Using the lamp instead of looking into the mirror women and men in discussion about the relationship between men and women in

Much of the discussion on which Dr Ljungberg van Beinum embarks,such as the enigmatic nature of the relationship between men and women, liesfirmly within the territory of social studies,

INTO THE MIRROR

The book series Dialogues on Work and Innovation presents empirically based studies as well

as theoretical discussions on the practice of organizational renewal.

Its publications reflect the increasingly urgent need for the development of new forms of work organization In today’s interdependent world, workplace reform and organizational effectiveness are no longer solely the concern of individual organizations; the local and the global have become closely interconnected.

Dialogues on Work and Innovation mirrors the fact that enterprise development and societal

development cannot be kept separate Furthermore, the Series focuses on the dialogue between theory and practice, and thus on the mutuality of knowledge and action, of research

and development The Dialogues stress the critical significance of joint reflexivity in

action-oriented research and the necessity for participatory processes in organizational change.

Editors

Hans van Beinum, Halmstad University (Editor-in-Chief)

Richard Ennals, Kingston University Werner Fricke, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Bonn Øyvind Pålshaugen, Work Research Institute, Oslo

Editorial Board

O¦guz Babüro¦glu (Sabanci University); Claude Faucheux (CREDS, Fontainebleau); Davydd J Greenwood

(Cornell University); Denis Gregory (Ruskin College, Oxford); Björn Gustavsen (National Institute for Working Life, Stockholm); Kurt Aagaard Nielsen (Roskilde University); Annemieke Roobeek (University of Amsterdam); John Shotter (University of New Hampshire); Stephen Toulmin (University of Southern California); René van der Vlist (University of Leiden).

Volume 11Ingrid Ljungberg van Beinum

Using the Lamp instead of Looking into the Mirror

Women and men in discussion about the relationship between

men and women in the work place

Looking into the Mirror

Women and men in discussion

about the relationship between men and women in the work place

JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY

AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIAINGRID LJUNGBERG VAN BEINUM

Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ljungberg van Beinum, Ingrid.

Using the lamp instead of looking into the mirror : women and men in discussion about the relationship between men and women in the work place / Ingrid Ljungberg van Beinum.

p cm (Dialogues on work and innovation, ISSN 1384-6671 ; 11)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1 Sex discrimination in employment Sweden Case studies 2 Sex role in the work -Sweden Case studies 3 Sex discrimination against women Sweden Case studies 4 Man-woman relationships Sweden Case studies I Title II Series.

environment-HD6060.5.S8 B45 2000

ISBN 90 272 1781 5 (Eur.) / 1 55619 678 4 (US) (Pb: alk paper)

© 2000 – John Benjamins Publishing Company

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher.

John Benjamins Publishing Co · P.O.Box 75577 · 1070 an Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O.Box 27519 · Philadelphia PA 19118–0519 · USA

Stephen Toulmin

In this essay, Dr Ingrid Ljungberg van Beinum draws attention to a fascinatingseries of questions, which have received too little attention from students ofsociety, even those working in the field of action research In almost all advancedcountries, the lack of equality between women and men is by now a muchdiscussed political issue But the social and psychological factors that make ithard to redress this injustice have been under-studied, and the present bookshould provoke a lively debate, and lead to further research designed to map inmore detail the hitherto unexplored area that Ingrid Ljungberg van Beinum hereopens up Much of the discussion on which Dr Ljungberg van Beinum embarks,such as the enigmatic nature of the relationship between men and women, liesfirmly within the territory of social studies, but I would like to point out, by way

of introduction, some of the broader connections of her subject: with socialhistory, cultural anthropology, depth psychology, and even moral philosophy

As a general matter, the difficulty of achieving equal relationships betweenmen and women, either in the workplace or in the home (to say nothing ofpositions of political and social power) is a commonplace for contemporary socialscientists and activists alike It goes without saying that in social, familial andother situations, women are widely expected to play secondary roles This haseven been true of many people who have insisted verbally on their commitment toequality There is a story about Beatrice and Sidney Webb, a couple who werecentral figures in the British Labour Party at the beginning of the twentiethcentury: When she was asked how she and Sidney could work together soeffectively, Beatrice replied, “Because we have a clear division of responsibility:Sidney takes all the important decisions, and I take all the unimportant decisions.”Beatrice’s reputation as a woman of formidable Will led on to the furtherquestion, “Which of you decides whether any decision is important or unimpor-

tant?,” and her follow-up reply was, “I do.” It is no surprise that this story went

the rounds of London; and this is evidence that Beatrice Webb’s behaviour was anexception to a general rule If Sidney had answered the same questions similarly,nobody would have bothered to report the fact Our normal expectations wouldhave been met, and nothing more would have needed saying

While these inequalities were notorious in certain times and places — inVictorian England, or in many Muslim countries today — social and culturalobstacles to gender equality have been so much the rule throughout the history ofhumankind that Women of Power and Authority have been remembered for longafter And in many cases their names have become proverbial Everyone knowsabout the Amazons; the French and English are all familiar with Jeanne d’Arc andEleanor of Aquitaine; all English schoolchildren can tell you about the triballeader Boadicea; and even the Victorians had their Florence Nightingale Therespect Europeans have today for Gro Harlem Brundtland, whose Norwegiancabinet was more than half made up of women, is slightly grudging, while SadakoOgata would be a far less influential political leader in Japan itself than she is asthe United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Yet, regrettably, all suchcases tend to be regarded as exceptional How do we react to news of the 10-year-old girl who is the reputed leader of the terrorist Army of God on the Thai-Burmese border? If we heard the same report about a 10-year-old boy, we wouldstill be horrified, but not nearly so amazed.

* * *

By noting these historical facts, however, we reach only the threshold of theproblems that Ingrid Ljungberg van Beinum articulates If we treat the ideal ofequality as a serious matter in actual practice, all human institutions are con-fronted with the task of meeting its claims And anybody concerned with this field

of research must look again at the ways in which, on either an institutional or anindividual level, participatory action can help to realize this ideal IngridLjungberg van Beinum addresses equality as a relational question that can only bedealt with once it is recognized that women and men are both different andsimilar So she rightly insists that we cannot — and should not try to — “reducethe ‘other’ to ‘same’.”

Is the demand for equality a twentieth century European one? The challengesposed by the suffragettes or the feminists have indeed been clear, open andforcible for a little more than a hundred years But the underlying ideals on whichthe demand rests are as old as philosophy itself Early in Book VIII of the

Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle discusses the different kinds of philia — i.e.

“friendship” or “relationship” — and his key statement about the best kind of

philia presents, as an ethical ideal, two people each of whom treats the other in

ways designed to promote the other’s good

True: Aristotle himself came from a society in which his statements were

understood as referring to relationships between two male citizens of comparable social standing But — like the Constitution of the United States — his Ethics is

written in such terms that we have been able to broaden the application of itsprinciples in ways that the original author did not foresee

By now, then, equality within relationships, in the workplace or elsewhere, is

an ideal whose claims few will openly contradict But the obstacles to realizingthis ideal are not social and cultural alone and — as Dr Ljungberg van Beinumrightly insists — the hardest ones to overcome are those that lead us into issues ofdepth psychology Still, these too must be addressed if we are to deal with thebarriers we find ourselves erecting, against our own wills If we are honest, we alladmit to finding ourselves reacting in discriminatory ways toward people of otherraces or religions, not just genders, and one significant part of our own “emotionalhomework” is that of bringing the sources of these reactions to the surface

In this respect, Ingrid Ljungberg van Beinum frames her basic position interms of the powerful image of Lamps and Mirrors These are images that havemuch force, both in depth psychology and in religion Even more than JacquesLacan, the late Heinz Kohut spoke of experiences of narcissistic injury in emo-tional development as causing us to perceive other human beings as in a distortingmirror Some of us lose the ability to see others as entitled to goals and life-plans

of their own, and so become manipulative in the demands we impose on them.Others lose the sense of having our own legitimate goals and life-plans, and soidealize those whose supposed wishes we can follow, instead: so we becomeunquestioning followers These twin narcissistic tendencies in turn prevent us

from being true moral agents, by the criterion in Kant’s Grundlegung, that we

treat all others — and ourselves as well — as Fellow Citizens in a Commonwealth

of Rational Agents, each of whom is entitled to equal standing and respect

In the history of religion, too, a very special place is occupied by the Society

of Friends, usually known as the Quakers This is a Church whose meetingsinvolve no spiritual authority or hierarchy: all members of a meeting are free tobreak the silence in which they are initially sitting, in order to raise a moral orsocial issue that they find in their deepest inwardness The deepest conviction ofQuakers is that, if they are in a situation where they are not distracted, an InnerLight will show them how to act

But this Inner Light focuses attention not inwardly but outwardly Theirmeetings are not therapy groups, in which the members help each other disentan-gle their emotional perplexities, but groups committed to bringing the light ofmoral reflection to bear on outer events and the suffering of other humans: thepoor, the wounded, the victims of mistreatment of any kind

