Thoughts in regards to the Popular Front, its destruction, and the relationship of that destruction to the rise of '2nd Wave' Feminism

It's been a while since I have put up anything on the blog.  I've been trying to get finished with my dissertation, and put together two substantially revised chapters over the past quarter, the last two weeks focused on the revisions of my very unorganized Gilman chapter.  Within that context, some folks have been wondering about my argument in that case.  I thought I would put up this discussion here, which supplies the context of my argument.

Merril’s work needs to be placed within the context of the destruction of the Popular Front of the 1930’s and 1940’s with the rise of the cold war and McCarthyism. The destruction of that social formation ended an array of political and aesthetic possibilities that existed within that historical bloc. Those radicals that survived the purges and the deportations of the period had to create a new style and form to be heard. The artists involved in that project were left without a cultural milieu to work within, or any substantial institutional support. Ideological purges were a defining aspect of the era, occurring in locations as disparate as the university and the steel foundry. Chandler Davis noted that between the years of 1947-1950, “most institutions, from the government through the unions and universities to the American Civil Liberties Union… declared Communists unwelcome,” setting a precedent for the years to follow. (Davis 272) He also notes that the loyalty oaths utilized by those institutions not only restricted the involvement of members in the Communist Party, but also organizations with associations with the Communist Party. Radical artists had to navigate this minefield in order to find legitimate spaces to offer critiques of the society and avoid censure. Failure to negotiate these dangers could lead to the blacklists, that is, the inability to publish or work in the industries of popular media. In a few cases, it led to criminal charges or expulsion from the country.

In order to understand the full implications of this destruction, it’s necessary to briefly sketch out the impact of the Popular Front on U.S. culture and politics. Until recently, the dominant critical interpretation of that formation reflected the narrative produced by the forces that supported its destruction, putting an emphasis on Moscow, the naiveté of artists, etc. However there have been a number alternative interpretations of the period, most notably the argument presented in Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front. Denning makes the argument that the Popular Front was a part of a larger cultural formation, one that he calls the Cultural Front. “The cultural front was… the result of the encounter between a powerful democratic social movement—the Popular Front—and the modern cultural apparatus of mass entertainment and education.” (Denning xvii-xviii) The formation of the cultural front consisted of a mass movement, a tentative formation of organic intellectuals, and institutional structures, ranging from magazine publishers to trade unions. For Denning, this formation cannot be simply reduced to the influence of the Communist Party and “Moscow gold.” Instead, it constituted a counter-hegemonic force within the society, a force crucial to the New Deal alliance, and yet, “making a culture that was neither a Party nor a liberal New Deal culture.”[1](Denning 5) For Denning the culture of the Popular Front constitutes radical social democratic social formation in which the Communist Party played a significant role, although not a central role. At the same time, the cultural front was inextricably linked to the rising mediated spectacle of mass culture.

As Stuart Ewen notes through his analysis of advertising, that system, the system of mass culture and the structure of the advertising that supports it, is intimately linked with the system of mass industrial production.[2] These institutions not only represented industrial capitalism, but were enmeshed in its interests, material processes, and social networks. They operated simultaneously as a system of legitimization for industrial capitalism, and contributed to the process of incorporating workers into that system as consumers, rather than as simple cogs. Mass production simultaneously demanded an increased mass consumption base to thrive. As Stuart Ewen notes, a group of intellectuals began to develop a sort of social democracy of consumption, responding to Henry Ford’s experiments in social control in his factories.[3] Ewen notes, “The image, the commercial, reaches out to sell more than a service or a product; it sells a way of understanding the world. The basic premise is that in a corporate, industrial world, it is the agencies of communication that provide the mechanisms of social order.”[4] The apparatuses of the social democracy of consumption are implemented to simultaneously respond to and shape popular desires, while maintaining the basic structures of capitalist accumulation. Rather than limiting themselves to the limited, crudely instrumental forms of control used by Ford, the intellectuals developing these structures began to draw on the recent development of psychoanalysis, linking structures of consumption with formations of desire. Ewen’s work links the shift in mass production with the rise of an image based advertising structure, tying into unconscious libidinal structures of the society. The cultural front can only be understood as a network of individuals and institutions the simultaneously immanent to that nascent system, yet exogenous to its logic.

Denning argues that the cultural front constituted a powerful counter-hegemonic force within the period of the 1930’s and the 1940’s, as well as containing a powerful legacy for the rest of the century through its intellectual, literary, and musical contributions. Denning notes, the most literal measure of that power can be seen in a 1942 Fortune poll in which, “25 percent of Americans favored socialism and another 35% percent had an open mind about it.” (Denning 4) However, the depth of that success went considerably beyond those numbers. The Popular Front was linked to innumerable campaigns from union organizing, fights against racial discrimination, to direct action efforts to keep families in their houses and apartments. Denning notes that these modes of politics drew on the tradition of the “voluntary reform association”, large popular organizations focused on single issues, from the League of Women Shoppers to the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. (Denning 63) These public sphere activities merged with the massive labor unrest and strike activity in cities ranging from San Francisco, Minneapolis, Harlan, and Detroit to form a network of organizations and activists throughout the country. Those structures posed an alternative vision of inclusion, one that was based on a participatory social democracy, rather than a vision of inclusion based on the social democracy of consumption being developed by the intellectuals linked to Fordist forms of production.

However, this formation, what Denning, working in the vocabulary of Antonio Gramsci, refers to as a historical bloc, was quickly destroyed in the post war years. The alliances of the Popular Front had already been put under strain because of the acceptance of the no strike clauses insisted on by the Roosevelt administration during the war, as well as the acceptance of the Japanese internment camps by most of the Popular Front. These actions simultaneously delinked the cultural formation of the Popular Front from worker militancy and led the institutions of the Popular Front into a more uncritical alliance with the Roosevelt administration. However, this alliance began to quickly unravel with the end of the war. There was an immediate upsurge in labor militancy with the end of the war, represented by a wave of strikes throughout the country. The reaction to this upsurge in labor militancy was the Taft-Hartley act, which both limited the abilities of labor to strike and disallowed unions with membership involved in the Communist Party to benefit from the National Labor Relations Act. Despite initial opposition by the CIO leadership to this act, the conservative elements of the federation took advantage of the law to expel Communists and Communist affiliated unions from the CIO, effectively removing the influence of the radical left from the union movement.

