‘Two paradigms of women jostle for first place in the medical model of
reproduction. In the first, women are seen not only as passive patients
but in a mechanistic way as manipulable reproductive machines. In the
second, the mechanical model is replaced by an appeal to notions of the
biologically determined ’feminine’ female’.
Women Confined, 1980, p34.
‘…first-time mothers… discover that it is not just a case of having the
baby and carrying on as though nothing had happened: something has
happened, a historical event….producing a baby is
re-producing, looking differently at one’s body,
one’s identity, one’s way of living….And
in becoming a mother a woman takes her place among all women, conscious
in a new way of the divisions between men and
women….Motherhood is a handicap but also a strength; a trial
and an error; an achievement and a prize.’
Becoming a Mother, 1979, p308.
Technologies alter the relationship between nature and culture, and this is especially true of motherhood, where the overall effect is to control and commodify women’s bodies.’ The Ann Oakley Reader, 2005, p119.
One major consequence of childbirth for women… is termed “postnatal depression”. Despite its appearance, this is a deeply unscientific label: it lacks any clear definition, aetiology or treatment, and has no apparent link to the hormonal mechanisms which are often said to produce it.’ The Ann Oakley Reader, 2005, p120.
The family
‘Women’s domesticity is a circle of learnt deprivation and
induced subjugation:a circle decisively centred on family life.’
Housewife, 1974, p233
‘The family’s gift to women is a direct apprenticeship in the
housework role. For this reason, the abolition of the housewife role
requires the abolition of the family, and the substitution of more open
and variable relationships….people living together in a
chosen and freely perpetuated intimacy, in a space that allows each to
breathe and find her or his own separate destiny.’
Housewife, 1974, p236.
‘Male-dominated culture has designated as female all labours of emotional
connectedness….The principal mode of developing this
sensitivity in women is the gender-differentiated nuclear family. Women
mother. Daughters are transformed into mothers. An autonomous sense of
self…does not need to develop. Women’s sense of
identity is thus dangerously bound up from early childhood with the
identities of others. Not so for men, who as little boys look into
their mothers’ faces and see what they learn is not a
reflection of their own…So if it isn’t in love
that women are lost, it’s in the family. The tension between
the interests of the family and the interests of women as individuals
has been rising for some two centuries. It is not possible for these
interests to be reconciled.’
Taking it Like a Woman, 1984, p201.
Feminism
‘When I say I’m a feminist what do I mean? I mean that I believe
that women are an oppressed social group, a group of people sharing a
common exclusion from full participation in certain key social
institutions (and being over-represented in others). Women in Britain
in the 1980s are still subject to the awful soul-destroying tyranny of
being told the meaning of their lives by others in terms which are not
theirs.’
Taking it Like a Woman, 1984, p186.
‘All women are feminists at heart. In their psychology lies a great love for
women as a class. But it’s interred beneath a great mound of
rubbish.’
Taking it Like a Woman, 1984, p197.
Housework
‘Despite a reduction of gender differences in the occupational world in recent
years, one occupational role remains entirely feminine: the role of
housewife. No law bans men from this occupation, but the weight of
economic, social and psychological pressures is against their entry to
it. The equation of femaleness with housewifery is basic to the
structure of modern society…’
The Sociology of Housework, 1974, p.29.
‘Housework is work directly opposed to the possibility of human
self-actualization.’
Housewife, 1974, p222.
‘…it has become acceptable for a husband to “help” his
wife; provided he doesn’t help too much, it is regarded as
probable that his masculinity will survive, The concept of
“help” here is obviously political…’
Becoming a Mother, 1979, p211.
‘Both men and women may value men’s involvement in the family, but
this doesn’t guarantee a shared division of
labour…Public policy has kept the domestic division of
labour at home where it belongs…’
Genderon Planet Earth, 2002, p100.
‘Homes aren’t havens for the people who work in them…The
material effects of housework…seem like bragging or nagging
when housework doesn’t really exist as work. It’s
difficult then to see that public health…begins at home, and
that most of the housework women do is primary public health work
– an effective way of improving the health of populations.
Whenever women’s accounts of their household work are
studied, what stands out is this material experience of labour and
responsibility: the “compulsory” nature of
housework and childcare, the unremitting obligation to do it or see
that it gets done, the physical effects of heavy manual labour, the
psychological effects of social isolation, fragmentation, and trying to
stretch scarce resources.’
Gender on Planet Earth, 2002, pp100-1.
‘Time-budget studies show that women’s housework has decreased and men’s has increased somewhat with the growth in women’s employment, but men’s greater efforts do not fill the gap left by women doing less…Men create more housework than they do and, in many households, children do as much housework as men...Even in supposed paradises of gender equality, such as Sweden, 87% of couples do not share housework.’ The Ann Oakley Reader, 2005, p56.
Imagining the future
‘To liberate society from gender- and class-inequality would be a
transformation that is almost beyond the bounds of
imagination…It is…essential that the whole
balance between work and non-work life should be
re-thought…’
Women Confined, 1980, pp299-300.