Theologically, the Society of Friends found the deepest source of the flicts in 17th century Europe in the rival Churches’ insistence on doctrinalorthodoxy This had the effect of substituting obedience to dogma for spontane-ous charitable action — Theory for Practice, if you will — and the Friends made

con-it their concern to build a network of communcon-ities wcon-ithin which truth was open toall who viewed the troubles of the world as best illuminated by honest reflectionand a sense of human equality and need

* * *

With this broader framework in place, it is easier to see why Ingrid Ljungberg vanBeinum is committed to the methods of action research, rather than to sociologi-cal theory or political science Her task, and the task of action research generally,

is not to put forward universal conceptual systems to explain gender inequalities

while leaving them alone: rather it is to discover how organizations or institutionscan be improved from within in ways that enhance — rather than obstruct —gender equalities Her conclusions are ones that touch our private lives as well asour institutional structures For action researchers as for Quakers — it turns out —

“Looking into the Mirror” only distracts us from the shortcomings of our publicenterprises as well as our personal emotions It is “Using the Lamp” that will

focus our attention on the practices that are needed to remedy the shortcomings of

our individual and our social lives

The title of this book: “Using the lamp instead of looking into the mirror”, was

inspired by a 1953 publication of M H Abrams entitled The Mirror and the Lamp Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition On the inside page Abrams

gives the following citation:

It must go further still: that soul must become its own betrayer, its own deliverer, the one activity, the mirror turn lamp

William Butler Yeats

The mirror and the lamp refer to two common and antithetic metaphors One is acomparison to a reflector of external objects and is static, the other one to a radiantprojector which makes a contribution to the objects it perceives and is dynamic.According to Abrams (1953: 59), “Plato was the main source of the philosophicalarchetype of the reflector, Plotinus was the chief begetter of the archetype of theprojector “ I found these two metaphors very appropriate for my study as the first,the mirror, in its reflection, portrays the standard, traditional, passive and staticview of the relationship between men and women, while the lamp refers to an act

of power, of change, of searching, making and discovery This distinction is verypertinent to the objectives and procedures of my approach, which is concernedwith trying to change the way women and men understand their relationship.The enigmatic relationship between men and women has been a deep con-cern of mine for many years I have seen this relationship as the critical issue incoming to grips with women’s subordination In feminist research and practice,attention is mostly given to women only and to women’s situation as the subordi-nated sex in society Subordination, though, means that you are subordinated tosomeone, it is a relational issue Man and woman, to my way of thinking, form thesmallest and most basic, the most powerful and significant existential unit there

is They constitute in their inter-relationship the ultimate space for creative ordestructive development, and thus lend themselves to the study of differences parexellence Even the smallest increase in our ability to understand and deal withgender differences would in my view, add to our ability to understand andmanage differences in general This has occupied me for a couple of decades, inboth practice and theory in different settings and in different countries

Another reason for writing this book has without doubt been the need to seewhether I would be able to structure and effectively articulate many years of

experience in this field, including the inter-organizational project that this study ismainly about.

What finally made me pursue my writing was the feeling of obligationtowards the subject, to relate my inner speech to the world outside, and above alltowards the participating organizations and to the men and women who becameengaged in such a fully committed manner in this somewhat radical study.The project that is the mainstay of this book would not have taken placewithout the financial support of the KOM program (Women and Men in Co-operation) of the Swedish Work Environment Fund and the Swedish Work LifeFund Neither would it have taken place without the support given by the threeparticipating organizations, a nuclear plant, a school district and a postal district.They all gave of their time and effort, each of them letting about ten of theiremployees spend a month on the project during the year it was running I am indebt to all these men and women, who so fully engaged themselves in discussionsabout their relationships and thus were able courageously to confront their ownorganizations with the possibilities for further development

To be a participant in an action-oriented research project puts high demands

on one’s ability to take responsibility The men and women involved in thisproject rose magnificently to this challenge One of the participants, who hadearlier experience of working with researchers, later wrote in a working paperthat, in this project, she felt for the first time that she was treated as a ‘subject’ by

a researcher These are the kinds of reactions that are so encouraging andrewarding to someone engaged in this type of research

Many people had an influence, directly and indirectly in the writing of this book.Some of those I wish to mention in particular

This publication would not have seen the light of day without the gentlepushing and sustained critical support of my husband Hans van Beinum We metand fell in love more than thirty years ago and still are expanding our relationship

In many ways our marriage has the characteristic of an action research process

We involve each other, amongst other things, in a never ending intellectualjourney in which we recognize and respect each other’s subjectivity and jointlyengage in working through, in an interpersonal manner, the enigmatic relation-ship between women and men, which forms the basis of this study In more waysthan one, our marriage thus has formed the intellectual and experiential workshop

of this study

I am most grateful to René van der Vlist, professor emeritus of the University

of Leiden, who was my supervisor when writing my doctoral dissertation onwhich this book is based I am greatly indebted to his logical mind, methodologi-cal knowledge and personal encouragement and patience Werner Fricke of theFriedrich-Ebert-Stiftung and professor in Bremen was of immense help not onlywith his comments but also by his great confidene in my ability to finish this

book I was greatly inspired by the publications of Stephen Toulmin and feel veryprivileged that I was able to get to know him and may count him as one of my veryspecial friends Ingela Josefson with her sharp, but generous and practical mindhas been a great inspiration, both in person as well as in her writings.

I wish to thank my colleagues Agneta Hansson, Göran Andersson and LenaLundén at the Centre for Working Life Research and Development (CAU),Halmstad University, Sweden, for their participation and hard work during theconferences of the project In particular the many discussions and various per-sonal interactions with Agneta Hansson were of great importance to me Igratefully acknowledge the financial support from CAU and Halmstad Universityduring the writing of this book, and I greatly appreciated the tolerance andencouragement many of my colleagues showed for my need for space and, attimes, my preoccupied behavior during the spring of 1999

Long ago, in the ’70s, I had an almost paradoxical experience, which turnedout to be of great importance My friend, the late Tommy Wilson, psychiatrist andfounding member of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London, when

he heard of my interest and study intentions, shook his head and said: “Ingrid, becareful, you may open a Pandora’s box” This remark has always functioned as acheck on, and at the same time as a set of ‘rapids’ through which to pursue myinterest I am grateful for his remark, which turned out to be a very wise one andfrom which I have profited greatly during the writing of this study

During 1992 and 1993, I participated in an international program on actionresearch (ACRES), where the participants were given many opportunities todiscuss and write about their research projects In this connection I especiallywant to extend my warmest thanks to Claude Faucheux for the endless patienceand learned comments he made while reading many drafts of articles concerningthis project His thoughts and remarks have influenced me greatly

Without having had the opportunity and experience in Canada of working inmany projects concerning the relationship between men and women, this publica-tion would probably never have become the way it has Endless were the hoursMarjorie Blackhurst, my colleague and close friend, and I spent on discussingdesigns of projects, and our views on women and men in organizations Weshared the idea that women’s subordination is a relational question Her ability touse her down-to-earth experience as a former corporate manager, as she joined

me in radical and adventurous thinking, has helped me enormously

Halmstad, 18th February 2000Ingrid Ljungberg van Beinum

Sexual difference is one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue, of our age According to Heidegger, each age has one issue to think through, and one only Sexual difference is probably the issue in our time which could be our

“salvation” if we thought it through.

(Irigaray 1984, p.5)

This book is a journey through time and through space One can call it a ‘nomadicfiguration’ (Braidotti 1994) It is a story that begins in the middle and ends in themiddle, to paraphrase Gilles Deleuze (Deleuze 1992) It is about the relationshipbetween men and women and about sexual difference and human dignity in theworkplace The study is based on an action research project in which threeorganizations interacted with each other It is also a story about language, about a

‘conversational’ difference (Czarniawska 1997) between the ‘masculine’ and the

‘feminine’, a difference that also affects the dialogue between the academic andthe non-academic world (Lykke and Braidotti 1996)

An important question and struggle for me in putting my experiences andthoughts on paper has been: How can we, males and females, who are inclinedand even conditioned to write in an academic ‘genre’, come across both to eachother as well as to the ‘other’ (the non-academic males and females), in a way that

is understandable to all? Is it possible to write in such a way that it is academicallyacceptable and, at the same time, can be read and understood by other readers?And especially by those men and women who were engaged, sometimes in a verypersonal way, in the action research project this thesis is partly about?