The shift in the trade union movement had an immediate effect on the cultural front of the movement. The trade unions were a major funding source for publications such as the Federated Press, as well as a whole set of union publications. (Horowitz 102-152) Denning notes that half of all Popular Front publications were funded by the union movement, and this funding evaporated as those unions either became more conservative to respond to Taft-Hartley, or became smaller, more embattled units outside the protection of the National Labor Relations Act. (Footnote) In addition, subscription funded publications such as PM closed due to cheaper, advertising funded publications. At the same time, the independent studios involved in the production of socially conscious films closed due to the post war economic crisis in the film industry as well as the effects of the red scare. (Footnote) The destruction of these institutions also contributed to the destruction of the cultural front. With a few notable exceptions such as the independently financed Salt of the Earth, spaces for explicit radical critiques in popular publications evaporated, and the attempts to express radical ideas could only occur in veiled terms.

Furthermore there had been a radical transformation of the social structures and the class structure of the nation. Many of the political goals of the Popular Front were accomplished by the liberal New Deal State. It’s already been noted that the middle class had double from 30% in pre-depression times to 60% after the war.[5] The United States government worked to create the conditions for economic security internally. In addition to the creation of the National Labor Relations Board, the intervention in education was probably the most obvious of the interventions, taking the form of the G.I. Bill for education. Although it also included the National Defense Education Act, which both subsidized industries and the education of individual scientists. These policies were also linked to a shift in the loan structure of housing, which allowed for families to purchase a house with only a very small deposit. However, these benefits structurally excluded African Americans. These transformations, as David Roediger notes in his recent work, Working Towards Whiteness, occurred within the white supremacist context of the New Deal. The shifts in the access to housing, education, and other benefits was segregated at best, structurally reinforcing the practices of redlining and restrictive covenants, and at worst, were completely inaccessible to African-Americans. The programs and institutions constituted what historian Ira Katznelson called affirmative action programs for whites.

The post-New Deal political consensus can be read as a combination of fulfilling the incorporation of the white working classes and former new immigrants as consumers, rather than simply as cogs, and the systemic destruction of the radical elements of the Popular Front who wanted a more radical destruction of the society. The need to incorporate working classes into the society as something beyond simple cogs of the machine had been seen as early as the turn of the century, by a number of intellectuals responding to the phenomenon of mass production introduced by Ford. These individuals “Built on the expanded production and the economic potential of consumer markets, advertising created the imagery, the aesthetic, of a social-democratic capitalism, one that understood and would claim to solve the most basic contradictions of modern life.”[6] These theories had been developed around the turn of the century, but the working classes remained too impoverished to be fully incorporated in a consumer society. As we had seen previously in the work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, project of incorporation depended on a combination of modes of expertise and through that, a re-imagination of the reproductive labor of the household, although the modes of redistribution to create that vision were left unimagined. The radical activism of the Popular Front through its demands for redistributive programs and contributions to industrial unionism ironically created the conditions to fulfill the promises made by Fordist democratic capitalism.

The new regime of consumption was to be anchored in the new suburban household. This household was meant to fulfill a multiplicity of purposes, social, cultural, and psychic. Elaine Tyler May notes that the new household was widely seen as an analogous form of containment, a domestic equivalent to the Cold War foreign policy of the U.S. government of the late 1940’s through the 1950’s as a way of neutralizing the class struggle through the containment of the home. Uncannily replicating the logic implicit in Gilman’s Herland, the household was supposed to act as the supplement to the alienated and regimented nature of the workplace, providing a space of leisure, and the creation of social meaning. That supplement was dependent on the labor of women who were expected to carry the weight of this process. To accomplish that, the household had to take on a radically different function within the society. As Stephanie Coontz notes, the post-war period was defined by a cultural shift in the family structure as well as the economic shift discussed earlier. As I noted in the earlier chapter, the vast majority of new housing was constructed in the suburbs, and the new families distanced themselves from their parents, moving out of their parents’ house earlier, and moving farther away from them. The new nuclear family additionally was designed to fulfill the social psychic and emotional needs of its members in an unprecedented manner, marking former homo-social gathering places such as the bar as pathological. The new household was both the sign and seal of the guaranteed social wage, and the compensation for the lost possibility of social democracy.

Within this context, Betty Friedan offers a useful narrative of the shift from the formation of the Popular Front to the rise of a feminist politic in the wake of the ruins of that earlier formation. Daniel Horowitz maps out this transformation in his biography, Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique. Horowitz places Friedan’s intellectual development at the center of the culture of the Popular Front, from her role as the editor of her university paper, SCAN (Smith College Associated News), to her involvement with the Popular Front news service, and for the new service of the radical trade union, the UE. Friedan was intensely involved in what Michael Denning called the ‘laboring of American culture,’ the creation of genuinely participatory social democracy within the structures of mass culture, both within the workplace, and through modes of consumption. At the same time, her involvement gestured towards the nascent forms of feminism contained in the Popular Front, both through the participation of women in the movement, but more notably, through later efforts of the movement to distinguish itself from the explicitly patriarchal politics of fascism, leading to connections on the part of the movement with the initially suspicious institutions of the official women’s movement. However, she also mapped the disintegration of that alliance. She was pushed out of the first job because of a combination of political conflicts, and the news service’s desire to return jobs to veterans through firing women to open spaces. The UE position collapsed due to the attacks on the union because of their refusal to recognize the stipulations of the Taft-Hartley Act. For Friedan, the loss of these jobs constituted a fundamental betrayal of the Popular Front, gesturing to its limitations and defeat.