‘We need a new world order which values all human beings, the right to
satisfy all basic human needs, ecological tolerance and a respect for
the future. The domination of nature and of women, the eating of
animals, the economic goal of unlimited growth (for some), monopolistic
corporate power and the pursuit of technology for its own sake are the
same side of the same coin. A new relationship with nature and respect
for Mother Earth are needed to reverse these malignancies, but these
won’t come about until we’ve untangled the links
between culture, masculinity and violence against all forms of
life.’
Gender on Planet Earth, 2002, pp152-3.
Men
‘Masculinity – a set of images, values, interests and activities held
important to the successful achievement of male adulthood –
isn’t a biologically given condition. Sociobiological
explanations of masculine aggression and crime don’t work.
because these aren’t universal, because different cultures
sanction or proscribe different patterns of behaviour, and because male
violence is systematically linked to sexual and economic power
relations. ….Violence, crime, sport and war are all contexts
for making masculinity happen.’
Gender on Planet Earth, 2002, p37.
‘The state is a masculine institution: men hold most of the top positions in
government and its associated agencies…’
Gender on Planet Earth, 2002, p45.
‘We live in a toxic world which poses a major threat to public and personal
health. …most environmental damage happens because of the
earth’s domination by the Western lifestyle, which depends on
constantly rising levels of consumption, an addiction to technology,
and meat as the basis of the human diet….Some people are far
more culpable than others. The most culpable are men and male-dominated
transnational corporations. The major victims are the poor, women and
children, and the populations of Third World countries. The script of
female nature being tortured by male culture is also directly inscribed
on women’s bodies in the medical management of that most
“natural” of all activities, childbirth.’
Gender on Planet Earth, 2002, p127.
‘The desecration of the earth is the result of a specific masculine
consciousness that devalues women’s
experiences…The cause and consequence of the rape of Mother
Earth is a global pattern of growing inequalities between the First
World and the Third, between classes and ethnicities and between men
and women.’
Gender on Planet Earth, 2002, p152.
Relationships between men and women
‘…the cultural expectation of great intimacy between men and women clashes
with the very different…socializations of the sexes. Men and
women are reared primarily as masculine and feminine individuals, the
one to notions of potency, public-mindedness and emotional
invulnerability, the other to standards of fragility, domesticity and
emotional hypersensitivity. …it is hard to see how they can
hope to be one another’s greatest friends.’
Subject Women, 1981, p245.
Sex and gender
‘Most of the debate about sex differences is angled at proving that women are
or are not different from men, rather than proving that men are or are
not different from women. If this fact needs explaining, it is enough
to point out that the bias of our culture is still
patriarchal…’
Sex, Gender and Society, 1972, p208.
‘While our society is organised around the differences rather than the
similarities between the sexes, these two extremes of masculinity and
femininity will recur, so apparently confirming the belief that they
come from a biological cause. Whatever biological cause there is in
reality, however influential or insubstantial it may be, thus
…becomes increasingly a rationalisation of what is, in fact,
only prejudice.’
Sex, Gender and Society, 1972, p210.
‘..women and…men…are jointly locked in a culture which
distorts the possibilities of humanness as an ethical project. Women
are outsiders in a system which often appears to them to come from
another planet. And so, indeed, it has been brought to them by men,
whose alienation from the experiences of others is often so complete
that they can’t even see their own will to power. These dual
positions of aliens and outsides are the creation of a gendered
division of labour inherited from the past. But that
past…lives in the present through men’s
understandable reluctance to give up their ownership and
commodification of the world.’
Gender on Planet Earth, 2002, p3.
‘Today’s pronounced backlash against feminism reinstates a revamped sociobiology and an obsessional chase for genes that explain everything as a major strategy for closing the door on sociological understandings of difference.’ The Ann Oakley Reader, 2005, p4.
Social science
‘…sociology has been in its modes of thinking, methodologies, conceptual
organization and subjects of inquiry, one of the most sexist of
academic disciplines….the male’s social world has
constituted the world of male sociology.’
Women Confined, 1980, p71.
‘It is hard to remember today what the world was like before
women’s studies. When I went to university almost thirty
years ago, there were no women’s studies courses. I remember
studying economic and policy theory, moral philosophy and sociology,
with a sense of inchoate puzzlement about the representations of
humankind embedded in these subjects. In economics, for example, there
was Rational Man, a bit like Piltdown Man, or some other archaeological
relic. Next to him…was The Housewife, who spent her entire
life in shops choosing what to buy and being responsible for the shape
of supply and demand curves….The sexist bogs of philosophy
were equally oppressive. But the Platonic ideal of philosophy as an
activity that must rise above the ordinary mundanities of life at least
gave me the answer to the question about what The Housewife was
doing….She was out there consuming commodities, so that he
could sit and think and devise theories about the world that would not
work.’
Essays on Women, Medicine and Health, 1993, pp206-7.
‘…the automatically laudatory designation of qualitative methods within feminist social science and other “anti-positivist” sociologies is a cause for concern, since such methods are no guarantee of equal power relations between the researcher and the researched.’ The Ann Oakley Reader, 2005, p187.
‘Universities are not comfortable sites of feminist struggle, and they remain relatively inhospitable to women and other outsiders. The fit between what is regarded as “cutting edge” research and scholarship, on the one hand, and the products of masculine social science, on the other, remains uncomfortably close.’ The Ann Oakley Reader, 2005, p188