In the process of writing I came to the conclusion that it was inevitable that Iwould not be quite successful in this objective When saying that this is a storythat moves through time and space I do not intend to state just the generallyobvious, but to refer to the fact that in this narrative different things move indifferent ways through different times and different kinds of space First of all I

am writing about a process of change that people in the organizations concerned,together with me as a researcher, have gone through as we participated in aproject with a certain time span In addition I refer to my own thinking before,during and after the project and its linkages with both bygone times and futurepossibilities Also, I cannot avoid showing how perspectives or ways of lookingand reflecting on a specific issue can change, depending on the context withinwhich one moves, at a specific moment

One can understand the change of perspectives as a kind of development anyhuman being goes through from one period of time to another in a more or lessdiachronic fashion At the same time, learning itself can be circular in the sensethat it is caused by and is dependent on the context or space within which wehappen to move in a synchronic manner Earlier experiences, memories, relationswith ‘important others’ in other settings, as well as ideals and visions about thefuture, can suddenly pop up in a totally different context or form, causing us tomove in a kind of spatial time-warp.

A large part of this study is concerned with an interpretation of discussionsbetween men and women in which they talk about the meaning of the relationshipbetween men and women in the workplace, about the way they look upon eachother and at the differences between them, if any And, if there are differences,how they actually handle them or would like to deal with them, given theopportunity to do so These discussions constitute an important part of the inter-organizational action research project that involved three very different organiza-tions (a nuclear plant, a postal district and a school district) and which took placeduring a 13 month period in 1992–1993

In this project the relationship between men and women was the focus aswell as the unit of involvement and action, addressing the subordinated position

of women in organizations and ultimately in our society The participating menand women, who were engaged in a series of linked discourses, tried to find ways

to better this situation in a constructive manner in their own organizations Step

by step, moving forward and backward, they were able, on the whole, to manage

it And in doing so, they created a promise that reaches beyond the boundaries ofthis book

I now will briefly indicate the contents of the various chapters

Chapter 1 – The Question In this chapter I present the intellectual focus I have

chosen for this study, which is the enigmatic nature of the relationship betweenmen and women in the context of subordination Women and men are seen asboth similar and different The history of subordination as well as the notions ofsimilarity, difference, equality, agency and sameness are discussed

Chapter 2 – An attempt toward a reflexive reflection As this study is conducted

as an action research project, the researcher is not only required to reflect on thevarious developments, but in view of the fact that the researcher is activelyinvolved in the process itself, she has to engage in reflexivity as well Theresearcher has to explain him or her-self In this chapter I relate, in a personalmanner, how I, as a woman, became aware of the questions feminism is trying todeal with, and why I have adopted the position I have

Chapter 3 – The objectives of the project, the organizations involved and the research approach taken The objectives, the organization and the methods of the

research process form an interdependent whole Nevertheless the three mainperspectives of the mosaic of the project are discussed separately As subordina-tion is being considered primarily as a relational issue, a relational approach hasbeen chosen, i.e., the dialogue between men and women in the context of theirwork place The project has been organized as an inter-organizational actionresearch project, participated in by a nuclear power plant, a school district and apostal district in the province of Halland in Sweden The eleven steps thatconstitute the process of the project are explained

Chapter 4 – An analysis of the individual discussions An extensive process of

individual discussions was conducted These discussions were tape recorded,transcribed, analyzed and the outcomes grouped into clusters and sub-clusterswith regard to gender positions They provided rich material on the attitudes ofmen and women, and were necessary as a critical preparation for the searchconference, the first inter-organizational encounter

Chapter 5 – Widening the dialogue, dynamics of intra- and inter-organizational action This chapter discusses the three work groups of the three participating

organizations The members of the work group, who also participated in theindividual interviews, conducted similar discussions with their colleagues withintheir own organizations, in order to prepare an organizational profile to be used asinput for the search conference The design, structure, outcomes and dynamics ofthe search conference are discussed, as well as four follow-up theme days

Chapter 6 – The evaluation conference — dialogues between men and women as

an integral feature of work The evaluation conference, which was organized as a

series of inter-organizational processes, was the concluding event of the project

It has been structured in three approaches (a) reporting and interaction betweenthe three work groups, (b) a discussion and interaction between two groups whichwere a mix of organizations, males and females, and (c) an event where the threeorganizations presented development plans for the ‘other’ organizations Thisrich mixture, dealing with the relationship between women and men in differentsettings, on various levels and in different contexts, brought to the fore thelearning that had occurred during the project

Chapter 7 – Many a little makes a mickle — final remarks In this final chapter, after

a recapitulation of the project, some further reflection and illuminations are given,aided by the thinking of Bion, Winnicott, Levinas, and Jonsen and Toulmin Thestudy suggests that many little steps are necessary before any critical mass can be

developed A reflection on a limited sample of the great variety of developmentsgoing on in the present world suggests that these ‘systems’ cannot relate to eachother in a meaningful way other than by means of dialogue They all representdifferences of a different kind However, systems, conceptual, political or of anyother kind, do not talk with each other People do The chapter goes back to theoriginal point of departure, namely, the attempt to increase the understanding of andrespect for the enigmatic difference between men and women If any generalconclusion can be drawn, it suggests the need for the increase and better organiza-tion of discourse in society.

The Question

… So God created man in his own image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase, fill the earth and subdue it, rule over the fish in the sea, the birds of heaven, and every living thing that moves upon the earth” (Genesis I: 27, 28) And so the LORD God put the man into a trance, and while he slept, he took one

of his ribs and closed the flesh over the place The LORD God then built up the rib, which he had taken out of the man, into a woman He brought her to the man, and the man said: “Now this, at last — bone from my bones flesh from my flesh!

— this shall be called woman, for from man was this taken” (Genesis 2: 21,22)

From Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 (The New English Bible, 1970, Oxford University

Press and Cambridge University Press).

Introductory remarks

I propose in this study that it is the nature of the relationship between men and

women that is the real issue underlying the issue of equality between women andmen in society — or rather, underlying the inequality and subordination ofwomen to men This somewhat bland and vague statement, the ‘nature of therelationship’, covers a multitude of factors, many of which can be identified andare articulated in the daily conversation between men and women These factors,

if made visible (which is not necessarily the case) can then provide a discursivebasis from which we can begin to grapple with such questions as inequality andsubordination

Inequality is a phenomenon which has deeply rooted causes that go back intothe early days of history and has been a consistent characteristic in the develop-ment of human civilization

If the inequality and subordination of women is a function of the nature of therelationship between men and women, logic suggests that the only way to changethat situation is to change the actual relationship between women and men Thequestion is, however, in what way might this be done? Many questions to do withunderstanding and changing human relationships provide more than one answer,

of course For instance, to put it simply, in order to change the relationship

between men and women, one can work from within the relationship, or fromoutside it, changing the organizational, structural (e.g job design) and otherexternal conditions that provide a determining context for the communication andthus for the relationship between women and men.

The studies of the Tavistock Institute, as early as the 60s, pointed to the factthat the organization of technology has a mediating function; the organization ofthe technology in the work process greatly influences the communication be-tween people, and therefore their relationship Furthermore, one should of courserealize that it is not uncommon, as Hollway points out (Hollway 1995: 91), that “arecognition of the fact that all understanding of the world is mediated throughlanguage has been falsely reduced to a premise that the world can be understood

as discursive” A similar point is also made by Himmelfarb (1994) when ing post modernist history Although I agree with the idea that the externalphysical world and the embodied self are substantial realities, we may neverthe-less only be able to deal with them through discursive formulations To have themworked up discursively, so to speak

discuss-In the case of this study, I argue — and that is the particular perspective Ihave chosen — that the fundamental aspect of a human relationship is the fact that

it is an inter-subjective relationship, and thus a linguistic relationship I refer here

to Gadamer’s thesis of “the essential linguisticality of all human experience of theworld” (Gadamer 1976: 45); “Language”, he says, “is the fundamental mode ofoperation of our being-in-the world and the all embracing form of the constitution

of the world.”(1976: 3)

Language and action are closely connected: “Words are like tools in a

toolbox” (Wittgenstein, PI: 11) Gender relations, like all human relationships,

therefore can be seen primarily in terms of a discourse or a lack thereof As the

focus of this study is primarily on working from within the relationship between men and women, one can argue that one needs a discourse in order to change a

discourse, so to speak Unless men and women discuss with each other the waythey perceive and understand each other, and not only by using representative but

also in particular formative language, it is difficult to imagine that they will

change their views, behavior, appreciation and ways of talking ‘of’ and ‘about’each other (Shotter 1989) In a constructive and creative dialogue betweenwomen and men, we see the double hermeneutic, that is, the circular interactionbetween social science and society (Giddens 1982) functioning on the microsocial and psychological level, but now as a circular, interactive, mutually enrich-ing process between groups of people

The challenge is, therefore — and this has been a guideline throughout this

study — how can we promote and utilize the discourse between men and women

at work in order to generate some change in the nature of their relationship in the workplace, and thereby also affect and improve organizational performance?