The 1950’s were a period of reevaluation for Friedan, as she married and moved to the suburbs. She worked as a freelance writer for a variety of women’s magazines and was involved in neighborhood politics. Horowitz notes that Friedan’s shift in concerns, from the urban to the suburban; from the problems with poverty to the problems with prosperity were a common theme within the work of social criticism of the time. This collective effort can be seen as an attempt to produce a new political aesthetic that could be heard through the atmosphere of red baiting and the cold war, and produced a new critical framework to understand the new prosperity. However, Friedan’s work was markedly different than other leftist intervention through her emphasis on the suburban household, and expectations put upon women within that household. She focused on its many functions in the maintenance of the new dominant structures of the society, mapping out the construction and legitimization of the new role of women through the expertise of home economists and psychologists in the pages of women’s magazines. She argued that women’s restriction to the household effectively legitimated and expanded levels of consumption needed for the Fordist state, and created a way of mediating and creating an escape valve for the pressures created by the new society. Friedan states this quite polemically,

“The unremitting attack on women which has become an American preoccupation in recent years might also stem from the same escapist motives that sent men and women back to the security of the home…. No one has ever been blacklisted or fired for an attack on “the American woman.” Apart from the psychological pressures from mothers or wives, there have been plenty of nonsexual pressures in the America of the last decade—the compromising, never-ceasing competition, the anonymous of the purposeless work in the big organization—that also kept a man from feeling like a man. Safer to take it out on his wife and his mother than recognize a failure in himself or in the sacred American way of life. The men were not always kidding when they said their wives were lucky to be able to stay home all day. It was also soothing to rationalize the rat race by telling themselves that they were in it “for the wife and kids.” And so men re-created their own childhood in suburbia, and made mothers of their wives. Men fell for the mystique without a murmur or dissent. It promised them mothers for the rest of their lives, both as a reason for their being and as an excuse for their failures.” (Friedan 297)

The figure of the housewife then becomes the lynchpin for the entire social system of the post war era. She simultaneously acted as a force of legitimating remaining in the system for men, and at the same time, became an escape valve for the anger and aggression produced within such a system. Friedan implicates the entire superstructure of expertise, from psychologists to home economists in this process. The professionalization of child raising demanded by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, rather than facilitating new forms of collectivity in the household, was used to further isolate housewives, legitimating the new system of consumptive social democracy. The patriarchal control of the household became the social contract between men, legitimizing the often meaningless and repetitive labor of the Fordist factory or the assembly line logic of the business office. Drawing from the work of Sylvia Federici, the ‘mystique’ of domestic femininity created an implicit cross-class alliance between primarily white men, not only dependent on the social wage, but also on the access to women as a commons for men. It expanded the sexual contract to the white working class as well as the middle classes. The contract offered both material as well as psychic benefits to those who accepted its strictures.

The power of Friedan’s text largely arises through her rhetorical identification with the feminine mystique. That is to say, the power of her narrative is derived through her claim to be a housewife negotiating her way through this new form of domesticity. However, it is precisely this rhetorical claim to the conventional role of the housewife that causes a set of limitations to the text. To begin, Friedan’s censorship of her radical past leads to an erasure of the history of working class. Unlike many later radical feminists, Friedan’s claims about the mystique are limited to the post-war period, but her history of women’s activism is limited to the activities of the middle classes. Women’s union and radical activism is placed under erasure, which limits the forms of activism analyzed in the text.[7] Additionally, Friedan’s critique is dependent on her engagement with the psychological conventions of her time. That engagement is often quite critical of the discipline’s complicity with the feminine mystique, but it also embraces the hetero-normative impulse of psychology, arguing that homosexuality is a possible pathological response to the mystique.[8] If Friedan strategically engages with these conventions to be heard, these conventions profoundly shape and limit the epistemological possibilities of the text.

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[1] Ibid., 5.

[2] Stuart Ewen, Channels of Desire,

[3] Stuart Ewen, Channels of Desire, 37

[4] Stuart Ewan, Channels of Desire, 42

[5] Look for this fact again

[6] Stuart Ewen and Elizabeth Ewen, 37

[7] Friedan, x.  See also Horowitz and Coontz

[8] Friedan,

Another short essay on Joanna Russ: Biopolitics and The Femle Man

      I've been rereading Joanna Russ' The Female Man, while working on a substantial rewrite of an earlier paper that I want to turn into a dissertation chapter.  Within that context, I came across a fairly interesting passage that I had previously given very little thought, one that links the text with a very problematic biopolitical thread that can be found in feminist utopias, one that I had previously thought was left out of her work.  The relevant passage occurs in section viii of the first section of the book, which gives a brief historical sketch of the world of Whileaway,

      "Humanity is unnatural!" exclaimed the philosopher Dunyasha Bernadetteson (A.C 344-426) who suffered all her life from the slip of a genetic surgeon's hand which had given her one mother's jaw and the other mother's teeth--orthodontia is hardly ever necessary on Whileaway.  Her daughter's teeth, however, were perfect."

      This comment along with the obsessive concern about IQ in an earlier section point to a moment that the focus on social construction is briefly undone, and the eugenics of earlier feminist science fiction and utopias enters back into the picture.  If the initial conceit of the book is that the four characters, Janet, Jeanette, Jael, and Joanna are all the same individual within different social settings, the radicality of Whileaway can no longer be understood within the transformation of social structures, but in some sense draws on the eugenic construction of its subjects, placing it closer to the work of Herland than I'm sure Russ would have liked to be associated. 

       At the same time, a reasonably observant reader of the text could note that the description of Whileaway oscillates between satire and idealization, that is, between the world as a sending up of earlier traditions of science fiction that Russ thinks rather poorly of, and the radical possibilities contained in rereading, rewriting, and drawing from those traditions, in order to produce the type of cognitive estrangement that the genre has the potential of producing.  I would largely agree that one is not being a terribly attentive reader if one ignores Russ' satirical engagement with the history of the genre, but I would point out that it's a satirical engagement that papers over the racial implications in those utopian traditions.  This point is reflected in her own critical rereading of her review of Gilman's Herland, which notes the ways that she minimalizes the racism in that novel.

      To move on from this very particular moment in the novel, albeit one that gestures towards a set of significant contradictions in the text, the more I work through questions of social reproduction the the 20th century of the United States, the more I'm convinced that the question of racialization has to be put at the center of the forms of reproductive labor in the household, and more specifically the ways that those forms of labor are organized and valorized.  If the first half of the century is defined by a variety of attempts to incorporate new immigrants and elements of the working class into the dual regime of sexuality and consumption, those attempts simultaneously consciously worked to integrate these groups into an expanded whiteness, that only worked through a series of brutal acts of exclusion that denied the humanity of large sections of the world.  The civilizing discourse of Gilman, the settlement house movement, theorists of mass consumption operated on the premise of a sort of racial uplift, one that largely drew from the now discounted evolutionary theories of Lamarkian selection.

