It has not always been like this everywhere, but it is a fact that all around the world strong bipolar ideologies can be found saying that close-physical care-work “at home”, is “women’s business”. The high effort and time-consuming tasks of preparing meals, cleaning rooms, fetching water from (often distant) wells, watching toddlers, mending clothes and so on are extensively attributed to the part of humanity which (generally) is able to give birth and to breastfeed. Implicitly or explicitly, the protagonists of the bipolar ideology assume that there is a naturally given link between these generative abilities and the duty to care for children and other ‘weak’ members of the species.
In the New Testament, for example, we can read that “women will be saved through childbearing “ (1 Tim 2,15) which means that they are not seen as people who exist for their own sake but as functionaries for the preservation of the species in a comprehensive sense. Mostly, the naturalizing ascription of certain unavoidable tasks to the female gender is combined with patterns of disciplining and downgrading: Women are defined as the minor gender, summoned to be silent in public and generally “in submission” (1 Cor 14,34). Many religious and philosophical authorities have contributed to establishing as common sense the idea that it was God’s or Nature’s decision to create females as the inferior half of humanity which has to be controlled by members of the better, the male one.
The misconception of the ‘self-made man’ as a result of the bipolar order
As systematically silencing half of the species results in ignoring half of human experience, this hierarchical symbolic order has led to the dominance of human self-conceptions in which the notions of independence and freedom are overemphasized: Thinkers who routinely delegate the fulfilling of their daily needs to silent women and servants (often slaves) perceive themselves as self-contained, self-made, sometimes even as essentially pure immortal spirit beyond the natural limits of ephemeral bodies. It is no coincidence that the Latin word nature is derived from the verb nasci which means to be born.
One result of this misperception is the modern idea of the homo oeconomicus (Link p. 381-391) which has nested as an enormously influential core-concept in modern economics. It says that humans are best defined as detached independent rational decision-makers with complete access to information who pursue certain consistent, self-interested goals. In this hegemonic model, facts such as vulnerability, interdependence, fragmented knowledge, historicity, neediness, natality and mortality disappear behind the phantasm of a perfect self-determination which is in fact the reflex of a presumptuous masculinity constantly and invisibly nourished by the services of subjugated people.
“Feminist Economics” is the new paradigm humanity needs
One momentous consequence of this traditional symbolic is that care-work, the biggest economic sector, is, to the present day, treated as a women’s issue: Instead of explicitly rejecting misleading concepts such as the homo oeconomicus, and replacing it with a realistic symbolic, influential economists, philosophers and politicians are still waiting for the feminist assumed responsible for putting topics such as Everbody’s Naturalness and Everybody’s Dependency on Care-Work on the agenda. Some women thinkers themselves still tend to call theories that focus on human dependency “feminist” (or “purple”), thus voluntarily marking as only of partial or even marginal importance what in fact is essential.
We must bring this misnomer and misconception to an end. It is definitely not women* or feminists only, but all humans, who are responsible for a realistic worldview and the respective life-saving activities. What has so far been understandably but mistakeably called “feminist economics” is the new paradigm humanity needs.
ConFusion 