The fight by women for their rights, for equality, for equal opportunities, forsocial justice (through affirmative action, etc.) has been and still is very essentialand necessary It was the only way the voice of women could be heard But it is anecessary, not a sufficient condition By fighting for equal numbers (in socialstructures, etc.), for equal opportunities and equal recognition, women drawattention to inequality and to various forms of social injustice But this logical andnecessary fight for rights can easily become a trap By fighting inequality in thecontext of inequality, i.e social injustice, we are fighting symptoms reflecting a

more fundamental issue, and by doing so we do not only not address the real

cause of the situation, but we may well ensnare ourselves, and make it impossible

to engage with the real question By fighting men, in order to achieve equality,which we do in a still largely patriarchal culture, we may become men ourselves,

to put it in simple terms, and thus become part of the problem

Women find themselves in a paradoxical situation due to the limited socialroles available to them If they embrace them, they may collude with the ideologythat has defined them; if they reject them, they deny all possibilities for participa-tion Rorty, discussing MacKinnon, puts it as follows:

Only if somebody has a dream, and a voice to describe that dream, does what looked like nature begin to look like culture, what looked like fate begin to look like a moral abomination For until then only the language of the oppressor is available, and most oppressors have had the wit to teach the oppressed a language

in which the oppressed will sound crazy — even to themselves — if they describe themselves as oppressed (Rorty 1998: 203)

Therefore, instead of fighting men and fighting a man’s game, we — that is, men

and women together — should jointly face the existing and historically mined relationship between men and women, and together search for ways to

deter-change it This then raises the difficult question of what are the psycho- and cultural dynamics that play a role when we define ourselves and each other, andwhen we engage with the old question about whether women and men aredifferent or similar And, if they are similar, in what way, to what extent, and inwhat kind of context?

socio-In order to get a better understanding of this question it is important to have asense of the historical dimension underlying all this I shall therefore begin mydiscussion by drawing attention to some of the long term influences in thepanorama of gender relationships

As pointed out by Lerner (1986), until recently, history has been written bymen and therefore, understandably, is about men and men’s understanding ofhistorical events It is a history of the choices men have made and about theimportance and interconnectedness of developments as they have seen them.Before continuing my discussion along historical lines, it may be of interest togive an illustration of the fact that, not so long ago, gender images and symbolism

were also used in discourse on science.

The following citation from a Nobel Lecture, in which the laureate, aphysicist, is summing up the history of his prizewinning work, can be seen as anexample:

That was the beginning, the idea seemed so obvious to me and so elegant that I fell deeply in love with it And, like falling in love with a woman, it is only possible if you do not know much about her, so you cannot see her faults, the faults will become apparent later, but after the love is strong enough to hold you to her So,

I was held to this theory, in spite of all difficulties, by my youthful enthusiasm …

So what happened to the old theory that I fell in love with as a youth? Well I would say it’s become an old lady, who has very little that’s attractive left in her, and the young today will not have their hearts pound when they look at her anymore But, we can say the best we can for any old woman, that she has become

a very good mother and has given birth to some very good children And I thank the Swedish Academy of Science for complimenting one of them (Feynman,

1964, in Harding, 1986: 120)

I doubt whether any male Nobel Laureate today would make such a statement inpublic However, I am also not so sure that these kinds of analogies have actuallydisappeared from our mental make up

Another telling example is from Paul Feyerabend, explaining why his posal for a rational reconstruction of the history of science is preferable to KarlPopper’s:

pro-Such a development, far from being undesirable, changes science from a stern and demanding mistress into an attractive and yielding courtesan who tries to antici- pate every wish of her lover Of course, it is up to us to choose either a dragon or

a pussy cat for our company I do not think I need to explain my own preferences (Feyerabend, 1970: 229, in Harding 1986: 120)

These passages present some very typical cultural images of manliness andwomanness I leave the obvious interpretation to the reader The statementsbelong to the numerous illustrations we can still find today in our daily life of theappropriation of women

The visibility of men and invisibility of women did not, of course, begin withthe two biblical versions of the ‘creation’ of ‘man’ kind, viz., man and woman,presented as quotations at the beginning of this chapter What they tell is a story of

an ambiguous historical narrative An ambiguity we have been living with forthousands of years For women of this day and age in the western, Christianworld, these two versions of Genesis have a kind of symbolical meaning How-ever, what they represent is much more than a symbolism They also portray thecomplexity of gender relations in today’s reality

The Bible itself, which is a product of writings over a period of about fourhundred years, builds on already existing and much older cultures In thosecultures there were ambiguous assumptions about the relationship between men

and women (Lerner 1986), which even St Paul, with his strong misogynousposition, has not been able to eradicate from history The manner in which inthose days (around 2000 BCE) the (in-)equality between the sexes seems to havefluctuated appears to be much the same as we are experiencing it at present.The notions of difference, similarity and equality have indeed occupiedmankind since the beginning of civilization The first version of Genesis de-scribes two people, a man and a woman They are in no wise said to be different.They are both images of God They were both told to be fruitful and reproducethemselves Thus, they were only different in a biological sense; otherwise theywere similar and equal.

The second version, however, gives a fundamentally different type of originwhich not only implies but in fact legitimizes ownership The woman is subordi-nate to the man She is his property

Looking back at ancient history, written primarily by men, it seems quiteremarkable that the version of Genesis 1 emerged at that time, and furthermore,that it did not completely disappear in subsequent masculine history The building

of a patriarchal society had already been going on for a few thousand years Withthe development of agricultural societies women’s sexuality and reproductivecapacity became, according to Gerda Lerner, a commodity Societies with morewomen, and therefore children, enjoyed increased production through a largelabor force — a situation that, let us not forget, still obtains in large parts of ourworld During tribal wars it was the women who were captured and enslaved,whereas men were killed As Gerda Lerner writes:

It was only after men had learned how to enslave the women of groups who could

be defined as strangers, that they learned how to enslave men of those groups and, later, subordinates from within their own societies Thus the enslavement of women, combining both racism and sexism, preceded the formation of classes and class oppression Class differences were … expressed and constituted in terms of patriarchal relations Class is not a separate construct from gender; rather, class is expressed in gendered terms (Lerner 1986: 213)

The first observable difference was that between the sexes As Gerda Lernerpointed out, when men learned to enslave women they also “acquired the knowl-edge necessary to elevate ‘difference’ of whatever kind into a criterion fordominance” (1986: 214) The commodification of women through using women

as valuable objects of exchange may well represent the first accumulation ofprivate property

The human drive to own and dominate and therefore of necessity to conquermay in the end have led us into a society built on differentiation of classes Aswomen were part of men’s conquering and thus part of property they also took onthe status of that specific ‘conqueror’ This, according to Lerner, led to a situation

in which each class is actually constituted of two sub-classes: men and women

The ‘conqueror’ depended on his female property for reasons of both ductivity and productivity It was therefore natural to build wealth and status byhaving more women The sexual, reproductive and productive capabilities ofthose women who belonged to one man also formed the basis for a ranking orderbetween the women.

repro-The class position of women became consolidated and actualized through their sexual relationships It always was expressed within degrees of unfreedom on a spectrum ranging from the slave woman, whose sexual and reproductive capacity was commodified as she herself was; to the slave — concubine, whose sexual performance might elevate her own status or that of her children; then to the ‘free’ wife, whose sexual and reproductive services to one man of the upper classes entitled her to property and legal rights (Lerner 1986: 215)

Consequently, each class of society not only consisted of two sub-classes, menand women, but the female class itself consisted of different classes This couldresult in a woman, who belonged to a man with very high status, herself being thewoman with the highest rank in the group of his women, could obtain certaineconomic and educational privileges

As women were objects of exchange, daughters per se were valuable and

were exchanged for other commodities The higher the status of the new ownerthe better the situation became for the exchanged Therefore women in their ownway experienced power over other people, both women and men, by belonging to

a certain class It constituted a ‘reciprocal agreement’ about sharing power withthe man, in exchange for sexual and economic subordination

According to Lerner these class and racial privileges served “to undercut theability of women to see themselves as part of a coherent group … since women

uniquely of all oppressed groups occur in all strata of the society” (ibid 218) To

divide the enemy — those who are ‘different’ — into competing groups hasthroughout history been a common strategy for containing power, used by suchexperts on power as Machiavelli, as well as men — and sometimes women — ofour times For women this has meant that because they have participated in theirown process of subordination “they have been psychologically shaped so as to

internalize the idea of their own inferiority” (ibid 218) By being unaware of our

own history as women, as we never were part of man’s way of writing history, wehave made and are continuously making ourselves victims of subordination

In a somewhat different language, Rorty states, in that regard: “For a woman

to say that she finds her moral identity in being a woman would have sounded,until relatively recently, as weird as for a slave to say that he found his moralidentity in being a slave” (Rorty 1998: 219)

This short summary of the origin of patriarchy, as described by Lerner andalso, for instance, in somewhat different terms, among others by Kelly (1984) and

Bullough et al (1988), and the subsequent class structure in society, together with

women’s unawareness of their own history, gives us the background againstwhich we, in my view, have to see women’s struggles for self-recognition andindependence But it may well be that we only now, at the beginning of this newcentury, are beginning to fathom the enormous impact which the character of ourhistory, interwoven as it is with the history of men, has had and still has on ourthinking While men’s history of the images of men has more or less followed anevolutionary track, women — in being subordinated — have had the ‘advantage’

of learning not only this male track but also the other track, the one that is peculiar

to women

A subordinated group develops extraordinary skills in relating to persons in

power In her insightful book Toward a new psychology of women, Jean

Baker-Miller, more than 20 years ago, took as her point of departure the question “ …what do people do to people who are different from them and why?” (Baker-Miller 1976: 3)

She, like Lerner, proposes that the most basic difference is the differencebetween women and men She also addresses the questions of when differencecauses enhancement and creativity and when it has negative effects: “when does

it lead to great difficulty, deterioration, and distortion and to some of the worstforms of degradation, terror, and violence — both for individuals and groups —

that human beings can experience” (ibid 3) and as difference is mostly a factor of inequality: “what happens in situations of inequality?” (ibid 3).