      These points are probably most substantially developed by Michel Foucault in his, History of Sexuality, Volume 1, but several essays by Etienne Balibar do a good job of expanding on this in a number of essays in the text co-written with Immanuel Wallerstein.  There have been a number of substantial feminist critiques of Foucault based on his presumed discounting of sexual difference, and I would certainly accept that the intense weight put upon women in the bourgeois project of sexuality is not taken into account.  The figure that is utterly erased from the text is that of the mother, but at the same time, Foucault's reading of sexuality as a both bourgeois and racist project only just recently seems to be incorporated into contemporary feminist work.  This is not to say that feminists have refused to confront racism, but all too often its taken as a separate issue to the questions of sexuality that they are taking on.  This erasure all too often leads to the inability to recognize the way that a biopolitical project that's deeply embedded in the logic of the formation of race haunts the history of the twentieth century.

works in progress

     As I mentioned yesterday, I'm writing a brief post before I go to bed today.  I got caught up in grading over the weekend, so I couldn't put up anything at that point.  Not that I'm complaining.  After all, it pays the bills, and some of the work that my students managed to put together in their interpretation of a series of clips I picked out was frankly pretty impressive.  (You can find the selections I chose here.)  There were a few responses that I would have been pretty happy with if I had produced them as blog posts.  At the same time, that probably took about twelve to thirteen hours to complete.  It didn't give me a lot of time to write for the blog or to deal with my own dissertation work, which is getting pushed increasingly to the summer.  I'm not all that thrilled about that.

      I had suggested that I might take up the series of blog postings on reinterpretations of the Babel story that I had left by the wayside a while ago, but my copy of James Baldwin's essays has seemed to have disappeared.  I either need to find that object again, or I need to find another interpretation of the story to go on with that.  I'm hoping I find the Baldwin essays at some point because his take on the story is considerably different than the narratives about transgression and loss that have been at the center of the previous stories.  Instead, Baldwin goes back to a more literal biblical interpretation of the story, but in such a way as to challenge the foundational structures of white supremacy that constitute the United States.  Not that any of that should be remarkably surprising for anyone who has made any attempt to engage with Baldwin's work.  (If you haven't read any of Baldwin's essays, I'd recommend dropping what you're doing, and going to the local library to check out a collection of his work.... right now.)

      On the other hand, I feel like I have a better sense of what my overall project is in regards to the dissertation.  I realized that I'm in some sense trying to challenge some of the stories around the laboring practices set up by some of the recent work by post-autonomist writers.  Largely drawing on the argument written by Toni Negri in the early 1980's on the transition from the 'mass worker' to the 'social worker', these writers have tried to argue that current regime of production is increasingly dominated by forms of affective labor.  This shifts the workplace considerably, moving towards a more flexible approach to production, dependent on the worker's creativity and ability to adapt to a multiplicity of situations, and to act as a sort of jack of all trades.  It is also tied to the worker's focus on producing affect, rather than a physical product.  I don't disagree with this at all, but these qualities become a lot less novel if you focus on the household, rather than the formal workplace.  As Ruth Schwarz Cowan notes, these very qualities were introduced into the household at the turn of the twentieth century, as the household increasingly industrialized.  In addition, Stuart Ewen notes the linkage between advertising and the production of affect in his work on public relations, advertising, and other forms of expertise.  It's significant that both workers' struggles for the social wage, and the attempt on the part of employers to stabilize mass production was centered on the space of the household.  In effect, the household was a significant space of overlapping contestation within the class struggle.  Borrowing from Cowan's structure of argument, I want to ask what happens if we center our focus on these struggles, rather than on the workplace.

       I have an answer for why science fiction, which links into Edelman's concept of 'reproductive futurism' and complicates it, but I don't have the energy to take Edelman's Lacanian framework right now, and translate it into the materialist framework that I am working from.  Needless to say, Edelman's focus on the concept of the symbolic is both very provocative, but also extraordinarily reductive.  Edelman manages to reduce the complexities of mass social life to the individualized structures of the psyche, something that Freud managed to avoid in his analysis of the social in Mass Psychology and Jokes and their Relationship to the Unconscious, but I've always preferred Freud's actual work to the Lacanian framework.  I ultimately think by reducing all forms of social order to the symbolic as such, one loses out on the capacity of those social orders to operate in very different ways.  I suppose this shouldn't be terribly surprising out of a man who mistakes the Democratic Party for the left.  It's obvious that Edelman is working in some of the same terrain as thinkers such as Laurent Berlant, but I like that work.  Edelman just irritates me.  At the same time, I think there's something in Edelman's critique that is significant for science fiction studies, an argument that might make us focus on the conservative and preservative elements of the modes of estrangement in science fiction, as well as its radical qualities.  In any case, I suspect that this isn't the last time that I will write on the subject.

Notes on the Post-War Period

Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique opens with her identification of a gap or lacunae in the dense network of discourse surrounding the household, a gap identified with the yearning of women. 

            “For over fifteen years there was no word of this yearning in the millions of words written about women, for women, in all the columns, books and articles by experts telling women their role was to seek fulfillment as wives and mothers.  Over and over women heard in voices of tradition and of Freudian sophistication that they could desire no greater destiny than to glory in their own femininity.  Experts told them how to catch a man and keep him, how to breastfeed children and handle their toilet training, how to cope with sibling rivalry and adolescent rebellion; how to buy a dishwasher, bake bread, cook gourmet snails, and build a swimming pool with their own hands; how to dress, look, and act more feminine and make marriage more exciting; how to keep their husbands from dying young and their sons from growing into delinquents.  They were taught to pity the neurotic, unfeminine women who wanted to be poets or physicists or presidents….  A thousand expert voices applauded their femininity, their adjustment, their new maturity.  All they had to do was devote their lives from earliest girlhood to finding a husband and bearing children.” (Friedan 58)

             The unnamed problem discussed by Friedan is defined by its dialectical opposite, the utopian promise of an expertise created through a dense discourse of scientific and technical expertise, in the form of technical manuals, psychoanalysis, and social convention.  Friedan gestures towards an intense instrumentalization of the household through the construction of a dense web of discourse.  The care of the bourgeois family is mapped out in painstaking detail, through the minutiae of childcare, the management of resources, and most of all, the affective economy of femininity.  Friedan recognizes the intense social, political, and economic pressure being put on the newly reconstructed household, intuitively recognizing the radical shift in the economy of the family in the post war years described by Stephanie Coontz.  The figure of the mother can be found at the center of that nexus, linking shifts in political, social and libidinal economies.  Rather than following Friedan’s repressive hypothesis, I want to read the ‘feminine mystique’ as the symptom of the intensification of the body of the white mother, transforming her into the guarantor of the stability of not only the household, but the nation itself, linking to the creation of what Stuart Ewen calls consumer social democracy as well as introducing the working classes to the regime of sexuality.  These hegemonic structures along with the expansion and reintegration of the white supremacist order were intended to legitimate and reinforce the logic of capitalist accumulation.

