Feminism, Family Work, and Moral Discourse: A Comment on Ahlander and Bahr's "Beyond Drudgery, Power, and Equity"

Abstract

In a recent JMF article, Beyond Drudgery, Power, and Equity: Toward an Expanded Discourse on Moral Dimensions of Housework in Families, Ahlander and Bahr (1995) present a call to expand study of housework to include investigations of moral meanings families assign to their domestic labors. They suggest that certain contemporary, popular theories and branches of research have focused too intently on technicality, rationality, political expediency, and economics, and have, therefore, missed more important interpersonal, reciprocal, commonsense notions of love and responsibility expressed through family work. I am sympathetic to their arguments. Specifically, I, too, would welcome an expanded dialogue among social scientists on analysis of morality and its effects on our disciplines as well as on lives of families we study. However, I am concerned that Ahlander and Bahr have presented an inaccurate depiction of feminist contributions to theory and research on housework and family work. First, I detail some of vital contributions of feminist research on family work that Ahlander and Bahr ignore or misconstrue. Second, I question conceptualization of morality that Ahlander and Bahr use, and I note how feminist scholarship provides insight into their call for an analysis of moral discourse of family work. My main argument is that, because Ahlander and Bahr dismiss feminist contributions to family work research, their moral discourse analysis is flawed in two fundamental ways. First, they improperly split moral discourse analysis from analysis of other irrevocably interrelated social phenomena, such as justice, equity, and gender stratification. Second, they forward private home and individual families as location and units for moral discourse analysis and thus reify a presumed-and feminists argue false-split between private and public social structures and relations. Mischaracterization of Feminist Theories Beyond Drudgery, Power, and Equity mischaracterizes feminist theories. This mischaracterization includes a misrepresentation of what constitutes feminist research as well as two erroneous claims about underlying assumptions of feminist research. First, authors overgeneralize about many forms of feminist literatures and conflate all of feminist research into liberal, individualistic, contractual exchange theories and what they label as legalistic distributive justice theories. Both exchange and distributive justice theories represent specific types of feminist scholarship, but they do not represent a dominant canon. The authors select these as representative of feminist theory, and, in doing so, typecast feminists as overly concerned with economic power, equity, and conflicted gender relations. Second, authors make two erroneous claims about feminist critiques: that feminists view housework as unmitigated drudgery and that the usual feminist critique of division of labor rests on assumption that sex role ideology, both in families and in larger society, stems from a dominance/submission relationship between sexes . . rooted in kind of work assigned to each (Ahlander & Bahr,1995, p. 58). What is most inaccurate about these claims is that authors suggest that feminists' typical position is that relations between women and men are always contentious. I will address first simpler problem of abbreviated sample of feminist theories. Recently mainstream family sociology journals and other general mainstream sociology journals have focused on economic theories and distributive justice theories (Bergen, 1991; Brayfield, 1992; Major, 1993, 1987; Molm, Quist, & Wisely, 1994; Sanchez, 1994; Thompson, 1991). Some of these feminist-economic or feminist-exchange theories do model negative, coercive, exploitative principles Ahlander and Bahr mention (Delphy & Leonard, 1992). …