Warn’s Studies ht. Fwm, Vol. 5, No. 5, pp. 509-517, 1982. 0277-5395/82/0505094!803.00p Printed in Great Britain. Pergsmon Press Ltd.

BOOK REVIEWS WOMEN, POWER AND POLITICS by Margaret Stacey and Marion Price. Tavistock Publications, London, 1981.

Students of politics who are familiar with the history of British struggles for social democracy will feel a small warm glow of recognition when they read this book. It comes !Yom a palpable kinship with the best of Fabian writings; somewhere in the two decades around the turn of the century, perhaps, fresh with the excitements of Poor Law Reports, Education Acts and the 1906 election. Stacey and Price convey that mixture of ebullient optimism and cautious analysis, of careful and comprehensive collection of materials, the whole fired up with occasional flashes of partisan passion and the tremendous sense. of having to know more before we can do more. It is tempting to extend the analogy, but that would be wrong and misleading. There are certainly some parallels between socialism at the beginning of this century and feminism now. Continuing failure to recruit from the working class, rival theories and factional strife, no money and not enough activists, public derision and private doubt, nervousness about co-option: all of these are recurrent themes in the history of progressive movements. Strategies of ‘permeation’, though, are foreign to contemporary feminists, and, as Stacey and Price point out, many feminists reject the notion of seizing power, taking the position that power itself and the structure of public life are such that the political domain, as patriar&ally constituted, not only cannot liberate women but cannot create the conditions of any kind of humane society. Stacey and Price demur, cautious!y, pointing to the success of British women MP’s in organizing resistance to the attack on the 1967 Abortion Act. There is much room for caution, though, in the rather harrowing tales of defeat and dispiritment which are untlinchingly recorded here.

Despite this, Stacey and Price an?. persistently upbeat in their interpretation of the course of the women’s movement since it developed as a corollary of the marriage of libertarianism to individualism, a halhnark of bourgeois political ideology from the seventeenth century onwards. Women, in fact, have had considerable success in achieving civil rights, but they have achieved such rights legally without the transformations in prevailing ideologies and social structures-notably the nuclear family-which would give substance and power to their participation in politics. It is this situation which Stacey and Price set out to explicate.

They do this by placing their work clearly in the analytically difficult context of power relations. They have, of course, no illusions about the legendary difficulties of defining power. Recognizing the strength of the Marxist position that power can be understood only in terms ofclass struggle, Stacey and Price nonetheless perceive the need for a broader conception, a need which is partly methodological, but (more importantly, in their view) also historical. Thii has several implications for their work. In the lirst instance they must, as all feminists must, deal with the concreten%as of patriarchal power. Secondly they also want to deal with what they see as dilTerent but concrete power relations in exemplary, cross-cultural kinship arrangements. Thirdly, they believe that the acquisition of political power is in fact the only practical strategy which, within liberal democracies, can bring about radical social transformations. They do not discuss the revolutionary option at any length; they are probably correct here, insofar as it is not in fact an option at this time: seizing power is difficult enough for feminists; acquiring arms is not only more difficult but ideologically problematic for the sort of life-centred anti-war politics which feminism generally espouses.

Stacey and Price prefer aconcept of power rather than a dejinition of power, thus evading the trials of coping with the finer shades of influence, authority and so forth with which bourgeois social science has attempted to show, with very modest persuasiveness, that capitalist society is substantially democratic. The authors note that the public realm myth ofuniversal political participation is matched by a myth in which the private domain is seen as taking the form of an increasingly ‘democratic egalitarian family.’ Stacey and Price recognize that the complexities of power relations, both in the private and public domain, need a flexible concept of power which can account for obvious wreakings of the will of the strong upon the weak, but can also make sense of the perceptions which the weak have of their own experience of powerlessness. They properly reject the retreat to evasive doctrines of ‘apathy,’ preferring to extend the meaning of power from the simplistic notion of the triumph of one will over another to embrace the phenomena in which ‘the views, interests or wishes of one category or group are normally given precedence, in which there is not struggle or contict, but in which their superiority is taken for granted either because it is believed to be correct or because there appears to the subordinate persons no way to make a challenge’ (p. 102). Thus, many issues which actually are power issues, and particularly male/female relations, do not enter the domain of power, which is public life, and do not appear on the ‘public agenda.’