She distinguishes between two different types of inequality, the first being

the temporary inequality, where ‘the lesser party’ is socially defined as unequal.

It exists between e.g parent and child or teacher and student and the overall task

in such a relationship is for the superior person to bring the lesser person up toparity, i.e adulthood, maturity and knowledge It constitutes a temporary dispar-ity and even if each relationship of this kind is of a shortlived character we havegreat difficulties in dealing with it and to, for instance, decide how many rights toallow the lesser party

The second type of inequality, the permanent inequality, is closely linked to

the first type and forms the base of how we think, feel and act with regard to thefirst one Here the relationships between individuals or groups are defined bymeans of ascription, that is, your birth defines you in regard to such criteria asrace, sex, class, nationality, religion etc This relationship is different from thefirst, in the sense that there is no “assumption that the goal of the unequalrelationship is to end the inequality; in fact, quite the reverse” (Baker-Miller1976: 6) The dominant group defines acceptable roles for the subordinate group,which often involve tasks that the dominant group does not want to perform,while tasks they prefer to perform are carefully guarded The dominant grouprepresents what is seen as normal, and threatening activities from subordinatedgroups are perceived with alarm as these disrupt what is seen as right and good

All morality confirms this view and all social structures sustain it As the bers of the dominant group are convinced that their judgement of what is right andwrong is beyond discussion, they are unable to understand why other (subordi-nated) groups can be upset or angry.

mem-The subordinated groups, in addition to having internalized subordinationand dominance and consequently colluding and identifying with their oppressors,

as mentioned earlier, can also, and at the same time, focus on another strategy formaintaining their separate identity A way of surviving as a different group andculture As direct and open confrontation can have dire consequences, they oftenresort to indirect and disguised ways of acting For reasons of survival, thesubordinates have to know the dominant group’s way of thinking and reactingmuch better than the dominant group needs to know those characteristics of thesubordinate group The oppressed have to become highly attuned Here, as Baker-Miller puts it, “the long story of ‘feminine intuition’ and ‘feminine wiles’ begins”and “it seems clear that these ‘mysterious’ gifts are in fact skills, developedthrough long practice, in reading many small signals, both verbal and non-verbal”(Baker-Miller 1976: 11) This is also, with all probability, the origin of men’s andwomen’s different (use of) language, something I shall return to later in thediscussion

It is interesting to note that van der Vlist, as well as others, points to the factthat social inferences about leaders are more differentiated than inferences aboutsubordinates This is because people are motivated to make an effort to form anaccurate impression of persons they are dependent upon (compare van de Vlist

1991; Fiske 1993; Berscheid et al 1976; Konst 1998; Konst et al 1999).

From a historical perspective, subordinate groups have of course tended attimes to move towards greater freedom Many women, who were in the luckycircumstance of not having had education withheld from them, have for manycenturies expressed their objections against male dominant views in written form

In the middle ages this mostly took the form of different interpretations of theBible But as these views were ignored by the dominant culture, because they didnot fit, they remained to a great extent invisible History was written by men — as

a continuing story Women’s history, by contrast, is more like occasional blips onthe historical radar screen of the masculine development

One such a ‘blip’, although a very long one, spanning over a period of almost

400 years is the ‘Querelle des Femmes’ Until recently, it has seldom beenmentioned by feminist writers1 apart from French feminists and feminist histori-ans It was a kind of discourse on ‘feminist thinking’ that took place between

1400 and 1789 It arose, as Kelly (1984) informs us, in intimate association with,and in reaction to, the new secular culture of the modern European state Christine

1 Some exceptions are Kelly 1984, Wade Labarge 1986, Lerner 1993, Derksen 1996 and Lasch 1997.

de Pisan, often referred to as the first modern woman, was the originator of thesediscourses Coming from an environment that approved of the education ofwomen, she, after becoming a widow at twenty-five, continued her studies andproduced some fifteen volumes of work in seventy large notebooks Most of herwork was widely diffused, bringing her both fame and subsidies (Kelly 1984).The thinking of the participants in the ‘querelle’ was in opposition to thedominant culture in three ways: first, the ‘querelles’ were almost all polemical andresponses to specific published attacks upon them; second, these early feministswere concerned with what we now would call gender They had a sure sense that

the sexes are culturally formed, not just biologically Women were a social group.

They directed their ideas against the notions of an inherently defective sex thatflowed from the misogynous side of the debate, and against the societal shaping ofwomen to fit those notions (Kelly 1984) Third, they were opposed to themistreatment of women and stood for a general conception of humanity

Kelly also aptly points out that the history of women resembles that of earlysocialism, in the sense that the feminist theorists of the ‘querelle’ are separatedfrom social action through the barrier of class, represented by their privileged andliterate culture There was no connection between theory and action

In France, England and North America, though, during the late 18th andearly 19th century, there were female radical sects that in different ways tried toescape the two major institutions of power — the family and the Church — by, forinstance, improving women’s education and creating opportunities for greatereconomic autonomy Not until the second half of the 19th and in the 20th century,was feminist theory successful in finding a base in social action and therebybecoming recognized as a ‘political’ movement

It is interesting in this connection to note that, while there were a number of

‘querelles’ taking place in those times, the ‘querelle des Anciens et desModernes’ in the late 17th century was seen as the first dispute in which “the idea

of the modern first acquired an explicit polemical edge as a rejection of the deadweight of history and tradition” (Felski 1995: 13) Although Felski is a feministtheoretician, the ‘querelle des Femmes’ is not seen as an example of an earlyradical and modern discourse It is not even mentioned It seems to me that this isyet another example, not only of ‘women-history blips’, but of the difficultywomen have, as the subordinated group, in becoming acquainted with andtherefore recognizing their own history

A Our ‘common’ background

I now turn to some ‘vignettes’ or ‘pictures’ of different ways in which men andwomen understand themselves From this I shall try to draw some conclusionswith regard to further steps, both theoretical and practical

With these ‘pictures’ or perspectives I shall try to identify and emphasize some ofthe most important and influential ways of thinking about the question ‘who am I?’

I focus on some general historical developments, although feminism isslowly entering the notion of our ‘common background’ (see, for instance:Giddens 1990: 157; Giddens 1991: 215–217 and 228–230; Giddens 1992; Beck1992: 103–126; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995: 29–31 and 56–66; Touraine1995: 222–224; Rorty 1998: 202–227, and others)

It is of course impossible to even summarize more than two thousand years

of thinking about human nature Nevertheless, it is important to try and clarify forourselves some of the positions in the evolving story of this existential question inorder to gain some intellectual grip on the issues affecting the relationshipbetween women and men In other words, we have to understand the fundamen-tals of our stories and the way in which they are interwoven, in order to under-stand ‘difference’ both in theory and in practice Not the least for reasons that, asBaker-Miller puts it: “ a dominant group, inevitably, has the greatest influence indetermining a culture’s overall outlook — its philosophy, morality, social theory,and even its science”, and “ legitimizes the unequal relationship and incorporates

it into society’s guiding concepts The social outlook … obscures the true nature

of this relationship — that is, the very existence of inequality” (Baker Miller1976: 8)

This ‘feels’ very much true Women, to the same extent as men, are fed withthe ideas, ideologies, economic perspectives etc of their generation and of thetime they happen to live in In our upbringing, at home, at school and, for some,later at university, we are learning what it means to be a human being, that is,developing an identity and a sense of self It is interesting to note that not Erikson,

or Kohlberg or Winnicott in their well known, and widely referred to, ment theories write about girls (Eriksson 1963; Kohlberg 1976; Winnicott 1971).The way one sees oneself leads to conclusions about what one ought to do

develop-and how one can do it For instance Stevenson, in his book Seven Theories of Human Nature points out that the theories of Plato, Christianity, Marx, Freud,

Sartre, Skinner and Lorenz, although radically different in content, have “someremarkable similarities in structure” They are not just

theories, but ways of life, subject to change and growth and decay A system of beliefs about the nature of man which is thus held by some group of people as giving rise to their way of life is standardly called an ‘ideology’

such as Christianity and Marxism

An ideology, then, is more than a theory, but is based on a theory of human nature which somehow suggests a course of action (Stevenson 1974: 8).