            Within that economy, ‘expertise’ and ‘yearning’ are mutually constitutive, operating within a sort of dialectical relationship.  In her recognition of the dialectical relationship between ‘expertise’ and ‘yearning, Friedan implicitly develops a sort of class analysis, recognizing a common set of experiences between (white) women centered in the psychic, social, political, and economic structures of the household, which crossed ostensible class barriers.  The labor of the household becomes a central locus of complex set of techniques of population, legitimizing the Fordist regime of accumulation, and perhaps more significantly, operating as a locus meant to stabilize the social reproduction of the newly expand regime of accumulation.  In effect, the structures of affective labor and forms of consumption are central to mitigating the alienation of the workplace, continuing a regime of consumption, but perhaps more significantly, reproducing the population.  The mother becomes the focus for this web of discourse not because of irrelevance as Friedan occasionally thinks, but because these modes of unpaid labor are central to the regime as a whole.  That centrality, in turn, produces the modes of resistance gestured towards in Friedan's choice of language, 'yearning.'  Feminism becomes the primary, but not exclusive form of resistance to this regime. 

          In their work, Empire, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt argue that the current regime of accumulation is increasingly defined by modes of affective labor.  I'm interested in exploring the role that feminism as a form of counter-conduct to Fordist capital and the various attempts to appropriate those forms of counter-conduct coagulate into the current regime of accumulation.

My Eaton Conference Talk on Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland

I'm currently working on transforming this into my first chapter for my dissertation, and I thought that I would put this initial draft up to see what folks think. What is worth saving and expanding, and what should be gotten rid of? I was fairly happy with this as a talk, although it was not universally popular with the small crowd there. I believe the work was referred to as 'presentist', which I think means that it didn't as as apologia for Gilman. At the same time, I should note that I am not interested in acting in the role of the prosecutor, either. Rather I am interested in exploring her work as a sort symptomatic formation, gesturing towards the forms of expertise and institutional structures that would arise in the post-war period. Or perhaps more precisely, I'm interested in looking at the way that it aligned with the social forces of its time that would eventually form those policies. This is not to say that Gilman's vision aligns perfectly with what Friedman would call the 'feminine mystique.' After all, Gilman was working towards a end of the isolation of housework, but both her work and the post war period were interested in modernizing the household economy through a combination of technology and a grid of discourses of expertise. I think I will leave the conversation at that.

The reception history of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland fits nicely into a fairly conventional narrative of academic feminism. Gilman was significant not only for her fictional work, but for her substantial popular sociological work as well. Gilman produced several books and countless articles critically analyzing sexuality, gender, evolutionary theory, and economics. Gilman biographer Judith A. Allen noted that Gilman’s rediscovery by historian Carl Degler in the 1950’s and 1960’s, “appeared in the wake of widely lauded postwar feminist texts,” the English translation of De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in 1953 and the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. (Allen 6) Feminist scholarship of the 1970’s and the 1980’s saw Gilman’s work as a precedent for their calls for women’s liberation, tying into academic feminism’s cross-disciplinary effort to create a theoretical and historical archive for the movement. Herland ties neatly into those later collective feminist efforts. Originally published as a serial in Gilman’s monthly magazine Forerunner in 1915, the novel was only rediscovered in the 1970’s and was finally published in book form in 1979. The novel becomes one of many rediscovered artifacts during the initial phase of feminist scholarship of the 1970’s and 1980’s. In particular, the novel played a significant role in conceptualizing the subgenre of feminist science fiction, providing a significant precedent for the genre, linking it to the longer tradition of the women’s movement.

Gilman’s work also fit into the critiques posed by Black feminists and other feminists of color, beginning with the critical interventions made by the poet Audre Lorde, feminist critic bell hooks, and the later work produced by Gloria Anzaldua amongst others. This work challenged the assumptions of the primarily white academic analysis of radical feminism, focusing on the gaps, lacunae, and contradiction in their analysis of the category of woman. That work very easily implicates the work of Gilman, particularly through the assumptions implicit in her evolutionary, neo-Darwinian framework. As Allen notes, there have been, “intense debates since the 1990’s over Gilman and class, race, ethnicity, and eugenics, particularly as contributed by advocates of new race history, whiteness studies, third wave feminism, and antiracism.” (Allen xiv) Even as Gilman used this framework to critique the domestic structures of the household, she legitimized the larger framework of Eurocentric, white supremacy. That framework operates through a logic of what Johannes Fabian in his critique of anthropology calls the absence of co-evalence, the “persistent tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse.” (Fabian 31) Within that context, Gilman poses an evolutionary hierarchy of humanity, legitimizing and reinforcing the racialized categories of colonialism, along with a set of racializing assumptions about the working classes and new immigrants. However, the concerns about Gilman’s politics within critical studies of science fiction start earlier than that date. Joanna Russ’ 1979 review of the text brings attention to Gilman’s racism, and critiques its hierarchical, evolutionary logic.

My particular engagement with the work of Gilman is aligned with the emergent reassessment of her work. Gilman’s feminism is inescapably marked by the white supremacy and class politics of her time in ways that are not easily dismissed. My argument is that we can begin to read those aspects of her politics as congruent to her larger political aims, rather than in contradiction to them. As Allen notes, Gilman’s critique of the heterosexual institutions of sexuality and domesticity, are tied into her opposition of the provincial labor of ‘sex’, to the far more profound labor of ‘race,’ which derives from her Darwinist framework. This is developed in small section from her work, Women and Economics.

“Natural selection develops race. Sexual selection develops sex. Sex-development is one throughout its varied forms, tending to only to reproduce what is. But race development rises ever in higher and higher manifestation of energy. As sexes, we share our distinction with the animal kingdom almost to the beginning of life, and with the vegetable world as well. As races, we differ in ascending degree; and the human race stands highest in the scale of life so far.

