nor individual women could leap-over imbedded constraints on the form and scope of their power. Women could be saints but not popes, queens but not legislators, angels of mercy but not warriors of death. Whether our historic forebears regarded such constraints as unacceptable is not an easy question. Not holding our ideas of power and equality; not being members of modern secular society that celebrates individual choice and downgrades community obligation, what strikes us as intolerable seemed to the overwhelming majority of our pre-modern ancestors part of nature's plan and god's design. Women were authoritative in ways men were not; men governed in ways women did not.

What are we to make of all this? We cannot return to pre-secular, pre-modern ways of life. But we can see that secular male dominance is most visible in societies in which complementarity of powers has given way to an enhancement and expansion of institutionalized male authority accompanied by a simultaneous diminution of women's domestic, sacral and informal authority. As the world of female power recedes, the sphere of male power encroaches, absorbing more and more features of social life into the orbit of the juridico-political, the bureaucratized, the 'legitimately' powerful. Women are left with few apparent options: to acquiesce in their historic loss of symbolic-domestic authority; to manipulate their diminished social role as mothers inside increasingly powerless families; or to join forces with the men, assuming masculine roles and identities and competing for power on established, institutionalized terms. Shifting our focus from exclusive concentration on images of female victimization, we recognize the often terrible costs of being the institutionally and politically powerful sex. For is it not ironic that the dominant sex has also been the most expendable--that, historically, male bodies were sent into battle to kill and to die in order that female bodies be protected? Suppose the instruments that ostensibly signify our power instead speak to our powerlessness. Suppose the powerful are daily disempowered by the very magnitude of the force at their disposal. Suppose what has become of dominion is not so much the power to act as an important compulsion to react.

Worshiping penultimate power and fantasies of perfect control, we find ourselves bowed under by our 'tools', our instrumentalities of violence, genuflecting at the restlessly moving altar of consumerist fantasy, obsessively seeking 'more' and 'better' and 'the best'. Missiles proliferate. MX's get built. Enmities are shored up by the daily repetition of war-like rhetoric. Acid rain falls. Toxic waste stagnates. Species are added to the endangered list. Teenagers kill themselves in epidemic proportions. Missing and quite possibly tortured, abused or murdered children stare back at us from milk cartons, utility bills and movie ads. Who are we? What have we become? Powerful-powerless: does it matter? Are we not more and more 'Equalized' as potential victims of our own quest for power?

The fall of the Roman Empire was the birth of a startlingly new idea: the ontological equality of all souls before God, a heady notion that stoked the latent power of each individual to participate in some way inside the frame of a freshly redefined community. Christianity "made possible the ideal of a social order resting upon the free personality and a common effort towards moral ends".

Although this heady moral revolution failed to secure earthly peace and justice, its promise of a peaceable kingdom lives on wherever men and women refuse to make peace with making war; wherever love and care are gifts freely given, not revocable allowances that may be stingily recalled; wherever the power to forgive is reckoned above the power to punish.

Perhaps women are the "fools" in Western political thought and practice whose official powerlessness grants them a paradoxical freedom: freedom from full assimilation into the prevailing public identity whose aims, in our day, are efficiency and control.

The great Jane Addams looked to the "long road of women's memory" for alternatives to militaristic power. Feminism made sense, she declared, only if it got linked to an active repudiation of a world governed by physical force. Eleanor Roosevelt proclaimed it "up to the women" to constitute themselves as a vanguard for democratic change, to struggle ceaselessly, beginning with their own children, to supplant a will to power with a "will to peace". Men she found too immersed in the old will to war.Women's different social location may deny them access to some forms of power, but it engenders recognition of others.

Hannah Arendt challenges received notions of political beginnings as the actions of male hordes or contractualists, warring to seek civic order. She finds the ontological root of hope, the human capacity that sustains political being and our capacity to act in "the fact of natality". From her book, 'The Human Condition':

"The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, 'natural' ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new human beings and the new beginnings, the action they are capable of by being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope, those two essential characteristics of human existence...that found perhaps their most glorious and most succinct expression in the new words with which the gospels announced their 'Glad tidings': 'a child has been born unto us"'.

The infant, like all beginnings, is vulnerable. We nurture that beginning, neither knowing, nor being able to control, the 'end' of the story. Birth is a '1miracle" that renews and irreversibly alters the world. Arendt's configuration stirs recognition of our own vulnerabilities and necessary dependency on others.

Women, in and through their powerlessness, understand what it means to be vulnerable and what is required of those upon whom the even more powerless and vulnerable, children, depend. Their openness to beginnings, even under conditions of hardship and privation, terror and torture, have daily renewed the world, making possible future beginnings. The challenge for women at this fateful juncture is to keep alive memories of vulnerability as they struggle to overcome structurally sanctioned inefficacy and to reaffirm rather than repudiate interdependencies as they seek a measure of institutional 'legitimacy'.

Women, from a double-vision that straddles powerlessness and power, are in a powerful position to insist with Camus that one must never avert one's eyes from the suffering of children and that, seeing that suffering one is required to act. For every woman, whether she is a biological mother or not, fears more than anything else the possibility that she will be powerless. Not to have a career, to fail to win a prize, to be unable to buy a new car, to lack the votes to pass a law, to be deserted by her mate, to suffer illness or to sustain injury to her own body, all these and more she can manage. No, the fear of powerlessness that haunts her is that she will be unable, at some terrible moment, to spare her child, or a child, painful suffering; powerless to hold at bay the forces of terror and dislocation; powerless to fend off bombs or runaway cars or sadistic predators or cruel teachers or to forestall the child's own reckless actions. To take the measure of this fear is to face powerlessness at its most pitiless and yet not to abandon hope, not to lose the capacity to struggle for power understood as action in common with others for a more peaceful, less violent world.

Editor's Note:

Jean Bethke Elshtain, PhD, is a mother of four, a professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA. Her doctoral dissertation was "Women and Politics: A Theoretical Analysis". She is a noted writer and lecturer. Her recent book, "Public Man, Private Women" (Princeton University Press) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. This article is excerpted from her presentation at the Fourth International Stauros Congress on The Meaning of Human Suffering. The theme of the Congress was Powerlessness - of the Poor - of Women - and of Disabled Persons.