Although Stevenson is not unaware of the gender perspective, as he brieflymentions in his introduction: “This book does not attempt any systematic discus-

sion of feminist issues: it presents some rival theories of general human nature”

(ibid 3) I use his publication in order to make my point that the notion of

‘women’, as an ontological reality, does not appear in any of these “philosophicaland theoretical’ positions discussed by Stevenson I have made some selectionsfrom his writing

The Bible sees man as created by a transcendent God who has a definitepurpose for our life and as God made us then it is His purpose that defines what

we ought to be, and we must look to Him for help Humans are committed to abelief in God, a personal being who is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectlygood, who created and controls everything that exists

Marx, by contrast, denied the existence of God and condemned religion asthe ‘opium of the people’ and held that each individual is a product of the humansociety he lives in If we are made by our society, and if we find that our life issomehow unsatisfactory, then there can be no real cure until society is trans-formed There are in Christianity and Marxism different understandings of what

is basically wrong with mankind Christianity says the world is not in accordancewith God’s purposes, that man’s relationship to God is disrupted Man misuseshis freedom, he rejects God, and is thus infected with sin Marx replaces thenotion of sin by that of ‘alienation’, which conveys a similar idea of some idealstandard which actual human life does not meet

Christianity and Marxism represents two systems of belief which, according

to Stevenson, are total in their scope Both claim to have the essential truth aboutthe whole of human life; they assert something about the nature of all men, at anytime and place And these world views claim not only assent but also action; ifone really believes in either theory, one must accept that it has implications forone’s way of life

Plato, especially in the Republic where he uses the the words of Socrates to

tell us about his conception of the ideal human society, is still, some 2300 yearslater, very much alive in our minds Whenever anyone asserts that the cure for ourproblems is that we should be ruled by those who really know best, then he isasserting the essence of Plato’s theory His reasoning was rational, building onthe division between body and soul, and his account of what makes a state just isgiven in terms of a model state that has three social classes: workers, soldiers andrulers Justice is said to be the performance by each class of its job and non-interference in the jobs of other classes He gives the same account for whatmakes a man just by dividing the human soul into three parts, corresponding tothe social classes of his state: desire (workers), spirit (soldiers) and reason(rulers) A just man is ruled by reason and not by desire since each of his parts isdoing its job and not the job of another part

Sartre was one of the leading exponents of atheistic existentialism Hemaintained that Marxism and existentialism are complementary in their critique

of society and the aim of expressing in political liberty the freedom inherent inhuman nature Sartre, though, held to the idea that we are not determined by

society, but that each individual is completely free to decide for himself what hewants to be and do He expresses a fundamental concern with the nature of humanexistence and the freedom of the will, and states “We have not been created forany purpose, neither by God nor evolution nor anything else We simply find

ourselves existing, and then have to decide what to make of ourselves.” … “We

are ‘condemned to be free’” (Sartre 1957: 438–439, in Stevenson 1987: 93).What he obviously means is, according to Stevenson, that “there are no ‘true’

general statements about what all men ought to be” and that this is simply “a

rejection of any notion of objective values” He draws a distinction betweenconsciousness, being-for-itself and non-conscious objects, being-in-itself Thisbasic dualism is shown by the fact that

consciousness necessarily has an object; it is always consciousness of something

which is not itself.

As consciousness is always of something other than itself,

Sartre holds that it is always aware of itself as well, so it necessarily distinguishes itself and its object

and

this is connected to our ability to make judgments about such objects … so

conscious beings, by their very nature, can conceive of what is not the case.

(Stevenson 1987: 93–94).

Regardless of whether one agrees or not with Freud’s psychoanalytical theory,one has to admit his great influence on our understanding of ourselves in thiscentury One illustration for instance is the way in which various psychoanalyti-cal terms have found their way into the use of our common daily language It is farbeyond the scope of this summary to try to do justice to Freud’s fifty-year-longdevelopment and modification of his theories I will only select some of his ideasthat I consider to be of prime importance

As is well known, Freudian psychoanalysis, with its emphasis, inter alia, on

biological determinism and on the so-called Oedipus complex and penis envy, hasbeen and still is a matter of hot debate in feminist circles (see, among others, Friedan1974; Firestone 1970; Millett 1970; Mitchell 1974; Dinnerstein 1977; Chodorow1978) As Stevenson points out (Stevenson 1987: 72–76), one can distinguish fourmain points in Freud’s theory of man First the principle of determinism — thatevery event has preceding sufficient causes within the realm of the mental.Stevenson points out that there is an interesting parallel with Marx here, for

… both are saying that our consciousness, far from being perfectly free and rational, is really determined by causes of which we are not aware; but whereas Marx says that these causes are social and economic in nature, Freud claims that they are individual and mental (Stevenson 1987: 73).

The second main point is the postulation of the unconscious mental states As iswell known, Freud distinguishes three major structural systems within the humanmind or personality: the id, which contains all the instinctual drives; the ego,which deals with the real world outside the person; and the superego, a specialpart of the ego which contains the conscious, the social norms acquired inchildhood The third main feature of Freud’s concept of man is his theory of theinstincts or drives One such basic instinct is sexual in nature and he asserted thecrucial importance of sexual energy or libido in adult life.

Contrary to Freud, there is the object-relations theory, its most prominentproponents being Winnicott and Fairbairn Objects relations theory posits amaturational self that develops through real relations with external objects Itrejects the emphasis on drives Fairbairn re-defines the libido as object seekingrather than pleasure seeking (Fairbairn 1941, 1944) He maintains that the objectseeking impulse is impelled not by erotic desire, but by a desire for a relationship

“Fairbairn substitutes the capacity for intimacy and mutuality for the Freudian

goal of genital primacy” (Wright 1992: 286; see also Fairbairn’s Journey into the Interior by J D.Sutherland 1989).

I have emphasized the position and theory of Fairbairn contra Freud, as his

views, with their emphasis on the importance of the development of relationships,from a psychological point of view, is much more consonant with my orientation

as expressed in this study

The fourth point mentioned by Stevenson is Freud’s development or cal theory of individual human character It asserts the crucial importance, foradult character, of the experience of infancy and early childhood

histori-Stevenson points out that, as far as Freud is concerned, we must distinguishtwo independent questions: the truth of Freud’s theories, and the effectiveness ofthe method of treatment based on them We must not forget that the goal ofpsychoanalytical treatment can be summarized as self-knowledge

It has been suggested (by both psychoanalysts and philosophers) that analysis is not primarily a set of assertions to be tested empirically, but more a

psycho-way of understanding people, of seeing a meaning in their action, their mistakes,

their jokes, and their dreams It may be said that, since human beings are vastly different from the entities studied by physics and chemistry, one should not condemn psychoanalysis for failing to meet criteria for scientific status which have been taken from the established physical sciences Perhaps the psychoana- lytical discussion of a dream is more akin to literary criticism, such as the interpretation of an obscure poem, in which there are reasons (but not conclusive reasons) for a variety of interpretations (Stevenson 1987: 84).

Such a view of psychoanalysis has been given philosophical backing by a sharp

distinction between reason and causes And hence between scientific explanation

(in terms of causes) and the explanation of human action (in terms of reasons, i.e.the beliefs and desires which made it rational for the agent to do what he did).(Stevenson 1987: 85)

Other illustrations of belief systems which Stevenson used and which have hadand still have a great influence on western culture, on our thinking and on ourunderstanding of men, include those of Skinner and Lorenz The reason that Idraw attention to Stevenson’s Seven Theories of Human Nature is that, as I

emphasized before, all of them ignore a women’s subjectivity, in the sense of not allowing women their own authentic sense of self.