This conception of power has some al&i&s with Marxist notions of false consciousness and ideology. Stacey and Price, however, intend it as ‘empirical theory.’ They are content to relate their analysis to behaviour and attitude, albeit a version of these concepts which is enriched by sensible interpretation of data and no preference at all for a ‘value-free’ standpoint. Many feminists, including this reviewer, would argue that empirical theory of this kind obscures important dimensions of analysis; attitudes and behaviour, in this view, (shiued uneasily by materialists

510 Book Reiiews

and phenomenologists) are facile quantitative glosses on more profound questions of knowing and, indeed, of being and doing. In this particular work, the concept of power does enable the author to make some quite broad historical claims which are provocative, but are also question-begging. They argue, for example, that power, understood in this way, does in fact accrue to women in some cultural and historical forms of kinship relation. Such power is based on their familial ties and comes from the status of wife, mother, daughter, mother-in-law and so forth. Exercised in the private domain, such power nonetheless has had political and economic signi6cance in, for example, pre-Islamic nomadic tribes, and its suppression (here, the authors are following Memissi’s Beyond the Veil: Male-Fe&e Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1975) emerged from a perception of femininity as supernatural strength rather than natural weakness.

This problematic argument is not in fact logically necessary to the main socio-historical context in which Stacey and Price place their work. They put in place another level of oppression in addition to the ‘two job’ burden which women wage labourers already carry; the interaction of public and private is one, they claim, in which women’s only historical locus of power, the family, is steadily eroded by the invasion of the Welfare State and its experts. At the same time women’s struggles to place feminist issues on the public agenda are circumscribed by the actual conditions of domestic life and by the need to fight, as men have done, on the basis of an ideology of liberal individualism. Women have won civil rights as individuals but failed to place the collective problems and aspirations of women on the public agenda. They have individual rights but no collective power, ‘trappings without substance’ @. 135).

These contentions are, of course, quite accurate, and few relatively short books bring such a wealth of research analysis and interpretation to bear on their exposition. Stacey and Price are, as one would expect, fully aware of the need to develop more conclusively an integrated theoretical analysis of the relation of production and reproduction (pp. 185-186). Many feminologists share this view, and Stacey and Price’s work is precisely the sort of material which must be available before such theoretical work can go forward in a constructive way. It does not, though, seem

-to be necessary to posit an historical possession of power to show that it is in fact bourgeois social relations which destroy its locus the family. It is important, of course, to show exactly what is ‘destroying the family,’ especially in the context of New Right propaganda. In this case, it seems that a socialist economic analysis must be conjoined with a feminist one, and that women’s contribution to history is not best served by its conceptualization as power.

Meanwhile, we have a book which will be of great value to social scientists, in terms of both intrinsic interest and pedagogical usefulness. Their work is strongest in its treatment of the struggles of women in England, though they do adduce useful cross-cultural data. Their refusal to think in terms of ‘failures’ is polemically pleasing, but also well documented. In terms of strategy, they reject the spectre of co-option and appear to feel that the formation of women’s political parties is overdue. In fact, there are already feminist parties in France, Belgium and Canada. I happen to belong to the latter, which is still miniscule and has yet to make the decision to run candidates and then find the resources to do it. These parties still reflect the unequal class representation which is inevitably found where parties seek activists among triply oppressed working women butjnd them among educated, oftm childless women. Nonetheless, vary slowly a strategy directed to effective work in the public domain is emerging, and a debt is owed to Stacey and Price for making it clear that such a strategy is at least an option and may well be an essential step in the realization of the progressive force within feminism.

MARY O'BRIEN

WOMEN IN THE Two GWMAN~ A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF A !Jocu~~sr AND A NONXICJALIST Socm by Harry G. Schtier, 235 pages. Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1981. Price, hardback E13.26.

When Germany was defeated in 1945 the victors intended to treat it as a single economic unit. It was divided into zones which were for the time being to be occupied by the United States, France, Britain and the Soviet Union respectively.

By 1949 the Eastern part under the Soviet occupation had moved so far towards the Marxist-Leninist ideology that two separate constitutions were drawn up and thus two Germanies emerged. The Western part.eventually became the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the Eastern part became the German Democratic Republic (GDR), i.e. two separate sovereign states.

A study of the differences of social phenomena in the two countries has similar advantages to a study of identical twins separated at birth. The innate characteristics of the two investigated groups can be assumed to be the same, the dissimilarities will be due to ideological differences and/or to subsequently developing economic conditions.

The post-War economic recovery of both states is miraculous. The story of the West German Wirtschufiswunder is well known but even some of the Western analysts admit that the GDR’s strides are the ‘real economic miracle*. Whereas billions of dollars were poured into the Western state to help its recovery the Eastrm Republic had to pay reparations for war damage to the USSR and a large number of factories were moved from the GDR to the Soviet Union. In spite of this disadvantage the GDR, also bereft of her sources of energy-now located in Poland-has become one of the 10 most industrialized nations of the world.

This is the background against which SchaITer has conducted his study of the position of women in the two German&. Details concerning sex equality within both constitutions (and the loop-holes which ensure the