When, then, it can be shown that sex-distinction in the human race is so excessive as not only to affect injuriously its own purpose, but to check and pervert the progress of the race, it becomes a matter for most serious consideration. Nothing could be more inevitable, however, under our sexuo-economic relation. By the economic dependence of the human female upon the male, the balance of forces is altered. Natural selection no longer checks the action of sexual selection, but co-operates with it.” (Gilman, Women, 37)

As Allen correctly notes, all references to race contained in Gilman’s work reference the human race, rather than any specifically, socially constructed category. But, that category itself is understood within the logic of an evolutionary hierarchy, moving from the primitive to the modern. Sympathetic critics have read Gilman’s work as an unacknowledged predecessor to Foucault’s critical analysis of sexuality, arguing that her construction of an analysis on the basis of the ‘sexuo-economic’ basis of sex and gender relations presages Foucault’s work within the History of Sexuality. (Allen 10) I would argue that, on the contrary, Gilman is better read is better read as contributing to the maintenance and intensification of that structure, proposing new and more efficient forms of reproductive labor. Gilman’s critique of the ‘sexuo-economic’ system is rooted in that evolutionary ideology, marking the conventions of reproductive labor as ‘primitive.’ The dependence of women upon men in this primitive system of ‘sexual selection,’ a category of evolutionary process that Gilman associates with conservation or the tendency “to only reproduce what is” disrupts the hierarchical evolutionary process of ‘natural selection.’ It’s difficult to avoid the similarity in this language to the various text examined by Foucault, focused on the instrumentalization of the bourgeois child’s body, regulating and shaping its reproductive energies.

I want to look at Gilman’s interest in domesticity, technological innovation, and the biopolitics of eugenics in relationship to the post-war formation of domesticity critiqued by Betty Friedan amongst others. My argument will be that, aside from the emphasis on collective motherhood, Gilman’s utopian conception has an uncanny resonance with the discursive formation of cold war domesticity, with its emphasis on expertise, reified notions of femininity, and whiteness. As Elaine Tyler May notes, the domestic sphere was seen a space to neutralize the class struggle of the previous era. Gilman similarly gestures towards the utopia of Herland as an escape from the logic of class struggle. Gilman also contributes to the process of the slow integration of the working classes into the discursive apparatuses of sexuality, a process beginning in the 19th century and concluding in the middle of the 20th century. Additionally, this process of integration of the working classes into the regime of sexuality ties in neatly with the attempts on the part of Fordist intellectuals to create what Stuart Ewen calls a social democracy of consumption, the attempt to incorporate workers into the system of industrial mass production capitalism as consumers, rather than simply as cogs. That project aimed to restructure the aspirations and desires of the restless and excluded working classes, while maintaining the larger apparatus of capitalist accumulation.

My particular engagement with Gilman’s novel is strongly informed by Phillip Wegner’s analysis of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backwards contained in his text, Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity and is largely complimentary to that argument. Gilman was strongly influenced by Bellamy’s work, and was briefly involved in the Nationalist movement that Bellamy created in the wake of the success of his utopia, Looking Backwards. In turn, that text informs the formal and political engagements of Gilman’s Herland. Both texts are written in response to the reorganization of American society in response to the rise of industrial, mass production, Bellamy’s text produced at the beginning of that process and Gilman’s text produced well into its formation. Wegner argues that Bellamy’s text argues, “the modern American nation state can be formed only through a collective act of forgetting, a breaking of the bonds of the past, and a reorientation toward a single future.” (Wegner 63) That process of forgetting, as Wegner notes, is crucial to the process of reproducing the imagined community of the nation. Bellamy’s text is able to imagine a new, more powerful nation arising from the current tumult of industrial class struggle through the erasure of the relations and means of production. Instead, we are offered a unified, middle class vision of the nation, built upon consumption based on the newly created department store. Wegner states, “The whole of society in Bellamy’s utopia thus has been transformed into a giant marketplace, occupied by a population that now functionally defines itself according to the sheer circular formality of the commodity process: the endless consumptions of fetishized goods, objects that magically seem to produce themselves, becoming a social end in itself.” (Wegner 80) Gilman’s work, rather than reducing the world to consumption, reduces it to the biopolitical realm of reproductive labor, focusing on motherhood and the raising of children, but expanding into the biology of animal husbandry and horticulture.

My initial impulse to follow this train of thought came out of my reading of a short article of Gilman’s contained in the 1980 collection, The Politics of Housework. Gilman’s article, “The Home: Its Work and Influence” poses a substantial challenge to the 19th century cult of motherhood, but that challenge operates through her evolutionary, Darwinist framework. Gilman poses a need to modernize the ‘primeval’ labor of the household with the new forms of expertise developed in the disciplines of ‘Household Science’ and ‘Domestic economics.’ Building on this new disciplinary framework, she proposes the sweeping away of the amateur, sentimentalized labor of the isolate household replacing it with newer, efficient, scientific procedures and techniques. Critic Sally Stein amongst others has explored the impact of assembly line production techniques on the conventional structures of the household, bringing not only the new technologies of the era into the house, but also the techniques developed in the Taylorist division of labor. The same forms of time-motion study used in the workplace to economize the movement of the worker were envisioned and implemented in the transformation of household labor, producing an instrumentalized economy of the household. Despite Gilman’s ability to shock sensibilities, her new experimental household built upon the techniques of domination and exploitation developed in the workplace, rather than challenged them.

It’s important to note that Gilman’s vision of the new, managed space of domestic and reproductive labor is not the privatized space of the household that eventually becomes the dominant post-war structure. Rather than translating the scientific management of Fordist modes of production to the privatized space of the home, Gilman proposes a far more direct model, proposing collective modes of daycare, cooking, and other aspects of domesticity. Unlike the later attempts to organize around the concept of wages for housewives who saw their campaign as a larger struggle to bring down the capitalist world system, Gilman was genuinely committed to these modes of collectivized, trained wage labor positions. However, her vision of modernizing the labor of the household presented a similar challenge to the erasure of that labor within the sentimentalized guise of motherhood. Although Gilman’s projection of the Fordist collective household draws upon and legitimates the apparatuses of expertise later to legitimate what Betty Friedan would later call ‘the feminine mystique,’ it cannot be read as a simple blueprint of the post-war economy.