Derksen makes a somewhat similar point, although in a different context, inher discussion of images of women in the history of philosophy:

Women are seen as less rational than men, belong in the home, and are to be excluded from the public and intellectual life of society The female is seen as functioning within and symbolically representing the cyclical, natural order, the male as standing for and achieving things in the historical cultural order With respect to the male order, that of the female is inferior The Pythagorean women, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Bacon, Rousseau Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are all to some extent of this opinion … Irigaray is perhaps in her own category,

in that she wishes to reformulate the question of the relationship between a general concept of human nature and the valuation of the masculine and the feminine by combining the notions of difference and equality (Derksen 1996: 147)

I have drawn mainly on Irigaray’s position, which I shall discuss later in thischapter

B Women as women — a process of individuation

It is not until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as I explained earlier, that theconnection between feminist theory and social action started to be made; a shift inthe sense that concerns about rights and social justice are being transformed intoaction This was the time when women started to articulate and claim specificrights as a social group, to become actual members of society as citizens andpolitical agents in the same way as men were and always had been To be able tovote was seen as a minimum condition for having equal human rights Slowly,and in country after country, this was finally achieved in the Western world Thismarked only the beginning of a long list of issues in which women, and at timesalso men, started to become engaged It is ironic that feminists called thisdevelopment, which began in the 19th century, the first wave of feminism, thusactually ignoring what women had been doing and fighting for (writing, arguingand discussing), albeit in ‘blips’, for centuries

The second important shift, is called the second wave of feminism, whichstarted around the 1960s This wave is not only concerned with rights and socialjustice, but is a process that is taking place on a deeper level: it is concerned with

a new identity for women I deliberately use the word ‘new’ in this connectionbecause something important had happened

During the Second World War women in the US and in England had beenforced out of the “enforced domestication of middle-class women” which hadtaken place a few hundred years earlier (Kelly 1984), because there was ashortage of labor The men were at war and industrial production had to beincreased to meet the demands made by the war Women acquired a taste forbeing paid for their work in industry, in contrast to working in the home withoutpay The men came back from war and things went back to normal for a while —but women did not forget their experience of working outside the home and theirnew ‘freedom’.

The economic development of the Western world in the 1960s once againcaused a significant shortage of labor Women were again asked to participate inthe employed sector of society Since that time, women have stayed in the laborforce as a necessary and natural part of the societal production system This hasled, without us really noticing it, to a shift in societal and political thinking — orrather I would call it decision-without-reflection — about private economy, not aone-person family income with the man as the breadwinner, towards a two-person family income This major shift in societal and culturally embeddedthinking about family economics has, again rather invisibly (in most European —

at least northern European countries — a family can hardly survive on oneincome) led to fundamental changes in the relationship between men and women.First, the distinction between the public and private spheres has becomeincreasingly blurred ‘The private is the public’ declared the feminists of the 1960s.But also, by bringing women into the public workforce, the public domain has beeninvaded by the private Examples of this can be seen in such things as legislation,first about maternity and then parental leave (this happens in Scandinavia and is stillseen as a radical example), but also in such a phenomenon as the fact that women’sstress levels are higher than men’s at the end of a working day, as they start to think

of the household chores ahead (Frankenhaeuser 1993)

Second, women’s entry into the labor force has not only changed the pendency between the public and the private It is also the cause of a fundamentalchange in the interdependency between men and women in the private sphere,which in turn is influencing the public one There is a psychological shift in thedependency pattern between men and women living together When womenstayed at home, caring for and looking after the private sphere, there was abalance between what Eichenbaum and Orbach call the economic and emotionaldependencies Women were economically dependent on their husbands, while

interde-giving emotional support in return, while men were economically independent, but emotionally dependent (Eichenbaum and Orbach 1983).

What is meant by economic dependency is easy to understand, but emotionaldependency needs further explanation Dependency is a basic human condition.When properly cared for, it allows us to become (relatively) independent A well

functioning relationship is thus a necessary condition in order to come to gripswith dependency and subsequently with independence In Eichenbaum andOrbach’s words it means:

that achieving autonomy and independence rests on the gratification of dency needs It is only when a child feels confident that he or she can depend on

depen-others that the child grows up feeling confident enough to be independent Women are indeed fearful of independence and success But this is not because they have been raised to depend on others It is precisely for the opposite reason:

Women are raised to be depended upon; to place their emotional needs second to

those of others While women have traditionally been dependent economically, they have always been the emotional caretakers of the family At the same time that women are depended upon for emotional support and nurturing, they learn to behave dependently (Eichenbaum and Orbach 1983: 19)

In our culture, with its dominating instrumental rationality and increasing vidualism (Taylor 1991), we have come to feel ashamed of dependency feelings,and women and men together collaborate, or rather collude, in the process ofkeeping their dependency needs from view

indi-The balance in this relationship has become upset by women becoming, inprinciple, economically independent They no longer have to bargain for eco-nomic support in return for emotional support It may be equally attractive to beeconomically self-sustaining and find the emotional support somewhere else than

in marriage Even the reproductive system can be taken care of in another waythan through a formal marriage Nowadays one can have sex without children,and children without sex

Today, more than ten years after this very important conceptual ing of men and women in the family sphere, we should perhaps start to raise a fewmore questions What Eichenbaum and Orbach were pointing out was, of course,already taking place in practice They came to this conclusion through theirexperience about what was said during therapy sessions

understand-Some obvious, somewhat speculative questions and observations are:(1) With regard to the private sphere: has a new generation of men and women,growing up with mothers who are more or less economically independentand with fathers who are struggling with the independence of their wives,been able to find new and different ways of handling their emotional depen-dency?

(2) With regard to the public sphere: has a collective, societal, and historicallyembedded prejudice contributed to the striking and well known fact thatfemale dominated professions within the service sector, such as providingcare (e.g for children, ill or elderly people, and nursing in general), educa-tion (especially lower and middle education) and retailing, are being deval-

ued, not only with regard to status, but also de facto in terms of pay?

These are some of the issues we have to take into account when focusing onother questions about inequality However, we should be aware of the dangeroustendency to regard the issue of inequality between men and women in society,and of differences in general, in a segmented and fragmented fashion (a form ofmaladaptation) We should be continuously aware of the fact that we are facedwith a relational problem, which cannot be understood or tackled independently

of the context of the relationship between men and women Only then can ageneral understanding be developed The very fundamental and old question weare faced with is that, like all human relationships, the relationship between menand women on the one hand is both multiple and infinitely varied and, on theother, more or less stable and ‘unified’ in terms of being connected Both areexpressed and guided by means of (sometimes different) values If that connec-tion (‘unity’), in one form or another, were not there, for instance either as a

loving or as a misogynous one, the human world would develop into chaos This tension between multiplicity and ‘unity’ is our central problem The ‘unity’ will

vary from the interpersonal level, as in the intimate ‘jointness’ in marriage, tobeing based on the use of values on a more general level, as seen in attitudes, suchas: men are this, women are that

These attitudes are based on general values, historically and culturally bedded, which play a decisive role in the various forms and levels of thesubordination of women

em-C Similarity or difference

Arguments about whether men and women are basically similar or even basicallythe same (i.e identical), or different have, for some time now, divided bothfeminist theoreticians and practitioners into different camps The proponents ofthe view that women are basically the ‘same’ as men, are of the opinion that alldifferences, apart from the purely biological, reproductive difference, are a result

of the process of men’s and women’s cultural socialization (see for instanceBadinter 1989) Some even go so far as to say that one develops male, respec-tively female behavior only by chance, because from the time of birth onebecomes classified as a boy or a girl through the physical appearance one mighthave as a baby If this classification were not to take place, the baby whophysiologically is a boy could be called a girl and would, through the socializa-tion process, thus adopt female characteristics An important reason for notwanting to bring possible differences between the sexes to the fore is based on thefear that, by acknowledging the difference, one emphasizes and thereby confirmsthe subordinated status of women

The proponents of the similarity position in this debate face the problem ofhaving to deal with the question of standards, i.e if one uses the concept of

sameness or the less strong concept of similarity, one is faced with the question:sameness or similarity with regard to what or whom? Hirdman, for example, inher investigation of power relationships within Swedish society, firmly points outthat male values are the norm (Hirdman 1988).

There is of course a historical basis for understanding, at least partly, thissometimes confusing debate As Judith Evans says:

In its most basic form, the argument concerns women’s similarity to or ity from men That, though, is not its starting point; that is, it is not its primary motivation to find out what sex differences, beyond the most basically biological, there are, and how they are caused Rather, in its origins at least, it concerns the quest for equality of the sexes — equality of rights and of opportunities, and more radically, of condition (Evans 1995: 3)

dissimilar-The feminists of the 60s, especially those of the liberal school, mostly lookedupon equality between the sexes as being a matter of ‘sameness’, i.e that womencan only be equal if they are the ‘same’ as men, although this did not mean to beidentical, but as ‘capable’ as men The notion of ‘equality’ was not used in thecontext of policy or legal rights, to which I refer later in this chapter In morerecent developments of feminist thoughts the issue of difference has been placedmore in the foreground

Discussing equality and differentiation between men and women, Sr (sister)Prudence Allen, a Canadian writer, describes the relationship between men andwomen in the following terms:

(1) Sex polarity, which refers to the idea that men and women are different andnot equal,

(2) sex unity, which means that men and women are equal and not significantlydifferent, and

(3) sex complementarity, which is based on the notion that men and women areequal as well as significantly different

Historically, sex polarity has been the prevalent view in our society and is inaccordance with Genesis 2, where Eve is created out of Adam’s rib, in contrast toGenesis 1, where Adam and Eve are created as complements and as each other’sequal As I have pointed out earlier, the former constitutes the basic value ofWestern patriarchal culture