However, the difference between Gilman’s vision of domestic and reproductive labor and the feminine mystique of domesticity blurs considerably as we enter into her utopian vision of Herland. The shift from the negative work of critique to the positive work of imagining an alternative society reintroduces the conventionality of reproductive labor and introduces a mystique of motherhood. It constructs this new model through a journey of intensive epistemological work, moving from the generic form of the primitive jungle, to the capture of the protagonists in the modernist Grecian city of Herland, and then to the enclosed space of the school house and the larger training space of the society. Within that explicitly epistemological framework, the reader is expected to follow the educational journey of the naïve male protagonists of the novel. However, satire supplements this educational program. As Joanna Russ notes, “There is the primitive delight of wish-fulfillment, i.e. escorting American men all over Herland (the book follows the classic Utopian pattern of lots of tours and discussions) and hearing the say, “Yes, you’re right. You’re absolutely right. Feminism is the hope of the world.”” (Russ 152) The end point of this pedagogical journey is marriage, created in the modernist terrain of the utopia of the city, rather than the primitive jungle of the old household.

To accomplish this work, Gilman’s utopia works through the convention of what Frederic Jameson calls world reduction. We are given glances of a large urban society, but are only given fragments of information about the structures of administration and production in that city. The initial description of the city combines the orderly fantasy of the garden city with the exoticism of ‘pre-Incan architecture in Peru, combining the clean lines of modernism with mosaics of monoliths. (Gilman, Herland, 35) During the return of the three protagonists to the city after an initial escape attempt, the narrative offers a brief description of the nation of Herland. “We rolled through many villages and towns, and I soon saw that the parklike beauty of our first-seen city was no exception.” (Gilman, Herland 44-45) But beyond the assurance of the nation’s uniform beauty, we are offered no information about administration or governance of the land beyond a brief reference to the coveted status of ‘overmother.’ Additionally, we have no way ascertaining either the modes or the relations of production of the land. Instead, we are given a world defined by the reproductive labor of domesticity. The walls of the household are broken down and the work of raising children, educating them, caring for them spreads across the nation of Herland as its exclusive project. Even the biological labors of breeding animals and the tending of gardens ties back into the central function of motherhood, operating as thin metaphors for family planning and the eugenics project. The nation becomes an overwhelming metaphor for the new household, redefined by the novum of a system of evolutionary rationality.


To define that system, the novel must first open in the terrain of the primitive. The group of adventurers, Jeff Margrave, poet and botanist, Terry Nicholson, who studied geography and meteorology, and the sociologist narrator, Vandyck Jennings began their journey of exploring, “the thousand tributaries and enormous hinterland of a great river, up where the maps had to be made, savage dialects studied, and all manner of strange flora and fauna expected.” (Gilman, Herland, 4) The narrative offers no more detail concerning the location of the utopian space of the narrative. Instead, the space is marked as the generic primitive, outside the maps, anthropology, and the botanical and the zoological sciences of Europe. The structure of this generic primitive defines the journey into the land of Herland, shifting from the predictable anthropological journey into the exploration of the novum of Herland.

“As we got further and further upstream, in a dark tangle of rivers, lakes, morasses and dense forests, with here and there an unexpected long spur running out from the big mountain beyond, I notice that more and more of these savages had a story about a strange and terrible “Woman Land” in the high distance.

“Up yonder,” “Over there,” “Way up”—was all the direction they could offer, but their legends all agreed on the main point—that there was this strange country where no men lived—only women and girl children.”

Had no one else gone? Yes—a good many—but they never came back. It was no place for men—that they seemed sure of.

I told the boys these stories, and they laughed at them. Naturally I did myself. I knew the stuff that savage dreams are made of.” (Gilman, Herland, 4)

The nation of women exists within this generic, primitive space, but it stands outside of its generic logic. The “strange and terrible “Woman Land”” could only be seen “in the high distance” of that primitive space. The ‘savages’ of Gilman’s narrative operate outside of the cognitive map of its modern other, unable to even identify its location outside of a broad sense that it sat above them, hostile and alien. The society of the ‘savages,’ returning to Fabian’s critique, operates in a different temporality of the modern society of women. The protagonists of the story laughed at the obscure narratives of the ‘savages,’ but they are equally implicated in the temporal critique of the narrative.

As the group prepared to discover the nature of the society, they speculated on the nature of the society.

“We talked and talked.

And with all my airs of sociological superiority I was no nearer than any of them.

It was funny though, in the light of what we did find those extremely clear ideas of ours as to what a country of women would be like. It was no use to tell ourselves and one another that all this was idle speculation. We were idle and we did speculate, on the ocean voyage and the river voyage, too.” (Gilman, Herland, 10)

Despite ‘airs’ of civilizational and disciplinary superiority, the men entering the utopian space of the community of women were no more able to predict or immediately comprehend what they would find than the surrounding ‘savages.’ The protagonists themselves were caught in the same ‘primitive’ logic of the surrounding villages. As the narrator notes, “We were not in the least “advanced” on the woman question, any of us, then.” The incomprehension of the ‘idle speculation’ of the narrators returns us to Gilman’s critique of the household economy, which was also defined as ‘primitive,’ in opposition to the modern forms of science and technology defining the rest of the society. The narrators must begin their journey within the terrain of the generically primitive precisely because they themselves are defined by the primitive state of the domestic labor of the individual household. The three figures could accomplish little more than the derided savage. However, this critique makes no effort to mark their dismissive assessment of the local population as skewed or biased in any way. Instead the critique embedded in the linkage between the two groups is grounded in the very binary between the modern and the primitive. The figuration of the generic primitive frames and grounds the critical framework of the narrative, its invisible walls enclosing the utopian space of the novel.

The movement into the utopian space of Herland immediately begins to challenge the expectations of the protagonists, shifting from the primitive to the intensely controlled space of the garden city.

“The road was some sort of hard manufactured stuff, sloped slightly to shed rain, with every curve and grade and gutter as perfect as if it were Europe’s best…. Here was evidently a people highly skilled, efficient, caring for their country, as a florist cares for his costliest orchids. Under the soft brilliant blue of that clear sky, in the pleasant shade of those endless rows of trees, we walked unharmed, the placid silence broken only by the birds.” (Gilman, Herland, 20.)

The movement from the space of the primitive to the country of women is not simply a shift in space, but is also a shift in temporality, moving from the generic space of expedition to the modernist space of ‘Europe’s best.’ The first signifier of this shift is the existence of the modern roadway, but the passage lingers on the description of the flora and the fauna of the place. The sign and seal of modernity is the ability to tend to the plants and animals, to shape them, and to construct a neat and orderly landscape, defined by tranquility and the sound of birds. The architecture was noted for its integration into this landscape. In contrast to the ‘offensive mess man made in the face of nature’ that defined the cities of California, the architecture complimented the natural surroundings. Modernity is then defined by the ability to shape biological material from the chaos of the primitive, and to construct architecture that blends into the modernized ‘endless rows of trees’ and carefully shaped and pruned landscape. In short, the modernity of Herland is biopolitical, not industrial. Just as significant, the land was described in terms of the household. “We felt like small boys, very small boys, caught doing mischief in some gracious lady’s house.” (Gilman, Herland, 20)

The narrative expands on the scope and intensity of that political shaping of life, or what Foucault called the shift from the sovereign act of ‘letting live’ and ‘making die’ to the regulatory act of ‘making live’ and ‘letting die.’ Through the educational process of the protagonists, we discover that the society regulates all aspects of life within their domain, selectively breeding cats to make no noise and to refuse to hunt birds, for instance. In addition, they had let several species die, including cattle, horses, and the domesticated dog. It’s difficult to avoid reading these moments within Jameson’s linkage of the utopian form with the Freudian reading of the daydream as a form of wish fulfillment. The narrative, after all, offers the fantasy of cats that don’t kill songbirds, an absence of the violence of dogs, etc. But focusing on that would miss out on the ability of the society to shape every aspect of life in its boundaries. Operating within an orthodox Suvinite framework, this biopolitical control is the novum of the narrative. Beyond those acts of making live and letting die, Gilman states, “They had worked out a chemistry, a botany, a physics, with all the blends where a science touches an art, or merges into an industry, to such a fullness of knowledge as made us feel like school children.” (Gilman, Herland, 65)

That knowledge of the sciences and the intense regulatory mechanisms of life that defined the society were directed towards the central function of the society, motherhood. The society was created out an elaborate history of a slaveholding, polygamous people, destroyed by conquest, during its decline. The women of the society took over when the slaves attempted to take over the society. After the slaves killed the remaining men, they were killed by the women. Shortly after, the women began to give birth by parthenogenesis, allowing for the society to continue. Motherhood is described in terms that would later appear in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.

“Here was Mother Earth, bearing fruit. All that they ate was fruit of motherhood, from seed or egg or their product. By motherhood they were born and by motherhood they lived—life was, to them, just the long cycle of motherhood.

But very early they recognized the need of improvement as well as of mere repetition, and devoted their combined intelligence to that problem—how to make the best kind of people. First this was merely the hope of bearing better ones, and then they recognized that however the children differed at birth, the real growth lay later—through education.” (Gilman, Herland, 61)

The structures of the society are focused on the raising of children, and more significantly, all the needs and desires of the society are directed to this end. That work is collective and is the work of every member of the society. The utopian space of Herland may have shattered the binary of private and public, but it has done so by totalizing the domestic and reproductive labor of motherhood, leaving no outside to its responsibilities. Within that project, the society intensely controlled the process of who can and cannot have a child, banning ‘unfit’ mothers from having children. The society was defined by a Eugenics project of population control, as well marking the fit and the unfit. The intense control of the flora and fauna of the land is replicated in the control of the human society. The mystique enters into the picture explicitly through the universal consent to these policies, accepting the universal goal of motherhood and furthering the reach.

Despite the explicit Eugenic dimension contained in the social structure, the primary tool used to transform the society was education, as noted by the passage above. This pedagogical dimension of the society defines the majority of the narrative, following the protagonists of the society as they moved from the primary school of their initial enclosure to the secondary school or university of young women that they later graduate into. That process, which was ostensibly staged as an exchange of information, trained the protagonists into the logic of the society. They learned the language, the institutions, and the scientific knowledge of the society. That process of learning was defined by one on one education by a set of older women, labeled ‘Aunts.’ Later, the men learned from the women who they later married in a strange ceremony, publicized throughout the nation. This pedagogical process, ostensibly collective, was put into practice in a manner that was both individuated, and conventionally heteronormative.

That heteronormative process defined the telos of the process, creating a new form of the heteronormative marriage, directed towards the goals of the society. Rather than refusing the erotic as Joanna Russ’ reading claims, the narrative offered a new norm of heterosexual marriage, one directed towards synthesizing the ‘sex’ work of reproduction with the ‘race’ work of evolutionary transformation. That model failed through the limitations of the men of the narrative, but Gilman’s narrative continued in a sequel in which the women of the narrative moved out into the world at large, advocating the combination of eugenics and motherhood, mirroring the political work of Gilman herself.

notes concerning Foucault

      Fairly early in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, Foucault links the the biological and the economic through the 'political economy of population.'  He states, "Through the political economy of population there was formed a whole grid of observations regarding sex.  There emerged an analysis of the modes of sexual conduct, their determinations and effects, at the boundary line of the biological and the economic domains....  In time these new measures would become the anchorage points for the different varieties of racism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  It was essential that the state know what was happening with its citizen's sex, and the use they made of it, but also that each individual be capable of controlling the use he made of it.  Between the state and the individual, sex became an issue, and a public issue no less; a whole web of discourses, special knowledges, analyses, and injunctions settled upon it."  (Foucault, 20)  My first observation on this passage is that the question of racism enters into Foucault's analysis much earlier than I had initially remembered.  It's difficult to imagine that it took so long to turn to the analysis of racism contained in his work, only entering into academic conversations with the printing of Society Must Be Defended and the work of Ann Stoler.  The second observation is that Foucault gestures towards something that I am having difficulty producing in my dissertation on reproductive politics.  Within this work, there is the tendency to work within one of two economies, either focusing on the biopolitical, focusing on questions of racialization and sexuality, or focusing on the question of consumption, labor and technology in the household.  But Foucault is gesturing towards the interconnection of these two issues, the question of population occurs at its boundary.  My research has found an interesting parallel between two phenomena, the narrative offered by Foucault about the introduction of the working class into the regime of sexuality, an introduction which is only finalized with the advent of 'late capitalism' and the creation of what Stuart Ewen calls 'the social democracy of consumption.'  Both find their focal point of the household, constructing intense networks of discourse based on new institutions and forms of expertise.  Unfortunately, there aren't many examples of how to link these questions together.