With the emergence of the women’s movement, the second perspective, sexunity, became important as a counterweight to the first one However, if oursociety is serious in its attempt to achieve equality between men and women, onlythe third alternative, viz., sex complementarity, would offer true equality betweenwomen and men, according to Allen (1987)

In the mid-80s Judge Abella, then chairman of the Canadian Royal sion on Equality in Employment for women, native people, disabled persons and

Commis-visible minorities, expressed her views on equality and difference as follows:equality

means that no one is denied opportunities for reasons that have nothing to do with inherent ability … Further … discrimination … means … limiting an individual’s

or group’s right to the opportunities generally available because of attributed rather than actual characteristics, [and] sometimes equality means treating people the same, despite their difference, and sometimes it means treating them as equals by accommodating their differences (Silberman Abella 1984: 2–3)

As a policy statement regarding national legislation on equality, this is an

unusu-ally broad and humane definition To treat people in a certain way does not per se

mean one does so out of an inner conviction It may well be the result ofenvironmental forces such as legislation or peer pressure

The point is that, unless we recognize, understand and believe in equality asequal rights, we cannot deal with differences/similarities in a genuine fashion andconsequently society will have great difficulty in developing equality as anauthentic cultural characteristic

Talking, for instance, about men and women as human beings, few in theWestern Christian world would disagree with the statement that women and menare equally human, and are the same from that point of view This forms thefundamental basis for dealing with differences in a creative and constructivemanner Also, similarity is taken as the point of departure, for instance, inlegislation on human rights and in national policies concerning equality betweenthe sexes At the same time one cannot on the experiential level in everyday lifeavoid being aware of the behavioral differences between the sexes Similarity anddifference float into one another, in a manner of speaking The nature of therelationship between men and women remains, by definition, an ambivalent reality

D Once more similarity and difference

As mentioned earlier, the subordination of women is basically a relational nomenon It requires an other — a person, a group or social system — to be or feelsubordinated Therefore it can only be fully understood and dealt with in arelational manner, that is, in this case, from within the actual relationship betweenmen and women Because of this I have taken gender intersubjectivity — theculturally embedded relationship between men and women which recognizes andrespects sexual difference, i.e corporeality — as my point of departure Bothconceptually and in terms of research practice A position I already mentioned atthe beginning of this chapter

phe-At this point, I want to show, as Irigaray suggests, how the relations betweenmen and women are paradigmatic for getting a grasp of the puzzling and intricate

nature of our attempts to communicate with others different from ourselves.

My position, in short, to put a very complex question in a rather misleadinglysimple fashion, is that men and women should be understood as being bothdifferent and the same, in the sense of being equally human, as Simone deBeauvoir put it already in 1949 when she pointed to the need for a recognitionboth of difference and equality (as she calls it) between the sexes in order not todevelop a feminism that would become trapped in the logic of either/or (deBeauvoir 1949 in Zerilli 1996).

It is interesting to note that almost 50 years later this aspect is, more or less,again expressed by Drucilla Cornell as:

… the possibility of a ‘new choreography of sexual differences’ as the promise of

a feminism that loosens the bonds that tie all of us up, to one degree or another, into rigid gender identities (Cornell 1996: 109).

I must emphasize though that, in my view, difference, similarity, sameness andequality, although highly interdependent, represent four different perspectives.They are positions along very different dimensions They do not present acontinuum; rather, similarity, difference and equality form three corners of atriangle They can be understood as constituting a triadic configuration, as it were,

in terms of which the relationship between men and women should be positioned.The notion of sameness (the fourth perspective) is a derivative of a combination

of certain masculine-based understandings of similarity and difference, as I willexplain in my comments on sameness

The notion of difference, in our daily, common-sense use and perception,

pertains to sexual difference, to our embodiment, to corporeality and to itsembeddedness in the masculine culture Of course, in general, conceptually andempirically, difference encompasses more than differences between the sexes; italso includes such differences as those between groups of women or men,between individuals, and ‘within woman’ and ‘within man’ We should be aware

of the fact that there may be more variations within the sexes than between them,and similarly more within national cultures than between them Also, we must notforget, as Spelman argues, that “… though all women are women, no woman isonly a woman” (Spelman 1990: 18 in Evans 1995: 133) Nevertheless, as Imentioned earlier, for the purpose of this study I take gender intersubjectivity,which recognizes and respects sexual difference, as my frame of reference In thatcontext we have to recognize that people, men and women, are basically different

in terms of their sense of self, their identity In their individual subjectivity, intheir unique relationship to the concrete world Women are faced with thedifficulty and challenge of developing an identity that is not defined by men,either directly or indirectly An identity that is neither explicitly nor implicitlyformulated exclusively in terms of being ‘different’ from men In other words, not

in terms of ‘the other’ from the men’s point of view As Rorty puts it:

Much feminist writing can be read as saying: We are not appealing from phallist appearance to non-phallist reality We are not saying that the voice in which

women will some day speak will be better at representing reality than present-day masculinist discourse We are not attempting the impossible task of developing a non-hegemonic discourse, one in which truth is no longer connected with power.

We are not trying to do away with social constructs in order to find something that

is not a social construct We are just trying to help women out of the traps men have constructed for them, help them get the power they do not presently have, and help them create a moral identity as women (Rorty 1998: 210)

They would thereby avoid the embarrassment of the universalist claim that the term ‘human being’ — or even the term ‘woman’ — names an unchanging essence, an a-historical natural kind with a permanent set of intrinsic features Further, they would no longer need to raise what seem to me unanswerable questions about the accuracy of their representations of ‘woman’s experience’.

They would instead see themselves as creating such an experience by creating a

language, a tradition, and an identity (Rorty 1998: 211–212)

We, women, have no other choice than to create our identity ourselves, rather

than trying to describe an authentic woman’s experience in the unavoidablymasculine embedded history and culture which surrounds us

This means that one will praise movements of liberation not for the accuracy of their diagnoses but for the imagination and courage of their proposals (Rorty 1998: 214).

In the process of trying to create our identity, we will be faced with the elusive ‘I’that shows an alarming tendency to disappear when we try to introspect it, which

is the manner in which the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy refers to it Braidottimakes the point that any labor of feminist reflection, and I would add feminist

‘reflexivity’, is above all creative labor (Braidotti 1991) A formidable challengewhich is well articulated in the following citation:

We want to do our work We want to create and be critical too But how can we create if we know that our theoretical tools, our handholds, our rewards and also in part our unconscious images of what it is to be a creative person are produced by

a culture which has excluded and devalued us? This is the question: how can we create, how can we create ourselves? (Minnick 1978: 5, in Braidotti 1991: 164)

Similarity refers to the common human characteristics of life and death It

recognizes that people, men and women, are both purposeful beings The concept

of similarity is reflected in the notion of human action (agency) as it applies to

both women and men Ian Craib (1992), in his discussion of Giddens, summarizes

the latter’s views about action and the actor as follows The actor can be seen interms of three levels:

(a) The unconscious, which refers to the level of motivation which is mostdivorced from action itself Motives are seen as the actor’s ‘wants’, and theyrefer to the potential for action rather than the action itself

(b) Practical consciousness emphasizes the knowledge-ability of actors Ourknowledge of what is going on is not always explicit However, we knowwhat we are doing, or perhaps more accurately, we know how to do it Weare conscious of these things in a practical, taken-for-granted way, weroutinely ‘rationalize’ what we do.

(c) reflexive, discursive consciousness is our ability to reflect upon our actionsand describe, monitor and give rational accounts of them There is no cleardividing line between discursive and practical consciousness, but a constantmovement between the two

(These are some of the main aspects of Giddens’s thinking in relation to ity, as discussed by Craib (1992) For a more detailed exposé of Giddens’s viewsand theories about agency see Giddens (1982, 1993, 1996); also Joas (1996)).Agency is not an easy concept To say that we, both women and men, areknowledgeable and purposeful beings is, at best, an incomplete statement Ourknowledgeability is always bounded, structurally and institutionally Van derVlist makes that point when he discusses the interdependency of factors whichinfluence behavior (van der Vlist 1981: 96–97) “Agency refers not to the inten-tions people have in doing things but to their capability of doing those things inthe first place” (Cassel 1993: 96, referring to Giddens)

similar-Equality can of course be seen as being equal in the context of agency I,

however, use it in the more usual and fundamental manner as something to beunderstood in the context of social policy and social justice Le Grande suggestsfive different models of equality in the context of social policy:

(a) equality of public expenditure, whereby everyone receives the same amount

(d) equality of opportunity;

(e) equality of outcome, where resources are provided so that everyone is equalafter a service has been given This notion is one that has been particularlydeveloped in socialist political ideologies (Le Grande 1982, quoted in the

Collins Dictionary of Sociology 1995: 202).

John Rawls, in his publication on Political Liberalism presents equality in the

context of social justice as follows:

(a) Each person has an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basicrights and liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme for